E. H. Gombrich, Richard Woodfield (editor) · 1960 (Art and Illusion ch. 2); anthology 1996 · EPUB · Calibre ID 408
Resurfaced in Ill-Favored Black Unicorns (2026-10-03).
Role in the triad
Second witness: schema and correction in pictures; Dürer’s rhinoceros.
Why this book
Gives Eco’s mechanism in pictures and is cited by Eco by name (p. 348). Starts, like Eco, from Kant’s schematism (chapter epigraph). Supplies the rhinoceros Polo saw, drawn by a man who never saw it, and a catalogue of creatures drawn ‘from life’ from schemata.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “is a skill so deeply hidden in the human soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick that Nature here employs” (Kant epigraph, p. 88)
- “Copying, we learn from these experiments, proceeds through the rhythms of schema and correction.” (p. 97)
- “Both proceed by classifying the unfamiliar with the familiar, or more exactly, to remain in the zoological sphere, by creating a subspecies.” (p. 101)
- “The familiar will always remain the likely starting point for the rendering of the unfamiliar; an existing representation will always exert its spell over the artist even while he strives to record the truth.” (p. 103)
- “you cannot create a faithful image out of nothing. You must have learned the trick if only from other pictures you have seen.” (p. 104)
- “It reminds us that the starting point of a visual record is not knowledge but a guess conditioned by habit and tradition.” (p. 107)
Themes
drawn from life · Dürer · Kant’s schematism · representation · schema and correction · stereotype