Gestalt psychology in Italy

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,Vol. 36(1), 31–42 Winter 2000� 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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IAN F. VERSTEGENis a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Art History at Temple University, 8thFloor Ritter Annex, Philadelphia, PA 19122, email: [email protected]. His major interestsare early modern painting and color, technique, and theory. He has published in the fields of estheticsand the history of psychology.

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY IN ITALY

IAN VERSTEGEN

Graz gestalt psychology was introduced into Italy after World War I with Vittorio Ben-ussi’s emigration to Padua. His earliest adherent, Cesare Musatti, defended Graz theory,but after Benussi’s premature death became an adherent of the Berlin gestalt psychologyof Wertheimer-Ko¨hler-Koffka. He trained his two most important students, Fabio Metelliand Gaetano Kanizsa, in orthodox Berlin theory. They established rigid “schools” in Paduaand Trieste. The structure of Italian academics allowed for such strict orthodoxy, quiteunlike the situation in America, where scientific objectivity mitigated against schools. Inthe 1960s, some of the students of Metelli and Kanizsa (above all Bozzi) initiated a realistmovement—felt in Kanizsa’s late work—that was quite independent of that of J. J. Gib-son. Finally, more recently, Benussi and Graz theorizing have been embraced again, sen-timentally, as a predecedent to Kanizsa-Bozzi.� 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

[La psicologia della gestalt] sino ad assumere un ruolo egemone nella ricerca psicol-ogica nel nostro paese.

Riccardo Luccio (1985)1

The history of gestalt psychology is familiar enough. Around 1910, Max Wertheimer(1912/1961) conducted experiments in Frankfurt in which he showed that a form of illusorymovement was irreducible to bare sensations; the process was a “gestalt” process. Subse-quently, Wertheimer collaborated with Wolfgang Ko¨hler and Kurt Koffka (Kohler, 1929;Koffka, 1935; Wertheimer, 1945; cf., Ash, 1995). Koffka emigrated to America, and, withthe rise of Nazism, Wertheimer and Ko¨hler followed him. Koffka died young, in 1941, andWertheimer died just two years later in 1943. Only Ko¨hler lived to an old age, but by thattime he was an isolated, if respected, figure. The gestalt doctrine had left little impact onAmerican psychology.

Gestalt psychology is one of those schools that is perfunctorily included in English-language textbooks without the justification of exactly why it is included. Undoubtedly a partof history, gestaltists are mentioned for their contribution to perception, but then dismissedfor their extravagant claims about brain physiology, made in support of a strange doctrine of“isomorphism.” For those more sympathetic to gestalt psychology, the school is known as2

a victim of academic socialization (Ash, 1985; Sokal, 1984). After a forced migration to the3

1. “Gestalt psychology came to assume a hegemonous role in psychological research in our country.”2. See Henle (1990) for some standard American reactions to gestalt doctrines.3. On Kurt Lewin’s unique success story, see Ash (1992).

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textUnited States because of Nazism, members of the school encountered a scientific environment

alien to their phenomenological commitments and natural-philosophical interests in monisticmodels of physical science.

It is enticing to construct thought experiments of what might have happened to gestaltpsychology if Hitler had never lived. With that in mind, one turns with interest to Italy for arare success story of gestalt psychology. In the thirty years succeeding World War II (1945–4

1975), while gestalt psychology declined in the English-speaking world, Italy was a strong-hold of gestalt. Thus, the most important and orthodox gestalt psychologist in Germany atthe time, Wolfgang Metzger (1899–1979), dedicated his authoritative text,Gesetze des Se-hens(1975), to the memory of his “Italian and Japanese friends.” His friends were, of his5

own generation, Cesare Musatti, Fabio Metelli, and Gaetano Kanizsa, and, of the youngergeneration, Paolo Bozzi, Giorgio Tampieri, Gian Franco Minguzzi , and Giovanni Vicario,among others. The work they put forward was in many respects very orthodox and, I wouldlike to argue, was gestalt psychology, in spite of the fact that it was not recognized by theemigreGerman psychologists in America.6

