Summary
"Art and Illusion: Psychology of Visual Representation" (eng. Art and Illusion) is an epoch-making work of the Austrian-British art historian Ernst Gombrich from 1960. The book was based on his lectures held in 1956 at National Gallery of Art in Washington. It is considered one of the most important and influential texts of the 20th century in the fields of art history, visual perception and cognitive psychology.
Gombrich starts from a seemingly simple question: Why did different eras and cultures depict the visible world in such different ways? Why, for example, did the ancient Egyptians not paint the way the Impressionists did, even though both looked at the same physical world? Rejecting the idea that human eyes have changed physiologically throughout history or that earlier civilizations were simply not skilled enough, Gombrich looks for an explanation in the psychology of perception and the role of tradition. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
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