Leonardo da VinciAround 1500Told painters to stare at stained walls and mottled stones until landscapes, battles and faces appeared. A way to wake the imagination.
Alexander Cozens1785Published a method of making deliberately random ink blots, then turning them into landscapes. The accident first; the picture from looking.
Hermann Rorschach1921Asked people what they saw in ink blots, believing the answers said something about the person looking. Whether it works is still argued about.
Mr Squiggle1959 to 1999For forty years on Australian television, Norman Hetherington’s puppet with a pencil nose turned children’s scribbles into pictures, often upside down.
Donald Winnicott1960s and 70sThe squiggle game: a quick line passed between two people, each finding something in the other’s mark.
STILL OPENThere’s a word for it now: pareidolia, seeing faces and figures in random shapes, like a face in a power socket or a rabbit in a cloud. But why two people can look at the same squiggle and see completely different things is still a beautiful question.