Image and Myth

A History of Pictorial Narration in Greek Art

Luca Giuliani, Joseph O'Donnell

• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226025902
• Sujet: Arte
• Sous-sujet: Arte generale

On museum visits, we pass by beautiful, well-preserved vases from ancient Greece—but how often do we understand what the images on them depict? In Image and Myth, Luca Giuliani tells the stories behind the pictures, exploring how artists of antiquity had to determine which motifs or historical and mythic events to use to tell an underlying story while also keeping in mind the tastes and expectations of paying clients. Covering the range of Greek style and its growth between the early Archaic and Hellenistic periods, Giuliani describes the intellectual, social, and artistic contexts in which the images were created. He reveals that developments in Greek vase painting were driven as much by the times as they were by tradition—the better-known the story, the less leeway the artists had in interpreting it. As literary culture transformed from an oral tradition, in which stories were always in flux, to the stability of written texts, the images produced by artists eventually became nothing more than illustrations of canonical works. At once a work of cultural and art history, Image and Myth builds a new way of understanding the visual culture of ancient Greece.

CHAPTER 1

Images and Texts Compared

A Diagnosis of Contrasts

Revisiting Lessing’s Laocoon

Mythological images are pictures that tell a story. But what actually constitutes the narrative content of these images? Moreover, how do we distinguish narrative images from nonnarrative ones? Clear distinctions presuppose a precise knowledge of what is being distinguished from what. If, for instance, we position the realm of narrative on one side of a dividing line, what lies on the other side? Without a clear idea of this nonnarrative antithesis, the distinctiveness of the narrative mode of representation itself remains unclear.

As it turns out, the question as to what might be considered the antithesis of narration is easily answered. This issue was already addressed in the mid-eighteenth century by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who systematically compared narration and description as two fundamental possibilities of representation that are both antithetical and complementary. More specifically, this comparison forms the methodological linchpin of Lessing’s treatise Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry.¹ Published as a fragment in 1766, repeatedly cited and, paradoxically, often obscured by its own fame, Laocoon provided both a significant impulse and a conceptual framework for this book. Since this framework will not be explicitly addressed in the following chapters, it is important to recall here the major features of Lessing’s argument, not least to emphasize those points that are in need of revision and reformulation.²

For Lessing, both poetry and painting represent “absent things as present, [both] give us the appearance as the reality. Both produce illusion, and the illusion of both is pleasing.”³ In his view it is precisely the production of illusion that distinguishes art from nonart. In the artwork the absent object is manifested for the recipients so vividly that it commands their complete attention, with the result that the artwork itself and the techniques used to produce the illusion remain unnoticed. However, the techniques of illusion employed by poetry and painting are completely different: “Painting uses forms and colors in space. Poetry articulates sounds in time. The signs employed by the former are natural, while those employed by the latter are arbitrary.”⁴ This last sentence refers to a distinction that was largely self-evident for Lessing and his contemporaries.⁵ Natural signs are regarded here as those whose connection to the signified is based on the laws of nature or on a similarity relation that is comprehended as natural. By contrast, the relationship between arbitrary signs and the signified is not based on natural law but on human convention, a prime example being found in the array of human languages.

However, the different techniques employed by the two arts are not equally suited to fulfilling their common goal of illusion. An aesthetic illusion can only be achieved when a similarity relation exists between the artwork and the simulated object. In the field of painting this similarity between the sign and the signified is unproblematic, since it is guaranteed by the naturalness of the semiotic system employed. This is not the case in the field of poetry, which is dependent on arbitrary signs. This gives rise to Lessing’s central question: how is poetry able to produce illusion? How can a similarity relation between artwork and the represented object be achieved within the arbitrary horizon of language? In order to answer this question, Lessing endeavors to demarcate the different possibilities available to linguistic and pictorial art as clearly as possible.

He divides everything that can be made an object of linguistic or pictorial representation into two, and only two, categories: “Objects which exist side by side, or whose parts so exist, are called bodies. . . . Objects which succeed each other, or whose parts succeed each other in time, are called actions.”⁶ These two categories of object correspond to description and narration, two distinct representational modes that are both antithetical and complementary. Whereas description depicts the juxtaposition of bodies in space, narration traces the succession of actions in time. As it turns out, this distinction corresponds precisely to the fundamental difference between painting and poetry: the signs employed by painting exist side by side in space, whereas the signs employed by poetry exist in succession over time: “If signs must unquestionably stand in an easy relation with the thing signified, then signs arranged side by side can represent only objects existing side by side . . . while consecutive signs can express only objects which succeed each other . . . in time.”⁷ The answer to Lessing’s question can thus be formulated as follows. The similarity between sign and signified as the basis of illusion in the realm of poetry cannot be generated by means of its individual (arbitrary) semiotic elements. However, this similarity can be generated in the way these signs are connected in the sense that a sequence of words and sentences can be made to represent a sequence of actions. What connects these signs is the syntactical principle of successivity—exactly the same principle as that underlying the sequence of signified objects. This shared connective principle produces an “easy relation,” which could equally be described as a similarity relation. This relationship effectively “naturalizes” the arbitrary signs of language; they attain the immediate aesthetic efficacy that causes the listener to forget their arbitrary character and thus produces illusion.

