It is virtually impossible as an individual immersed in the 20^th and 21th centuries’, United States culture to read, seriously consider, and have a sense of how Robert Vischer’s On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics would have been received by the leading-edge intellectuals of his society.  We have the results of nearly 150 more years of neurological research at our disposal.  The person on the street has the conceptual, if not experiential, knowledge that human beings, confined by their individual interfaces, project their impressions, interpretations (their “occurring worlds”), and meanings on all objects, people, events, environments, etc., including themselves.  People outside the scientific community are aware that all of their thoughts, emotions, sensations, ideas, visions, perceptions, etc. are brain pattern beyond the control of their “conscious minds.”  Approximately seven seconds before a human being is aware she has a thought, a brain pattern has already generated the thought and moved on.  Many ordinary people have completed workshops, seminars, and courses and/or have read books on how to use the available neurological research to work with their brains’ patterns to live the lives they envision.

In the 19^th century, however, the idea that a human being’s perception of objects is not of how the objects are in actuality but rather the resultant mirroring of the human being’s projection, must have been a radical revelation.  And while, the current reader may grow impatient and dismiss what must seem irrelevancies, the distinctions about which Vischer and his colleagues theorized (symbolism of form, concept of similarity, emphatic sensations, attentive feeling, responsive feeling, immediate feeling, associations of ideas, symbolism of the presentation, the idea of “expand[ing]” “the kindred sensation . . . and sympathy . . . into a general human self . . . sullied by this one image of suffering,” “a free appearance of the imagination,” the “harmonious Idea, “the ideality of imagination,” “free appearance,” the “imagining will,” “art is . . an intensification of sensuousness . . . [translating] the indefinability and instability of mental life . . . the . . . disorder of nature, into a magnificent objectivity,” “symbolism of the present,” “conscious or unconscious content” and its perception as such, “direct” or “indirect idealization, etc.”), they established the foundations and directions of research from which individuals in the 20^th and 21^st century have benefitted.

When Vischer refers to Raphael and idealization, the image of Raphael’s Fire in the Borgo, occurrs to me.  This is one of the paintings in which Raphael creates an ideal of the beautiful woman with the figure of the woman carrying vessels of water to the fire.  The figure and the image are so strikingly exquisite it seems as if Raphael intends the viewers to become instantaneously and fully taken over by the presence he has created. After reading Freud’s theory about interpreting pictorial symbolism in dreams, however, I have a entirely new projection on the Fire in the Borgo.