The essential meta-question of my disserting

My dissertation deals with the work of Ernst Gombrich, the industrious and widely renowned Austrian art historian (though he was undoubtedly much, much more than that!). But the essential question that I am pursuing, the snark that continually buzzes around my head, is how it is that pictures represent. That a painting shows an orange, a hillside, or a beautiful nude and that all of these things can be seen in a painting is beyond doubt. But what makes that painting a picture of an orange, a hillside, or a nude?

More generally, what makes any "naturalistic" painting or photograph a representation of its subject? (Max Black, 1972, p. 95)

It is the answer to this question that I am hunting; it is the answer to this question that is always delightfully eluding me. Perhaps, as Black concludes, the landing place we seek is not as concrete or fixed as we would like—perhaps there are no necessary conditions for a picture's depicting its subject. At the same time however, "the disqualification of some proposed condition as a necessary or sufficient criterion by no means shows that condition to be irrelevant to the application of the concept in question." (Black, 1972, p. 126)

For Black the concept of depiction is a range or cluster concept. There is no single criterion that makes it such that a picture is said to depict its subject. Black checks off four possibilities:

1. Causal history
2. The producer's intentions
3. The information in the picture
4. Resemblance or "looking like"

All of these are deficient conditions for clarifying depiction, though, as I pointed out above, this does not make them irrelevant to depiction. This may be the case, but I am wary of carrying Black's torch—after all, I am trying to defend Gombrich's position and he seems to disagree with Black. (Of course Gombrich never attempted to explicitly tackle the problem of explaining depiction. Should we therefore fault him for our failed attempts to pinpoint an established position in his writings?)