ABSTRACT
The art historian Ernst Gombrich once observed that artists do not learn to draw from nature, they learn to draw from other artists; in his words, “Art is born of art-not of nature.”1 What he meant by that remark was that the way artists see what they paint is influenced by the techniques of perspective, composition, and lighting that they learned by studying the styles and mechanisms developed in their cultural tradition. “What painter,” he asks, “ever learned to represent everything that exists in nature? . . . [H]is representation of ‘everything that exists in nature’ will still be linked with those representations that were handed on to him by his teachers.”2 Gombrich used this observation to analyze that indefinable something called style and to call into question our use of such terms as natural and realistic. The resulting book is a virtuoso tour of the history of art through topics as varied as optics, psychology, and psychoanalysis.
