Pictorial Structure Research Articles

Ambiguity in Pictorial Depth

Pictorial space is the 3-D impression that one obtains when looking 'into' a 2-D picture. One is aware of 3-D 'opaque' objects. 'Pictorial reliefs' are the surfaces of such pictorial objects in 'pictorial space'. Photographs (or any pictures) do in no way fully specify physical scenes. Rather, any photograph is compatible with an infinite number of possible scenes that may be called 'metameric scenes'. If pictorial relief is one of these metameric scenes, the response may be considered 'veridical'. The conventional usage is more restrictive and is indeed inconsistent. Thus the observer has much freedom in arriving at such a 'veridical' response. To address this ambiguity, we determined the pictorial reliefs for eight observers, six pictures, and two psychophysical methods. We used 'methods of cross-sections' to operationalise pictorial reliefs. We find that linear regression of the depths of relief at corresponding locations in the picture for different observers often lead to very low (even insignificant) R2s. Thus the responses are idiosyncratic to a large degree. Perhaps surprisingly, we also observed that multiple regression of depth and picture coordinates at corresponding locations often lead to very high R2s. Often R2s increased from insignificant up to almost 1. Apparently, to a large extent 'depth' is irrelevant as a psychophysical variable, in the sense that it does not uniquely account for the relation of the response to the pictorial structure. This clearly runs counter to the bulk of the literature on pictorial 'depth perception'. The invariant core of interindividual perception proves to be of an 'affine' rather than a Euclidean nature; that is to say, 'pictorial space' is not simply the picture plane augmented with a depth dimension.

Posttraumatic Parieto-Occipital Epilepsy

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article LETTERFull AccessPosttraumatic Parieto-Occipital EpilepsySofia Brissos M.D.,Vasco Videira Dias Psy.D.,Teresa Paiva M.D., Ph.D.,Sofia Brissos M.D.Search for more papers by this author,Vasco Videira Dias Psy.D.Search for more papers by this author,Teresa Paiva M.D., Ph.D.Search for more papers by this author,Published Online:1 Apr 2007AboutSectionsView articlePDFView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail View articleSIR: The prevalence of epilepsy after traumatic brain injury (TBI) is about 4%, 1 parietal and occipital seizures being considered a rare outcome. 2 , 3 We report a case of a patient where posttraumatic parieto-occipital seizures were misidentified as psychiatric symptoms, and stress the importance of the neuropsychological evaluation in the diagnosis, especially when imaging and electrophysiological exams show no anomalies. Case ReportA 39-year-old right-handed woman, with no psychiatric history, suffered a TBI after being hit by a car, presenting a Glasgow Coma Scale score of 15 upon hospital admission. The cranial computed tomography scan revealed epidural left temporobasal hematoma and sinking left zygomatic arch fracture. More than a year after TBI, she started complaining of tingling and numbness in the right leg and inability to move despite no loss of power in the limb. These episodes lasted 1 to 2 minutes without loss of consciousness, but she had to interrupt ongoing tasks. They were preceded by a sense of malaise and followed by fatigue and disorientation, and their frequency had increased to an episode every 2 weeks. She also complained of poor concentration, forgetfulness, sleep disturbances, headache, dizziness, anxiety and sadness, and being medicated with antidepressants, without response. Magnetic ressonance imaging (MRI) 2 years after the accident and the EEG revealed no anomalies. During the neuropsychological evaluation, when drawing a three-dimensional figure (cube), she complained of difficulty in the task, dizziness and tingling of the right leg, followed by involuntary rapid tremor-like movements on the same side for about a minute, with no loss of consciousness. On the same day the EEG revealed paroxysmal bilateral temporo-occipital activity with left accentuation and contra-lateral homonymous propagation. The suggestion test was negative. She was medicated with a regimen of sodium valproate, 1600 mg daily, and reevaluated after 6 months, but when drawing a three-dimensional figure she developed a seizure with the same characteristics.Comment Our patient presented few risk factors for late seizures, 4 the first seizure occurring more than a year after TBI, similar to the 20 months’ mean time previously reported. 5 Parietal and occipital seizures are mainly characterized by the presenting auras, including somatosensory phenomena, although the clinical manifestations may spread beyond and overshadow the focal origin. The paresthesia may spread in a Jacksonian manner, with motor activity in the affected body member following the sensations in about 50% of cases. Some parietal seizures may resemble panic attacks and be misdiagnosed as a psychiatric disorder, but showing poor response to antidepressants, as with our patient. Parieto-occipital seizures may be provoked by stimuli involving the receptive, interpretive, and connective function of the parietal and occipital lobes. The EEG may show focal discharges in the posterior regions, but the seizures are often electrically silent. 3 Even though MRI and functional imaging often reveal underlying pathology, 3 a normal exam, as in our patient, should not exclude the presence of organic lesion. The constructional apraxia, revealed as a disturbance in drawing without correct spatial relationships, existed despite the absence of apraxia for single movements. 6 The copying deficit was particularly evident in drawing three-dimensional figures, and was not simply one of formulating the sequence of steps necessary to produce a complex abstract form. This may be due to a difficulty in encoding the pictorial structure of a model depicting a three-dimensional object, suggesting the existence of a parietooccipital lesion. In summary, although a rare outcome from TBI, posttraumatic parieto-occipital epilepsy may occur even after minor head trauma and few risk factors, and respond poorly to anticonvulsants. Symptom presentation is pleomorphic, and can be misdiagnosed as psychiatric. The neuropsychological evaluation is useful in the diagnosis, especially when functional and neuroimaging exams show no anomalies, and may help establishing a causative role for TBI in producing neuropsychiatric disorders, which is important from clinical, scientific, and legal perspectives. Department of Psychiatry, Júlio de Matos’ Psychiatric Hospital, Lisbon, PortugalDepartment of Psychology and Sociology, Autonomous University of Lisbon, PortugalDepartment of Neurology, CENC, Lisbon, Portugal

