Che cosa vediamo quando vediamo un’immagine? Con Arte e illusione, pubblicato nel 1960, Ernst H. Gombrich è stato il primo a indagare a fondo l’effetto che hanno su di noi le immagini figurative. Alla sua indagine, concepita nell’ambito della storia delle arti pittoriche, si sono successivamente affiancati molti studi in vari contesti di ricerca, dalla psicologia della visione all’estetica analitica, dalla semiotica ai visual studies. Questo studio si concentra su quei nuclei teorici della proposta di Gombrich che suscitano l’interesse dei (...) filosofi e sulla fortuna di alcune idee di Gombrich, specialmente nel dibattito di area analitica. (shrink)

E. H. Gombrich's Adoption of the Formula form Follows Function: A Case of Mistaken Identity? This article is a longer note on what is a minor problem in the oeuvre of a great art historian. Its theme is E. H. Gombrich's use of the formula form follows function as the summary of his commonsense approach to the problem of style change. Although I am not sure how interesting this inquiry is in an art historical context, from the perspective of my (...) own field of design history and of modernist design theory, Gombrich's adoption of the formula constitutes an intriguing problem. (shrink)

E. H. Gombrich in 1968: Methodological Individualism and the Contradictions of Conservatism The commonalities Gombrich affirmed between his own positions on science, politics, and art and those of his friend Karl Popper are key to understanding both his work on the history of style and the conservative fulminations on method he published from the early 1950s onwards. United with Popper by their shared experience of exile from fascism, Gombrich failed to register the amateurish character of Popper's political theory and that (...) his aversion to notions of social determination disabled the historian. Popper's skepticism regarding the ontological status of social collectivities and rejection of the concept of totality reinforced Gombrich's suspicions of holistic analysis and led him to fall back on naturalistic descriptions of individuals acting in a social world glued together by such commonsensical categories as "traditions" and "institutions". In this regard he is representative of the common aversion to sociology of the British intellectual establishment in the early Cold War. (shrink)

Ten Reasons Why E. H. Gombrich is not Connected to Art History This is a speculative essay on the place of E. H. Gombrich in art history. Gombrich is universally known, and still often studied at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He is indispensable for the historiography of the discipline. But at the same time, he is not often cited, and his work is not usually part of the ongoing conversations of the current state of art history or visual studies. (...) This brief essay questions that condition. (shrink)

There is a popular view on depiction which holds that convincingly realistic paintings depict their subjects through evoking in the spectator the illusion of seeing these very subjects face to face. There is, as it were, an exact 'match' between the visual experience of seeing something in a picture and the corresponding visual experience one would entertain if one were to stand in front of the real thing. This view, which we shall call 'illusionism', supports the widespread assumption that some (...) kinds of pictures -- notably post-Renaissance perspective paintings -- provide the correct, 'natural' way to depict physical space because they capture the way the visual system enables one to see the world. The most notable defence of illusionism has been offered by Ernst Gombrich. In his Art and Illusion, Gombrich (1960) argues that the development of Western art consists in a series of discoveries about the nature of visual perception that eventually lead to pictorial techniques that are able to elicit illusionary visual experiences on part of the spectator and thus reach the perfection of naturalistic representation. (shrink)

This article examines E.H. Gombrich’s critical appraisal of Arnold Hauser’s book, The Social History of Art. Hauser’s Social History of Art was published in 1951, a year after Gombrich’s bestseller, The Story of Art. Although written in Britain for an English-speaking public, both books had their origins in the intellectual history of Central Europe: Gombrich was an Austrian art historian and Hauser was Hungarian. Gombrich’s critique, published in The Art Bulletin in 1953, attacked Hauser’s dialectical materialism and his sociological interpretation (...) of art history. Borrowing arguments from Karl Popper’s critique of historicism, Gombrich described Hauser’s work as collectivist and deterministic, tendencies at odds with his own conception of art history. However, in his readiness to label Hauser a proponent of historical materialism, Gombrich failed to recognize Hauser’s own criticism of deterministic theories of art, especially formalism. This article investigates Gombrich’s reasons for rejecting Hauser’s sociology of art. It argues Gombrich used Hauser as an ideological counterpoint to his own version of art history, avowedly liberal and individualist in outlook. (shrink)

