Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2023.2168111
H. Maguire
Abstract The Christogram, the sign combining the letters chi with a rho, an iota, or a cross, became extremely common in Early Christian art, in both the East and the West, where it was freighted with multiple and overlapping meanings, whether theological, imperial, or both. The Christogram’s capacity to create meaning through letters and words was elaborated upon in later medieval art in the West, in a way that had no counterparts in Byzantium. In the medieval West, the sign of the Chi Rho sometimes assumed the status of an intellectual puzzle, the solution of which could lead to spiritual understanding. There was nothing comparable in the art of Byzantium. Following the crisis of iconoclasm in the East, the type of Christogram that combined the chi or the cross with a rho, creating a loop at the top of the vertical bar, almost completely disappeared from the monumental decoration of Byzantine churches, even while other types survived. One major problem was that the rho made the Christogram resemble ring signs, which were ubiquitous in Eastern magic from antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. The issue of magic had become particularly sensitive in the Byzantine Church as a result of the iconoclastic dispute, in which both sides, the supporters and the opponents of images, accused the other of sorcery. In the Byzantine East, the removal of the loop from the upright letter stripped the Christogram not only of its more overt magical associations but also of many possibilities for word-play and meaning that were exploited by artists in the West.
{"title":"Speaking sign or acting device? Reading and using the Christogram in Byzantium","authors":"H. Maguire","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2023.2168111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2023.2168111","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Christogram, the sign combining the letters chi with a rho, an iota, or a cross, became extremely common in Early Christian art, in both the East and the West, where it was freighted with multiple and overlapping meanings, whether theological, imperial, or both. The Christogram’s capacity to create meaning through letters and words was elaborated upon in later medieval art in the West, in a way that had no counterparts in Byzantium. In the medieval West, the sign of the Chi Rho sometimes assumed the status of an intellectual puzzle, the solution of which could lead to spiritual understanding. There was nothing comparable in the art of Byzantium. Following the crisis of iconoclasm in the East, the type of Christogram that combined the chi or the cross with a rho, creating a loop at the top of the vertical bar, almost completely disappeared from the monumental decoration of Byzantine churches, even while other types survived. One major problem was that the rho made the Christogram resemble ring signs, which were ubiquitous in Eastern magic from antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. The issue of magic had become particularly sensitive in the Byzantine Church as a result of the iconoclastic dispute, in which both sides, the supporters and the opponents of images, accused the other of sorcery. In the Byzantine East, the removal of the loop from the upright letter stripped the Christogram not only of its more overt magical associations but also of many possibilities for word-play and meaning that were exploited by artists in the West.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"14 1","pages":"3 - 18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87012268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2023.2168472
G. Targia
Abstract The linguistic and discursive dimensions of art theory and art writing are currently attracting renewed critical attention. This article analyses some of the constructive strategies employed by Erwin Panofsky in shaping his own language, challenging a reductionist understanding of his alleged ‘logocentrism’ and of the verbal and visual as categorically distinct media. I focus mainly on Panofsky’s early writings on medieval art as a case in point to characterize his conception of the writing of images as an act of interpreting. Drawing on the distinction between the language of the art historian and the role of language in the history of art, I will emphasize the pivotal role of Panofsky’s ‘Reflections on Historical Time’ as a logical premise for his definition of iconological analysis. As part of a ‘unity of meaning’, the written word related to artworks is to be regarded—Panofsky seems to suggest—as inseparable from the visual evidence.
