Parts and Wholes in Pictorial Art

The part–whole relation is fundamental to the Gestalt description of visual awareness; therefore one<br>expects it to play an equally important role in the visual arts. The formal science of parthood relations<br>is mereology. Thus, it is natural to attempt to construct a mereological account of the structure of<br>works of the visual arts. However, I argue in this paper that such a program is headed for failure.<br>There are various reasons for this, perhaps the more interesting being that one deals with parallel<br>pictorial worlds.