The Objective Eye: Color, Form, and Reality in the Theory of Art by John Hyman, 2006, University of Chicago Press, Ltd. Chicago

The Objective Eye: Color, Form, and Reality in the Theory of Art by John Hyman, 2006, University of Chicago Press, Ltd. Chicago

Chapter 9

Realism and Relativism

As I have said, Goodman holds that “the literal or realistic or naturalistic system of representation is simply the customary one.” Realism, he argues, is not a matter of fidelity to nature and cannot be measured by resemblance. For our judgements of resemblance are influenced by our visual habits, and our visual habits are influenced by the kinds of pictures we are used to seeing. Hence, resemblance cannot be a “constant and independent” standard against which pictures can be measured because “the criteria of resemblance vary with changes in representational practice.” “Realism”, Goodman concludes, “is relative, determined by the system of representation standard for a given culture or person given at the time.”

Quotes from Nelson Goodman Languages of Art, p.39

Links to Dunning and Edgerton and Panofsky – Symbolic Form. 

Page 184

Whether or not this claim is true, however, it does not follow from the observation that the art we see modifies our visual habits and influences the resemblances we perceive because fidelity to nature may also be something that we must learn to see and judge correctly and because art may be a source from which we learn. In a similar way, progress in the physical sciences has enabled us to refine our observations of natural effects, and these observations have in turn enabled us to test scientific theories. There is nothing suspicious about this interaction between theory and observation, and nothing that should make us wonder whether we possess a “constant and independent” standard, with which scientific theories can be assessed. Science has sometimes progressed in this way, step by step, placing its weight on one foot while it moves the other one, and there is no reason why art should not sometimes do the same.

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Chapter 10

The canvas of the Brain

…perspective has seemed to many scholars to epitomize the humanistic philosophy of the Renaissance because it defines pictorial space in relation to an individual observer in a particular place. Alberti’s De pictura, which contains the first exposition of the system, mentions Protagoras’s famous remark that man is the measure of all things, and many writers have seen this thought as being implicit in some way in the system itself. For example, John white claims that perspective carries humanism “into the pictorial world itself” because it expresses “man’s central position as observer of a pictorial world of which he himself is the measure.” I am sceptical about this idea, but I have confined my reasons to the notes.

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Since we are concerned with the depiction of depth, distance and solidity, the question in the theory of vision that concerns us is how depth, distance, and solidity are perceived by sight. The approach to this question that has had the greatest influence in the twentieth century is due to Helmholtz. Here is the way in which Helmholtz presents the question: “Each of our eyes projects a two-dimensional image on its own retina. In whatever way we suppose the conducting nerves to be arranged, the two retinal images when united in the brain can only reappear as a two-dimensional image. But instead of the two-dimensional retinal images, our experience presents us with a solid image of three dimensions…How can this experience of depth come about?”

Part of Helmholtz’s own answer to his question concerns the differences between the two images in our eyes. But he points out that the world does not look flat to us when we close one eye, and this is obviously correct. As it happens, the first pilot to fly solo around the world had only one eye, and he landed his plane successfully a number of times on the trip. Furthermore, few animals apart from primates and cats can use binocular disparity to perceive distance. So how do we perceive distance, depth, and solidity with a single eye? This is Helmholtz’s answer: “The means we possess in this case are just the same as those the painter can employ in order to give the objects represented on his canvas the appearance of being solid objects, and of standing at different distances from the spectator.” Helmholtz goes on to mention perspective, shading, and foreshortening and the representation of things with plane surfaces, such as walls and pavements, and things with well-known shapes and sizes, such as men and cattle.   

Page 226-226

….Richard Gregory claims that “when an artist employs geometrical perspective he does not draw what he sees – he represents his retinal image.” Blakemore claims that in the Renaissance “artists must have learnt that their task was to challenge the viewer just as he is tested by the image in his own eye.” Irving Rock claims that “photographs and drawings are comprehensible to us because they more or less resemble the image of a scene as it appears to us on our retinas.” According to these writers, pictures that resemble retinal images will tend to produce the same experience of depth, distance, and solidity as retinal images do themselves. As Gregory explains: “A picture is essentially like a retinal image – both are flat projections of three-dimensional space…the brain is so familiar with the problems of adding the third dimension from information given by the flat retinal image that we might expect it to cope with pictures”. Artists can therefore represent depth and solidity successfully by reproducing the geometrical structure of a retinal image and the patterns of light and dark that occur in it – and this is exactly what painters who use perspective, foreshortening, and shading do. When they use these techniques, artists somehow bypass the mechanisms in their own brains, which transform their retinal images into perceptions – that is, into the solid images of three dimensions Helmholtz referred too – and copy their retinal images instead. (????- Maybe not)

Page 227

However, it has also been quite widely argued by theorists of art that perspective has no mathematical, physical, or physiological justification and no basis independent of the habits instilled in us by our cultural history. If we find that it looks right, this is an effect of acculturation, and if we believe that it is right, this is an effect of cultural bias. Many writers have held this view and have defended it with the nominalist arguments criticized in chapters 8 and 9, but the original source of the relativist position is Panofsky’s main publication on perspective, the article “Die Perspektive als ‘Symbolische Form,’” which appeared in 1927.

