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----ATSAH (Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History) Call for Papers CAA 2001/Chicago, Illinois DEADLINE MAY 31, 2000
Describing paintings vs. depicting descriptions
As most art historians realize, it is practically impossible to illustrate a story or a text literally. Writers can relate how an event takes place in successive phases in time, while painters (especially since the Renaissance) are tied to representing only one particular moment. That means that painters somehow always have to manipulate the story or text they illustrate so as to be able to make a representation which is recognizable and expresses the core of the story. Still, paintings were and are often considered (and valued) as æliteralÆ renderings of the text or story they illustrate. Descriptions of paintings, on the other hand, are usually accepted at face value as accurate renderings in words of what is to be seen, rather than as variations of literary examples, which indeed they often are. This session will consider examples of paintings in which the text to be illustrated has consciously been manipulated and adapted to the visual possibilities of the medium of painting, and examples of descriptions which on purpose do not exactly render what is to be seen. The main question will be: did the painters or writers under consideration only manipulate what they read or saw so as to adapt it to their own particular medium, or did they also try to add something in their own artistic medium to the work they responded to? Particularly welcome are examples of æchain reactionsÆ, such an author ædescribingÆ (or rather, responding to) a painting in which a (well known) text has been illustrated. Examples are Battista FieriÆs poem from ca. 1498 for Isabella dÆEste, ædescribingÆ Andrea MantegnaÆs Parnassus (now in Paris, Louvre), and Caius Silvanus Germanicus silva from ca. 1520, ædescribingÆ Jacopo RipandaÆs mural paintings with scenes from Roman History in the ConservatorsÆ Palace in Rome.
J.L. de Jong Institute for the History of Art and Architecture, Groningen University, P.O. Box 716, 9700 AS Groningen, The Netherlands, email: J.L.de.Jong@let.rug.nl; tel. (+31) 50 - 3636091, fax: (+31) 50 - 3637362
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