WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1884822
Elizabeth Lastra
{"title":"Confronting premature death: Cluny, Arthur Kingsley Porter, and the tomb of Alfonso Ansúrez","authors":"Elizabeth Lastra","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.1884822","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1884822","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Since the early twentieth century, the carved sarcophagus of Alfonso Ansúrez has been considered a central work of Spanish medieval art. Nonetheless, its singular imagery remains enigmatic and its contentious modern history largely unexplored. The late eleventh-century sarcophagus of the young noble Alfonso Ansúrez is both exceptionally clear and frustratingly enigmatic. Inscriptions label every detail, down to a cup labeled calix, and large carved figures signal the viewer through pronounced gestures, but the tomb’s details diverge from developing norms in funerary iconography. Unlike the common medieval representation of the deceased as a nude androgynous soul, the young Alfonso, while plainly identified by the inscription “deceased Alfonso,” is shown fully dressed and animate. This article argues that the tomb depicts Alfonso’s reception of last rites, which may not have been observed before the young noble’s untimely death. The carefully marked details actualize a ritual indispensable for the salvation of his soul. The article also elucidates the little-known role played by Arthur Kingsley Porter — probable victim of another premature death — in the Spanish monument’s clandestine and controversial appearance in the United States.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"6 1","pages":"323 - 336"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90855076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2020.1868279
L. Freese
{"title":"Hungry minds: the visual and verbal language of taverns and coffee houses in early American periodicals","authors":"L. Freese","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2020.1868279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2020.1868279","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Eighteenth-century American periodicals utilized depictions of taverns and coffee houses to aid subscribers in their navigation of complex political environments. Many eighteenth-century artists and publishers drew upon public knowledge of the significance of small variations in drinking habits, imported beverages, and tavern life as a communication strategy. Public knowledge of, and interest in, tavern and coffee-house culture made this subject matter a particularly legible and engaging vehicle for discussions about politics, class, and identity. Editors and artists built on public knowledge to affirm the status of a socioeconomically and geographically limited readership. As connective spaces for the performance of norms and distribution of knowledge, magazines, coffee houses, and taverns served as hubs for knowledge distribution. Depictions of taverns and coffee houses, in contrast to other popular subject-matter in early American periodicals, worked to reaffirm the status and ideals of subscribers during this tumultuous period in American history.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"79 7 1","pages":"299 - 310"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87952599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1910463
Jakub Lipski
{"title":"Meta-pictorial discourse and the early theory of the novel in eighteenth-century Britain","authors":"Jakub Lipski","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.1910463","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1910463","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The first half of the eighteenth century saw a tendency among early British novelists to frame their fictional narratives with theoretical deliberations that helped to situate their texts within the complex network of fictional taxonomies and conventions. Typically in the form of authorial prefaces, these commentaries were implicitly or explicitly intertextual, invoking other texts and authors by way of contrast and/or comparison. Given the unstable taxonomy at the time, referring to other literary projects proved a relatively efficient strategy of self-definition. If purely literary meta-discourse may be taken for granted, the peculiarity of a number of authorial commentaries in the eighteenth century was meta-pictorial content. This article traces the uses of two types of meta-pictorialism. The first type is metaphorical: the use of painterly vocabulary with reference to literary aspects. A mere rhetorical device at first glance, this type is also revealing of generic issues. The second type is meta-pictorial naming, that is, a meta-commentary using the name of a painter.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"17 1","pages":"383 - 389"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86005018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2020.1870853
Adam Y. Stern
{"title":"Before the altar: a Kafkan study in analytic iconology","authors":"Adam Y. Stern","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2020.1870853","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2020.1870853","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article reads Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial in parallel with Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–16). It sets the novel within the context of the Grünewald revival in France and Germany during the first part of the twentieth century. The revival culminated in a wave of veneration that turned the altarpiece into a symbol of national suffering in the closing days of World War I. Against this background, the article argues for a connection between the intense focus on Christ’s “splayed hands” and the repertoire of manual gestures that Kafka scatters throughout his novel. Borrowing critical language from Bruno Latour and Joseph Koerner, the article argues that Kafka’s hands can be read as an iconoclastic analysis of Grünewald’s altarpiece. In the novel’s final scene, K.’s own splayed hands mark an attempt to turn himself into a living icon and transform his executioners into the iconoclastic breakers of his Christ-like image. The final section of the article uses this tableau as a means of rethinking current debates about the relationship between Christianity and secularism. Latour’s and Koerner’s work on iconoclash, the article suggests, makes Kafka’s image destruction a creative moment in a longer history of Christian iconoclasm.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"1 1","pages":"311 - 322"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77325409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1902704
Jennifer L. Nelson
{"title":"The feast of Toxcatl in the Florentine Codex: ekphrasis as etiology and preservation","authors":"Jennifer L. Nelson","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.1902704","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1902704","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Ekphrasis, understood as a metaphor for encounter, serves as a literal vessel for an encounter between Nahua and Spanish worldviews in the illustrated bilingual Spanish and Nahuatl encyclopedia Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (mostly written 1547–78), overseen by Bernardino de Sahagún in collaboration with Nahua scholars. Crucially, the function of ekphrasis—intensified verbal description of visual artifice—differed between Spanish and Nahua users of the encyclopedia, both in general and in this context. The twin missions of the text, to diagnose Nahua deviance from Christianity, and to record the Nahua world and its practices, directly conflict. This essay examines the differences between the side-by-side Spanish and Nahuatl accounts of a major Mexica ceremony, Toxcatl, with a special focus on rhetorical discrepancies between the two. It also argues that the unusually explicitly gruesome illustrations of this section may have functioned differently for the two audiences: as iconographic aids to identification of idolatrous ritual for the Spanish, but for a Nahua audience as ongoing ekphrasis-prompts, extending the ritual.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"110 1","pages":"371 - 382"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76069837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1927456
