“In this inspired book, Leonard Barkan traces the origins and transformations of the word-image conundrum in art and literature from Plato to Shakespeare, providing a deeply learned and often brilliant meditation on a central theme of contemporary aesthetics and cultural history. This is vintage Barkan–a seductive book, written with eloquence and insight, and giving much pleasure and intellectual profit.”–Marvin Trachtenberg, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

“Vibrant, insightful, and elegantly written, this book reflects a lifetime of thought by a master of his subject.”–Jaś Elsner, University of Oxford and University of Chicago

“A dazzling display of erudition spiced with humor and rhetorical wizardry, this book will interest anyone who cares about pictures or words–and what else is there?”–Michael Ann Holly, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His books include Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton); Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture; The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism; and Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome.

Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures

By Leonard Barkan

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14183-1

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………ixIntroduction…………………………………………………xiOne Visible and Invisible……………………………………..1Two Apples and Oranges………………………………………..27Three Desire and Loss…………………………………………75Four The Theater as a Visual Art……………………………….127Afterword……………………………………………………161On Sources and Further Readings………………………………..163Primary Sources: Works Consulted and Works Cited…………………169Further Readings in Words and Images……………………………175Index……………………………………………………….189

Chapter One

Visible and Invisible

Shortly before I turned sixteen, I took part in a high school film project. Each member of the group was required to write and direct a movie in the course of the summer, and we all served as each others’ crew. My fellow-cineastes devoted laborious thought to the choice of a subject, only to end up with the sorts of themes—rock-and-roll, science fiction, the pangs of young love—that doubtless could have provided quite predictable maps of our various adolescent preoccupations. I, however, seized on some rather arcane material, and without a moment’s hesitation. In German class, I had just been assigned a Stefan Zweig short story called “Die unsichtbare Sammlung,” and I decided it was perfect for a movie.

It was the story of an impoverished elderly couple—the husband was already totally blind—whose only remaining treasure was his collection of old master prints. A shrewd art merchant, on the lookout for some valuable goods at a low price, journeys to the couple’s remote abode in the provinces. The old man is thrilled at the prospect of showing off his treasures, but once the wife understands the purpose of the visit, she gets desperately upset, begs the visitor to return to his hotel, and sends her daughter there to provide him with an explanation. It seems that in order to have the money to live during a time of grave economic crisis, the two women have been selling off the collection one piece at a time. By now there is nothing left but the blank sheets of paper that they have been regularly inserting into the precious folios. The blind old man cannot tell the difference, but now that an expert from the city has come calling, their cover is about to be blown. Not only is the crafty dealer deprived of his expected fast profit, but, pressured by mother and daughter, he finds himself back in the apartment, where he is compelled to sit for hours with the old man and his imaginary art objects. At first unwillingly and then with increasing empathy and imagination—this character change is really the point of the story—he goes through the charade of looking at nonexistent Dürers and Mantegnas and Rembrandts while the blind collector basks in the delusory pleasures of believing that he owns several hundred priceless masterpieces.

I gave no particular thought, so many decades ago, to the reasons why this subject, with all its dim resonances of Mittel-Europa and the German inflation of the 1920s, should have seized my imagination in preference to stuff I actually knew from my own experience. From my present perspective, however, I am first of all struck by what seems like the bizarre determinism of the episode: some decades before I had ever heard the word ekphrasis, I was making a movie about it. I knew nothing about classical rhetoric, and certainly had never heard the technical term for the verbal presentation of a visual object inside a literary work; but it was clearly the question of words-about-pictures that led me to seize on the Zweig material. The exposition in my movie (as, frankly, in the story itself) was a bit ponderous; it wasn’t easy for me to establish on screen what kind of character the art dealer was, why he was scouring the provinces for merchandise, and how it happened that the old couple could be living in such straitened circumstances and yet be presumably in possession of such an artistic treasure trove. Where the film at last picked up its little bit of speed, however, was the big final scene—to which I allotted more than half of the total screen time—when the blind old man, in possession of a captive audience, lovingly described sheet after sheet of his invisible collection. The camera relentlessly took in the shiny emptiness of page after page while the elderly collector recounted a lifetime’s familiarity with each art work. Only now, when I reread the original text, do I realize that I invented most of these speeches. The lengthy monologues recounting the features of Dürer’s Great Horse or Rembrandt’s Hundred Guilder Print—which I recall with some agony, since the actor who played the old man had a lot of trouble retaining his lines—have no place in the original story at all; we hear about these speeches, but we never actually hear them. Zweig was clearly less interested in ekphrasis than I was.

