Painting, Perspective and the Cyclical Nature of the Gaze
It is a well-established practice to relate the phenomena of sight and representation to the evolutionary movements of history. The way obiects are depicted functions as a kind of 'instant photograph," a thermometer capable of measuring the cultural, ethical, and socia contents of a given era.

Perspective, understood as a technique for engaging with reality, fulfilled the clarifying needs of a specific historical moment, one in which the observer’s central viewpoint aligned with a worldview that elevated the uniqueness and centrality of the human being to canonical status, in contrast to the multiplicity of the surrounding universe. The artistic avant-gardes introduced a decisive shift in the visual and representational field, dismantling the principles of central unity and introducing multiple optical “angles,” each corresponding to perceptual situations radically different from those that preceded them.

Painting thus offers intelligible explanations in the form of frames from a single film composed of historical events. These frames may be understood as tiles in a mosaic of visions, perspectival or otherwise, black and white or in color, two-dimensional or three-dimensional, depending on the will to see of both the artist and the observer. In this sense, painting far precedes architecture, which, by employing “petrified frames,” constructs a filmic continuity that resembles a “replay” more than a feature-length narrative. Through the reading of these individual pictorial frames, one can delineate the global character of an era, an era shaped by the cyclical evolution of the act of seeing.

From "Design of New Words"
Frames of the Visible by Filippo Lo Presti 1989