The Apartment: A Novel by Greg Baxter

the artist simply placed the closer person below the person farther away. Often an object’s position on the page had to do with its thematic importance to the story the painting was telling, so that you might have minor scenes playing out at the bottom of paintings, such as a battle, with small figures, and large figures above them. At this time it was not understood that the nearness and distance of objects could be represented by size, and the first evidence that artists had begun to associate size with depth in a field didn’t emerge until late antiquity. Then, suddenly, from the early Middle Ages onward, interest in perspective vanished, and it would not re-emerge until the rule of Charlemagne and the Carolingian Renaissance. Throughout its history, at least until it became untenable as a method of inquiry, the study of perspective seemed to be, among other things, a sign that human beings believed in an intellectual destiny that was contained in the intersecting lines of reality; by studying those lines we studied that destiny. In Byzantine art, where principles of perspective were well understood, reverse perspective was often used, so that the farther away an object got, the larger it became. In this way, the vanishing point became the viewer, and, so the book I read speculated, the lines of convergence, which would have, in reverse perspective, naturally come from everywhere, represented the omnipresence of God. The breakthroughs that would take place in fifteenth-century Florence were driven by a handful of artists, all of whom were deeply influenced by each other and some of whom were profoundly influenced by the eleventh-century work of a man named al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, or Alhazen, who was born in the city of Basra, and composed his great work, the
Book of Optics
, while under house arrest in Cairo. Alhazen’s discoveries resolved the ancient dispute between the mathematicians, like Ptolemy and Euclid, and the physicists, like Aristotle, over the nature of vision and light. He also showed that vision is not merely a phenomenon of pure sensation but also of judgement, imagination and memory. In the
Flagellation
, the section of ceiling above Christ is filled with light. The light is miraculous: it has no source. Everything apart from that light is geometrically and optically explicable. Christ is aware of the light, but his torturers are not.
    It seems like a long time ago that I read those things about perspective. Everything I have experienced here – even our bus ride into town this morning – feels like it happened years ago. Saskia and I once had a conversation about this time distortion. We were sitting in a café that is on the top floor of the museum of contemporary art. I had spent the afternoon there, and she came after work. She was in black trousers and an ultramarine top with a fat bow around the neck. She’d had a long weekend of parties, and looked exhausted. Our surroundings, she said, so long as we keep them familiar, remind us of yesterday more than, for instance, fifteen years ago, because, if our whole life is in every memory, it is the recent memories that seem more superficially consistent with reality. Go somewhere you haven’t been for fifteen years. Walk around the places you knew, and try to think of what you cared about the day before you got there. I did this recently, she said. I was sent away for work. I hired a car and drove to the place I used to live. I had a sandwich near a fountain I used to sit beside, and where I imagined what my life would be like once I became an artist. I was going to build a sculpture the size of a cathedral. I sat at this fountain, and had a bottle of water and watched people go by, and nobody recognized me and I didn’t recognize them. My memory of the fountain did not seem at all like a memory. It seemed like I had only had the thought about being an artist that morning, and the reason I had flown there, for work – all that seemed like