nm0114: anyway okay what i want to do today is to try and bring together 
various other points that i was making last time if you remember what i did 
last time was to circulate a whole series of different er illustrations of one 
sort or another and just to make a number of comments about them but not in any 
particularly systematic way well other than one thing which kind of emerged i 
think from last week which was that we saw that in a n-, number of different 
cases in the cases of Roman portrait busts of the first century B-C first 
century A-D in the case of early photography in the case of caricature in all 
of those cases it's by a calculated departure from exact resemblance that a 
higher degree of realism was achieved okay so interesting kind of preliminary 
conclusion by actually exaggerating for example the er folds of the face in the 
Roman portrait busts a greater effect of realism was achieved than the actual 
literal same shape that you get for example in 
Madame Tussaud's okay well now what i want to do then is to is to put together 
some of this into some sort of systematic set of ideas and what i'm going to do 
is i'm going to consider a number of theories which might be put forward in 
order to er explain what might be meant by realism in the visual arts so these 
are different theories which all address themselves to the question what is it 
for er a painting or a drawing or a visual representation to be realistic okay 
the f-, the first theory that i'm going to consider is as i said last week one 
that in fact no-, nobody has ever seriously put forward but an extraordinarily 
pervasive theory in the sense that remnants of it exist in a great deal of 
thinking about visual arts and about representation and a great deal of it 
exists as r-, remnants in various theories about er wha-, what it is to be 
realistic and this theory i'm going to call the resemblance theory or the copy 
theory so the 
resemblance theory or the copy theory says that a painting is realistic to the 
extent that it resembles what it's of okay that's the extremely simple theory 
so we could say that A is a realistic representation of B if A resembles B 
that's the theory now i've said that nobody has ever put this forward seriously 
as a theory b-, and that because as soon as we come to investigate it we find 
that there are a number of very significant drawbacks to the theory and it's 
these drawbacks which have prevented people from ever i think putting it 
forward seriously er and i'm going to run through some of the difficulties okay 
and i'm going to sort of store up perhaps the er well er i was going to store 
up the main ones till the end but i think they're all important difficulties 
the first thing is this that er resemblance and representation resemblance and 
representation just seem to be two different sorts of things for 
example er an object resembles itself to the maximum possible degree but very 
rarely resembles itself er resemblance unlike representation er is reflexive 
and resemblance unlike representation is symmetric er in other words what i 
mean by that okay what do i mean by saying that they are reflexive and they're 
s-, symmetric er resemblance is reflexive a thing resembles itself but 
representation isn't necessarily reflexive a thing doesn't necessarily 
represent itself it's symmetric if A resembles B then B resembles A but if A 
represents B B doesn't necessarily represent A if you think of a painting which 
is what we're talking about painting or drawing if you think of a painting of 
the Duke of Wellington Goya's famous painting of the Duke of Wellington er how 
many of you have seen the James Bond film Dr No in when er Bond gets to Dr No's 
er you know hideout eventually on the wall in his hideout is Goya's portrait of 
the Duke of Wellington don't know if 
you if you realized that that's what it was but at the time when the film was 
made which of course was quite a long time ago it's one was that the first 
sm0115: yeah 
nm0114: one yeah 
sm0115: sixty-six 
nm0114: er the er Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington had just been 
stolen from the National Gallery so it was a kind of in joke you know it was 
still missing at the time when the film was made it's subsequently been found 
so the joke was it was Dr No who had it anyway if we think of o-, a portrait 
but if you don't know the portrait you can imagine it okay y-, you can imagine 
a portrait of the the military hero the Duke of Wellington okay now it may be 
that the portrait resembles the Duke of Wellington if it's a good one maybe it 
does okay and it may be that the portrait represents the Duke of Wellington in 
fact it certainly does but the Duke of Wellington who if the portrait resembles 
him he resembles the portrait he doesn't represent the 
portrait do you understand it's just not symmetrical we wouldn't want to say we 
wouldn't want to say we don't say that the Duke of Wellington is a good 
representation of his portrait okay now of course there are reasons why we 
don't say that which we're which we're going to come on to in a minute or two 
er the things which resemble each other closely don't necessarily represent 
each other er for instance twins identical twins resemble each other closely 
but they don't necessarily represent each other one could represent the other 
but not necessarily or the cars off an assembly line might all resemble each 
other very much but one doesn't represent another so all of these are just 
thoughts about th-, you know that we haven't yet put our finger on exactly what 
it is but these are thoughts about the way in which resemblance and 
representation seem to be two different sorts of thing we're going to see what 
the difference is in just a second or two but 
there's a further problem and the further problem is this this theory assumes 
that there is some way of kind of telling whether A resembles B some way of 
telling as it were objectively whether A resembles B A is a realistic 
representation of B if A resembles B that assumes that we can tell in some way 
whether A resembles B and the problem there the problem there is this that 
