See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/31140141

Gombrich, formalism and the description of works of Art

Article  in  The British Journal of Aesthetics · April 1994

DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/34.2.134 · Source: OAI

CITATIONS READS

6 1,559

1 author:

Richard Woodfield
University of Birmingham
41 PUBLICATIONS   128 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Richard Woodfield on 08 October 2018.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Preprint of British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 34, No. 2, April, 1994

GOMBRICH, FORMALISM AND THE DESCRIPTION OF WORKS OF ART

Richard Woodfield

CECIL GOULD once contrasted Kenneth Clark and E. H. Gombrich in the following terms:

In looking at works of art Kenneth Clark, a Scotsman brought up in England, started with the
visual aspect—the relation of form and colour which appealed, or failed to appeal, to his
eve—and then allowed his mind to consider it. Gombrich, on the other hand, who grew up
in the heady intellectual atmosphere of Vienna of the 192os, appears to do the opposite.
With him the cerebral element appears to predominate over the visual.1

The reader of Clark's autobiography Another Part of the Wood2 will, however, discover his
attachment to the great Viennese historian Alois Riegl:

I had read, with immense difficulty, the works of Riegl and had formed the ambition to
interpret every scrap of design as the revelation of a state of mind. I dreamed of a great
book which would be the successor to Riegl's Spätrömische Kunst-Industrie, and would
interpret in human terms the slow, heavy, curve of Egyptian art or the restless, inward-
turning line of Scythian gold, and would stand for hours looking at Anglo-Saxon ornament
and try to describe how its rhythms differed from the decorations on a Chinese bronze.3

I am sure that there were quite as many connoisseurs in Vienna as there were in England willing to
respond to the purely visual appeal of works of art. As we shall see Riegl himself stood in need of a
`cerebral' corrective. What is intriguing, however, is Gould's characterization of Clark's perceptual
process, which has its roots in the history of formalism.
As Gombrich has pointed out, it was Ruskin who gave currency to the idea of the `innocent
eye4 and it was Conrad Fiedler who challenged the idea that the artistic image could escape the
mediation of thought.5 Fiedler's formalism reflected his friend, Hans von Marée's, rejection of
contemporary interest in literary and anecdotal imagery: `interest in art begins only when interest in
literary content vanishes. The content of a work of art that can be grasped conceptually and
expressed in verbal terms does not represent the artistic substance which owes its existence to the
creative powers of the artist'.6 This did not imply that the work of art would have no subject but that
the interest of the subject was purely what was experienced visually. Nevertheless he distinguished
between the artist's perceptual experience of the world and the conceptualization of that visual
experience in the work of art. The artist's ideal but impossible aim was to arrive at some kind of fit
between visual experience and depiction:

It is the essential characteristic of the artist's nature to be born with an ability in perceptual
comprehension and to use that ability freely. To the artist, perceptual experience is from the
beginning an impartial, free activity, which serves no purpose beyond itself and which ends
in that purpose. Perceptual experiences alone can lead the artist to artistic configurations.

1
A review of New Light on Old Masters (1986) in Apollo (January 1987), p. 75.
2
Kenneth Clark, Another Part of the Wood (London, 1985).
3
Ibid., p. 108.
4
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Oxford, 1986), p. 250.
5
Conrad Fiedler, Über die Beurteilung von Werken der Bildenden Kunst (1876), trans. H. Schaeffer-Simmern &
F. Mood, On Judging Works of Visual Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles. 1949).
6
Ibid., pp. 10-11.
 To him the world is but a thing of appearances. He approaches it as a whole and endeavours
to recreate it in a visual whole. The essence of the world which he tries to appropriate
mentally and to subjugate to himself consists in the visible and tangible configuration of its
objects.7
The difficulty the artist continually faced was the intervention of knowledge in perception of the
world: `even the simplest sense impression that looks like merely the raw material for the
operations of the mind is already a mental fact, and what we call the external world is really the
result of a complex psychological process'.8 What Fiedler treated as a difficulty his friend, the neo-
classicist sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand, turned to positive account by insisting on the need for
clarity and structure in the visual image.9 The depiction of immediate response to sensory stimulus
simply resulted in formlessness: `An artistic representation, to be strong and natural, must bring to
bear, out of the embarrassing richness which Nature affords, and in spite of it, those elementary
effects which correspond to our most general conception of form'.10
He argued that tactile memories played an important role in our recognition of objects. It
was the artist's business to create images which would trade on both kinaesthetic and optical
sensations. A picture is a static image of a world which we move around in, handle and see with both
eyes. The painter's problem was to reconcile this freedom of movement, and point of view, with the
need to create a single image. Proxemic and distant vision placed different demands on the
spectator: from a great distance relationships became obvious at a glance, closer views demanded a
kind of visual compounding activity. According to Hildebrand, the very purpose of a picture was to
awaken the idea of space11 but the coherence and unity of a picture was quite distinct from the
coherence and unity of nature itself.12 The idea of representation was pivotal to Hildebrand's
formalism as while:

7
Ibid., pp. 42-3.
8
Quoted by Gombrich in Art and Illusion (Oxford, 1986), p. 53 from `Moderner Naturalismus und künstlerische
Wahrheit', in Schriften über Kunst (Leipzig, 1896), p. 177. In his Durham lecture of 1955, Gombrich remarked `It
is an intriguing fact that Hildebrand had made a portrait bust of the psychologist Helmholtz. One would like to
know what the two talked about during the sitting' (unpublished ms. p. 3). For comments on the von Marées
circle see Kenworth Moffett, Meier-Graefe as art critic (München, 1973), passim.
9
The parallel with the history of Impressionism in France is striking. In 1880, Emile Zola declared that
Impressionist art lacked structure and Seurat's painting responded to `formlessness' with a neo-classical
severity. It would be interesting to know whether there was a critical network around 'Parisian' Impressionism
which extended to Italy. See S. Loevgren, The Genesis of Modernism (London, 1971).
10
Adolf von Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (1893), trans. Max Meyer and Robert
Morris Ogden, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture (New York, 1907). It is worth noting that
Hildebrand defined the problem which Gombrich eventually set out to solve in Art and Illusion:
`Considering how different a thing a picture is from the natural object which it represents, the force of the
illusion which it produces remains a riddle unless we understand that the picture depends for its spatial effect
on no other subjective conditions than does Nature. Neither produces spatial ideas directly, but only indirectly,
and that through the medium of the same class of mental processes. Since Nature and the picture both
stimulate our sense organs in the same manner, we arrive, in fact, at the same resultant idea. The parallel
between Nature and Art is not to be sought in the equality of their actual appearances, but rather that both
have the same capacity for producing visual effects. The value of the picture does not depend on the success
of a deception, as does the popular value of a panorama, but on the intensity of the unitary spatial
suggestiveness concentrated in it'. Ibid., pp. 55-6.
11
Hildebrand, p. 49.
12
Hildebrand, p. 52. This is a notion that Gombrich explored to great effect in his lecture `Raphael's "Madonna
della Sedia" reprinted in Norm and Form (London, 1966); he argued the painting was a solution to the problem
of reconciling two 'mutually limiting demands that of lifelikeness and that of arrangement' (p. 74).
 `the elements of sensation which compose these spatial values are lines, light and shade,
and colors ... it is to be noted that these constitute a spatial value and act on our form
conceptions only when regarded by us as representing an object'.13

The artist's forms were recognized as objects in space and the space they inhabited was prior to
their depiction: `Ideas suggested by form, as expressive not of space, but of organisation, function or
movement, take their place as factors in art only after the spatial ideas are established'.14
While Hildebrand linked his theoretical ideas to a neo-classical sculptural practice his book
played an important role in creating a conceptual tool for the analysis of other styles. As Wölfflin
famously said in the preface to the first edition of Die klassische Kunst (1899),15 Hildebrand's book
offered new techniques for the analysis of works of visual art taking it out of the domains of artistic
personalities and historical circumstances. Wölfflin elaborated the contrast between optic and
haptic into a set of five polarities which he then applied to Classic and Baroque art. He theorized the
shift from optic to haptic, from one consistent set of formal categories to another set, as an
autonomous development of art according to its own visual laws.
Perhaps the most radical application of the new formalistic technique of analysis was
16
Riegl's. While there could be an argument for the autonomy of artistic development over a
relatively short period of history, Riegl boldly applied the doctrine to a much greater period of time
and wider sweep of cultures. The general perceptual thesis of Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie
(1901)17 covered the development of the history of the visual arts from Egypt and archaic Greece,
through classical Greece and Rome, to the early middle ages. All three modes of representation were
to be taken as equally naturalistic, each reflecting the artist's engagement with the visual world:

to reclaim the `naturalism' for particular styles can just lead to misunderstandings. The
ancient Egyptian who tried to represent the objects in their strictly `objective' appearance
meant this to be as `naturalistic' as one could imagine. The Greek, however, felt his own to
be especially `naturalistic' when he compared his with them. And could the master of the
portraits of Constantine with its lively expression of the eyes not have felt that he was a
greater `naturalist' than, for example, the master of the portrait of Pericles? Yet all three
would have, in the most modern sense, taken `naturalism' for something purely unnatural.
Indeed, each style of art strives for a true representation of nature and nothing else and
each has indeed its own perception of nature in that he views a very particular phenomenon
of it (tactile or optical, Nahsicht, Normalsicht, or Fernsicht).18

Wölfflin had remarked on the asymmetry between visual attention and pictorial depiction:

13
Hildebrand, p. 62.
14
Hildebrand. p. 100.
15
Wölfflin, Classic Art, translated by P & L Murray (London, 1968).
16
For connections between Wölfflin and Riegl see Joan Hart, `Some Reflections on Wölfflin and the Vienna
School', Akten des XXV Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte (Vienna, 1984), Vol. I. pp. 53-64.
17
Alois Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie nach den Funden in Österreich-Ungarn (Vienna, 1901) translated
as Late Roman Art Industry (Rolf Winkes) (Rome, 1985). In view of this article's stress on historical continuities
it should be said that although Riegl's Kunstindustrie was originally published in 1901, a second edition was
published in 1927 in a collection of his writings, Gesammelte Aufsätze, edited by Hans Sedlmayr. Sedlmayr was
a member of the group responsible for Kritische Berichte, where Gombrich made his first contributions to art
historiography. Sedlmayr also published a book, Die Architektur Borrominis (Berlin, 1930), which set out to
apply the techniques of Gestalt analysis to Borromini's architecture; the challenge which this posed to
Gombrich was reported in his essay `Art History and Psychology in Vienna Fifty Years Ago', College Art Journal
(Summer 1984), pp. 162-4. One finds echoes of the situation in Norm and Form (London, 1966), pp. 82-83.
Gombrich's critique of Wölfflin did not appear until 1963 and was published in Norm and Form, under the title
`Norm and Form'.
18
Riegl, p. 226, n. 117.
 L. B. Alberti [1435] had observed that a person walking over a green meadow takes on a
green colour in the face, but even to him this fact had no binding significance for painting.
We see here how little style is determined by observations of nature alone, and that it is
always decorative principles, convictions of taste, to which the last decision is assigned.19

