For Berger, this central aim was the reason for the development of both perspective and tangible realism within the genre of oil painting. Oil painting, commissioned by the ruling class, was thus tasked with the purpose of reflecting that class’s power to own and possess back to it. Within that philosophical system, the world and all within it is reduced to property and commodity. Charting the manner in which its rise was contemporaneous with the rise of capitalism, Berger ultimately asserts that the central aim of oil painting was to depict the philosophical system of capitalism. In Chapter Five, Berger undertakes a historicized analysis of the visual codes of oil painting.

Under the cultural conditions both created by and responsible for the creation of the nude, the woman internalizes the male gaze and objectifies herself as a manner of survival under patriarchy. In turn, this visual language indoctrinates both women and men-but especially women. Through his analysis of the genre’s distinct set of conventions, including the mandate to render the naked female body completely free of hair, and the occasional presence of a mirror within the picture frame, in order to condemn a woman for her so-called ‘vanity,’ Berger demonstrates the manner in which the visual language of the nude engenders a fundamentally-unequal way of seeing women. Instead, for him, the nude normalizes the sexist, patriarchal reduction of female humans to the status of sex objects to be used and looked at by men. He judiciously distinguishes the nude, as an art form with its own distinct set of conventions, as entirely different from the human experience of nakedness and lived sexuality. In Chapter Three, Berger carefully elucidates the visual codes of the nude, using several oil paintings that demonstrate and validate his argument.

Each chapter composed of reproductions seems to serve a thematic aim which matches either the chapter that precedes or proceeds it. Berger’s textual chapters alternate with chapters entirely composed of reproductions of works of art or pieces of visual media, including reproductions of oil paintings, editorial photography, and advertisements. The rest of the book is spent analyzing three different genres of visual material: the nude (Chapter Three), oil painting (Chapter Five), and ‘publicity images,’ or advertisements (Chapter Seven).

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