ON PERSPECTIVE IN MEDAL DESIGN

Although the New York 0/11 medal is a striking design, the faulted perspective isn't properly executed--the artist took quite a liberty here. (I am sure it was deliberate; proper perspective has been understood since the Renaissance.) No matter what type of perspective is employed, all of a group of parallel lines need to converge on one point, called the vanishing point. The towers being vertical lines, their vertical lines are parallel and should converge. Yet on the medal, the left tower's vertical lines converge lower left, while the tower on the right, whose vertical lines should be parallel to the other tower's lines, instead has its lines converging towards the upper right.

Here are a couple of photographs to show how it works in reality. The first is taken from between a pair of skyscrapers, though they aren't the WTC:

(Note that the lines don't even have to be drawn off the corners of the building--ANY vertical line, even those between columns of windows, will converge to the same point because it's parallel to every other vertical line.)

And here's the actual WTC, though not taken from a point between the towers.

In this case the point of convergence or vanishing point is outside the photo (the fact that the yellow lines don't quite meet is symptomatic only of my imperfect vision and clumsiness with the mouse).

Whatever one may think of the merits of the medal design, one thing it surely isn't is an example of vaulted perspective, because it's not even remotely properly done. I'm sure the artist did this deliberately, because it's simply too glaring to be a mistake. While I heartily endorse the desire to memorialize what was destroyed on that awful day (I did buy one of the medals myself) I found the incorrect perspective very distracting. It suggests to me the towers caught in the act of toppling almost toward each other (even though they didn't).

Which, come to think of it, could be exactly the impression the artist was trying to make.

On a related note, Dave Lange writes:

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
FALLEN HEROES MEDAL DESIGN: VAULTED PERSPECTIVE (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v17n48a13.html)

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