Coiffed

attributed to Bonifacio Bembo
Portrait of a Woman
before 1480
tempera on panel
Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris

Bernhard Strigel
Portrait of a Woman
ca. 1515
oil on panel
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Bernard van Orley
Portrait of Margaretha van Oostenrijk
1518
oil on panel
Musée de Brou à Bourg-en-Bresse

Lucas Cranach the Elder
Portrait of a Woman
ca. 1525-35
oil on panel
Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel

Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen
Portrait of an Old Woman
1545
etching and engraving
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Hanns Lautensack
Portrait of Felicitas von Eckh
1553
etching
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Willem Key
Portrait of a Young Woman
1557
oil on panel
Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands

Anonymous Flemish Artist
Portrait of a Young Woman
ca. 1660
oil on canvas
Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Jean Ranc
Portrait of a Woman
ca. 1715
oil on canvas
Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Narbonne

Jean-Étienne Liotard
Portrait of Marie-Anne Marconnay,
Madame Jean-Louis Maisonnet
1755
pastel on vellum
Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Françoise Duparc
Portrait of a Young Woman
ca. 1760-70
oil on canvas
Musée Hyacinthe Rigaud, Perpignan

Henry Fuseli
Portrait of a Woman
1781
drawing
Graphische Sammlung, Zentralbibliothek Zürich

Cornelis Kruseman
Portrait of Lydia Johanna Maria van Hoogeveen
1826
oil on canvas
Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden

Anonymous Photographer
Portrait of a Woman
ca. 1845
hand-colored daguerreotype
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Edward von Steinle
Head of the Tiburtine Sibyl
1848
drawing, with added gouache
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Anita Rée
Girl with Dandelion Puff
1926
oil on canvas
private collection

The passage [of Calderón's verse-drama, as reproduced in yesterday's post] repays study, for the poet succeeds where many psychologists have failed in describing the panorama of illusions that may be evoked by the indeterminate.  It is the power of expectation rather than the power of conceptual knowledge that molds what we see in life no less than in art.  Were we to voyage in the Mediterranean we would, alas, be unlikely to see the train of Neptune's suite so convincingly conjured up as did the seventeenth-century traveler steeped in the reading of the classics and the experience of mythological paintings.  But since we all probe the distant and indeterminate for possible classifications, which we then test and elaborate in a game of projections, Calderón's beautiful text provides us with the desired justification for comparing the reading of indeterminate pictures with the reading of indeterminate scenery.  The experience of the radio "monitor" confronted with indistinct speech and that of the sailor confronted with indistinct shapes on the horizon are not incommensurate.  We must always rely on guesses, on the assessment of probabilities, and on subsequent tests, and in this there is an even transition from the reading of symbolic material to our reaction in real life.  When we wait at the bust stop and hope the Number Two is coming into sight, we probe the indistinct blot that appears in the distance for the possibility of projecting the number "two" into it.  When we are successful in this projection, we say that we now see the number.  This is a case of symbol reading.  But is it different with the bus itself?  Certainly not on a foggy night.  Nor even in full daylight, if the distance is sufficiently great.  Every time we scan the distance we somehow compare our expectation, our projection, with the incoming message.  If we are too keyed up, as is well known, the slightest stimulus will produce an illusion.  Here as always it remains our task to keep our guesses flexible, to revise them if reality appears to contradict, and to try again for a hypothesis that might fit the data.  But it is always we who send out these tentacles into the world around us, who grope and probe, ready to withdraw our feelers for a new test. 

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