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    Visuality and virtuality : images and pictures from prehistory to perspective / Whitney Davis.

    • Title:Visuality and virtuality : images and pictures from prehistory to perspective / Whitney Davis.
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    • Author/Creator:Davis, Whitney, author.
    • Published/Created:Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2017]
    • Holdings

       
    • Library of Congress Subjects:Visual perception in art.
    • Description:xiii, 350 pages ; 27 cm
    • Summary:A provocative and challenging new conceptual framework for the study of images This book builds on the groundbreaking theoretical framework established in Whitney Davis's acclaimed previous book, A General Theory of Visual Culture, in which he shows how certain culturally constituted aspects of artifacts and pictures are visible to informed viewers. Here, Davis uses revealing archaeological and historical case studies to further develop his theory, presenting an exacting new account of the interaction that occurs when a viewer looks at a picture. Davis argues that pictoriality - the depiction intended by its maker to be seen - emerges at a particular standpoint in space and time. Reconstruction of this standpoint is the first step of the art historian's craft. Because standpoints are inherently mutable and mobile, pictoriality constantly shifts in form and possible meaning. To capture this complexity, Davis develops new concepts of radical pictorial ambiguity, including "bivisibility" (the fact that pictures can always be seen in ways other than intended), pictorial naturalism, and the behavior of pictures under changing angles of view. He then applies these concepts to four cases - Paleolithic cave painting; ancient Egyptian tomb decoration; classical Greek architectural sculpture, with a focus on the Parthenon frieze; and Renaissance perspective as invented by Brunelleschi.
    • Notes:Includes bibliographical references and index.
    • ISBN:9780691171944 hardcover ; alkaline paper
      0691171947 hardcover ; alkaline paper
    • Contents:Machine generated contents note: pt. ONE ANALYTICS OF IMAGING PICTURES IN VISUAL SPACE
      ch. 1 Visuality and Virtuality: Analytics of Visual Space and Pictorial Space
      ch. 2 Radical Pictoriality: Seeing-As, Seeing-As-As, Seeing-As-As-As...
      ch. 3 What the Chauvet Master Saw: On the Presence of Prehistoric Pictoriality
      pt. TWO BIVISIBILITY, BIVIRTUALITY, AND BIROTATIONALITY
      ch. 4 Divisibility: Between the Successions to Visuality
      ch. 5 Bivirtuality: Pictorial Naturalism and the Revolutions of Rotation
      ch. 6 Birotationality: Frontality, Foreshortening, and Virtual Pictorial Space
      pt. THREE PICTORIAL SUCCESSIONS OF VIRTUAL COORDINATE SPACE
      ch. 7 What Hesire Saw: Virtual Coordinate Space in Ancient Egyptian Depiction
      ch. 8 What Phidias Saw: Virtual Coordinate Space in Classical Greek Architectural Relief
      ch. 9 What Brunelleschi Saw: Virtual Coordinate Space and Painter's Perspective.
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