It now becomes clear that the art of the word and the art of the image not only differ in terms of their techniques but that this difference also extends to their modes of representation and their objects. Painting finds its (only possible) fulfillment in the descriptive mode. It portrays bodies coexisting in space. Since it cannot express temporal succession but only spatial juxtaposition, it is in fact unable to portray actions; it can only suggest them by representing bodies in a single moment of movement. The exact opposite applies to poetry: it operates in the narrative mode and its subjects are actions; it restricts descriptive moments to the absolute minimum and seeks possibilities of translating even this minimum into actions. In Lessing’s view, a poetry that deviates from this imperative and, rather than narrating actions, aims to describe bodies in terms of their spatial juxtaposition would be a contradiction in terms; by operating descriptively, such a poetry fails to achieve the goal of illusion and thus forfeits its status as art. And when language loses this status, it is—in Lessing’s terminology—no longer poetry, but prose.

Taking Lessing beyond Lessing

Lessing’s conceptual system exhibits an economy, clarity, and elegance that remain a source of profound intellectual enjoyment even today; his argumentative acuity is enthralling, at times even startling. But how useful is this theory in methodological terms? For all the claims of his statements to general validity, the scope of the phenomena Lessing takes into consideration here is a conspicuously narrow one. When he speaks of painting, he is thinking exclusively of an art gallery stocked with a range of works dating from the Renaissance to his own time. This restricted perspective does not even allow for the existence of other epochs and forms of painting. For Lessing, the idea that ancient vase painting could be made the subject of aesthetic consideration would have been inconceivable.

However, the aspect of Lessing’s system that seems most historically distant from current thinking is his concept of the artwork, which is diametrically opposed to the concept found in modern aesthetics. For Lessing the artwork serves mimesis and ideally renders itself completely transparent in order to direct the gaze of the viewer to the represented content: the entelechy of the artwork is the painted tableau, and the entelechy of the tableau is the transparent window.⁸ By contrast, from the late eighteenth century onward, an aesthetics gradually asserts itself that comprehends the artwork not as the mirror image of a given reality but as an autonomous microcosm that foregrounds itself as the product of an artificial process and claims a specific type of attention. Aesthetic quality no longer lies in transparency but, on the contrary, in opaqueness.⁹ However, although this paradigm shift abrogates an essential, if not the central, premise of Lessing’s system, it does not detract from the incisiveness of his analytic concepts.

The Laocoon treatise provided me with an insight that is as simple as it is fundamental: it is only when we contrast and compare the range of representational possibilities available in the linguistic and pictorial fields that the phenomenon of pictorial narration takes on precise contours. This comparison shows that the representational form of narration in the field of images (in contrast to that of language) is confronted with specific difficulties that require specific solutions. These have not always been readily available and their development has often been a gradual process. Against this background, the history of pictorial narration is best understood as a history of problem solving.

In this sense, Lessing’s treatise remains seminal. This is not to say that all of his arguments are relevant. Many of Lessing’s theses have been vehemently criticized (in part already during the eighteenth century) and require fundamental revision if they are to serve as effective methodological instruments. Here I will restrict myself to four points that I regard as central to the current discussion.

First—Lessing regarded painting as a natural semiotic system in which sign and signified are linked (or, in normative terms, must be linked) by a steadfast similarity relation. This view was subsequently challenged by the recognition—already emerging in Lessing’s time—of the historical variability not only of every language but also of all the fine arts. It was recognized that painting was not restricted to one form and that there was an enormous variety of culturally specific painting styles. It is now an established commonplace that every style of painting, insofar as it can be said to have an objective point of reference at all, depicts the world in a form that is culturally specific and shaped by prevailing conventions. In this sense, pictorial semiotic systems are just as much subject to convention as linguistic ones.

