Perceptions

Anonymous Austrian Artist 
Orange
ca. 1800-1850
gouache on paper
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Hans Thoma
ABC Bilderbuch - Lemon
ca. 1905
drawing
(print study for book illustration)
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Jacopo Ligozzi
Study of Spruce Twigs
ca. 1590-1610
watercolor on vellum
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Anonymous German Artist
Ex Libris - Bibliothek zu Augsburg
ca. 1550-1600
hand-colored woodcut
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wulfenbüttel

Anonymous German Artist 
Sacred Heart
15th century
hand-colored woodcut
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Anonymous Russian Artist
Ex Libris - Gubar
ca. 1922
zincograph
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques
des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Carl Krahl
Arms of Lower Austria
ca. 1850
watercolor and gouache on paper
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Max Eckhardt
Stone-Carved Coat-of-Arms
on Cannon-Boring Mill near Dresden
1901
watercolor on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Gustav Klimt
Initial G
1897-98
drawing
(illustration for Secessionist magazine Ver Sacrum)
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Charles-Alexandre Mairet
Initial P with Press Workers
ca. 1910-20
color woodblock print
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Franz von Seitz
Design for Nautilus Vessel
ca. 1865-75
watercolor and gouache on paper
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Alexandre Chaponnière
Study of Foot
ca. 1780-90
engraving
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Anonymous Italian Artist
Reliquary shaped as Arm, with Hand in Blessing
ca. 1470
gilt bronze with rock-crystal inset
Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Adolf Wölfli
Schähren-Hall und Schährer-Skt: Adolf Ring
1926
drawing (colored pencils)
Aargauer Kunsthaus, Switzerland

Anonymous Printmaker after Andrea Palladio
Ground Plane - Bramante's Tempietto, Rome
1581
woodcut
(page from Palladio's Quattro Libri dell'Architettura)
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Adolphe-François Appia
Espace Rythmique - La Porte Ouverte
1909
drawing
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

From the point of view of information there is surely no difficulty in discussing portrayal.  To say of a drawing that it is a correct view of Tivoli does not mean, of course, that Tivoli is bounded by wiry lines.  It means that those who understand the notation will derive no false information from the drawing – whether it gives the contour in a few lines or picks out "every blade of grass" as Richter's friends wanted to do.  The complete portrayal might be the one which gives as much correct information about the spot as we would obtain if we looked at it from the very spot where the artist stood.

Styles, like languages, differ in the sequence of articulation and in the number of questions they allow the artist to ask: and so complex is the information that reaches us from the visible world that no picture will ever embody it all.  That is not due to the subjectivity of vision but to its richness.  Where the artist has to copy a human product he can, of course, produce a facsimile which is indistinguishable from the original.  The forger of banknotes succeeds only too well in effacing his personality and the limitations of a period style.  

But what matters to us is that the correct portrait, like the useful map, is an end product on a long road through schema and correction.  It is not a faithful record of a visual experience but the faithful construction of a relational model.  

Neither the subjectivity of vision nor the sway of conventions need lead us to deny that such a model can be constructed to any required degree of accuracy.  What is decisive here is clearly the word "required."  The form of a representation cannot be divorced from its purpose and the requirements of the society in which the given visual language gains currency.

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960).