Edouord Manet, Le Dejeuner sur L’Herbe, 1863

Manet challenged the rules of perspective from new, relativistic coordinates. Le Dejeuner sur L’Herbe is equivalent to traveling past a picnic on a train nearing half the speed of light. Perceptual distortions include objects appearing to flatten out, the background moves closer to the foreground, shadows change from chiaroscuro to sfumato, and everything begins to look more 2 dimensional. Approaching the speed of light, space contracts. The standard representation of perspective in 3 dimensions becomes increasingly foreshortened. When the train reaches 186,000 miles per second, the scene would look like this:

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Space along the train's axis of direction contracts into an infinitely thin plane of height and depth and no length. An entire dimension is eliminated at light speed.

During this period, Manet, Monet, and Cezanne deconstructed 600 years of perspective dogma to embrace a new paradigm of relative reference outside of normal human experience. In terms of cultural impact, deconstructing perspective was as revolutionary as creating it.

 

Adapted from Art & Physics, L. Schlain