Page - 269 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

HOW GOMBRICH WILL BE REMEMBERED 269 Gombrich drew attention to its dependence on The Story of Art and also on his early study of car- icature with Kris, of which only small fragments were every published.3 What is striking about the papers at the Warburg Institute is that they show that already by about 1940 Gombrich’s interests in perception and representation extended be- yond the immediate problems raised by carica- ture. They also demonstrate that these interests were closely connected with and perhaps stimu- lated by his thinking about iconography. In his own publications he kept his study of what we would call pre-iconographic description separate from his investigations of iconography and iconology, most of which were eventually collected in Symbolic Images, published in 1972. The majority of the articles in that book had been written in the 1940s or early 1950s, notably the studies of Botticelli’s Primavera and Pous- sin’s Orion. These were “learned picture puzzles”, problems that Gombrich found intriguing be- cause he believed that he had come across pos- sible solutions; but it is evident that even he was not always convinced by the results, especially in the case of his study of Botticelli. More impor- tant was the article that gave the book its title, Icones symbolicae, which first appeared in 1948. This dealt with the issues of interpretation raised by personifications, and clearly reflected Gom- brich’s thinking from the time he was preparing his book with Kurz. It includes on the second page a reference to the Introduction to Panof- sky’s Studies in Iconology. The article was much expanded for its republication in Symbolic Imag- es, which also included other previously unpub- lished material, namely the essay on the Stanza della Segnatura and the Introduction, on Aims and Limits of Iconography. In these pieces Gom- brich made his most effective and influential attack on the type of iconographical approach favoured by Panofsky and especially by his fol- lowers, but it is probably no accident that they first appeared in print after the death of Panof- sky, a scholar whom Gombrich certainly respect- ed, and who had been closely associated with the Warburg Institute in Hamburg. Gombrich’s main interest, as I have tried to show, was not in the study of iconography con- sidered in isolation, but in the investigation of the different techniques used by artists to represent the real world and of the ways in which images are interpreted by the viewer. This was the theme of Art and Illusion, which remains and surely will remain his most admired scholarly achievement. Ideas about perception have moved on consid- erably since the book’s appearance in 1960, so in scientific terms Gombrich’s theories may be in some respects out of date. But that does not greatly affect the importance of the book, which has as much to do with the questions that Gom- brich asked as with the answers that he provided. Chief among those questions is why the history of art is not a simple story of increasing mastery of the representation of nature, as Vasari im- plied. If artists at different periods used different methods for representing the world, something much more complicated must have been going on. It brings us back to the paradox of caricature: that resemblance need not be based on similar- ity. After reading Art and Illusion, the old and then dominant ideas about stylistic change being caused by some kind of general laws – perhaps of the kind suggested by Wölfflin – or as reflect- ing some spirit of the age, became impossible to maintain.  Gombrich looked at what artists, or at least representational artists, actually did, and at how their works were perceived, in a way that no art historian before him had attempted. He did not, of course, suppose that artis- tic change could be explained simply by the 3 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, London, 1960, pp. ix, xii. For publications on caricature under the joint authorship of Gombrich and Kris, see The Principles of Caricature, in: British Journal of Medical Psychology, XVII, 1938, pp. 319-342, and note 1 above.