IT SEEMS more an instinct than some mere whim. As soon as our muscles have the strength we start hauling ourselves upwards. We scramble first onto doorsteps and chairs and parents’ shoulders, and when we get older we begin climbing trees, before progressing to church towers and the top decks of buses, to lugging picnic hampers up to panoramic promontories and puffing up mountains to stand on the peak. We crane out of plane windows during take-off and landing. We envy the birds.

And why? We want, quite simply, to see what we can see. We want to feel the exhilaration of expanded horizons. It’s scarcely surprising, then, that the artist, from the moment that he was handed the key by Filippo Brunelleschi (the architect who invented the system of “linear” perspective), should so often have sought out high viewpoints. It comes perfectly naturally to anyone who sets out to explore a vision of the world, and especially so to someone who seeks to capture his insights by merging the microcosm of the canvas with the viewer’s reality.

A loan exhibition, The Impossible View, currently showing at The Lowry in Salford, brings together oil paintings, watercolours, photographs and prints from the 16th century to the present day to examine the ways in which artists have sought out high vantage points, in which the panoramic vista and the shifting, multiple sweep of the bird’s-eye perspective have been used to provide the spectator with a sense of man’s place in the wider map of the world.

Lowry’s work is the starting point. Born and brought up in Manchester, his eye constantly drawn upwards by the dizzy perpendiculars of smokestacks, his preoccupation with elevated viewpoints is already apparent in student drawings. Lowry’s industrial landscapes of the 1930s to the 1960s take a typically high vantage point.And these form the core of this exhibition.

The show, however, gets off to a disappointing start. The opening room sets the scene by placing Lowry’s works in the context of a selection of painters who have chosen a similar lofty stance to present the complexities of the inscrutable urban jungle. But the lighting levels have had to be kept very low so that the beautiful bruised colours of David Bomberg’s 1944 Evening in the City of London with its smoggy sun sinking behind the dome of St Paul’s, and the impasto heat haze of Leon Kossoff’s 1975 Dalston: Summer Day No 1, turn to mud.

But persist. The lighting improves. And not only are many of the views included painted of local spots, but also, works that might in other contexts have been easily passed over, can now be admired. How many people would stop to appreciate Jacob van Ruisdael’s understated little landscape on the walls of the National Gallery? Amid a superb collection, it cannot compete. But here its subtlety stands out. And the paintings by Turner, Thomas Moran and Gino Severini positively shine.

Impossible View does not set out to provide a definitive survey of the elevated vantage point. Rather it picks out and explores a few aspects of the idea. As techniques progressed, as spreading Dutch landscapes gave way to more dramatic panoramas painted upon circular buildings, as lenses grew more sophisticated, as the Claude glass came into fashion to create instant picturesque and the camera obscura became common artistic practice, as photographic instruments were sent skywards, at first attached to balloons, later in space rockets, records of the planet’s surface grew gradually more spectacular, more comprehensive, more precise.

At its simplest, this exhibition, with its before and after etchings of the Great Fire of London 1666, its painted scenes of the 1739 Great Frost, its photographic record of the ruins of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, its 1971 photo-montage of a crater on the moon, could be seen as documentary. But it is about far more than topographical record. The scenes that it presents are not necessarily truth — as anyone who seeks out the actual sites from which Lowry painted will find out.

Many of Lowry’s cityscapes were composites, assembled according to loose “linear” perspective so that if you study more closely, you can see that Lowry, while achieving a sense of depth by raising his viewpoint, has painted his figures as if seen from ground level. And several artists in this show have chosen such wilfully unrealistic perspective.

So why do artists choose the impossible view? Some seem to do so for almost propagandist reasons. The painters of biblical scenes set out to echo the all-powerful overview of God. Rich landowners wanted to display their own power, flaunting the expanse of their properties. And Moran’s dramatic painting done from the banks of the Colorado River was presumably, in part, intended to entice the rolling wagons of American pioneers further west. For others the impossible view was a stylistic choice. Turner’s fish-eye lens view of sunset over Petworth Park was intended to heighten a sense of the sun’s radiance and evoke the sublime. And the Italian Futurist, Severini, captures a sense of the modern bustle of boulevard life in the prismatic planes of his busy surface.

The artists’ own perceptions are integral to their presentations of the landscape. This show is less about what we see, than how we see it and why. Perhaps Lowry chose his isolated perspective because that was the way in which this solitary painter could convey his sense of aloneness, of how removed he felt from the matchstick people who milled about below.

In his stark depiction of the road from Arras, Christopher Nevinson speaks of his horror at war’s devastation. In a photo-montage of the Grand Canyon, David Hockney seeks to capture the way we see the world, “not all at once but rather in discrete separate glances”. And by presenting a landscape in this way, he evokes our experience of it as it builds up around us, enveloping us like some aerial vision.

This show, for all its flaws (and the catalogue, by the way, is dreadful), takes us back to the fundamentals of art appreciation, to the experience of seeing as it establishes our place in the surrounding world.

• The Impossible View is at The Lowry in Salford (0870-787 5794) until January 11.