This is Chapter One of NORMAN BRYSON's : Word and Image, French Painting of the Ancien Regime. (1983). Text in Yellow are quotes from the author, Text in Orange are quotes from others.
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DISCOURSE, FIGURE
Canterbury, late 12th Century
IN THE APSE of the Cathedral at Canterbury there is a window which can tell us a good deal about the controls operating on the image in the art of Christian Europe. Approaching the window from a distance, we recognize at once that its square central panel depicts the Crucifixion. Placed against the sides of the square are four lesser, semicircular panels which are not so easily identifiable, and as we go up closer to the window we may simply enjoy them for their dazzling colour and design. But our disinterested visual pleasure is soon interrupted, because as we move closer still, the lesser panels resolve from abstraction and light into precise narrative scenes. Going round the square in clockwise order, we find that they represent the Passover, with a priest sacrificing a lamb and marking a lintel with a sign that is almost a cross; then a strange group of two figures who carry between them a cluster of grapes hanging from a rod; then a patriarch performing a miracle; Moses striking the rock in the desert and causing a river to appear; and finally a scene of sacrifice: Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac. Obviously there is a rationale behind these juxtapositions, and just as we are beginning to work out the resemblances and parallels, we discover that our work has already been done for us. Set into the border of each semicircle is a Latin inscription indicating how the image as a whole is to be understood.
It's a bit odd to begin a book about 18th Century French painting with a detailed examination of a 12th Century English stained glass window - but I suppose the author wants to emphasize his commitment to semiotic analysis. And it gives him yet another opportunity to
use, and then abuse, another world-class masterpiece of English art - just as
he did with the miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard in the Preface. The 12th
Century stained glass windows at Canterbury are the liveliest, most
expressive art in the cathedral - but he tells us that the Latin
inscriptions surrounding each scene turn them into strictly scholastic affairs. Once the lesson is learned, the windows have nothing else to
give the viewer.
(how is Christ on the Cross like Moses in the Desert ?)
"Just as the rock was riven to yield water, so was Christ pierced by the spear, water is for the flesh, blood is for the spiritual"
The window displays a marked intolerance of any claim on behalf of the image to independent life. Each of its details corresponds to a rigorous programme of religious instruction. To prevent the occurrence of those alternating crises of adoration and iconoclasm which had troubled the Church in Byzantium, the image in Western Christendom has been issued with a precise but limited mandate: 'illiterati quod per scripturam non possunt intueri, hoc per quaedam licturae lineamenta contemplatur'. Images are permitted, but only on condition that they fulfil the office of communicating the Word to the unlettered. (Alcuin of York, 735-804). Their role is that of an accessible and palatable substitute. And not only must the image submit before the Word, it must also take on, as a sign, the same kind of construction as the verbal sign. Speech derives its meanings from an articulated and systematic structure which is superimposed on a physical substratum. · Its signs resolve into two components: the acoustic or graphic material- the 'signifier'; and intelligible form - the 'signified'. With the linguistic sign, interest in the sensuous materiality of the signifier is normally minimal except in certain highly conventionalised art situations; we tend to ignore the sensual 'thickness' of language unless our attention is specifically directed towards it. And the Canterbury window similarly plays down the independent life of its signifying material, which progressively yields, as we approach it, to a cultivated transparency before the transcendent Scripture inscribed within it. The status of the window is that of a relay or a place of transit through which the eye must pass to reach its goal, which is the Word. Qualities that might detain the eye during that transit are to be carefully restrained.
Not only have churchmen like Alcuin demanded that images do no more than communicate the Word - but the questions-and-answers associated with each image "curtail the number of aspects the image can easily present" and "ensures a finite boundary". "Each question is dealt with completely, so that when the answer falls into place, the image has no further purpose to serve"
Yet despite Alcuin's demands and the restrictive rubrics installed around them, many of these images have fascinated not just me, but art lovers over the centuries - including the ones who have posted nice big images of them onto Wikimedia Commons or websites that offer them for sale. Perhaps they even fascinated the artists themselves and those who commissioned them. (Alcuin had been dead, then, for almost four hundred years). Perhaps the artists of that time disobeyed church doctrine as frequently as the rapacious nobility and everyone else who lived outside of the monastery walls. Living within a kind of monastery, himself, it's not surprising that Bryson empathizes with his scholarly forefathers.
(How is Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac like the crucifixion of Jesus ?)
(the text is lost - but it must have read something like:
Divine intervention restored the innocent victims)
This top piece is my favorite - it is so brisk, exciting, and full of energy. It compares quite well with the great oil paintings on the same subject as painted by Caravaggio and Rembrandt. Isaac is really in a tight spot - and Abraham really means business. I'm pretty sure I would notice this vibrant design even if I were standing thirty feet away on the floor of the cathedral.
