Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures: by Barkan Leonard

Author:Barkan, Leonard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400844784
Publisher: Princeton University Press

pleasing through its beauty, but, on the contrary, on account of a strange, horrible, and unexpected invention, [it] gave no little satisfaction to the people: for even as in the matter of food bitter things sometimes give marvelous delight to the human palate, so do horrible things in such pastimes, if only they be carried out with judgment and art; which is evident in the representation of tragedies. (1:653)

Back to tragedy and to what has become ut poesis pictura: Vasari turns the analogy around, now exploiting the properties of text as a way of theorizing picture. Everyone knows that tragedy is an art form that is enthusiastically embraced despite its painful contents; by that association, he proposes that visual art as well has the right to be ugly or (indeed, in the mode of Horace’s much quoted sentence about the liberties of poets and painters) to represent that which could never be seen in the world.

Into this fairly traditional set of materials, Vasari somewhat surprises us by his reference to food, whose analogical force ought to inspire the same sorts of questions we have asked about the utility of pictures in an account of poetry. Vasari—let us say in particular because he has been brought up on Tuscan cuisine—takes it as a given that bitter tastes might seem unwelcome but are in fact deeply satisfying; they are, in short, the equivalent of Aristotle’s snakes and corpses. By moving from Piero di Cosimo in one direction toward tragedies and in the other direction toward, let us say, cicoria, Vasari is mapping out the gamut from bodily sensation at one end to the loftiest intellectual satisfactions at the other end—all of which is placed under the aegis of pleasure.

And that is really the territory for word and image. An artist has—for reasons that are lost to history, as indeed the work itself is lost to history, though preserved in strikingly varying replicas—made a set of creative choices, and a whole descendancy of writers has responded to them. It’s a little like skiagraphia: a material practice in the workshop that gets subsequently exploited by writers as a trope. In this case, the subject has to do with desire. Whereas in the Republic mimesis was a set of mechanisms, and untrustworthy ones at that, for Aristotle it is a fundamental—indeed, an infantile—source of pleasure. Given that the real object of these discussions is poetry, the first necessity of the image is, essentially, that which gets ascribed to the Aphrodite: the dream, in other words, of direct bodily response. And so what was rhetorical in the case of skiagraphia, becomes narrative in the case of the Cnidia. If the world has never before seen an unclothed female goddess in marble, or at least never seen a figure with so complex a set of erotic solicitations, if the statue raises the question of desire in the presence of divinity and in the presence of art, then some imaginative and logocentric observers are going to be inspired, in the fashion of mythological etiologies, to tell backstories about that nakedness and that desire.

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