Introductory: Gombrich's Struggle Against Metaphysics The paper deals with E. H. Gombrich's lifelong polemics against metaphysics in art history and the humanities. They began in 1937 and continued up until his final (posthumous) book The Preference for the Primitives. Analyzing the "fallacies" and "pitfalls" resulting from metaphysical collectivism, essentialism, expressionism, holism and relativism such as a "belief in hypostatized collective personalities" and "style as a super-artist" or "physiognomic fallacy", Gombrich also unmasked their ideological implications. He first targeted nationalism and racialism, (...) then the perils of totalitarianism and finally all forms of relativism. Gombrich's plea for the universality of the "canon of excellence" can be regarded not only as a defence of humanism but also as a form of apology for the values of Western liberal democratic society. (shrink)

Form of Thought and Presentational Gesture in Karl Popper and E. H. Gombrich The paper deals with common elements and differences in Popper and Gombrich, especially concerning their forms of thought and presentational gesture. Among others it considers the model of common sense which was basal for both of them as well as the similarities of searchlight theory (Popper) and some postulates of Gestalt psychology (Gombrich). At the end it analyses their approaches to historiography with special focusing on Gombrich's comments (...) on the concept of social history of art. (shrink)

For philosophical readers, a review of biology Nobel laureate Eric R. Kandel’s Age of Insight historical thesis, that today’s ‘neuroaesthetics’ is a continuation of Vienna’s great contributions to modernism from 1900 on, becomes a ‘critical study’, by closely examining Kandel’s valuable account of E.H. Gombrich’s psychology, then, broadly, his own case for the validity of ‘neuroaesthetics’. The article much credits Kandel for recognising and explaining—unlike most philosophers, with their epistemological and metaphysical perspectives—why Gombrich’s Art and Illusion is subtitled ‘Psychology’, since (...) it is about what its author termed throughout ‘convincing’ depiction. But, while holding that Kandel’s case for ‘neuroaesthetics’ is, at least in tone, superior to Ramachandran’s, the study broadens still further into a critical examination of it, with at first standard—since Aristotle—arguments against reductivism, as a materialism that neglects first formal then final causes or purposes. Original to the critique is an additional argument, that so-called ‘neuroaesthetics’ is not only inconsistent with the ‘reductionist’—not reductivist—principles of Kandel’s own science, as explained in his earlier account of them, In Search of Memory, but also contradicts a basic Darwinian principle underlying all modern biology, that genuine novelty can arise from rearrangement of older materials. The conclusion is that although neuroscience may make important contributions to aesthetics and appreciation, there is as yet no basis for holding that it could produce an aesthetics. (shrink)

Sir Ernst Gombrich and the Barber from Tuscany In the spirit of Sir Ernst Gombrich, this essay uses an anecdote—a chat between Gombrich and a barber from Tuscany—to illustrate a deeper point, namely, how cultural memory, tradition, and a canon give rise to an implied language of culture and cultural value. Gombrich staunchly defended tradition against relativism. By relativism, he meant something like "radical subjectivism." To his mind, subjectivism (in the cultural and social sense of the term) is not only (...) impossible, since meaning is conferred through culture and society, but it is also dangerous (in the cultural and ethical sense of the term), since it denies the existence of shared values. Against consensus on the one hand and radical subjectivism on the other, Gombrich advocated a middle way: criticism and self-criticism to ensure latitude; the search for "truth" to ensure a limited plurality of interpretations. (shrink)

Esito di un convegno tenutosi a Roma nel 2003, i saggi raccolti in L’arte e i linguaggi della percezione offrono una variegata panoramica delle posizioni maturate nel dibattito intorno al programma epistemico di Ernst H. Gombrich, prendendo in esame non soltanto gli aspetti più squisitamente filologici della sua biografia intellettuale — la formazione, i rapporti con la scuola di Vienna, la complicata relazione con Warburg e la scuola iconologica — ma anche i fondamenti filosofici del suo pen...

