Engraved plate illustrating consequences drawn for composition

6  Locke comes at the beginning not so much because he offered the eighteenth century a powerful theory of visual perception, though he did this too, as because, in the course of stating his theory in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), he framed in a particularly gripping way the issue of how we achieve a perception of the three-dimensional world from the two-dimensional array of stimulations on the retina. The form in which he first established the issue was: on what basis do …

IN WHAT follows now I want to do several things which will lead to a different texture, a closer focus and a smaller grain. First I have to provide something that is questionable, in a sense and for reasons I shall be returning to later. Secondly, it is time to address a piece of detail. The account of Picasso in 1910 was very schematic and general: it had to be, because I was trying to block in a general scheme in relation to an already existing account of early Cubism. But art criticism …