 Depiction or pictorial representation was studied less intensively by philosophers than linguistic meaning until the 1960s. The traditional doctrine that pictures represent objects by copying their appearance had been challenged by art theorists since the first quarter of the twentieth century, when what were thought of as illusionistic styles of painting lost favour, due to the growing prestige of so-called “primitive” artistic styles, and the fauvist and cubist experiments of artists at that time. But it took several decades before philosophers became interested in these debates. When they did so, it was largely due to the impact of two books: Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (1960), and Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art (1968). Gombrich explored a variety of problems about the nature of depiction, the evolution of style, and the nature of realism, drawing extensively on theories of visual perception advanced since Helmholtz, and on Karl Popper’s falsificationist theory of science. Goodman, by contrast defended a purely conventionalist theory of depiction in general and realistic depiction in particular, which was rooted in the nominalist philosophy he had developed in collaboration with W.V.O. Quine. A large part of the philosophical work on this topic during the past fifty years consists in attempts to develop theories of depiction in general, and realistic depiction in particular, which overcome the objections to their views, while avoiding the simplifications and alleged cultural bias of the traditional ideas they rejected.