It is difficult to overestimate the impact, beginning in the 1960s, which Gombrich’s discussion of visual representation made on a good number of theorists in an entire generation of thinking about art and—even more—about literary art. For literary theory and criticism were at least as affected by his work as were theory and criticism in the plastic arts. Art and Illusion radically undermined the terms which had controlled discussion of how art represented “reality”—or, rather, how viewers or members of the (...) audience perceived that representation and related it to their versions of “reality.” And, for those who accompanied or followed him—from Rosalie Colie to Wolfgang Iser—Gombrich helped transform for good the meaning of a long revered term like “imitation” as it could be applied to both the visual and verbal arts. I believe he must, then, be seen as responsible for some of the most provocative turns that art theory, literary theory, and aesthetics have taken in the last two decades.In much of his work since the 1960s, however, Gombrich has appeared more and more anxious to dissociate himself from those who have treated his earlier books and essays as leading to the theoretical innovations which have claimed support from them. In The Image and the Eye, the statements which put distance between himself and such followers seem utterly unambiguous. And against the charge that his work has become more conservative with the passing years, I suspect Gombrich would argue that any claim of difference between, say, Art and Illusion and The Image and the Eye is a result of an original misreading, that the recent work is only more explicitly defending a traditional position which was quietly there all along, though supposedly friendly theorists wrongly saw him as subverting it in the earlier work. Thus Gombrich is now self-consciously committed to undoing what he sees as our errors of reading rather than his own errors of writing. Murray Krieger is University Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of, among other works, The Tragic Vision, The Classic Vision, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and Its System, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory, and, most recently, Arts on the Level. He is presently working on Ekphrasis: Space, Time, and Illusion in Literary Theory . His latest contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor,” appeared in the Summer 1979 issue. (shrink)

Ernst H. Gombrich criticized abstract painting with several remarks scattered around his wide oeuvre. I argue that his view of abstract paintings is coherent with the account of pictorial representation he put forward in Art and Illusion, show some limits of such view, and maintain that, although several of Gombrich’s criticisms of abstract painting should be rejected, some of his remarks are insightful and worthy of consideration.

The two most common names to invoke for a perceptualist aesthetics are Rudolf Arnheim and E. H. Gombrich. But the similaritied and differences between them have never been explicitly drawn. This paper undertakes such an analysis based on the three categories of representation, expression and historical objectivity. Arnheim's less stringent solutions to the problems of representation and expression are applauded but Gombrich's unique attempt to ground both of these categories in a form amenable to non-historicist approach to history are also (...) praised. Gombrich's anti-historicism derives from Karl Popper and Arnheim is fleshed out with the theories of Maurice Mandelbaum. The parallel comparison of Popper-Mandelbaum helps to underscore differences and show an alternative to Gombrich and Popper's nominalism. (shrink)

This article revisits an earlier social scientific analysis of the thought of Rudolf Arnheim and E. H. Gombrich. Adding to the earlier analysis in terms of social ontology and historical development is an analysis of the sufficiency of perception to yield information about the world, both in ordinary and in artistic contexts. Gombrich held to an idea of perception as hypothesis testing, and it joins with Popper's philosophy in the deferred warrant of the perceptual image. Arnheim, instead, followed the Gestalt (...) theorists to believe that each stage of perceptual experience was incorrigible according to the given conditions. Consequently, Arnheim felt confident addressing the essence of art, while Gombrich remained anti‐essentialist. Ultimately, Gombrich's Popperian empiricism attenuates realism, whereas Arnheim's gestaltism seeks to build a bridge between ordinary and scientific observation. (shrink)

