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| Attic Greece Panathenaic Prize Amphora 332-331 BC black figure pottery British Museum |
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| Attic Greece Panathenaic Prize Amphora (detail) 333-332 BC black figure pottery British Museum |
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| Greek culture in South Italy Dinos with Symposium Scene ca. 375-350 BC red figure pottery Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"The picture conjured up by art is unreliable and incomplete, it appeals to the lower part of the soul, to our imagination rather than to our reason, and must therefore be banished as a corrupting influence. . . . this is precisely what the famous passage in [Plato's] Republic suggests. Does a couch differ from itself according to how you view it from the side or the front or in any other way? Or does it differ not at all in fact though it appears different? It is first of all for this reason – for his failure to represent the couch as it is by itself and for including only one aspect of it in his picture – that the artist is condemned as a maker of phantoms. But that is not all. The same magnitude, I presume, viewed from near or far does not appear equal. – Why, no. – And the same things appear bent or straight to those who view them in water and out, or concave and convex, owing to similar errors of vision about colours and there is obviously every confusion of this sort in our souls. And so scene-painting in its exploitation of this weakness of our nature falls nothing short of witchcraft, and so do jugglery and many other such contrivances."
"For us, who have lived with the heritage of Greek and post-Greek art throughout our lives, it may need a good deal of historical imagination to recapture the thrill and the shock which the first illusionist images must have caused when shown on the stage or on the walls of Greek houses. There is reason to believe that this did not happen before Plato's lifetime and that his outburst against the trickeries of painting was an outburst against 'modern art'. For it was only in Plato's period, toward the middle of the fourth century, that the Greek revolution was moving toward its climax, only then that the tricks of foreshortening were joined by those of modelling in light and shade to produce the possibility of a real trompe l'œil."
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| Greek culture in South Italy Muse with Lyre ca. 350 BC painted terracotta (fragment) Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Leonardo da Vinci Little Madonna ca. 1495 oil on panel, transferred to canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Leonardo da Vinci Virgin of the Rocks ca. 1506-1508 oil on panel National Gallery, London |
"Once this fact is understood it may be easier to see why the amount of information packed into the picture may hinder the illusion as frequently as it helps it. The reason lies precisely in the limitations of the medium that may occasionally obtrude themselves and contradict the impression the painter wanted to conjure up. No wonder, therefore, that the greatest protagonist of naturalistic illusion in painting, Leonardo da Vinci, is also the inventor of the deliberately blurred image, the sfumato, or veiled form, that cuts down the information on the canvas and therefore stimulates the mechanism of projection. In describing this achievement of the perfect manner in painting, Vasari praises these outlines hovering between the seen and the unseen. In the same context, Titian's contemporary, Daniele Barbaro, adapts Pliny's praise of Parrhasios' outline to the technique of sfumato that leads us to understand what one does not see. He speaks of the soft disappearance on the horizon of objects from our view which is and is not, and this can only be achieved by infinite practice, delighting those who do not understand it and stunning those who do."
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| workshop of Leonardo da Vinci Bacchus, or, St John the Baptist ca. 1510-1515 oil on panel, transferred to canvas Louvre, Paris |
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| Cavaliere d'Arpino St Clare at the Siege of Assisi before 1640 oil on panel Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Diego Velázquez Surrender of Breda ca. 1635 oil on canvas Museo del Prado, Madrid |
"In his description of a real or imaginary painting Philostratus commends the trick of the artist who surrounds the walls of Thebes with armed men so that some are seen in full figure, others with the legs hidden, others from the waist up, then only the busts of some, heads only, helmets only, and finally just spearpoints. All that, my boy, is analogy, for the eyes must be deceived as they travel back along the relevant zones of the picture. It must have been this passage which inspired Shakespeare to describe in The Rape of Lucrece a painting of the fall of Troy:
For much imaginary work was there;
Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
That for Achilles' image stood his spear,
Grip'd in an armèd hand; himself behind
Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind:
A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head,
Stood for the whole to be imaginèd.
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| Valentin de Boulogne Expulsion of the Money-changers from the Temple ca. 1620-1625 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| John Constable Weymouth Bay 1816 oil on canvas Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| John Constable Cloud Study 1821 oil on paper, mounted on panel Yale Center for British Art |
"Artists turned against the academies and the traditional methods of teaching because they felt it was the artist's task to wrestle with the unique visual experience which can never have been prefigured and can never recur. The history of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art thus became, in a way, the history of the struggle against the schema. Not entirely though. Some artists always kept their heads. Degas, for instance, dismissed the excited talk of his impressionist friends with the remark that painting was a conventional art and they would better occupy their time by copying drawings by Holbein. According to Meder, it was Rousseau who first held forth in Emile in 1763 against the traditional way of teaching the elements of drawing. Emile should never be taught to copy other men's work, he should copy only nature. This is one of those programmes which may be said to be charged with explosive ignorance. True, similar things had been said before of or by Lysippus and Caravaggio, but in the eighteenth century the demand had a new ring. It is the time of 'original genius' and of nature worship. And so the break in tradition is heralded, which foreshadows the modern dilemma."
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| Joseph Mallord William Turner Venetian Scene ca. 1840-1845 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Joseph Mallord William Turner Venetian Festival ca. 1845 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
– from Art and Illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation by E.H. Gombrich (London: Phaidon Press, 1960 – an expanded version of the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1956)