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08413_Field_TCGG T178.txt
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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