Dans The Elements of Drawing, le célèbre critique d’art anglais John Ruskin endosse le rôle de professeur pour livrer, en trois longues lettres adressées aux débutants, son enseignement sur l’art du dessin. De cet ouvrage hybride, mêlant exercices, observations sur les couleurs, commentaires de peintures et descriptions lyriques de la nature, la postérité retiendra principalement un court passage sur la formation de la perception. Dans une note de bas de page du premier chapitre, Ruskin nous dit en effet que « (...) toute la force de la technique picturale dépend de la possibilité pour nous de retrouver ce que nous pourrions appeler l’innocence de l’œil ». Cette note célèbre a fait l’objet de nombreux commentaires (chez E. Gombrich et N. Goodman notamment), qui viennent discuter, et souvent réfuter, la possibilité d’un regard vierge. À rebours des lectures de surplomb qui autonomisent ce passage et le transforment en « théorie », nous proposons de revenir au texte de Ruskin en pensant l’innocence de l’œil dans son articulation singulière et fondatrice aux exercices qui l’accompagnent. L’hypothèse que nous soumettons est la suivante : c’est l’exercice, dans sa conduite réitérée, qui permet de comprendre le sens de l’innocence perceptive. Bien loin d’un apprentissage scolaire, l’exercice du regard engage chez Ruskin une manière d’être au monde. (shrink)

After an initial period of popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, André Malraux’s works on the theory of art, "The Voices of Silence" and "The Metamorphosis of the Gods", lapsed into relative obscurity. A major factor in this fall from grace was the frosty reception given to these works by a number of leading art historians, including E.H. Gombrich, who accused Malraux of an irresponsible approach to art history and of "reckless inaccuracies". This essay examines a representative sample of the (...) art historians' arguments and contends that they reveal serious misreadings of Malraux’s texts and a recurring tendency to confuse matters of interpretation with matters of fact. The article suggests that the charge of irresponsibility might well be levelled at the critics themselves, and that the myth of Malraux as guilty of ‘reckless inaccuracies’ needs to be debunked. (shrink)

I argue that if we read E. H. Gombrich's Art and Illusion with the charity that it deserves, we will find a much subtler theory of depiction than the illusion theory that is usually attributed to Gombrich. Instead of suggesting that pictures are illusory because they cause us to have experiences as of seeing the depicted objects face to face, I argue that Art and Illusion is better read as making the point that naturalistic pictures are illusory because they cause (...) us to see qualities and properties that the pictures themselves do not possess. Once we appreciate this point, we will be in a better position to appraise the value and limits of naturalistic art. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é relacionar o ready-made de Duchamp – uma obra de arte que é idêntica a um objeto comum – com a história da arte que o precedeu e entender de que modo sua ruptura radical já estava dentro dessa história. Inicio com uma introdução ao e interpretação do ready-made. Em seguida, me respaldando em Gombrich, Greenberg e outros, examino os três tipos de arte na história propostos por Peter Bürger, focando na questão da realidade/irrealidade da obra, (...) aos poucos me aproximando da relação da obra com seu caráter de objeto. Meu ponto principal é que a bidimensionalidade do quadro reforça a existência da tela e assim também a relação de sua experiência com o mundo concreto em que o quadro se encontra, em contraposição a ilusão dramática do quadro tridimensional. A seguir, examino os impressionistas, onde se inicia um movimento de encontro à realidade da tela, que se radicaliza depois em variadas vertentes do modernismo, onde se encontra Duchamp. Tendo feito este percurso, examino o conceito de vanguarda de Bürger e sua relação com o que ele chama de práxis vital, o mundo fora do quadro ilusionista, que explico através da ideia de distração de Walter Benjamin. Aqui, sugiro pensar o ready-made como uma proposta de transposição da arte e sua teoria ao mundo "não-artístico" das coisas comuns. (shrink)