In the edited volume,Documents of Gestalt Psychology(Henle, 1961), the most impor-tant collection of gestalt work from the 1940s and 1950s, no Italian work was included. Evenin Germany, the monumental volume of theHandbuch der Psychologiedevoted to perception,and edited by Metzger (1966), contained only one Italian contribution, Gaetano Kanizsa’schapter on color appearance. Later, when Italians began publishing in English, they wererecognized by English-speaking gestaltists to be the allies that they were, as they arguedagainst past experience as an explanation for visual perception and contested various inter-pretations of visual phenomena (e.g., Kanizsa, 1969; Canestrari and Farne`, 1969). What is ofmore interest are the years of isolation, when unrecognized the Italians regarded themselvesas orthodox gestalt psychologists.

The impetus for gestalt psychology entered Italy more or less by accident. After the FirstWorldWar, Vittorio Benussi (1878–1927), an ethnic Italian born in Austro-HungarianTrieste(now part of Italy), decided to emigrate to Italy (Musatti, 1928, 1966). The most importantresearcher of Alexius Meinong’s Graz school ofGegenstandstheorie, he was offered a chairin psychology at the University of Padua. Fritz Heider (1970, 1983), who received his doc-7

torate at Graz, recalls that Benussi spoke German with an Italian accent and came from afamily with strong anti-Austrian sentiments; he had felt alienated in Austria. Unfortunately,he suffered the same fate among academics in Italy, for his reputation had been won in theGerman language in German periodicals. In 1927 he committed suicide.

Benussi was not himself a gestalt psychologist as the Italians came to understand them-selves, but his appearance in Italy allowed for what may be called the “Berlin” theory theyaccepted. The Berlin theory is normally identified with the theories of Max Wertheimer,Wolfgang Kohler, and Kurt Koffka. There is no question of Benussi’s importance in thehistory of experimental psychology, but recently a group of scholars have argued that Benussi,

4. On Italian gestalt psychology, in addition to the citations listed, see Kanizsa and N. Caramelli (1988), Poggi(198?), Sambin (1980) and Smith (1988).5. “Dem Andenken Max Wertheimers und den italienischen und japanishen Freunden, in denen sein Geist le-bendig geblieben ist.”6. An exception is Rudolf Arnheim, who well knew all of the Italian work and cited it prominently in his ownpublications.7. Benussi has recently been receiving philosophical attention; see M. Antonelli (1994) and N. Stucchi (1988).

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textslightly older than Wertheimer, was a “gestalt psychologist” before Wertheimer (e.g., Smith,

1994).Certainly the phenomena Benussi studied resembled those of the later Berlin scientists,

but the assertion that he was a gestaltist makes sense only if the term “gestalt psychology” istaken to describe a field of research—the perception ofGestaltenand its philosophical im-plications—rather than as the name of a particular school. “Gestalt” was introduced intopsychology by Christian von Ehrenfels in 1890 to refer to a certain kind of ontological object,a founded content (or “quality”) that is dependent upon objects and rises above them as acontent. A whole generation of theory followed this paper and was in a sense “gestalt psy-chology.” The “gestalt revolution” of Wertheimer, Ko¨hler, and Koffka, however, refers to adifferent ontological idea of gestalt as asui generiswhole and not founded on any moreelementary objects.

These are merely two ontological ideas, both of which are useful, and perhaps both arerequired for a complete theory. The difference lies in the epistemological consequences of8

adopting one or the other. The gestalt quality of Ehrenfels-Meinong-Benussi went well withan intellectualist view of perception, according to which the mind produces a percept, thepercept being the dependent gestalt quality. The Berlin gestalt wholeGestaltgoes well withan autonomous view of perception according to which the percept organizes itself, by mutualinteraction. The constitutive sensations of the first view, however, go better with a construc-tivist view of perception because gestalt productions are correlated to personality and emotion.The percept of the latter view exists of itself, and contact with the subject is less important,suggesting some kind of objectivism.

