Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures (Essays in the Arts) by Leonard Barkan (PDF)

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The skirmish between painting and poetry—from Plato and Praxiteles to Rembrandt and ShakespeareWhy do painters sometimes wish they were poets—and why do poets sometimes wish they were painters? What happens when Rembrandt spells out Hebrew in the sky or Poussin spells out Latin on a tombstone? What happens when Virgil, Ovid, or Shakespeare suspend their plots to describe a fictitious painting? In Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures, Leonard Barkan explores such questions as he examines the deliciously ambiguous history of the relationship between words and pictures, focusing on the period from antiquity to the Renaissance but offering insights that also have much to say about modern art and literature.The idea that a poem is like a picture has been a commonplace since at least ancient Greece, and writers and artists have frequently discussed poetry by discussing painting, and vice versa, but their efforts raise more questions than they answer. From Plutarch (“painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture”) to Horace (“as a picture, so a poem”), apparent clarity quickly leads to confusion about, for example, what qualities of pictures are being urged upon poets or how pictorial properties can be converted into poetical ones.The history of comparing and contrasting painting and poetry turns out to be partly a story of attempts to promote one medium at the expense of the other. At the same time, analogies between word and image have enabled writers and painters to think about and practice their craft. Ultimately, Barkan argues, this dialogue is an expression of desire: the painter longs for the rich signification of language while the poet yearns for the direct sensuousness of painting.

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⭐Brilliant, learned and accessible. It’s like getting a liberal arts education over coffee. A personal introduction to the topic and the scholarly tradition surrounding it.

⭐Citing numerous instances from the art and literature of classical times, and plotting the broadening response to that legacy up to and including the Early Modern period, Leonard Barkan’s Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures highlights a penchant among poets for making metaphorical raids on territories that were arguably the lawful preserve of painting and sculpture. In turn, painters and sculptors were often engaged in story-telling centred on scenes, narratives and personae drawn from mythology and poetry, in which pictorial schemes sometimes accommodated written texts quite literally; whether for labelling or commentary purposes or because written text somehow featured among the events depicted. Might it seem, then, that the visual arts took a back seat while the themes and interests of literature were prioritised? To infer so would be to ignore these poets’ recurrent efforts to conjure for their readers some recalled or imaginary work of sculpture or painting. Such recourse entailed a seeming-transformation, or imaginative re-rigging, of the idea expressed. Beyond the call of mere metaphor, readers were launched upon an altogether different schema, connoting foreign procedures and a quite different mode of address. Yet, the poet must have had reasons for considering this the best, or only, way of realising his idea.Certain threads of Barkan’s account might encourage the fancy that, somewhere along the line, the job-description for poets and painters was substantially upgraded, so that poems and pictures thereafter needed to convey, not simply the contents of the human mind, but also the mind’s own action, boundless reach, characteristic elasticity, and fertility of invention. Perhaps this realisation became explicit only gradually, and developed over the centuries, as poets and painters worked at the edge of their awareness, taking lessons from the past or from the livelier spirits among their own contemporaries. Citing Ovid, Barkan ponders the notion of metamorphosis: certainly, a fitting symbol for the whole of mortal life, but especially connotative of the life of the mind: the mind as a shifting locus of viewpoint (and thus perspective); wellspring of desires and dreams; driver of invention; source of self-transformation and renewal.Despite its many competitive advantages the linearity of time-based, verbal, discourse undermined it in at least one respect: thus, a poet’s occasional borrowings from painters and sculptors yielded the possibility of invoking, mid-flow, a static tableau; a moment of suspension that afforded the temporary illusion of an unbroken unity. Certainly, this unity existed elsewhere; not least, in the expressive cohesiveness of poetry itself; but, through self-identification with a visual art, poetry re-evaluated comparison (its customary stock-in-trade); doubling its value as a function of reflection; key to a higher awareness.The unity attributed to a painted or sculpted subject was tied up with its inseparability from the signifying object. By contrast, a verbally encoded art form makes no unmediated appeal to the senses. While visual representation does not guarantee pleasure, it nevertheless connects with desire and its promises; thus, some panoramic display of classical ruins, a scene strewn with fragments of fallen masonry, broken columns, dismembered statues and damaged inscriptions, might, with good reason, be taken for an emblem of pain: the pain of unrequited love, or Petrarch’s grief for his love’s untimely demise. The Renaissance project sprang from just such ruins, being founded, in part, on nostalgia for an elusive ideal. And, amid these ruins, some marble tableau might mirror what was already lost to us long before we ever dared desire it. If art’s quasi-erotic attachment to imagery speaks to a conflation of desire and loss, then, where poems are seen as speaking pictures and pictures as silent poems, it is silence that must surely have the upper hand. To challenge this silence is to produce only an echo; and echo, with its narcissistic adumbrations, is found again in the play between word and image.Meanwhile, poetry’s symbolic assimilation of quite extraneous artistic procedures and forms allowed it virtually to spill over its official frontier into an intervening mental space where the echoes and shadows of opposing practices were free to commingle, share, and argue, as counterparts. Such cross-fertilisation could only have enlivened the public arena. Barkan judges that this more socially discursive, even political, mode of operation invigorated not only rhetoric and historiography, but also Renaissance experiments in architecture; so setting the tone for a revival of drama; not least, in the playhouses of Elizabethan and Jacobean England (where word and image began to shape-shift as never before).Barkan’s study is itself a kind of theatre: the primary sources he quotes often send him on errands back and forth among texts which variously quote, allude to, and build on one another. Thus, the impression of an autonomous, burgeoning discourse: a virtual `exchange of views’ extending from epoch to epoch. This commentary abounds with novel parallels, unforeseen trajectories, paradigmatic figures, spectral schemas, game-changing chimeras and transformative parables. The art and literature of other epochs might nevertheless sometimes appear to us quaint and naïve; not least, the way difficult and elusive concepts are so readily morphed into fantastical-seeming allegories. Yet these strains of our heritage lie not far beneath the skin.`Meta-cognition’ might approximately describe the key value this author traces in its slow steps from emergence through evolution; a phenomenon addressed philosophically and explored artistically over the course of two millennia; though ever tacitly-so: as a theme submersed; appearing under different topic-guises. Accordingly, Barkan’s own treatment, which never once parts company with the sources he has gathered for comparison, allows these to speak on their own terms, not necessarily ours. Thus, to venture the shorthand tag, `meta-cognition’, may amount to a hasty transgression and suggest incontinence on my part, since this pretends to label a process which Barkan – however tirelessly he plots it – always stops short of naming. Much more presumptuous might it seem, then, to suggest that the same term, `meta-cognition’, could help also to locate a prized, hidden, core-subject-matter: mainspring of the centuries-long, cross-media endeavour here described. Barkan, however, chooses to keep faith with the spirit of that actual search: never veering from its manifest, materially compromised, meandering course.

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