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100-551: Pictures are made with various materials and techniques, such as painting, drawing, or prints (including photography and movies) mosaics, tapestries, stained glass, and collages of unusual and disparate elements. Occasionally, picture-like features may be recognised in simple inkblots, accidental stains, peculiar clouds or a glimpse of the moon, but these are special cases, and it is controversial whether they count as genuine instances of depiction. Similarly, sculpture and theatrical performances are sometimes said to depict, but this requires

200-606: A comparison between the way the world is represented in Homer 's Odyssey and the way it appears in the Bible. In addition to Plato and Auerbach, mimesis has been theorised by thinkers as diverse as Aristotle , Philip Sidney , Jean Baudrillard (via his concept of Simulacra and Simulation ) Samuel Taylor Coleridge , Adam Smith , Gabriel Tarde , Sigmund Freud , Walter Benjamin , Theodor Adorno , Paul Ricœur , Guy Debord ( via his conceptual polemical tract, The Society of

300-433: A broad understanding of 'depict', as simply designating a form of representation that is not linguistic or notational. The bulk of studies of depiction however deal only with pictures. While sculpture and performance clearly represent or refer, they do not strictly picture their objects. Objects pictured may be factual or fictional, literal or metaphorical, realistic or idealised and in various combination. Idealised depiction

400-407: A certain exaggeration, the relationship of the imitation to the object it imitates being something like the relationship of dancing to walking. Imitation always involves selecting something from the continuum of experience, thus giving boundaries to what really has no beginning or end. Mimêsis involves a framing of reality that announces that what is contained within the frame is not simply real. Thus

500-594: A complementary, fantasized desire to achieve a return to an eternally static pattern of predation by means of " will " expressed as systematic mass-murder became the metaphysical argument (underlying circumstantial, temporally contingent arguments deployed opportunistically for propaganda purposes) for perpetrating the Holocaust amongst the Nazi elite. Insofar as this issue or this purpose was ever even explicitly discussed in print by Hitler's inner-circle, in other words, this

600-554: A famous comparison between the way the world is represented in Homer 's Odyssey and the way it appears in the Bible. From these two seminal texts Auerbach builds the foundation for a unified theory of representation that spans the entire history of Western literature, including the Modernist novels being written at the time Auerbach began his study. In his essay, " On The Mimetic Faculty "(1933) Walter Benjamin outlines connections between mimesis and sympathetic magic , imagining

700-438: A higher to a lower estate " and so being removed to a less ideal situation in more tragic circumstances than before. He posited the characters in tragedy as being better than the average human being, and those of comedy as being worse. Michael Davis, a translator and commentator of Aristotle writes: At first glance, mimesis seems to be a stylizing of reality in which the ordinary features of our world are brought into focus by

800-432: A kangaroo or armadillo through illustrations. Many fictions and caricatures are promptly recognised without prior acquaintance of either a particular style or the object in question. So competence cannot rely on a simple index or synonymy for objects and styles. Schier's conclusion that lack of syntax and semantics in reference then qualifies as depiction, leaves dance, architecture, animation, sculpture and music all sharing

900-434: A later study by John Willats (1997) on the variety and development of picture planes, Gombrich's views on the greater realism of perspective underpin many crucial findings. A more frankly behaviouristic view is taken by the perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson , partly in response to Gombrich. Gibson treats visual perception as the eye registering necessary information for behaviour in a given environment. The information

1000-408: A mirror in front of the viewer, it reflected his painting of the buildings which had been seen previously, so that the vanishing point was centered from the perspective of the participant. Brunelleschi applied the new system of perspective to his paintings around 1425. This scenario is indicative, but faces several problems, that are still debated. First of all, nothing can be said for certain about

1100-483: A mirror. So painters or poets, though they may paint or describe a carpenter, or any other maker of things, know nothing of the carpenter's (the craftsman's) art, and though the better painters or poets they are, the more faithfully their works of art will resemble the reality of the carpenter making a bed, the imitators will nonetheless still not attain the truth (of God's creation). The poets, beginning with Homer, far from improving and educating humanity, do not possess

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1200-521: A model for beauty, truth , and the good. Plato contrasted mimesis , or imitation , with diegesis , or narrative. After Plato , the meaning of mimesis eventually shifted toward a specifically literary function in ancient Greek society. One of the best-known modern studies of mimesis—understood in literature as a form of realism —is Erich Auerbach 's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature , which opens with

1300-437: A notational system might allow such resemblance. It is widely believed that the problem with a resemblance theory of depiction is that resemblance is a symmetrical relation between terms (necessarily, if x resembles y, then y resembles x) while in contrast depiction is at best a non-symmetrical relation (it is not necessary that, if x depicts y, y depicts x). If this is right, then depiction and resemblance cannot be identified, and

