Art and Illusion A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

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Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation by Eastward.H. Gombrich
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Art and Illusion Quotes Showing one-28 of 28

"Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly tin can brand us see a thread which is not there."
― E.H. Gombrich, Fine art and Illusion

"What a painter inquires into is non the nature of the physical world but the nature of our reactions to it. He is not concerned with causes simply with the machinery of certain furnishings. His is a psychological problem-that of conjuring up a convincing paradigm despite the fact that not one individual shade corresponds to what we call "reality." In order to empathize this puzzle-every bit far as we tin merits to understand it as nevertheless-scientific discipline had to explore the chapters of our minds to annals relationships rather than private elements."
― East.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

"All thinking is sorting, classifying. All perceiving relates to expectations and therefore to comparisons. When we say that from the air houses appear like toys to united states of america, or human beings like ants, we mean, I advise, that we are startled by the unfamiliar sight of a firm that compares to the familiar sight of a toy on the nursery floor. We feel that but for our knowledge we might accept been deceived and accept almost mistaken the one for the other. Our guesses and methods of testing them have become somewhat unsettled, and we endeavour to describe the feel past indicating possibilities which flitted through our minds. But, to repeat, there is no "objective" sense in which a human can look "the size of an ant" only because an emmet crawling on our pillow volition look gigantic in comparing with a man in the distance. In professor Due east.G. Slow'southward words, "Phenomenal size, like physical size is relative and has no meaning except equally a relation between objects."
― Due east.H. Gombrich, Fine art and Illusion: A Written report in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

"I believe what we call the Renaissance artists' preoccupation with structure has a very practical basis in their needs to know the schema of things. For in a mode our very concept of "structure," the idea of some basic scaffolding or armature that determines the "essence" of things, reflects our demand for a schema with which to grasp the infinite variety of this globe of change. No wonder these issues have get somewhat clouded by metaphysical fog which settled over the discussions of art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

"At that place is one blazon of scientific illustration in which this consequence of scale on impression is best-selling officially, as it were. Geographers who depict sections of mount ranges will exaggerate the relation of summit to width according to a stated proportion. They have found that a truthful rendering of vertical human relationship looks false. Our mind refuses to have the fact that the distance of 28,000 feet to which Mount Everest soars from sea level is no more than the altitude of but over 5 miles which a motorcar traverses in a matter of minutes."
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

"The term which psychology has coined for our relative imperviousness to the dizzy variations that get on in the world effectually us is "continuance." The color, shape, and brightness of things remain to the states relatively abiding, even though nosotros may notice some variation with the change of distance, illumination, angle of vision, and so on."
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Report in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

"Styles, like languages, differ in the sequence of articulation and in the number of questions they permit the artist to enquire; and and so complex is the information that reaches usa from the visible world that no picture will ever embody it all. This is non due to the subjectivity of vision but to its richness. Where the artist has to copy a human being production he can, of grade, 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 menses style."
― Due east.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

"In Altdorfer's painting, infinitude acquires a special pathos and beauty through its religious associations, but in principle, as Nietzsche knew, all claims to copy nature must lead to the demand of representing the infinite. The corporeality of data reaching us from the visible globe is incalculably large, and the artist's medium is inevitably restricted and granular. Even the most meticulous realist can accommodate simply a express number of marks on his console, and though he may effort to shine out the transition between his dabs of paint beyond the threshold of visibility, in the end he will e'er accept to rely on suggestion when it comes to representing the infinitely pocket-sized."
― Eastward.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

"That power of belongings on to an image that Ruskin describes and then admirably is not the power of the eidetic; it is that faculty of keeping a large number of relationships nowadays in one'southward heed that distinguishes all mental achievement, be it that of the chess player, the composer, or the slap-up creative person."
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

"The possibility that all recognition of images is connected with projections and visual anticipations is strengthened by the results of recent experiments. Information technology appears that if yous show an observer the paradigm of a pointing hand or arrow, he will tend to shift its location somehow in the direction of the movement. Without this tendency of ours to run into potential movement in the form of anticipation, artists would never accept been able to create the suggestion of speed in stationary images."
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Report in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

