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Extracts from: Peter Nesteruk, A Rhetoric of Time in the Arts: Eternity, Entropy and Utopia in Visual Culture (2011).
From: Chapter One: A Short
History of the Rhetoric of Eternity:
Priority
and Narrative in Medieval and Renaissance Art.
Contents: Stained Glass. Antiquity, Late-classical, Early-medieval, Jacopo di Cione, Duccio, Botticelli, Monaco, Barnaba da Modena, the Master of the Aachen Altarpiece, 'Last Judgment' ('Giudizio Universale'), Georgios Klontzas (1568-1602), 'Annunciation', in Cappella dell' Annunciata, Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, in Rome, (1500, restored 1989), by Antoniazzo Romano, 'Lot and his Daughters', Rutilio Manetti, 'Lot and his Daughters', by Jan Masseys (1563), Lucas Cranach the Elder, 'Lot and his Daughters' (1528), 'The fate of the earthly remains of St. John the Baptist' (1485), by Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Lucas Cranach the Elder, 'Paradise' (1530), Hans Holbein’s 'The Ambassadors' and Chinese landscape painting.
The Argument….
The role played by temporality
in the affectivity and interpretation of art has been, in general, an area long
and unjustly neglected. This is an omission that this study should begin to
redress. This, the opening chapter will comment upon a selection of
representative works from the periods of medieval and renaissance art, treating
them as key periods in the history of Western art in terms of their open and
frequent use of temporal potentials for the furtherance of narrative and other
rhetorical, that is, persuasive, ends. Such potentials were to become hidden,
employed with great subtlety, or even become part of the painterly unconscious,
from the seventeenth century onward. This chapter will deal with the period up
to the seventeenth century when temporal rhetoric was employed in a fairly
direct way (the following chapter will continue the story) and will accordingly
begin with a short methodological introduction, to be followed by a brief
pre-history introducing some key moments in the evolution of the rhetoric of
time, and only then develop the major themes in a discussion centering upon a
number of images. These images will be chosen in order to demonstrate the main
types of temporal reading available. The aim of this discussion will be to show
what a reading attuned to temporal rhetoric might have to offer to the
interpretation of medieval and renaissance art. Such offerings would include
the following: an understanding of the role played by figural/illusionistic
space in construing time and its other, a temporally sensitive position
internal to human experience, and the link of these former elements to a sense
of temporality which is, arguably, the major contributor to the affective
impact of painting, other forms of image (engravings, stained glass), and the
various plastic forms of visual culture upon their original (but also later)
audiences. Next, there is the cumulative role of the above in situating the
viewer within the picture in terms of
temporal presence and belief (and not simply as the external witness of a given
narrative process or sacral event). The two previous stages should permit
historians and cultural anthropologists to work upon reconstructions of
devotion, meditation, the mentalité
of a given artwork's implied audience, and their relations of collective
self-recognition or construction of identity (‘ideology’ in the best sense).
The issue is one of achieving a viewpoint from within a community sharing a
pattern of rhetoric, a code of communication.
*
If our own, most intimate,
experiences of past and future consist of uncertain presences, of memories and
prognoses that (usually) are not to be confused with our everyday perception of
living in the present, but which co-exist with it as a kind of second, faded,
less distinct, or less immediate form of presence; then the effect of the
pictorial equivalent of these kinds of degree or plane of presence would be
effectively to translate space into time.[1] Just as, in the appraisal of the two
dimensional art-object, we seek out or impose analogues for the
three-dimensional spatial dimensions that are fundamental to our everyday
experience of physical space, so too, I want to suggest, do we (perhaps less consciously)
look for, locate, and interpret accordingly any cues in the art-object
according to the varieties of temporal experience available to us (the three
dimensions of lived time and their 'other' the 'outside' of time). Just as we
do not ever quite completely only live in the present, so neither can the
artworks that we experience; they too must exhibit the movements and
ambiguities of temporal valency (of past, present, and future) that we impose
upon our everyday experience. Passing through a hall on our way to give a
conference paper, we may equally negotiate the immediate spatial geography,
reflect on the paper we have written, and face either anxiety or adrenalin at
the thought of the performance yet to come. The sight of a book on a
publisher's table may stimulate recollection of the past, the sight of the
doorway leading to the site of performance may stimulate a projection into the
future. And for experiences which are not everyday, that are marked by
transport or the uncanny, there is always the trace of the beyond, the 'other'
world of the eternal or the ‘outside’.
