Lambert Wiesing's The Visibility of the Image is the most important book on the history of art history I know. It gives six case studies of six art historians: Zimmermann, Riegl, Woelfflin, Fiedler, Merleau-Ponty and Morris, in search of the roots of a certain version of broadly formalist vision of art history and an account of our engagement with pictures. ... Read moreA must-read for anyone interested in any of these six authors but also for anyone interested in (vaguely formalist) art history and our engagement with pictures.
Bence Nanay, Professor of Philosophy and BOF Research Professor Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp (Belgium), and Senior Research Associate Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, UK
Wiesing's landmark study reveals the deep historical roots of contemporary debates in image theory while at the same time opening up new philosophical resources. The reader is granted access to a distinctive tradition of enquiry that erroneously enriches our understanding of image perception.
Jason Gaiger, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Oxford, UK
A must read for anyone interested in the philosophical questions arising from pictorial representation.
Dominic Gregory, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Sheffield, UK
In this fascinating work - part history of philosophically-minded aesthetics, part rumination on the nature of images, and part exploration of how the possibilities implicit in that nature have increasingly been exploited by new image-making technologies - Wiesing offers a deeply informed and theoretically searching exploration of one of the dominant phenomena of our age.
Robert Hopkins, Professor of Philosophy, New York University, USA
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