The Shattered Mirror of the Twentieth Century

The history of Western representation can be viewed as a long, steady march toward the perfection of illusion. For nearly five centuries, ever since Brunelleschi and Alberti codified the laws of linear perspective in the Italian Renaissance, the canvas was understood as a window. It was a transparent plane through which a viewer, standing in a fixed position, could peer into a coherent, three-dimensional world. This “Renaissance window” dictated that space was static, time was frozen, and the observer was the singular centre of the universe. In the first decade of the 20th century, amidst the soot and steam of industrialising Paris, a small cadre of artists took a hammer to that window. They did not merely crack it; they shattered it entirely, and in the shards of that destruction, they found a new language for the modern world. This movement, which began as a derisive insult and ended as the bedrock of modernism, was Cubism.

The history of human expression is often categorised into distinct sensory silos: the visual arts, occupied with space, light, and static form; and music, the domain of time, rhythm, and invisible vibration. Yet, this segregation is a relatively modern bureaucratic convenience rather than an artistic reality. For millennia, artists, philosophers, and scientists have pursued a unified theory of perception—a “visual music” where the eye might hear, and the ear might see. This pursuit is not merely a stylistic experiment but a fundamental inquiry into the neurological and spiritual architecture of human consciousness.