AFTERWORD:

The Afterword offers some critical reflections upon the collection as a whole, which displays a stimulatingly wide range of approaches to works of art ranging from the Renaissance to our own time. While contributors do not always distinguish between writing about art and words within pictures, the volume rightly stresses the graphic qualities of language, and ‘the pictural characteristics of writing itself’. The book also makes three cogent points about the history of intermedial encounters. Early modern works seem at first to stage a paragone between pictures and words but actually exemplify their interdependence; reflecting the influence of Lessing, the long nineteenth century stresses their competition; and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries works of art become intermedial hybrids, irreducible to the straightforward categories of visual or verbal. This rich collection of essays shows how, since the Renaissance, the paragonal competition between image and word gradually gives way to full cooperation.