1400-488: A one-way reference running from picture to object encounters a problem. If its semantics is undifferentiated, then the relation flows back from object to picture. Depiction can acquire resemblance but must surrender reference. This is a point tacitly acknowledged by Goodman, conceding firstly that density is the antithesis of notation and later that lack of differentiation may actually permit resemblance. A denotation without notation lacks sense. Nevertheless, Goodman's framework

1500-573: A particular character or may be the "invisible narrator" or even the "all-knowing narrator" who speaks from above in the form of commenting on the action or the characters. In Book III of his Republic (c. 373 BC), Plato examines the style of poetry (the term includes comedy, tragedy , and epic and lyric poetry ): all types narrate events, he argues, but by differing means. He distinguishes between narration or report ( diegesis ) and imitation or representation ( mimesis ). Tragedy and comedy, he goes on to explain, are wholly imitative types;

1600-442: A person an object looks N times (linearly) smaller if it has been moved N times further from the eye than the original distance was. The most characteristic features of linear perspective are that objects appear smaller as their distance from the observer increases, and that they are subject to foreshortening , meaning that an object's dimensions parallel to the line of sight appear shorter than its dimensions perpendicular to

1700-450: A picture plane – a severe exercise in self-reference and ultimately a sub-set of pattern. But just how pictures function remains controversial. Philosophers, art historians and critics, perceptual psychologists and other researchers in the arts and social sciences have contributed to the debate and many of the most influential contributions have been interdisciplinary. Some key positions are briefly surveyed below. Traditionally, depiction

1800-511: A possible origin of astrology arising from an interpretation of human birth that assumes its correspondence with the apparition of a seasonally rising constellation augurs that new life will take on aspects of the myth connected to the star. Belgian feminist Luce Irigaray used the term to describe a form of resistance where women imperfectly imitate stereotypes about themselves to expose and undermine such stereotypes. In Mimesis and Alterity (1993), anthropologist Michael Taussig examines

1900-409: A resemblance theory of depiction is forced to offer a more complicated explanation, for example by relying on experienced resemblance instead, which clearly is an asymmetrical notion (that you experience x as resembling y does not mean you also experience y as resembling x). Others have argued, however, that the concept of resemblance is not exclusively a relational notion, and so that the initial problem

2000-481: A series of experiments between 1415 and 1420, which included making drawings of various Florentine buildings in correct perspective. According to Vasari and Antonio Manetti , in about 1420, Brunelleschi demonstrated his discovery by having people look through a hole in the back of a painting he had made. Through it, they would see a building such as the Florence Baptistery . When Brunelleschi lifted

2100-405: A theory of depiction. Where stylistics and a basic object is nominated, resemblance is prominent, but where more elaborate objects are encountered, or terms for nature denied, simple perception or notation flounder. The difference corresponds somewhat to the division in philosophy between the analytic and continental. Dozens of factors influence depictions and how they are represented. These include

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2200-474: A third, deeper level, a fundamental structure or ideology (called iconology). He even ascribed the use of perspective a deep social meaning (1927). However more recently, a natural or neutral level tends to be abandoned as mythical. The cultural scholar W. J. T. Mitchell looks to ideology to determine resemblance and depiction as acknowledgement of shifts in relations there, albeit by an unspecified scheme or notation. Iconography points to differences in scope for

2300-462: Is a psychological disposition to detect a resemblance between certain surfaces, such as inkblots or accidental stains, etc. and three-dimensional objects. The eye is not deceived, but finds or projects some resemblance to the surface. This is not quite depiction, since the resemblance is only incidental to the surface. The surface does not strictly refer to such objects. Seeing-in is a necessary condition to depiction, and sufficient when in accordance with

2400-451: Is again grounded in optics or the visible, although this does not exclude writing nor reconcile resemblance with reference. Discussion tends to be restricted to the function of outlines in schemes for depth. The art historian Norman Bryson persists with a linguistic model and advances a detail of parsing and tense, ' deixis '. He rejects resemblance and illusion as incompatible with the ambiguities and interpretation available to pictures and

2500-440: Is also critical of the inflexible nature of structuralist analysis. Deixis is taken as the rhetoric of the narrator, indicating the presence of the speaker in a discourse, a bodily or physical aspect as well as an explicit temporal dimension. In depiction this translates as a difference between 'The Gaze ' where deixis is absent and 'The Glance' where it is present. Where present, details to materials indicate how long and in what way

2600-403: Is also termed schematic or stylised and extends to icons, diagrams and maps. Classes or styles of picture may abstract their objects by degrees, conversely, establish degrees of the concrete (usually called, a little confusingly, figuration or figurative, since the 'figurative' is then often quite literal). Stylisation can lead to the fully abstract picture, where reference is only to conditions for