{"title":"Writing images as an act of interpreting: notes on Erwin Panofsky’s studies on medieval subjects and the problem of language in and of art history","authors":"G. Targia","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2023.2168472","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2023.2168472","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The linguistic and discursive dimensions of art theory and art writing are currently attracting renewed critical attention. This article analyses some of the constructive strategies employed by Erwin Panofsky in shaping his own language, challenging a reductionist understanding of his alleged ‘logocentrism’ and of the verbal and visual as categorically distinct media. I focus mainly on Panofsky’s early writings on medieval art as a case in point to characterize his conception of the writing of images as an act of interpreting. Drawing on the distinction between the language of the art historian and the role of language in the history of art, I will emphasize the pivotal role of Panofsky’s ‘Reflections on Historical Time’ as a logical premise for his definition of iconological analysis. As part of a ‘unity of meaning’, the written word related to artworks is to be regarded—Panofsky seems to suggest—as inseparable from the visual evidence.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"2 1","pages":"88 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82291070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2022.2046912
Justin Willson
Abstract In medieval Greek manuscripts, scribes often compared their completion of the transcription of a codex to a ship reaching a harbor. Scholars have noted that this nautical imagery shaped how poets conceptualized their work as authors, but the harbor metaphor also carried over to metaliterary and ekphrastic passages theorizing the affect of images and the built environment. Thus, a technical metaphor born to describe the physical labor of book-making was adapted to elucidate the intellectual labor of book-writing, image-making, and building. The present study discusses the harbor metaphor via the concept of “terminality,” an impulse towards closure that inscribed the content of an object (logos, eikôn) or space (chora) within an experiential horizon. The terminus offers an opportunity to appreciate the often-overlooked importance of the letters themselves (the graphai) in the world before print. The graphê, quite simply, traced the contours of how other media were understood and perceived, providing assurance that literature and art were as well-regulated as the practice of scribal transcription.
{"title":"The terminus in Late Byzantine literature and aesthetics","authors":"Justin Willson","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2022.2046912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2022.2046912","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In medieval Greek manuscripts, scribes often compared their completion of the transcription of a codex to a ship reaching a harbor. Scholars have noted that this nautical imagery shaped how poets conceptualized their work as authors, but the harbor metaphor also carried over to metaliterary and ekphrastic passages theorizing the affect of images and the built environment. Thus, a technical metaphor born to describe the physical labor of book-making was adapted to elucidate the intellectual labor of book-writing, image-making, and building. The present study discusses the harbor metaphor via the concept of “terminality,” an impulse towards closure that inscribed the content of an object (logos, eikôn) or space (chora) within an experiential horizon. The terminus offers an opportunity to appreciate the often-overlooked importance of the letters themselves (the graphai) in the world before print. The graphê, quite simply, traced the contours of how other media were understood and perceived, providing assurance that literature and art were as well-regulated as the practice of scribal transcription.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"24 1","pages":"435 - 447"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91081419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.2013681
M. Otto
Abstract The work of Dublin-based painter Lorcan Walshe is particularly concerned with the relationship between inscription in its broadest sense and the visual image. His two related series, The Artefacts Project (2007) and Museum Pieces (2008), engage with Ireland’s precolonial past in search of personal artistic, as well as broader cultural, roots during a period when national narratives were being challenged and reconfigured as a result of an increasingly diverse Irish society. The Artefacts Project and Museum Pieces reflect on whether the art of the precolonial past can still be read in a meaningful way in a postcolonial present in which Ireland finds itself part of a globalized world. Reaching across the chasm of history, Walshe’s works emphasize that our reading of the past must always involve an act of translation in order to retain significance in the present: the meaning of the artefact is created anew as it is translated not only from one historical moment into another, but also from one artistic medium into another. This article argues that Walshe’s The Artefacts Project and Museum Pieces question the hierarchical division between writing and the visual image by reading the artefacts of Ireland’s past as visual texts. In this context, drawing and painting themselves emerge as forms of inscription that are part of the process of reading and acts of translation. As a result, the artefact becomes a palimpsest of translations and inscriptions.
