The historiography of ancient art has so far barely allowed the perspective inherent to antiquity to be voiced. Rather, it has been persistently overshadowed by foreign concerns, particularly the notion of an evolutionary trajectory of art history leading to the modern, linear perspective norm. The perspective of antiquity contributes to the recognition and justification of the radical otherness of ancient art and explores the question of why, despite all the naturalism in detail and all the changes in representation conventions, it consistently avoided the unification of individual figures and objects in the space of natural perception, that is, under a perspective. The result of the analysis is a rehabilitation of the concept of symbolic form, adopted by Erwin Panofsky from Ernst Cassirer and applied to perspective, but it goes beyond this by expanding the development of structural conformities and complementing the aspect of spatial representation (Panofsky) with the considerations of thought (Platonic art criticism) and vision (theories of seeing).