The Image and the Eye:

...all art remains what is called conceptual, a manipulation of vocabulary, and . . . even the most naturalistic art generally starts from what I call a scheme that is modified and adjusted till it appears to match the visible world...

...When is illusion truthful...

...An explicit exposition of man's way of knowing the creatural state is required in the doctrine of creation...

...In Art and Illusion Gombrich proposed that an analysis of the transformational logic exercised in painting might shed light upon the prior and distinct process of visual perception itself, whose inner workings- located in that evidently indistinguishable mind-eye- elude scientific examination...

...Our "seeing" is really much more like that of the computer-controlled cameras that NASA uses in outer space, cameras that generate images in response to questions that are put in them by people who must anticipate what they think will be there...

...Seeing is a transitive verb," linking subjective hypotheses with ambiguous information to produce 'pictures' of the world...

...Mind cannot be located apart from the senses, but is somehow displayed in their selection and attention...

...His themes have been the processes of human perception and representation, and the varieties of illusion...

...Nell Gifford IT MAY BE no exaggeration to call Sir Ernst Gombrich, until recently Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition and Director of the Warburg Institute at the University of London, the most influential art historian of the twentieth century...

...The data of modern perceptual research suggest a substantial unity of perception that undercuts radically the mind-body division upon which our ordinary understanding of ourselves is based...

...It was proposed that mundane intelligibility was grounded in the created relation between Nature and Imago Dei, whose proportionality analogically represented the relation between creature and Creator...

...If that is so, then the participatory, synthetic, un-accidental way in which creatures come to know "the creatural state" is a proper topic for theological anthropology...

...And we could do worse than attend to the issues explored in this probing and engaging book.ing and engaging book...

...But could it be located without resort to a priori claims about where it "should" or "must" be...

...they hope to be deeply informed...

...The ways in which we "read" television images and X-rays illustrate his initial proposition that ". . . the painter's starting-point can never be the observation and imitation of nature...

...There is no fixed correlation between the optical world and the world of our visual experience...

...Caricature distorts every element of an image in order to communicate a likeness of the whole...

...In classical Christianity, that collection of calls-and-responses that extended from Nicaea to the brief but brilliant synthesis of Thomas Aquinas, these questions were posed as having to do with "proportionality" and the "two natures...

...Neither that Kultur nor its dogmatic foundations survived the 1930s, during which both Gombrich and his friend Karl Popper emigrated to England...

...In The Image and the Eye, he extends his research to twentieth century forms of representation (photographs, moving pictures, X-rays) and interpretation (information and communications theory...

...As such, it is an excellent point of entry for the newcomer, as well as a welcome amplification for those familiar with other works...

...Looking back over Gombrich's career as teacher and writer, we can say that he lifted out our visual metaphors for learning and knowledge- at a time when the world had reason to question the foundations of knowledge- took them "literally," and asked what they might mean...

...For Gombrich-the-art-historian, that paradoxical necessity turned on the relations between representation and illusion, which, in his view, mirrored the perennial philosophical problem of appearance and reality...

...The book we are considering here is a sort of holograph of Gombrich's treatment of representation-and-illusion over five decades...

...Cognition is irreducibly incarnate...

...Born in Vienna in 1909, Gombrich was trained in the traditional art-history-as Kulturgeschichte that owed its foundations to Hegel and the German Romantics...

...His analysis of the hypothetical nature of perception suggests a radical revision of all traditional theories of mind, one in which the divisions between sense and thought, eye and mind, are demolished...

...Art, he came to believe, replicates and plays upon an elasticity of perception that originates in the retina itself...

...The Herculean task of our century has been to establish a working theory of knowledge on the basis of empirical indeterminacy...

...The Image and the Eye is intended as a sequel to Art and Illusion (1960), where Gombrich examined the "code" of perception and representation as displayed in the record of Western art, which through the nineteenth century aimed for the successful imitation of nature...

