Setting the Seen

This book examines our vision with two eyes as it has been investigated in science and how it has been expressed in art. Binocular vision has been studied extensively by scientists but used sparingly by artists. The history of pictorial art has been concerned primarily with monocular vision: by trying to capture three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface it is as though the world was being viewed with one eye alone. The depth we see in a real scene is different from that depicted on the surface of a painting, drawing or screen. Even when we describe the apparent depth in a picture we do not see the surface as other than flat