THE PHOTOGRAPHIC EYE BY A. HYATT MAYOR Curator of Prints

Though magnifiers, drawing machines, and cameras have been used in making works of art for a long time, their connection with technique and style has received only passing mention. Yet devices that affect the way we see are bound to affect style in art, since style both reflects and conditions ways of seeing. Everybody's seeing is constantly changing. The hat 1/ that startled at Easter looks normal in May and will be dowdy by August. In the first Cezannes that I remember facing, at the age Rock-crystal lento of twenty-three, I could not an period, about identify the objects reprequest of Richar sented. Like the Australian bushman who was shown a photograph of himself, I asked "What is it?" Yet it took only a few months for valley views and stone villages to reveal themselves in Cezanne's coloring and rhythms. A history of seeing can be demonstrated by the widely differing kinds of pictures that were considered lifelike in their day. Near Eastern painting, which charms us like a bright patchwork, was to its makers and patrons a window into a real world. In the tenth century a poet described an embroidered tent at Antioch by saying, "Whenever the tent side billows with the wind The horses ramp and lions outwit their prey."' According to Vasari the laurel in the background of the Museum's Madonna by Girolamo dai Libri was so "truly a living tree, graceful and most natural," that birds used to fly into the church where it hung to perch on its