The Erotics of Close Reading: Williams, Demuth, and “The Crimson Cyclamen”

Williams scholars who have focused on his relationship to the visual arts have tended towards formalistic analysis. Here is James Guimond: When Williams-particularly in the 1920's-or Demuth dealt with subjects they admired such as flowers, their reaction was to take them entirely out of life where they could decay and disappoint. Both Demuth's flower paintings and Williams' flower poems present their subjects as timeless, richly abstract, beautiful designs. (48-49) Peter Halter: The tension created by such a syntactic ambiguity can be directly related to the Cubist technique of including the ambiguous or contradictory overlapping of planes, or of fusing, or metonymically displacing, the material qualities of objects, so that a pipe becomes transparent while a glass or a carafe is opaque. (88) Dickran Tashjian: [Demuth's] commentary on the American scene emerges from the formal means that [he] has exercised. His Cubist-Realism, as some critics have designated his style, exploits the geometry inherent in the building, thereby creating its own pictorial structure. . . . [T]he clarity of lives (even in the passages that characterize the lower street in the closest approximation of Cubism), the rays that unite sky and building, the brightness of the colors, and the elegant twists of smoke all combine to create an aesthetic experience in marked tension with the drab architectural realities of such towns. (67) In these examples, the language of formalism obscures other interesting aspects of Williams's fascination with painters and painting. For one, the idea that blurring the boundaries of art forms (poetry and painting) was an expression of a transgressive poetics as it went against such modernist pieties (think Greenberg, think Kandinsky) as the separation of arts and the purity of form. For another, and perhaps most intriguing, the fact that many of the artists he came into contact with lived lives that I'd characterize as dissident, or nonheteronormative, or queer. The relationship with Demuth is an excellent case in point. As noted, scholars center discussions of their relationship on the mutual interest in defining a new type of American art that accepted the realities of urbanism and industrialism as appropriate subject matter, but that was, stylistically, influenced by European modernism's attention to experimental forms and sleek designs. Critics emphasize the Futurist influence-the possibly ironic celebration of machine age culture in the smoke stacks, grain elevators, skyscrapers, and auto plants that constituted what Demuth called My Egypt. There is discussion of how Williams wanted to be a painter when young, and Demuth, then studying art at Drexel, a writer, and of how they knew each other in Philadelphia. A note about their first meeting in 1903 over a bowl of prunes at Mrs. Chain's boardinghouse on Locust Street is de rigueur. Williams is quoted as not realizing Demuth was gay, and Demuth himself not realizing it. The closest commentators get to suggesting the queer dimensions of Demuth's work is when they acknowledge, as do Peter Schmidt and Tashjian, that his flowers and industrial landscapes possess a veiled or displaced erotic dimension, even as the art works lack a specific sexual content. Of course, much of Demuth's work, especially his watercolors, is overtly, even scandalously, bawdy and homoerotic, but these works are not discussed in the context of Williams's interest in his art. Williams himself felt that the content of much of Demuth's work barred it from public appreciation. In Demuth's Three Sailors on the Beach, a watercolor from 1930, the artist depicts one of his most overt scenes of public homoeroticism through the image of men about to engage in fellatio. Demuth implicated himself in the scene by placing his own initials inside a heart-shaped tattoo upon the arm of one of the sailors.1 As Tashjian does helpfully point out, Distinguished Air (1930) depicts sailors admiring a giant phallus (based on a Brancusi) at an art gallery-a scene that Demuth drew from an episode deleted from a 1925 story by Robert McAlmon. …

