Oblique Views and Three-Dimensionality in Maya Art

Resumen

Schafer's 1919 study on Egyptian art remains an extremely useful tool, not only for the egyptologist, but for all those interested in ways of representation with no perspective.

Introducing the English translation (1974), Gombrich does not hesitate to state: "It constitutes indeed the only attempt ever made of analyzing an artistic style as a mapping procedure".

Schafer, he goes on, teaches us the transformation-rules we have to apply to translate and to understand the Egyptian image. Schafer's fundamental thesis does not surprise any more. In their attempts to reproduce nature, the Egyptians construct their images summarizing those physical aspects of the object which they consider to be the essential, or more characteristic. To this effect, they rely on mental images rather than on an incomplete and truncated appearance. To represent a three-dimensional object on a flat surface, they proceed by "frontal views" of parts of the object: that which seen frontally en face or in profile extends into the third dimension is transferred to the flat plane of the image. Hence, the typical way of presenting man with shoulders and eyes en face; head, limbs, and torso in profile. Ideally, in such an image, "the at first sight confusing appearance of the parts on the two-dimensional plane can in fact be shown to conform to the simple technical rule, that in their two-dimensional projection, parts protruding from the three-dimensional plane must be seen in profile, and parts extending on the plane en face" (Iversen 1975:35).