Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2023.2168117
Vincent Debiais
Abstract This article focuses on one of the most intensely ‘graphic’ artefacts produced during the Middle Ages in Western Europe: the so-called Bury St Edmunds Cross or Cloisters Cross. As this fascinating object has been thoroughly studied in many aspects, especially epigraphically, it can seem presumptuous to go back to one of the best-known artefacts of medieval art and epigraphy. This article, however, does not pretend to discuss the content of the texts or the exceptional nature of the object, but rather the graphic and pragmatic means used to compose a discourse of great theological richness around it. In essence, it returns to the degré zéro of the analysis of the cross, to address what it materially means ‘to combine’ writing and image. Starting from the example of the Cloisters Cross, the article applies this kind of ‘low-regime’ analysis to painting, sculpture, stained glass, mosaic, and any artform where the encounter of texts and images is the result of planning, adapting, and composing gestures that reflect the semiotic and aesthetic ambitions of visual creation during the Middle Ages.
{"title":"Allusion and elusion: writing on the Cloisters Cross","authors":"Vincent Debiais","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2023.2168117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2023.2168117","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article focuses on one of the most intensely ‘graphic’ artefacts produced during the Middle Ages in Western Europe: the so-called Bury St Edmunds Cross or Cloisters Cross. As this fascinating object has been thoroughly studied in many aspects, especially epigraphically, it can seem presumptuous to go back to one of the best-known artefacts of medieval art and epigraphy. This article, however, does not pretend to discuss the content of the texts or the exceptional nature of the object, but rather the graphic and pragmatic means used to compose a discourse of great theological richness around it. In essence, it returns to the degré zéro of the analysis of the cross, to address what it materially means ‘to combine’ writing and image. Starting from the example of the Cloisters Cross, the article applies this kind of ‘low-regime’ analysis to painting, sculpture, stained glass, mosaic, and any artform where the encounter of texts and images is the result of planning, adapting, and composing gestures that reflect the semiotic and aesthetic ambitions of visual creation during the Middle Ages.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"12 1","pages":"33 - 42"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86694484","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: 10.1080/02666286.2023.2168467
Beatrice Daskas
Abstract Besides their undoubted aesthetic value, monuments possess an ideological function. They are meaningful forms built to commemorate significant deeds or events or to celebrate individuals who are prominent within a community. Monuments become essential for the articulation of cultural identity and memory, through which political powers and intellectual élites seek legitimation and support. As historical objects operating in fluid and transformative cultural environments, their significance is constantly renegotiated to suit new ideological agendas. Rhetoric, and in particular rhetorical descriptions or ekphraseis, may offer insights into the way in which monuments have been seen and communicated over the course of time. While representing selective verbal–visual narratives, these texts can convey specific conceptions of the monuments and encourage interpretations that are distant from the original intentions of those who had them installed. On this premise, this paper proposes a more comprehensive interpretive framework for the analysis of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, a Byzantine monument recently brought to international attention by the Turkish government’s decision to change back its status from museum to mosque. This framework resorts to rhetoric and its unique capacity to unveil, across time and space, how the monument has been perceived, expressed, appropriated, reframed, and negotiated by people as an indivisible component of their culture.
{"title":"Competing ‘iconographies’: Hagia Sophia, ideology, and the construction of a cultural icon then and now","authors":"Beatrice Daskas","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2023.2168467","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2023.2168467","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Besides their undoubted aesthetic value, monuments possess an ideological function. They are meaningful forms built to commemorate significant deeds or events or to celebrate individuals who are prominent within a community. Monuments become essential for the articulation of cultural identity and memory, through which political powers and intellectual élites seek legitimation and support. As historical objects operating in fluid and transformative cultural environments, their significance is constantly renegotiated to suit new ideological agendas. Rhetoric, and in particular rhetorical descriptions or ekphraseis, may offer insights into the way in which monuments have been seen and communicated over the course of time. While representing selective verbal–visual narratives, these texts can convey specific conceptions of the monuments and encourage interpretations that are distant from the original intentions of those who had them installed. On this premise, this paper proposes a more comprehensive interpretive framework for the analysis of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, a Byzantine monument recently brought to international attention by the Turkish government’s decision to change back its status from museum to mosque. This framework resorts to rhetoric and its unique capacity to unveil, across time and space, how the monument has been perceived, expressed, appropriated, reframed, and negotiated by people as an indivisible component of their culture.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"32 1","pages":"63 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74471412","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: 10.1080/02666286.2023.2168116
D. Ganz
Abstract Writing in gold has almost completely escaped the attention of art historical manuscript studies. Whereas the semantics and the materiality of gold used in works of goldsmithery as well as in illuminations and panel paintings have been frequently discussed, the fact that gold has been also applied to embellish texts, be they single initials and titles or entire chapters and volumes, has drawn relatively sparse comment. This article is part of a larger research project on Western chrysography. Its scope is to investigate the specific reasons for the use of gold as writing material in the Western Middle Ages. This implies a critical re-evaluation of the standard explanations of the phenomenon in previous research. To approach the issue, it is fruitful to look at single manuscripts and analyse their specific places and ways of application of chrysography. One case that plays a prominent role in this paper is the Golden Psalter from St Gall: an illuminated manuscript that was begun at the court of Charles the Bald and later completed at the monastery of St Gall. In studying this and other examples, the particular and somehow contradictory colour and light effects of chrysography will be emphasized. On the one hand, gold script has the potential to attract visual attention at a long range, especially under the artificial illumination of candlelight; and, on the other, pages with gold script resist a fast, transparent reading of written notation. They draw the reader’s attention to the forms and arrangement of the letters, to the weave of the lines, to the oscillation between emphasis and fade-out on the page, and to reflections that dissociate the graphemes from their material carrier, provoking an optical state of suspense. In short, writing in gold constitutes a specific model of ‘Schriftbildlichkeit’ or ‘Iconographia’, defying the disappearance of the single graphemes behind the text which for a long time has been considered the most characteristic feature of writing.