By contrast, Riegl regarded works of art as products of will (Kunstwollen) which manifested the
World View (Weltanschauung) of the age. With his hostility to considerations governing the
technical development of art, the history of art became the history of forms of visual attention.
Riegl, like Hildebrand, accepted the notion of the priority of the existence of a spatial field
over the construction of forms within it. It was only within the pre-existent space of the visual field
that one might perceive objects near to, middling or far away and those distances determined both
the appearance of, and organizational relationships between, the objects depicted in the pictorial
field. The three different stages of artistic construction could be equated to three different
possibilities of subjecting the world to visual attention: (1) in the Egyptian and archaic Greek phases,
there was an adherence to the `material individuality of objects ... the tactile plane suggested by the
sense of touch'.20 From an optical point of view, the eye was so close to its subject that depth-
defining shadows disappeared. `The main accent ... is placed on the silhouettes which are kept as
symmetrical as possible because symmetry reveals to the exterior an uninterrupted tactile
connection within the plane in the most convincing manner'.21(2) In classical Greece, the eye came
into play recognizing the presence of depth through the existence of shadows. But at the same time
the materiality of forms was retained through the perception of surface continuities. 'To perceive
them [the forms] the eye has to move a little from the Nahsicht: not too far away, so that the
uninterrupted tactile connection of the parts are no longer visible (Fernsicht) but rather to the
middle ... we may call it Normalsicht . . .'.22 (3) In the art of late antiquity `an existence of space
appears to be recognised, but only as it adheres to material individuals; that is an impenetrable
coherent space measured cubically, not infinite deep space between material objects'.23 Objects
were located in relation to each other, not in space, but across the pictorial plane which was not,
itself, tactile because it was broken by deep shadows.
In summary, each phase in the development of depiction in antique art constituted an
alternative mode of representing spatial entities generated by their presence as objects of near,
medium and distant vision. In accordance with traditional associationist psychology, visible things
were the product of the combination of sensations registered by the presence of forms and colours
in planes and space.24
Riegl's analysis of the representation of space was taken further by Panofsky in his famous
essay `Die Perspektive als symbolische Form' published in the Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg for
1924-5.25 Although Panofsky started by describing `perspective in the full sense' as providing the
spectator with an opportunity to look through the picture plane into a world circumscribed by the
laws of one point linear perspective, he also made it clear that this was not the only valid spatial
construction of the world. He contrasted mathematical/optical space with psycho-physiological

19
Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichteliche Grundbegriffe (1915), trans. M. D. Hottinger as Principles of Art History
(London, 1932), p. 51.
20
Riegl, p. 24.
21
Riegl, p. 25.
22
Riegl, p. 25.
23
Riegl, p. 26.
24
Gombrich's expression, used in the Bodonyi Review; see note 33.
25
Now available in translation by Christopher S. Wood, Perspective as Symbolic Form/Erwin Panofsky (New
York, 1991). This essay should properly be read in conjunction with `Die Entwicklung der Proportionslehre als
Abbild der Stilentwicklung', Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft, XIV (1921), republished in translation in
Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York. 1955).
space, arguing that both were equally valid forms of representation, both articulated facets of
experience that could be seen. It was not just that the artist adopted a convention of representation,
rather that there was a clear symmetry between perception and depiction:

Thus in an epoch whose perception was governed by a conception of space expressed by

strict linear perspective, the curvatures of our, so to speak, spheroidal optical world had to
be rediscovered. However, in a time that was accustomed to seeing perspectivally—but not
in linear perspective—those curvatures were simply taken for granted: that is in antiquity. In
antique optics and art theory (as well as in philosophy, although here only in the form of
analogies) we constantly encounter the observation that straight lines are seen as curved
and curved lines as straight;26

Echoing Riegl, he argued that in late antiquity there had been a major shift in the character of spatial
perception. Classical antiquity had a systemic view of space, as a continuum in which objects were to
be depicted and in terms of which they were to be seen in relation to each other. By contrast, as
Late Antiquity did not know `systemraum' its artists proceeded from the concrete individual object,
generating a 'Dingraum' which was an aggregate, or discontinuous, space.
The history of art was related to a history of changing spatial perception, all of which was
appropriate to the cultural moments in which it was produced. In a later essay 'Zum Problem der
Beschreibung and Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst', published in 1932,27 Panofsky
focused on the kind of difficulty that this could create for the art historian. If even a Roman, Lucian,
looking at a painting by the Greek Zeuxis could not tell what the precise spatial relationships were
between depicted objects,28 there must be a fundamental problem involved in the historian's
activity of describing works of art.
How does the art historian gain access to the contemporary perception of works of art
produced in the past? According to Panofsky, it must be out of an intuitive sense of the validity of
depictions born from cultural understandings of the workings of perceptual processes.
It is important to stress that it would make no sense to ask whether, in Panofsky's view,
optical perception changed through history. Given the necessary interaction between mind and eye,
he held that the mind's construction of what was offered to it by the senses changed over time:

the perception of the appearance of something can only acquire a linear or painterly form
through the active intervention of the mind: so that the `optical focus' should be interpreted
as a mental or spiritual focus on the optical, and consequently, the `connection of the eye to
the world' is in truth a connection of the mind to the world of the eye. 29

