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.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (370 p.)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2017]

Summary:

A provocative and challenging new conceptual framework for the study of imagesThis 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.A profound new theory of the work of both makers and viewers by one of the discipline’s most esteemed and engaged thinkers, Visuality and Virtuality is essential reading for art historians, architects, archaeologists, and philosophers of art and visual theory.

Contents:

Chapter 5. Bivirtuality: Pictorial Naturalism and the Revolutions of Rotation

Chapter 6. Birotationality: Frontality, Foreshortening, and Virtual Pictorial Space

Part Three: Pictorial Successions of Virtual Coordinate Space

Chapter 7. What Hesire Saw: Virtual Coordinate Space in Ancient Egyptian Depiction

Chapter 8. What Phidias Saw: Virtual Coordinate Space in Classical Greek Architectural Relief

Chapter 9. What Brunelleschi Saw: Virtual Coordinate Space and Painter's Perspective

Notes

Index

Illustration Credits

Copyright Page

Cover Page

Half-title Page

Title Page

Contents

Preface

A Note on Notations and Abbreviations

Introduction: Images and Pictures

Part One: Analytics of Imaging Pictures in Visual Space

Chapter 1. Visuality and Virtuality: Analytics of Visual Space and Pictorial Space

Chapter 2. Radical Pictoriality: Seeing-As, Seeing-As-As, Seeing-As-As-As...

Chapter 3. What the Chauvet Master Saw: On the Presence of Prehistoric Pictoriality

Part Two: Bivisibility, Bivirtuality, and Birotationality

Chapter 4. Bivisibility: Between the Successions to Visuality

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780691245904

0691245908

OCLC:

1321798357