2700-471: Is based on qualitative judgments, and would need to be faced against the material evaluations that have been conducted on Renaissance perspective paintings. Apart from the paintings of Piero della Francesca , which are a model of the genre, the majority of 15th century works show serious errors in their geometric construction. This is true of Masaccio's Trinity fresco and of many works, including those by renowned artists like Leonardo da Vinci. As shown by

2800-669: Is close to an object under observation and directly facing an observer's eyes (i.e., the observer is on a line normal or perpendicular to the plane). Then draw straight lines from the object to the observer. The area on the plane where the drawn lines pass through the plane is a point-projection prospective image resembling what is seen by the observer. Additionally, a central vanishing point can be used (just as with one-point perspective) to indicate frontal (foreshortened) depth. The earliest art paintings and drawings typically sized many objects and characters hierarchically according to their spiritual or thematic importance, not their distance from

2900-436: Is distinguished from denotative meaning by the presence of a mimetic element or resemblance . A picture resembles its object in a way a word or sound does not. Resemblance is no guarantee of depiction, obviously. Two pens may resemble one another but do not therefore depict each other. To say a picture resembles its object especially is only to say that its object is that which it especially resembles; which strictly begins with

3000-490: Is divided between description, covering writing and extending to more discursive notation including music and dance scores, to depiction at greatest remove. However, a word does not grow to resemble its object, no matter how familiar or preferred. To explain how a pictorial notation does, Goodman proposes an analogue system, consisting of undifferentiated characters, a density of syntax and semantics and relative repleteness of syntax. These requirements taken in combination mean that

3100-434: Is echoed in the theories of philosophers such as Robert Hopkins , Flint Schier and Kendall Walton . They enlist 'experience', 'recognition' and 'imagination' respectively. Each provides additional factors to an understanding or interpretation of pictorial reference, although none can explain how a picture resembles an object (if indeed it does), nor how this resemblance is then also a reference. For example, Schier returns to

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3200-738: Is evident in Ancient Greek red-figure pottery . Systematic attempts to evolve a system of perspective are usually considered to have begun around the fifth century BC in the art of ancient Greece , as part of a developing interest in illusionism allied to theatrical scenery. This was detailed within Aristotle 's Poetics as skenographia : using flat panels on a stage to give the illusion of depth. The philosophers Anaxagoras and Democritus worked out geometric theories of perspective for use with skenographia . Alcibiades had paintings in his house designed using skenographia , so this art

3300-403: Is filtered from light rays that meet the retina. The light is called the stimulus energy or sensation. The information consists of underlying patterns or 'invariants' for vital features to the environment. Gibson's view of depiction concerns the re-presentation of these invariants. In the case of illusions or trompe l'oeil, the picture also conveys the stimulus energy, but generally the experience

3400-570: Is merely apparent. In art history, the history of actual attempts to achieve resemblance in depictions is usually covered under the terms " realism ", naturalism ", or " illusionism ". The most famous and elaborate case for resemblance modified by reference, is made by art historian Ernst Gombrich . Resemblance in pictures is taken to involve illusion. Instincts in visual perception are said to be triggered or alerted by pictures, even when we are rarely deceived. The eye supposedly cannot resist finding resemblances that accord with illusion. Resemblance

3500-682: Is not a single occurrence of the word "experiment". Fourth, the conditions listed by Manetti are contradictory with each other. For example, the description of the eyepiece sets a visual field of 15°, much narrower than the visual field resulting from the urban landscape described. Soon after Brunelleschi's demonstrations, nearly every interested artist in Florence and in Italy used geometrical perspective in their paintings and sculpture, notably Donatello , Masaccio , Lorenzo Ghiberti , Masolino da Panicale , Paolo Uccello , and Filippo Lippi . Not only

3600-590: Is not systematically related to the rest of the composition. Medieval artists in Europe, like those in the Islamic world and China, were aware of the general principle of varying the relative size of elements according to distance, but even more than classical art were perfectly ready to override it for other reasons. Buildings were often shown obliquely according to a particular convention. The use and sophistication of attempts to convey distance increased steadily during

3700-421: Is of perceiving two sets of invariants, one for the picture surface, another for the object pictured. He pointedly rejects any seeds of illusion or substitution and allows that a picture represents when two sets of invariants are displayed. But invariants tell us little more than that the resemblance is visible, dual invariants only that the terms of reference are the same as those for resemblance A similar duality

3800-403: Is one of two types of graphical projection perspective in the graphic arts ; the other is parallel projection . Linear perspective is an approximate representation, generally on a flat surface, of an image as it is seen by the eye . Perspective drawing is useful for representing a three-dimensional scene in a two-dimensional medium, like paper . It is based on the optical fact that for