Building models of animals from video

This paper argues that tracking, object detection, and model building are all similar activities. We describe a fully automatic system that builds 2D articulated models known as pictorial structures from videos of animals. The learned model can be used to detect the animal in the original video--in this sense, the system can be viewed as a generalized tracker (one that is capable of modeling objects while tracking them). The learned model can be matched to a visual library; here, the system can be viewed as a video recognition algorithm. The learned model can also be used to detect the animal in novel images--in this case, the system can be seen as a method for learning models for object recognition. We find that we can significantly improve the pictorial structures by augmenting them with a discriminative texture model learned from a texture library. We develop a novel texture descriptor that outperforms the state-of-the-art for animal textures. We demonstrate the entire system on real video sequences of three different animals. We show that we can automatically track and identify the given animal. We use the learned models to recognize animals from two data sets; images taken by professional photographers from the Corel collection, and assorted images from the Web returned by Google. We demonstrate quite good performance on both data sets. Comparing our results with simple baselines, we show that, for the Google set, we can detect, localize, and recover part articulations from a collection demonstrably hard for object recognition.

Thomas Kinkade's Romantic Landscape

It is easy to dismiss the work of contemporary landscape painter Thomas Kinkade, but whether it is good or not, it is telling. This article begins by noting the remarkable lack of critical response to Kinkade’s work, then looks at his marketing techniques, juxtaposes his work with Komar and Melamid’s Most Wanted Painting, and locates the source of his earnestness in his conversion to evangelical Christianity. I analyze the pictorial structure and the meanings of Kinkade’s images by comparing them to some of his artistic sources, especially his hero Norman Rockwell. The common thread that ties together the art that has most influenced Kinkade is a search for relief from the pressures and shortcomings of modern life. In linking Kinkade with past art that he has admired and adapted, including works by the impressionists, Caspar David Friedrich, Thomas Cole, and painters of the American West, I argue that his work is neither naive nor simply kitsch, but rather a heartfelt, sentimentalized variant of Romantic landscape painting that he has managed to make relevant to a large audience. The reason for the stark contrast between popular acclaim and critical disdain for Kinkade’s work is that viewers bring different values and apply different standards with respect to sentimentalism, artistic quality, and the nature and social purpose of art. Finally one runs up against a basic paradox in Kinkade’s enterprise: the images and the artist preach the virtues of a simple lifestyle, while his company’s products in practice encourage consumerism without demanding lifestyle transformation.

