Pictures look like what they depict to those who understand them. That is a natural and seemingly unassailable thought. Looking at Mona Lisa, the painting strikes us as looking like a woman with a mysterious smile in front of a mountainous backdrop. Call this the ‘looks like’ intuition. It is tempting to think not just that the ‘looks like’ intuition is true, but that it gets at the heart of what is distinctive about depictive understanding in pre-theoretical, informal terms. To understand a depiction (as opposed to a linguistic description, say) is for it to strike us as looking like what it depicts. In this talk, I take the ‘looks like’ intuition at face-value, and discuss what it more precisely comes to. I consider and reject three interpretations, before presenting what I take to be its correct interpretation. It is easy to think that the int ...