These approaches formed an undercurrent in Italian psychological history as the principalfigures came to grips with the two quite different traditions emanating from Berlin and Graz.It is, therefore, with some interest that we turn to the period when Benussi came to Italy andask how his students and their students ever came to be such ardent Berliners.

BERLIN VS. GRAZ

Events in Italy took place against a background of debates between Berlin and Graz thatpreceded Benussi’s coming to Italy. This mature debate was prefigured in a famous polemicbetween Benussi, himself, and Kurt Koffka in 1914–1915 (Ash, 1995; Metelli, 1987; Smith,1994). Like Wertheimer’s foundational paper on seen motion from 1912 (discussed in fol-lowing paragraphs), Koffka’s response to Benussi became a defining document for a devel-oping theoretical viewpoint. For that matter, Wertheimer and Ko¨hler had not yet begun theirteaching careers in Berlin, hence, the “Berlin school” (Koffka was in Giessen and thenmovedto Smith College). Therefore, it is anachronistic to view it as a mature exchange; but it wasextremely important. Implicitly, at least, later Italians would accept Koffka’s criticism overthat of their own national ancestor, in the same sense that they would elevate his later andfundamentalThe Principles of Gestalt Psychology—as some Italians would say—to the levelof scripture (Koffka, 1935/1970).

The polemic followed upon the publication of Max Wertheimer’s famous article onperceived motion and centered around the proper reception of his main findings. Wertheimer,it will be recalled, discovered a kind of illusory perceived movement that had no sensational

8. This was the conclusion of the Berlin gestalt psychologist, Edwin Rausch (1966).

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textor retinal support. Experimental subjects saw two bulbs alternatively light up side by side,

and reported an impression of movement. Koffka and his students varied Wertheimer’s ex-perimental set-up. The most important variation was devised by Friedrich Kenkel (1913).Kenkel had sought to induce movement using illusory figures like the Mu¨ller-Lyer illusionto prove that the apparent movement of the figure was not based on a gestalt constructedfrom base sensations, but illusions from the very start.

The desire to distinguish between a gestalt quality based on common elements, a foundedquality arising above them, and a completely transformed gestalt whole was in a sense a testof the Graz theory. This caused Benussi to write a short review of the article (Benussi, 1914).First, Benussi affirmed his priority in discovering the illusory movement discussed by Kenkeland argued that his approach did not differ substantially from the new one espoused byWertheimer. Thus, he wrote of “misunderstandings,” terminological “differences,” and “ap-parent” divergences. We shall see much the same claim by Benussi’s student, Musatti, and acommon theme will be developed here that Italian psychologists preferred a fruitful experi-mental link to their native colleagues even if it meant a certain kind of theoretical contradic-tion.

Benussi’s review was followed by Koffka’s response, which came to be translated andincluded in W. D. Ellis’sSourcebook of Gestalt Psychologyand retrospectively defined as atrue Berlin gestalt psychological document (Koffka, 1915/1938). There Koffka outlined thealternative open to the Italians unhappy with Benussi’s theoretical formulations. Accordingto Koffka, Benussi sought to maintain the constancy hypothesis, affirming that he could treatthe “sense impressions which remain constant” and “images” (Vorstellungen) separately.Though, according to him, not a pure Meinongian production theory any longer, his expla-nation of motion as an “image of extra-sensory origin” (Vorstellung aussersinnlicher Prov-enienz) still looked like a form of Helmholtzian unconscious inference. As Mitchell Ash hasshown, Benussi and Koffka refused to join in debate on the same terms. Benussi was trainedin formal ontology and could not help maintaining the distinction between stimulation andpercept, whereas Koffka only cared about psychological experience.

MUSATTI

The crucial link in Italian gestalt psychology was Cesare Musatti (1897–1989), who isespecially important because he was Benussi’s student and also because he survived to trainstudents after Benussi committed suicide. Ironically, Musatti is best known as the most im-portant Italian psychoanalytic writer of his generation and the editor of the Italian edition ofthe works of Sigmund Freud. Less well known is the fact that he was also one of the premierperceptual researchers of Italy, and responsible for introducing the Berlin gestalt theory toItaly and training important students in this tradition (Fabio Metelli, Gaetano Kanizsa) whosecontribution, as discussed in the following paragraphs, continues to be felt even today.