This study provides a step by step explanation of André Malraux’s theory of art. Drawing on his major works, such as "The Voices of Silence" and "The Metamorphosis of the Gods," it examines topics such as the nature of artistic creation, the psychology of our response to art, the birth of the notion of “art” itself and its transformation after Manet, the birth and death of the idea of beauty, the neglected question of the relationship between art and the passage (...) of time, the emergence of our “first universal world of art,” the contemporary role of the art museum and the musée imaginaire, and the contentious question of the relationship between art and history. -/- Rejecting negative criticisms from writers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and E. H. Gombrich, the study argues that Malraux offers us a theory of art that is fully coherent and highly illuminating. In addition, the analysis shows that he presents a radical challenge to the traditional explanations of art inherited from the Enlightenment that have dominated Western thinking for some three hundred years. In short, the study unveils a way of understanding art that is nothing short of an intellectual revolution. -/- The book is the English version of a study entitled André Malraux et l’Art: Une Révolution Intellectuelle published in French by Peter Lang in April 2021. (shrink)

This book is a first attempt to cover the whole area of aesthetics from the point of view of critical rationalism. It takes up and expands upon the more narrowly focused work of E. H. Gombrich, Sheldon Richmond, and Raphael Sassower and Louis Ciccotello. The authors integrate the arts into the scientific world view and acknowledge that there is an aesthetic aspect to anything whatsoever. They pay close attention to the social situatedness of the arts. Their aesthetics treats art as (...) emerging from craft in the form of luxurious and playful challenge to the audience. In developing it they place emphasis on the number of questions and claims that can be settled by appeal to empirical facts; on the historical character of aesthetic judgements; and on the connection of aesthetic truth to true love and true friendship, i.e. fidelity and integrity, not to informative truth. (shrink)

Estudio bibliográfico / A bibliographical study of: Ernesto Grassi, Retorica come filosofia. La tradizione umanistica, trad. di Roberta Moroni, a. c. di Massimo Marassi, La Città del Sole, Napoli, 1999, pp. 198 . E.H. Gombrich, Imágenes Simbólicas. Estudios sobre el arte del Renacimiento, 2, versión castellana de Remigio Gómez Díaz, Editorial Debate, Madrid, 2000, pp. 244.

This essay examines mimetic pictures and the forms of subjectivity encoded in them. Mimetic pictures are representations which are unique in looking like the objects or events they depict. However, the objects or events typically have properties which are incompatible with those of the picture considered as a material artifact. Thus, if a mimetic picture looks like what it depicts, it does not look like what, considered as an artifact, it is. Since seeing a mimetic picture as a picture is (...) seeing what it looks like, it seems to follow that seeing a mimetic picture entails not seeing its material properties. But this is a paradox: it suggests that looking at mimetic pictures means not seeing what is being looked at. My aim is to resolve this paradox. ;This goal is pursued by exploring the forms of subjectivity historically attributed to the spectator of mimetic pictures. Three theorists are examined: Leon Battista Alberti, John Locke, and E. H. Gombrich. While their positions are tied to the forms of pictorial practice central to their respective historical contexts, they share a common attitude toward the paradox of pictoriality: they explain mimetic appearance as an illusion produced in the seeing subject by the picture. This commonality suggests a consistent attitude toward pictorial appearance from the Renaissance to the present; I analyze this attitude, arguing that the concept of illusion, rather than helping us grasp the forms of subjectivity encoded in pictures, obscures it. ;The essay concludes by proposing that cultures of mimesis produce a complex visual activity of recognition and disavowal which I call "fascination". I defend the thesis that mimetic pictures do not induce illusions but are displays in which the social dynamic of illusion is witnessed. This thesis is combined with Lacan's theory of the gaze to redefine mimetic pictures as theatrical entities exhibiting the social interaction of desire and visual appearance. As theatrical, pictures elicit a mode of reflective subjectivity rather than deceiving a pre-reflective spectator. This thesis resolves the paradox of mimetic pictures by analyzing their apparent possession of incompatible properties as a sign that pictures are artifacts in which the social and relational nature of appearance itself can be seen. (shrink)

