Depiction is meaning conveyed through pictures. Basically, a picture maps an object to a two-dimensional scheme or picture plane

Picture plane

A picture plane is the imaginary flat surface which is usually located between the station point and the object being viewed and is ordinarily a vertical plane perpendicular to the horizontal projection of the line of sight to the object's order of interest....

. Pictures are made with various materials and techniques, such as painting, drawing, or prints (including photography and movies) mosaics, tapestries, stained glass, and collages of unusual and disparate elements. Occasionally pictures may occur in simply inkblots, accidental stains, peculiar clouds or a glimpse of the moon, but these are special cases. Sculpture and performances are sometimes said to depict but this arises where depiction is taken to include all reference that is not linguistic or notational. The bulk of research in depiction however deals only in pictures. While sculpture and performance clearly represent or refer, they do not strictly picture their objects.

Pictures may be factual or fictional, literal or metaphorical, realistic or idealised and in various combination. Idealised depiction is also termed schematic or stylised and extends to icons, diagrams and maps. Classes or styles of picture may abstract their objects by degrees, conversely, establish degrees of the concrete (usually called, a little confusingly, figuration or figurative, since the ‘figurative’ is then often quite literal). Stylisation can lead to the fully abstract picture, where reference is only to conditions for a picture plane – a severe exercise in self-reference and ultimately a sub-set of pattern.

But just how pictures convey meaning is disputed. Philosophers, art historians and critics, perceptual psychologists and other researchers in the arts and social sciences have contributed to the debate and many of the most influential contributions have been interdisciplinary. Some key positions are briefly surveyed below.

Resemblance

Traditionally, depiction is distinguished from denotative meaning by the presence of a mimetic element or resemblance (see for example Wikipedia treatment of image

Image

An image is an artifact, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person.-Characteristics:...

 and icon

Icon

An icon is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, from Eastern Christianity and in certain Eastern Catholic churches...

). A picture resembles its object in a way a word or sound does not. Resemblance is no guarantee of depiction, obviously. Two pens may resemble one another but do not therefore depict each other. To say a picture resembles its object especially is only to say that its object is that which it especially resembles; which strictly begins with the picture itself. Indeed, since everything resembles something in some way, mere resemblance as a distinguishing trait is trivial. Moreover, depiction is no guarantee of resemblance to an object. A picture of a dragon does not resemble an actual dragon. So resemblance is not enough.

Theories have tried either to set further conditions to the kind of resemblance necessary, or sought ways in which a notational system might allow such resemblance. The problem is resemblance is a two-way or symmetrical relation between parties; each equally resembles the other, while reference is one-way or asymmetrical, only one points to the other. Converting or combining them would seem to invite a fatal compromise.

Illusion

The most famous and elaborate case for resemblance modified by reference, is made by art historian Ernst Gombrich

Ernst Gombrich

Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, OM, CBE was an Austrian-born art historian who became naturalized British citizen in 1947. He spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom...

 (1960; 1963 (1982). Resemblance in pictures is taken to involve illusion. Instincts in visual perception

Visual perception

Visual perception is the ability to interpret information and surroundings from the effects of visible light reaching the eye. The resulting perception is also known as eyesight, sight, or vision...

 are said to be triggered or alerted by pictures, even when we are rarely deceived. The eye supposedly cannot resist finding resemblances that accord with illusion. Resemblance is thus narrowed to something like the seeds of illusion. Against the one-way relation of reference Gombrich argues for a weaker or labile relation, inherited from substitution

Substitution

Substitution may refer to:- Sciences :* Substitution , a syntactic transformation on strings of symbols of a formal language* Substitution of variables* Substitution cipher, a method of encryption...

). Pictures are thus both more primitive and powerful than stricter reference.

