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Lecture 2 Reading Poems that refer/react to Paintings - Summary |
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1a Key question: How do paintings and poems resemble each other? How do they differ? 1b First steps in “reading” paintings 2 The four stages of iconographic analysis 3 Ekphrasis 4 Visual images and Verbal images 5 Examples 1 & 2
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1a First take on a key question - How do paintings and poems resemble each other? and how do they differ? |
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How do paintings and poems resemble each other? How do paintings and poems differ from one another? A classic discussion of the issue can be found in G. E. Lessing (1729-81, German dramatist and critic), the author of Lacoön, 1766 (a key text on the relation between the plastic arts and poetry, focused on a classical statue, shown below).
1. The layperson’s view: each art presents appearance as reality; absent things as present; both deceive, and the deception is pleasing. 2. The philosopher’s view: both arts derive their appeal from a common source: a concept of beauty derived from bodily objects and applied to various things, including actions, thoughts, and forms. 3. The critic’s view: the two arts apply shared aesthetic values differently to their respective media Source: [Lessing, Preface] Thus while the first two emphasize the commonalty between the two arts–painting as mute poetry, or poetry as vocal painting– the last recognizes where the shared features make way for differences.
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1b First step in “reading” paintings |
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We approach each painting with a set of questions (independent of the poem that sets up a unique relation between itself and the painting).
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2 The four stages of iconographic analysis |
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The procedures described in 1b above correspond (with minor and interesting differences) to the stages of iconographical analysis followed by many art historians.
Source: Roelof van Straten, An Introduction to Iconography (1996: 16-17) [Note that Straten splits into stages 2 & 3 (iconographical analysis & interpretation) what Panofsky gives as 1 stage (iconographical analysis): for our purposes either format will do.]
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3 Ekphrasis |
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There is a long tradition to the practice of poets describing, invoking, inventing, or reacting in words to a real or imagined visual image. The relation set up by a poet through language with a pre-existing image is called ekphrasis. When a painting “imitates” a poem, the visual image is called “reverse ekphrasis”. There are many, slightly divergent definitions of the basic idea. Some are given in Murray Krieger’s Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (1992): Jean Hagstrum (1958): “that special quality of giving voice and language to the otherwise mute art object” (Krieger 267). Leo Spitzer (1962): “the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art” (Krieger xiii). Murray Krieger (1967): “the ekphrastic dimension of literature reveals itself wherever the poem takes on the `still’ elements of plastic form (i.e. form as in the visual arts) which we normally attribute to the plastic arts (drawing, painting, sculpture, etc). In so doing, the poem proclaims as its own poetic its formal necessity, thus making more than just loosely metaphorical the use of spatial language to describe–and thus to arrest–its movements” (266). J. A. W. Heffernan (1993): the “verbal representation of a visual representation”. Murray Krieger (1998): “the attempted imitation in words of an object of the plastic arts, primarily painting or sculpture” (4).
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4 Visual images and Verbal images |
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The complex relations between visual and verbal mages range, at the extremes, between: 4.1 belief in their correspondence or equivalence across differing media (verbal images operating as symbolic signs within the language system, visual images operating as direct sensory stimuli, making ekphrasis possible, and endorsing the basic equation made famous in the Latin phrase ut pictura poesis: “as in painting, likewise in poetry’, and supporting the idea that a picture is “mute” until language gives it a caption and a voice), and 4.2 belief that the two forms of image operate very differently, each according to the enabling/disabling conditions of its medium, making one fundamentally incommensurate with the other (some arguing that verbal imagery appeals to the imagination in a way that transcends the visual medium; others arguing that visual impressions signify in ways that words cannot equal or express accurately (rendering ekphrasis always a paradox).
"THIS IS NOT A PIPE" - i.e. Words are NOT pictures!
Further Reading: Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). PN 1126 Kri Valerie Robillard & Els Jongneel (eds.), Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1998) PN 56 Ekp.Pi
TYPES OF EKPHRASIS
Source: Valerie Robillard (1998: 61)
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5 Examples |
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5.1 Example 1
Charles Demuth, I Saw the Number 5 in Gold, 1928 (Benton, p. 36)
5.2 Example 2
David Inshaw, The Badminton Game (1972-73), The Tate (London) Image source: http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=7038&searchid=7353
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Last Updated 11 January 2012 |