十一世紀中葉的三本畫家傳記（劉道醇的《聖朝名畫評》和《五代名畫補遺》以及郭若虛的《圖畫見聞志》）對於視覺性和視覺有許多的描述，本文認為在這些描述之中，隱含著某些認知的假設，換個方式說，認知的假設形塑了這三部書的視覺性及視覺描述。本文的目的即在重建劉道醇和郭若虛的認知假設。兩人的書，記載了他們自己以及早先的其他人如何觀賞及回憶那些已散佚或尚存的圖畫，本文透過細讀其紀錄，說明他們如何想像視覺產生感知及記憶發生作用的過程，並進一步揭示他們對於視覺性（包括當下眼睛感知之視覺化與以回憶而產生的心中圖像）的理解是截然不同的。本文的旨趣不在解析鑑賞的運作機制，而在重構劉道醇和郭若虛如何呈現觀看的行動，以及他們選擇記憶和記錄哪些視覺經驗與特質。簡要地說，他們設想了三個不同的視覺性類別：親身觀賞繪畫的體驗、畫家以寫生或形似的方法摹寫對象的本領，以及畫作誘發觀看者在心中產生彷若擴充實境之意象的能力。通過解釋文本性、視覺性和物質性的相互聯繫，本文的結論是這兩位文人對觀賞和創作繪畫的視覺體驗提出了獨特且彼此相異的概念。

This article seeks to reconstruct the implicit epistemic assumptions that shaped descriptions of visuality and vision in three mid-eleventh-century collections of painters’ biographies—Liu Daochun’s 劉道醇 (fl. 1050-1060) Shengchao minghua ping 聖朝名畫評 (c. 1057) and Wudai minghua buyi 五代名畫補遺 (1059), and Guo Ruoxu’s 郭若虛 (c. 1041-c. 1098) Tuhua jianwen zhi 圖畫見聞志 (c. 1074). Through a close reading of these texts, which record how these two Northern Song literati viewed and recalled paintings both lost and extant, this article will explain how they imagined the processes of visual perception and memory to function. Liu and Guo’s written descriptions of the experiences of observers viewing paintings, and of painters viewing and painting pictorial subject matter, provide evidence of two distinctive understandings of visuality that involved both optical visualization in the present and mentalized visions in memory. For Liu and Guo, writing about viewing paintings re-activated the experience of seeing for themselves, which involved reconstituting images from their own visual memories, or describing other observers’ visual experiences from a further remove. By analyzing these corpora of painters’ biographies, we can understand more than just the critical apparatus of connoisseurship at its formative stage. More important, we can reconstruct how Liu and Guo represented these acts of seeing, and what kinds of visual experiences and qualities they chose to remember and record. Liu and Guo articulated three types of visuality: the experience of viewing paintings firsthand, the mimetic abilities of painters to convey the life-likeness or form-likeness of painted subjects, and the capacity of painted images to induce mentalized visions of augmented realities. By revealing how textuality, visuality, and materiality were interconnected, this article demonstrates how these two writers presented distinctive and divergent conceptions of the visual experience of viewing and creating paintings.