{"title":"‘The word’s challenging opposite’: the visual language of Lorcan Walshe’s The Artefacts Project and Museum Pieces","authors":"M. Otto","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.2013681","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.2013681","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The work of Dublin-based painter Lorcan Walshe is particularly concerned with the relationship between inscription in its broadest sense and the visual image. His two related series, The Artefacts Project (2007) and Museum Pieces (2008), engage with Ireland’s precolonial past in search of personal artistic, as well as broader cultural, roots during a period when national narratives were being challenged and reconfigured as a result of an increasingly diverse Irish society. The Artefacts Project and Museum Pieces reflect on whether the art of the precolonial past can still be read in a meaningful way in a postcolonial present in which Ireland finds itself part of a globalized world. Reaching across the chasm of history, Walshe’s works emphasize that our reading of the past must always involve an act of translation in order to retain significance in the present: the meaning of the artefact is created anew as it is translated not only from one historical moment into another, but also from one artistic medium into another. This article argues that Walshe’s The Artefacts Project and Museum Pieces question the hierarchical division between writing and the visual image by reading the artefacts of Ireland’s past as visual texts. In this context, drawing and painting themselves emerge as forms of inscription that are part of the process of reading and acts of translation. As a result, the artefact becomes a palimpsest of translations and inscriptions.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"33 1","pages":"348 - 360"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78425036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2022.2033595
Maile Hutterer
Abstract In the Middle Ages, the image of a sunbeam passing through glass or crystal was a popular metaphor for explaining Mary’s perpetual virginity. One of the most frequently repeated quotations that employs this metaphor has long been attributed to the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot St Bernard of Clairvaux, which might suggest that the emergent Gothic style contributed to its contemporaneous propagation in text and image. However, this much-repeated quotation is in fact the commentary of a seventeenth-century Dominican scholar, who mixed a widespread medieval trope with Bernard’s own discourse. A reevaluation of the use of the sunbeam motif in text and image suggests that, whereas it was commonly used to explain the Virgin Birth in literature, in visual art it was more frequently associated with the Incarnation. Furthermore, as I argue, the translation of the motif from text to image appears to have been catalyzed by a materially focused affective piety and the devotional texts of late medieval mystics such as the Meditationes vitae Christi and St Bridget of Sweden’s Revelations.
{"title":"Illuminating the sunbeam through glass motif","authors":"Maile Hutterer","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2022.2033595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2022.2033595","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the Middle Ages, the image of a sunbeam passing through glass or crystal was a popular metaphor for explaining Mary’s perpetual virginity. One of the most frequently repeated quotations that employs this metaphor has long been attributed to the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot St Bernard of Clairvaux, which might suggest that the emergent Gothic style contributed to its contemporaneous propagation in text and image. However, this much-repeated quotation is in fact the commentary of a seventeenth-century Dominican scholar, who mixed a widespread medieval trope with Bernard’s own discourse. A reevaluation of the use of the sunbeam motif in text and image suggests that, whereas it was commonly used to explain the Virgin Birth in literature, in visual art it was more frequently associated with the Incarnation. Furthermore, as I argue, the translation of the motif from text to image appears to have been catalyzed by a materially focused affective piety and the devotional texts of late medieval mystics such as the Meditationes vitae Christi and St Bridget of Sweden’s Revelations.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"36 1","pages":"407 - 434"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85299003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.2016328
D. Ben-Shaul
Abstract Yves Klein’s conceptual project Theatre of the Void is associated with two well-known works: the single appearance of the newspaper Dimanche, which Klein published on 27 November 1960 with a declaration that the world is voided for twenty-four hours; and the iconic image Leap into the Void, which appears in it for the first time. This article reframes the project—by offering an inclusive, structural, and theoretically contextualized reading of its interrelated components. Seen as one level of action embedded within another, the simulated newspaper infiltrated the city; within the urban site it constitutes a declaratory performative act of total voiding; responding to the declaration, the leap is the agency of the total transformation into the voided world; and this world is potentially established and reflected by the interdisciplinary scenarios printed in Dimanche. Within this framework, the article discusses the project’s conceptual “socio-metaphysical” duality. One aspect of this duality is the project’s conception of total voiding as a metaphysical endeavor aiming at transcendence. The other is the insight that the project qualifies existence itself as a voided socio-political fabrication.
