Art, Representation In
Pictures form a subset of the artifacts that serve to represent particular things or kinds of thing, real or imagined, in a broad inclusive sense of the term represent. Like some of their fellow representations, but unlike others, pictures go on to attribute properties to the things or kinds they represent—properties that thereby constitute their pictorial content. How does this work? What distinguishes the representing done by pictures—depiction—from the representing done by various other familiar kinds of representation?
Plato and Pictorial Mimesis
Near the start of his case for banishing the poets from his ideally just city (Plato 1992, Republic X, 595a–598b), Plato urges that poetry and painting are analogous mimetic activities, structured so as to be able to imitate—approximately replicate—only a superficial and trivial part of the deep and serious things they profess to take as models. The argument employs a three-story metaphysics with Plato's Forms at the top, ordinary three-dimensional worldly particulars in the middle, and appearances (eidola, phainomena, phantasmata) at the bottom. Paradigm cases of appearances are shadows and reflections. Shifty, shimmery, and insubstantial, they owe such limited stability and stable apprehensibility as they to their owners, the three-dimensional worldly particulars from which they derive and to which they bear a real if limited resemblance.
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