Writing for the Eyes: Preaching and Visual Imagery in Seventeenth-Century Kyiv

Abstract

Summary The article explores how two early modern Ukrainian preachers, Stefan Javors’kyj and Antonij Radyvylovs’kyj, adapt and combine Neoplatonic philosophy, Aristotelian epistemology, the antique, and the Renaissance idea of poetry and painting as sister arts to create pictorial texts that translate some material manifestations of contemporary visual culture such as the emblem into written form; how these images – both visual and verbal – help structure and organize thought, and what effects they might have on cognition. I will argue that in their sermons, the traditional concept of ut pictura poesis often intersects with what we may call ut pictura creatio divina (as is painting so is divine creation) – with an emphasis on the analogies that tie painting to God’s creation of man. Just like God “painted” man into existence so the preacher should make use of verbal pictures to visualize the moral and spiritual truths he is propounding to his audience. Accordingly, in the second part of the article, I discuss the preachers’ engagement with verbal-visual forms such as emblems and impresas, showing how verbal representations of physical images could function as cognitive devices that could be stored in the audience’s memory to stimulate virtuous behavior.