Perception and depiction reflected each other and were the products of the cultural psychology of
an epoch, of which any stylistic feature of an individual artist's work was a manifestation. Like any
particular use of proportion or perspective, Michelangelo's form-defining hatchings, for example,
were symptomatic of much deeper cultural and spiritual values. This approach to stylistic analysis
tied together his early theoretical writings with the introduction to Studies in Iconology which was,
itself, an extension of the essay on the problem of describing works of art.

26
Panofsky, p. 34. This seems to me like a case of the El Greco fallacy but see Gombrich's rebuttal of this,
which is to be found in Art and Illusion (Oxford, 1986), p. 218.
27
Panofsky, Logos, XXI (1932), pp. 103-119.
28
Panofsky referred to Lessing's Lettres Antiques for the source but see now the extract from Lucian's Zeuxis or
Antiochos, 3, in J. J. Pollitt, The Art of Greece 1400-31 B.C. (Englewood Cliffs. 1965), pp. 156-158.
29
Quoted from `Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst', Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine
Kunstwissenschaft, 10 (1915), in Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (New York,
1984). p. 61.
 In the very year that Panofsky published his essay on the problem of description, Gombrich
spent his summer thinking about the same problem, which was in the air'. His own meditations
surfaced in the Bodonyi Review in 1935.30
Under the tuition of Julius von Schlosser, Gombrich had become deeply engaged with the
notion of Kunstsprache, the visual mechanics of artistic imagery. Schlosser was a friend of Croce's
and shared his view of art as language;31 he was also a friend of Karl Vossler and encouraged his
students to study linguistics. Consequently, Gombrich attended the lectures of Karl Bühler who,
besides holding the chair of psychology at the University of Vienna, was also deeply interested in
linguistics. The Bodonyi Review was both an investigation of Kunstsprache and a re-examination of
traditional psychological assumptions about the nature of pictorial imagery.
One of the hallmarks of Bühler's approach was its combination of conceptual enquiry with
experimental observation. The Bodonyi Review concerned itself with providing a testable framework
for the interpretation of data drawn from history.32 Its subject was the use of the gold ground in late
antique art and the old explanatory theory held up for re-examination was Riegl's formalist
conception of the work of art as only form and colour in plane and space.33 Sharing Schlosser's
hostility to the thematic study of motifs, it treated the gold ground as a communicative device.
The first stage of the analysis explicitly foregrounded psychological explanation. It drew from
Bühler's study Die Erscheinungsweisen der Farben,34 to characterize the gold as a compacted surface,
like fallen snow. Not really perceived as the boundary to a space, defining space, it appeared to
swim beyond it. As a surface it offered itself to the artist who wants to represent light. But gold did
not just represent light, it was also a symbol of light35 and the symbolic meaning of light had been
spelt out by the church fathers in their commentaries on biblical passages such as `For with thee is
the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light' in the Old Testament and `God is light' in the
New.36
Furthermore, gold was not one colour among many but a metal with a material presence.
The gold ground broke the illusion of art to present the spectator with a materially valuable thing,
the type of object of which the primitive bejewelled icon was the best example.
Following analysis of the perceptual effects of the gold ground, the next stage was to
consider its role in the total image, much as one might try to analyse a text within a larger and more
complex text.37 Given the possibility that the gold ground represented light, the question emerged as
30
`J. Bodonyi, Entstehung und Bedeutung des Goldgrundes in der spätantiken Bildkomposition
(Archaeologiai Ertesitë, 46, 79.32/3)'. Kritische Berichte zür Kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur, 5, 1932/33
(published in 1935), pp. 65-75. At the beginning of the review, Gombrich mentioned an exchange of views
