A picture refers to its object through a non-linguistic[citation needed] two-dimensional scheme, and is distinct from writing or notation.
Pictures are made with various materials and techniques, such as painting, drawing, or prints (including photography and movies) mosaics, tapestries, stained glass, and collages of unusual and disparate elements.
Occasionally, picture-like features may be recognised in simple inkblots, accidental stains, peculiar clouds or a glimpse of the moon, but these are special cases, and it is controversial whether they count as genuine instances of depiction.
[1] Similarly, sculpture and theatrical performances are sometimes said to depict, but this requires a broad understanding of 'depict', as simply designating a form of representation that is not linguistic or notational.
In a later study by John Willats (1997)[9] on the variety and development of picture planes, Gombrich's views on the greater realism of perspective underpin many crucial findings.
He pointedly rejects any seeds of illusion or substitution and allows that a picture represents when two sets of invariants are displayed.
The appeal to broader psychological factors in qualifying depictive resemblance is echoed in the theories of philosophers such as Robert Hopkins,[16] Flint Schier[17] and Kendall Walton.
Of course recognition allows a great deal more than that – books teaching children to read often introduce them to many exotic creatures such as a kangaroo or armadillo through illustrations.
He denies resemblance as either necessary or sufficient condition for depiction but surprisingly, allows that it arises and fluctuates as a matter of usage or familiarity.
Denotation is divided between description, covering writing and extending to more discursive notation including music and dance scores, to depiction at greatest remove.
This is a point tacitly acknowledged by Goodman, conceding firstly that density is the antithesis of notation[22] and later that lack of differentiation may actually permit resemblance.
Nevertheless, Goodman's framework is revisited by philosopher John Kulvicki[24] and applied by art historian James Elkins[25] to an array of hybrid artefacts, combining picture, pattern and notation.
Pictorial semiotics aims for just the kind of integration of depiction with notation undertaken by Goodman, but fails to identify his requirements for syntax and semantics.
It seeks to apply the model of structural linguistics, to reveal core meanings and permutations for pictures of all kinds, but stalls in identifying constituent elements of reference, or as semioticians prefer, 'signification'.
Older practitioners, such as Roland Barthes[27] and Umberto Eco[28] variously shift analysis to underlying 'connotations' for an object depicted or concentrate on description of purported content at the expense of more medium-specific meaning.
A later adherent, Göran Sonesson,[29][30] rejects Goodman's terms for syntax and semantics as alien to linguistics, no more than an ideal and turns instead to the findings of perceptual psychologists, such as J. M. Kennedy,[31] N. H. Freeman[32][33] and David Marr[34][35] in order to detect underlying structure.
He rejects resemblance and illusion as incompatible with the ambiguities and interpretation available to pictures and is also critical of the inflexible nature of structuralist analysis.
Deixis is taken as the rhetoric of the narrator, indicating the presence of the speaker in a discourse, a bodily or physical aspect as well as an explicit temporal dimension.
Where present, details to materials indicate how long and in what way the depiction was made, where absent, a telling suppression or prolonging of the act.
The distinction attempts to account for the 'plastic' or medium-specific qualities absent from earlier semiotic analyses and somewhat approximates the 'indexic' aspect to signs introduced by Peirce.
Deixis offers a more elaborate account of the picture surface and broad differences to expression and application but cannot qualify resemblance.
But iconography's findings take a rather recondite view of content, are often based on subtle literary, historical and cultural allusion and highlight a sharp difference in terms of resemblance, optical accuracy or intuitive illusion.
The cultural scholar W. J. T. Mitchell[41][42][43] looks to ideology to determine resemblance and depiction as acknowledgement of shifts in relations there, albeit by an unspecified scheme or notation.
[44] These include the equipment used to create the depiction, the creator's intent, vantage point, mobility, proximity, publication format, among others, and, when dealing with human subjects, their potential desire for impression management.