Norris Kelly Smith has a point of view about art through the ages that may cause clangor among art instructors but will undoubtedly find compatible audience with artist and art viewers who enter the realm of looking at pictures with a hope for transcendence. HERE I STAND: Perspective from Another Point of View is a lovely extended essay that postures the concept that mathematics and science probably have little to do with the way paintings have been constructed and executed from the Renaissance forward. Texts on art emphasize the 'vanishing point', showing how artists use lines and graph squares to create a since of foreground and background, distance, and depth. Smith explores the internal vision of painters and argues that such 'mathematical clues' had much less significance to artists than the presence of social, religious, and political values - insitutionsa of the times outweigh the scientifc dissection approach. If grids are applied to, say Piranesi, then the matematical mind finds little but contradictions. If however the paintings of castles, or battles, or even vistas of boulevards and cityscapes are observed from the eye of an artist who places more value on his view of man's place in the conteext of what is being represented, then 'perspective' just naturally develops. Observation is a response to the eye and the eye relfects the mind and experiences of the painter. This is not an earth-shattering postulate, but it is certainly a refreshing new way of observing paintings both from the past and from the present. He closes his find little book by stating "Architects cannot be pessimists, cannot give way to despair. They can devise ways of making us more comfortable, of moving traffic more expeditiously, but they cannot, any more than can deracinated painters, install the institutions that must, in the long run, be more important and more enduring than any work of art can possibly be." The book is generously illustrated and beautifully designed. Recommended for open-eyed artists and art lovers.