What is it that the
interpretation of art has to gain from a careful appraisal of the various
temporal relationships that are represented or located in the art object? The
key to many works may lie in the way different temporalities, their valencies,
their symbolic import, collectively interact to produce a meaning which
includes -indeed may often be said to explain- the art object's affective
impact and its ethical content or 'message'. Further, the location of the lived
experience of time in art need not be singular or unique. This lack of
singularity will be found in general within the first of the two main
complementary axes along which temporal effects are organised: the location of
past and future, in opposition to the present, to be found within certain
textual contrasts. Where more than one temporal experience or identity is to be
found, each is made up of its own kind or combination of implied past, present,
and future (as, for example, in the gendering of, or attribution of cultural
specificity to, different temporalities within a single artwork). The second
major axis or temporal trope, represents perhaps the most used, the most
familiar, as well as most ideologically loaded, form of temporal persuasion in
art. This trope centers upon the rhetorical attribution of eternity, which is
located in the perceived contrast of history, or duration, to its other,
eternity.[2] Furthermore, this contrast usually
carries with it the rhetorically potent and mysterious qualities associated
with the sacred. This form of temporal rhetoric is often found to be the
figurative key or second meaning of the most significant binary opposites in
the text (typically found in the opposition of the upper to the lower portion
of the visual text, an opposition which seems to feature in perhaps as much as
ninety percent of Medieval and Byzantine religious art). This key ideological,
persuasive, and community-cementing notion, operates through a contrast of the historical
to the eternal, the contingent to the unchanging. It is as if a belief must
anchor itself in the beyond, out of reach of the vagaries of history, in the
realm of the sublime, in order to place it beyond sublunary question (the
foundation is placed outside of the system it guarantees).
These two aspects of temporal
interpretation (which we might gloss as experiential temporalisation versus
rhetorical extra-temporality) may be read as made possible by either: (i) an
quasi-essential or shared quality of the human species (giving us humanity the
temporal animal), temporality here is a quality which can be more-or-less
automatically recovered from its inscription in any given art-work; or (ii) as
the figurative dimension of meaning-making (if we assume humanity as the
interpreting animal), where painter or viewer, for their own reasons, encode or
apportion significance according to the art-work's potential for second
meanings. For most purposes, or as an initial stage of investigation, these two
explanations of temporal interpretation (the subjective or phenomenological,
and the figurative or rhetorical) may be read as synonymous: however, where
considerations of cultural difference are paramount, a distinction may need to
be made between intuition then-and-now and between figure then-and-now (or
between the constitution of these categories in any contrasting
cultural-historical situations).[3]
Temporal
analyses will be therefore be premised upon the location of types of time and
their contrasts. These temporal kinds (or their rhetorical analogues, if one
takes the path of figure alone) may be based upon degrees of presence
(figure-ground, proportion, distortion, luminosity) and the contrasts they
produce in the art-work. These factors, in conjunction with an implied
viewpoint, may interact, in turn, with the artwork's use of line and vanishing
point - as well as with more overtly symbolic material referring to (real or
imaginary) points or periods in time (as, for example, in details of
architectural historicism read as a form of historical citation or temporal,
that is epochal, deixis). When different times, or points in time, are
coordinated in a single image we are offered narrative (this presentation
usually takes the form of some kind of left-right/top-bottom directionality);
when the coordination can be read as comprising past, present and future events
then we are in fact invited into a time machine where we, the viewer, take our
place in the ‘present’ of the picture, marrying our present with that of the
image, taking our place within the world of the narrative, open to its implied
meanings and feelings
…Geertgen tot Sint Jans, 'The fate of the earthly remains of St. John
the Baptist' and Lucas Cranach the Elder, '
A variation on the formula
of narrative directionality is the temporal loop. 'The fate of the earthly
remains of St. John the Baptist' (1485), by Geertgen tot Sint Jans, depicts the
narrative chronology progressing from the picture's back to its front, and then
continuing on in its middle ground (respectively, from around 10/20BC to 362 AD
to the thirteenth century; from the burial of the Baptist, and separately his
head, to Emperor Julian the Apostate's attempt to cremate the Saint's bones, to
the finding of the bones by the Knights of Malta, and their portage to their
