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ASSOCIATION FOR TEXTUAL SCHOLARSHIP IN ART HISTORY
CAA 89TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE
CHICAGO, IL
FEBRUARY 27 - MARCH 3, 2001

Sponsoring Society: Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History (ATSAH)

ORGANIZER: Jan de Jong, Institute for Art and Architecture, Groningen, The Netherlands

Session Speakers

Chair: Jan de Jong, Institute for Art and Architecture, Groningen, The Netherlands

Speaker 1: Corinne Mandel
Affiliation: University of Western Ontario
Subject: Text and Intertextuality in il Poppi's 'Alexander Giving Campaspe to Apelles'

Speaker 2: Caroline P. Murphy
Affiliation: University of California at Riverside
Subject: Jerusalem to Bologna, via Mantua; Lavinia Fontana's 'Visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon'

Speaker 3: Kate Benzel 
Affiliation: University of Nebraska-Kearney
Subject: Virginia Woolf and Walter Sickert: Pen and Paintbrush

Session Title: 'Describing paintings vs. depicting descriptions'

As most art historians realize, it is practically impossible to illustrate a story or a text literally. Writers can relate how an event takes place in successive phases in time, while painters (especially since the Renaissance) are tied to representing only one particular moment. That means that painters somehow always have to manipulate the story or text they illustrate so as to be able to make a representation, which is recognizable and expresses the core of the story. Still, paintings were and are often considered (and valued) as 'literal' renderings of the text or story they illustrate. Descriptions of paintings, on the other hand, are usually accepted at face value as accurate renderings in words of what is to be seen, rather than as variations of literary examples, which indeed they often are. This session will consider examples of paintings in which the text to be illustrated has consciously been manipulated and adapted to the visual possibilities of the medium of painting, and examples of descriptions which on purpose do not exactly render what is to be seen. The main question will be: did the painters or writers under consideration only manipulate what they read or saw so as to adapt it to their own particular medium, or did they also try to add something in their own artistic medium to the work they responded to? Or were there perhaps other reasons why artists or writers did not exactly record what they read or saw?¹

Particularly welcome are examples of 'chain reactions', such as an author 'describing' (or rather, responding to) a painting in which a (well-known) text has been illustrated. One example is Battista Fiera's poem from ca. 1498 for Isabella d'Este, 'describing' Andrea Mantegna's Parnassus (now in Paris, Louvre)². Mantegna, to start with, did not literally illustrate the myth of Mars, Venus and Vulcan as is told by Homer and Ovid, while Fiera in his description added details from Virgil's account of the forge of Vulcan (Aen. VIII, 425). A second example is Caius Silvanus Germanicus' silva from ca. 1520, 'describing' Jacopo Ripanda's mural paintings with scenes from Roman History in the Conservators' Palace in Rome³. Ripanda did not exactly illustrate the account of his classical sources, while Silvanus in his turn included passages from Statius and Virgil, which do not correspond to the paintings.

The examples just mentioned were both chosen from the realm of Italian art, but examples from other areas and periods are just as welcome. The only requirement is that the works of art to be discussed are still existing or known (for instance through prints or copies), so that the representations and the descriptions can actually be compared. This means that this session will not deal with contributions consisting of theoretical observations which dwell exclusively on describing visual experiences or on the literary genre of the ekphrasis.

¹ Good examples and discussions can be found in Lora Anne Palladino, Pietro Aretino: Orator and Art Theorist (PH.D., Yale University, New Haven, 1981), Ann Arbor 1982).

² See, amongst others, R. Jones', "What Venus did with Mars". Battista Fieri and Manteg­na's Parnassus', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44, 1981, 193-198, and R. Lightbown, Andrea Mantegna, Oxford 1986, 200-201.

³ See, amongst others, S. Ebert-Schifferer, 'Ripandas Kapitolinischer Fres­kenzyklus und die Selbstdarstellung der Konservatoren um 1500', Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 24, 1988, 75-218.

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