Defining Pictorial Style: Lessons from Linguistics and Computer Graphics

A definition of pictorial style in terms of distinctive combinations of pictorial devices characteristic of a particular culture or period or the work of an individual artist is proposed. Four kinds of pictorial structure are described: the drawing (spatial) systems, the denotation systems, the mark systems and the attributes systems. Three pictures by Poussin, Rembrandt and the Achilles painter are then analyzed in terms of these four systems. It is suggested that descriptions of style of this kind can be thought of as hypotheses about the nature of the implicit rules that generated the pictures to which they were applied. Examples of ways of testing this suggestion by embodying such stylistic rules in computer graphics programs are given.

Image Information Mining System Evaluation Using Information-Theoretic Measures

During the last decade, the exponential increase of multimedia and remote sensing image archives, the fast expansion of the world wide web, and the high diversity of users have yielded concepts and systems for successful content-based image retrieval and image information mining. Image data information systems require both database and visual capabilities, but there is a gap between these systems. Database systems usually do not deal with multidimensional pictorial structures and vision systems do not provide database query functions. In terms of these points, the evaluation of content-based image retrieval systems became a focus of research interest. One can find several system evaluation approaches in literature, however, only few of them go beyond precision-recall graphs and do not allow a detailed evaluation of an interactive image retrieval system. Apart from the existing evaluation methodologies, we aim at the overall validation of our knowledge-driven content-based image information mining system. In this paper, an evaluation approach is demonstrated that is based on information-theoretic quantities to determine the information flow between system levels of different semantic abstraction and to analyze human-computer interactions.

Pictorial Structures for Object Recognition

In this paper we present a computationally efficient framework for part-based modeling and recognition of objects. Our work is motivated by the pictorial structure models introduced by Fischler and Elschlager. The basic idea is to represent an object by a collection of parts arranged in a deformable configuration. The appearance of each part is modeled separately, and the deformable configuration is represented by spring-like connections between pairs of parts. These models allow for qualitative descriptions of visual appearance, and are suitable for generic recognition problems. We address the problem of using pictorial structure models to find instances of an object in an image as well as the problem of learning an object model from training examples, presenting efficient algorithms in both cases. We demonstrate the techniques by learning models that represent faces and human bodies and using the resulting models to locate the corresponding objects in novel images.

Coherent Structures in the Atmospheric Surface Layer under Stable and Unstable Conditions

Simultaneous measurements of the instantaneous values of absolute temperatureat seven heights within the lower 36 m of the atmospheric boundary layer underdifferent stability conditions were carried out, accompanied by measurements ofthe wind velocity components at two levels and of solar radiation flux at the surface.The data obtained allow one to investigate individual convective cells known ascoherent structures (CS). Outside the CS, i.e., during quiet periods, an instanttemperature profile is in close agreement with the dry-adiabatic lapse rate, butwithin CS the temperature changes much faster with height, and the shape ofthe profile varies significantly.A method was developed to transform temperature records from sensors atseveral heights into an other form, namely, into temporal variations of theheights of isothermal surfaces. Since coherent structures were found to advectwith the mean wind velocity, these temporal height variations may be transformedinto the spatial ones, i.e., into the xoz-plane section of the temperature field.In such a pictorial presentation coherent structures look like asymmetric columnsof heat, penetrating the whole atmospheric surface layer.Coherent structures also exist in the stable stratified surface layer, but they have aninverse asymmetry and occupy only the lower several metres. Wavelike activitydominates in the upper part of the stable surface layer.The characteristic time of surface-layer adjustment to the rapid changes of solarradiation (due to cloud shadows or cloud gaps) was found to be on the order ofone minute. Such a time interval is required for coherent structure to reach the topof surface layer.

Poussin's Esther before Ahasuerus: Beauty, Majesty, Bondage

The painting Esther before Ahasuerus marks a definitive resolution in Nicolas Poussin's approach to narrative. Instead of focusing on the representation of the passions, Poussin epitomizes Esther's beauty, Ahasuerus's majesty, and the bondage of Israel. He constructs these ideas as pictorial concetti through metaphorical allusions to ancient artworks that also appear in a contemporary text on Esther by Luigi Manzini. These same works inspired Poussin's theoretical precepts on the concetto and ideal imitation. Esther resolves Poussin's experiments with pictorial structure in his later narrative paintings to transmit poetic conceits directly to the beholder.

