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Books 159 during his stay in Venice or that he had not seen Viator’s work, even though a pirated edition appeared in Nuremburg in 1509? Ivins’ answer is that he had seen both the Alberti and Viator constructions and understood neither and that in his erroneous description he has confused elements of the two. Ivins’paper wasfirstpublished in 1938in a limited edition. It is a fascinating piece of detective work in art history and was well worth reprinting. This book includes also reproductions of the first two editions (1505 and 1509,Toul) of Viator’s work. In the secondedition, the virtually unaltered Latin text is supplemented by a French gloss and some of the illustrations are replaced by new ones. There seems little justification for 20 illustrations to appear twice or for the very high price of the book. Image, Object and Illusion: Readings from Scientific American. Richard Held, ed. Freeman, Reading, England, 1975. 137 pp., illus. Paper, E2.00. Reviewed by Jan B.Deregowski* This collection of 12 articles from Scientific American is divided into three sections dealing respectively with (1) Colour and Contrast, (2) Spatial Dimensions of Vision and (3) Form Analysis. These are preceded by an Introduction by Held and a general paper on The Process of Vision by Neisser. In addition, each section has its own short introduction that provides a background for the articles,mentioning brieflytheir significance. The texts, in the ScientiJic American tradition, are eminently readable and richly illustrated. They deal with the empirical studies of visual phenomena rather than with a phenomenological analysis of percepts and, assuch, provide an insight into how things work in art but not why they work. The strange aberrations called visual illusions are discussedby Gregory, who argues convincingly for his hypothesis of misapplied constancy scaling. Attneave is equally persuasive in advocatingthat a multistable visualmechanism is responsible for those changes in an unchanging environment that are sometimes observed, for example, the illusion that an anemometer appears to change its direction of rotation in a wind of unvarying direction and the illusion in Salvador Dali’s ‘Slave Market with Apparition of the Invisible Bust of Voltaire’. These two articles canbeconsidered asthemiddle layersof the book, sincethey deal with more global phenomena than those in Colour and Contrast (dealt with by Ratlif), Perception of Neutral Colours (Wallach), The Perception of Transparency (Metelli) and Texture and Visual Perception (Julesz). Perception of Faces (Harmon) and Perception of Disoriented Figures (Rocks) are articles of special interest to students of art. The article on eye movements (Norton and Stork) deals both with the noveltechnique evolvedfor their measurement and with some of the findings. The methods of catching the will-0’-thewisp , as Doob once called it, of visual phenomena, Eidetic Imagery are described by Haber. My article on the influence of culture upon visual perception completes the book of selections. There isan inherent danger in publishing collections of articles by different authors, for in the attempt to please many the collection satisfies but few. In this case, the danger has been avoided because topics are confined to a relatively narrow subjectarea; the articleswereprepared duringthe lastdecade and they treat novel trends in the study of perception. Although the book isprimarily directed to students of visual perception, artists can learn much from it. Theory and Practiceof Color: A Color Theory Based on Laws of Perception. Frans Gerritsen. Studio Vista, London, 1975. 179 pp., illus. f15.00. Color: Origin, System and U s e s . Harald Kiippers. Trans. from German by F. Bradley. Van Nostrand Reinhold, London, 1973. 155 pp., illus. E8.50. Reviewed by Ralph Brocklebank** These two lavishly produced books have much in common. At first glance, the numerous colour plates seem to promise an exciting treatmept of the phenomena of colour, culminating in the presentation of a colour order system. A closer look brings *Dept. of Psychology, King’s College, University of Aberdeen, Old Aberdeen AB9 2UB, Scotland. **Goethean Science Foundation, Orland Clent, Stourbridge, West Midlands, DY9 9QS, England. disappointment: a rapid scamper through the scientific background is too condensed to be more than a garbled account of disconnected and ill-digested scarps, full of errors and misrepresentations. Although each book suffers from .a translator...

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