E. H. Gombrich

Austrian-British art historian and philosopher of art (1909–2001). His Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960) develops a resemblance-and-schema account of pictorial representation: pictures represent by inducing in viewers a perceptual response similar to (though not identical with) the response their depicted objects would induce; the recognition of that similarity is mediated by schemas — visual conventions and stylistic templates that artists modify and viewers learn.

The view occupies an explanatory middle ground: resemblance is neither raw nor unmediated (against naive imitation theories) nor reducible to convention (against radical conventionalism). Gombrich's "making and matching" accounts of stylistic development — artists begin with inherited schemas, test them against perception, and modify them iteratively — became canonical in 20th-century art history.

In Taddio 2025 Gombrich is cited as the principal resemblance-tradition picture theorist. The rejection runs alongside the rejection of Goodman: where Goodman grounds representation in denotation, Gombrich grounds it in (schema-mediated) similarity. Both are downstream of the phenomenal-invariants level Taddio takes as foundational.

Gombrich's Position (As Engaged by Taddio)

Gombrich's central claims, as relevant to Taddio:

  • Pictures represent through resemblance, but resemblance is not unmediated copying — it is mediated by visual schemas that the artist modifies.
  • The artist's task is "making and matching": the artist begins with an inherited schema (e.g., for representing trees, faces, landscapes) and progressively adjusts it through perception of the specific subject.
  • Style is a system of schemas: stylistic differences across periods reflect different available schemas and different match-making operations.
  • The viewer's interpretation is conditioned by familiarity with the schemas: ambiguities resolve toward the schemas the viewer knows; "the beholder's share" is a load-bearing concept.

Taddio's Counterargument

Taddio §8 collapses Gombrich and Goodman into a single rejected family — resemblance theories on one side, denotation theories on the other, both grounded in learned conventions or schemas. Against both:

  1. The conditions under which marks become functional images — figure-ground, principles of unification, amodal completion, transparency conditions, depth cues — operate at a level prior to learned schemas. They are phenomenally explicit, not learned (Taddio §6: "we do not learn to see, at most we learn to look; consequently, we do not learn to perceive transparency").
  2. Therefore the explanatory base of pictorial representation is not schema-mediated resemblance but the field of phenomenal invariants.
  3. Resemblance, when it occurs, is a consequence of shared invariants between image and object, not the foundation of representation. Cf. MP: "Resemblance is the result of perception, not its mainspring."

The Wittgensteinian anchor (Taddio §3) reinforces the move: when we see an animal pierced by an arrow in a silhouette, we do not "know" that the segments represent an arrow; we see the arrow piercing the figure. Past experience operates as one Gestalt principle among others (and is overridden by amodal completion in conflict cases) — it is not the foundation Gombrich's schema theory makes it.

Position on the Wiki

This entity is created primarily to anchor the competing position Taddio rejects. The wiki's broader engagement with Gombrich is thin: Gombrich has not been ingested as a primary source, and his work spans much that Taddio does not engage (his lectures on Renaissance perspective, his Saxl-Warburg-influenced iconology, his work on the symbolic image). Future ingests would deepen the position.

Connections

  • rejected by Taddio as foundational picture theorist; Art and Illusion is the principal resemblance-tradition rival to the phenomenal-invariants account.
  • paralleled by Goodman as the other principal rival picture-theorist (resemblance vs. denotation).
  • contrasts with phenomenal-invariants account: schemas are learned and operate at the conventional level; phenomenal invariants are pre-conventional and operate at the phenomenal-organizational level.
  • paralleled (more sympathetically) by MP's account of "style" as coherent deformation — both treat pictorial expression as more than imitation, but MP locates the operation at the body's encounter with the visible while Gombrich locates it at the schema-modification level.
  • cited within the picture-theory tradition that includes Hopkins (1998), Walton (1990), Wollheim (1998).

Sources

  • taddio-2025-art-and-psychology — Gombrich cited at §2 (in the picture-theory list) and implicitly at §8 (as resemblance-theorist rejected alongside Goodman).
  • Indirect via Taddio: Gombrich 1960 Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Pantheon). Not ingested as primary source.