ABSTRACT
Interest in the possible meaning of vague, indefinite, and ambiguous visual phenomena is as old as humanity. Even in the most ancient times, there were specialists in the unraveling of meanings presumed to be hidden in clouds, intestines, ashes, wax or lead poured into water, etc. Nowadays tea leaves, coffee grounds, and crystal balls seem to be preferred for divining significant events. The obvious error in such procedures is the belief that the indefinite accidental forms are a result of objective, purposeful, powerful, and immutable reality forces. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) seems to have been the first writer to realize that those procedures were of some significance and he was keenly aware of the subjective nature of percepts elicited by vague stimuli, auditory or visual. He knew that the same vague stimulus may bring forth very different percepts in different individuals. Rorschach (1884–1922), whose father was a teacher of drawing and who loved and appreciated art, may have been familiar with Leonardo’s remarkable ideas. Ellenberger said of Rorschach that “there is no doubt that he had fundamentally an artist’s personality.” * Writing about the Greek painter Apelles, Pliny 36 described the difficulties which that artist had in painting the foamy mouth of a panting dog.
The thing that displeased him was the evident traces of art in the execution of it, touches which did not admit of any diminution, and yet had all the appearance of being too labored, the effect being far removed from his conception of the reality: the foam, in fact, bore the marks of being painted, and not of being the natural secretion of the animal’s mouth. Vexed and tormented by this dilemma, it being his wish to depict the truth itself, and not something that only bore a semblance of truth, he effaced it again and again, changed his pencil for another, and yet by no possibility could satisfy himself. At last, quite out of temper with an art, which in spite of him, still obtruded itself, he dashed his sponge against the vexatious spot; when, behold: the sponge replaced the color that it had just removed exactly in accordance with his utmost wishes, and thus did chance represent nature in a painting. *