(how is the crucifixion like the sacrifice of a lamb at Passover ?)
"He who was as spotless as lamb sacrificed himself for mankind"
The design of black came strips seems especially effective in this piece
as it complicates pictorial space.
(how is the crucifixion like the grapes carried by these two men ?)
"The one (the Jew) refuses to look at the cluster, the other (the Gentile) thirsts to see it"
The supervising authorities might have noticed that everyone in the other sections of this window was Jewish - so just to make it clear that Jews should be considered deviant, this section badly mangles Numbers 13:23 so that it may tell the story of a pious Christian and a hapless Jew. It's a terrible idea -
but notice how the artist has depicted the Jew and the Gentile as identical.
Given Bryson's disdain for aesthetics, he could probably care less -- but this section was rebuilt in the late 19th Century. The modern glass workers may have stuck close to the original design - but the magic is gone - especially in the design of the blue background pieces that feel cumbersome and lifeless.
.
Here is the window as a whole - it feels like a magical incantation
that has erupted into sacred visions.
Alcuin would have been shocked.
/
Chartres, 1155
Here's another image from about the same time,
of the same crucified Christ between the two Marys.
With a more inwardly emotional and less triumphant aesthetic,
France was heading toward the Gothic.
.
.
.
Here are some other favorites from Canterbury
I found on the internet.
This one depicts an accident in the wood shop.
This is a madwoman being restrained
the old fashioned way.
Jonah lives in world of wonders
Lot's wife turns back to see the destruction of Sodom,
and you know what happens next.
Jonah escapes from the whale and Noah escapes from the deluge
just as Christ climbs out of his tomb.
No idea what's going on here, but it's a beautiful scene
about gentle lives full of passion, purpose, and wonder.
Bryson acknowledges the beauty and design of these windows, but he does not feel further into the character, feelings, and life energy of the artists and where they lived -- and that's how I find visual art so fresh and thrilling. Even when we don't know the intended story - the pictorial space and the human gestures within it, produce a vision that has come from a mind and world so very different from our own.
Are the feelings that we get from art important to art history? That depends on who is looking at it - which is why Bryson and his academic discipline prefer a more objective, semiotic approach.
But we might notice that Bryson has spent three pages writing about one window, and has shared nothing of any value other than his translations of the inscriptions. Didn't we already know that art in religious buildings was intended to be canonically correct? Had he wanted to select less vibrant art that did little else than confirm an ideology, Canterbury Cathedral has plenty of other pieces from which to choose.
The window at Canterbury is a good example of the supremacy of the discursive over the figural; terms for which I at once apologise to the reader, because they may suggest a more scientific approach than he or she will find in this book, and because these two ungainly words are going to be used rather often. Part of their awkwardness comes from unfamiliarity, though for this I do not apologise.
The discursive only overwhelms the figurative when you ignore the formal.
The problem I will be looking at is one which has been sadly neglected- the interaction of the part of our mind which thinks in words, with our visual or ocular experience before painting. Everyone who has visited a museum or a gallery will know the curious sensation of moving on from one painting to the next and almost before taking in the new image at all, of finding the eyes suddenly plunging down to the tiny rectangle of lettering below or beside it. Many of the paintings discussed in this book. were seen for the first time by people who held in their hands a special publication which took the place of our modern rectangles of lettering - the livret of each new Parisian Salon, and the information there was far more elaborate than our rudimentary names and dates, though the need met in each case is similar : Even in the twentieth century, when every formerly accepted convention of art has been questioned and refashioned, one convention which has survived almost intact is the use of an inscription as a handle on the image - even when the usual content of the inscription is demolished, as in Duchamp's 'The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even'. We have not yet found ourselves able to dispense altogether, in our dealings with the image, with some form of contact with language. And language enormously shapes and delimits reception of images. One need think only of the different impact of the same photograph in newspapers of differing ideology; or the difference between this:
,,,, and this: .....
This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself
So how do you react to these two presentations? This piece is so famous, it may be difficult to experience it without relating to what you already know about its origins. That requires what might be called the discipline of viewing: letting the painting speak for itself ; letting the painting enhance what you know about Van Gogh, rather than the other way around. It's a meditative practice of emptying your mind and then letting the painting fill it up - as if you were the artist pondering where to put the next mark. With a dirt path that jolts to a stop right in the middle of the painting - and the sky blotted out by swirling, dark smears - it's a rather terrifying image, with or without any association with the artist’s suicide (and by the way, according to the Van Gogh Museum website, this was not his last painting)
Here's the black and white image that accompanied the text in the paperback edition of Bryson's book. It's not even recognizable to me as a landscape -- and I see no path into the middle. It feels more like waves crashing into rocks - or maybe an ABX painting from mid-century New York:
Milton Resnick, Swan (1961)
With its dabs of thick paint, however, it's quite likely that Van Gogh's actual painting appears quite different from any online or printed reproductions - so the question of how it feels needs to be addressed in person. And if you go to Amsterdam to see it, please ignore whatever thoughts you have concerning the artist's untimely death.
