Gombrich on the Renaissance Volume III: The Heritage of Apelles

this book (in my opinion) shows Gombrich's best qualities as historian AND art critic. In his earlier publications, Gombrich famously established that "realist" representation was as much dependent on the transmission of schematic and/or conventional patterns as those arts identified as "decorative" or "abstract." In "The Heritage . . ." he maps the history of the representational conventions at work in the most magically compelling of early Renaissance "realisms"--the rendering of light (direct, reflected and refracted) in Flemish painting. By focusing historical attention on light effects, rather than on linear perspective (initially, a Florentine invention), Gombrich has made it possible to rethink the whole of Renaissance painting's cultural significance, as a creative application of the ancient and medieval science of optics--the systematic study of light and visual perception. The textbook characterization of Renaissance art still privileges the "mathematical" rigors of perspective-rendering over the "intuitive" mimicry of light (and its corollary, color), but Gombrich brilliantly demonstrates that they are the two sides of a single coin, each concerned with translating into pictorial formulas the mechanisms of light's transmission and light's reception by the eye.