The case for an external spectator

I question the assumption that painting always presents a self-contained world. I use Masaccio’s Trinity to claim that in certain works, integrated into their architectural
settings, the internal onlooker is fused with the external spectator. Here the imaginative engagement is situated. I highlight differences afforded internal and external spectators: with the former, the viewer identifies with a spectator who already occupies an unrepresented extension of the ‘virtual’ space; with the latter, the beholder enters that part of the fictive world depicted as being in front of the picture surface, the work thus drawing the ‘real’ space of the spectator into its domain. I claim that this distinction mirrors two distinct types of visualization: where a scene is presented as elsewhere, and where it is juxtaposed with an existing reality.

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