which occurred between himself and Bodonyi at the time of the work's composition; the review was a
continuation of that discussion, not a `critique or criticism'. Irrespective of the contents of Bodonyi's
dissertation, the contents of the Review were Gombrich's own.
31
On Schlosser and language see Michael Podro, `Against Formalism: Schlosser on Stilgeschichte', Akten des
XXV Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte (Vienna, 1984), Vol. I, pp. 37-43.
32
Another historical experiment that Gombrich became involved in before he started working as Ernst Kris's
assistant was E. Kris and O. Kurz, Die Legende vom Kunstler: Ein historischer Versuch (Vienna, 1934).
33
`Die neue Grundauffassung wird schon im Untertitel der Arbeit angekündigt: "Ein Beitrag zur Sinndeutung
der spätantiken Kunstsprache." Damit ist die Stellung zu Riegls berühmter These gekennzeichnet, die im
Kunstwerk nu "Form und Farbe in Ebene und Raum" sehen will. Es ist die damals herrschende Formalästhetik
Herbarts, ihm wohl durch Zimmermann in Wien vermittelt, aus der sich Riegl in seinem ersten Hauptwerk das
methodische Rüstzeug zu schaffen sucht.' Gombrich, Bodonyi Review, p. 66.
34
Bühler, Die Erscheinungsweisten der Farben (Jena, 1922).
35
Gombrich raised the question of why if it was available to represent light, it hadn't been used by naturalistic
artists? He gave a full answer to this question in `Visual Metaphors of Value in Art' (1952), republished in
Meditations on a Hobby-Horse (London, 1963).
36
Psalm 36, 9 & John Epistle I. 1. 5.
37
'Er wählt also seinen Gegenstand, nicht weil er ihn durchaus für das älteste Beispiel für das Auftreten des
Goldgrundes hält; seine Gründe sind vielmehr methodischer und zwar wieder sprachgeschichtlicher Natur: So
wie ein unbekanntes Wort und seine Bedeutung leichter in einem größeren Textzusammenhang ermittelt
to how it fitted into the composition to form a coherent whole. Its pictorial presence had to be given
sense; the notion of compositional effect required an understanding of what was `going on'.38
Formal analysis had to give way to a third strategy, that of genetic analysis: the historical
investigation of the development of a particular pictorial construction.39 Acknowledging Panofsky's
study of the development of the representation of space, Gombrich criticized his notion of
‘Dingraum'—aggregate or discontinuous space—describing it as the hypostatization of a negative.
`Lack of unity is not a special form of unity'.40 In the Albani landscape, the separate landscape zones
were unified by light-flooded space. As a pictorial technique, this kind of unification could also be
seen in East Asian landscapes of cloud and mist. In the case of the mosaics at S. Maria Maggiore, the
gold ground occupied the space between foreground and background but commentators made the
mistake of treating it naturalistically: Pfuhl as the representation of a flood, Sieveking as a rocky path
and Kömstedt, in yet another example, as a sandy beach. Close inspection for consistency revealed
the invalidity of such interpretations.
Genetic analysis demonstrated that the gold ground stood between the foreground and
background as a neutral, light-emanating, space; it both represented light and was light.41 The
development of the neutral space of the gold ground emerged out of the collapse of
representational techniques used to depict both space and colour.
The transformation of the nature of the middle ground demanded historical explanation.
Riegl answered in terms of a changed Kunstwollen from haptic to optic perception. Paradoxically,
this preserved a naturalist approach to the representation of space: the picture plane was still
treated as being transparent onto a world. Riegl treated changes in the history of the human
spiritual condition as an important part of his explanation but simply as a parallel to the artistic
changes. Gombrich criticized this as failing to provide a causal explanation of the change: `one has to
think of a kind of prestabilised harmony of autonomous streams, not of the interactions of cogs in a
machine'42 Gombrich's criticism of Dvorak could equally be applied to Riegl: `The unity of the art
concept (Kunstbegriff), of the spiritual and social function of art within different spiritual/intellectual
circles and constellations, is unreflexively assumed'.43 He condemned it as nothing less than a

