What arguments-drawing upon forgotten eighteenth-century religious, educational, medical, and artistic polemics-might be mustered today to justify perceptual expertise? What proof can be offered to show that specialization in visualization is not just deceitful craft? In other words, does it take distinctive art or knowledgeable skill to understand the precise techniques, histories, and rhetorical strategies of seeing and interacting with images?' A positive answer to such pressing contemporary questions requires the revision of commonly held view. This scholarly divisionism splits the early modern period into prophetic or interpretive Romanticism thought to be fundamentally at odds with rational or philosophical Enlightenment. Yet it can be demonstrated that the deepest concerns of these supposedly opposite eras frequently coincided.2 Eighteenth-century British empiricists and French Cartesians as well as nineteenth-century creators of aniconic aesthetics were simultaneously fascinated and repelled by trompe l'oeil trickery and new sensuous technology emitting fake simulations and delusive special effects (fig. 1).3 Broadly speaking, this distrust of misleading or fanatical visions led, on one hand, to an illuminating criticism determined to expose ignorant and optically fueled superstition (fig. 2).4 On the other hand, it gave rise to JudeoProtestant biblical, and eventually secular, hermeneutics. An informed scrutiny of texts was to help eradicate the spellbinding idolatry believed endemic to papist Baroque oral-visual culture. 5 In particular, visual quackery-castigated as empty conjuring and voyeuristic display6-was the target of Neoclassical systematics and of Romantic algebraicism directed alike against mere mechanical deception, as William Hazlitt put it.' These theoretical, and essentially. linguistic, methods aimed to demolish the juggling or ingenious artisans responsible for manufacturing the trifling tricks of Rococo painting. Analogies to the miraclemongering empiric, the legerdemain charlatan, and the duping quack eddied around the manually produced and reproduced, or conjured, image. Performance challenges and defies discourse.8 Thus the Romantic essayist Hazlitt, in The Indian Jugglers, noted that intellectuals can fool the public. Brahmins can build up their dogmas and philosophies end and not be detected. A juggler, rope-dancer, or knife-thrower, however, cannot persuade the audience at the Olympic Theater that he performs astonishing feats without actually giving proofs of what he says. To be able to catch four balls in less than second and to repeat this activity requires precision of movement akin to a mathematical truth.9