But whether a picture can deceive a little while it represents as much seems gravely compromised. Claims for innate dispositions in sight are also contested. Gombrich appeals to an array of psychological research from James J. Gibson, R. L. Gregory, John M. Kennedy, Konrad Lorenz, Ulric Neisser and others in arguing for an ‘optical’ basis to perspective, in particular (see also perspective (graphical)

Perspective (graphical)

Perspective in the graphic arts, such as drawing, is an approximate representation, on a flat surface , of an image as it is seen by the eye...

. Subsequent cross-cultural studies in depictive competence and related studies in child-development and vision impairment are inconclusive at best.

Gombrich’s convictions have important implications for his popular history of art, for treatment and priorities there. In a later study by John Willats (1997) on the variety and development of picture planes, Gombrich’s views on the greater realism of perspective underpin many crucial findings.

Dual invariants

A more frankly behaviouristic view is taken by the perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson (1978), partly in response to Gombrich. Gibson treats visual perception as the eye registering necessary information for behaviour in a given environment. The information is filtered from light rays that meet the retina. The light is called the stimulus energy or sensation. The information consists of underlying patterns or ‘invariants’ for vital features to the environment.

Gibson’s view of depiction concerns the re-presentation of these invariants. In the case of illusions or trompe l’oeil, the picture also conveys the stimulus energy, but generally the experience is of perceiving two sets of invariants, one for the picture surface, another for the object pictured. He pointedly rejects any seeds of illusion or substitution and allows that a picture represents when two sets of invariants are displayed. But invariants tell us little more than that the resemblance is visible, dual invariants only that the terms of reference are the same as those for resemblance

Seeing-in

A similar duality is proposed by the philosopher of art, Richard Wollheim

Richard Wollheim

Richard Arthur Wollheim was a British philosopher noted for original work on mind and emotions, especially as related to the visual arts, specifically, painting...

. He calls it ‘two-foldness’ (1987, pp. 46-7, 72-5.). The picture surface is called the ‘configurational’ aspect, the object depicted the ‘recognitional’. Again, illusion is forestalled by the prominence of the picture surface where an object is depicted. Yet the object depicted quite simply is the picture surface under one reading, the surface indifferent to picture, another. The two are hardly compatible or simultaneous. Nor do they ensure a reference relation.

Wollheim introduces the concept of ‘seeing-in’ to qualify depictive resemblance (1987 pp. 59-61). Seeing-in is a psychological disposition to detect a resemblance between certain surfaces, such as inkblots or accidental stains, etc and three-dimensional objects. The eye is not deceived, but finds or projects some resemblance to the surface. This is not quite depiction, since the resemblance is only incidental to the surface. The surface does not strictly refer to such objects. Seeing-in is a necessary condition to depiction, and sufficient when in accordance with the maker’s intentions, where these are clear from certain features to a picture. But seeing-in cannot really say in what way such surfaces resemble objects either, only specify where they perhaps first occur.

Wollheim’s account of how a resemblance is agreed or modified, whereby maker and user anticipate each other’s roles, does not really explain how a resemblance refers, but rather when an agreed resemblance obtains.

Other psychological resources

The appeal to broader psychological factors in qualifying depictive resemblance is echoed in the theories of philosophers such as Robert Hopkins (1997), Flint Schier (1986) and Kendall Walton

Kendall Walton

Kendall Lewis Walton is an American philosopher, the Charles Stevenson Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. His work mainly deals with theoretical questions about the arts and issues of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of...

 (1990). They enlist ‘experience’, ‘recognition’ and ‘imagination’ respectively. Each provides additional factors to an understanding or interpretation of pictorial reference, although none can explain how a picture resembles an object (if indeed it does), nor how this resemblance is then also a reference.

For example, Schier returns to the contrast with language to try to identify a crucial difference in depictive competence. Understanding a pictorial style does not depend upon learning a vocabulary and syntax. Once grasped, a style allows the recognition of any object known to the user. Of course recognition allows a great deal more than that – books teaching children to read often introduce them to many exotic creatures such as a kangaroo or armadillo through illustrations. Many fictions and caricatures are promptly recognised without prior acquaintance of either a particular style or the object in question (Ross 1971). So competence cannot rely on a simple index or synonymy for objects and styles.

