He argues that our perception of images is always an active and constructive process, in which we use our prior knowledge and expectations to make sense of what we see. This means that images are not simply passive reflections of reality, but rather are actively engaged with and interpreted by the viewer.
Why do different cultures and eras have such different artistic styles? Gombrich explains that styles differ not because artists "saw" the world differently, but because they started with different schemas and had different artistic aims (e.g., Egyptian conceptual representation vs. Greek naturalism). gombrich art and illusion pdf