resemblance turns out to be rather a kind of squishy notion when we come to 
look at it because the fact is that as riddles constantly suggest to us 
anything can resemble anything else in some way or other you know in what way 
is a raven like a scrubbing brush or something like that those sort of 
questions that come up in Alice in Wonderland and so on and if you're ingenious 
enough you can think of ways you know in what g-, in what way does George W 
Bush resemble a and then you know a-, put in anything and you come up with some 
witty answer so we can think of ways in 
which almost anything can resemble almost anything else and if that's true 
which i think it is in other words resemblance isn't as it were a single 
objective relationship that exists between two objects one object resembles 
another in some way or other if that's the case then it's not very good as a 
criterion of realistic representation okay that's pr-, some preliminary 
thoughts now we want to as i was indicating get on to perhaps the more serious 
points one reason why representation and resemblance aren't quite the same or 
aren't the same at all is that representation involves the notion of intention 
and that's what resemblance lacks so let's representation involves intention 
for one thing to represent another some sort of intention must be involved but 
resemblance as it were exists in the world as we might want to say quite apart 
from human thoughts whereas representation only exists via human intention so 
one thing represents another only if 
there's some sort of human intention involved now representation of course is a 
very very general term and representation can be involved in for instance 
parliamentary representation an M-P represents a constituency the M-P 
represents a constituency through a variety of different human intentions that 
isn't a natural relationship you understand what i'm trying to say there we 
don't pick somebody to be an M-P because they you know objectively represent 
their constituency you know oh they're they're really fat so they have the same 
shape as the South Riding of Yorkshire constituent it doesn't mean like that 
they don't it's not because there's some you know in nature existing 
resemblance between the M-P no that man represents the constituency because the 
constituents have chosen that man to represent the constituency okay and 
representation whether an M-P's representation or in language or in art is 
something that involves intention to some degree 
whereas resembles la-, resemblance lacks that and that's one reason why this is 
not going to be a good account there's some further reasons why it won't be a 
good account as well er and one of these is the problem of fictions 
the problem of fictions in giving any reasonable account of realistic 
representation we must take into account the fact that A can be a realistic 
representation of B where B is something that doesn't exist okay we can have 
you know a super-realistic drawing or painting of a unicorn for example or of 
Mr Pickwick or of a battle that never took place or of a landscape that never 
existed and i think that it's just straightforwardly true that we ascribe to 
various sorts of visual representation the label realistic even when what they 
are representations of never actually existed that's the problem of fictions 
and of course the resemblance or copy theory just can't account for that this 
painting is a realistic representation 
of Mr Pickwick if the painting resembles Mr Pickwick well if Mr Pickwick never 
existed the painting can't resemble him okay so the problem of fictions the 
copy theory just couldn't cope with er i think that's really enough on the 
resemblance theory er and i've given you enough reasons i think for supposing 
that it's not going to be er a good theory although of course as i say vestiges 
of it you know crop up all the time i mean it's the most obvious it's the most 
obvious explanation of realistic representation isn't it the painting is 
realistic 'cause it looks like the thing it resembles the thing you know it's 
the kind of the naive the obvious explanation but when we try and erect it into 
a theory it just doesn't seem to work okay so we've got to think of er some 
other theory and one of the most powerful theories that has been put forward 
and one of the most influential theories i've knocked my microphone off damaged 
your 
om0117: 
nm0114: yeah 
om0117: and then 
nm0114: must have got caught on something 
om0117: 
nm0114: can you put that over there okay 
sf0116: now when you take your glasses off it's going to go 
nm0114: ah 
thank you yes [laughter] [laughter] kind of imposssible knot [laugh] 
om0117: underneath the glasses then 
nm0114: well that might be a help yeah okay thanks okay this the theory i'm 
going to consider next i say one of the most influential theories in this area 
i'm going to call the deception theory and the deception theory says more or 
less you know to put it at its simplest that A is a realistic representation of 
B if the audience are deceived into thinking they are in the presence of B okay 
sm0118: well yeah but surely somebody looking at a painting of er Mr Pickwick 
doesn't believe they're actually in the presence of him 
nm0114: well 
sf0119: well but if you have a painting of a window for example in a room er 
and there is another window a real window similar you can you can confuse that 
painting of the real window 
sm0118: oh certainly i'm not saying it doesn't work for some things 
sf0119: 
sm0118: absolutely 
nm0114: well let's ju-, let's let's look at it okay i mean there m-, there may 
be things wrong with this theory 
but there may also be some advantages in this theory i think as a matter of 
fact that er there are some there are two at least big advantages of this 
theory the first is that actually just to deal with Ben's point directly i 
think that it it gets over the point of fictions because f-, for this reason 
that you can of course be deceived into thinking you're in the presence of a 
unicorn you could you could be okay it's possible but the painting couldn't 