3900-427: Is possible, the aesthetic and ethical value of depiction and the nature of realism in pictorial art . Mimesis Mimesis ( / m ɪ ˈ m iː s ɪ s , m aɪ -/ ; Ancient Greek : μίμησις , mīmēsis ) is a term used in literary criticism and philosophy that carries a wide range of meanings, including imitatio , imitation , nonsensuous similarity, receptivity , representation , mimicry ,

4000-432: Is proposed by the philosopher of art Richard Wollheim . He calls it 'twofoldness'. Our experience of the picture surface is called the 'configurational' aspect, and our experience of the object depicted the 'recognitional'. Wollheim's main claim is that we are simultaneously aware of both the surface and the depicted object. The concept of twofoldness has been very influential in contemporary analytic aesthetics, especially in

4100-442: Is relatively simple, having been long ago formulated by Euclid. Alberti was also trained in the science of optics through the school of Padua and under the influence of Biagio Pelacani da Parma who studied Alhazen 's Book of Optics . This book, translated around 1200 into Latin, had laid the mathematical foundation for perspective in Europe. Piero della Francesca elaborated on De pictura in his De Prospectiva pingendi in

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4200-909: Is revisited by philosopher John Kulvicki and applied by art historian James Elkins to an array of hybrid artefacts, combining picture, pattern and notation. Pictorial semiotics aims for just the kind of integration of depiction with notation undertaken by Goodman, but fails to identify his requirements for syntax and semantics. It seeks to apply the model of structural linguistics, to reveal core meanings and permutations for pictures of all kinds, but stalls in identifying constituent elements of reference, or as semioticians prefer, 'signification'. Similarly, they accept resemblance although call it 'iconicity' (after Charles Sanders Peirce , 1931–58) and are uncomfortable in qualifying its role. Older practitioners, such as Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco variously shift analysis to underlying 'connotations' for an object depicted or concentrate on description of purported content at

4300-436: Is sometimes used to refer to the self-consistency of a represented world, and the availability of in-game rationalisations for elements of the gameplay. In this context, mimesis has an associated grade: highly self-consistent worlds that provide explanations for their puzzles and game mechanics are said to display a higher degree of mimesis. This usage can be traced back to the essay "Crimes Against Mimesis". Dionysian imitatio

4400-438: Is the concern of the philosopher. As culture in those days did not consist in the solitary reading of books, but in the listening to performances, the recitals of orators (and poets), or the acting out by classical actors of tragedy, Plato maintained in his critique that theatre was not sufficient in conveying the truth. He was concerned that actors or orators were thus able to persuade an audience by rhetoric rather than by telling

4500-443: Is the efficient cause, that is, the process and the agent by which the thing is made. The fourth, the final cause, is the good, or the purpose and end of a thing, known as telos . Aristotle's Poetics is often referred to as the counterpart to this Platonic conception of poetry. Poetics is his treatise on the subject of mimesis. Aristotle was not against literature as such; he stated that human beings are mimetic beings, feeling

4600-455: Is the influential literary method of imitation as formulated by Greek author Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the 1st century BC, who conceived it as technique of rhetoric : emulating, adapting, reworking, and enriching a source text by an earlier author. Dionysius' concept marked a significant departure from the concept of mimesis formulated by Aristotle in the 4th century BC, which was only concerned with "imitation of nature" rather than

4700-403: Is the study of pictorial content, mainly in art, and would seem to ignore the question of how to concentrate upon what. But iconography's findings take a rather recondite view of content, are often based on subtle literary, historical and cultural allusion and highlight a sharp difference in terms of resemblance, optical accuracy or intuitive illusion. Resemblance is hardly direct or spontaneous for

4800-643: Is the task of the dramatist to produce the tragic enactment to accomplish this empathy by means of what is taking place on stage. In short, catharsis can be achieved only if we see something that is both recognisable and distant. Aristotle argued that literature is more interesting as a means of learning than history, because history deals with specific facts that have happened, and which are contingent, whereas literature, although sometimes based on history, deals with events that could have taken place or ought to have taken place. Aristotle thought of drama as being "an imitation of an action" and of tragedy as "falling from

4900-938: Is thus narrowed to something like the seeds of illusion. Against the one-way relation of reference Gombrich argues for a weaker or labile relation, inherited from substitution . Pictures are thus both more primitive and powerful than stricter reference. But whether a picture can deceive a little while it represents as much seems gravely compromised. Claims for innate dispositions in sight are also contested. Gombrich appeals to an array of psychological research from James J. Gibson , R. L. Gregory, John M. Kennedy, Konrad Lorenz, Ulric Neisser and others in arguing for an 'optical' basis to perspective, in particular (see also perspective (graphical) . Subsequent cross-cultural studies in depictive competence and related studies in child-development and vision impairment are inconclusive at best. Gombrich's convictions have important implications for his popular history of art, for treatment and priorities there. In