Describing the Virgin

Descriptions of the Virgin began to emerge in Italian popular devotional literature in the fifteenth century and in theological texts in the sixteenth century. In such texts, worshippers and readers were no longer left to imagine the appearance of the Virgin in prayer. Rather, her image was given in a description. And this represents a complete shift away from the tradition in the West, a tradition that originated in St Augustine's De Trinitate. This tendency to describe the physical appearance of the Virgin for meditation via texts also existed, although inconsistently, in paintings of her. In the itinerant artist Antonello da Messina’s two images of the Annunziata (Munich and Palermo, c.1470) the painter appropriates the pictorial structure of portraiture to depict her. It is the portrait–like format and all its associations that confirm the reality of this sacred person. The images must be thought of as pictorial examples of what one might call the urgency of similitude that pervaded devotional literature of the period. Because of the pressures of the Reformation and the suspicion with which images were viewed, beginning in the sixteenth century, Catholic theologians seemed to have used the idea of likeness to defend the use of images in devotion. The more the image was a reflection of its archetype, the less it was like an idol, or false image, hence the importance of the descriptions of the Virgin Mary.

Toward a Phenomenological Understanding of Visual Communication

Phenomenology understands communication as a dyadic encounter and considers language theprimary medium of this meaning-making experience. Considerationsfor visual communication theory include extending the idea of dialogue to a pictorially mediated encounter between makers and beholders not present to each other as well as recognizing the role of pictorial codes in describing the meaning making practices of production (encoding) and interpretation (decoding). Examples of encoding studies illustrate how creators and receivers are available to each other through the discursive pictorial structure of a mediated text. Our reliance on a linguistic code to apprehend this pictorially coded semiotic activity remains a challenge.

'L'art verbal des poètes-peintres: the text/image problem In the context of Blake's ‘Infant Sorrow’ as analysed by Roman Jakobson in L'art verbal des poètes-peintres Blake) Rousseau et Klee

Jakobson's point of departure in L'art verbal des poètes-peintres Blake, Rousseau et Klee, signalled by a quotation from Blake, is that in a poem or in a picture structurally all is significant, down to the last detail. In the section on Blake's poem from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ‘Infant Sorrow’, Jakobson discovers striking patterns of symmetry in the verse and stanzaic forms, syntactic and morphological structure, phonetic and punctuational patterns, and in the interrelationship between these domains. According to Jakobson, this high degree of ‘geometric’ organization on the part of the poet is a function of Blake the artist's powers of pictorial composition, and leads Jakobson to reaffirm ‘l'analogie remarquable entre le rôle de la grammaire en poésie et, chez le peintre, les regles de la composition fondees sur un ordre géométrique latent ou manifeste, ou au contraire sur une revolte contre tout agencement géométrique'.1 No actual comparison is, however, made by Jakobson between Blake's text and the illustrative page into which it is set. What such a comparison might lead one to affirm, and why such a comparison was not made by Jakobson, will be the subject of a section below. Furthermore, Jakobson does not place this poem in the larger context of Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) and its partner poem, ‘Infant Joy’. This is because Jakobson's main aim in analysing ‘Infant Sorrow’ is to assert the high degree of organization - grammatical, formal, phonetic, etc. — of the poète-peintre's text. On this basis Jakobson will proceed, in the second section of his essay, to discover specific structural parallels between the painting and the verse accompanying Douanier Rousseau's Le Rêve. Only at the end of this section will the general point of Jakobson's project in this essay be spelled out, through a quotation from Carola Giedion-Welcker's study on Klee (1946) in which she claims that ‘le poete est inseparable du peintre’ (Jakobson, p. 152). This quotation gives Jakobson, the cue to pursue in the third and final section of his essay a structural analysis of Klee's poem ‘Zwei berge … ‘. Jakobson's analysis leads him to discover in Klee's poem ‘un des sin spatial, purement métaphorique, d'une facture biblique’ (Jakobson, p. 155) and to construct a schematic diagram showing the ‘etonnante union de transparence radieuse, de savante simplicité et d'imbrication multiforme [qui] permet, chez Klee, au peintre comme au poète, de deployer une harmonieuse combinaison de procédés, surprenants par leur variété, aussi bien sur un morceau de toile que dans quelques lignes d'unJournal’ (Jakobson, p. 159). Jakobson's second schematic diagram of the poem (Jakobson, p. 155) in particular is organized in such a way as to mimic the asymmetrical semi-geometrical structure of many of Klee's drawings and paintings. In this way, Jakobson aims to convince the reader of the profound analogy between poetic composition and pictorial structure.