Musatti was born in Mira, in the Veneto region of Italy, near Venice. He was a studentof mathematics and philosophy at the University of Padua and turned to psychology underthe influence of Benussi. Musatti became Benussi’s assistant and, with his premature death,replaced him in the chair of psychology. During the fascist period, Musatti, an ethnic Jew,was forced to leave Padua, but after the end of the war he became director of the PsychologicalInstitute at the University of Milan.

Musatti’s (1924) first study was completely within Benussian theory. It was devoted tothe study of stereokinetic phenomena, in which rotating disks seem to be cones projectinginto three-dimensional space. Like Benussi, Musatti ingeniously varied his stimuli and dis-



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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textcovered the ideal conditions for the illusion to appear. The reason we see the three-dimen-

sional cone, he argued, was due to perceptual assimilation, in which our past experience ismerged with the present perceptual event, resulting in a three-dimensional percept. The dis-tance of Musatti from Berlin can be seen in the critique published by P. Renvall (1929),inspired by his teacher, E. Kaila, and Wertheimer. Renvall argued that no recourse to pastexperience was necessary, only the structural laws of Wertheimer.

Musatti’s adherence to Benussi was codified in the book that he wrote during Benussi’slifetime, Analyses of the Concept of Empirical Reality(1926/1964). According to Musatti(1926/1964), in the preface of the reprinted edition, he considered himself to be a “Benussian”while his teacher was alive; in fact, he stated his book to be compatible with a Meinongian“theory of objects” (Gegenstandstheorie) and more particularly with Benussi’s theory ofrepresentations of a non-sensory origin (Vorstellungen aussersinnliche Provenienz) (p. 10;cf. Bozzi, 1980, p. 16). When Musatti (1929) wrote his programmatic article,“La psicologiadella forma” [gestalt psychology], two years later, he was, as Riccardo Luccio (1985) writes,still under Benussi’s sway. Musatti (1926/1964) again says that he retained this view “becauseof loyalty to my teacher, but also because the logical thinking of Meinong was closer to theformality I had formed during my earlier studies” (p. 8).

When Benussi died, and Musatti succeeded him in the chair of psychology, Musatti(1926/1964) slowly emancipated himself and ultimately “felt himself more independent andlargely adhered to the principles of this undoubtedly more complete doctrine [of the Berlinschool]” (p. 9). The turning point of Musatti’s thinking is undoubtedly“Forma e assimila-zione” [Form and assimilation] of 1931 (Musatti, 1931), which the author saw as a warmingto the Berlin theory with, however, suggestions of his own. The most notable suggestion wasthe reduction of all of Wertheimer’s rules of perceptual organization to one; what Musatticalled the law of maximal homogeneity [massimo omogeneita`]. Homogeneity was not aphysiological reduction, for Musatti wanted to effect this reduction in purely phenomenalterms, without reference to Wertheimer’s physiological hypothesis. Most importantly, ho-mogeneity was still a function of assimilation, and a result of both present and past experience.

A common misunderstanding about Wertheimer’s original article is that his “rules” areabsolute and can be put into competition with one another (some critics think they are refutingWertheimer when they can make one overpower another). Rudolf Arnheim (1974) has decriedthis misinterpretation by making reference to the original article wherein Wertheimer saysthat his rules are only a “poor abstraction” (p. 467). Unfortunately, this passage is not availablein either the Ellis orWertheimer translations of the article, and English-speakingpsychologistshave unknowingly thought that Wertheimer had somehow elevated his rules to absolute prin-ciples. The same cannot be said of Musatti, who knew the German psychological literatureintimately. Musatti nevertheless set himself to the task of something that did not really dis-agree with Wertheimer, but supplemented him. Musatti’s hope to reduce the rules to purely9

phenomenal terms, and his impatience with Wertheimer’s physiological hypotheses, wereimportant for Italian psychology.

