Archaeological and anthropological investigations of depictions seldom extend beyond a single culture or a single geographical location, although there is a powerful factor common to all depictions, the factor of human perception. In this volume an attempt is made to show how this factor affects both creation and recognition of depictions, how, in common with everyday vision of the environment,
typical contours
are derived and used, not merely to depict individually readily recognisable models, but also how by concatenation they lead to such a splendid figure as Australian
Kakadu
crocodiles, or by distortion to creation of illusions of pictorial depth, such as is evoked by
Leonardo da Vinci’sperspective
and by
inverted (Byzantine) perspective
thought by some to be an aberration.
Bartel’s
studies show that pictorial depth is often achieved to the artist’s, and many a viewer’s, but not to geometer’s satisfaction by partial distortion, and Chinese masterpieces embody, side by side, ‘normal’ and inverted perspective.
The visual process is universally uniform (if it were not, one would not be able to recognise an
Altamira
bison as a bison) and its foibles can be freely exploited.
Its best known exploiter is probably
Cezanne.
His pictures are admired by many and puzzle many. Strzeminski postulated that they compound distinct lines of sight, thus endorsing primacy of
central vision,
a concept thought by
Gombrich
to be of greater import to geometers than to artists.
Deregowski / Deregowski
On Picture Making and Picture Seeing jetzt bestellen!
Weitere Infos & Material
Introduction in which the reader enters pictorial donnybrook.- On perception of depth, real and portrayed.- On perspective in many guises.- On prof. Farish's immediately comprehensible and Cezanne's immediately puzzling pictures.- On cultural press; If we draw, what and how should we draw?.
Jan B. Deregowski, D.Sc., FRSE, FBPsS, is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Aberdeen. He has been pursuing studies of visual perception in many cultures and has published some of his findings in
Illusions, Patterns and Pictures
(Academic Press, 1980) as well as, recently, two overviews:
Cross-cultural Studies of Illusions
(in the Oxford compendium of Visual Illusions, OUP, 2017) and
The Psychology of Graphic Perception
(in the Oxford Handbook of Archaeology and Anthropology of Rock Art, OUP, 2018).