Schier’s conclusion that lack of syntax and semantics in reference then qualifies as depiction, leaves dance, architecture, animation, sculpture and music all sharing the same mode of reference. This perhaps points as much to limitations in a linguistic model.

Notation

Reversing orthodoxy, the philosopher Nelson Goodman

Nelson Goodman

Henry Nelson Goodman was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism and aesthetics.-Career:...

 (1968) starts from reference and attempts to assimilate resemblance. He denies resemblance as either necessary or sufficient condition for depiction but surprisingly, allows that it arises and fluctuates as a matter of usage or familiarity (1988, pp. 16-19).

For Goodman, a picture denotes. Denotation is divided between description; covering writing and extending to more discursive notation including music and dance scores, to depiction at greatest remove. However, a word does not grow to resemble its object, no matter how familiar or preferred. To explain how a pictorial notation does, Goodman proposes an analogue system, consisting of undifferentiated characters, a density of syntax and semantics and relative repleteness of syntax. These requirements taken in combination mean that a one-way reference running from picture to object encounters a problem. If its semantics is undifferentiated, then the relation flows back from object to picture. Depiction can acquire resemblance but must surrender reference. This is a point tacitly acknowledged by Goodman, conceding firstly that density is the antithesis of notation (1968, p. 160) and later that lack of differentiation may actually permit resemblance (1988, p.131) A denotation without notation lacks sense.

Nevertheless Goodman’s framework is revisited by philosopher John Kulvicki (2006) and interestingly applied by art historian James Elkins (1999) to an array of hybrid artefacts, combining picture, pattern and notation.

Pictorial semiotics

Pictorial semiotics

Semiotics

Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...

 aims for just the kind of integration of depiction with notation undertaken by Goodman, but fails to identify his requirements for syntax and semantics. It seeks to apply the model of structural linguistics, to reveal core meanings and permutations for pictures of all kinds, but stalls in identifying constituent elements of reference, or as semioticians prefer, ‘signification’. Similarly, they accept resemblance although call it ‘iconicity’ (after Charles Sanders Peirce, 1931-58) and are uncomfortable in qualifying its role. Older practitioners, such as Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes

Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...

 (1964) and Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose , an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...

 (1970) variously shift analysis to underlying ‘connotations’ for an object depicted or concentrate on description of purported content at the expense of more medium-specific meaning. Essentially they establish a more general iconography

Iconography

Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means "image writing", and comes from the Greek "image" and "to write". A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the...

.

A later adherent, Göran Sonesson (1989. 2001), rejects Goodman’s terms for syntax and semantics as alien to linguistics, no more than an ideal and turns instead to the findings of perceptual psychologists, such as J. M. Kennedy (1974 ), N. H. Freeman (1985; 1988) and David Marr (1977; 1978) in order to detect underlying structure. Sonesson accepts ‘seeing-in’ (2006) although prefers Edmund Husserl’s version (Husserl 1966; 1980). Resemblance is again grounded in optics or the visible, although this does not exclude writing nor reconcile resemblance with reference. Discussion tends to be restricted to the function of outlines in schemes for depth.

Deixis

The art historian Norman Bryson (1983) persists with a linguistic model and advances a detail of parsing and tense, 'deixis’. He rejects resemblance and illusion as incompatible with the ambiguities and interpretation available to pictures and is also critical of the inflexible nature of structuralist analysis. Deixis is taken as the rhetoric of the narrator, indicating the presence of the speaker in a discourse, a bodily or physical aspect as well as an explicit temporal dimension. In depiction this translates as a difference between ’The Gaze

Gaze

Gaze is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan to describe the anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be viewed. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses some sense of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object...