Now, we might think this ascendancy or supremacy of the discursive is a function of a certain limited technology - the image at Canterbury is textually saturated because it does not yet know how to be otherwise. And support for this view might be found in the 'traditional' account of the development of European painting as a series of technical leaps towards an increasingly accurate reproduction of 'the real'. A crucial figure here is Masaccio, and as a specimen of his work I have chosen the official who receives the tribute money in his fresco in the Brancacci Chapel. The French critic Francastel voices the traditional reaction:
Placed at the edge of the space and of the fresco, his calves tense, his demeanour insolent, this magnificent sabreur bears no relation to the figures of gothic cathedrals: he is drawn from universal visual experience. He does not owe his imposing presence to the weight and volume of his robes: his tunic moulds itself on his body. Henceforth man will be defined not by the rules of narrative, but by an immediate physical apprehension. The goal of representation will be appearance, and no longer meaning.
I've actually seen this fresco - as well as reading and writing about it on this blog. But this is the first time I've noticed that the "magnificent sabreur's" heel seems to be extending out from the picture plane. Thankyou Masaccio for creating this clever effect - and thank you Francastel for noticing it. By the way, Pierre Francastel is primarily known for writing "Art et Sociologie" (1948) and "Peinture et Société" (1951) - which would place him somewhere outside the more aesthetically minded historians of style with whom Bryson is contending.
The given quote is way too short to give any idea of what Francastel had in mind when he mentions "the rules of narrative". Does that refer to the kind of didactic program that Bryson found in the Canterbury windows? Does it refer to the customary practices of story telling in 15th Century Florence? Or does it refer to a more general kind of narrative logic?
The opposition Francastel erects is Meaning versus Being, and--it might seem that the terms 'discursive' and 'figural' repeat that opposition: that the Canterbury window, ,where discourse subjugated figure, has subordinated Life to Text, whereas the Masaccio, with its goal of 'appearance and no longer meaning', appeals to 'universal visual experience'.
Bryson transforms Francastel's 'appearance and no longer meaning' into "Meaning versus Being" so that he can raise the issue of "perfect reduplication" much as he did in the preface with the hungry birds in Pliny’s fable. Perhaps he believes that appearance is equivalent to being - but Francastel does not mention 'being' at all in the given quote. His equivalence is between 'physical apprehension" and 'appearance' - both of which he opposes to meaning - just as he opposes Masaccio to what’s found in Gothic cathedrals.
But doesn’t the meaning conveyed by images always depend on appearance and recognizability? That’s the problem that I have with this fragment of Francastel. Both Gothic and Renaissance depend on a recognizable appearance, but the one more closely resembles a private world of dreams and visions, while the other more resembles a public space in which you might participate. (an idea well articulated by Norris Kelly Smith in Here I Stand )
Received opinion would support such an opposition: there remains a vague conception of the image as an area of resistance to meaning, in the name of a certain mythical idea of Life. Vasari's history of the progress of Renaissance painting is built on this 'common-sense' view: the progress he sees is an evolutionary liberation of Life from the repression of the textual. Italian art, he believed had thrown off the constrictions of dogma and pedagogy, .and having escaped the control of discourse, at once came to an objective registering of the visual experience common to ~ all men: optical truth.
Bryson distorts Vasari's "nature" just as he distorted Francastel's "appearance". Here is what Vasari wrote about Mantegna:
he showed that he knew how to take the good from living and natural objects as well as from those created by art. But with all this, Andrea always believed that good classical statues were more perfect and possessed more beautiful parts than is shown by nature, because those excellent masters, according to what he judged and what he has seen in those statues, had taken the perfection of nature from many living persons....".. Vasari, Lives of the Artists
"Taking the perfection of nature from many living persons" is hardly the same as seeking "optical truth".
But let us reconsider this 'common-sense' view. At its deepest level it assumes that painting can be calibrated by degrees of remoteness from, or approximation towards, an Essential Copy. Masaccio is near, the Canterbury window far off. Yet such a view ignores the obvious fact that there is no Essential Copy, and that the rules governing the transposition of the real into the image are subject to historical change. Obviously, we would not hesitate to describe the Masaccio as 'realistic' by comparison with the window; but such a decision does not concern, as Vasari believed, the distance of the copy from an original, but only those visual effects we currently agree to call realistic. Husserl has a good phrase for the kind of outlook Vasari represents: the 'natural attitude'.
