Art and Illusion

First published in 1960 from the Mellon Lectures, this study asks how pictures come to look like the world and why styles change. Gombrich argues that artists work from inherited schemata which they correct against observation, and that the viewer completes the illusion. He follows conventions from ancient and medieval images through Renaissance perspective, caricature, and nineteenth-century experiments that give more to the eye's guesswork. Psychology of perception sits beside the history of making. The book is an argument about pictorial representation, not a biography of painters and not a manual of technique.

Bound in blocked buckram. Yellow slipcase with a reproduction of a painting in black and white.