In this work, Musatti first reviewed Benussi’s early theory according to which a dis-tinction is made between illusions of judgment (illusione di giudizio) and representative il-lusions (illusione rappresentativa) and considers Wertheimer’s proposal that there is noindependence between perceptual processes and such verificational processes. He ultimately

9. It should be pointed out that Arnheim resided in Italy from 1932 to 1938, making his home in Rome afterleaving the Berlin because of the rise of Nazism. Arnheim did not have contact with psychologists like Musatti, andhe never met him. Arnheim became acquainted with Metelli and Kanizsa only after the war.

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textupholds Benussi’s idea that peception is based on assimilation that draws on past experience.

Before his death, Benussi had worked on hypnotism and suggestion, and Musatti undoubtedlybelieved that Benussi’s theory was much more fruitful for a unified approach to perceivingand personality. The way Musatti follows Benussi on this point makes his later interest in10

Freudian psychology much less unusual.So far we have been speaking only of Meinongian production theory and early Benussian

theory, but Musatti (1931) makes the Benussian claim that any difference between the Berlintheory and Benussi’s mature thought is “resolved in a change of terminology” (p. 227). Hemakes this claim against the widespread opinion that the mature Benussi was still operatingupon an early Meinongian production theory. Musatti supposedlymakes this claimconcerningBenussi’s late, Padua work. Of course, as we saw, Benussi made the same claim concerninghis own (pre-1920) Graz work as well. They thus went to great trouble to retain Benussi’sempirical work within the new tradition.

By picking and choosing, Musatti was able to accept the Berlin theory—on the conditionof the acceptance of one of the themes of Benussi’s late work—assimilation. This gesturewas very important for subsequent Italian experimental psychology, for it allowed a temporaland empirical continuity to remain in the tradition by altering or at least ignoring the theo-retical discontinuity. As a matter of fact, to the very end, Musatti never discounted the effectsof past experience in perceiving. Logically, he believed, one could never decide the truth ofthe matter; is was an “impossible experiment.”

In any case, Musatti—like Benussi—pursued a fruitful research program. In additionto his important work already cited on stereokinetic phenomena, his“Forma e assimilazione”explored the field of figure perception. Musatti (1937) also investigatedmovement perception,inserting his work within the context of the latest German work. He varied, for example,Hans Wallach’s (1935) displays in which diagonal lines passing before an aperture appear tobe moving downward. By passing two strips of opposite slant across each other, he obtainedthe illusion of moving downward, but the diagonals appeared rigid and connected.

After the Second World War, Musatti turned his attention to color perception (Musatti,1953). He was concerned with unifying research on the isolated problems of color contrast11

and color constancy. Musatti based his theory of color perception on the concept of perceptualequalization. He assumed that the optical sensation is split or scissioned into two differentcomponents; that is, object color and environmental illumination. Perceptual assimilationoccurs when there is perceptual equalization between object colors, while color contrast andcolor constancy occur when there is perceptual equalization among the components consti-tuting the environmental illumination.

In all of the fields reviewed, object perception, movement perception, and color percep-tion, Musatti, much like Benussi, proved himself to be altogether an able and prolific exper-imenter. Just as Benussi’s stimuli had looked like Koffka’s, but his theoretical explanationhad been different, so, too, Musatti’s stimuli were identical to those of his Berlin counterparts.Even Musatti never accepted Berlin theory, but his location of his work (if not his explanation)in the camp of the Berliners allowed for the complete acceptance of their tenets by his students.

Italy was not disrupted by fascism to the degree that Germany was disrupted by Nazismuntil Mussolini adopted the racial policies of Hitler in 1938 (which is what caused Rudolf

10. For Benussi, assimilation was the foundation for personality as well as perceptual psychology. See Benussi(1926).11. An English translation of this article, with commentary, has been prepared by the present author with TizianoAgostini.



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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textArnheim finally to leave), providing Italy with six years more of relative stability than Ger-

many. As a Jew, Musatti lost his professorship at Padua and went to work for the OlivettiCompany in Ivrea (near Milan) as an “industrial psychologist.” Immediately, in 1945, hebecame professor and director of the Psychological Institute of the State University of Milan.

