The вЂњvisionвЂќ of the western space is at the same time one of the four вЂњrealвЂќ visions of the world and an iconic symbol-or a synecdochic emblem-of them all.

On the observation deck of the tower, the visitor contemplates successively the four sides of the world according to the four compass points. In fact, the image of the prospect of the western plain is an emblematic one. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984) and my analysis of seventeenth-century maps of Paris in Portrait of the King, trans. Vollrath (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1984) Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Harvey, The History of Topographical Maps: Symbols, Pictures and Surveys (London, 1980) Louis Maris, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. A position that the cartographical fictions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries never dared to offer to their вЂњreaders.вЂќ See Discovering New Worlds: Essays on Medieval Exploration and Imagination, ed. Such a regular grid tracing space, seen only at night, appears less to define loci and individual properties than to indicate possible movements across space, an abstract set of directions for moving objects, all potentially moving towards the horizon line. This process of totalization at work through the beholder's gaze is nevertheless displaying its practical weakness, its cognitive uncertainty, its ontological trouble from its beginning to its end. In the slide, taken at dusk, space up to its ultimate background is crisscrossed by a linear network of light spots that imperatively, in the coming night invading the image, leads the gaze if not toward a vanishing point at least to a plane where sky and earth fade and vanish into each other.1 The spectator's eye, in the position of a bold bird's-eye-view,2 is located in a dominating position and at such altitude that his gaze вЂњcollectsвЂќ a space that he вЂњreallyвЂќ totalizes, the plain up to its extreme frontier.3 As a dominating eye, a totalizing view, a scopic or theoretical controlling power of space, the beholder, in one moment through his gaze, identifies himself with the tower's master4 and metonymically with the master of the world.

Two prospects, two visions of the world confront each other: the one from above, the highest viewpoint possible on earth from a building, opens up a space to the stupefied gaze led to its visual limit and to the spatial frontier of the horizon where gaze and earth seem to coincide. 2, for example), the views of the tower from the ground at a distance. 1) recalls the prospect they have discovered from the top floor of the building, from its western side, the plain stretching away as far as the eye can see, the others (fig. Visitors to the observation deck of the Sears Tower-вЂњthe highest tower in the worldвЂќ-can buy, when back on the ground, some slides that commemorate their visit and keep it in their memory.

Eye of the beholder 3 1993