I defend a solution to a long-standing problem with perceptual appearances, brought about by the phenomenon of perceptual constancy. The problem is that in conditions which are non-ideal, yet within the range that perceptual constancy works, we see things veridically despite an “appearance” which is traditionally taken to be non-veridical. For example, a tilted coin is often taken to have an “elliptical appearance”, shadowed surfaces a “darker appearance”. These appearances are puzzling for a number of reasons. I defend and elaborate (...) on an approach taken by Sean Kelly, and earlier by the art historian E.H. Gombrich, according to which we can be tricked by our ability to bring about a kind of Gesltalt shift between different possible perceptual interpretations of a scene. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is on E. H. Gombrich's claim that pictorial perception is a case of illusion. My aim is to point out that, on the one hand, the interpretation of this claim that is widely accepted in pictorial theory is not supported by Gombrich's analysis of pictorial perception; and, on the other hand, that the interpretation of the claim that I see as more compatible with Gombrich's analysis is not consistent with relevant facts about our relation to (...) pictures. However, I will argue, Gombrich's elaboration of the claim of illusion is significant to the extent that it highlights important aspects of the system of pictorial representation. (shrink)

When it comes to the notion of creativity, both R. Dawkins and D. Dennett argue that creativity is a matter of random mutation, in the same way that genes randomly mutate. Neither Dennett nor Dawkins see anything else in the mimetic theory of creativity than a process of Darwinian evolution. However, this complete reliance upon the extension of evolution for understanding creativity needs to be supplemented by combining it with other ideas such as those of "schema theory," because creativity always (...) occurs within a structured context and is not simply a matter of random mutation of ideas. Schema theory comes largely from the works of E.H Gombrich, who argued that "schemas" play a crucial role in how it is that we are able to be creative. He defines schemas as structure and traditions in society that help to convey the meaning of our creative efforts. Just as semantics needs syntax within language in order to formulate and convey meaning, so by analogy memes need schemas for the creation and expression of new ideas. Rather than being the antithesis of creativity, existing forms of expression and traditions are important for the creation of new ideas. This needs to be factored into any theory of creativity in order to account for the effect of the social context on creative endeavours in addition to a Darwinian account of memes. The unconscious processes at work within the brain that are involved in the generation of ideas and other creative products can be understood using the notion of a "generator", as originally conceived by D. Dennett. This notion goes beyond mere concrete Skinnerian behavioural trial and error. Within this generator, there appear to be at work processes such as those of bisociation and association, as discussed by A. Koestler, as well as processes such as the role of language, memory, generate-and-test and intentionality that must be acknowledged in addition to the syntactic operations of schemas and the replicating contents of memes. The operation of all of these ingredients within the generator, when understood together, can be seen as responsible for our ability to be creative. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s remarks on “seeing-as” have influenced several scholars working on depiction. They have especially inspired those who think that in order to understand depiction we should understand the specific kind of visual experience depictions arouse in the viewer (e.g. Gombrich [1960], Wollheim [1968; 1987]). In this paper I would like to go a different way. My hypothesis is that certain of Wittgenstein’s claims both in the Tractatus and in his later writings resonate well within the context of an objective resemblance (...) account of depiction (Hyman, 2006). (shrink)