actually resemble a unicorn because there isn't actually a uncorn so the 
somebody somebody could be deceived into thinking they were in the presence of 
Mr Pickwick i mean you might not be okay 
sm0118: 
nm0114: yeah it's okay so 
sm0118: 
nm0114: yeah so whether or not whether or not B has ever actually existed is 
quite a separate point from whether people can be deceived into thinking that 
they're seeing them you remember you know that case that that in the early 
years of this century about the er the two 
young girls who said that they met fairies at the bottom of the garden 
sf0120: 
sm0121: 
nm0114: that's right remember those and 
sf0122: it was on T-V recently 
nm0114: and m-, and many people were as it were deceived into thinking that 
they were seeing representations of fairies okay er i mean this is this is a 
slightly different from here what i'm pointing out is that it's possible for 
people to be deceived into thinking that they're seeing things which actually 
didn't exist okay so it deals with the it deals with the problem of fictions 
and i think another thing that it does another thing that this theory does is 
that it brings in a reference to the audience and i think that's a very 
important and i see that as an advantage of the deception theory and i see it 
as an advantage of the deception theory for this reason that notoriously 
standards of realism shift and change across time and across different 
societies and if we had a theory like the resemblance theory it seems to put 
forward as it were an absolute 
criterion for realism it becomes difficult to explain how these shifting 
standards of realism over time or over societies could occur but if we bring in 
reference to the audience then we've got built into this theory a way in which 
we can account for that because it may be that some people are deceived into 
thinking that they're in the presence of B and other people are not so for some 
people this painting may be realistic and for other people it won't be and that 
simply accords with the facts of art history for example i mean er famously in 
art history there are paintings which were when they were first painted and put 
put on exhibition were greeted by people as being highly unrealistic and which 
later came to be accepted as realistic and Turner is the perhaps the best 
example of that but it happens again and again and again in the history of art 
and that shifting standard of realism er can be explained if we introduced into 
the definition of what realism is some 
reference to the audience okay so two advantages it deals with the problems of 
the fictions and it it brings in a reference to the audience so helps to 
explain the shift in standards however it's got one i think obviou-, oh i 
should say that this theory the deception theory has been most forcefully er 
argued for er by Ernst Gombrich in a large number of books from the nineteen-
fifties onwards Ernst Gombrich one of the great writers on art and art 
criticism er and this is his theory that i'm essentially discussing now the 
deception theory okay so it's got some advantages but it's got one principal 
disadvantage and that is that it's obviously false i mean it's just 
straightforwardly obviously false it's obviously false when a painting that you 
think is realistic deceives you into thinking you're in the presence of the 
thing that's represented i mean that just is straightforwardly false you may 
think i think for example that Constable is frequently 
a highly realistic painter his painting of Salisbury Cathedral for example 
seems to me to be you know one of the masterpieces of of realism Jan van Eyck 
is a master of realism you know the painting of Salisbury Cathedral you looked 
at it 
sf0123: i'm sure we haven't 
nm0114: but we're not we're not for a moment look you know there's you know are 
you now thinking wow we didn't know Salisbury Cathedral was so close to namex 
no you're not you're not d-, you're not at all deceived into thinking that 
you're in the presence of Salisbury Cathedral so it's i-, so the 
straightforward disadvantage of this theory is that it's obviously false okay 
so we'll have to see what Gombrich says to that yeah 
sf0124: could you not instead of being in the presence of think that if i was 
standing at that particular point where it's drawn from that would be the same 
as the image that i would see on my retina 
nm0114: yes we could say that and so that's that suggestion i-, leads on to 
something i'm 
going to talk about in a minute which is the diaphanous plane experiment i'm 
going to explain that but i'm just writing it up to remind me to deal with that 
particular the particular point you've just rai-, the diaphanous plane 
experiment and that i will explain what that means okay er so first of all i 
should say having pointed out about a theory which has been so influentially 
argued in a number of very large books by a very famous art critic over many 
years having pointed out that it's just straightforwardly false you may think 
well goodness me i mean did this man devote his whole life to you know arguing 
for a theory that's just so obviously wrong well what he does is that he tries 
to introduce a series of qualifiers into the theory in various ways you know A 
is a realistic representation of B if the audience er er tend to be deceived 
into thinking that they're in the presence of B or phrases like that okay so 
what Gombrich 
says is okay now of course of course i agree that the conditions of staging for 
example of a painting i'll explain that in a minute conditions of staging the 
conditions of staging of a painting mean that we are very rarely deceived into 
thinking that we're ac-, we're actually in the presence of the thing depicted 
but there's all the same as it were a tendency to be deceived and that given 
the right conditions of staging we would be deceived so the idea behind the 
conditions of staging is this of course you didn't think when i showed you that 
painting that you were in the presence of Salisbury Cathedral course you didn't 
think that for one reason we're in namex for another reason you know i'm 
