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, whic