2018 Chapters (Layout Features)

Gombrich and Warburg : Making and Matching, Grasping and Comprehending

Freedberg, David A.

There is no claim in “Art and Illusion” about the constitutive role of illusion in art – not by any stretch of the imagination. It still remains the most serious effort in art history to engage with a contemporary scientific project – in those days the cognitive psychology of visual representation. “Art and Illusion” continues to move me as I struggle to frame the relevance of contemporary cognitive neuroscience to the projects of art history. As I write, no art historian has engaged with this critical new discipline to the extent to which the neuroscientists have engaged with ours – and precisely with some of the issues raised by Gombrich in his great book of 1960.