holding up this reproduction it's obviously a reproduction in a book and so on 
there are all sorts of things about the conditions of staging which you know 
mean that you're unlikely unless unhinged to think you're in the presence of 
Salisbury Cathedral but suppose 
if it this is a bit like your point little bit like it we're going to come more 
on more onto your point with the diaphanous plane experiment but suppose that 
we were in a house in Salisbury and suppose we got Constable's painting and 
suppose we put it at the end of a room and suppose we placed Constable's 
painting behind the leaded windows with curtains in front and suppose we 
arranged the lighting in the room such that you know when somebody came into 
the room and they looked down the end of the room they'll say oh i didn't 
realize you had a view of the cathedral from here okay now there would be a 
situation where somebody was deceived into thinking they were in the presence 
of the object depicted the conditions of staging were were right a little bit 
like your point 
okay so this tendency to be deceived there's a tendency to bes-, be deceived 
you know given the appropriate staging or setting now before i get on to 
talking in more detail about what lies behind this and the and the diaphanous 
plane experiment er there's something that i want to point out that [sigh] i i 
don't find that i don't find this qualification of the theory very satisfactory 
one reason is this that people can be deceived into thinking they're in the 
presence of an object in all sorts of different ways and all sorts of different 
ways that have nothing to do with the realism of the representation at all i 
mean for example er you wouldn't take you know that shape that i've just drawn 
on the board to be a realistic representation of a human being i take it i 
can't you know i i take i don't can't see how you could think that's a 
realistic representation of a human being but i can imagine conditions of 
staging such that you might be 
deceived into thinking that it was a human being E-G you know after a late 
night at the union we decide to break in to the Language Resource Centre and we 
do that and we creep upstairs and we try and find the room where the lectures 
are and it's all in the dark and we come into this room and it's very very dark 
there's a slight bit of illumination which illuminates the board and we go aagh 
[gasp] somebody there okay we're deceived into thinking that that shape is a 
person it could could happen couldn't it i mean or the fact that people are 
deceived tells us it seems to me more about them and their state and the 
conditions of staging than about the thing it is that deceives them 
sm0125: yeah as soon as you bring in a qualifier you've got two extremes of a 
totally unrealistic thing being able to be realistic okay 
nm0114: yeah 
sm0125: by this definition and a totally realistic thing being completely 
unrealistic by this definition 
nm0114: exactly it's the exactly 
sm0125: so it includes and excludes absolutely everything at the same time 
nm0114: that's 
right er it's a death by a thousand qualifications as it were as soon in you 
put in the qualification well it's well that part of it i think yeah okay now 
okay the first thing i want to go on to is the diaphanous plane experiment this 
was an extraordinarily pervasive idea in the fif-, late fifteenth sixteenth 
seventeenth centuries in fact up to the eighteenth or nineteenth century as 
well but particularly at that time the diaphanous plane experiment the idea of 
the diaphanous plane experiment is this how can we produce a perfectly 
realistic painting okay that there's the question how can we produce a 
perfectly realistic painting and in the history of western art after the 
secularization of the subject matter of art and after the introduction of 
linear perspective as a mode of representation then the idea of realistic 
representation became very important in the minds of many artists and they 
wanted 
to produce paintings that were as realistic as possible so what would be the 
means of producing the most realistic possible painting and the an idea which 
many of them had i think it's possible but i can't remember whether i handed 
round er i don't 
sm0126: sorry did you say this was 
nm0114: this this is an idea which started in the in the fifteenth century for 
instance albe-, Albrecht Dürer 
sm0127: 
nm0114: exact contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci Dürer er yeah er for example 
was taken by this idea as was Vermeer great er Flemish artist but it w-, it 
went through i mean the point then was it went right through in a way to er the 
early nineteenth century as well er here is er a woodcut of somebody carrying 
out the diaphanous plane experiment so you can pass that around and i'll talk 
about it now the idea of it is this okay in order to produce a perfectly 
realistic representation what we do is we get the scene that we want to 
represent for example er if i take this building whatever that is what's that 
building is that is er 
Animal and Microbial Sciences okay i want to produce a perfectly realistic 
representation of that building then what i do is i get between me and the 
building a diaphanous diaphanous meaning transparent diaphanous is a phrase 
which is a a word which is most often used now to apply to women's dresses a 
diaphanous dress meaning a kind of transparent you know Jennifer Lopez type 
dress or whatever [laughter] er but it just means transparent so we get a 
transparent plane and by plane we just mean a a plane you know flat surface and 
okay so a very good example of a diaphanous plane is precisely a piece of glass 
okay so there is a diaphanous plane so between us and the scene we want to 
represent is a diaphanous plane the piece of glass 
sm0127: 
nm0114: and then what i do is this just listen to the technique involved in the 
diaphanous plane experiment what i do is i mix my paints and i take some point 
on the diaphanous plane and what i do is i put a 
blob of paint we can imagine this being done you know blob of paint by blob of 