eventual home, the convent of Saint Jean d'Arc in 1252).[4] What is important is that two kinds of
temporal description are possible here: either, all is in the past for the
viewer in the present time (the painting -painted after the events depicted-
represents three moments in the past, connected by a narrative). Or the times
represented may be ordered according to the picture's own priorities, in which
case the large and full foreground may be read as the present (as the key event
depicted into whose time we are to enter), with the other two, less present,
grounds taking their temporal valencies according to their positions before
this key event (the past) or after it (the future), with the key event taking
the valency of the presented present). The later sequence will be seen to form
a kind of temporal loop (from back to front then back to the middle
ground). In terms of meaning, the
failed attempt to destroy
Another variation on the
temporal loop, this time incorporating the directionality, left to right (our
right to left), can be found in Lucas Cranach the Elder, 'Paradise' (1530)
(Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). However before looking at the painting
itself, it is worth taking time to examine the left/right issue as it is
evinced in this kind of painting and the elements it mobilises in order to
transmit significance. The first element is that of the narrativisation of
direction, with the movement of the same (or interrelated) characters through
the unified space of the painting (simultaneous narrative). So far the ordering
of time in the painting is as seen from a position 'outside'. However, the
centre (foreground) of the painting may also be read as the equivalent of a
'now' position, so rendering the other events as 'before' and 'after'. This
'now' position would represent the key turning-point in the narrative, and is
here highlighted as the place and time
of the implied viewer, who is invited into the text, as it where, exchanging
the process of time viewed from the outside for a temporality experienced from
the inside.
Temporality brings us to the
second element in the unpacking of the right/left issue - which I will divide
into three aspects; point of view, directionality, and morality. The question of point of view centers around
the contrast between our (the viewer's) point of view and its inversion, that
of, from, or from within, the painting, as in the case of geometric perspective
versus inverse perspective - in this case the latter is God's point of view
(the position of God's presence in the painting). The second aspect is that of
directionality; what is the 'proper' direction, 'our' left to right, the
direction of writing - perhaps as the visualised arrow of time in the West? Or
the art object's left to right (as represented in the Cranach)? The arrow of
time, the arrow of narrative, crystallizes the issue of directionality into the
deictic properties of 'towards'. Towards what is right and proper; this is the
right direction, a direction which is prescribed by Law and which is the home
of the Good. A just way anchored in eternal Truth. Yet the question still
remains: why exchange the left/right of the viewer for the right/left of the
art object? A point of view originating from within the painting implies a
place within the time and space of the painting as the site of truth, the place
and time from which value is to be apportioned; the point of view of the
artwork is to be preferred to our (individual, external) place of vision. The
viewer must identify with the message, and ideology of the two dimensional
illusion before which he or she stands. There is only one moral viewpoint, that
of the painting, and it is this viewpoint which determines not only, the
placing of the valencies of good and evil, but also the question of whose left and right is to be granted
significance, and so which direction is the proper one (towards the picture's right). The third element in
our discussion of the role of left and right, and the passage between them is,
therefore, that of morality. The
source of the moral directionality of the picture (which ever left/right
viewpoint is adopted) lies in the extra-temporal realm; we have again returned
to the rhetoric of eternity, with right and left, together with the direction
towards each, respectively tagged as good and evil. For example, see the
division of the Tympanum, a division performed by the Last Judgment which it
depicts, where the tympanum's right is Heaven, and its left is Hell, on the
church of St. Foy, Conques, 1125-1135 - Hell, in Anglo-Saxon devotional art, is
often depicted in the far right-hand (the text's left-hand) corner. Both of
these mythical places are, of course, outside of time, are therefore eternal,
and represent as shown together in the Last Judgment genre, the edge of time,
the end or edge of history, the last event of the Christian world view (as
offered by the Gothic cathedral front, for example), hence lifting the implied
viewer, out of history, out of time, and offering a glimpse of, indeed a
vantage point or place from within, the outside of time (perhaps as one of
those about to be judged). Clearly the combination of these three aspects of
the left/right question and their implications allows for a multiplicity of
effects and messages to be conveyed.
