Why does looking at a painting take so long? Looking at Pieter Breughel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, for example, we feel that we are somehow taking in the entire painting within a single visual “gulp.” We see the steep hillside, the plowman blithely tilling his field, the galleons and placid sea below and the rich red of the plowman’s shirt, the pale green of the sea, the whitish-yellow of the evening sky. All this, and much more, seems somehow to fuse into a complex, fascinating and harmonious whole, loaded, in its entirety, into our conscious experience. So why do we continue to look, to examine, to scrutinize and to ponder? Have we not mentally loaded up Breughel’s painting within little more than a glance?

中文翻译：

---

视觉的碎片化

为什么看一幅画要花这么长时间？例如，看着老彼得·布勒格 (Pieter Breughel) 的《伊卡洛斯陨落》(Icarus of Icarus)的风景，我们觉得我们不知何故在一个单一的视觉“吞咽”中吸收了整幅画。我们看到陡峭的山坡，农夫在他的田地里快乐地耕作，下面是大帆船和平静的大海，还有农夫衬衫的浓郁红色，海水的淡绿色，傍晚的天空是黄白色的。所有这一切，以及更多，似乎以某种方式融合成一个复杂、迷人而和谐的整体，完全融入我们的意识体验中。那么，我们为什么还要继续观察、检查、审视和思考呢？我们是不是只看了一眼就在精神上加载了 Breughel 的画？