Visuality and virtuality : images and pictures from prehistory to perspective / Whitney Davis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Davis, Whitney, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Visual perception in art.

Physical Description:

xiii, 350 pages ; 27 cm

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2017]

Summary:

A provocative and challenging new conceptual framework for the study of images This book builds on the groundbreaking theoretical framework established in Whitney Davis's acclaimed previous book, A General Theory of Visual Culture, in which he shows how certain culturally constituted aspects of artifacts and pictures are visible to informed viewers. Here, Davis uses revealing archaeological and historical case studies to further develop his theory, presenting an exacting new account of the interaction that occurs when a viewer looks at a picture. Davis argues that pictoriality - the depiction intended by its maker to be seen - emerges at a particular standpoint in space and time. Reconstruction of this standpoint is the first step of the art historian's craft. Because standpoints are inherently mutable and mobile, pictoriality constantly shifts in form and possible meaning. To capture this complexity, Davis develops new concepts of radical pictorial ambiguity, including "bivisibility" (the fact that pictures can always be seen in ways other than intended), pictorial naturalism, and the behavior of pictures under changing angles of view. He then applies these concepts to four cases - Paleolithic cave painting; ancient Egyptian tomb decoration; classical Greek architectural sculpture, with a focus on the Parthenon frieze; and Renaissance perspective as invented by Brunelleschi.

Contents:

Introduction : Images and pictures

Analytics of imaging pictures in visual space. Visuality and virtuality : Analytics of visual space and pictorial space

Radical pictoriality : seeing-as, seeing-as-as, seeing-as-as-as ...

What the Chauvet Master saw : on the presence of prehistoric pictoriality

Bivisibility, bivirtuality, and birotationality. Bivisibility : between the successions to visuality

Bivirtuality : pictorial naturalism and the revolutions of rotation

Birotationality: frontality, foreshortening, and virtual pictorial space

Pictorial successions of virtual coordinate space. What Hesire saw : virtual coordinate space in ancient Egyptian depiction

What Phidias saw : virtual coordinate space in Classical Greek architectural relief

What Brunelleschi saw : the pictorial succession of painter's perspective.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780691171944

0691171947

OCLC:

966971553