The Space of the Word: epigraphy in the interiors of Dutch churches of the 17th century

The article deals with the problem of the relationships between the word and the image in the monuments of pictorial and graphic art, depicting the text, so-called text painting, «tekstschilderijen» in Dutch. Mostly anonymous, these monumental images of the Word were painted on boards, columns, and church walls throughout the Northern Netherlands during the first century after the Reformation. Formally, these images belong to the history of painting, since the same materials are used: paints on a board or on a stone in a decorative frame, but the way of depicting reminiscent of an enlarged page of Holy Scripture puts them on a par with the monuments of graphic art. The emergence of “verbal pictures”, texts that became ornaments and calligraphy, the scale and structure of which shifted their verbal content from the individual world of personal initiation into the fixed didactics of public space, corresponded to new doctrinal guidelines and radically changed the semantic structure of the Gothic cathedral. The Bible provided a new graphic language: text that was authoritative enough to become canonical and flexible at the same time to take many varieties of forms. “Verbal pictures” were the texts that became ornaments and calligraphy. The dialectical content unity, their design, interaction with the church space and viewing traditions of the text pictures help to reconstruct not only the author's intention as artistic ones, but also the cultural and historical context.