"At this point the reader should be warned that the argument here developed would not be accustomed by all schools of psychology. The Gestalt school would take none of it. The pioneers of this important movement want to minimize the role of learning and experience in perception. They call back that our compulsion to encounter the tiled floor, or the letters, not equally irregular units in the plane but equally regular units bundled in depth is far also universal and as well compelling to be attributed to learning. Instead they postulate an inborn tendency of our brain. Their theory centers on the electrical forces which come into play in the cortex during the procedure of vision. It is these forces, they merits, that tend toward simplicity and balance and make our perception always weighted, as it were, in favor of geometrical simplicity and cohesion. A flat, regularly tiled floor is simpler than the complex pattern of rhomboids in the plane, hence it is a flat, regularly tiled flooring we really see."
― Eastward.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Written report in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

"Co-ordinate to a classic experiment by Wolfgang Kohler, you can take two grayness pieces of newspaper-one night, one vivid-and teach the chickens to expect nutrient on the brighter of the two. If you so remove the darker piece and supervene upon it by one brighter than the other 1, the deluded creatures will look for their dinner, non on the identical gray paper where they accept always found information technology, only on the paper where they would wait information technology in terms of relationships-that is, on the brighter of the two. Their little brains are attuned to gradients rather than to individual stimuli. Things could not get well with them if nature had willed it otherwise. For would a memory of the verbal stimulus have helped them to recognize the identical paper? Hardly always! A cloud passing over the sunday would change its effulgence, so might fifty-fifty a tilt of the caput, or an arroyo from a different bending. If what we call "identity" were not anchored in a constant relationship with environs, it would exist lost in the anarchy of swirling impressions that never repeat themselves."
― East.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

"Y'all should await at certain walls stained with clammy, or at stones of uneven colour. If you lot take to invent some backgrounds you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, great plains, hills and valleys in swell variety; and and so again you will see there battles and foreign figures in violent activeness, expressions of faces and clothes and an infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the audio of bells, in whose stroke you may find every named word which y'all can imagine."
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

"A white handkerchief in the shade may be objectively darker than a lump of coal in the sunshine. We rarely confuse the one with the other considering the coal will on the whole be the blackest patch in our field of vision, the handkerchief the whitest, and it is relative brightness that matters and that we are aware of."
― East.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Report in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

"We shall never know what Rubens' children "actually looked like," but this need not mean we are forever barred from examining the influence which acquired patterns or schema have on the organisation of our perception. It would be interesting to examine this question in an experimental setting. but every student of art who has intensely occupied himself with a family unit of forms has experienced examples of such influence. In fact I vividly remember the shock I had while I was studying these formulas for stubby children: I never thought they could be, only all of a sudden I saw such children everywhere."
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Report in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

"We all know the experience at the moving pictures when nosotros are ushered to a seat very far off-center. At first the screen and what is on it look so distorted and unreal we feel similar leaving. But in a few minutes nosotros accept learned to take our position into account, and the proportions right themselves. And as with shapes, then with colors."
― Due east.H. Gombrich, Fine art and Illusion: A Written report in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

"Without this faculty of man and fauna alike to recognize identities across the variations of difference, to make allowance for changed conditions, and to preserve the framework of a stable earth, art could not exist. When we open our eyes under water nosotros recognize objects, shapes, and colors although through an unfamiliar medium. When we beginning see pictures we run into them in an unfamiliar medium. This is more than a mere pun. The ii capacities are interrelated. Every time nosotros encounter with an unfamiliar type of transposition, in that location is a brief moment of shock and a menstruation of adjustment-but it is an aligning for which the mechanism exists in us."
― East.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Written report in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

"Nosotros receive no message in the strict sense of the word when a friend enters a room and says "good morning." The word has no function to select from an ensemble of possible states, though situations are conceivable in which it would have.

The most interesting consequence of this way of looking at communication is the general determination that the greater the probability of a symbol's occurrence in any given situation, the smaller volition be its information content. Where we can conceptualize nosotros need not listen. Information technology is in this context that projection will practice for perception."
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Written report in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

"Hildebrand, also, challenged the ethics of scientific naturalism by an entreatment to the psychology of perception: if we endeavour to analyze our mental images to detect their primary constituents, we will find them composed of sense data derived from vision and from memories of touch and movement. A sphere, for instance, appears to the eye as a apartment deejay; information technology is affect which informs us of the properties of space and course. Whatsoever attempt on the part of the creative person to eliminate this noesis is futile, for without information technology he would not perceive the world at all. His task is, on the contrary, to compensate for the absenteeism of movement in his work by clarifying his paradigm and thus conveying not just visual sensations simply too those memories of touch which enable us to reconstitute the three-dimensional course in our minds."
― E.H. Gombrich, Fine art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

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