书名：Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Prehistory to Perspective / 可视性和虚拟性：从史前到未来的图像  
定价：420.0  
ISBN：9780691171944  
作者：Whitney Davis  
版次：1  
出版时间：2017-01  

内容提要：  

书名：Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Prehistory to Perspective

作者：Whitney Davis

出版：Princeton University Press，2017

装帧：精装，368页

语种：英文

This book builds on the groundbreaking theoretical framework established in Whitney Davis’s acclaimed previous book, A General Theory of Visual Culture, in which he shows how certain culturally constituted aspects of artifacts and pictures are visible to informed viewers. Here, Davis uses revealing archaeological and historical case studies to further develop his theory, presenting an exacting new account of the interaction that occurs when a viewer looks at a picture.

Davis argues that pictoriality—the depiction intended by its maker to be seen—emerges at a particular standpoint in space and time. Reconstruction of this standpoint is the first step of the art historian’s craft. Because standpoints are inherently mutable and mobile, pictoriality constantly shifts in form and possible meaning. To capture this complexity, Davis develops new concepts of radical pictorial ambiguity, including “bivisibility” (the fact that pictures can always be seen in ways other than intended), pictorial naturalism, and the behavior of pictures under changing angles of view. He then applies these concepts to four cases—Paleolithic cave painting; ancient Egyptian tomb decoration; classical Greek architectural sculpture, with a focus on the Parthenon frieze; and Renaissance perspective as invented by Brunelleschi.

A profound new theory of the work of both makers and viewers by one of the discipline’s most esteemed and engaged thinkers, Visuality and Virtuality is essential reading for art historians, architects, archaeologists, and philosophers of art and visual theory.