0.8 Making the cognitive turn in art history: a case study  (Page 4/17)

Visualization of spoken words moving through space is just one of the ways the engagement with space in this manuscript enhances the impact of the miniatures on reader-viewers. To gain greater access to this aspect of the reader-viewer’s experience of this illuminated manuscript, I begin with philosopher and aesthetician Richard Wollheim’s concept of “seeing-in,” which implies a dual response to a painting. Wollheim laid out this idea, which is “widely regarded as [his] major philosophical contribution,” according to Arthur Danto in Wollheim’s obituary in The Guardian of 5 November 2003, in Art and Its Objects (1968; rpt. 1971; 2 ^nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); he returned to this idea in “On Pictorial Representation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56.3 (Summer, 1998): 217-226. One part of the experience comes from attending to the flat surface itself, and the other involves “seeing an object in the paint,” Danto, Guardian . that is, the “registering of pictorial content.” Jerrold Levinson, “Wollheim on Pictorial Representation," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56.3 (Summer, 1998): 227-33, at 228. Wollheim identifies “seeing-in” as a “special perceptual skill.” Wollheim, “On Pictorial Representation,” 221. Cognitive philosopher Alva Noë’s study, Action in Perception, analyzes visual perception from the perspective of neuroscience. As Noë observes, far from being precisely focused and expansive, our perceptual field consists of a small, central area of sharp focus called the fovea; the rest of the field becomes progressively blurry towards the edges. The silver (now oxidized to black) and gold frames of the miniatures in this manuscript suggest just such a blurriness, creating a halo of light around the image that may enhance “seeing-in” by mimicking the actual perceptual field of the reader-viewer.

Further, according to what Noë calls the enactive view, perceptual experience depends upon sensorimotor knowledge acquired through physical action. “Perception,” he claims, “is a way of finding out how things are from an exploration of how they appear.” Alva Noë. Action in Perception (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2004), 165. “How they (merely) appear to be plus sensorimotor knowledge gives you things as they are.” Noë, 164. Noë uses the example of seeing objects overlapping in such a way that one occludes part of another; in the miniature of the Judgment of Solomon, for example, the true mother’s body occludes part of the deceitful mother’s body. But we know that her occluded body is complete because we draw on our experience of having moved our bodies in space to enable multiple points of view. Thus, perception results from appearance plus sensorimotor knowledge, or knowledge acquired through physical action. Perception, in other words, is a bodily experience.

Neuroscience has discovered, Noë reports, that “Perception is not a process of drawing an internal representation, so it seems implausible that pictures depict by producing the sort of representation in us that the depicted scene would produce.” Noë, 178. He goes on to offer an alternative: “The enactive approach suggests a rather different conception of pictorial representation. Pictures construct partial environments. They actually contain perspectival properties such as apparent shapes and sizes, but they contain them not as projections from actual things, but as static elements. Pictures depict because they correspond to a reality of which, as perceivers, we have a sensorimotor grasp. Pictures are a very simple (in some senses of simple) kind of virtual space. What a picture and the depicted scene have in common is that they prompt us to draw on a common class of sensorimotor skills.” Noë, ibid.