{"title":"Writing in gold: on the aesthetics and ideology of Carolingian chrysography","authors":"D. Ganz","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2023.2168116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2023.2168116","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Writing in gold has almost completely escaped the attention of art historical manuscript studies. Whereas the semantics and the materiality of gold used in works of goldsmithery as well as in illuminations and panel paintings have been frequently discussed, the fact that gold has been also applied to embellish texts, be they single initials and titles or entire chapters and volumes, has drawn relatively sparse comment. This article is part of a larger research project on Western chrysography. Its scope is to investigate the specific reasons for the use of gold as writing material in the Western Middle Ages. This implies a critical re-evaluation of the standard explanations of the phenomenon in previous research. To approach the issue, it is fruitful to look at single manuscripts and analyse their specific places and ways of application of chrysography. One case that plays a prominent role in this paper is the Golden Psalter from St Gall: an illuminated manuscript that was begun at the court of Charles the Bald and later completed at the monastery of St Gall. In studying this and other examples, the particular and somehow contradictory colour and light effects of chrysography will be emphasized. On the one hand, gold script has the potential to attract visual attention at a long range, especially under the artificial illumination of candlelight; and, on the other, pages with gold script resist a fast, transparent reading of written notation. They draw the reader’s attention to the forms and arrangement of the letters, to the weave of the lines, to the oscillation between emphasis and fade-out on the page, and to reflections that dissociate the graphemes from their material carrier, provoking an optical state of suspense. In short, writing in gold constitutes a specific model of ‘Schriftbildlichkeit’ or ‘Iconographia’, defying the disappearance of the single graphemes behind the text which for a long time has been considered the most characteristic feature of writing.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"72 1","pages":"19 - 32"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76304949","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: 10.1080/02666286.2023.2168118
Fabio Guidetti
Abstract This paper engages with MS Harley 647 in the British Library, London, a manuscript produced probably at the imperial court in Aachen during the reign of Louis the Pious (814–40 CE), which contains the surviving portion (about four hundred and eighty lines) of Cicero’s Latin translation of the Greek poem Phaenomena, written by Aratus of Soli between 275 and 250 BCE. The poem is a description of the night sky based on the earliest celestial globe, manufactured by the astronomer Eudoxus of Cnidus in the first half of the fourth century BCE. The text itself, however, is not the most important element of the manuscript: in fact, its dominant feature are the full-page images of constellations, to which Cicero’s text, at the bottom of each page, functions as a caption. This article examines the interaction between words and images in the astronomical illustrations of the manuscript, showing how their scientific content is conveyed to the user (at the same time viewer and reader) through the unity of the verbal and the visual. The long-debated question of the originality of their peculiar layout is also addressed, with conclusive evidence supporting the theory of a late Roman model. Finally, the insertion of the text within the illustrations will be interpreted as an allusion to the idea, presented in the proem of the Phaenomena, that the constellations are God’s message ‘written’ in the sky to help humans in their basic activities, above all agriculture: a key concept in Stoic theology that could also appeal to a Christian audience.
{"title":"Writing in the sky: the late antique astronomical illustrations of MS Harley 647","authors":"Fabio Guidetti","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2023.2168118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2023.2168118","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper engages with MS Harley 647 in the British Library, London, a manuscript produced probably at the imperial court in Aachen during the reign of Louis the Pious (814–40 CE), which contains the surviving portion (about four hundred and eighty lines) of Cicero’s Latin translation of the Greek poem Phaenomena, written by Aratus of Soli between 275 and 250 BCE. The poem is a description of the night sky based on the earliest celestial globe, manufactured by the astronomer Eudoxus of Cnidus in the first half of the fourth century BCE. The text itself, however, is not the most important element of the manuscript: in fact, its dominant feature are the full-page images of constellations, to which Cicero’s text, at the bottom of each page, functions as a caption. This article examines the interaction between words and images in the astronomical illustrations of the manuscript, showing how their scientific content is conveyed to the user (at the same time viewer and reader) through the unity of the verbal and the visual. The long-debated question of the originality of their peculiar layout is also addressed, with conclusive evidence supporting the theory of a late Roman model. Finally, the insertion of the text within the illustrations will be interpreted as an allusion to the idea, presented in the proem of the Phaenomena, that the constellations are God’s message ‘written’ in the sky to help humans in their basic activities, above all agriculture: a key concept in Stoic theology that could also appeal to a Christian audience.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"37 1","pages":"43 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77886983","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: 10.1080/02666286.2023.2168111
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。
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