The Fragmentation of Vision

Why does looking at a painting take so long? [1] Looking at Breughel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels), for example, we feel that we are somehow taking in the entire painting within a single visual “gulp.” We see the steep hillside, the ploughman blithely tilling his field, the great galleons and placid sea below; the rich red of the ploughman’s shirt, the pale green of the sea, the whitish-yellow of the evening sky. All of this, and much more, seems somehow to fuse into a complex, fascinating and harmonious whole, all loaded, in its entirety, into our conscious experience. So why do we continue to look, to examine, to scrutinise, and to ponder? Have we not mentally “hoovered up” Breughel’s painting within little more than a glance?