How fun to find an old Phaidon! This is Gombrich’s classic study approaching representation as a negotiation between inherited conventions, perception, expectation and correction.

He is depth-y, moving across ancient art, Renaissance painting, caricature, advertising, scientific illustration and optical experiment, arguing that artists work through learned schemata. That is, a process of making, testing and modifying images rather than simply reproducing what the eye supposedly sees.

Originally delivered as the A. W. Mellon Lectures, Art and Illusion sits somewhere between art history, psychology and a theory of knowledge. It is delightful to see this kind of thought directed at how a mark becomes depth, how incomplete forms become whole objects, why pictorial conventions become invisible once we have learned them, but then translated through a psychological filter. It is filled with hundreds of illustrations, repeatedly showing how much work the viewer performs in making an image intelligible. A foundational book on representation, and still useful for thinking about images as constructed systems rather than passive reflections of reality.

Phaidon Press, London, 1962. New edition, reset 1962; text substantially follows the second edition with minor revisions and a new preface. Hardcover with dust jacket. Jacket worn with rubbing, edge chipping and small tears; light foxing to preliminary pages, internally otherwise clean and sound.