Register — the series
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A picture in bands
A register picture stacks its scene in horizontal bands, each with its own ground line and every figure drawn at one height. The feet line and the heads line of any pair are then parallel to the arithmetic floor — 0° against 15.4° in a photograph of the same figures — so the picture has no horizon anywhere in it, and what a reader recovers is an ordering with no metre attached.
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Bands with no overlap name a height for the eye
Read as a view, a stack of bands is one drawing of a family of eyes and row spacings. Keeping every figure clear of the row in front sets the least elevation: 40° for a procession and 74° for a crowd. There is a real parallel view that draws it exactly, an oblique one onto the wall itself, but it draws its people as paper. What the arrangement buys, on one wall, goes as the square of the number of bands.