paint you know tiny little point like that i put a blob of paint which then 
exactly matches the colour of what lies behind it what i see behind it okay so 
i mix my paints in such a way that at each stage when i put a blob of paint on 
the piece of glass it then covers up what lies behind it I-E Animal and 
Microbial Sciences building but also is exactly the same colour as and i just 
make sure that i match all the colours and then when i've filled the diaphanous 
plane with paint what i have is something that conceals what lies behind it but 
exactly matches what lies behind it such that if i've done this if i've 
performed this experiment successfully such that we can't tell the diaphanous 
plane as it were is is now metaphorically still diaphanous you know it it isn't 
any longer really transparent because i've put paint on it but it's as if it 
were still transparent 
because we can't tell looking at it that it covers what it conceals because it 
it covers and exactly matches what it conceals okay that's the idea of the 
diaphanous plane experiment and throughout i i've come back in a minute 
sm0127: 
nm0114: and throughout the er er fifteenth century up to the nineteenth century 
this remained a kind of ideal of er the perfectly realistic painting and indeed 
the er development of the camera er arose out of such a set of ideas i don't i 
haven't got time to go into this now but i mean it would be interesting to talk 
about this but the the camera yeah it's interesting this isn't it why why do we 
call an apparatus for taking photographs with the Italian or Latin name for a 
room because that's what camera is camera's Latin for room well the reason is 
this that in the sixteenth seventeenth eighteenth century art people very often 
had camera obscuras er there still are camera obscuras there's one in Edinburgh 
has anybody seen the camera obscura in 
Edinburgh 
sf0128: yeah 
nm0114: and a camera obscura is a darkened room and that's what it actually 
literally means camera obscura a darkened room and in within the darkened room 
you have thrown onto a wall or onto a table depe-, depending where the thing is 
you have thrown onto a wall or a table an image which comes into the room by 
means of a say a pinhole of light or perhaps a a lens which then casts an image 
of what lights lies outside the room onto the table and the camera obscura in 
Edinburgh is indeed a fascinating thing because you can go into that room and 
with the powerf-, powerful lens that they have they can show you in this 
darkened room the whole of Edinburgh the camera obscura is in a high point near 
the castle and they can rotate round at the top of this r-, room a p-, a 
powerful telescope and they can kind of home in on you know a couple who are 
sitting together a mile away from this room in a on a chair in Princes Street 
Gardens and you can read the 
headlines on their papers and so on it's such a kind of fantastic thing there 
on the table in front of you are these people an amazing idea okay and artists 
wanted to use the camera obscura to help them produce paintings and so what 
they did was that they produced portable camera obscuras this one in Edinburgh 
is a large room but you produce a portable camera obscura my grandfather was an 
artist and he had a portable camera obscura and what it what it consisted of 
was a was a wooden box and that's about the actual size of one side of the 
wooden box in the front of which was a lens which you could rotate around and 
then there was a a lid that you could lift up and you'd put a sort of black 
cloak around you so you could then look in to this er er machine and you 
there's a piece of ground glass there and an image of what lay outside would be 
formed on this ground glass and you could then look down onto the ground glass 
and see you know the image of the scenes around you and 
then if you wanted you could put a piece of er fairly thin paper on top of that 
and draw the outlines of objects and so you know produce a a good sketch of the 
scene that you were looking at and so that was were a portable camera obscura 
and because people in the early nineteenth century became interested in the 
idea of somehow other fixing this image that the camera started they started 
treating the you know the paper here with chemicals such that the images which 
were put onto the paper were kept permanent and that was how the camera started 
that's why the camera's called a camera that's why it's called a room 'cause it 
developed out of the camera obscura the portable camera obscura and that itself 
out of the darkened room okay and that's just m-, er by the way now okay ba-, 
Ben what was it what were you going to say 
sm0129: you'll probably get onto it 
nm0114: yeah 
sm0129: i'll leave you to go before i mention 
nm0114: all right okay all right 
sm0129: yeah 
nm0114: but there's a problem there's a problem with the 
diaphanous plane experiment in fact there are whole series of problems and 
interestingly enough it's a project which you can't actually succeed in 
carrying out i'm not i'm not saying it's very difficult to carry out i'm saying 
you can't carry it out it's actually impossible to produce by this means er a 
perfectly realistic representation of the scene which lies behind and i'm going 
to try to explain some of the difficulties okay we're starting with some of the 
more obvious difficulties the first thing is this that of course if i actually 
put my finger on the glass which i am doing now and i put it such that it is 
trying to cover that window there what actually is happening is that i see two 
images of my finger when i concentrate on the on the window i see two images of 
my finger which lie either side of that window 'cause i've got two eyes and the 
finger which is near me when i then when i then focus on the thing which is 
further away i see two fingers you under-, you understand what i'm saying there 
so when i put a blob of paint where my finger is which bit of what lies behind 
should it cover up there are two bits which it covers up oh well look you might 
say look [laugh] it's not a problem close one eye okay so we've got to close 
