Parts and Wholes in Pictorial Art

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