I find ever present and confronting me a single spatia-temporal reality of which I myself am a part, as do all other men found in it and who relate to it in the same way. This 'reality', as the word already indicates, I find existing out there and I receive it just as it presents itself to me as something existing out there. 'The' world as reality is always there: at the most it is here and there 'other' than I supposed it, and should it be necessary to exclude this or that under the title 'figment of the imagination', 'hallucination', etc., I exclude it from this world which in the attitude of the general thesis is always the world existing out there. It is the aim of the sciences issuing from the natural attitude to attain a knowledge of the world more comprehensive, more reliable, and in every respect more perfect than that offered by the simple information received by experience, and to resolve all the problems of scientific knowledge that offer themselves upon its ground.
What Husserl says of the sciences issuing from the natural attitude equally applies to painting: within the natural attitude, which is that of Vasari, Francastel, and the birds of Zeuxis, the image is thought of as self-effacing in the representation or resurrection of things, instead of being understood as the milieu of the articulation of the reality known by a given visual community. It is clear that the term 'realism' cannot draw its validity from any absolute conception of 'the real', because that conception cannot account for the historical and changing character of 'the real' within differing cultures and periods. ....... It is in relation to this socially determined body of codes, and not in relation to an immutable 'universal visual experience', that the realism of an image should be understood.
Anthony Adcock, Marked Out
Bryson has distorted Pliny, Francastel, and Vasari - and since I have no interest in perfect re-duplicaton or anything like an essential copy, I will neither attack nor defend the straw man he has created - except to note that there are paintings that really do convince the viewer that they are the objects depicted rather than depictions of objects. Their success depends, among other things, on cancelling out binocular vision - either by depicting objects that are nearly flat - or by keeping the viewer at such a distance that the space between our two eyes is irrelevant - like the faux architectural detail painted on the ceiling of an auditorium or church. No social conventions are required, any more than Parrhasias needed them to fool Zeuxis with his faux curtains.
Once realism is no longer a question of the Essential Copy, we can begin to explore the means used by the realistic image to persuade us of its illusionism. We have mentioned the exhaustion of the image by the text, in the case of the medieval image. According to the natural attitude, such an image fails to record universal visual experience; it is servile and depleted. By contrast the Masaccio displays a marked excess of the image over the text, and because it is seen to break away from the symbolic requirements of discourse, Francastel is prepared to describe it as lifelike. In the terms of my own description, the image is neither like nor unlike Life - but it is far more figural than the Canterbury window. It supplies us with more visual information than we need to grasp its narrative content, and more than we can recuperate as semantically relevant. With the panel that dealt with the Passover, all that was necessary to establish the idea of' Passover' was a man daubing a mark on the lintel of a doorway: only quite minimal information had to be supplied to trigger our immediate discursive response; and with Masaccio's scene of the tribute money, all one needs are the component ideas of 'apostle', 'money', ' receiver of money', and the activity which connects them, of 'donation'. The narrative can be parsed, like a sentence, into its minimally sufficient requirements: apostle - donation- recipient. And the Masaccio meets this rudimentary textual demand on the image: the halo establishes 'apostolic ', the outstretched hand meeting the open palm establishes 'gives money to' (we do not even have to see the money itself; 'money' is contained in the gesture). The economy or frugality of these signalling means is medievally concise. But Masaccio supplies much more information than this. For example, the donor at the right of the fresco is bearded, white-haired, and robed; the recipient is beardless, brown-haired, and clad in a tunic. In context, these oppositions generate the semantic idea of sacred: profane. To be sure, the pairs bearded:unbearded, robe: tunic and white-haired:brown-haired do not of necessity generate sacred: profane. It is possible to imagine a scene in which these polarised attributes might feature without any accompanying sense of meaningfulness. It is only when combined with the more central opposition apostle: official that these secondary meanings emerge from semantic latency into semantic realisation. Some parts of the image are more discursively charged than other parts; there is a hierarchy of semantic relevance. This idea of relevance is vital, because realism insists on the presence of the irrelevent as part of its persuasional technique.
Just as he insists that resemblance aims at re-duplication, Bryson boils down narrative to a bleached skeleton of semiotic parts. The emotional effects of color, drawing, and design are all irrelevant.
I could not find any other painting that combined Saint Peter finding the coin in the fish with Jesus rendering a judgment and paying off the tax collector. But Rubens, or his studio, painted both scenes separately. Combined, they invoke the same discourse that Masaccio did. But what an emotional, philosophical, spiritual, and political difference there is. It's the difference between the post-Medieval city state of Florence in 1420 and the Post-Reformation Spanish Empire of 1620. No collection of discrete, semantically charged signals could ever account for it. Bryson's semantic analysis of Masaccio barely scratches the surface and is no less speculative - Masaccio having left behind no explanation of the signifiers and signified.
