Pôr as coisas em perspectiva

The effect of the [invention of artificial perspective, first systematized by Alberti in 1435], was nothing less than to convince an entire civilization that it possessed an infallible method of representation, a system for the automatic and mechanical production of truths about both the material and mental worlds. The best index to the hegemony of the artificial perspective is the way it denies its own artificiality and lays claims to being a "natural" representation of "the way things look," "the way we see," or (in a phrase that turns Maimonides on his head) "the way things really are." Aided by the political and economic ascendance of Western Europe, artificial perspective conquered the world of representation under the banner of reason, science , and objectivity. No amount of counterdemonstration form artists that there are other ways of picturing what "we really see" has been able to shake the conviction that these pictures have a kind of identity with natural human vision and objective external space. And the invention of a machine (the camera) built to produce this sort of image has, ironically, only reinforced the conviction that this is the natural mode for representation. What is natural is, evidently, what we can build a machine to do for us.

W. J. T. Mitchell. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. UCP (1986)