I got hooked on “The Invisible Collection” because I believed that the most cinematic thing of all (which is usually taken to mean the most visual thing of all) would be the recurring shot of an empty page. Actually, there is more to it than that. This was my second summer in the film project. The first year we had made only silent films, since recording equipment was too expensive and too complicated for us to learn about; only now were we working in sound. And even with this leap forward, our audio equipment wasn’t quite up to the rigors of perfect lip synchronization; hence it was much easier for us to work in voiceover than in dialogue. The real allure, both technological and aesthetic, of the Zweig short story was thus the potent incongruity of the blank sheet on the screen and the florid voice on the soundtrack. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had chosen a narrative which—like so many others, as it turned out—seemed to set words and pictures in parallel but in truth exposed a vast gap between them.

That unfulfilled promise of parallelism is really the theme of this book. Like Zweig’s old collector (though I hope my sheets offer a little more substance), I come to this endeavor with a gallery full of images and texts stored in my memory. We will come soon enough to such far-ranging and influential pronouncements as ut pictura poesis or a picture is a silent poem, a poem is a speaking picture, which have led to grandiose imaginative leaps whereby sonnets and cupolas, or tragedies and friezes, have been placed in a common comparative space that their creators could scarcely have anticipated. For the moment, we may consider the simplest case of all: what happens when a work of visual art comes with a verbal caption? To the modern museumgoer, after all, this is the defining condition of images that are worthy of being housed in hallowed spaces: hence, every visit to the Louvre or the Metropolitan is inevitably an exercise in word-and-image.

If it seems that that way madness lies—if, in other words, we shy away from analyzing the optical and interpretive patterns of every museum visitor as he or she measures the relative weight of the object inside the frame and the placard located (usually) to its right—it might be best to begin with the cases where the picture houses something like a caption within itself. Take the reclining nude painted by Jean Cousin the Elder around 1550 (figure 1.1). The artist has clearly absorbed various classical and Italian visual conventions, including a certain traditionally erotic display of the female body, the presence of signifying props like the skull or the ewers, and the surrounding landscape that, depending on who is looking at it, may hover between mere scene-painting and deliberate message-making. Such interpretive questions are, at least partially, laid to rest, however, because the artist has inscribed the words EVA PRIMA PANDORA (“Eve first Pandora”) in a prominent spot on the canvas.

We could imagine this inscription to be a conveniently authoritative sixteenth-century equivalent to a museum wall caption, which informs viewers what is being depicted and, to some extent, what they should think about it. For me, though, this textual cartouche raises as many questions as it answers. Are we, for instance, to locate it literally in the space of the picture, hanging over the lady’s outstretched frame? For the purposes of emblem or allegory, such an implication is almost absurd, since it is the categorical separation of signifier from signified, as much as their hermeneutic interconnection, which defines such systems. Yet in Cousin’s painting—perhaps because it is a painting and not an allegorical poem or a page out of an emblem book—such spatial literalism seems plausible, given the perspectival composition of the whole scene and the two golden ribbons which begin to suggest that the little sign is actually attached to the tree, even though the point of connection, perhaps coyly on purpose, falls outside the picture plane. Yet more unsettling is the content of the inscribed caption. Rather than performing the practical service of telling us what we are looking at (as on the typical museum wall), these words precisely confuse the issue. Are we looking at Eve, or are we looking at Pandora? The rules of pictures would seem to insist on one or the other; after all, it’s precisely the element of multiple time planes, captured in that pivotal PRIMA, which is generally thought to be inexpressible in the visual medium, and therefore the province of words.

At least, Eve/Pandora doesn’t seem to know that she has an allegorical sign hanging over her head. Elsewhere, however, text becomes part of the story, generally because someone is either writing words or reading them. Two very famous seventeenth-century paintings immediately spring to mind. Both Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds (figure 1.2) and Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast (figure 1.3) center on pieces of writing. Not only is each of these texts, to varying degrees, in an arcane language, but in both instances the entire plot of the story revolves around the challenging toil of decoding the mysterious meaning of the words. Between Rembrandt and Poussin the process works differently. In the case of mene mene tekel upharsin, the hermeneutic labor has already been narrativized and completed inside the biblical tale, with Daniel unpacking the handwriting on the wall as signifying the end of Belshazzar’s reign; in short, the viewer’s work has already been done, though it exists only in future prospect at the moment of the picture. By contrast, Et in Arcadia ego is placed at the center of a scene in which the interpretive effort is currently under way; and, since no very clear direction is offered by the individuals performing this labor, the Daniel-like work is left decidedly for the viewer to undertake, as generations of great art historical literature have demonstrated. So far as my own personal gallery is concerned, however, these celebratedly enigmatic canvases are, paradoxically, rather straightforward entries by visual artists in the realm of language, in essence postulating a relatively simple relationship between the verbal and the visual. Picture, according to this model is real, substantive, mimetic, objective, earthbound, while word is divine, revelatory, in a foreign tongue, and mightily in need of expert interpretation, even among those who speak its arcane language.

