The Beholder’s Share: Art and Illusion – Editions Rémanence

Editions Rémanence book reviews

In the vast library of art history, there are books that describe paintings, and then there are books that explain how we see them. E.H. Gombrich’s *Art and Illusion*, based on his 1956 A.W. Mellon Lectures, belongs firmly to the latter. It is a work of immense intellectual courage that bridges the gap between the museum and the laboratory, applying the insights of psychology to the riddle of style. Why, Gombrich asks, does art have a history? Why did the Egyptians draw what they knew, while the Impressionists painted what they saw?

Gombrich’s answer shattered the 19th-century ideal of the "innocent eye"—the notion that an artist can simply open their eyes and transcribe nature without bias. Instead, Gombrich posits that seeing is an active process. We do not look with a blank slate; we look with a "mental set." We project a hypothesis onto the world and then test it. In his famous formulation, "making comes before matching." The artist must first have a schema—a mental template or a rough sketch—before they can correct it to match reality.

The Prison of Schema

This concept of the "schema" is crucial. Gombrich demonstrates that for millennia, artists did not paint what they saw; they painted what they had learned to paint. A child draws a circle for a head not because heads are circles, but because the circle is the closest available schema in their mental toolkit. The history of art, then, is the slow, agonizing process of trial and error, of modifying these rigid schemata to better approximate the infinite complexity of the visible world.

To illustrate this, Gombrich often points to ambiguous figures, showing how our mind snaps between interpretations based on what we expect to see. The image does not change, but our reading of it does.

This psychological insight has profound implications. It suggests that our perception is always filtered through tradition and habit. We are, in a sense, prisoners of our own vocabulary. The "Greek Miracle"—the explosion of naturalism in ancient Greece—was not a biological evolution of the eye, but a cultural revolution in the willingness to correct the schema against the evidence of the senses.

The Beholder’s Share

Perhaps the most enduring concept from the book is "the beholder’s share." Gombrich argues that an illusion is not a one-way transmission from artist to viewer. It is a collaboration. The artist provides the cues—a few brushstrokes suggesting a face, a shadow implying depth—and the viewer completes the picture. We connect the dots. An Impressionist painting, close up, is a chaos of pigment; it is the beholder’s mind that resolves it into a bustling Parisian boulevard.

From a traditional perspective, this touches on a deep metaphysical truth about the limits of human knowledge. We are finite beings trying to grasp an infinite reality. We can never see the world with the absolute, unmediated clarity of God. We are always interpreting, always guessing. Our vision is "fallen" in the sense that it is imperfect and reliant on our own internal projections.

Truth and the Discipline of Sight

However, *Art and Illusion* is not a manifesto for relativism. Gombrich does not say that "truth is whatever we see." On the contrary, he describes the history of art as a noble struggle towards truth. The artist constantly compares their illusion with reality, correcting the error, refining the schema. It is a process of humility. The artist must submit their inner prejudice to the outer fact.

There is a moral dimension to this discipline of the eye. To see the world as it truly is—to strip away the comfortable "schema" of prejudice and habit—requires an act of will. It parallels the spiritual life, where one must constantly purify the conscience to perceive the will of God clearly. The illusion is easy; the reality is hard. Gombrich honors the artists who, through centuries of labor, taught us to see the shimmer of light on a leaf or the expression of a human face, bringing us one step closer to the mystery of creation itself.