Nevertheless, Lessing’s argument that the similarity relations characterizing the two systems are quite different and even antithetical remains valid. At the linguistic level there is no similarity at all between sign and signified (with the exception of onomatopoeic expressions, which were frequently discussed in the eighteenth century but are ultimately of little relevance).¹⁰ The situation is quite different in the case of the fine arts, where the similarity between the image and its object represents a central and persistent concern. However, the similarity relation needs to be understood here not as a constant but as a historical variable. There is a myriad of possible—often unforeseen—ways of producing similarity relations and making them comprehensible for the viewer. Entire generations of artists have competed with one another to find ways and means of producing similarities between representation and represented. Indeed, for such artists, the discovery and differentiation of new ways of creating similarity has constituted an explicit and decisive goal of artistic endeavor. On the other hand, there have also been periods in which similarities have been either unconsciously blurred or intentionally deconstructed. The less a semiotic system is based on similarity relations, the greater its arbitrariness. It follows that conventionality and arbitrariness need to be clearly distinguished from one another: all pictorial semiotic systems are conventional but they are arbitrary to very different degrees.¹¹ It is impossible to measure similarity and arbitrariness in absolute terms because there is no universally applicable scale that could be used to determine their (opposing) values. However, in general it would seem clear that, on the one hand, arbitrariness in the process of depiction can never be reduced to zero (since this would presuppose complete identity between picture and depicted), and that, on the other hand, pictures, as long as they do not renounce the similarity relation, can never attain the degree of arbitrariness that inheres in linguistic texts.

Second—One of Lessing’s fundamental premises concerns the different relationships of linguistic and pictorial art to time. Language is conceived in terms of pure successivity, painting in terms of pure simultaneity. Language develops in a linear fashion over time. By contrast, for painting the temporal dimension and thus successivity have no meaning.¹² But is this simple opposition sustainable? Lessing’s model has frequently been challenged on the basis of its lack of differentiation.¹³ To what extent can language be understood as pure successivity? It is really only the individual phonemes that temporally succeed one another. However, their successivity changes into the simultaneity of the word, and the successivity of the words into the simultaneity of the sentence. To be sure, the sentences making up a text follow one another in linear succession like the links in a chain—and yet the individual links cannot be understood in themselves but only as part of a synthesis that the listener must construct through the progressive application of memory. Consequently, linguistic expressions cannot be conceived in terms of pure successivity but must be understood as based on a complicated dialectic between successivity and simultaneity, with meanings always constituted at the level of simultaneity. Meaning is never generated via temporal succession but always within a synchronous horizon.

However, just as language cannot be understood in terms of pure successivity, the painted picture cannot be interpreted in terms of pure simultaneity. Simultaneity refers to a certain form of perception: objects existing simultaneously in space are objects that can simultaneously be perceived. But should and can images be perceived and comprehended in a single moment? The discussion about the duration and form of aesthetic perception is vast and largely shaped by normative aesthetics.¹⁴ At the beginning of the eighteenth century Roger de Piles highlighted the decisive significance of the very first viewing (“le premier coup d’ oeil”) in his Cours de Peinture par Principes. Here he argues that a painting—irrespective of its size—must be constructed in such a way that it can be perceived in terms of its entire composition (“le tout ensemble”) in a single moment.¹⁵ In his response to Laocoon, Herder takes up this concept although he fundamentally alters its meaning. For Herder, the first view mediates nothing less than access to a contemplative eternity: “The first view should be permanent, exhaustive, eternal, and it is merely human weakness, the inertness of our senses, and the disagreeability of extended effort that, in the case of works requiring in-depth study, make necessary perhaps a second, perhaps a hundredth viewing; still, all these consecutive viewings are ultimately only one.”¹⁶ A solution to this quandary, as every visitor to a museum or gallery knows, is still not in sight. Although we are aware of the point at which we begin to contemplate a picture, we never know at what point this process actually reaches completion.

Nevertheless, when it comes to the physiological processes involved in viewing we have accumulated somewhat more knowledge than was available in Lessing’s time. The range within which our eye perceives acutely is relatively tiny. Optimal ...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Preface: The Pictorial Deluge and the Study of Visual Culture
• 1. Images and Texts Compared: A Diagnosis of Contrasts
• 2. Images of the World: The Eighth Century
• 3. The Advent of Pictorial Narratives in the Seventh Century
• 4. Playing with Writing in the Eighth, Seventh, and Sixth Centuries
• 5. Directing the Gaze in the Sixth and Fifth Centuries
• 6. Images in the Pull of Text: From the Fifth to the Fourth Century
• 7. Pictures for Readers: The Birth of the Illustration in the Second Century
• 8. Looking Back: Pitfalls and Nodes
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name and Subject Index
• Index of Ancient Greek Artworks