5000-728: The dithyramb is wholly narrative; and their combination is found in epic poetry . When reporting or narrating, "the poet is speaking in his own person; he never leads us to suppose that he is anyone else;" when imitating, the poet produces an "assimilation of himself to another, either by the use of voice or gesture." In dramatic texts, the poet never speaks directly; in narrative texts, the poet speaks as himself or herself. In his Poetics , Aristotle argues that kinds of poetry (the term includes drama, flute music, and lyre music for Aristotle) may be differentiated in three ways: according to their medium , according to their objects , and according to their mode or manner (section I); "For

5100-618: The east doors of the Florence Baptistery . Masaccio (d. 1428) achieved an illusionistic effect by placing the vanishing point at the viewer's eye level in his Holy Trinity ( c.  1427 ), and in The Tribute Money , it is placed behind the face of Jesus. In the late 15th century, Melozzo da Forlì first applied the technique of foreshortening (in Rome, Loreto , Forlì and others). This overall story

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5200-475: The "imitation of other authors." Latin orators and rhetoricians adopted the literary method of Dionysius' imitatio and discarded Aristotle's mimesis . Referring to it as imitation , the concept of mimesis was crucial for Samuel Taylor Coleridge 's theory of the imagination . Coleridge begins his thoughts on imitation and poetry from Plato, Aristotle, and Philip Sidney , adopting their concept of imitation of nature instead of other writers. His departure from

5300-435: The 1470s, making many references to Euclid. Alberti had limited himself to figures on the ground plane and giving an overall basis for perspective. Della Francesca fleshed it out, explicitly covering solids in any area of the picture plane. Della Francesca also started the now common practice of using illustrated figures to explain the mathematical concepts, making his treatise easier to understand than Alberti's. Della Francesca

5400-663: The Foundation of the World (1978), René Girard posits that human behavior is based upon mimesis, and that imitation can engender pointless conflict. Girard notes the productive potential of competition: "It is because of this unprecedented capacity to promote competition within limits that always remain socially, if not individually, acceptable that we have all the amazing achievements of the modern world," but states that competition stifles progress once it becomes an end in itself: "rivals are more apt to forget about whatever objects are

5500-484: The Guna, for having been so impressed by the exotic technologies of the whites that they raised them to the status of gods. To Taussig this reductionism is suspect, and he argues this from both sides in his Mimesis and Alterity to see values in the anthropologists ' perspective while simultaneously defending the independence of a lived culture from the perspective of anthropological reductionism. In Things Hidden Since

5600-538: The Holocaust was still unfolding. Calasso's earlier book The Celestial Hunter , written immediately prior to The Unnamable Present , is an informed and scholarly speculative cosmology depicting the possible origins and early prehistoric cultural evolution of the human mimetic faculty. In particular, the books first and fifth chapters ("In The Time of the Great Raven" and "Sages & Predators") focuses on

5700-576: The Spectacle ) Luce Irigaray , Jacques Derrida , René Girard , Nikolas Kompridis , Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe , Michael Taussig , Merlin Donald , Homi Bhabha , Roberto Calasso , and Nidesh Lawtoo. During the nineteenth century, the racial politics of imitation towards African Americans influenced the term mimesis and its evolution. Both Plato and Aristotle saw in mimesis the representation of nature , including human nature, as reflected in

5800-412: The act of expression , the act of resembling, and the presentation of the self . The original Ancient Greek term mīmēsis ( μίμησις ) derives from mīmeisthai ( μιμεῖσθαι , 'to imitate'), itself coming from mimos ( μῖμος , 'imitator, actor'). In ancient Greece , mīmēsis was an idea that governed the creation of works of art, in particular, with correspondence to the physical world understood as

5900-414: The audience to identify with the characters and the events in the text, and unless this identification occurs, it does not touch us as an audience. Aristotle holds that it is through "simulated representation," mimesis, that we respond to the acting on the stage, which is conveying to us what the characters feel, so that we may empathise with them in this way through the mimetic form of dramatic roleplay. It

6000-546: The cause of the rivalry and instead become more fascinated with one another." In The Unnameable Present , Calasso outlines the way that mimesis, called "Mimickry" by Joseph Goebbels —though it is a universal human ability—was interpreted by the Third Reich as being a sort of original sin attributable to "the Jew." Thus, an objection to the tendency of human beings to mimic one another instead of "just being themselves" and

6100-401: The contrast with language to try to identify a crucial difference in depictive competence. Understanding a pictorial style does not depend upon learning a vocabulary and syntax. Once grasped, a style allows the recognition of any object known to the user. Of course recognition allows a great deal more than that – books teaching children to read often introduce them to many exotic creatures such as

