This book is part of a promising new wave of scholarship. From the 1960s onward, writing on perspective was divided between what might roughly be called humanist interpretations and technical accounts. Humanist writing made use of structuralist, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic interpretations, and it has produced a line of texts from Hubert Damisch to Hanneke Grootenboer. Technical writing, such as Martin Kemp’s, has accumulated an equally impressive range of information. Recently there have been signs that the two strains are merging, for example in Lyle Massey’s Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). Anne Friedberg’s new book is a contribution to the first, humanist, kind of writing, but with an important difference: she is concerned not only with the origins of the perspective window but with its continuation and proliferation to the moving image and the computer screen. I will return, at the end, to this theme, and to the other kind of writing. The Virtual Window is a survey of the window metaphor, from Alberti through Microsoft’s Windows and on to X-Boxes and other developments around 2005, when the manuscript was finished (244). En route Friedberg discusses such...