Likewise, incomplete visual images push the beholder into completing the image: artists provide the hints that the viewer must use to complete the image. Artists cannot represent every detail of reality, no matter how painstakingly they work. It is the creation of an illusion that allows the beholder to fill in the details. Gombrich asserts, "I believe that this illusion is assisted by what might be called the 'etc. principle,' the assumption we tend to make that to see a few members of a series is to see them all." Furthermore, the expectation of the viewer as well as the context of the image affect the meaning the viewer assigns to an image.
Eh Gombrich Art And Illusion Pdf Download
In one of the most interesting chapters of the book, Gombrich turns to a discussion of caricature, drawing on his earlier work with Ernst Kris. He uses the work of Freud and other psychologists in the exploration of the "minimum clues of expression," those features that allow a viewer to see a face in only a few lines. Finally, Gombrich closes this section and the book with a discussion of the similarities between "the language of words and visual representation," concluding "the true miracle of the language of art is not that it enables the artist to create the illusion of reality. It is that under the hands of a great master the image becomes translucent."
Illusion is one of the most puzzling phenomena in the study of perception and by extension, the study of representational art. In the case of an illusion, perception is not dependent on how the receptors in the eye and brain react, nor is it dependent on the object being perceived. That is, a human being is able to make meaning from an image independent of the physiology of either the eye or the image. For example, when children see a picture of a duck in a book and are asked what they see, they will answer, "A duck." Now, the light receptors in the children's retinas do not fire in an identical way when the children see a real duck outside in a pond and when they see a picture of a duck. Likewise, the picture does not resemble in any real way the duck in the real world. The picture, therefore, is illusory; it is paint on paper. Yet the human mind is capable of perceiving the paint on paper as a duck. Gombrich uses the following example to illustrate the ways that human beings confront illusions each day and still make sense of the world:
If the reader finds this assertion a little puzzling, there is always an instrument of illusion close at hand to verify it: the bathroom mirror. I specify the bathroom because the experiment I urge the reader to make succeeds best if the mirror is a little clouded by steam. It is a fascinating exercise in illusionist representation to trace one's own head on the surface of the mirror and to clear the area enclosed by the outline. For when we have actually done this do we realize how small the image is which gives us the illusion of seeing ourselves "face to face." To be exact, it must be precisely half the size of our head.
Clearly, the perception of representational art requires the use of illusion. It is only throughillusion that the viewer recognizes the landscape in the painting to be the landscape out the window. One of Gombrich's main purposes, then, in Art and Illusion is to investigate how artists, across time, have developed the particular illusions that they have in order to render their paintings ever closer to the perception of "reality."
For Gombrich, making sense of what he heard required that he match what he heard to his internal catalogue of possible German word combinations. The difficult part of this process, of course, was that he could not let his expectations lead him to fabricate illusions about what he heard. He needed to use both his knowledge of possibilities and his critical faculties. As the receiver of auditory information, Gombrich needed to consider both the words and their contexts while keeping in mind his own expectations.
Without this wartime experience of listening and translating, Gombrich may not have considered how expectations affect recipients of sensory input and he may not have considered the importance of the psychology of perception for the understanding of art. Viewers of art fill the gaps of what they see based on their internal catalogues of what is possible. Moreover, according to Gombrich, "the context of action creates conditions of illusions." Context and expectation shape the meaning viewers impart to works of art, just as Gombrich and his colleagues used context and expectation to interpret German messages. 2ff7e9595c
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