Bearing the above in mind let us
now re-examine Cranach's '
…Hans
Holbein, ‘The Ambassadors’.
I now want to turn to Hans
Holbein’s famous painting, 'The Ambassadors', for a mode of temporal reference not
discussed above, a mode symbolic through the foregrounding or self-reference of
a visual figurative form (the anamorphosis)
and for an early example of the Vanitas
genre with its particular relation of the temporal to the extra-temporal.[6] Holbein's ‘The Ambassadors’ is full of
instruments of measurement, quantitative measurement, not least for the
measurement of time; an attempt to master time and space through science. This
attempt at mastery is of course aimed at the future, the better to control the unknowable
and render predictable the contingent aspects of human existence. However this
mastery, is revealed as helpless arrogance, as vanitas, when confronted by everyone's ultimate future, the only
safe prediction anyone can make, that of the eventual arrival of death. The
fate of human endeavor, death as the real end of our future, making of life and
its puny endeavors to predict and control a Vanitas, is signaled by the presence of a
Death's head or human skull, an anamorphosis
that is not at first discernable. The instruments are evident first, but on
closer examination and some changing of position by the viewer, the death’s
head too becomes (almost) clear. Thus far the 16-17th century Vanitas plays its typical role, a symbol
of the end, of the future as death (the skull as the remains of a dead body, of
the site of consciousness, the part-whole relation explains the symbol). In
effect an irony is offered by contrasting futures (control, versus its lack).
Beyond the future, so beyond temporality, the rhetoric of the end of time is
also present here; by its connection to death, of its beyond, in the Christian
mythology. Death is to lead to an escape from time as duration, into the
after-life; eternity in Heaven - or in Hell.
However as
remarked above, the Death's head is 'hidden', is a barely visible anamorphosis; a image concealed from the
main (implied) point of view requiring (implying) yet another point of view to
reveal it for what it is. Another implied reader is needed… which (especially
if the implied position is difficult to realise) may connote another kind of
time as well as another space from which to see. The anamorphosis in the foreground can only be seen from an 'other'
space above viewer head-level, or from below the level of the painting - this
other perspective works as a figure to suggest another time outside of the
rational Renaissance space/time of the picture. This negative form of the
rhetoric of eternity, as employed by another (ideological) point of view, is
augmented by a crucifixion hidden in (the picture's) top right corner, in a
space 'behind' the space depicted; a space with its own second meanings: last
things; eternity. Both symbols (un-recoupable skull and hidden crucifix)
indicate the vanity of the mastery which is the picture's most immediate
message (witness the compasses, maps, globes, instruments, and clocks) by
subverting this space - indicating the extra-temporal realm beyond. To see the anamorphosis one must either be below
ground or hovering above it; the message seems fairly clear. Furthermore, as
seen from below, the skull's right eye-socket is oversized: seen from the
'above' position however both eye-sockets are proportional, indicating that
this is the 'proper', implied, (elevated) position from which to see the skull
- a position from which the rest of the picture is effectively scrambled. The
change of perspective connotes a change of ideology and an affirmation of faith
over reason. Again space as time has symbolically bridged the gap to the
sacred, affirming a particular identity, community, and world-view.
