A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting

This is the first in a series of books in which one of the most influential of contemporary art theorists revised from within the conceptions underlying the history of art. The author’s basic idea is that the rigor of linear perspective cannot encompass all of visual experience and that it could be said to generate an oppositional factor with which it interacts dialectically: the cloud.

On a literal level, this could be represented by the absence of the sky, as in Brunelleschi’s legendary f...