“The points of contact which the quest of style may have with the so-called classic art do not concern us.
“Others will seek, and will, no doubt, discover, these analogies which in any case cannot be looked upon as a return to methods, conceptions, and values transmitted by classical painting.
“A few examples will illustrate our theory.
“We see no difference between one of those nude figures commonly called artistic and an anatomical plate. There is, on the other hand, an enormous difference between one of these nude figures and our futurist conception of the human body.
“Perspective, such as it is understood by the majority of painters, has for us the very same value which it lends to an engineer’s design.
“The simultaneousness of states of mind in the work of art: that is the intoxicating aim of our art.
“Let us explain again by examples. In painting a person on a balcony, seen from inside the room, we do not limit the scene to what the square frame of the window renders visible; but we try to render the sum total of visual sensations which the person on the balcony has experienced; the sun-bathed throng in the street, the double row of houses which stretch to right and left, the beflowered balconies, etc. This implies the simultaneousness of the ambient, and, therefore, the dislocation and dismemberment of objects, the scattering and fusion of details, freed from accepted logic, and independent from one another.
“In order to make the spectator live in the center of the picture, as we express it in our manifesto, the picture must be the synthesis of what one remembers and of what one sees.
“You must render the invisible which stirs and lives beyond intervening obstacles, what we have on the right, on the left, and behind us, and not merely the small square of life artificially compressed, as it were, by the wings of a stage.”
[This feeling of transparency is fundamental to the theory.]