...Something like that paradigm, shorn of the simplistic terms to' which we reduce its elements when we are tired of thinking and looking, is suggested by Gombrich's claim that...

...Karl Popper- and subsequently Thomas Kuhn and a host of others- would come to regard the choices that scientists necessarily make among available hypotheses as "aesthetic...

...In the thirties, he recognized the tyrannical uses to which privileged insights- the discernment of geistes- could be put...

...The doctrine of creation," writes Karl Rahner, ' 'has not to be considered as an object which is placed alongside the object of the doctrine of grace and of the supernatural order as something quite different from it...

...In his hands, and in our time...

...Along the way, the borders between his discipline and the philosophy of science, psychology, and contemporary philosophical epistemology faded...

...The limits of our knowledge, it turns out, are the limits of the world we participate in creating...

...Like Popper, whose Poverty of Historicism circulated in manuscript...

...Those are not innocent questions...

...How is it that we decode the first, are misled by the second...

...We do, too, and the "innocent eye," in Ruskin's infinitely attractive expression, in fact generates its images out of an indissoluble participation of eye-and-mind that draws upon memory and anticipation and requires time and mobility in order to organize random sensory stimuli...

...These are not innocent matters...

...Trompe I'oeil accurately imitates in order to deceive...

...as we move through the world, we experience a continuous range of visual hypotheses extending from the most general to the minutest particular.'' Perception itself depends upon hypotheses which we constantly propose to the indiscriminant barrage of retinal stimulation...

...in our judgments which are based-on visual impressions, sensation and judgment interpenetrate to such an extent that after a certain age it becomes hardly possible to separate them...

...Steadily, for half a century, he has pushed, tugged, and pummeled the traditional materials with which art historians work-objects, their iconography, dating, and attribution-molding his discipline into a new shape, something very nearly resembling "philosophical anthropology...

...And Gombrich, combining the study of perceptual psychology and art history, moved to propose that perceptual acts depend on the coding of virtually infinite visual stimuli into a recognizable world, on the terms of prior hypotheses about its presence and nature...

...This dazzling world of stimuli to which we are confined is yet a world that we share with one another and in which we are responsible...

...The line between representation and illusion was a boundary that human culture could afford neither to ignore nor to trespass...

...That problem, obviously, is not unique to art history...

...The problem, then, is to account for the ways individuals (and whole cultures) shape the imaginal 'space' between indeterminant retinal sensations and pictures-of-the-world...

...Incarnation," Rahner suggests elsewhere, is no accidental union of natures, "but is precisely what God himself becomes . . . when he exteriorizes himself into the dimension of what is other than himself...

...The 'pictures' we bring back from daily experience are not, like NASA photos, simply titillating...

...The location- the possibility- of intelligibility is the fundamental question, and neither subjective nor objective answers suffice...

...The logic of that code, he claimed, is transformational, translating three-dimensional perceptions, mobile and serial, into two-dimensional images that are fixed both temporally and spatially...

...Also-like Popper, he refused to lapse into an expressionistic relativism or nihilistic atomism, Janus options that had been taken up in the period surrounding the first war...

...when is "truth" illusion...

...The search for some proportionality between our awareness of flux and our experience of order was the task, and he began his search with tools of his trade: caricature and trompe I'oeil, both devices that "fool the eye...

...If art' 'plays upon an elasticity of perception that originates in the retina itself," then the study of illusion and representation refers ultimately to the nature of the human subject, both individual and collective...

...How can deliberate distor-tionscconvey information...

...revelation with "natural" knowledge...

...Grace was a synthetic participant with Nature...

...If that world looks increasingly like a dwindling global village whose home address is Ground Zero, then questions of perception and cognition, as Gom-brich and his burgeoning corps of interlocutors pose them, are neither innocent nor inconsequential...

...If they end up on the front page, it's because we've disagreed about their content, or nature, or implications...

...Does it matter...