Q2112Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak.
These are the first two sentences of a book that began as four half-hour BBC programmes, made cheaply and deliberately without reverence. Berger cut into a Botticelli with a scalpel on camera to show how a detail changes meaning once it is separated from the whole. His point in this opening is disarmingly simple and hard to argue with: the eye gets there first, and everything we are later told about a picture arrives to explain something we have already had.