one eye the next thing is if i close one eye and cover up a spot there and then 
look up there okay if i look up at the corner of the building i can see in my 
peripheral vision that the spot which i put on the glass is now no longer 
covering what it previously covered in other words there's an effect of 
parallax which e-, which exists okay er another problem when i when i look at 
the building A-M-S what i see is in focus when i look at my finger what i see 
is no longer in focus okay do i paint A-M-S in focus or not in focus you 
understand as i as i look now at that building as i look at the building itself 
i see something which is in focus 'cause my eye is adapting to this distant 
vision but then when i now focus on 
the diaphanous plane on which i'm going to put paint what lies behind is now no 
longer in focus so do i paint what's in focus or what's not s-, not in focus er 
another another problem is this if you think what happens when you look at a 
scene if you look at a scene from a fixed position with one eye with just a 
fixed focus which is what we're now being required to do to perform this 
unusual experiment then i mean just think about this right i'm i'm looking i'm 
looking at the A-M-S building and let's suppose i'm actually focusing on part 
of the building the top right hand corner of one of the small slit-like windows 
there and i'm looking at that now th-, think of how one sees the rest of the 
building as you look at that do you understand what i'm getting at here a well 
known thing about vision about peripheral vision d-, a similar point is this if 
you if you focus on something that's in front of you like that and you hold up 
a hand here i'm aware of this hand but 
i'm aware of it in a very kind of imprecise way yeah just try doing it i mean 
you all must know this you know i couldn't say for example how many fingers are 
being held up except for that is my hand so i know [laughter] okay in other 
words the nature of human vision is such that in the centre of the field of 
vision we have a detailed er piece which is in focus and as we get more and 
more towards the periphery we have less detail more as it were blurred vision 
sf0130: 
nm0114: now should should the perfectly realistic diaphanous plane experiment 
should that result in a painting which is like that which is you know perfectly 
in focus in the middle but more and more blurred as we get towards the outside 
i did actually in the things i passed round to you i showed you but didn't 
comment on it er a picture which was like that using a particular kind of 
advertising technique okay this picture here if you look at that you'll see 
that this area here is sharply in 
focus and as we get more towards the outside of it for example the top of the 
woman's head and the outside of it it's less and less in focus quite a common 
technique for fashion photography in fact sometimes photographers actually 
smear the edge of the lens with Vaseline in order to get this kind of effect 
and sometimes can be done just with focusing and so on okay will our diaphanous 
plane experiment result in a picture like that because if it does here's the 
paradox if it does it won't actually look realistic because when we look at it 
just think about this a neat point when we look at it if you look at the centre 
of such a painting where it is in focus okay then the periphery of the painting 
will be doubly out of focus once because it actually is out of focus and once 
because of the nature of your vision do you understand what i'm saying here if 
the whole of that picture were in focus then if you looked at the centre of it 
the bit in the centre would in your field of 
vision be in focus and the surrounding bit of it would be blurred the 
peripheral vision would be blurred but in this we have that kind of squared so 
should a perfectly realistic painting be one that's in focus all over which our 
field of vision never is or should it be one which is like our field of vision 
in which case when we look at the perfectly realistic painting it doesn't look 
at all realistic okay now these are some of the reasons why the diaphanous 
plane experiment actually turns out to be a kind of you know impossible dream 
Ben were you going to kind of say something different 
sm0129: just think that we 
nm0114: all right all right 
sm0129: and anyway i mean i was going to sort of comment about stereoscopy and 
nm0114: mm 
sm0129: and stuff 
nm0114: mm 
sm0129: but but that's just an extrapolation of what you've said anyway so 
nm0114: right okay okay and there's an additional er so that's some thoughts 
for you but there's an additional extra reason of course that's worth 
commenting on i suppose which is that no realistic painting is going to deceive 
us for very long of course paintings can sometimes deceive us when paintings do 
deceive us it's usually something to do more with our expectations and 
conditions of staging than it is to do with the realism of them er for example 
here here's a a a real example [cough] in the er the Vatican there's a series 
of portraits of former popes and on one of these portraits of one of the former 
popes there is on the the pope's er robe there's a fly painted and so many 
people as they've walked along have seen the fly and have gone onto the corner 
of the painting they've actually now put on the corner of the painting a piece 
of plastic [laughter] it doesn't have glass on it otherwise but they've put it 
on the corner of the painting a piece of plastic to prevent damage to the 
painting now the point i want to make about that is not is is this it's not 
that that painting of a fly is particularly realistic okay it's just that the 
conditions of staging are such that people when they see the fly there think 
it's a real fly they just don't expect to see a fly 
on the robe of a cardinal or a pope 
sf0132: 
nm0114: yeah so 
sf0133: i've got a trailer 
nm0114: mm 
sf0133: wasp on it and people keep going 
nm0114: [laughter] oh right yes yes [laughter] very similar so er pic-, the so 
right so people can sometimes be deceived by a painting when they are it's not 