werden kann, so ist für B. das Problem des Goldgrundes dort am ehesten zu lösen, wo es am kom plexesten
erscheint, d.h. wo der Goldgrund "in eigenartiger Weise in die Komposition einbezogen ist".' Gombrich,
Bodonyi Review, pp. 67-8.
38
For a demonstration of this point see Gombrich's remarks on Veronese's Mystical Marriage of St Catherine
in `The Meaning of Beauty' reprinted in E. H. Gombrich, Reflections on the History of Art, ed. Richard
Woodfield (Oxford, 1987), p. 188.
39
39 Genetic analysis has been a constant feature of Gombrich's work. Art and Illusion is, of course, the major
study but other examples are `The Heritage of Apelles' in The Heritage of Apelles (Oxford, 1976), `Ideal and
Type in Italian Renaissance Painting' in New Light on Old Masters (Oxford, 1986) and, more recently, 'Watching
Artists at Work: Commitment and Improvisation in the History of Drawing' in Topics of our Time (London,
1991).
40
`Panofsky spricht vom Dingraum, Aggrega traum, vom diskontinuierlichen Raum. Es scheint mir wichtig auf
die Gefahr hin zuweisen, die jeder Hypostasierung solcher Negativa droht: Uneinheitlichkeit ist keine
Spezialform der Einheit, Aggregatraum auch keine des Raumes im neuzeitlichen Sinne.' Gombrich, Bodonyi
Review, p. 68.
41
As a proof by negative example, Gombrich cited a scene in the depiction of the Mount of Olives in the Codex
Rosanensis where there was a strip of darkness as a sign of night between the moonlit earth and the zone of
the starry sky.
42
'Die tiefe geistesgeschichtliche Wandlung wird bei Riegl natürlich nicht außer Acht gelassen. Sie wird aber
der Änderung des Gestaltungswillens gleichsam koordiniert als parallelgerichtetes Kulturwollen etwa, das
vergleichbare, strukturverwandte Erscheinungen aufweise. Man hat wohl an ein Art prästabilierter Harmonie
autonomer Abläufe zu denken, nicht an das Ineinandergreifen eines Räderwerks.' Gombrich, Bodonyi Review,
p. 71.
43
Die Einheit des Kunstbegriffs, der seelischen und sozialen Funktion der Kunst innerhalb verschiedener
geistiger und kultureller Kreise und Konstellationen wird unbedenklich vorausgesetzt ...' Gombrich, Bodonyi
Review, p. 72.
thoroughly unhistorical aestheticism. Reinstating history required a sociological investigation of the
changed cultural function of art in late antiquity.
For Gombrich, perception of form could not be divorced from perception of meaning.
Recognizing that pictures mediated experience of their created world, he emphasized the necessity
of understanding the nature of that mediation and the function of imagery at the time that it was
produced: form followed function. Riegl had simply failed to recognize the changed representational
function of pictorial art in late antiquity.
In the art of classical antiquity, imagery was created in which the viewer was expected to
assume the role of a spectator in a scene in which he had an imagined presence. The depiction of
the scene was governed by the notion of the fruitful moment, which was not the climax but the
turning point of action. The turning point was particularly effective because it would generate a
variety of imaginative responses to the depicted event44 By contrast, in the art of late antiquity the
purpose of visual imagery was quite different as the visual arts had changed their place within the
overall cultural framework; their role had changed from `showing' to `telling'.45 This, in turn, brought
with it different formal structures. The dematerialization of the figure, the replacement of mimicry
by set expressive gestures and the significance of gesture overall were structural properties which
belonged to the picture-script (Bilderschrift).
The idea of the picture script was signalled in the famous letter from St Gregory the Great to
Bishop Serenus of Marseille: `What Scripture is to the educated, images are to the ignorant, who see
through them what they must accept; they read in them what they cannot read in books'.46 The
compositional difference between the two visual forms, the scene and the picture- script, lay in their
principles of unity. In the later art: `All parts of the picture are virtually at the same time the words
of a sentence. Only their summary gives a meaning: the content of the story.47
In terms of pictorial logic, not only was the idea of the fruitful moment inapplicable to
picture-script but a picture field containing continuous narrative was as little a slice of space as it
was a certain moment. Picture-scripts consisted in juxtapositions of motifs and if motifs were
juxtaposed they could not be understood in relations of existence to each other in a possible
depicted space: 'Discontinuous space is not really a space at all but involves a quite different
representational principle.'48 To take another, and more obvious, example, if, in the case of
continuous narrative, the same figure is repeated across the pictorial field it cannot be said to be to
the left or the right of itself.
But there was another important factor to take into account and that was the difference
between the abbreviated signs of the catacombs and the picture- scripts of the mosaics. The mosaics
were symbols in Goethe's sense, symbols as opposed to rationally constructed signs. The symbol was
not exhausted by meaning but was a sensuous manifestation of it; in a magical sense, it was what it
represented.49
The question of the aesthetic value of the art of late antiquity should not be thought of in
terms of the formal values of a world of illusion (Scheinwelt) but in terms of the materiality of the

