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?
It is natural to suspect that the purpose of extended looking is the direction of our attention and our powers of...