so much to do with the realism of the painting more to do with some other set 
of expectations that they have but even when people are deceived by a painting 
[cough] they're not deceived for very long even if even if we were which i 
think is impossible to succeed in producing the diaphanous plane perfect 
representation it wouldn't deceive us for very long at all for as long as we 
stood in one position with one eye open with a fixed direction of gaze we might 
think gosh there's the A-M-S building but as soon as we waver slightly open the 
other eye change our direction of gaze move any of those things the illusion is 
destroyed it immediately becomes apparent that this is a painting and not the 
real thing you unders-, so er and and that's just i 
mean that's just what people do people don't stand with a fixed focus with one 
direction of gaze with one eye open for hours on end so even realistic 
paintings 
sf0134: 
nm0114: mm 
sf0134: it's nothing but just the list sounds funny 
nm0114: yes 
sf0134: you just imagine people standing with one leg 
nm0114: yeah [laughter] 
sf0134: 
nm0114: okay now finally on the deception theory it seems to me that there's a 
there's another reason why the deception theory has to be rejected i mean all 
the reasons we've suggested so far are perfectly good reasons but there's 
another reason for the deception theory to be rejected it's simply as i've put 
here the wrong sort of explanation and i want to emphasize this the wrong sort 
of explanation it simply is untrue to our experience of art in this way what 
interests us and intrigues us about art in general and about realistic art in 
particular is the way in which one thing can be something else er when we look 
at a painting of a vase of flowers a a a say a late eighteenth century French 
painting a vase of flowers you can you imagine 
i don't know if you think of tho-, if you know these paintings but the in the 
late eighteenth century France there was a whole er kind of a still still life 
type of thing we'd have a vase of flowers and maybe in front of the vase of 
flowers you might have a selection of fruit maybe some dead game or something 
like that as well that kind of thing a kind of still life idea when we when we 
look at one of those paintings one thing that interests us and and intrigues us 
is the way in which oil paint on canvas can be oil paint on canvas and be or 
represent you know flowers and fruit and the dead animal that's that's what's 
exciting about art if if the true explanation of realism was that we were being 
deceived it would remove the point of art the painting itself would as it were 
disappear from view you know the only the only reason then why we might be 
interested in the in the painting of a vase of flowers was if we were 
interested in the vase of flowers but i think 
that we're interested in art because we're interested in one thing standing for 
another representing another that's what we find intriguing interesting about 
art so i think it's the wrong sort of explanation i-, as it were subverts the 
whole point of what interests us most about art so we have to reject i think 
the deception theory er i will mention just extremely briefly two further 
possible theories both of which have been fairly influential in last fifty 
years or so one of them we might call er er information theory 
in this theory A is a realistic representation of B to the extent that it gives 
us information about B or more information it gives the more realistic it is 
[cough] now this can er this doesn't suffer from the problem of fictions 
because we could be given information about you know a unicorn even though a 
unicorn doesn't exist er it doesn't fall foul of the the way in which in the 
deception theory this could be a realistic representation of a human being 
because this gives us very little information about the person it it it accords 
with some of the ideas we might have about realism you know that a highly 
realistic painting you know does give us a lot of information a Jan van Eyck 
painting for example you know van Eyck's paintings very very realistic so 
realistic you can take a magnifying glass and look at them and you can see you 
know the individual blades of grass he often painted 
with a single hair to get all the detail in 
sm0135: last week 
nm0114: yes mm-hmm so er it gets at that but it doesn't seem to be right at 
least as it is because giving us information well information can be given in 
all sorts of different ways this doesn't seem to get at the kind of pictorial 
nature of pictorial art when i say information can be given in all sorts of 
ways information could be given in in coded ways er for instance er a 
photograph and the negative of a photograph could each give us the same amount 
of information in fact as the positive is generated from the negative the 
positive can't give us more information it gives us just the same information 
the negative does we wouldn't be inclined to say that the negative was a 
realistic representation of the thing i th-, i'm just trying to get at an idea 
there or take another example suppose we have er thi-, think of think if you've 
got some super-duper computer and you've got some wonderful er you 
know f-, photo editor type program and you've got a super new printer which 
prints out to high resolution and you you print out a high resolution copy of a 
painting say a a van Eyck or a Constable to take two examples we've been 
talking about okay now at some stage inside your computer in order d-, to do 
all of this the information which is contained in the thing that you print out 
has been encoded in some way in some digital way there could for example be a 
program we could produce a program for printing out the van Eyck painting you 
know er just to st-, step back a stage i've been lecturing for so long at this 
university that er i thought of this same point even before computers were 
common er when i first came to this university nobody had ever seen a computer 
that's literally true there was a computer in the university and it was in 