Page 229

Unlike Helmholtz, Panofsky was deeply influenced by Kant’s theory of space, and in order to understand Panofky’s argument about perspective we need to be aware of the two main doctrines about space and time that Kant defends in the Critique of Pure Reason.  The first doctrine is that space and time are modifications of our sensibility, and the second is that they are pure forms of all sensible intuition. The first doctrine means that space and time are formal, or structural, features of our perceptions: they are not intrinsic structural features of the world, and physical objects and events do not have spatial and temporal properties independently of their relationship to sentient beings. Kant said this explicitly as follows: “If the subject…be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish.” However – and this is the second doctrine – they are also pure forms of all sensible intuition. This means that space and time are not a quirk of human psychology because any perceptual experience by any kind of creature would necessarily be organized in the same way.

Page 228 – 229

…the forms in which we experience space and time – and therefore, we are bound to add, the forms of space and time themselves – vary from one society and one epoch to another. They are not “pure forms of all sensible intuition”: they are varied and parochial “symbolic forms.”

Panofsky’s article defends the idea that perspective is not a uniquely valid method for representing space – as Alberti and Helmholtzians had claimed, albeit for different reasons – but a historically contingent symbolic form. It is, he says, “comprehensible only for a quite specific, indeed specifically modern, sense of space.” He describes this modern sense of space in terms that combine the different – and mutually inconsistent – views about space held by Newton, Descartes, and Leibniz, between two and three centuries after the invention of perspective. He calls it “an infinite, unchanging and homogenous space,” recalling Newton; a space the recedes “’body’ and ‘nobody’ to a common denominator of substance étendue,” recalling Descartes; and “a homogenous and infinite system of dimensional relationships,” recalling Leibniz.

What solid evidence does Panofsky offer to support this mixture of Kantianism, relativism, and intellectual history in the longue durée? The principal piece of evidence, which Panofsky acquired from Guido Hauck, is this: “Perspectival construction ignores the crucial circumstance that the retinal image – entirely apart from its subsequent psychological ‘interpretation’, and even apart from the fact that the eyes move – is a projection not on a flat surface but on a concave surface. Thus already on this lowest, still prepsychological level of facts there is a fundamental discrepancy between ‘reality’ and its construction.” So Panofsky does not reject the idea that the right way to decide about the status of perspective is to compare perspective pictures with retinal images. Rather, he points out that the result of making this comparison is not the one that Helmholtzians claim it is. He argues that perspective pictures do not in fact resemble retinal images because the retina is curved. Hence, whereas the Renaissance system of perspective represents straight lines as straight, retinal images represent straight lines as curves. A curvilinear system of perspective would therefore eliminate the fundamental discrepancy he refers too, between what he calls “reality” – presumably, the scare quotes are there to remind us of the neo-Kantian theory of space that he accepted – and its construction on the surface of a painting: “The orthagonals of a building, which in normal perspective construction appear straight, would, if they were to correspond to the factual retinal image, have to be drawn as curves. Strictly speaking, even the verticals would have to submit to some bending.”

Page 229 – 230

The idea that painters in the Renaissance copied their retinal image is like the idea that the retinal image has to be the right way up. It seems to make sense, as long as we think of the retina – as Blakemore actually describes it – as a canvas for the brain. But if we reject this way of thinking about the retina completely, it is obviously untenable because a painting that really did resemble a retinal image would be painted upside down on the inside of a sphere; it would flicker and change four or five times each second, which is the rate at which the eyeball jumps from one fixation to another; some parts of it would be blurred and some parts of it would be in focus; it would have a blurry wedge in the corner where the nose is; there would be a blank patch near the middle for the blind spot; and so on.

Page 230 

Conclusion

 I argued that realistic art is neither a familiar repertoire of conventions nor a series of techniques for trompe l’oile and that Renaissance perspective is not a means by which painters match the images in our eyes. Rather, the evolution of realistic techniques extended the modality of pictorial art, as the evolution of language has extended the range of meanings they are capable of expressing, and Renaissance perspective was a geometrical synthesis of the principal realistic techniques invented by Greek artists in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.

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