senses was felt to be the very mode of this “inference” and led 
at once to the disintegration of the idea of the “imitation of 
nature” as a visual affair. Gombrich writes (p. 16):

          Two German thinkers are prominent in this story. 
     One is the critic Konrad Fiedler, who insisted, in 
     opposition to the impressionists, that “even the simplest 
     sense impression that looks like merely the raw material 
     for the operations of the mind is already a mental fact, 
     and what we call the external world is really the result of a 
     complex psychological process.”

          But it was Fiedler’s friend, the neoclassical sculptor 
     Adolf von Hildebrand, who set out to analyze this process 
     in a little book called The Problem of Form in the  
     Figurative Arts , which came out in 1893 and gained the