This space,
image, and illusion in effect demands quite another kind of point of view for
its realisation. Again we have been returned to the other of time, this time,
not by allusion, nor synecdoche (the embracing ideological context of Christian
belief), but directly, through the indirectness of the figure of the Death's
head, the anamorphosis, which
suggests a point of view other than that of the picture as a whole, a viewpoint
which originates elsewhere, and (symbolically) returns the thoughts of the
attentive viewer to that place: the outside of time, eternity, the other time
of religious ideology. Thus a double deixis (future as death, leading to
eternity, and the other space/time whose perspective is figurally performed by
the anamorphosis) indicates the
painting's religious message through its temporal relations and especially its
strategic deployment of the rhetorical outside of time. 'The Ambassadors' insists
that the temporal point of view, through which we view it, is a false one; the
true point of view, the one that will illuminate the end of things, finds its
origin elsewhere. The future, the painting suggests, ultimately always leads to
such a place and time, but this place lies outside of historical contingency
and temporal experience and can be attested to only by figure, paradox and
faith.
…Comparative: Chinese Art
Let us now compare these
findings with a geo-cultural block from the ‘other’ side of the world, the East
Asia or the ‘Orient’ as generations of ‘Orientalists’ have called it, with what
was initially a different, in fact ‘opposite’ tradition of left/rightness and
so narrative directionality, but which in terms of many of the other key
elements of a temporal rhetorical reading contains similar if not identical
elements (as in left/right (moral) and the three grounds).[7]
Chinese
landscape painting begins with religion, with the depiction of a Daoist paradise.
The continuous echo of this relation, like the persistence of the sound of the
‘sea’ in a shell, in the history of Chinese landscape art is indeed hard to
avoid. In terms of the kinds of temporality locatable in the artwork, above all
the rhetoric of eternity as a sublime relation, this persistence of paradise
comes as no surprise to the Western art lover as the zoning employed resembles
that of the sacred symbolism as found in the history of Western Art. Not least
in the importance accorded to the top and background. Moreover the path (the
Way) in landscape art, the path we follow with our hearts and our souls as with
our eyes, is often a slow climbing hypsosis (eye-leading upwards), a
zigzag rising, taking us up to the top (of the painting) and beyond…
The passage
upwards leads us through the grounds of the image: top/back, middle,
fore/bottom. All three grounds have stylised, symbolic, indeed distilled
equivalents, or meanings in Chinese (religious/landscape art) where they are
often separated by symbolically significant areas of white space. In the
evolution of the hanging scroll we can further see the existence of multiple
(implied) points of view; one for each ground as the norm, accentuating the
different meanings attachable to each part. Such paintings imply a
monumentality without threat; the Chinese compromise between Beautiful and
Sublime type elements evinces an aesthetic which does not need to exploit such
an explicit opposition between these elements – as in Western (Romantic) art
(however a form of identity confirmation via order and via threat, gentle and
less gentle ‘sublime’ effects clearly exist in Chinese art, not least in
nineteenth century landscape art, see the mountains and rivers, or shan shui, paintings of Li Keran).
The top, whether
separated, floating, or as contiguous background (but always in proximity to
the sky) carries one meaning. In Chinese and Medieval western art alike, this
is the realm of the more than human, of deities and heroes, of feitian and angels, their home, a
depiction of the heavens. The place of ideals, the field of pure aspiration, a
country free of contingency. The place also of the sublime, the lofty domain of
the un-representable. No matter how often presented as real; its placing and
suggestion are nevertheless suggestive of a realm beyond the everyday, beyond
illusion, care and desire.
The foreground
(a space often expanded to include the centre of the image). The ground of the
present, temporal, earth-bound; site of the tiny temple, humble dwelling of
lonely bench, site of diminutive humans observed in their contemplation of the
colossal vistas before them (just like us, as if an echo, mirror, or
instruction, of how to look and what to learn). The amalgam of the two presents
(of the picture and of ourselves) offers the hand of meaning, the bridge of
understanding or participation (giving the sense of the painting as ritual),
and provides the conduit for the transfer of the moral from the image to the
self.