44
`Man könnte sagen, nicht die Aktion. die Reaktion stand im Mittelpunkt.' Ibid., p. 72.
45
The contrast between showing and telling was brought out at length in chapter 6 of The Story of Art.
46
Translated in C. Davis-Weyer, Early Medieval Art 300-1150 (Englewood Cliffs, 1971), pp. 47-49.
47
Gombrich quoting Bodonyi: `Alle Teile des Bildes sind gleichsam die Worte eines Satzes. Erst ihre
Zusammenfassung gibt einen Sinn: den Inhalt der Erzählung.' Gombrich, Bodonyi Review, p. 73.
48
‘Wird besonders klar, daß der diskontinuierliche Raum eben gar kein Raum ist, sondern ein ganz anderes
Darstellungsprinzip involviert.' Gombrich. Bodonyi Review, p. 71. For recent observations of this kind see John
Hyman, The Imitation of Nature (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 103 ff.
49
It was precisely within this context that one should understand the Iconoclastic Controversy.
 artefact.50 This was an issue which Gombrich took further in his second contribution to Kritische
Berichte, the Garger Review of 1937.51
The fundamental mistake made by the formalist writers following Fiedler was to assume
that there was a straightforward relationship between the artist's picture plane and the so-called
visual field. Extreme formalism was vitiated by the need to identify coloured forms as objects and
expressively active people as expressively active.52 The conclusive objection to formalism was,
however, that one needed to understand pictorial conventions to describe relationships in the
pictorial field. This was not so much a matter of Stilgeschichte as Sprachgeschichte: Kunstsprache
rather than style, device rather than motif, artefact rather than work of art.53 The starting point for
understanding such conventions was the institutional context of artistic practice, the overall purpose
behind artistic production within a specific culture. As Gombrich and Kris declared in their later
unpublished manuscript on caricature: `there is no unambiguous "language of form"such as artists
and aestheticians have sometimes dreamed of. Any such language only comes into being in an
institutional context.’54

50
Paradoxically, Hildebrandian formalism could not account for the value of the artifactuality of the work of
art and, in so far as the aesthetic quality of late antique art depended on colour, neither could Fry's formalism.
51
'Wertprobleme und mittelalterliche Kunst', Kritische Berichte, 1937, translated and published in Meditations
on a Hobby-Horse, London, 1963, as 'Achievement in Medieval Art'.
52
Panofsky discussed this at length in his 1932 essay on the problem of description. Pespective as Symbolic
Form/Erwin Panofsky. p. 237. The following is the 1939 shortened version in Studies in Iconology: ' "Formal
analysis" in Wölfflin's sense is largely an analysis of motifs and combinations of motifs (compositions): for a
formal analysis in the strict sense of the word would even have to avoid such expressions as "man", "horse", or
"column", let alone such evaluations as "the ugly triangle between the legs of Michelangelo's David" or "the
admirable clarification of the joints in a human body".' (p. 7).
53
On which, for Schlosser's point of view see Julius von Schlosser, ' "Stilgeschichte" und "Sprachgeschichte"
der bildenden Kunst', Sitzungberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil. Hist. Abt. 1 (1935),
pp. 3-39.
54
Unpublished MS (1938), The Caricature Style, p. 3.

View publication stats