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| Raphael Madonna with the Fish ca. 1513 oil on panel Prado, Madrid |
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| Caravaggio Madonna of Loreto ca. 1604 oil on canvas Basilica of Sant' Agostino, Rome |
"I hope I need not stress here that I do not think this highly schematic mental diagram can ever do justice to the richness of historical development. I have dwelt on it mainly as an example of what I propose to call the principle of sacrifice, in contrast, that is, to what I have called the principle of exclusion. It will be remembered that the principle of exclusion is a very simple, not to say primitive, principle that denies the value it opposes. The principle of sacrifice admits and indeed implies the existence of a multiplicity of values. What is sacrificed is acknowledged to be a value even though it has to yield to another value which commands priority. But the mature artist will never sacrifice more than is absolutely necessary for the realization of his highest values. When he has done justice to his supreme norm other norms are allowed to come into their own."
"I think these two principles which I have here contrasted are so often confused because the partisans of movements in art tend to be terribles simplificateurs. Radical exclusion is something everyone can understand. Relative sacrifice is a more complex and more subtle matter. For all critics of the past both Beauty and Truth were acknowledged values. What Caravaggio was accused of – to take up the previous example – was to have sacrificed Beauty to Truth, while the academic tradition was attacked for sacrificing Truth to Beauty. The true accusation in both cases was perhaps that both sacrificed more of the rival value than was absolutely necessary to do justice to their supreme norm."
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| Nicolas Poussin Triumph of David 1630 oil on canvas Prado, Madrid |
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| Peter Paul Rubens Adoration of the Magi 1609 & 1629 oil on canvas Prado, Madrid |
"The historian will frequently find that opposing camps of critics have more in common than they admit. Rubénistes and Poussinistes, Delacroix and Ingres, Wagner and Brahms, shared so much common ground that their differences concerning certain priorities of value loomed all the more largely. Seen from a distance these differences partly disappear."
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| Eugène Delacroix Greece on the ruins of Missolonghi 1826 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Portrait of Madame Moitessier 1851 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
"The same cannot be said of a true principle of exclusion such as the absence of ornament in functionalism or the absence of symmetry from abstract expressionism. Such extremes may be amenable to a purely neutral morphological description. They could be noticed by an archaeologist from Mars even when life on this planet was extinct. Most stylistic changes have more to do with the mutual adjustment of conflicting norms which can perhaps be understood but never measured by any objective formal criterion."
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| Eugène Delacroix Mademoiselle Rose ca. 1820 oil on canvas Louvre, Paris |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Small Bather 1826 oil on canvas Phillips Collection, Washington DC |
– E.H. Gombrich, from the essay Norm and Form, first delivered as a lecture at Turin University in 1963, reprinted in the author's essay collection Norm and Form (London: Phaidon Press, 1966)