METELLI AND KANIZSA

As the new director of the Psychological Institute in Padua, Musatti was thrust into anauthoratative role and began to take on students immediately. Two of his students would goon to become extremely important psychologists of the postwar era, Fabio Metelli (1907–1987) and Gaetano Kanizsa (1913–1993). These two psychologists were important becausethey responded to the increasing dominance of Berlin gestalt psychology and became moreor less complete adherents to that tradition, completely severing their ties to their intellectualancestor, Benussi.

Metelli was born in Trieste (10 July 1908) and graduated from the University of Paduain 1929 with a thesis on the esthetics of Plato (Kanizsa, 1987; Musatti, 1987; Stagner, 1989).From 1929 to 1940, he was voluntary assistant to Musatti. Not being Jewish, he was notbarred from professional positions. From 1940 to 1942, he worked for the National Councilof Research (Consiglio Nazionale di Ricerche) and was granted the title docent in 1942. In1943, he directed the Psychological Institute in Padua and, after spending some time inCatania and Trieste, in 1951 was named professor there.

Metelli’s (1940, 1941) earliest research was a direct extension of Musatti’s own onmovement perception and figural perception, as well as courtroom testimony. Mario Zanforlin(1987), a student of Metelli, has reviewed his earliest publications on motion perception,noting his interrelating of three concepts—totalization, apparent rest (quiete apparente)—the obverse of Wertheimer’s apparent motion—and stratification.

Metelli (1940) had two significant experimental set-ups. In the first, he slowly rotated aconfiguration consisting of a half-circle attached to a black rectangle that turned on the axisof the circle. The circle appeared to stay still, with the rectangle seemingly rotating above it.The circle appearing still is an example of totalization; the amodal completion of the circleunderneath the rectangle. The appearance of the circle behind the rectangle was stratification,and the still appearance of the circle was an example of apparent rest. Another phenomenonMetelli studied was a slowly rotating black disk with a white wedge attached to it; it appearsas a static black disk with the wedge detached and rotating above it.

Kanizsa was also born (18 August 1913) in Trieste (Gerbino, 1993; Vicario, 1994). Heexhibited the cosmopolitanism of Trieste; he was the son of a Hungarian father and a Slov-enian mother. Like Metelli, he also enrolled at the University of Padua, but his research waspsychological from the start. His thesis, also directed by Musatti, was written on Jaensch’stheory of eidetic imagery and was completed in 1938 (Kanizsa, 1938). It was during this12

time that he came to know Musatti’s assistant, Metelli, thus beginning a lifelong friendship.Being an ethnic Jew (like Musatti), Kanizsa entered the academic world exactly when

ethnic laws prohibited his obtaining any position. He was, however, in addition, a politicallyactive anti-fascist, and he was ultimately exiled by Mussolini’s government to Buttrio (nearUdine) for three years. He escaped, however, and went to Rome where he is said to havejoined the resistance and obtained the title“Capitano della Piazza,”an army commander in

12. I am grateful to a referee for suggesting the possible ideological motivation for this study, in light of Jaensch’stheories of race and characterology.

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textcharge of crowd control. After the war, as Metelli was installed in Padua, Kanizsa followed

Musatti to Milan and became his assistant. In 1954, he was given the title of professor ofpsychology at Trieste. His most famous work began to appear in the 1950s, when he publishedhis works on subjective contours, modes of color appearance, and phenomenal transparency(Kanizsa, 1954/1979, 1955a/1979, 1955b/1979).

Just as Metelli’s research continued seamlessly that of Musatti and Berlin gestalt psy-chology in motion perception, so Kanizsa’s studies continued seamlessly the same themes inresearch on color perception. Kanizsa (1955b/1979) took the phenomenon of “subjectivecontours,” already pointed out by Friedrich Schuhmann, and gave a gestalt explanation ofthe effect in terms of the tendency towardpragnanz. He showed how the contour could affectthe brightness of an area, just as gestalt psychologists had shown that contour could affectthe figural character of an area. He also departed from Berlin works on transparency, con-tributing to them by demonstrating that in order to speak meaningfully of transparency, onemust have at least four surfaces: two surface colors and two film colors that give the impres-sion of transparency.