’ where deixis is absent and ‘The Glance’ where it is present. Where present, details to materials indicate how long and in what way the depiction was made, where absent, a telling suppression or prolonging of the act. The distinction attempts to account for the ‘plastic’ or medium-specific qualities absent from earlier semiotic analyses and somewhat approximates the 'indexic’ aspect to signs introduced by Peirce.

Deixis offers a more elaborate account of the picture surface and broad differences to expression and application but cannot qualify resemblance.

Iconography

Lastly, iconography is the study of pictorial content, mainly in art, and would seem to ignore the question of how to concentrate upon what. But iconography’s findings take a rather recondite view of content, are often based on subtle literary, historical and cultural allusion and highlight a sharp difference in terms of resemblance, optical accuracy or intuitive illusion. Resemblance is hardly direct or spontaneous for the iconographer, reference rarely to the literal or singular. Visual perception here is subject to reflection and research, the object as much reference as referent.

The distinguished art historian Erwin Panofsky

Erwin Panofsky

Erwin Panofsky was a German art historian, whose academic career was pursued mostly in the U.S. after the rise of the Nazi regime. Panofsky's work remains highly influential in the modern academic study of iconography...

 (1955) allowed three levels to iconography. The first is ‘natural’ content, the object recognised or resembling without context, on a second level, a modifying historical and cultural context and at a third, deeper level, a fundamental structure or ideology (called iconology). He even ascribed the use of perspective a deep social meaning (1927). However more recently, a natural or neutral level tends to be abandoned as mythical. The cultural scholar W.J.T. Mitchell (1980; 1986; 1994) looks to ideology to determine resemblance and depiction as acknowledgement of shifts in relations there, albeit by an unspecified scheme or notation.

Iconography points to differences in scope for a theory of depiction. Where stylistics and a basic object is nominated, resemblance is prominent, but where more elaborate objects are encountered, or terms for nature denied, simple perception or notation flounder. The difference corresponds somewhat to the division in philosophy between the analytic and continental.

Other issues

Other debates about the nature of depiction include the relationship between seeing something in a picture and seeing face to face, whether depictive representation is convention

Convention (norm)

A convention is a set of agreed, stipulated or generally accepted standards, norms, social norms or criteria, often taking the form of a custom....

al, how understanding novel depictions is possible, the aesthetic and ethical value of depiction and the nature of realism

Realism (visual arts)

Realism in the visual arts is a style that depicts the actuality of what the eyes can see. The term is used in different senses in art history; it may mean the same as illusionism, the representation of subjects with visual mimesis or verisimilitude, or may mean an emphasis on the actuality of...

 in pictorial art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

.

See also

• Figurative art
  Figurative art
  Figurative art, sometimes written as figurativism, describes artwork—particularly paintings and sculptures—which are clearly derived from real object sources, and are therefore by definition representational.-Definition:...
  
  
• Representation (arts)
  Representation (arts)
  Representation is the use of signs that stand in for and take the place of something else. It is through representation that people organize the world and reality through the act of naming its elements...
  
  
• Realism (arts)
  Realism (arts)
  Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
  
  
• Representationalism
• Symbol
  Symbol
  A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
  
  

Books

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• Eco Umberto (1980), A Theory of Semiotics (Milan 1976) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
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• Gombrich E H (1960), Art and Illusion (Oxford: Phaidon Press).
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• Gombrich E H (1982), The Image and the Eye (Oxford and New York: Phaidon Press).
• Goodman, Nelson (1968), Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.).
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• Walton, Kendall (1990), Mimesis as Make-believe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
• Willats John (1997), .Art and Representation: New Principles In The Analysis Of Pictures (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press).
• Wollheim, Richard (1987), Painting as an Art (London: Thames and Hudson).

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  J. J. Gibson
  James Jerome Gibson , was an American psychologist, born in McConnelsville, Ohio, who received his Ph.D. from Princeton University's Department of Psychology, and is considered one of the most important 20th century psychologists in the field of visual perception...
  
  – (1978), ‘The Ecological approach To Visual Perception In Pictures’, Leonardo, 11, p.231.
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