Some thoughts that pertain to this week’s readings:

I’m fascinated by two concepts and am hoping to marry them together in this (brief) blog post. In Arnheim’s texts, he discusses how the vivid qualities of color in paintings decay over time due to pigmentation and the natural circumstances under which they are shown. Paintings, as we see them today, are “lies.” We can never hope to gain the full experience of, for example, Renaissance Fresco paintings simply because of preservation and restoration issues.

But what struck me beyond that, when marrying these concepts with Livingstone’s concise history of theories of seeing, is maybe we also have a different way of seeing that people did several hundreds of years ago. The eye, as Livingstone mentioned, has been actively changing and modifying throughout the processes of evolution. On a scientific level, how much has the eye evolved in the last centuries? And on a cultural level, how are do receive stimuli from the world around us that would force us to see differently? So even if we were to find some way to time travel back to the Renaissance, we might still see completely different paintings than those who viewed them during their first reveal.