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Henri Zerner: Kubler and Focillon
Kubler and Focillon
(p. 631 – 636)

Henri Zerner

Kubler and Focillon
'A History of Things' as a Response to 'The Life of Forms'

PDF, 6 pages

  • physiology
  • gaze
  • history of science

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Henri Zerner

is a professor emeritus of the history of art and architecture at Harvard University. His work concerns the Renaissance in France, the Romantic Movement in Europe, the history of print media, and issues of historiography. He is currently preparing a study on Ingres’s Virgil Reading the Aeneid, a composition the artist kept pondering and revising from 1812 to 1865 in numerous variations and media.
Michael F. Zimmermann (ed.): Vision in Motion

Vision is not mere registration of what enters, via the gateway of our eyes, from the outside world into our inner consciousness. Understanding the act of seeing as mirroring the outside world in mental images overlooks its temporal aspect. From Berkeley to Helmholtz, from Goethe to Cézanne, new discourses based on the physiology of the sense organs lead to new conceptions of vision not only conceived of as a mental process, but as a cognitive activity. Even before Freud interpreted dreams, seeing was conceived of as accompanying our life even when we sleep. However, to understand even the stream of the sensations, we have to configure them in pictures. Since the 19th century, the media reflect about the confrontation of seeing as a diachronic activity and of perception as coded in synchronic images. The contributions to the volume investigate the opposition of the stream of sensations and the configuration of time – from early illustrations of plants to the avant-gardes, from gesture to cinema, from decapitation to dance, from David Hume to Bergson and Deleuze. The main objective is a critical examination of images rendering vision in motion, without reducing them to the temporality of narrative.

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