Visuality and Virtuality
Images and Pictures from Prehistory to Perspective
- 368 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
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 pictorialityâthe depiction intended by its maker to be seenâemerges 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 casesâPaleolithic cave painting; ancient Egyptian tomb decoration; classical Greek architectural sculpture, with a focus on the Parthenon frieze; and Renaissance perspective as invented by Brunelleschi.A profound new theory of the work of both makers and viewers by one of the discipline's most esteemed and engaged thinkers, Visuality and Virtuality is essential reading for art historians, architects, archaeologists, and philosophers of art and visual theory.
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Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Contents
- Preface
- A Note on Notations and Abbreviations
- Introduction: Images and Pictures
- Part One: Analytics of Imaging Pictures in Visual Space
- Part Two: Bivisibility, Bivirtuality, and Birotationality
- Part Three: Pictorial Successions of Virtual Coordinate Space
- Notes
- Index
- Illustration Credits
- Copyright Page