 The significance of the ambiguous image is meant to be that it makes us aware of a process that the perception of pictorial content always involves: the process of making a “tentative projection, a trial shot which transforms the image if it turns out to be a hit.” “Ambiguity—rabbit or duck?—is clearly the key to the whole problem of image reading” (1960: 198). Gombrich is commonly described as proposing an “illusion theory” of depiction (e.g., Lopes 1996: 37; Newall 2011: 2), but he emphatically disavowed any such intention, pointing out that the title of the lectures on which Art and Illusion was based was The Visible World and the Language of Art: