‘Between a thing and a thought’: syntax, twofoldness, and the wisdom of the Ancients

Abstract

This article offers an alternative to Richard Wollheim’s argument that our perceptual experience of a picture is ‘twofold’ because we see what it represents ‘in’ its ‘marked surface’. It is argued instead that we only see a picture’s immaterial ‘image’ in wholly virtual syntactic structures which we must extract from this surface. What syntactic structure is, and how it can be disaggregated from the marks that carry it, is examined. So too is how marks resolve into syntax, and how, when they do not, they contribute to pictorial meaning. A case is made that a picture’s marked surface, syntax, and meaning each has its own particular structure, but that we can use any one of these to grasp either of the others. The article ends with a consideration of how the emerging meaning of a picture can inform our sense of its syntax. Throughout it refers to works by the ‘Ancients’, Samuel Palmer and Edward Calvert, because these demonstrate a clear practical concern with the potential of separate marks to generate complex syntactic structures. The title is taken from a remark of Palmer’s.