“The true miracle of the language of art is not that it enables the artist to create the illusion of reality. It is that under the hands of a great master the image becomes translucent. In teaching us to see the visible world afresh, he gives us the illusion of looking into the invisible realms of the mind - if only we know, as Philostratus says, how to use our eyes.”

Art and Illusion (1960)

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Ernst Gombrich photo
Ernst Gombrich 16
art historian 1909–2001

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