Art and Illusion Quotes

“Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion

“There is no reality without interpretation; just as there is no innocent eye, there is no innocent ear.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“It is the power of expectation rather than the power of conceptual knowledge that molds what we see in life not less than in art.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“The artist, no less than the writer, needs a vocabulary before he can embark on a "copy" of reality.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“The familiar will always remain the likely starting point for the rendering of the unfamiliar; an existing representation will always exert its spell over the artist even while he strives to record the truth.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“What a painter inquires into is not the nature of the physical world but the nature of our reactions to it. He is not concerned with causes but with the mechanism of certain effects. His is a psychological problem-that of conjuring up a convincing image despite the fact that not one individual shade corresponds to what we call "reality." In order to understand this puzzle-as far as we can claim to understand it as yet-science had to explore the capacity of our minds to register relationships rather than individual elements.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“Los griegos decían que el asombro es el principio del conocimiento, y si dejamos de asombrarnos corremos el riesgo de dejar de conocer.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“The artist creates his own elite, and the elite its own artists.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“We 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 conclusion that the greater the probability of a symbol's occurrence in any given situation, the smaller will be its information content. Where we can anticipate we need not listen. It is in this context that projection will do for perception.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study 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 way our very concept of "structure," the idea of some basic scaffolding or armature that determines the "essence" of things, reflects our need for a schema with which to grasp the infinite variety of this world of change. No wonder these issues have become 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

“The term which psychology has coined for our relative imperviousness to the dizzy variations that go on in the world around us is "constancy." The color, shape, and brightness of things remain to us relatively constant, even though we may notice some variation with the change of distance, illumination, angle of vision, and so on.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“The more we become aware of the enormous pull in man to repeat what he has learned, the greater will be our admiration for those exceptional beings who could break this spell and make a significant advance on which others could build.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“There is one type of scientific illustration in which this effect of scale on impression is acknowledged officially, as it were. Geographers who draw sections of mountain ranges will exaggerate the relation of height to width according to a stated proportion. They have found that a true rendering of vertical relationship looks false. Our mind refuses to accept the fact that the distance of 28,000 feet to which Mount Everest soars from sea level is no more than the distance of just over 5 miles which a car traverses in a matter of minutes.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“That power of holding on to an image that Ruskin describes so admirably is not the power of the eidetic; it is that faculty of keeping a large number of relationships present in one's mind that distinguishes all mental achievement, be it that of the chess player, the composer, or the great artist.”
― E.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 us, or human beings like ants, we mean, I suggest, that we are startled by the unfamiliar sight of a house that compares to the familiar sight of a toy on the nursery floor. We feel that but for our knowledge we might have been deceived and have almost mistaken the one for the other. Our guesses and methods of testing them have become somewhat unsettled, and we try to describe the experience by indicating possibilities which flitted through our minds. But, to repeat, there is no "objective" sense in which a human being can look "the size of an ant" simply because an ant crawling on our pillow will look gigantic in comparison with a man in the distance. In professor E.G. Boring's words, "Phenomenal size, like physical size is relative and has no meaning except as a relation between objects.”
― 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. It appears that if you show an observer the image 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 see potential movement in the form of anticipation, artists would never have been able to create the suggestion of speed in stationary images.”
― E.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 amount of information reaching us from the visible world is incalculably large, and the artist's medium is inevitably restricted and granular. Even the most meticulous realist can accommodate only a limited number of marks on his panel, and though he may try to smooth out the transition between his dabs of paint beyond the threshold of visibility, in the end he will always have to rely on suggestion when it comes to representing the infinitely small.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“Styles, like languages, differ in the sequence of articulation and in the number of questions they allow the artist to ask; and so complex is the information that reaches us from the visible world that no picture will ever embody it all. This is not due to the subjectivity of vision but to its richness. Where the artist has to copy a human product he can, of course, 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 period style.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“For my understanding depends not only on my expectation and experience of possible types of music, but also on my knowledge of possible types of painting-in other words, on the mental set with which I approach the Mondrian.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“At this point the reader should be warned that the argument here developed would not be accepted by all schools of psychology. The Gestalt school would have none of it. The pioneers of this important movement want to minimize the role of learning and experience in perception. They think that our compulsion to see the tiled floor, or the letters, not as irregular units in the plane but as regular units arranged in depth is far too universal and too 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 process of vision. It is these forces, they claim, 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 floor we actually see.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“You should look at certain walls stained with damp, or at stones of uneven colour. If you have 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 great variety; and then again you will see there battles and strange figures in violent action, 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 sound of bells, in whose stroke you may find every named word which you can imagine.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“He spread his paint on canvas-here light, there dark-till it looked like a streaked agate stone, and then "with little trouble," he made a finished painting emerge surprisingly out of the chaos of mixed paint.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“We shall never know what Rubens' children "really looked like," but this need not mean we are forever barred from examining the influence which acquired patterns or schema have on the organization 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 of forms has experienced examples of such influence. In fact I vividly remember the shock I had while I was studying these formulas for chubby children: I never thought they could exist, but all of a sudden I saw such children everywhere.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“Without this faculty of man and beast alike to recognize identities across the variations of difference, to make allowance for changed conditions, and to preserve the framework of a stable world, art could not exist. When we open our eyes under water we recognize objects, shapes, and colors although through an unfamiliar medium. When we first see pictures we see them in an unfamiliar medium. This is more than a mere pun. The two capacities are interrelated. Every time we meet with an unfamiliar type of transposition, there is a brief moment of shock and a period of adjustment-but it is an adjustment for which the mechanism exists in us.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“We all know the experience at the moving pictures when we 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 like leaving. But in a few minutes we have learned to take our position into account, and the proportions right themselves. And as with shapes, so with colors.”
― 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 because 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.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“According to a classic experiment by Wolfgang Kohler, you can take two gray pieces of paper-one dark, one bright-and teach the chickens to expect food on the brighter of the two. If you then remove the darker piece and replace it by one brighter than the other one, the deluded creatures will look for their dinner, not on the identical gray paper where they have always found it, but on the paper where they would expect it 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 go well with them if nature had willed it otherwise. For would a memory of the exact stimulus have helped them to recognize the identical paper? Hardly ever! A cloud passing over the sun would change its brightness, and so might even a tilt of the head, or an approach from a different angle. If what we call "identity" were not anchored in a constant relationship with environment, it would be lost in the chaos of swirling impressions that never repeat themselves.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation

“Hildebrand, too, challenged the ideals of scientific naturalism by an appeal to the psychology of perception: if we attempt to analyze our mental images to discover 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 flat disk; it is touch which informs us of the properties of space and form. Any attempt on the part of the artist to eliminate this knowledge is futile, for without it he would not perceive the world at all. His task is, on the contrary, to compensate for the absence of movement in his work by clarifying his image and thus conveying not only visual sensations but also those memories of touch which enable us to reconstitute the three-dimensional form in our minds.”
― E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation