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| Adolph Menzel Suits of Armour 1866 watercolor and gouache on paper Hamburger Kunsthalle |
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| Salvator Rosa Two Soldiers with Attendant ca. 1657-58 etching Hamburger Kunsthalle |
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| Hans Thoma Young Woman with Dejected Knight 1894 watercolor on paper Städel Museum, Frankfurt |
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| Leonhard Beck Tournament Opponents Unhorsed 1517 woodcut Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Beyer Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor (posthumous portrait in classical garb) ca. 1770-80 marble Belvedere Museum, Vienna |
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| Philibert Benoît Delarue Soldiers gathered around a Knight of Malta 1753-54 drawing Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Benjamin West Portrait of George III 1783 oil on canvas Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| Francesco Solimena Prince Joseph Wenzel I von Liechtenstein 1725 oil on canvas Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna |
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| François Guérin Portrait of Prince Xavier of Saxony ca. 1765 oil on canvas Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden |
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| Anonymous Britain Artist after Anthony van Dyck Portrait of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford ca. 1635 oil on canvas National Portrait Gallery, London |
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| Pierre Mignard Portrait of young Louis XIV, King of France ca. 1655-60 oil on canvas Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen |
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| Hyacinthe Rigaud Prince Joseph Wenzel I von Liechtenstein 1740 oil on canvas Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna |
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| Jean-François de Troy Louis-Auguste, duc du Maine (illegitimate son of Louis XIV) ca. 1705 oil on canvas Musée d'Île de France, Château de Sceaux |
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| Anthony van Dyck James, 3rd Marquess of Hamilton ca. 1640 oil on canvas Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna |
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| Heinrich Göding Portrait of Elector Moritz of Saxony ca. 1606 oil on canvas Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden |
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| Frank Eugene Man in Armour ca. 1910 photogravure Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas |
For shadow, as Hogarth knew, is only an indication of form as long as we know where the light comes from. If we do not know, we have to guess. Psychologists have found that in the absence of other clues, Western observers have settled for the probability that the light falls from high up and from the left-hand side. It is the position most convenient for drawing and writing with the right hand, and it therefore applies to most paintings. . . . The method of isolation and guessing is not merely a frivolous game. It reminds us of the tremendous gulf that separates the reading of pictures from the sight of the visible world. Simply to equate the one with the other, as Ruskin did, in common with so many nineteenth-century critics, is to bar one's way to the understanding of representation. . . . Without some initial system, without a first guess to which we can stick unless it is disproved, we could indeed make no "sense" of the milliards of ambiguous stimuli that reach us from our environment. . . . It is hardly necessary to stress how immeasurably richer is the information we have at our disposal in this process of trial and error when we move around in the real world, compared with the interpretation of representations. The philosophers and psychologists from Berkeley's time onward were certainly right when they stressed the importance of touch for our confidence in a solid, permanent world. But we now know that touch is only one of a whole battery of cross checks at our disposal. . . . But all these clues, we may be sure, are subsidiary to the test of movement. Whenever we do not quite trust our eyes or want additional information, we shift our head slightly and watch the relative change of position.
– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)