My talk explores how Italian Renaissance artists signaled the subversion of alien belief systems by the dislocation of the perspectival construction of pagan religious edifices in their paintings. It will demonstrate how the act of perspectival dislocation was the pictorial equivalent of the critique and effacement of alterity in these works, serving to reinforce Renaissance culture’s strict association of direct optical perception with religious orthodoxy.

            As Classical Antiquity served as the primary model for Italian Renaissance perceptions of otherness, I will focus on three emblematic pictures representing the confrontation of Christian protagonists and pagan religious culture: Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation, Bramante’s Ruined Temple, and Raphael’s St. Paul Preaching in Athens. In all three works, the Christian “subject” is perceptually secondary to a pagan edifice, being placed to one side and/or set in the distance as if incidental to its environs. Yet, at the same time as showing the displacement of the Christian subject, these paintings also subvert the primacy of the pagan edifices that contain them by organizing them along eccentric perspectival axes dislocated from the picture’s actual center. This dislocation of the perspectival axis prevents any particular pagan subject or image from assuming dominant status. Indeed, pagan images in these pictures are significantly occluded from view or otherwise “effaced” by being shown from behind.

            I argue that the dislocation of the perspectival axis from the center of these paintings is a device meant as a strong critique of the whole pagan epistemological framework. Seeing in Italian Renaissance pictures was equated with proper understanding, and thus the indirectly seen was the improperly understood. Through perspectival “indirection” the viewer knew the “indirections” of erroneous belief. In the language of perspective, therefore, the displacement of the central perspectival axis was tantamount to the assertion of untruth, as truth itself was associated with the perception of objects in centered, frontal, iconic form, as in most paintings for liturgical contexts, especially sacre conversazioni.

            My paper concludes describing the ways in which the dislocation of the perspectival axis in paintings echoes discussions of the frontal and oblique gaze in Renaissance devotional exercises. My readings from these texts suggest that, just as the frontal address of the proper Christian image underlines its epistemological authority, the oblique view of a thing could be equated with equivocation or falsity. With the help of these texts, I thus show how the images under investigation constitute something more than an anomaly, being paradigmatic of Renaissance assumptions about seeing and emblematic of the ways in which the period’s religious painting reinforced these assumptions in representations of pagan alterity.