Art and Illusion

"...the borrowings of Renaissance artists from classical sculpture were not haphazard. They occurred whenever a painter felt in need of a particularly expressive image of movement or gesture, of what Warburg came to call Pathosformel. His insistence that quattrocento artists, who  had previously been regarded as the champions of pure observation, so frequently took recourse to a borrowed formula made a great impression. Aided by interest in iconographic types, his followers found increasingly that dependence on the tradition is the rule even with works of art of the Renaissance and the Baroque that has hitherto been regarded as naturalistic. Investigations of these continuities have now largely replaced the older preoccupation with style."

"Malraux knows that art is born of art, not of nature."
pg. 24

"'The progress of learning is from indefinite to definite, not from sensation to perception. We do not learn to have percepts but to differentiate them,' writes J. J. Gibson, discussing vision.

Modern research makes it probable that at first there are yet unorganized and amorphous wholes which progressively differentiate,' writes L. von Bertalanffy on his problems of theoretical biology."
 pg. 28

"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 mechanisms of certain effects. His is a psychological problem—that of conjuring up a convincing images 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."
pg. 49

"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"
pg. 50

"The claim to be a creator, a maker of things, passed from the painter to the engineer—leaving to the artist only  the small consolation of being a maker of dreams."
pg. 97

"What we call 'culture' or 'civilization' is based on man's capacity to be a maker, to invent unexpected uses, and to create artificial substitutes."
pg. 99

"...the "corrections" introduced by the Greek artist in order to "match" appearances are quite unique in the history of art. Far from being a natural procedure, they are the great exception. What is normal to man and child all over the globe is the reliance on schemata, on what is called 'conceptual art.' What needs explanation is the sudden departure from this habit that spread from Greece to other parts of the world."
pg. 118

"Narrative art is bound to lead to space and the exploration of visual effects, and the reading of these effects in their turn demands a different kind of 'mental set' from the magical rune with its enduring potency. But Plato was right when he felt that something had been sacrificed to this change: the timeless function of the potent image, the Pharaoh forever dominating his foes, had to be discarded in favor of an imaginary fleeting moment of time that might easily tempt an artist into triviality."
pg. 137-138

"...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."
pg. 155

"For Plato, the universal is the idea, the perfect pattern of the tree exists somewhere in a place beyond the heaven, or, to use the technical term, in the intelligible world. Individual trees or horses or men, such as the painter may encounter in real life, are only imperfect copies of these eternal patterns, imperfect because base matter will always resist the flawless  seal and prevent the idea from realizing itself. It was on these grounds that Plato himself denied art its validity, for what value can there be in copying and imperfect copy of the idea? But on the same grounds, Neoplatonism tried to assign to art a new place that was eagerly seized upon by the emerging academies. It is just the point, they argued, that the painter, unlike ordinary mortals, is a person endowed with the divine gift of perceiving, not the imperfect and shifting world of individuals, but the eternal patterns themselves. He must purify the world of matter, erase its flaws, and approximate it to the idea. He is aided in this by the knowledge of the laws of beauty, which are those of harmonious, simple geometrical relationships, and by the study of those antiques that already represent reality 'idealized,' i.e., approximated to the Platonic idea."
pg. 155-156

"...one suspects that the pattern they found behind the visible world was not the one laid up in heaven but the remembered shapes they had learned in their youth. Would not a Chinese call the orchid 'perfect' which correctly corresponds most closely to the rules he had absorbed? Do we not tend to judge  human bodies by their resemblance tot hose Greek statues that have become traditionally identified with the canon of beauty?"
pg. 156

"Artists turned against the academies and the traditional methods of teaching because they felt it was the artist's task to wrestle with the unique visual experience which can never have been prefigured and can never recur. The history of late eighteenth- and nineteenth century art thus became, in a way, the history of the struggle against the schema. Not entirely though. Some artist always kept there heads. Degas, for instance, dismissed the excited talk of his impressionist friends with the remark that painting was a conventional art and they would better occupy their time by copying drawings by Holbein."

Art and Illusion: A Study int he Psychology of Pictorial Representation
E. H. Gombrich
Pantheon Books 
1960 
New York, NY