伊夫·克莱因(Yves Klein)的概念项目《虚空剧场》(Theatre of the Void)与两件著名作品有关:克莱因于1960年11月27日出版的《Dimanche》的单一外观，宣称世界在24小时内是虚空的;以及第一次出现在影片中的标志性画面《跃入虚空》。本文通过对其相互关联的组成部分进行包容性、结构性和理论语境化的阅读，重新构建了该项目。这张模拟报纸被视为嵌入另一个层面的行动，渗透到城市中;在城市场地内，它构成了一种宣告性的表演行为;作为对这一宣言的回应，飞跃是向虚无世界全面转变的中介;这个世界是由《Dimanche》印刷的跨学科场景所潜在地建立和反映的。在这个框架内，文章讨论了项目概念上的“社会形而上学”双重性。这种二元性的一个方面是项目的完全空的概念，作为一种形而上学的努力，旨在超越。另一个是洞察到这个项目将存在本身限定为一个无效的社会政治捏造。
{"title":"Socio-metaphysical void: Yves Klein’s textual and imagistic performance of Théȃtre du vide","authors":"D. Ben-Shaul","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.2016328","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.2016328","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Yves Klein’s conceptual project Theatre of the Void is associated with two well-known works: the single appearance of the newspaper Dimanche, which Klein published on 27 November 1960 with a declaration that the world is voided for twenty-four hours; and the iconic image Leap into the Void, which appears in it for the first time. This article reframes the project—by offering an inclusive, structural, and theoretically contextualized reading of its interrelated components. Seen as one level of action embedded within another, the simulated newspaper infiltrated the city; within the urban site it constitutes a declaratory performative act of total voiding; responding to the declaration, the leap is the agency of the total transformation into the voided world; and this world is potentially established and reflected by the interdisciplinary scenarios printed in Dimanche. Within this framework, the article discusses the project’s conceptual “socio-metaphysical” duality. One aspect of this duality is the project’s conception of total voiding as a metaphysical endeavor aiming at transcendence. The other is the insight that the project qualifies existence itself as a voided socio-political fabrication.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"7 1","pages":"361 - 374"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78888473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1946374
Carly B. Boxer
Abstract Late medieval English uroscopy diagrams depict twenty colors of urine in bright, often garish, colors and gold leaf, arranged in correspondence to digestive states. This article argues that the use of color in these diagrams reveals medieval ideas about the perception of color more broadly, and that the images themselves could train practices of comparative looking and visual judgment. Appearing in multiple formats, these images facilitated the theorization and practice of uroscopy—the diagnosis of an ailment by the appearance of a patient’s urine—and survive in large numbers from late medieval England. Diagrams accompany treatises that describe at length the humoral causes, physical symptoms, and particular appearances of different colors of urine. Medieval digestive theory held that changes in the relative proportion of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness in the blood caused qualitative changes in the look of substances such as urine. Accounts of the appearance of bodily evidence in uroscopy treatises, however, relied on a slippery network of color descriptions and comparisons of colors of urine with other colorful objects. Diagrams made these relationships not only legible but also instructive. In juxtaposing text and image, this article incorporates uroscopy—perhaps the best documented medieval practical application of ideas about color—into broader discussions of medieval color theory.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2022.2045171
Chriscinda Henry, M. Soranzo
Abstract Historians of Renaissance art have long been familiar with Giovanni Aurelio Augurello’s interest in painting and sculpture, while historians of alchemy are aware of his lifelong dedication to the gold-making art immortalized in his masterpiece, Chrysopoeia (1515). Yet the problem of how these interests intersect in the poet’s work has either been disregarded or framed within outdated categories such as occultism and hermeticism. In a dialogue with recent theoretical work on intermediality, and based on the identification of several key artistic allusions in Augurello’s Chrysopoeia, this article proposes to interpret them beyond the conventions of ekphrasis. A remarkable focus on artistic techniques, processes, and materials, we argue, defines the self-referential blend of poetry and alchemy inscribed in Chrysopoeia. Rather than being the expression of an occult or hermetic mentality, this poem’s fascination with the materiality and poetics of artworks, we propose, is attuned with the Northern Italian aesthetics nurtured by Andrea Mantegna, Giulio Campagnola, and other artists of the time.
