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In celebration of its 50th anniversary, Leonardo invited authors who have been associated with the publication throughout its history to share their memories. This account describes some essays published in the journal by author David Carrier, with reference to his intellectual career. Because these publications are readily accessible to Leonardo’s readers, the author does not describe them in detail—nor does he cite all of his contributions. His aim is to sketch, in this personal reflection, one small part of the story of this now long-lived publication.

There is a great deal of public art in Pittsburgh. Surveying some examples of this public sculpture suggests some general lessons about the role of such art. Art in public spaces needs to be accessible to the public. One way to make it so is to present local history, commemorating local sports heroes, politicians or artists. Public art also needs to be placed in a way that is sensitive to local history. Most public art in Pittsburgh is not successful because it does not deal with the interesting history of that city. Much sculpture that is successful in a museum is not good public art, and some successful public art in Pittsburgh does not belong in a museum.

In March 2009 the important conference “E.H. Gombrich auf dem Weg zu einer Bildwissenschaft des 21.Jahrhunderts” was held in Greifswald, Germany, on the centenary of Gombrich’s birth. I was, I confess, a little surprised to hear that his reputation was in need of revival. Gombrich, it is true, relied upon the psychology of his day, and by the 1980s many younger art historians were no longer engaged by his ways of thinking. As feminists, they were offended by his focus on a male-oriented old master tradition; as modernists, by his obvious lack of sympathy with contemporary art; and as multicultural thinkers, by his lack of interest in non-European traditions. Also, of course, he had nothing to say about the emerging concerns of queer studies. Gombrich, like all of us, was a person of his own time. However, one result of the late-20th-century shift in how art-historical research was conducted was that most scholars resisted any attempt to ground analysis in the study of psychology. This then meant that the gap between the concerns of art history and those of experimental science became vast. In the past halfcentury, psychology has changed dramatically, but few art historians have followed these developments. Since cognitive psychology has revolutionized the ways that visual perception is understood, this gap seems unfortunate. To understand how we view and interpret pictures, one needs to appeal to psychology: what could be more obvious? The legitimate concerns of feminists, modernists and multicultural art historians might legitimately be formulated in these terms: that is our hope. There is a widespread, unspoken anxiety that a scientific concern with generality might undermine the pressing need for art history to do justice to the varieties of art produced by women and men of all cultures. There is also a fear that the study of psychology leads us back to a reductive, Eurocentric aesthetic. Gombrich, it is true, focused his attention on the naturalistic tradition that developed in Europe. In his survey history The Story of Art, art from outside Europe has a very marginal position. However, as Gombrich liked to note, his late study of decoration, The Sense of Order, focused attention on art from many cultures outside Europe. It is revealing that that book attracts less commentary than his accounts of representation. So, I propose, it is time to revisit Gombrich’s ways of thinking, not in a purely historical analysis, but rather to understand how we can reformulate his concerns in line with present-day psychology of perception. It is time again to open up discussion. John Onians’s Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (2008) offers a historical account. The renowned Columbia University scholar David Freedberg has relevant work in progress. And there are many other scholars also at work on this subject. What can art history learn from empirical studies of visual experience? What can analysis of visual art contribute to scientific studies of perception? Gombrich was the last of the art historians to take contemporary scientific issues pertaining to art seriously. It is time to revive his concerns. The humanities have much to gain and nothing to lose from serious reflection on this topic. It is time for art history to overcome its alienation from scientific psychology. This, then, is a call for submissions exploring this theme in Leonardo. We are interested not in purely historical perspectives, but in research looking to the future. What are the most promising new approaches? How can they aid our understanding of visual art? We are interested both in general programmatic statements and in innovative accounts of individual works of art. Knowing the importance of this topic, and the fact that all interesting claims are sure to be highly controversial, we welcome friendly, engaged debate.

Clark Glymour’s book Thinking Things Through: An Introduction to Philosophical Issues and Achievement offers a history of philosophy focused on the achievements of science. Glymour argues in passing that what he calls “primitivism” has pernicious consequences; he thinks that Marxists, phenomenologists and deconstructionists are primitivists. The author of this article claims, rather, that there is no reason to think that primitivism necessarily has these political implications, nor to believe that the philosophical tradition Glymour champions intrinsically has any particular view of political life. There need be no particular relationship between a philosopher’s view of scientific objectivity and that person’s politics—at least, there is no argument in Thinking Things Through to show that there is any such necessary connection. Published in conjunction here is a short response by Glymour.

One central question for a theorist writing about contemporary visual art is what literary style to adopt in describing that work. Contrasting Clement Greenberg’s art history narrative to the more recent writings of Joseph Masheck, the author indicates how the tradition of Byzantine aesthetics and a study of icons provide a novel framework for the discussion of modern abstract painting. Refusing to describe these recent works as the latest stage in a long process of historical development, Masheck’s texts force us to think for ourselves about the general lessons implicit in his assembled examples.

The painter Frank Stella has argued recently that the task of painting today is to maintain the tradition of great abstract art. The philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto has claimed that this is a post-historical era, a time in which it no longer makes sense to think in such terms. Comparing and contrasting these accounts offers a suggestive approach to much of the art discussed in Leonardo .

Donald Brook argues that David Carrier’s study of recent art criticism ignores the question whether there is a rational basis for art historians’ consensus on the importance of certain artworks. Brook believes that the central theme of Artwriting , that all representations are ‘conventional’ or ‘semiotic’, is mistaken. In his reply, Carrier states that Brook has misunderstood his view of the role of rhetoric in art criticism. He then refutes the assertion that he favors the semiotic theories of Goodman and Bryson over Gombrich’s theory of pictorial naturalism.