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| Waldemar Deonna Temple of Apollo, Corinth 1905 gelatin bromide print Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Waldemar Deonna Sphinx in the Aegina Museum 1905 gelatin bromide print Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Waldemar Deonna Temple of Aphaea, Aegina 1905 gelatin bromide print Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Waldemar Deonna Funerary Steles in the Aegina Museum 1905 gelatin bromide print Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Waldemar Deonna Temple of Apollo, Delphi 1905 gelatin bromide print Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Waldemar Deonna Temple of Apollo, Delphi 1905 gelatin bromide print Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Waldemar Deonna Treasury of the Athenians, Delphi (reconstructed from rubble, 1903-1906) 1905 gelatin bromide print Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Waldemar Deonna Treasury of the Athenians, Delphi (reconstructed from rubble, 1903-1906) 1929 gelatin bromide print Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Waldemar Deonna Achilleion Palace, Corfu (built ca. 1890 for Empress Elisabeth of Austria) 1905 gelatin bromide print Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Waldemar Deonna Urchin minding Turkeys, Athens 1905 gelatin bromide print Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Waldemar Deonna Propylaia on the Acropolis, Athens 1931 gelatin bromide print Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Waldemar Deonna Rue du Théâtre, Delos 1906 gelatin bromide print Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Waldemar Deonna Quartier du Théâtre, Delos 1906 gelatin bromide print Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Waldemar Deonna Cast of Diadumenos, Delos 1906 gelatin bromide print Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Waldemar Deonna Stairs to the Acropolis, Thasos 1907 gelatin bromide print Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Waldemar Deonna Theater, Epidaurus 1939 gelatin bromide print Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
All thinking is sorting, classifying. All perceiving relates to expectations and therefore to comparisons. When we say that from the air houses appear like toys to us, or human beings like ants, we mean, I suggest, that we are startled by the unfamiliar sight of a house that compares to the familiar sight of a toy on the nursery floor. We feel that but for our knowledge we might have been deceived and have almost mistaken the one for the other. Our guesses and methods of testing them have become somewhat unsettled, and we try to describe the experience by indicating possibilities which flitted through our minds. But, to repeat, there is no "objective" sense in which a human being can look "the size of an ant" simply because an ant crawling on our pillow will look gigantic in comparison with a man in the distance. In Professor E.G. Boring's words, "Phenomenal size, like physical size, is relative and has no meaning except as a relation between objects."
A penny is not more real when seen from above than when looked upon sideways. But the frontal view happens to be the one which gives us most information. It is this aspect which we call the "characteristic shape" of the object, the one (or sometimes two) which exhibit most of those distinctive features by which we classify and name the things of our world. It is on these distinctive features, as we have seen, that primitive art will concentrate, not because it draws on knowledge rather than sight, but because it insists on clear classification.
Now, this same insistence on distinctive features also influences our reactions in real life whenever we are confronted with an uncertainty. It is therefore inexact to speak of our knowledge which influences our perception of the oblique penny. Rather it is our search for knowledge, our effort after meaning. In the terminology of this book, we would have to speak of expectations, guesses, hypotheses which influence our experiences. We have frequently seen that these expectations can become so strong that our experience runs ahead of the stimulus situation. Perception, in other words, is a process in which the next phase of what will appear when we test our interpretation is all but anticipated. To experience the sight of a penny or dinner plate and to read it as such is to experience the anticipation that the shape will become rounder in a predictable way if we crane our neck a little and look at it from higher up.
But is it different with the so-called "constancy of size?" We have seen that the stimulus pattern of the house or the penny alone can suggest no size because it might stand for an infinite number of objects "out there." If we still assign a size in our mind to images of pennies or houses this is due to the same habit of thinking of things in some standard situation in which we usually inspect them. We compare the penny in the hand with the house across the road. It is this imaginary standard distance which will influence the scale at which a child draws such objects and which will also determine our descriptions of ants and men. The notorious question whether the moon looks as large as a dime or a dollar may not allow of a clear-cut answer, but most of us would protest if anyone suggested that it looks like a pinhead or an ocean steamer, easy though it would be to devise a situation where these statements would be true.
– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)