Liquidity and solidity are not only physical states of matter, but also common epistemological metaphors. In the seventeenth century, philosophical and scientific debates often included such images; Blaise Pascal is a prominent example of a thinker seeking to destabilise received patterns of thinking through the power of what Jeff Wall later named “liquid intelligence”. In painting, the emergence of fluid aesthetics can be interpreted as a rejection of the Renaissance ideals of firmness, stability and measurability. Claude Lorrain’s port scenes are a case in point: in a truly dialectical way, Claude repeatedly depicts the sea as a liquid entity seemingly contained in – and contained by – a frame of sumptuous, rock-solid architecture, while subtly subverting the hierarchy of values such compositions might be understood to validate. Through this reading, Claude’s paintings gain an unsuspected theoretical depth as a pictorial critique of human hubris and of the rigid, pretentious structures of humanist knowledge.

This article operates on two levels, it begins with a historical mapping of the global disseminations of perspective, then it examines a local case: the introduction and adoption of linear perspective in Greece between 1830 and 1860. The analysis of textual and visual sources reveals a complex historical process which includes: artistic transfers between Greece and Western Europe, translations of perspective treatises, the formation of the modern Greek term for “perspective”, the founding of educational institutions, and the advent of photography in Greece. The introduction of linear perspective in Greece constituted a crucial historical event, that shifted local pictorial traditions towards a Westernized naturalism. The examination of these local conditions, aims at a closer description of the global traits of perspective.

This text foregrounds performativity as entailed in both academic and artistic approaches to writing or depicting history. Discussing the recent performative and historiographical “turns” in art as complementing and reinforcing each other, the term apódeixis, as conceptualized in Johann Gustav Droysen’s theory of history to connect research and representation, is proposed to describe contemporary artistic engagements with history. The examined works by Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Erika Tan, and Bouchra Khalili critically engage with performativity and historiography. They also address the problem of “speaking for others”, introducing a critical debate from art and cultural theory and thus serving as examples of how art may fruitfully contribute to history writing today.