During the impoverisheddopoguerra,just as Metelli and Kanizsa were coming into theirown as established academics, Musatti more or less left experimental psychology to concen-trate on psychoanalysis. We have already seen how Musatti’s closeness to Graz psychologyleft him sympathetic to Benussi, even if he did not follow him to the letter. But, now, withMetelli and Kanizsa having no such loyalties, they fully embraced Berlin gestalt psychology.Kanizsa (1952) even published a polemic against stage or phase theories of perception, inwhich he argued that, since according to gestalt principles perception was caused by simul-taneous autonomous processes, it was meaningless to hypothesize perceiving as a stage-likeprocess. This work symbolized his complete separation from Graz thinking.

It was at this time that Koffka’sPrinciples of Gestalt Psychologywas elevated, as notedbefore, to the level of “scripture.” Wolfgang Metzger became the consistent, if predictable,psychological ally of the Italians. His orthodoxy was the standard against which the effortsof the Italians could be judged. In fact, Musatti and Metzger were said to tour the laboratoriestogether once a year in Padua and Trieste during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Even thoughMusatti no longer experimented, he maintained an intense interest in perception and was fullof suggestions and questions.

Metelli (1964/1975) continued to work on motion perception, and it was not until thelate 1960s that he began to publish on the subject with which his name later became synon-ymous: color transparency. In 1970, Metelli published his algebraic model of the satisfyingluminance conditions for seeing transparency, and this was followed by his famous article inScientific Americanin 1974 fully explaining the same phenomenon (Metelli, 1974). Kanizsacontinued to experiment in color and founded a new field of study in his discovery of thephenomenal shrinkage of objects.

THE PADUA-TRIESTESCHOOL

The students of Metelli and Kanizsa in many ways carried on the work of more or lessorthodox Berlin gestalt psychology. Two students trained in the late 1950s, Paolo Bozzi13

and Giovanni Vicario (1960), reported experiments on the extension of Wertheimer’s lawsof perceptual organization to sound. They saw “proximity” at work in grouping both tonally

13. Significant names we might mention are Renzo Canestrari, Mario Farne`, Sergio Masin, Gian Franco Minguzzi,Marco Sambin, Giorgio Tampieri, and Mario Zanforlin.



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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textand temporally, a finding that predates by many years, incidentally, American discussions of

sound grouping, “streaming,” etc.The unique thing about these students, however, is that they were conscious of belonging

to a school. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the psychologists of Padua and Trieste were knownto practice a particular kind of science. This was in dramatic contrast to the Ph.D.s beinggraduated from the New School for Social Research, where many of the German emigre´s hadsettled. While their teachers carried their gestalt affiliation with pride, having rememberedthe “age of schools” when behaviorism reigned supreme, almost all of their students displayeda degree of embarrassment with their unfortunate affiliation.

The cause of this embarrassment is not difficult to find. American psychological culturewas more scientistic, and Americans regarded objectivity as the result of disinterested eclec-ticism. Consequently, any psychology that was based on qualititative phenomena was boundto be suspect, and, further, psychology departments were structured toward a fruitful plural-ism. The Italians, much more used to partisan science, and not suffering from a positivistscientific culture, accepted the idea of scientific patrimony; the Americans rebelled.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Italians’ reactions to the “cognitive revolution”taking place in America in the 1960s. Vicario (1978), for example, wrote a review of UlricNeisser’sCognitive Psychologyunder the title,“Una gestaltista legge Neisser”(“AGestaltistreads Neisser”). The Italians were intensely aware of goings on in America and knew thatNeisser had been an assistant to Ko¨hler’s former assistant, Hans Wallach, at SwarthmoreCollege. Neisser, who had been nurtured at this gestalt stronghold during the heyday ofbehaviorism, must have struck the Italians as being odd. What was this new theory, and whywas it necessary? He appeared to be selling old wine in new bottles.