Howes, Ely Cathedral, 1850
Here is another window depicting the Passover, designed nearly seven hundred years later and probably based on the one at Canterbury. Possibly it could be connected to the English Arts and Crafts movement that was just beginning in that decade.
As with the Crucifixion scene at Canterbury, the magic of the medieval design is gone. It feels quite perfunctory -- these men might just as well be working in a wood shop or repairing a house. There's that feeling of being overstuffed that characterizes Victorian ornamentation. It echoes throughout the American Protestant churches that would be built the following decades. I began to hate it at a very tender age - but now find it at least a bit warm and comforting - like a quilt on a cold winter night.
William Morris, 1889
By contrast, the Ely Passover window makes the Canterbury version shown earlier feel spacious, airy, and mysterious. It may be an over simplification to say that English civilization in the late 12th century put more of its resources and energy into spirituality, while the British Empire in the 19th century was more focused on the materialism of the industrial revolution. But that's what a comparison of these two windows seems to show us. It's incredible that Bryson would determine that "the visual information it (the Canterbury window) emits is fully exhausted by textuality". I have never read any other art historian be this radically dismissive of the aesthetic information in a work of art. It's amazing - and a bit shocking - which may have enhanced this book's reputation in a critical discipline that was still taking a defiant turn against formalism.
This idea of relevance is vital, because realism insists on the presence of the irrelevant as part of its persuasional technique. Whereas at Canterbury every detail in the window announces its signalling work with equal stress, .here there is a shading from stressed to unstressed. The narrative sentence 'apostle donation- recipient' is at an absolute centre; the image would become nonsense if it lost this kernel. But sacred :profane is a secondary elaboration, occurring at a distance from the absolute centre. And it is not stressed in the same way as the narrative sentence is. All apostles, within this work, have haloes: without the haloes they would no longer be apostles. But some apostles have beards, others do not: this attribute is not a necessary one, but a secondary qualification. In the same way, wearing a tunic does not in itself establish 'profane person': if a figure who wore a tunic also sported a halo, we would not hesitate to call him sacred. Nor does 'white-haired' feature as an essential apostolic quality; some apostles have brown hair, just like the soldier; and some are without beards. The permutations amongst these characteristics establishes the idea of probability, which is to say, absence of certainty with regard to semantic recuperation, resistance to Meaning, and a descending register from the necessary to the probable to the irrelevant.
then what is the narrative necessity of the second priest and the second butcher in the Canterbury Passover scene ? The Ely Passover window told the same story without them.
Bryson attributes the irrelevant to Masaccio's ideology of realism,
but narrative irrelevance can be found at Canterbury and probably every other representational image.
When Bryson looks at an image,
he immediately superimposes an analytic structure
by asking "what elements tell this story -
and how far is everything else from it ?"
Instead of feeling his way into
the unique story that is being presented.
Then Bryson offers several statements about perspective:
The great guarantee of irrelevance, since we are dealing with Masaccio, is perspective; and it is as part of a general economy of information and its distribution that the relation between perspective and realism ought to be understood.
..perspective strengthens realism by greatly expanding the area on the opposite side of the threshold to the side occupied by textual function, and one might even say by instituting into the image a permanent threshold of semantic neutrality.
Perspective, besides being a technique for recording a certain optical phenomenon, is also a technique for distributing information in a pattern which at once arouses our willingness to believe.
Perspective ensures that the image will always retain features which cannot be recuperated semantically.
Perspective in painting always runs the risk of fracturing the image into two, figural and discursive, components
What this discussion ignores are the anomalies that almost always occur whenever some mathematical system of perspective has been applied. For example, in Masaccio's "Tribute Money",
the heads of the sixteen standing men are all in a horizontal line, parallel to the bottom frame of the fresco - even though they are standing in something like a semicircle around Jesus. The one closest to the viewer (the tax collector) has got to be 6-8 feet in front of the apostles in the rear.
It's an anomaly in terms of linear perspective - but it may be appropriate for the desired effect - which in this case appears to be directly confronting the viewer with Jesus, the tax collector, and the 12 apostles.
Bryson suggests that perspective organizes the subject matter -- but more importantly, perspective relates that subject matter to the viewer. It locates the viewer within the illusionary scene - in this case, the heel of tax collector thrusts out from the picture plane, so the viewer is about 8 feet away from him - or at whatever distance he must stand to see the entire painting on the wall. The perspective creates a "you are there!" effect. Contrast that with the distance between the viewer and the windows at Canterbury. As the colored light comes down from high above, it's like an ecstatic vision of biblical characters, rather than standing on the same ground as them. It's a very different experience - yet that difference is not accounted for by Bryson's semiotic analysis.
