The Art Bulletin

Neo-Assyrian relief sculpture is characterized by a distinctive network of visual formulas that functions almost like script, analogous to the hieroglyphic nature of Egyptian art. This quality of Assyrian art has not been studied thoroughly by scholars, who have mostly concentrated on visual narrative. On examination, it appears that the formulaic communication system of Assyrian art constitutes a highly sophisticated semiotic program that references important philosophical and religious concepts pertaining to Assyrian kingship. The art of Ashurnasirpal II can be seen as the apogee of the use of this semiotic, which takes different forms in the arts of later Assyrian kings.

Visual practices play a role in the making of scientific careers and theories that is not always straightforward. Several portraits of the Manchester surgeon Charles White, along with scientific illustrations associated with him, interfered with Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of John Hunter in ways that reveal the messy diversity of practices, uses, and contexts of images during the Enlightenment. The increased mobility of Enlightenment visual culture straddled the fields of art and science, reflected their social economies, and enabled images to maintain a meaningful role simultaneously in systems of knowing, projects of professional empowerment, and forms of political commentary.

Ferdinand Gaillard (1834–1887) was acclaimed as the last major practitioner in France of the reproductive engraving. Although he used the traditional burin, his techniques presented a challenge to his contemporaries. His versions of paintings by Bellini, Ingres, and van Eyck were noted for their historicist flavor, appropriate to the taste of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, where they were published. His rendering of sculptures by Donatello and his late portraits after his own drawings invited direct comparison with photographic methods of reproduction then being developed. Yet this connection should be measured against a self-consciousness in his working procedures characteristic of modernism.

In late-nineteenth-century Germany, Einfühlung, or empathy (literally, “feeling into”) described an individual spectator’s active perceptual experience—both haptic and optical—of an image, object, or spatial environment. Critique from within the discourse and a loss of interest among art historians and psychologists around 1900 preceded more forceful rejections by Wilhelm Worringer in 1908 and, later, Bertolt Brecht. The concept’s critical history reveals and reflects disciplinary fractures; a rejection of narrative with the birth of visual abstraction; and widespread transformations, with the birth of cinema, in the objects of spectatorship and the status of spectators themselves.