which is its counterpart. The ideas which Lucretius 
     expresses a quarter of a century before the writing of “De 
     Architectura” are the optical equivalent of the perspective 
     system which Vitruvius describes. (13)

     Likewise, the Romans exceeded the Greeks in their bias 
towards the life of action, of applied knowledge, and the lineal 
organization of many levels of living. In art this bias appears in 
the setting of flat planes, one behind the other, in order that 
action may appear by an oblique or diagonal shift in the planes. 
But there is one observation of John White’s (The Birth and  
Rebirth of Pictorial Space , p. 237) which is especially valuable in 
illuminating the most striking feature of Greek narrative: “All 
the forms lie in a single plane. All the movement is in one 
direction.” In a work devoted entirely to the victory of the visual 
over the other senses, White examines spatial design in