Dancing in the Dark: Deconstructing a Narrative of Epiphany on the Isopata Ring

In theory, narratives in any medium can recount religious, profane, real, or fantastic events. But some stories, those involving battles for instance, are easier to relate and understand than others; they have more narrative value, or narrativity. The often-reproduced scene on a ring from Isopata, Crete, is an instructive example of the rich narrative character of the finest Aegean glyptic art. It also exemplifies the difficulties posed to the modern viewer-narrator by images that depict religious tales or events. The examination of the pictorial structure and gestures of the protagonists on the Isopata ring undertaken here, which takes the form of a comparative analysis and centers the discussion within the theoretical framework of narratology, discloses the intense ambiguities of the ring's representation. The characters on the ring appear to take part in an event of some significance, yet it is not possible to determine the individual status of each figure (e.g., divine or mortal) from the pictorial texts at our disposal. Nor can we tell precisely what each figure is doing, where they are positioned in relation to one another, and in what sequence the action depticted should be read. This revelation is unsettling, given that the traditional view of Minoan religion as being focused on invoking an epiphany of the goddess through ecstatic dancing is based in large part on readings of the scene on the Isopata ring.

Evaluation of the museum environmental risk by means of tempera-painted dosimeters

The monitoring and control of environmental parameters provide useful information in order to reduce the decay of works of art. Dosimeters that reproduce the pictorial structure of paintings as closely as possible were prepared and tested to evaluate the effects induced on works of art by the “global” indoor environment. These dosimeters were aged under different conditions in ageing chambers, and successively were placed in the Uffizi Gallery for several months. The data obtained from the naturally aged dosimeters were compared with those found for the artificially aged, thus providing information on the alteration process induced by the environmental factors.

Tempera-Painted Dosimeters for Environmental Indoor Monitoring: A Spectroscopic and Chemometric Approach

The importance of minimizing the deterioration of works of art has stimulated the development of new methods for the monitoring and control of environmental parameters. The effect caused to paintings by the “global” indoor environment can be evaluated by using dosimeters that reproduce the pictorial structure of paintings as closely as possible. After having prepared these dosimeters with specific pigments and dyes, they were aged in aging chambers under different conditions. Subsequently, mock paintings, prepared by using a reduced set of the more sensitive dosimeters, were placed in several museums and historical sites. Information on the alteration process induced by the environmental factors was obtained from a comparison between the natural and artificial aging dosimeters.

Disguised Symbolism as Enactive Symbolism in Van Eyck's Paintings

In addition to making use of easily recognized symbols, in six of his most important paintings Van Eyck devised symbols to be discovered only during the process of prolonged meditation, with the intention of stimulating an experience of mystic revelation. This symbolism was conceived primarily in terms of visual interactions that provide the means for its disguise and, paradoxically, offer the best proof of its presence through the coherence and expressive power they contribute. The argument is made that in six of Van Eyck's most important pictures certain configurations compel the viewer who notices them to regard them either as deliberately expressive symbolic interactions or else as the unintended result of garbled pictorial structure. The consistency of form, effect, and concept strongly argues for the first view. In the second part of this article, the symbolism in three of Van Eyck's paintings-the Virgin in the Church, the Virgin with the Chancellor Rolin and the Virgin with Canon van der Paele-is examined in greater detail. The ideas are the familiar ones of Christian redemption and rebirth, and they rely on familiar imagery. But the imagery's symbolism is enhanced by an interplay of forms that seems to animate the picture in the process of being recognized as significant-as if the picture acted out its message, passing from an inert state to that of a vision, alive with meaning, and through this stirring of inner life, affirming the promise of rebirth in Paradise.

