Sight itself has a contextual social history

What then, is the social and cultural history, and the natural history (if such a thing exists) of
vision?

“A fifteenth-century painting is the deposit of a social relationship. On one side there was a
painter who made the picture, or at least supervised its making. On the other side there was
somebody else who asked him to make it, provided funds for him to make it and, after he had
made it, reckoned on using it in some way or other. Both parties world within institutions and
conventions—commercial, religious, perceptual, in the widest sense social—that were different
from ours and influenced the forms of what they together made.” Michael Baxandall, Painting
and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy

Art is a negotiated object

Trying to understand a historical object prerequisites contemporary perception, what Baxandell
calls “alien sensibilities”

Baxandell points out that there is an artistic obsession with volume and the visualization of
signification of volume in 15th century Italian art. He notes that most artistic patrons were
members of the merchant class, and indeed had the same practical, geographic knowledge as
painters.
- There is a shared, cognitive style portrayed by artists for their contemporary audience
- These shared, cognitive styles are constantly shifting
Baxandell posits that the analytical cubist obsession with focus and geometric space is rooted
in the nature of vision, namely periphery—that, while the eye is focused on a central object,
that vision which is outside the focus, the periphery, is obscured, often reduced to geometric
assumption, of blocky shapes

The human eye is constantly searching for order and pattern, along with decoration
- The stimulating delight to be found in many aesthetic objects is in the search for pattern and
order and the careful, technical estrangement of our pattern-recognition by the artist

Inner-Vision
- Parellelist approach
- The patterns of art parallel the patterns of neurological perception
- We make the world according to our perception—we are not just passive receptors
- Artists develop “perceptual shorthands”
- They do not give us all the information necessary, but instead allow the viewer to
discern the image for themselves
- Impressionists, for instance, reduce the more exact aspects of real-life, i.e. effect of
shadow, and only discernible by differences in color and luminosity
- The eye is still able to put the image together, however
- According to the Parellelist approach, the artist, in effect, caricuturizes reality, reducing it
to a neurologically identifiable shorthand
- However, humans are not pure brains in a vacuum—we bring to the aesthetic
experience our own biases, aloof from the base functions of our neuroses