Introduction : Images and pictures -- Analytics of imaging pictures in visual space. Visuality and virtuality : Analytics of visual space and pictorial space -- Radical pictoriality : seeing-as, seeing-as-as, seeing-as-as-as ... -- What the Chauvet Master saw : on the presence of prehistoric pictoriality -- Bivisibility, bivirtuality, and birotationality. Bivisibility : between the successions to visuality -- Bivirtuality : pictorial naturalism and the revolutions of rotation -- Birotationality: frontality, foreshortening, and virtual pictorial space -- Pictorial successions of virtual coordinate space. What Hesire saw : virtual coordinate space in ancient Egyptian depiction -- What Phidias saw : virtual coordinate space in Classical Greek architectural relief -- What Brunelleschi saw : the pictorial succession of painter's perspective.
Summary:
A provocative and challenging new conceptual framework for the study of images This book builds on the groundbreaking theoretical framework established in Whitney Davis's acclaimed previous book, A General Theory of Visual Culture, in which he shows how certain culturally constituted aspects of artifacts and pictures are visible to informed viewers. Here, Davis uses revealing archaeological and historical case studies to further develop his theory, presenting an exacting new account of the interaction that occurs when a viewer looks at a picture. Davis argues that pictoriality - the depiction intended by its maker to be seen - emerges at a particular standpoint in space and time. Reconstruction of this standpoint is the first step of the art historian's craft. Because standpoints are inherently mutable and mobile, pictoriality constantly shifts in form and possible meaning. To capture this complexity, Davis develops new concepts of radical pictorial ambiguity, including "bivisibility" (the fact that pictures can always be seen in ways other than intended), pictorial naturalism, and the behavior of pictures under changing angles of view. He then applies these concepts to four cases - Paleolithic cave painting; ancient Egyptian tomb decoration; classical Greek architectural sculpture, with a focus on the Parthenon frieze; and Renaissance perspective as invented by Brunelleschi.
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