Unseeing

Jusepe de Ribera
Youth with Hat-Flaps over Eyes
ca. 1630-40
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Markus Raetz
Sleeper
1958
color woodblock print
Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Filippo Parodi
Lucretia
ca. 1685-90
marble
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Domenico Maggiotto (Domenico Fedeli)
Sleeping Youth
ca. 1760
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Wilhelm Leibl
Head of Blind Man
ca. 1866-67
oil on canvas
Lenbachhaus, Munich

Anton Kolig
Dream of Happiness (Rudolf Baurecht)
1944
drawing
Leopold Museum, Vienna

Caspar David Friedrich
Youth sleeping on Grave Mound
ca. 1803
woodcut
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel

Anselm Feuerbach
Resting Nymph
1870
oil on canvas
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg

François Duchatel
Soeur Juliana van Thulden on her Deathbed
1654
oil on canvas
Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

Louis Fabritius Dubourg
Académie
ca. 1724
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jean-Baptiste Henri Deshays
Sleeping Woman
ca. 1757-58
oil on canvas
Kunsthalle Bremen

Edgar Degas
Scene from the Steeplechase - The Fallen Jockey
1866
drawing
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Bartolomeo Coriolano after Guido Reni
Sleeping Cupid
ca. 1630
chiaroscuro woodcut
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Charles Chaplin
Le Rêve
1857
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille

Edward Burne-Jones
Sleeping Beauty
1871
watercolor and gouache on vellum
Manchester Art Gallery

Anonymous German Artist
Recumbent Youth
16th century
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

It was a much-debated question at the time of Plato whether the language of words, the names of things, exists by convention or by nature.  Whether there is some real bond between the word "horse" and a horse, or whether it might also be called by any other name.  The question, put in that form, looks to us a little childish.  Most of us are convinced that with the exception of onomatopoeic words as "moo-cow," the names of things are more or less fortuitous labels, noises we have learned to make in order to indicate certain classes of things.  It has been traditional in this context to bring out the arbitrary and conventional nature of language by contrasting the accidental name "horse" or "cheval" with the artist's visual image of a horse.  This, it was thought, is not conventional but a real likeness, a natural sign, or what is also called an "icon."

In Plato's Cratylus, which is devoted to this problem, Socrates constantly makes use of this contrast.  "Could a painting, to revert to our previous comparison, be made like any real thing, if there were not pigments out of which the painting is composed, which were by nature like the objects which the painter's art imitates?  Is that not impossible?"

"Impossible," echoes his victim.  It is one of the moments in Plato's dialogues when one would have liked to have been present to thrust the speaker aside. "O Socrates," I would have said, "were you not trained as a sculptor?"  "I was," he would have admitted.  "And did you find that the stone you used was like the objects you imitated?"  "Not very much, by the dog."  "Or what about the cups from which you drank at the symposium?  Have you not noticed that the old-fashioned ones have black figures on the red burnt clay, while most of your recent pottery uses black for the ground and leaves the natural red of the cup free for the figures?  Are objects then both black and red according to the painter's whim?  But even if you thought of the colored paintings by Polygnotus or Zeuxis, we now know, O Socrates, that they could never hope to match their pigments against the reality of a sunlit landscape.  Yet sunlit landscapes have been painted, and what you considered impossible has happened."     

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