C. Wall
{"title":"Fielding’s prepositional, textual inns","authors":"C. Wall","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.1927456","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1927456","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract As the Narrator in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) explains: “Those little Spaces between our Chapters may be looked upon as an Inn or Resting-Place.” An inn is a prepositional sort of building: it is between here and there; one travels to or from it; it links villages and towns and cities; it is on the road and on the way. Inns became increasingly important in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century landscapes, depending commercially on their architectural uniqueness, even eccentricity. This essay examines the ways in which Fielding’s textual structures borrow the architectural as well as syntactical grammar of inns as part of a distinctly modern effort (in the words of the landscape gardener John Claudius Loudon) to “form new combinations on every movement of the spectator” (1806). From chapter headings, tables of contents, and spatial descriptions, on the one hand, to the shapes of syntax, paragraph, and plot, on the other, Fielding’s novels generate fresh perspectives from the act of reading.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"188 1","pages":"245 - 258"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73017087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1927453
Julie S. Park
{"title":"“All that we see is seen in perspective”: point of view as word and image","authors":"Julie S. Park","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.1927453","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1927453","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Whereas the fictiveness of narrative perspective is taken for granted in literature, it also emerges as a salient element in the experiences of pictorial art and architecture as part of a viewer’s internal response to their altered views of reality. Whether a visual technique or a narrative one for shaping the way things are seen, perspective assumes that the conditions of seeing an object are flexible and open to mental and material variables in diverse historical media and sites. These range from the cognitively provocative trompe l’œil fresco paintings of seventeenth-century Italy, the typographical headings used as chapter divisions in eighteenth-century British novels, and hand-colored eighteenth-century prints of city scenes made to look three-dimensional through an optical device, to the inscribed stones used in post war Berlin monuments, and an art historian’s recent perspectives on memories of his twentieth-century childhood home. Concentrating on perspective foremost as a medium and conduit for the imagination, Getting Perspective reveals its transhistorical role in word and image as a shaper and maker of imagined worlds.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"26 1","pages":"221 - 228"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83528343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1927459
Alexander Nemerov
{"title":"The outcast space of Perugino","authors":"Alexander Nemerov","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.1927459","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1927459","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract When I was a boy in St. Louis, Missouri, I grew up across the street from the house of Norris K. Smith, an art historian who taught at Washington University. As I have gotten older, I associate this experience with a picture in Smith’s last book–a book about Renaissance perspective and a kind of career summation he published in 1994 called Here I Stand: Perspective from Another Point of View. The picture, painted by the artist Robert Jordan, shows the vantage from the far distance of Perugino’s Sistine fresco, the Christ Giving the Keys of the Church to St Peter. Perugino shows the protagonists front and center, with smaller and inconsequential figures populating the mid ground and distance. But in Jordan’s picture we see Peter and his entourage as tiny figures in the far distance, beheld from over the shoulder of a faraway ball-player in Perugino’s original. Thinking of this image in Smith’s book, recalling the reversed perspectives of life on either side of Cornell Avenue in St. Louis, and considering my difference from Smith, I speculate on the meanings of the words world and space as they relate to Perugino’s painting and to the act of writing art history.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"19 1","pages":"288 - 297"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77823726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1927454
Lyle Massey
{"title":"Thaumaturgic visions: Andrea Pozzo’s St Ignatius Corridor","authors":"Lyle Massey","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.1927454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1927454","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Andrea Pozzo’s larger, more famous frescoes have tended to supercede his small, 1682 corridor outside St Ignatius Loyola’s private apartments in Rome. And yet, the site is more than just a prelude or footnote to his other, grander works in Mondovi, Rome and Vienna. The corridor stands out because it exploits radical disjunctions between perception and belief, subject and frame, and vision and hallucination. The anamorphic elements of the trompe l’œil architecture destabilize and threaten to overwhelm the quadri riportati that track a narrative regarding Ignatius’s life and miracles. Pozzo’s own publications are largely unhelpful for understanding anything more than the frescoes’ technical and geometrical rules. In fact, there is no text that can be used to understand the corridor’s “program.” But the corridor’s frescoes visually and phenomenologically suggest a Jesuit response to Counter-Reformation ideas about truth, sight and miraculous visions articulated through the visual contrasts and juxtapositions of its enclosed representational system. The site is thus a case study for the difficulties Jesuits faced both in distinguishing between different categories of visual phenomena and in policing different responses to them.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"7 1","pages":"229 - 244"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82497614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2021.1927457
Julie S. Park
{"title":"Mirror, box, print, novel: optical fictions of the eighteenth-century zograscope","authors":"Julie S. Park","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2021.1927457","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2021.1927457","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract How was narrative point of view developed through an optical device? In between Richardson’s publication of Pamela in 1740 and Fielding’s publication of Tom Jones in 1749, a device known as the zograscope first appeared in England in 1745. Whether appearing as a tabletop mirror or a wooden box, the zograscope allowed its users to see the world in three dimensions and in color from the comfort of home or in crowded venues. An understanding of psychological perspective as it was developed in eighteenth-century novels, and optical perspective as it was created by the zograscope, are incomplete without relating them to each other. They are equally identifiable as forms of narrative perspective, and demonstrate how text and image, and their materialities, came to interpenetrate each other in modern conceptions of point of view.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"21 1","pages":"259 - 274"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82134671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}