Faldoni, parts 2648 - 2651

 2648. But even when those gigantic paintings such as Tiepolo painted on the curving surfaces of Baroque church ceilings are reduced down to thumb nail reproductions, nevertheless one still finds that when one focuses on a face the feet can’t be considered at the same moment, and even more to the point, if one studies how some fingernails of some fleshy nymph were painted we really can’t also notice at the same instant, how the toenails were painted.

 2649. It seems to be a serous fault of the human eye that it has trouble taking in all of a large image at one time, and has to resort to the utilization of the passage of time. The brain has to resort to the expedient of assembling a number of images more or less remembered somewhere in the overcrowded brain, and an attempt then has to be made to make comparisons of one memory with another.

 2650. This is because the human eye was not designed for looking at and enjoying pictures of things. When the human eye was first created it had, seemingly, only one important task to preform and that was to distinguish what in the immediate environment was close to the person,  and what things were far away from the person. This was its job at the beginning, and the problems involved in the appreciation of works of fine art was apparently not even taken into consideration.

2651. The problem of how to sort out what was near to the person and what was far away from the person was solved by the eyes by the novel device of having the nearer objects take up lots and lots of the visual field of the retina, and distant things got to be represented with just tiny portions of the retina.