Whiteknights House and people from all over the university used to carry kind 
of shoeboxes full of punched cards to give in 
and then a week later they would get the the printout of what they were doing 
so that was just was incredible nobody had actually seen a computer at all 
anyway when i was talking about this sort of thing then i used a different 
example which was of n-, you know the way in which people with typewriters th-, 
those now as it s-, seemed rather kind of antique instruments some people used 
to be able to type and as the thing came out of the back of the typewriter you 
get a picture of the Mona Lisa 
sm0136: mm 
nm0114: have you ever seen that and you know there's a way of giving a kind of 
program for that like rather like a knitting pattern you know type er twenty-
one Ws followed by thirty-six Xs followed by fourteen Is followed by you know 
you could give a you could give a line by line program and if you type all 
those letters in the way that it said what would come out would be something 
rather like the Frank Zappa thing i showed last week or be something which when 
you held it up would look like the Mona Lisa okay you understand so that's the 
kind of precomputer example of the program okay in both cases what you have is 
a program which when this is carried out in some way or other results in an 
image now the point i'm making is this that the program contains it gives us in 
a certain way the same information as the picture does but we wouldn't call the 
program a realistic representation or would we and i'm just i'm going to 
actually take a break in just two or three minutes and i've s-, 
sf0137: 
nm0114: but wait wait there's just just an idea or would we listen couldn't 
there be some nerdy people who are so used to dealing with computer programs 
that when they see a program a line by line program 
sf0138: program 
nm0114: they'll they'll even one they've never seen before they'll say wow 
that's a fantastic image of so and so look if that seems extraordinary let me 
put two ideas to you if that seems an extraordinary idea to 
somebody who was entirely unacquainted with the conventions of musical notation 
it would seem absolutely extraordinary that somebody could look at that and say 
as somebody who was musically competent and could read music sight read music 
well somebody could look at that and say gosh that's a beautiful tune i mean 
people do that don't they when they have composition competitions then people 
who are composers send in scores and the judges don't get all of these things 
performed by orchestras they sit and they look at the scores and they say ah 
it's wonderful and so on they can do that is that any more extraordinary what 
i'm than what i'm saying or take another example another even more bizarre 
example perhaps if we're thinking of the way in which information is en-, 
encoded and can be read here information about the sound is encoded in a 
certain sort of way and can be read by some people in such a way that they as 
it were are directly in contact with the sound i'm 
supposing that there might be a way in which information could be encoded in a 
computer program so that people when they see the computer program as it were 
don't see the computer program they see the picture as it were through the 
computer program here's another example [cough] there was a guy who used to 
appear on television long time ago ninety-sixties round about then and he had 
this particular trick and what people would do would be to give him records 
vinyl records from which the label and the middle had been removed and he'd 
look at the vinyl record and he would say what the piece of music was okay you 
know from the kind of you know the the the ridges er you know how you know how 
a vinyl will look there's a certain kind of pattern of ridges on it [laughter] 
and what's more he would even i mean he would even get cocky as it were he'd 
say oh yes that's Beethoven's ninth symphony and it's in the Toscanini version 
nineteen-forty-seven 
version and wh-, and so on you know this kind of thing er as in so many things 
it turned out in the end to be kind of [laughter] a fraud [laughter] but look 
there's no reason i mean there's certainly n-, no reason in principle why 
somebody couldn't do that is there there's no reason in principle why somebody 
couldn't get just so used to looking at vinyl records and so used to 
associating them with the sounds that they produced that they could do 
something like that i mean you could certainly come to recognize the records in 
your own collection like that and if the labels fell off you could probably 
without having to play them you know if if you really looked at them very often 
you could do that and i don't see any reason why somebody couldn't get an 
expert at that so what i'm thinking 
of here is that information can be encoded in a variety of different ways but 
what matters is not so much the information but this little phrase here gives 
us there's something i-, the information theory doesn't doesn't on its own 
quite get at something which is important it isn't just that a realistic 
representation contains information [cough] but that it gives us the 
information it yields that information easily for instance Turner's paintings 
people couldn't read Turner's paintings originally but they came to be able to 
read them they came to be able to understand that they were of a storm at sea 
and so on the same information was contained in the 
painting before and after they were able to do it but that little phrase gives 
us it needs needs some expansion here it's to do with how easily the 
information er yields itself so a kind of adaptation of the information theory 
might be er information theory plus i think can't think of a very good way to 
put it but er 
sm0139: 
nm0114: easily yielded okay and the person who who's most forcefully advocated 
that is Nelson Goodman a very important philosopher of art and philosopher in 
general okay i haven't got time to say much more about that so what we'll do is 
we'll take a break now for about ten minutes and then we'll come back and have 
questions and discussion okay