{"title":"Poetic matters: Giovanni Aurelio Augurello (1441–1524), materiality, and the visual arts","authors":"Chriscinda Henry, M. Soranzo","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2022.2045171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2022.2045171","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Historians of Renaissance art have long been familiar with Giovanni Aurelio Augurello’s interest in painting and sculpture, while historians of alchemy are aware of his lifelong dedication to the gold-making art immortalized in his masterpiece, Chrysopoeia (1515). Yet the problem of how these interests intersect in the poet’s work has either been disregarded or framed within outdated categories such as occultism and hermeticism. In a dialogue with recent theoretical work on intermediality, and based on the identification of several key artistic allusions in Augurello’s Chrysopoeia, this article proposes to interpret them beyond the conventions of ekphrasis. A remarkable focus on artistic techniques, processes, and materials, we argue, defines the self-referential blend of poetry and alchemy inscribed in Chrysopoeia. Rather than being the expression of an occult or hermetic mentality, this poem’s fascination with the materiality and poetics of artworks, we propose, is attuned with the Northern Italian aesthetics nurtured by Andrea Mantegna, Giulio Campagnola, and other artists of the time.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"119 1","pages":"448 - 463"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79411834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2022.2025731
Timothy Raser
Abstract Letters written over the course of 1859–60 tell of an effort on Charles Baudelaire’s part to republish Charles Meryon’s Vues sur Paris, augmented with descriptive texts by the poet. The collaboration failed and, ever since, readers have wondered what would have come of it. At the same time, Baudelaire was “courting” Victor Hugo, sending him new and not-quite-new poems dedicated to him. At the very end of 1859, Baudelaire includes his Salon description of Meryon’s etchings in a letter to Hugo, one Walter Benjamin qualifies as among Baudelaire’s best prose pieces. Further, Baudelaire cites Hugo in his description of Meryon’s etchings, and declares that the etchings would certainly please him. Was the promise of more texts about the etchings nothing more than the tail end of an effort to please Hugo? Whatever the case, the project’s failure is not simply to be laid to the account of Meryon, afflicted by “délire mélancolique compliqué d’hallucination,” and dying at Charenton the year following Baudelaire’s own death. Baudelaire’s decisions are difficult to understand, and seem as influenced by Hugo as by other considerations. In particular, in his description of Meryon’s etchings, Baudelaire seeks to “inscribe” something on them, much as Hugo sought to inscribe his father’s name in his representation of the Arc de Triomphe. In fact, Baudelaire imposes the story of a dispute between father and son, or more exactly, God and man, on the etchings, a story modeled on his own relations to Hugo. Later accounts of Meryon follow the same pattern, insisting on finding narratives in images that they all acknowledge as monumental. This insistence on finding diachrony in synchronic images is the madness that afflicted Meryon.
1859年至1860年间写的信件讲述了查尔斯·波德莱尔(Charles Baudelaire)重新出版查尔斯·梅里恩(Charles Meryon)的《巴黎风景》(Vues sur Paris)的努力，并增加了诗人的描述性文字。这次合作失败了，从那以后，读者们一直想知道这次合作的结果。与此同时，波德莱尔正在“追求”维克多·雨果，给他寄来献给他的新诗和不太新的诗。在1859年底，波德莱尔在给雨果的一封信中提到了他在沙龙上对梅里翁蚀刻版画的描述，这封信被沃尔特·本雅明认为是波德莱尔最好的散文作品之一。此外，波德莱尔在描述梅里恩的铜版画时引用了雨果，并宣称这些铜版画肯定会让他高兴。承诺提供更多关于蚀刻版画的文本，难道只是为了取悦雨果的最后努力吗?无论如何，这个项目的失败不能简单地归咎于梅里恩，他患有“幻想症”，在波德莱尔去世的第二年死于夏朗顿。波德莱尔的决定很难理解，似乎受到雨果和其他因素的影响。特别是，在描述梅里翁的蚀刻版画时，波德莱尔试图在上面“刻”一些东西，就像雨果试图在凯旋门的画上刻上他父亲的名字一样。事实上，波德莱尔将父亲和儿子之间的争论，或者更确切地说，上帝和人之间的争论，强加在蚀刻版画上，一个以他自己和雨果的关系为原型的故事。后来对梅里恩的描述遵循同样的模式，坚持在他们都认为具有纪念意义的图像中寻找叙事。这种坚持在共时性图像中寻找历时性的做法正是折磨着梅里恩的疯狂之处。
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2022.2028524
Megan Dyson
Abstract The work of the British poet Christopher Logue is characterized by variation, collaboration, and intermedia projects. His output includes poetry set to jazz, printed poster-poems, public poetry performances, film scripts, collaborations with artists, and translations from Portuguese, German and, most significantly, ancient Greek. War Music, an ‘account of Homer’s Iliad’ according to its subtitle, became Logue’s life’s work, eclipsing many of his earlier projects. But collisions of word, image, and sound—the intermedia formats that characterize his early work—endure in Logue’s Homeric translations in the form of radical typographic experiments and textual images, such as inch-high capital letters marking the arrival of the god Apollo, and graphic shapes formed by variation in line lengths. This article demonstrates that War Music is a key text in the intersection of translation and visual poetry, which can be best understood in dialogue with other forms such as concrete poetry and the text-inspired art of Cy Twombly.
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