One of the most basic distinctions between verbal and visual expression is that verbal art extends through time and is therefore suited to narration, while visual art is perceived instantaneously and is therefore more suited to description. For pictures to tell a story would seem to be inimical to their fundamental nature, yet this is exactly what many pictures did in pre-modern western culture. Ut pictura poesis.
This seminar will focus on the pictorial arts of Europe in the period from about 1500-1650; our focus will be on The Netherlands, but we will look to Italy, Germany, and France for important comparative material. We will ask how Netherlandish artists addressed the challenge of signifring time’s passage in a synebronic medium. The history of “history” is different in Northern Europe, for the North lacks the large-scale fresco tradition of Giotto and Masaccio, the theorizations of Alberti. We will consider what alternative forms and conditions affected developments here. We will begin by considering two important transitions during the 16th century: the diminishing importance of illuminated manuscripts as a site for narrative illustrations accompanying a text, and the contested status of altarpieces as large-scale public rehearsals of well-known narratives. We will think about how “history painting” as an independent subject type arose out of these conditions, and what different demands it placed upon its beholders. What does the beholder need to bring to a history painting, and how were those expectations changing in this period? We will consider issues of genre and scale: can a landscape be a history? A still life? What is the relation between an implication of temporality, narrativity, and “history”? We will also consider whether “daily life” scenes can be read as experiments that force the beholder to mentally generate a new narrative from visual cues.
The class will be discussion-based, and will depend largely on independent ideas the students bring in from looking at images and doing the readings. Professor and students alike should come to the course with many questions, and leave it with many more.
Timetable
Tuesday, 11.00-13.00 hr
P.N. van Eyckhof 4, room 005
Method of Instruction
Seminar
Required reading
Two articles/chapters are available (as pdf files) at the secretary’s office of Pallas. Please send a message to pallas@hum.leidenuniv.nl – Mieke Bal ‘Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative’ (several pages through the book) – Gerard Genette ‘Boundaries of Narrative’ (in ‘New Literary History’ Vol 8 no. 1) 1-13
Readings will include literary narrative theory (Bal, Genette, Ricoeur, Todorov, Eco, Auerbach) and art theory (Alberti, Lessing, Lee, Goodman, Alpers, Mitchell, Puttfarken). We will of course look at key Netherlandish narrators from Lucas van Leyden and Heemskerck to Rembrandt and Jan Steen, but also at Cranach, Guido Reni, and Poussin.
Books reserved for this course at the library of the department of Art History:
A. Roesler-Friedenthal and J. Nathan eds., The Enduring Instant/Der bleibende Augenblick (Berlin 2003)
Meyer Schapiro, Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text The Hague/Paris, 1973
Marilyn Lavin, The Place of Narrative: Mural Decoration in Italian Churches, 431-1600 (Chicago: 1990)
Pictorial Narrative in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Studies in the History of Art 16 (1985)
Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting ed. & trans John R. Spencer (New Haven 1966)
Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford 1972)
Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative (2nd edition, Doornspijk 1984)
Bernard J. Muir ed., Reading Texts and Images (University of Exeter, 2002)
Patricia Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (Yale 1988)
Karel van Mander, Grondt der Edel Vry Schilderconst (1604)
Christopher Braider, Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700 (Princeton 1993)
Mariet Westermann, The Amusements of Jan Steen (Zwolle 1997)
Thomas Puttfarken, Roger de Piles, Theory of Art (Yale 1985)
Examination
Grade will be based on class participation, weekly reading responses, a short visual analysis paper, and a final research paper.
Information
Secretary’s office of Pallas, Institute for Art-historical and Literary Studies, P.N. van Eyckhof 3, room 104a; Telephone: +31 (0)71 5272166; E-mail: pallas@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Students are requested to register at the Pallas office.