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6200-461: The correctness of his perspective construction of the Baptistery of San Giovanni, because Brunelleschi's panel is lost. Second, no other perspective painting or drawing by Brunelleschi is known. (In fact, Brunelleschi was not known to have painted at all.) Third, in the account written by Antonio Manetti in his Vita di Ser Brunellesco at the end of the 15th century on Brunelleschi's panel, there

6300-456: The depiction was made, where absent, a telling suppression or prolonging of the act. The distinction attempts to account for the 'plastic' or medium-specific qualities absent from earlier semiotic analyses and somewhat approximates the 'indexic' aspect to signs introduced by Peirce . Deixis offers a more elaborate account of the picture surface and broad differences to expression and application but cannot qualify resemblance. Lastly, iconography

6400-479: The dramas of the period. Plato wrote about mimesis in both Ion and The Republic (Books II, III, and X). In Ion , he states that poetry is the art of divine madness, or inspiration. Because the poet is subject to this divine madness, instead of possessing "art" or "knowledge" ( techne ) of the subject, the poet does not speak truth (as characterized by Plato's account of the Forms ). As Plato has it, truth

6500-494: The earlier thinkers lies in his arguing that art does not reveal a unity of essence through its ability to achieve sameness with nature. Coleridge claims: [T]he composition of a poem is among the imitative arts; and that imitation, as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the SAME throughout the radically DIFFERENT, or the different throughout a base radically the same. Here, Coleridge opposes imitation to copying,

6600-445: The equipment used to create the depiction, the creator's intent, vantage point, mobility, proximity, publication format, among others, and, when dealing with human subjects, their potential desire for impression management. Other debates about the nature of depiction include the relationship between seeing something in a picture and seeing face to face, whether depictive representation is conventional , how understanding novel depictions

6700-429: The exact vantage point used in the calculations relative to the image. When viewed from a different point, this cancels out what would appear to be distortions in the image. For example, a sphere drawn in perspective will be stretched into an ellipse. These apparent distortions are more pronounced away from the center of the image as the angle between a projected ray (from the scene to the eye) becomes more acute relative to

6800-474: The expense of more medium-specific meaning. Essentially they establish a more general iconography . A later adherent, Göran Sonesson, rejects Goodman's terms for syntax and semantics as alien to linguistics, no more than an ideal and turns instead to the findings of perceptual psychologists, such as J. M. Kennedy, N. H. Freeman and David Marr in order to detect underlying structure. Sonesson accepts 'seeing-in', although prefers Edmund Husserl's version. Resemblance

6900-595: The first or second century until the 18th century. It is not certain how they came to use the technique; Dubery and Willats (1983) speculate that the Chinese acquired the technique from India, which acquired it from Ancient Rome, while others credit it as an indigenous invention of Ancient China . Oblique projection is also seen in Japanese art, such as in the Ukiyo-e paintings of Torii Kiyonaga (1752–1815). By

7000-465: The iconographer, reference rarely to the literal or singular. Visual perception here is subject to reflection and research, the object as much reference as referent. The distinguished art historian Erwin Panofsky allowed three levels to iconography. The first is 'natural' content, the object recognised or resembling without context, on a second level, a modifying historical and cultural context and at

7100-400: The knowledge of craftsmen and are mere imitators who copy again and again images of virtue and rhapsodise about them, but never reach the truth in the way the superior philosophers do. Similar to Plato's writings about mimesis, Aristotle also defined mimesis as the perfection and imitation of nature. Art is not only imitation but also the use of mathematical ideas and symmetry in the search for

7200-529: The later periods of antiquity, artists, especially those in less popular traditions, were well aware that distant objects could be shown smaller than those close at hand for increased realism, but whether this convention was actually used in a work depended on many factors. Some of the paintings found in the ruins of Pompeii show a remarkable realism and perspective for their time. It has been claimed that comprehensive systems of perspective were evolved in antiquity, but most scholars do not accept this. Hardly any of

7300-510: The latter referring to William Wordsworth 's notion that poetry should duplicate nature by capturing actual speech. Coleridge instead argues that the unity of essence is revealed precisely through different materialities and media. Imitation, therefore, reveals the sameness of processes in nature. One of the best-known modern studies of mimesis—understood in literature as a form of realism —is Erich Auerbach 's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953), which opens with

7400-527: The line of sight. All objects will recede to points in the distance, usually along the horizon line, but also above and below the horizon line depending on the view used. Italian Renaissance painters and architects including Filippo Brunelleschi , Leon Battista Alberti , Masaccio , Paolo Uccello , Piero della Francesca and Luca Pacioli studied linear perspective, wrote treatises on it, and incorporated it into their artworks. linear or point-projection perspective works by putting an imagery flat plane that

