The Image and the Eye

Description

A companion volume to Art and Illusion, The Image & the Eye provides a comprehensive and intriguing overview of art and our perception of its different dimensions.

In a series of landmark papers and lectures, Professor Gombrich presents his thoughts and arguments on subjects as diverse as the tricks of photography with perspective, the problems of expressing emotion through art and how pictorial representation can alter the way in which we see the world.

Like any work from Gombrich’s vast oeuvre, these masterly pieces display a lively curiosity and an infectious enthusiasm for understanding the challenges presented by art.

Ernst Gombrich was one of the greatest and least conventional art historians of his age, achieving fame and distinction in three separate spheres: as a scholar, as a popularizer of art, and as a pioneer of the application of the psychology of perception to the study of art. His best-known book, The Story of Art – first published 50 years ago and now in its sixteenth edition – is one of the most influential books ever written about art. His books further include The Sense of Order (1979) and The Preference for the Primitive (2002), as well as a total of 11 volumes of collected essays and reviews.

Gombrich was born in Vienna in 1909 and died in London in November 2001. He came to London in 1936 to work at the Warburg Institute, where he eventually became Director from 1959 until his retirement in 1976. He won numerous international honours, including a knighthood, the Order of Merit and the Goethe, Hegel and Erasmus prizes.

Gifted with a powerful mind and prodigious memory, he was also an outstanding communicator, with a clear and forceful prose style. His works are models of good art-historical writing, and reflect his humanism and his deep and abiding concern with the standards and values of our cultural heritage.

“A generous clarity of style and a quite breathtaking amplitude of reference. Gombrich’s unique combination of wisdom and curiosity is exhilarating.”—The Sunday Times

Additional information