‘MAKING PRECEDES MATCHING’ : with this famous formula, the epitome of his Art and Illusion (1960), 1 Ernst Gombrich proposed that artists, before they ever dream of copying what they see before them, make pictures by manipulating inherited ‘schemata’ that designate reality by force of convention. At some point an artist compares a pictorial schema to direct observation of the world, and on that basis presumes to correct the schema. This then enters the stock of available formulae until some later artist holds it up to the world and ventures a further adjustment. In this way art may come to have a history. Beholders, in turn, make their own sense of pictures by collating what they see on the canvas with what they know about the world and with what they remember of other pictures. Gombrich’s account of the making of art as an experimental and even improvisational process impressed many readers beyond the academic discipline of art history. However, for two decades or more, many art historians have considered his name a byword for a rationalist, Eurocentric and naively naturalist approach to art with which they no longer would wish to be associated. A forceful blow to Gombrich’s reputation was struck by Norman Bryson in his Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1983), an intricately reasoned critique of the quest for an ‘Essential Copy’ that has supposedly driven Western art and art theory since Antiquity. Bryson argued that the picture, as a conventional sign, delivers not reality but only a coded message about reality and that verisimilitude is nothing more than ‘rhetoric’ that persuades the unwary viewer that he or she is see- ing things as they really are. Within the discipline of art history, for at least a decade, Bryson’s polemic was highly influential. His anti-naturalism was embraced by art historians who wished to modernise their discipline, bringing it into step with the development of critical theory and poststructuralism that by the 1980s had already profoundly reshaped literary studies. The problem-solving model of the development of Western art that Art and Illusion proposed left Gombrich, in Bryson’s view, aligned with an unacceptable classical theory of representation: ‘so far from questioning the Whig optimism of that version, it in fact reinforces its evolutionary and teleological drive’. 2 After Bryson, one could almost be forgiven for thinking that the phrase ‘Essential Copy’, implying an endpoint to the process of experimentation, was Gombrich’s, which it was not. Yet only a decade later Keith Moxey presented Gombrich as ‘the most eloquent advocate’ of the ‘resemblance theory of representation’, according to which ‘representation has something to do with the imitation of nature’. Moxey then contrasted this view with that of the philosopher Nelson Goodman, numbering him among ‘Gombrich’s critics’, who ‘pointed out that [. . .] a picture never resembles anything so much as another picture’. 3 A reader who turns to Goodman’s book Languages of Art for further elucidation, however, will be surprised to find that the author mentions Gombrich not as his intellectual antagonist, but rather as a principal witness in his own conventionalist cause: ‘Gombrich, in particular, has amassed overwhelming evidence to show how the way we see and depict depends on and varies with experience, practice, interests, and attitudes’. 4 In Art and Illusion Gombrich makes a powerful case against what Ruskin called the ‘innocence of the eye’ (p.296). Per- ception, in Gombrich’s account, is not a given but a learned practice, involving an active construction of the world. Resem- blance to reality is an effect generated by the interplay between the expected and the unexpected. Pictures are ‘relational models’ of reality (p.253). Pictorial realism was a historical and collective product, and hard-won. The artist is not free, but faces a limited array of choices (p.376). Cultures determine what is possible (p.86). Such propositions inverted the conventional wisdom about representation. Like his near-exact contemporary, Claude Lévi- Strauss, Gombrich was a ‘reverse thinker’. Lévi-Strauss argued that myths are made by combining bits and pieces of previous myths. Meaning does not precede, but rather follows, the myth-maker’s bricolage. ‘Mythical thought [. . .] is imprisoned in the events and experiences which it never tires of ordering and re-ordering in its search to find them a meaning’. 5 Gombrich too solved problems by turning them inside out. For example, he pointed out that astrological associations do not explain character traits but create them: human nature adjusts itself, as it were, to fit the signs. 6 Gombrich’s paradoxical argument is also homologous with that of Thomas S. Kuhn, who in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) described the paradigmatic, essentially social basis of scientific knowledge. Just as Kuhn’s demonstration of the collective and conventional nature of scientific knowledge was a We are grateful to the Azam Foundation for sponsoring this article. 1 E.H. Gombrich: Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, New York 1960. Originally delivered in 1956 as the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. 2 N. Bryson: Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, Cambridge 1983, p.21. 3 K. Moxey: The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History, Ithaca 1994, pp.30–31. 4 N. Goodman: Languages of Art, Indianapolis and Cambridge 1976, p.10. Gombrich played a similar role in Umberto Eco’s Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington 1976, pp.204–05, a classic treatise that makes the most extreme case possible for the conventionality of signs. Even iconic signs, or pictures, which would seem to be related to what they signify in stronger than conventional ways, figure in Eco’s analysis as the products of cultural convention. In making his case, Eco enlisted none other than Gombrich, citing his analysis of Constable’s recoding of the light effects in the English landscape in Wivenhoe Park (National Gallery of Art, Washington; 1816). 836 december 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine Art History Reviewed VI: E.H. Gombrich’s ‘Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation’, 1960 by CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD MA.DEC.AHR6.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 19/11/2009 10:10 Page 836