The separated
middle ground of Chinese art is an island easily transposable forward or
backward in time. Before and after in Chinese art topography begin with the
metaphysical level, with the universal above and the particular below, the
in-between takes its place in this sequence, its symbolism coded accordingly.
The heights may be eternal, but the lower two grounds still admit of temporal
order – often showing a path that leads both eye and person up to the universal
plane.
But to where do
we climb? And by what route? For the direction of movement of time in Western
art (most typically in the depiction of narrative western medieval through to
Baroque art) prefers left to right, which we can call Left /Right (Narrative);
offering the subjective viewpoint, where the point of view of the viewer is paramount,
superior even to time, at times, which he or she stands above, seeing time in
its many stages, past present and future all at once, before us on the screen.
Yet, if the direction of narrative in western art is from (our) left to right
(as with our direction of writing) then in the East (China, Japan, Korea,
Vietnam, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia...) the direction of time was (until
recently) from (our) right to left, as evinced by the scroll tradition which
unfolds from right to left. Unfolding the scroll we follow the line of
narrative (as also the direction of reading, first from top to bottom as in
‘before’ and ‘after’ in Chinese language, respectively shang/上 to xia/下 , semantically equivalent
to ‘above’ and ‘below’, and then from right to left). The route taken then
should be from right to left. And the place to which they head? Logically to
the top left corner, both in the direction upward and in the right to left
narrative direction favoured by the East - including the gaze of the eye of the
seated watcher within the image, which also most often (at least in the
painting predating the spread of Western influence) traverses right to left and
looks upwards.
If narrative
directionality in Eastern and Western Art appears to proceed from opposite poles,
then the other left/right coding to be found in the image, which gives us the
place of the Good and the Holy, and so which we have called Left/Right (Moral),
appears to be the same in both cultures, favouring the (our) top left of the
picture corner – often showing itself in the dominance of peaks or heavenly
palaces (or, in Western art, the hand or eye of God, as in the Annunciation
genre). But why in a right-handed culture (and all cultures are right-handed)
should the favoured portion of the picture be on our left?
The answer, as
we have seen, lies in a one hundred and eighty degree shift in perspective.
This second left/right coding, that of Left/Right (Moral), finds its origin the
world of the statue, in the three dimensional world of right-handedness. No
matter we stand before it, the statue’s right hand is dominant, carries the
spear or orb, or scroll. Whence its place on the (our) left of the picture, so
going against our -intuitive- sense of the left as lesser or tabooed hand or
corner, but occupying the place of the object’s Right (hand). As if we were
again before the statue of the entity of power or religion – and so in thrall
to their (dominant) sense of left and right. So in art throughout the world,
with the exception of places where left and right must bow to the dictates of
space (narrative and face-on representations in tunnels leading to somewhere)
peaks peak on our left (the image’s right). The eye-raising lines of approach
culminate in a lofty left of centre peak (this is how, from the point of view
of the perceiving subject, the left hand side of the picture is found to be the
place of the gods despite the taboo on, or lesser priority of, the left hand
side in culture in general – because this position is classified, and
experienced, as the image’s, that is the object’s, right). So the right-to-left
directionality of narrative fits in naturally with Left/Right (Moral or
Object Right) in the East; whilst in the West it sometimes forces a change of
narrative direction from left-to-right to right-to-left (where it is God that
is moved towards).
When both
modalities of left/right in the image are found to be in tension with each
other, then the default right-to-left directionality of Eastern narrative is
reversed in caves containing a Buddha statue or complex of statuary, so
-apparently- following the Western model. However in reality the directionality
has been switched to prevent pilgrims and other participants from walking
anti-clockwise around the statue, to stop them following-on from the left hand
side of the statue (under taboo with left handedness). Instead they must move
from left to right, around the statue, that is clockwise, so necessitating the
switch in narrative directionality. Clearly the Left/Right (Moral) preference,
the gaze of the statue, has priority over the Right/Left (Narrative)
directionality, the gaze of the viewer.