My own interest is more engaged when the opposition seems less thoroughly staged. To cite yet another famous seventeenth-century work, many explanations have been offered as to what went wrong when Caravaggio produced a St. Matthew who was closely engaged with the angel in composing the words of his gospel (figures 1.4, 1.5). Whatever the theological and/or corporeal issues may have been, the replacement picture (the only one we still possess, unfortunately) radically demotes the book, the authentic Hebrew with which it is being inscribed, and the material process of inscription. Whereas the earlier picture centers on a focal point where textuality and physicality—letters and hands—coincide, the second version removes the Evangelist’s pen from the (now largely invisible) book and transfers the act of composition not just from an earthly to a heavenly personage but from an activity involving language to something far more abstracted, and painterly, as constituted by the mysterious and yet oddly precise gesture of the angel’s fingers. The contrast to Belshazzar’s Feast seems notable: if the Matthew as we now see it in San Luigi dei Francesi represents a more orthodox mentality than did its predecessor, might part of that retrenchment consist of a decision to leave text—a Hebrew text, yet—out of the picture?

Text, of course, can never be left out of the picture, or at the very least not within the universe of representational, narrative, and iconological art during the premodern eras that form the basis of my own scholarly experience. Words actually painted on canvases may represent an overly literal sampling. Instead of The Arcadian Shepherds, perhaps we might take as our paradigm a different object in my personal picture gallery, the Donatello statue of the prophet Habbakuk (figure 1.6), known as Lo Zuccone (Big Head):

[L]a quale per essere tenuta cosa rarissima e bella quanto nessuna che facesse mai, soleva Donato, quando voleva giurare, sí che si gli credesse, dire: “Alla fé ch’io porto al mio Zuccone”, e mentre che lo lavorava, guardandolo tuttavia gli diceva: “Favella, favella, che ti venga il cacasangue!” (Vasari, 2:405)

The latter was held to be a very rare work and the most beautiful that Donato ever made, and when he wished to take an oath that would commend belief he was wont to say, “By the faith that I place in my Zuccone”; and the while that he was working on it, he would keep gazing at it and saying, “Speak, speak, plague take thee, speak!” (De Vere, trans., 1:367)

Vasari’s anecdotes are, as ever, richly revealing. The sculptor is imagined in the midst of intense creative process, and the sign of success is, or would be, the ability of the depicted figure to utter speech. In itself, this is the oldest of all articles of praise for art objects: they are so real that they almost seem to speak. But we must understand it as more than an offhand trope; not only does it testify to the language nexus in the visual representation of the human form, but it also introduces a central competitive/comparative element in this nexus. Every occasion when a (necessarily mute) human representation is celebrated for its speaking potential amounts to a reminder not only of the triumph achieved by the particular work under discussion but also of the devastating limitation under which all the visual arts operate. Hence, in the case of Vasari’s Donatello, the furious, even profane struggle to produce the work, and the open-ended question of whether the statue can favellare or not, get signaled further by the proposition that the potential conversation will be taking place not between art object and viewer, as in the normal case, but between sculptor and sculptee. Hence, as well, the accompanying anecdote, in which (at least in the artist’s opinion) the effort is so successful that the statue can operate as a certification of the maker himself, functioning as a sort of personal patron saint.

What would the Zuccone have to say if he could speak? Neither Donatello nor Vasari can tell us, which is not surprising, given that the statue depicts a fairly obscure personage and that it was produced as a one-off work rather than as part of a narrative ensemble that might summon up a known set of speech acts. Indeed, the very choice of favellare, which derives from fabula, serves to remind us of the burdens of iconography, that most fundamental system whereby text is implicated in picture: what does an artist have to do in order that an uncaptioned image succeed in telling its necessarily language-based story?

Another corner of my personal picture gallery reminds us that the term story itself has to be viewed broadly. In 1641, Rembrandt produced an etching in which he portrayed the Mennonite preacher Cornelis Claesz Anslo (figure 1.7) gazing off into a middle distance and seated at a table with large folio volumes; while his right hand holds a pen and supports a closed book, his left hand points toward some invisible spot in an open book. In response to this work—the anecdote is frequently rehearsed in the word-and-image literature—the poet Vondel composed an epigram:

Ay, Rembrandt maal Cornelis’ stemm! Het sichtbre deel is ‘t minst van hem: ‘t Onsichtbre kent men slechts door d’ooren; Die Anslo zien wil, moet hem hooren. (4:209)

Go ahead, Rembrandt, paint Cornelis’s voice! The visible part is the least of him: The invisible can be recognized only through the ears; Who wishes to see Anslo must hear him.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Mute Poetry, Speaking Picturesby Leonard Barkan Copyright © 2013 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.