ABSTRACT
‘Times have changed and so have our ears.’ This line from Tacitus is the first reference in Roman antiquity that E. H. Gombrich finds to the psychology of perception and its relation to styles. His extraordinarily rich discussion of this whole subject, Art andIllusion, treats the history of art as a continuing tension between the stability of a style and the struggle against it, the struggle of an artist ‘to win freshness of vision’. 1 He gives many examples of the artist's ambivalence towards tradition, 2 cites the many exercises in copying the masters, and the common fear of becoming a slave to tradition. 3 Like other great art historians, his powers are taxed to account for innovation, but this is not the principal task of his book. Rather the other way, he deploys the psychology of perception to explain why innovation is so difficult. A current style imposes a closure on the possibilities of perception. A style is a contemporary organization of experience: ‘A style, like a culture or climate of opinion, sets up a horizon of expectation, a mental set which registers deviations and modifications with exaggerated sensitivity.’ 4 Constable succeeded in establishing a new way of transposing our awareness of brightness into painting, but beside Corot's work the brightness of Constable's painting is eclipsed. ‘It recedes behind the ridge which separates, for us, the contemporary vision from that of the past.’ 5