“Partisan” psychology had its drawbacks as well. In general, in Italy the chairmanshipor directorship of the department or laboratory was far from a revolving responsibility, butwas a prestigious and powerful position. Metelli oversaw Padua, and Kanizsa oversawTrieste,each with a great deal of power. Every work by one of their students that was published inthe 1950s and 1960s carried their names on the title page. When Kanizsa found out thatWolfgang Metzger had invited Paolo Bozzi to publish his thesis on naive physics in Germanin thePsychologische Forschung,he forbade him to do so, thus denying him recognition inEurope and America. Around 1965, Bozzi was invited by Kanizsa to write an introduction14

to gestalt psychology for Italian readers, but when he attempted a more ambitious philosoph-ical discussion of perception, a discussion that called into question certain assumptions ofBerlin theorizing, and even theorized what we recognize today to be a form of Gibsoniandirect realism, found that he could not publish the document.15

Bozzi seems to have had his revenge, however, and believes that his early discussionswith Kanizsa on the possibility of distinguishing between perceiving and thinking in a directrealist vein may have worked on the elder psychologist “like a worm in an apple” (come unverme in un pomo) and ultimately found its way into Kanizsa’s late thinking. Subsequently,Kanizsa (1985) tended to work much more in the direct realist direction and provided manydemonstrations of the cognitive impenetrability of certain perceptual processes.16

14. Apparently Kanizsa did not want his student to precede him in international publishing. After the appearanceof Kanizsa (1960), he indicated that Bozzi could then publish abroad. In 1990 Bozzi’s (1958) and (1959) publicationswere made available in English translation (by Paola Bressan and Paulo Gaudiano) by John Pittenger of theUniversityof Arkansas at Little Rock, in a departmental publication.15. Interviews with Paolo Bozzi, April 1994, and letter of August 1996. The manuscript was called“Fondazionidella psicologia”and still exists. I am grateful to Ugo Savardi of Verona for providing a copy to me.16. Bozzi reports that when Kanizsa re-read his manuscript some thirty years later in 1989, he was surprised thathis first reaction had been so hostile.

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Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textThe move of Italian gestalt psychology toward direct realism coincided with a historical

rehabilitation of Benussi. Even though in the 1920s he argued against the Berlin school forthe effect of emotion and mental set upon perception, his clear demarcation uponMeinongianlines of the act of perceiving into act and object seemed to serve the Berliners realist needs.Furthermore, he had never speculated on the brain in the way that Ko¨hler did; speculationsof which even the Italians were critical. Lastly, he worked in Italy and seemed to be aneglected figure in psychology. Was not his portrayal of perception into stages essentiallythe same as Kanizsa’s distinction between seeing and thinking?

Bozzi (1989) most recently called for a redefinition of gestalt psychology as an “exper-imental phenomenology” (fenomenologia sperimentale). In his opinion, psychological re-search should be almost purely phenomenological. Bozzi and Vicario have even argued indifferent ways that physiology is completely irrelevant to speculation upon the mind. Therecent emergence of “Austrian Philosophy,” based on the philosophy of Franz Brentano,Meinong, and others, has promised to provide a firm philosophical foundation for such stud-ies; they become a kind of material ontology that relies on the formal ontology of the phi-losophers. Even so, the influence of the Berlin school has been too strong to be overriddenso quickly; neo-Berlin ideas may assert themselves again.

Psychology in Italy by the 1990s had been completely internationalized and “Ameri-canized.” There is no fourth generation of Italian gestalt psychology of which we may speak.Still, when the history of gestalt psychology continues to be written, one will have to looknot to America, where in many cases we find a case of unsuccessful academic socializationof gestalt psychology, but to places like Germany, Italy, and even Japan. There, a degree ofpartisanship and patriarchy shielded these schools. While these ideas seem antithetical toscientific achievement to many Americans, it must be admitted that gestalt there permittedanother kind of achievement, one that by being one-sided allowed for even greater results.

I wish to thank Tiziano Agostini for his great hospitality on the two occasions I visited the University of Triestein 1994 and 1996, and Paolo Bozzi for his kind participation in my interviews.

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