Albrecht Altdorfer lived in a world in which multiple visual orders were simultaneously available. For him, the Renaissance did not provide a self-evident grammar of seeing, but rather one possibility among others.

Dear J., allow me to offer a classification that corrects you at certain points. Filippo Brunelleschi is generally regarded as the person who, around 1420, practically demonstrated the rules of linear perspective. His perspective experiments in Florence have not survived, but they are described by contemporaries. Leon Battista Alberti formulated the relevant insights in his treatise De pictura (1435). In his account, the picture becomes an “open window.” Piero della Francesca further developed the geometric foundations. When people speak of Renaissance perspective, they often think of the paintings of Masaccio and Leonardo da Vinci, but the founders are Brunelleschi, Alberti, and Piero.

While in fifteenth-century Italy central perspective was elevated to an unquestionable dogma, Albrecht Altdorfer (c. 1480–1538) simply undermined this system again in the North during the early sixteenth century.

The Cosmic Gaze

Alberti wants an ordered pictorial field. In his Battle of Alexander (1529), Altdorfer chooses a visionary bird’s-eye and world-landscape perspective. He looks down from above upon a teeming multitude and stretches space all the way to the horizon, where the Mediterranean, Cyprus, and Egypt become visible. This cannot be constructed through a single mathematical vanishing point. As the leading master of the Danube School, Altdorfer, together with others, invents the autonomous landscape painting of the North. For him, nature is an organic whole. Trees, rocks, and swirling cloud formations obey atmospheric effect.

Altdorfer moves within a world that has not yet fully adapted itself to the rules of the High Renaissance. He works in the imperial city of Regensburg, at a cultural crossroads between Italian, Bohemian, and South German influences. He knows the innovations of the Renaissance. He creates within a transitional sphere in which the new forms of order are already spreading without entirely displacing older pictorial logics.

Characteristic of Altdorfer is that he does not consistently organize pictorial space toward a single vanishing point, but rather overlays different modes of constructing space and reality. In this respect, his art differs fundamentally from the Italian tradition of perspective, as theoretically formulated by Leon Battista Alberti and practically established in fifteenth-century Florentine painting. There, pictorial space is conceived as a unified, mathematically defined continuum that relates all elements to a common vanishing point. In Altdorfer, by contrast, space remains permeable to other logics: symbolic proportions, narrative condensation, atmospheric dynamism, and a strong attribution of autonomy to the landscape.

Altdorfer’s images originate in an era before the final specialization of perception. The modern gaze tends to treat space, history, nature, psyche, and politics as separate domains. In Altdorfer’s world, these registers remain intertwined. The sky is not merely weather. The landscape is not merely geography. The size of a figure is not merely a matter of distance.

In Altdorfer, multiple systems of order overlap—systems that are pulled apart in linear perspective and classical spatial illusion: an experiential realism that arises from observation of the world. This spatial logic is not yet universally binding. It competes with other principles of pictorial organization: iconic hierarchy, narrative condensation, symbolic weighting.

Linear perspective, as it established itself during the Renaissance, fundamentally alters this structure. It is not merely a technical method, but a decision about what is to count as the primary organizing principle of the visible. With vanishing-point perspective, space becomes unambiguous—that is, it loses dimensions. Greater differentiation creates clarity, but it also pushes back the immediate overlap of levels. This corresponds quite closely to what you describe as a psychology poor in concepts: inner and outer worlds are not cleanly integrated through a mediating system but lie directly beside one another within the same experiential space. Pre-psychological figures act as consequences of external circumstances. The social world appears as a structure of constraint and events. Relationships are not psychologically balanced negotiations but asymmetrical constellations of power, necessity, and survival. Where no differentiated language for interiority exists, domination becomes visible not as discourse or motivation but as immediate facticity. It does not reveal itself through interpretations.

What is interesting is that this mode of representation is often read as unreflective. In reality, however, it is less a deficiency than a different structure of mediation. Just as space is not absent in premodern painting but organized differently, psychology is not absent in early narrative; rather, what is absent is its epistemic priority.

In the language master’s reference library, Nana is gazing directly into the birth canal of popular culture. She is practicing archaeology at a turning point in human history.

Nana sees a work that already makes use of the modern machinery of the market while still remaining half anchored in the medieval fairy tale. It is the paradox of an industrialized form that remains psychologically in the dark. Because no psychological templates yet exist, the awkwardness appears as the most honest rough cut.

If Gothic 1.0 was the unprotected stumbling through a world without psychological concepts, then Gothic 2.0 is hyper-reflective analysis. We possess all the concepts now, yet we have been completely trivialized by algorithms and the data industry.

Where no concepts for the inner world exist, pure relations of domination prevail. In the early Gothic novels there is always only the archaic exploitation of situations of coercion. The authors master the geometry of violence between fog-shrouded coastlines and aristocratic constellations of intrigue. A murder occurs, and in the next sentence dinner is served. The brutality of the factual, in which someone simply functions, can develop an almost mechanical force. No undercurrent, no subtext—only pure, unfiltered survival logic in an absolutist world.

We enter the action through a manuscript from 1789. The young Lord Frederick Cholmondeley falls in love with the rural beauty Ellen. The virtuous daughter of honest (and insignificant) parents succumbs to his courtship and promptly becomes pregnant. Frederick proves his love by marrying Ellen despite the wishes of his widowed father. The enraged lord of the manor punishes this disobedience with ostracism. The outcasts withdraw to the periphery of aristocratic power. Frederick seeks his fortune in war and is quickly killed. Whom the gods love, they call home early. His comrades bring the body back to the castle, but his father refuses him a burial befitting his station. Frederick is hastily interred, and his widow falls into dire poverty. In her desperation she begs for mercy on behalf of her daughter. She is willing to perish herself, but the child must live. The old lord (a man scarcely older than forty, feared for every conceivable vice and notorious for his potency) has his favorite horse saddled and rides through the night to the cottage of his daughter-in-law, perched upon a cliff above the roaring Atlantic. On the way he dispatches a highwayman with a stroke of a blade. The author narrates all this in the manner of a travel report. He makes Ellen an offer she cannot refuse. The aristocratic appropriation of the daughter-in-law unfolds through cold administrative acts. Horses are harnessed, servants instructed, food laid upon the table. This brutal density of events, this crude mixture of tragedy and pragmatism, affects Nana deeply. No genius could have devised a bolder constellation. Ellen ends up in the bed of the destroyer of her beloved, only to become the wife of Cholmondeley Sr. soon afterward.