Let us suppose that you view yourself — at least some of the time — as a serious, intelligent reader, interested in history, ideas and art. Maybe you work for the government, maybe you’re an attorney or a health-care provider or a would-be novelist or a starving musician. Your livelihood hardly matters. But you do read books other than just the usual bestsellers, you visit the National Gallery occasionally, you sometimes catch a play or concert on Friday night. In short, you make an effort to stay intellectually alive.
Ostensibly, it is for you that Leonard Barkan’s “Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures” is intended. There’s no descriptive subtitle, but at least a few readers will twig that the book deals with an old topic in aesthetic theory: the relationship between the verbal and the visual. Barkan’s title derives from an ancient saying credited to Simonides of Ceos: “Painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture.” Horace later coined the even more famous Latin tag “Ut pictura poesis,” which means: “As a painting, so a poem,” implying, as Barkan notes, that “a poem is or will be or should be like a painting.” By the 18th century, the German thinker Lessing strongly critiqued this supposed parallelism between the arts in his influential essay “Laocoon,” a meditation on the famous sculpture depicting a father and his sons in agony, being strangled by pythonlike serpents.
(Princeton Univ.) - “Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures” by Leonard Barkan
In more recent years, art history and art theory have been obsessively investigating the intricate relationship between image and ideology, the ways we see and interpret pictures, narration and theatricality in painting, literary pictorialism and the iconology and semiotics of art. (The connoisseurship of Bernard Berenson and the civilized appreciations of Kenneth Clark are extremely old hat these days.) One favorite area of investigation — by literary and art theorists alike — is that embodied in the Greek rhetorical term “ekphrasis,” meaning, in Barkan’s definition, “the verbal presentation of a visual object inside a literary work.” Think of Homer’s description of the elaborately tooled shield of Achilles in “The Iliad” or Auden’s description of Brueghel’s painting of the fall of Icarus in his poem “Musee des Beaux Arts.”
Obviously, this connection — this interpenetration or counterpoint — between two different arts can be fascinating. Early on, for instance, Barkan raises the question “What happens when a work of visual art comes with a verbal caption?” He doesn’t elaborate on this just then, but some readers will immediately call to mind the Rene Magritte painting of a pipe below which is the paradoxical phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” — “This is not a pipe.” Okay, what is it then? One answer is that it’s a picture.
Consider, too, what seems to be a constant time lag between verbal and visual innovation. Why did the avant-garde Baudelaire focus on a rather academic artist such as Constantin Guys as “the painter of modern life” rather than a truly revolutionary contemporarysuch as Manet? When, back in the 1960s and ’70s, J.G. Ballard, Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany were publishing innovative and subtle works of science fiction, why were the movies still fixated on simple-minded action films such as “Star Wars,” little different from the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s, aside from the improved special effects? For the most part, modernist painting and music appeared years before modernist literature. Why?
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