Let us look at another "break-through" Renaissance image, the Flagellation by Piero Della Francesca. Here, perspective is elevated to the status of a rival subject: the scriptural scene is made the pretext for a display of spatial virtuosity that till impresses us. But let us reconsider it, not as optically-based but as rhetorically-based - as a distribution of information. As we know, it was always possible for the pre-Renaissance image to indicate its discursive content by alteration of scale: the Virgin is colossal, the donors who kneel at her feet minute. And we might expect - particularly if we imagine that perspective actually does permit or enable more lifelikeness than any other visual system - such licence to distort normal scale to disappear with the advent of perspective. The Flagellation. is a reminder that the right to manipulate scale remains intact through the innovation. Here, the archaic scheme of Virgin and donor is simply inverted: the minor figures who stand apart from the Flagellation are gigantic, and the figure of Christ is made small. If we were physically to cut out from a reproduction of the panel its central textual component, the minimal visual sentence 'soldiers - flagellate - Christ', ninety per cent of the image would remain. It is the extent of the residue, which convinces, not through perspective as route to the Essential Copy, but through perspective as a means of aggrandising the figural irrelevance. lnbuilt into realist approaches to art is an idea of resistance and mistrust: truth cannot reside in the obvious, the central, the stressed, but only in the hidden, the peripheral, the unemphasised. When a work of prose contains a huge corpus of information which seems trivial, lifelikeness becomes an available criterion: realist prose begins with a refusal to go persuasive, rather than true: not one of the details a realist fiction or image supplies need correspond to actual events; it need only distribute its data in a certain proportion to have us convinced, and perspective always ensures that proportion, simply because there are so few ways in which the data concerning spatial location of bodies can be semantically important.
There is un-resolvable controversy regarding those three figures in the foreground. Apparently they are analogous to the Flagellation of Christ in the background, but no one can prove how.
Bryson points out that the large size of the three figures suggests that they are the primary subject of this painting —- and that seems obvious. He also points out that perspective has been consistently applied, and that also appears to be true. But then he offers "perspective as a means to aggrandize figural irrelevance". (i.e. diminish the importance of some figures by making them smaller). To which we might note that figures can be made smaller with or without perspective. And then he launches into a completely new direction with: "lnbuilt into realist approaches to art is an idea of resistance and mistrust: truth cannot reside in the obvious, the central, the stressed, but only in the hidden, the peripheral, the unemphasized. "...... and where did that idea come from ?
Apparently Bryson has reasoned that perspective is a realist approach to art - the "Flagellation" applies perspective - therefore the "Flagellation" is a realist painting - and therefore it is hiding its truth in the unemphasized. I certainly agree that the truth in this painting has been well hidden - possibly on purpose - but not because it is a "realist" painting. That’s just Bryson attributing his idea of realism or perfect re-duplication to others - which he has been doing since the very first paragraph of the Preface. Now he will use this mis-construed example to introduce a further discussion of semiotics:
There is a model within linguistics which can help us to clarify the kind of response we have when we decide that a work is 'realistic'. The interpretative practice of realism involves what linguistics and semiotics of nonlinguistic signs) describe as a high predominance of syntagm over paradigm. What do these terms mean?
Why is it necessary to determine whether a work is "realistic" and how is that determination made?
When, or if, Bryson ever gets around to explaining that, I will come back and read what follows. Until then, I'm going to skip much of what follows in this chapter.
As one reads a sentence, one follows simultaneously two sets of rules. The first, the syntagmatic, concerns the relationships of contiguity between individual words - how the individual words in the sentence exist as a sequence. The second, the paradigmatic set, concerns the relationships between individual words in the sentence and words outside it - the repertoire of other words from the vocabulary of the language.
Regarding "The Flagellation", we can distinguish between inner and outer relationships ( the relative size of the figures is inner - the identification of one of the figures as Christ is outer) . But there is no syntagm because there is no sequence between the parts - the whole thing comes at you all at once. And there is no paradigm because Renaissance Italian painting has nothing like a credible dictionary. (or if there were one that could be applied, why wouldn't Bryson have mentioned it ?)
Bryson applies semiotics to a Dutch still-life, but since its painter is unknown, it cannot be found on the internet. The small black-and-white photo that the book provides is not worth viewing.
But then he discusses the above painting that has been reproduced in high resolution by Wikipedia.