7500-470: The major themes of Adorno and Horkheimer 's Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1944) , which was itself in dialog with earlier work hinting in this direction by Walter Benjamin who died during an attempt to escape the gestapo . Calasso insinuates and references this lineage throughout the text. The work can be read as a clarification of their earlier gestures in this direction, written while

7600-507: The maker's intentions, where these are clear from certain features to a picture. But seeing-in cannot really say in what way such surfaces resemble objects either, only specify where they perhaps first occur. Wollheim's account of how a resemblance is agreed or modified, whereby maker and user anticipate each other's roles, does not really explain how a resemblance refers, but rather when an agreed resemblance obtains. The appeal to broader psychological factors in qualifying depictive resemblance

7700-540: The many works where such a system would have been used have survived. A passage in Philostratus suggests that classical artists and theorists thought in terms of "circles" at equal distance from the viewer, like a classical semi-circular theatre seen from the stage. The roof beams in rooms in the Vatican Virgil , from about 400 AD, are shown converging, more or less, on a common vanishing point, but this

7800-481: The medium being the same, and the objects the same, the poet may imitate by narration—in which case he can either take another personality, as Homer does, or speak in his own person, unchanged—or he may present all his characters as living and moving before us." Though they conceive of mimesis in quite different ways, its relation with diegesis is identical in Plato's and Aristotle's formulations. In ludology , mimesis

7900-443: The more "real" the imitation the more fraudulent it becomes. It was also Plato and Aristotle who contrasted mimesis with diegesis (Greek: διήγησις). Mimesis shows , rather than tells , by means of directly represented action that is enacted. Diegesis, however, is the telling of the story by a narrator; the author narrates action indirectly and describes what is in the characters' minds and emotions. The narrator may speak as

8000-834: The past and which has to be evoked for the reader through predication and description. Dramatic worlds, on the other hand, are presented to the spectator as 'hypothetically actual' constructs, since they are 'seen' in progress 'here and now' without narratorial mediation. [...] This is not merely a technical distinction but constitutes, rather, one of the cardinal principles of a poetics of the drama as opposed to one of narrative fiction. The distinction is, indeed, implicit in Aristotle's differentiation of representational modes, namely diegesis (narrative description) versus mimesis (direct imitation)." (pp. 110–111). Perspective (graphical) Linear or point-projection perspective (from Latin perspicere  'to see through')

8100-420: The perfect, the timeless, and contrasting being with becoming. Nature is full of change, decay, and cycles, but art can also search for what is everlasting and the first causes of natural phenomena. Aristotle wrote about the idea of four causes in nature. The first, the formal cause , is like a blueprint, or an immortal idea. The second cause is the material cause, or what a thing is made out of. The third cause

8200-481: The period, but without a basis in a systematic theory. Byzantine art was also aware of these principles, but also used the reverse perspective convention for the setting of principal figures. Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted a floor with convergent lines in his Presentation at the Temple (1342), though the rest of the painting lacks perspective elements. It is generally accepted that Filippo Brunelleschi conducted

8300-415: The person whose character he assumes? / Of course. / Then in this case the narrative of the poet may be said to proceed by way of imitation? / Very true. / Or, if the poet everywhere appears and never conceals himself, then again, the imitation is dropped, and his poetry becomes simple narration. "classical narrative is always oriented towards an explicit there and then, towards an imaginary 'elsewhere' set in

8400-402: The picture itself. Indeed, since everything resembles something in some way, mere resemblance as a distinguishing trait is trivial. Moreover, depiction is no guarantee of resemblance to an object. A picture of a dragon does not resemble an actual dragon. So resemblance is not enough. Theories have tried either to set further conditions to the kind of resemblance necessary, or sought ways in which

8500-405: The proliferation of hypermimetic affects in the digital age. You are aware, I suppose, that all mythology and poetry is a narration of events, either past, present, or to come? / Certainly, he replied. And narration may be either simple narration, or imitation, or a union of the two? / [...] / And this assimilation of himself to another, either by the use of voice or gesture, is the imitation of

8600-406: The quick proliferation of accurate perspective paintings in Florence, Brunelleschi likely understood (with help from his friend the mathematician Toscanelli ), but did not publish, the mathematics behind perspective. Decades later, his friend Leon Battista Alberti wrote De pictura ( c.  1435 ), a treatise on proper methods of showing distance in painting. Alberti's primary breakthrough

8700-428: The same mode of reference. This perhaps points as much to limitations in a linguistic model. Reversing orthodoxy, the philosopher Nelson Goodman starts from reference and attempts to assimilate resemblance. He denies resemblance as either necessary or sufficient condition for depiction but surprisingly, allows that it arises and fluctuates as a matter of usage or familiarity. For Goodman, a picture denotes. Denotation

