Practice question · Multiple choice
Why is a painting’s background often its most reliable evidence?
Hints
- Recall witting versus unwitting testimony.
- What did the painter not think anyone was looking at?
Show the answer
B. It was not what the painter was arguing about
Why
The tools on the wall, the food on the table, the clothes of the person nobody was looking at, none of it was the point, so none of it was bent to make the point. Unwitting testimony again, and it is where an image is most honest.
Practise Visual and Iconographic Sources
The app has 6 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Visual and Iconographic Sources
- A 1900 photograph shows a family posed stiffly outside their cottage. What is the most defensible thing the…
- Early war photography is reliably candid, because the technology made staging impractical.
- What questions should a historian put to a photograph?
- Roughly how much larger is Africa than Greenland, despite Mercator showing them at similar size?
- No projection preserves both area and shape, and no neutral map of the Earth exists. Why is that a…