Expansion of the syntagm permits the development of figurality: if language cannot enter the image, it automatically attains a certain autonomy. But that autonomy is not yet complete, because the still-life is still secondary to an outer reality before which it claims to be entirely passive. The decisive bid for figurality comes when the image breaks with that reflective and secondary posture and comes to assert the irreducibility of its own material construction. A brilliant example is the Vermeer in the National Gallery in London, known as Young Woman Seated at a Virginal . At first glance it seems to belong to the sign-formation of still life: it is a highly persuasive picture of a world, and one so free of discursive intent that it seems already well on the way to autonomy. But it goes much further towards autonomy than still-life is able to do. It contains within itself a series of adorned surfaces: the painting on the wall, the landscape inset into the lid of the virginal, the Faux-marble sides and stand of the instrument, the marbled flooring, and the row of representational tiles at the skirting. But not all these surfaces are represented as existing on the same level of transposition into painting.
the lace in the dress
the gilded frame
Whereas the representation of the lace in the girl's dress is based on a supposed one-to-one isomorphism between the 'original' and its 'copy', the representation of the gilding round the picture asserts considerable latitude of transcription: there is a gulf between the original and its representation. We cannot say that it is a high-fidelity transcription of an original that is out of focus, because we can see the actual strokes of the brush that articulate the representation. The signifier is visibly present on the canvas and its existence is as stressed here as it is understressed at the lace. The painted canvas of the painting on the wall is similarly elliptical: it is drained of all probable colour, and information essential to its reconstruction has been removed in a way that cannot be explained by the appeal to focus. Very clearly in the painted figure on the left, where a featureless female head lifts to meet a male head which has not yet been robbed of its face, it is not a question of information proportionally diminishing, but of information altogether cancelled. If we move a lens out of focus, we still receive the stream of visual information intact, as in a hologram: the information has merely been scrambled. But here, information has been arbitrarily omitted, as with the gilding of the frame. The disparity between the reproductive technique used to depict the lace and its surroundings, and the technique used to depict the painting and its frame, might pass unnoticed if the image did not so forcefully insist that we attend to the problem of transposition- the effect of the. real- elsewhere.
faux marble on the Virginal
real marble on the floor
Vermeer's copy of The Procuress (Dirck van Baburen)
the tapestry
detail of tapestry from Vermeer's Art of Painting (1662-68)
With the faux-marble, a new technique of transposition is brought into play: it is based on deliberately incomplete correspondence between a painted surface and the supposed original it copies, a transposition that deceives no one; unlike the real marble Vermeer is careful to include in his image. Yet by this stage, when we are already awake to the problem of reproduction, Vermeer's 'real' marble is not so real: the inclusion of so many other adorned surfaces alerts us to the work - the sweat - of realism, and once we are aware that the real is an effect that emanates from a precise source, we are no longer 'innocent'. To stress the process whereby we believe but at the same time do not believe in our painted illusionism, Vermeer adds his landscape to the lid of the virginal, and with this landscape there is no way of deciding whether it is a high-fidelity version of an object in partial focus, or a low-fidelity version of an object in full focus. With the gilded frame, though, we knew it was the latter; but now even that certainty is withdrawn. Framing the scene is a drape which is either faded, or robbed of information, like the faces in the painting on the wall; or so it appears until we notice that it is at roughly the same depth from the viewer as the bass viol, but as the viol is in sharp focus, we conclude that the drape has been treated elliptically. That is, the same area of canvas can be seen one way when taken alone, another way when placed against other objects: now we see the work of signification, and now we don' t.
This is one strange painting that seems much closer to something Gabriel Metsu might have done. Overall, it feels cluttered and small; the body of the young woman is awkward; and take a look at how it handles the tapestry. It is dull, flat, and threadbare in comparison with the deep, luscious, voluminous folds in Vermeer's 'Art of Painting". The stillness is gone; the clear, quiet atmosphere is gone; the magic is gone. Perhaps he was painting it as some kind of joke - a humorous companion piece for "Young Woman Standing at the Virginal" which was painted from the same bolt of canvas and includes many of the same elements.
more elegant and stately
Same kind of tiles on the floor and wall,
but the ones on wall are more sharply painted in this version.
Is it too far fetched to suggest that this painting presents a lady who formally receives her lover into her elegant music room. (that's a painting of Cupid up on the wall behind her). While in the other version, she has just received him between her legs - and the sense of jumbled disorder is post-coital exhaustion. (that's a painting of a brothel on the wall behind her)
The curvaceous viol does somewhat resemble a woman's body
whose strings have been penetrated by a phallic bow.
And that pattern painted onto the Virginal behind it
does look more like viscous fluid splatter than faux marble.
Outrageous as that interpretation may be,
it does seem more likely than
"a deliberately incomplete correspondence between
a painted surface and the supposed original that it copies."
There's no doubt that I have a ribald sense of humor;
perhaps Vermeer had one as well.
I realize that imaginative aesthetics is outside the scope of this book -- but is the artist's intention peripheral as well? Does Bryson really think that the artist intended to make the various areas of this painting contrast syntagm with paradigm? Does he really believe that the artist was intending that "now we see the work of signification, and now we don' t."? Isn't the intention of the artist critical to a semiotic study of signifier and signified?