:The Altarpiece in the Renaissance

Indroduction - the altarpiece in the Renaissance: a taxonomic approach MARTIN KEMP 1. Some thoughts on writing a history of Sienese altarpieces H. W. VAN OS 2. The Renaissance altarpiece: a valid category? PAUL HILLS 3. The northern altarpiece as a cultural document CRAIG HARBISON 4. The Netherlandish carved altarpiece c.1500 type and function KIM WOODS 5. Reform within the cult image: the German winged altarpiece before the Reformation BERNHARD DECKER 6. Appropriation and application: the significance of the sources of Michael Pacher's altarpieces MARK EVANS 7. Fra Bartolomeo's Carondelet altarpiece and the theme of the Virgo in nubibus in the High Renaissance ANDRE CHASTEL 8. Divinita di cosa dipinta: pictorial structure and the legibility of the altarpiece DAVID ROSAND 9. From cult images to the cult of images: the case of Raphael's altarpieces SYLVIA FERINO 10. Co-ordinated altarpieces in Renaissance Venice: the progress of an ideal PETER HUMFREY 11. The relationship of El Greco's altarpieces to the mass of the Roman rite DAVID DAVIES 12. The altarpiece in Catholic Europe: post-Tridentine transformations A. D. WRIGHT

Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society

Long-awaited, this full-scale revision of Impressionism immediately supersedes all other studies in the field. Herbert rejuvenates even the most famous paintings by seeing them in a dense and flexible context touching on everything from the hierarchy of theater boxes to the role of beer-hall waitresses. His mind and eye are as supple as his lucid prose, and his command of sociological data is staggering. In this classic of art history, both art and history are triumphantly reborn.-Robert Rosenblum, New York University This remarkable book will transform the way we look at Impressionist art. The culmination of twenty years of research by a preeminent scholar in the field, it fundamentally revises the conventional view of the Impressionist movement and shows for the first time how it was fully integrated into the social and cultural life of the times. Robert L. Herbert explores the themes of leisure and entertainment that dominated the great years of Impressionist painting between 1865 and 1885. Cafes, opera houses, dance halls, theaters, racetracks, and vacations by the sea were the central subjects of the majority of these paintings, and Herbert relates these pursuits to the transformation of Paris under the Second Empire. Sumptuously illustrated with many of the most beautiful Impressionist images, both familiar and unfamiliar, this book presents provocative new interpretations of a wide range of famous masterpieces. Artists are seen to be active participants in, as well as objective witnesses to, contemporary life, and there are many profound insights into the social and cultural upheaval of the times. A social history of Impressionist art that is truly about the art, informed by a penetrating analysis of the ways in which its pictorial structure and qualities communicate its social content. Herbert brings that society to life, but above all he makes some of the most familiar and frequently discussed works in the history of art come wonderfully and vividly to life again.-Theodore Reff, Columbia University Robert L. Herbert is Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He is the author or editor of numerous books and articles on nineteenth-century French art.

Cube copying after cerebral damage.

The capacity of patients with cerebral lesions to copy a picture of a cube, as opposed to a nonrepresentational figure of similar structural complexity, was examined. Patients with copying disability showed greater impairment for the cube than the noncube whereas patients without copying impairment and controls performed equally on the two figures. It was concluded that the copying-deficit patients had particular difficulty in drawing 3-dimensional figures and that the copying deficit was not simply one of formulating the sequence of steps necessary to produce a complex as opposed to a simple abstract form. The results suggest that copying-disability patients may experience particular difficulty in encoding the pictorial structure of a model which depicts a three-dimensional object. The occurrence of errors of intellectual realism in cube copying (which also occur in children's drawings) was noted and it was suggested that the patients were experiencing difficulty in perceptually isolating the picture structure from the picture content.