*See
also: Peter Nesteruk, ‘When Space is Time: The Rhetoric of Eternity: Hierarchy
& Narrative in Late-medieval and Renaissance Art’, in Gerhard Jaritz &
Gerson Moreno-Riano (eds.), Time and
Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, selected papers from the International
Medieval Congress, (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003) pp. 403-426. And other articles on Art from Website (esp.
The Trail of the Annunciation).
Copyright, Peter Nesteruk, 2011.
[1] For the philosophical tradition that treats
humanly experienced time as subjective and qualitative, as opposed to time as
abstract, scientific, objective, or quantitative, see Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, Trans. F. L. Pogson
(London: Swan, Sonnenschein, 1910). First Published in French, 1889, esp. pp.
11-18; 228-229. Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology
of Internal Time-Consciousness, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1964), see esp. pp. 23; 30; 49; 57; and section 24. Martin Heidegger, 'Being
and Time: Introduction', in Basic
Writings, Ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993) pp. 37-88, esp.
pp. 60; 61; 63; and 'Time and
Being', in On Time and Being, (New
York: Harper & Row, 1972), see esp. pp. 11; 13; 15. Sections of this
chapter were first published as: ‘When Space is Time: The Rhetoric of Eternity:
Hierarchy & Narrative in Late-medieval and Renaissance Art’, in Gerhard
Jaritz & Gerson Moreno-Riano (eds.), Time
and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, selected papers from the
International Medieval Congress, (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003) pp.
403-426.
[2] How to move from the three valencies
(the experience of time) to two binaries (the rhetoric of the outside of time)?
In rhetorical terms, there is no problem; contrasts in texts easily binarise
giving the rhetoric of the outside of time as the opposite to temporality as
such. If we take our experience of time as the first principle, then those
aspects with the potential to indicate either past or future (as 'less present'
in opposition to the 'more present', which is read as the viewer's implied
present, or 'now') may indicate both past and future simultaneously, resulting
in a implied position for the viewer outside of time, or in eternity. When
taken at their maximum extension, a finite and precise attribution of 'before' or
'after' becomes an infinitely extended 'before and after' - eternity- as a difference in temporal kind becomes an
opposition to temporality itself. An impossible relation for us time-bound
animals: hence we speak of a 'rhetoric of eternity'.
[3] In his phenomenological approach to the
roots of figure, Nicolas Abrahams, Rhythms,
(Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 1995), suggests that the two realms of
figure and phenomenology may not be so far apart, that the basic categories of
secondary signification are those
of the major poetic tropes (see esp. pp. 49-52).
[4] 'The fate of the earthly
remains of St. John the Baptist' / 'Schicksal der irdischen Überreste Johannes d. Täufers' (1485),
by Geertgen tot Sint Jans (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). See Picture Gallery of the
[5] Interestingly, the programme notes in the
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, discuss the narrative direction as from left
to right, obviously meaning the picture's left and right, yet without
mentioning why this viewpoint would be preferred to the other, experientially
prior, option - the left and right of the viewer, also the 'normal'
directionality for narrative representation in the history of Western art
(which is also, again in the West, supported by the left to right of the
direction of writing, and so of the implied arrow of time). In this case the
text's left/right relations take precedence over the subject's left/right as in
the moral form of the left/right opposition (as in the example of St. Foy
regarding the placement of heaven and hell). A valuable contrast to these
findings, and an important contribution to a comparative visual rhetoric, would
be provided by a study of the Arab
world's use of right/left as a script direction in relation to its visual
representations of narrative directions, and to any directional sense of good
and evil as privileging left and right. A further comparison with a
non-monotheistic culture would also be invaluable.
[6] Hans Holbein the Younger, 'The
Ambassadors' (early 16th century) National Gallery,
[7] A representative range of traditional
Chinese art may be found in the following: George Clunas, Art In China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Mary Tregar, Chinese Art (London: Thames &
Hudson, 1997); Ernest F Fellonosa, Epochs
of Chinese and Japanese Art (New York: ICG Muse, 2000). First Published,
1912; Zhang Anzhi, A History of Chinese
Painting (