Remarkably, despite centuries of speculation and philosophical reflection on the nature of vision, it was not until the mid nineteenth-century that an effective model of visual space perception began to emerge. In the complex interplay of different visual cues, binocular vision had proved especially elusive, and the tangible sense of solidity and spatial depth with which it is associated became a recognised component of visual experience, only after experiments by Charles Wheatstone in the 1830s demonstrated our capacity to derive sensation from the differing perspectives offered by each eye. By the end of the nineteenth-century, through the popular philosophical lectures of, amongst others, Hermann von Helmholtz and Henri Poincaré, the new found understanding of vision revealed by studies in physiology and optics would eventually find its way into the thinking of a new generation of artists and architects. Poincaré proved especially influential and his observations on geometry, vision and space became an inspiration for a number of early twentieth-century artists, intent on creating a new form of spatial expression in art and architecture. My thesis as a whole will deal more broadly with the science of physiological optics and its relation to avant-garde spatial devices. In this presentation, however, I will focus on a particular passage drawn from La Science et l’hypothèse, through which, Poincaré sought to reveal a disparity between the conventional understanding of space, and the sensory cues upon which spatial experience is based.

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