One of the most important books of the twentieth century, Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies is an uncompromising defense of liberal democracy and a powerful attack on the intellectual origins of totalitarianism. Popper was born in 1902 to a Viennese family of Jewish origin. He taught in Austria until 1937, when he emigrated to New Zealand in anticipation of the Nazi annexation of Austria the following year, and he settled in England in 1949. Before the annexation, Popper (...) had written mainly about the philosophy of science, but from 1938 until the end of the Second World War he focused his energies on political philosophy, seeking to diagnose the intellectual origins of German and Soviet totalitarianism. The Open Society and Its Enemies was the result. An immediate sensation when it was first published in two volumes in 1945, Popper's monumental achievement has attained legendary status on both the Left and Right and is credited with inspiring anticommunist dissidents during the Cold War. Arguing that the spirit of free, critical inquiry that governs scientific investigation should also apply to politics, Popper traces the roots of an opposite, authoritarian tendency to a tradition represented by Plato, Marx, and Hegel. In a substantial new introduction written for this edition, acclaimed political philosopher Alan Ryan puts Popper's landmark work in biographical, intellectual, and historical context. Also included is a personal essay by eminent art historian E.H. Gombrich, in which he recounts the story of the book's eventual publication despite numerous rejections and wartime deprivations. (shrink)

Erwin Panofsky explicitly states that the first half of the opening chapter of Studies in Iconology—his landmark American publication of 1939—contains ‘the revised content of a methodological article published by the writer in 1932’, which is now translated for the first time in this issue of Critical Inquiry.1 That article, published in the philosophical journal Logos, is among his most important works. First, it marks the apogee of his series of philosophically reflective essays on how to do art history,2 that (...) reach back, via a couple of major pieces on Alois Riegl, to the 1915 essay on Heinrich Wölfflin.3 Under the influence of his colleague at Hamburg Ernst Cassirer, the principal interpreter of Kant in the 1920s, Panofsky from 1915 on exhibits in his work ever more Kantian thinking and language.4 But Logos was not an art-historical review or one dedicated to aesthetics but a principal mainstream journal of the philosophy of culture. So ‘On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts’ has a good claim to be the culmination of Panofsky's philosophical thinking in his German period under the Weimar Republic. · 1. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance , p. xv; hereafter abbreviated SI. See Panofsky, ‘Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst’, Logos 21 : 103–19; trans. Jaś Elsner and Katharina Lorenz under the title ‘On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts’, Critical Inquiry 38 : 467–82; hereafter abbreviated ‘P’.· 2. See the discussion in Carlo Ginzburg, ‘From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method’, Myths, Emblems, Clues, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi , pp. 17–59, esp. pp. 36–41.· 3. See Panofsky, ‘Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst’, Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, ed. Karen Michels and Martin Warnke, 2 vols. , 2:1009–18; ‘Der Begriff des Kunstwollens’,Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, 2:1019–34, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel Snyder under the title ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, Critical Inquiry 8 : 17–33; and ‘Über das Verhältnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie: Ein Beitrag zu der Erörterung über die Möglichkeit kunstwissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe’, Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, 2: 1035–63, trans. Lorenz and Elsner under the title ‘On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts for a Science of Art’, Critical Inquiry 35 : 43–71.· 4. On neo-Kantianism in pre-Nazi Germany, see Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger , pp. 25–37; Éric Dufour and T. Z. R. Créteil, ‘Le Statue du singulier: Kant et le néokantisme de l’École de Marbourg', Kantstudien 93 : 324–50; Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture , pp. 22–51; and Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos , pp. 52–86. Specifically on the Cassirerian Kantianism of Panofsky, see Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art , pp. 181–82; Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History , pp. 91–92, 147–52; Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History, trans. Richard Pierce , pp. 174–77, 182–84; David Summers, ‘Meaning in the Visual Arts as a Humanistic Discipline’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside, ed. Irving Lavin , pp. 9–24; Mark A. Cheetham, Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of Discipline , pp. 68–77; Paul Crowther, The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and Its History , pp. 70–73; Allister Neher, ‘“The Concept of Kunstwollen”, Neo-Kantianism, and Erwin Panofsky's Early Art Theoretical Essays', Word and Image 20 : 41–51; Georges Didi-Huberman,Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman , pp. 4–6, 90–138; and Lorenz and Elsner, ‘Translators’ Introduction', Critical Inquiry35 : 33–42, esp. pp. 38, 40–42. (shrink)

