Study Guide: Ways of Seeing
This page presents summaries, key terms, and study questions for
John Berger's Ways of Seeing. The selections presented here are intended to focus on your reading
on the themes that are most important for our course.
You should be able to explain Berger's use of the following "key
terms" in your own words and to give examples that clarify your
explanation. You should be able to recognize the key images and explain
the reasons that Berger included them in his book.
Key Terms |
Key Images |
- image
- nude
- naked
- mystification
- perspective painting
- Renaissance
- publicity
- glamour
- "Cinderella" fantasy
- "Enchanted palace" fantasy
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- Hals, Regents of the Old Men's Alms House
- Hals, Regentesses of the Old Men's Alms House
- da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks
- Botticelli, Venus and Mars
- Memling, Vanity
- Bronzino, Allegory of Time and Love
- Rubins, Helene Fourment in a Fur Coat
- Teniers, Archduke Leopold Welhelm in his Private Picture
Gallery
- Holbein, The Ambassadors
- Blake, Illustration to Dante's Divine Comedy
- Gainesborough, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews
- Rembrandt, Portrait of Himself and Saskia
- Rembrandt, Self-Portrait
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Key Quotations
You should be able to write a paragraph that explains the following
quotations in your own words and that gives examples which support and
clarify your explanation.
- "The way in which we see things is affected by what we know or
what we believe" (8).
- "We only see what we look at" (8).
- "Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph"
(10).
- "According to usage and conventions that are at last being
questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of
a woman is different in kind from that of a man" (45).
- "[A] way of seeing the world, which was ultimately determined
by new attitudes to property and exchange, found its visualization in
the oil painting, and could not have found it in any other visual art
form" (87).
- Oil painting "defines the real as that which you can put your
hands on" (88).
- "Publicity relies to a very large extent on the language of oil
painting" (135).
- "You are what you have" (139).
- "Colour photography is to the spectator-buyer what oil paint
was to the spectator-owner" (140).
- "Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for
democracy" (149).
commentary © Virginia Bonner, 2003
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