It is here that the narrative content of music and musical notation enters to complete the meditation. The bass viol has its bow, placed rather irrationally round the strings; the virginal has its music, whose notation we can clearly see. This narrative centre reinforces the attention we have been paying to the conventional nature of visual notation, and the fact of distance between the signifier and the signifted. With still-life, the work of the signifier was hidden; now it comes to dominate the image. Faced with such varied distances between the signifier and the signified - minimal in the lace, deliberately separated in the false marble, apparently brought together in the real marble, separate again in the quoted painting and its elliptical frame, and totally divorced in the case of the gulf between the printed music and the sound coming from the instrument - the image as a whole forces us to recognize the independent existence of the signifiers of the painting, the strokes of paint of which it is built. The painting is not at all like a Titian or a Tintoretto, where the whole canvas announces the work of the brush, and where because the brushwork is equally evident everywhere, we can accept it as a precondition of the image. Here, the work of the brush in producing the effect of the real is sometimes dramatically evident (the quoted painting, the gilded frame), sometimes effaced (the lace, the viol), sometimes problematic (the drape, the landscape); and because the work of signification varies abruptly from place to place, we are much more aware of it than we are with, say, Titian, where it is everywhere, and because it is everywhere, is nowhere, or nowhere stressed. Let us recall an earlier observation on realism: that it depends on a supposed exteriority of the signified to the signifier. An image can persuade us that it reflects the real only for as long as it effaces the traces of its own production and conceals the independent material existence of the signifier. The Vermeer so forces our attention on to the activity and articulation of the signifier that the effect of the real is no longer generated in innocence. While that effect may begin when the image starts to assert its figurality and the impossibility of its recuperation by the textual forces that seek to infiltrate and subdue it, when figurality is pushed one step further the effect disappears; and in its wake it leaves us with the irreducible component of the image, that which can never belong to anything but the image itself: its paint.
Bryson's semiotic analysis has finally concluded that "Young Woman Seated at the Virginal" is essentially presentation of paint -- thus updating Vermeer to the mid twentieth century.
Within the natural attitude, an image will seek to record the pre-existing real unless prevented from doing so by a hostile agency. For Francastel - and there are still supporters for his view- the most powerful interference comes from textuality, and the painting of realism is seen as a progressive liberation from discourse as the technology of painting permits ever closer approximation towards the Essential Copy. The natural attitude, with its belief in a war between Meaning and Being, would polarise painting in this fashion: at the extreme end of failure to achieve the Essential Copy, it would place the sigil, the hieroglyph, the pictogram; then such an image as the Canterbury window, and then, on a sliding scale towards recapturing of the real, the Masaccio, the Piero, the Vermeer; and at the opposite pole from the discursive obstructionism of the hieroglyphic, still-life, and as the ideal expression of this category, the grapes of Zeuxis. Once the natural attitude is called into question, the polarity between Meaning and Being cannot be accepted; instead of a war between the text and the real, it is found that the effect of the real depends on a subtle mutuality and co-operation between the component of the image which declares its allegiance to discourse, and the component which refuses alignment with discourse. A new polarity emerges: the image is the site of convergence of two antithetical forces neither of which embraces the Essential Copy: what I am calling here the discursive and figural.
Jackson Pollock, Enchanted Forest, 1947
At the pole of pure discursivity, the hieroglyph or pictogram, as before; but at the opposite pole the irreducible life of the material signifier - the painterly trace, and as an exemplary case of that trace, the asemantic brushwork of abstract expressionism (the Pollock painting shown above).
If someone called this piece "Enchanted Forest", isn't that what it signified to him? It does feel more charming, spacious, and carefree than some of his other more angry, driven and compulsive work such as:
The term 'figurality' therefore requires apology: it seems to refer to figure in the sense of body, as in 'the figure of a man'; but in the definition used here, it returns to the root sense, offigura, formation, from fingere, to form. It is not out of perversity that the term has been chosen, but only to stress the more strongly that the poles between which the image moves are not from Text to Life, but from the textual to the painterly. Even in the case of still-life, even with the grapes of Zeuxis, one is still within the shadow of a language, though it is a mutilated language, one without verbs or predicates, and one which is 'all syntagm'. But the division of the painterly sign, as with all signs, is the division between the signified and the signifier, which gives rise to the discursive and the figural; and considered at the level of sign, painting is found to have a history which is not at all the history of emergent realism we find in the natural attitude, or the history of successive visual styles we find in classical art history. Figure and discourse are perhaps unattractive terms- Meaning and Being were certainly more sonorous; but let us explore their usefulness, as we approach our chosen body of study: French painting of the ancien regime.
What Figure-Discourse excludes is the tradition of image making on which every image that Bryson has shown depends. As much as that 12th Century Canterbury window depended upon Biblical text, it depended even more on the medieval image making that preceded it. Whether followed or rejected, that relationship is studied in the histories of style which Bryson here wishes to replace.
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