8800-410: The terrain of mimesis and its early origins, though insights in this territory appear as a motif in every chapter of the book. In Homo Mimeticus (2022) Swiss philosopher and critic Nidesh Lawtoo develops a relational theory of mimetic subjectivity arguing that not only desires but all affects are mimetic, for good and ill. Lawtoo opens up the transdisciplinary field of "mimetic studies" to account for

8900-512: The three beds: One bed exists as an idea made by God (the Platonic ideal , or form); one is made by the carpenter, in imitation of God's idea; and one is made by the artist in imitation of the carpenter's. So the artist's bed is twice removed from the truth. Those who copy only touch on a small part of things as they really are, where a bed may appear differently from various points of view, looked at obliquely or directly, or differently again in

9000-458: The truth. In Book II of The Republic , Plato describes Socrates ' dialogue with his pupils. Socrates warns we should not seriously regard poetry as being capable of attaining the truth and that we who listen to poetry should be on our guard against its seductions, since the poet has no place in our idea of God. Developing upon this in Book ;X, Plato told of Socrates's metaphor of

9100-407: The urge to create texts (art) that reflect and represent reality. Aristotle considered it important that there be a certain distance between the work of art on the one hand and life on the other; we draw knowledge and consolation from tragedies only because they do not happen to us. Without this distance, tragedy could not give rise to catharsis . However, it is equally important that the text causes

9200-455: The viewer, and did not use foreshortening. The most important figures are often shown as the highest in a composition , also from hieratic motives, leading to the so-called "vertical perspective", common in the art of Ancient Egypt , where a group of "nearer" figures are shown below the larger figure or figures; simple overlapping was also employed to relate distance. Additionally, oblique foreshortening of round elements like shields and wheels

9300-571: The way that people from one culture adopt another's nature and culture (the process of mimesis) at the same time as distancing themselves from it (the process of alterity ). He describes how a legendary tribe, the "White Indians" (the Guna people of Panama and Colombia ), have adopted in various representations figures and images reminiscent of the white people they encountered in the past (without acknowledging doing so). Taussig, however, criticises anthropology for reducing yet another culture, that of

9400-461: The writings of Dominic Lopes and of Bence Nanay . Again, illusion is forestalled by the prominence of the picture surface where an object is depicted. Yet the object depicted quite simply is the picture surface under one reading, the surface indifferent to picture, another. The two are hardly compatible or simultaneous. Nor do they ensure a reference relation. Wollheim introduces the concept of 'seeing-in' to qualify depictive resemblance. Seeing-in

9500-407: Was also the first to accurately draw the Platonic solids as they would appear in perspective. Luca Pacioli 's 1509 Divina proportione ( Divine Proportion ), illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci , summarizes the use of perspective in painting, including much of Della Francesca's treatise. Leonardo applied one-point perspective as well as shallow focus to some of his works. Two-point perspective

9600-461: Was demonstrated as early as 1525 by Albrecht Dürer , who studied perspective by reading Piero and Pacioli's works, in his Unterweisung der Messung ("Instruction of the Measurement"). Perspective images are created with reference to a particular center of vision for the picture plane. In order for the resulting image to appear identical to the original scene, a viewer must view the image from

9700-482: Was not confined merely to the stage. Euclid in his Optics ( c.  300 BC ) argues correctly that the perceived size of an object is not related to its distance from the eye by a simple proportion. In the first-century BC frescoes of the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor , multiple vanishing points are used in a systematic but not fully consistent manner. Chinese artists made use of oblique projection from

9800-423: Was not to show the mathematics in terms of conical projections, as it actually appears to the eye. Instead, he formulated the theory based on planar projections, or how the rays of light, passing from the viewer's eye to the landscape, would strike the picture plane (the painting). He was then able to calculate the apparent height of a distant object using two similar triangles. The mathematics behind similar triangles

9900-468: Was perspective a way of showing depth, it was also a new method of creating a composition. Visual art could now depict a single, unified scene, rather than a combination of several. Early examples include Masolino's St. Peter Healing a Cripple and the Raising of Tabitha ( c.  1423 ), Donatello's The Feast of Herod ( c.  1427 ), as well as Ghiberti's Jacob and Esau and other panels from

10000-552: Was the justification (appearing in the essay "Mimickry" in a war-time book published by Joseph Goebbels). The text suggests that a radical failure to understand the nature of mimesis as an innate human trait or a violent aversion to the same, tends to be a diagnostic symptom of the totalitarian or fascist character if it is not, in fact, the original unspoken occult impulse that animated the production of totalitarian or fascist movements to begin with. Calasso's argument here echoes, condenses and introduces new evidence to reinforce one of

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