ABSTRACT
If any claims derived from the inspection of a painting—or any other tangible thing—are to constitute historical understanding, the person making those claims must take fully into account the conditions of encounter with the thing in question. These conditions are twofold. First, there is the physical condition of the thing, which will almost inevitably have changed over time, whether inadvertently or by human design (or both) even if it is relatively young. Reproduction by analog or digital means is part of its transformation as a matrix. Second, the circumstances of encounter and inspection can subtly or radically affect a percipient’s cognitive response. Seeing a seventeenth-century painting that includes a representation of a rectangular patterned marble floor near a woven textile with an irregular pattern can bring out an aspect of each that might otherwise have escaped the percipient. A painting, whether artwork or not, is in constant flux, both physically and contextually. This leads any viewer to have to deal with the consequences of that flux in formulating a viable matrix from which to derive any historical knowledge claims. This chapter refers to the scholars Nelson Goodman and Dorothy Washburn; conservator Emil Bosshard; designer Ben Tunstall; and artists Pieter de Hooch, Kasimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Jan Steen, Joan Waltemath, and Andy Warhol.
