In this chapter, I intend to investigate the complex relationship between art, space, and sovereignty. In doing so, I analyze how this relation has taken concrete form and coagulated, as it were, in a crucial historical moment: the emergence of linear perspective that inaugurated Renaissance and modern humanism. Focusing on the work and the artistic relation-which has been defined as “the most important in the history of art”-between Masaccio and Masolino da Panicale, my aim is to show how, in the process of secularization, art and politics have been closely interwoven in creating the Cartesian-Hobbesian representation of the modern sovereign state. Looking at the artistic space, therefore, means exploring a ‘multidimensional window’, a liminal category, a crossroads in which space, sovereignty, and secularization intersect and reflect themselves into the aesthetic field, designing (and imposing) a specific vision of modernity and its epistemico-political discourse.
CITATION STYLE
Cerella, A. (2016). Space and sovereignty: A reverse perspective. In Art and Sovereignty in Global Politics (pp. 31–57). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95016-4_2
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