1. What are the important differences between visual representation and picturing?
2. Assuming that painters engage in imitation, Plato observes that you can make images of “yourself and the other animals, manufactured items, plants, and everything else” by holding up a mirror. What is the relationship between the mirror image and what it shows? Does Plato’s point demonstrate that the ability to make pictures is a trivial accomplishment?
3. An architect is designing a building. Why does the architect construct a three-dimensional model of the building as a supplement to a series of drawings of it? How does the activity of model building suggest ways in which picturing is a unique mode of visual representation? Architects frequently use so-called “3D” computer software to create simulated movement through their designs. To what degree can these videos replace three-dimensional models?
4. Choose a visual artwork that pictures a recognizable subject. Explain the difference between accounting for this relationship in terms of recognitional and in terms of experiential resemblance.
For this question, choose a painting or non-photograph depicting something from every day life, such as a still life of fruit, flowers, or other collection of items, or a landscape, seascape, or city scape. How does your experience of the painting differ from looking what is being shown in real life?
5. Does an artist’s intention to portray one person rather than another impose a standard of correctness for interpretation of the resulting portrait? Are paintings and photographs different in this respect?
6. Are there any artworks that lack historically emergent properties, such that their appreciation does not require knowledge of the work’s historical origins? As a test of this idea, select several examples of visual art and then decide whether their meanings would change if they came from different cultures or were created in different historical eras.
Some good historical artworks to choose from might be:
Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emmanuel Leutz
Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix
The Raft of the Medusa by Theodore Gericault
The Death of Marat by Jacque-Louis David
The Bulls and the Bears by William Hobrook Beard
The Death of General Wolfe by Benjamin West