As I see it, the historic role of literary Bloomsbury was to act as a sort of check or antibody continually attacking the proponents of the vulgar passions in the body politic whenever these menaced the traditional values of liberal England. In a democracy and perhaps in any modern state there is always a danger that men seeking power will rely upon the feelings rather than the intelligence of the masses. Such appeals to the vulgar passions represent a continual danger; (...) fight on till the Huns are smashed, squeeze Germany until the pips squeak, woman's place is in the home, stamp out dirty unnatural vice, keep the black man in his place—exhortations of this kind can be terribly effective. Against them, or most of them, one may oppose the arguments of the Sermon on the Mount: love your enemies, all men are brothers. This Bloomsbury did not do; it had no use either for the hero or for the saint. In its polemics it appeals to good sense and good feeling and relies upon the belief that ultimately the reasoned argument will prevail. Quentin Bell is the author of, among other works, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Bloomsbury, Ruskin, and On Human Finery. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Art and the Elite" and exchanges with E. H. Gombrich and James Ackerman. (shrink)

In his well-known Art & Illusion, E. H. Gombrich reproduces a brush and ink drawing entitled “Cows in Derwentwater” of a scene in the English Lake Country. The drawing was done by a certain Chiang Yee, whom Gombrich describes as “a Chinese writer and painter of great gifts and charm”. On the page opposite this reproduction Gombrich reproduces a lithograph of a similar scene in the Lake Country, this one an anonymous “‘picturesque’ rendering from the Romantic period” and dated 1826. (...) The differences, as one would guess, are striking—and utterly typical of these two traditions of painting and drawing. (shrink)

I am troubled by the temper of E. H. Gombrich’s response, “Representation and Misrepresentation” , to my “Ambiguities of Representation and Illusion: An E. H. Gombrich Retrospective” and by his preferring not to sense the profound admiration—indeed, the homage—intended by my essay, both for his contributions to recent theory and for their influence upon its recent developments. But I am more troubled by the confusions his remarks may cause in the interpretation of his own work as well as in the (...) judgment of mine. There are important issues at stake, I feel, especially as regards the relation between scientific and aesthetic inquiry.The very irritated tone of his reaction helps make what I see as my major point: his work has contained a conflict between two Gombrichs—one, the skeptical humanist and, the other, the positive scientist—and with the passing years the second has increasingly sought to obliterate signs of the first, becoming increasingly impatient with any attempt to revive those signs or remind us of their existence. On the other side, since the line of literary criticism with which I associate myself has drawn strength from the first Gombrich, this development in his work and in his attitudes has caused some disappointment. Murray Krieger is University Professor of English at the University of California. He is the author of many works, including The Tragic Vision, The Classic Vision, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and its System, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory, and Arts on the Level. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality” , “Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor” , and “The Ambiguities of Representation and Illusion: An E. H. Gombrich Retrospective”. (shrink)

This essay, part of a special issue on the Warburg Institute and Library, offers personal recollections of scholars whom the author encountered there as a student in the early 1970s, including E. H. Gombrich, Otto Kurz, Michael Baxandall, Frances Yates, D. P. Walker, A. I. Sabra, Michael Podro, Michael Screech, Arnaldo Momigliano, and Nikolaus Pevsner. The author's focus is on differences between the milieu of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, as it had been in Hamburg, and the ethos of the Warburg (...) Institute in London. The key document for establishing this contrast is an anonymous review — by Edgar Wind — attacking Gombrich's biography of Aby Warburg, which was published in 1970. Wind found the new Warburg circle “Lilliputian” in comparison with the old Hamburg circle, to which he had belonged. This essay disputes Wind's finding, based on its author's own experience, as well as on his sympathy with the reasoned empirical approach of Gombrich, Baxandall, and others at the London Warburg to issues that Aby Warburg had raised when the Library was in Germany. (shrink)