Gombrich Como Leer Una Pintura

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How to Read a Paintin
By E. H. GOMBRICH

ADVENTURES ofthe MIND

By visual paradoxes the artist shocks the viewer into the realization that there is more to art than meets the eye.
'one of Molicrc's immortal witticisms is surer to get a laugh from a modern audience than the surprise of his Buurseuis Geulilhomine when he is told that has been ''talking prose" all his life. But was poorM. Jourdain all that silly? What he had discovered in his frantic efforts to climb into the class of noblemen was, of course, not prose, but verse. The notion of prose as a special kind of speech could never have been thought of without the poet's truly surprising ways with language, so well described by the author of Alice in Wonderland:
For first you write a sentence^ And then you chop itsmall; Then mix the bits., and sort Ihem out Just as ihey chance to fall: • The order of the phrases makes No difference at all. Emst Hans Gombrich, director of the Warburg Institute of Ihc Umversily of Loi\clon and professor of the classical tradition there, was born m Vienna, which he kfl in 1936 under the shadow of the Nazi terror. Professor Gonibrich has written extensively on the history andtheory of art. His latest book, published in this country by Pantheon Books, Inc.. is Art and Illusion, which he originally delivered as the A. W. Mellon Lecturer in Fine Arts at the National Gallery in Washington in 1956. Professor Gombnch. who has taught also at Oxford, Harvard and Oberlin, gave the !96I Spencer Trask Lectures al Princeton University.

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The corresponding ways with imagespracticed by twentieth-century artists have turned us all into M. Jourdains. They have shocked us into a fresh awareness of the prose of pictorial representation. If we had told an art lover of former days that a picture needed deciphering, he would have thought of symbols and emblems with some cryptic "hieroglyphic" content. Take the

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those tactile \'aluc.s we need for recognition andparticipation in his world? If so, where should he stop? It Is not only touch that gives us information. It is riioveinent, looking at objects from several sides. Without such movement we would never learn to sort out the impressions received by our eyes. .So the debate went on, and representation became .selfcon.scious. The cubist revolution some fifty years ago established the painter's right topresent his own commentaries to the conundrum of vision. Instead of tracing the image of a camera obscura, the artist superimposes and telescopes fragments of representations which follow a mysterious order of

Fip;. 1. Stdl L-U.

Jan Simons^ Inrrfnlijs, scvcntrrnth

still life by the Dutch yc\'cntccnth-ccjitury painter Torretitius (Fig. 1). It seems clear enough as a representation, and for goodreasons: We know that the artist used an optical device, the camera obscura, to project the image of the motifs onto the canvas where he traced it as one might trace a projeeted photograph. What wonder that it seemed just as easy to recognize the objects in the picture as it would be to recognize them on the table. If deciphering eame in at all, it applied to a second level of meaning, as itwere—to the question of what these objects might signify. To the learned gentilbomme they would suggest more than a jug, a glass and a yoke, for he would recognize in this curious assemblage the emblems or ''attributes" of the personification of Temperance, a lady with the laudable habit of pouring water into her wine and a corresponding disposition meekly to accept the bridle and the yoke. It was onlywhen learned allusions of this kind went out of fashion, and when everybody could reproduce the image of objects by means of his own photographic camera, that artists began to question the simple assumptions underlying the stilllife painter's craft. No sooner had they done so than the public questioned their competence. What itnpudence of the impressionists to demand of us to decipher their...