Art terms, concepts, ideas… in no particular order
Ekphrasis. From the Greek for “description”, it refers to a verbal description aimed at vividly presenting a visual image. This literary translation of works of art can be seen as a struggle for dominance between words and images, a rivalry over eloquence between the silent picture and the loquacious text, or a gendered conflict between male narrative and female artistic beauty. As a literary practice, ekphrasis originated in ancient Greece as a rhetorical device in which one artistic medium attempts to convey the essence and form of another medium. Ancient ekphrastic descriptions are often the only surviving evidence of lost works of art, and this genre continued throughout the pre-modern, modern, to the post-modern era. Some notable examples include Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis (77-79 AD), Lucian’s Imagines (II century AD), Dante’s descriptions of sculpted works in Purgatorio (ca. 1308-1321), G.E. Lessing’s Laocoon (1766), John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819), W.H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts (1940), John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1974).
Beholder’s share. Expression coined by Ernst H. Gombrich in Art and Illusion (London 1960) to illustrate the viewer’s reading and interpretation of visual images. Given the ambiguous and partial nature of images, the beholder is faced with different possible interpretations to match against what the see until they find the most convincing option based on tradition, experience, artistic conventions, and mental set. Artists, in turn, will make stylistic choices that aim to trigger the beholder’s sensory expectations. “Any representation must of necessity allow of an infinite number of interpretations and […] he selection of a reading consistent with our anticipations must always be the beholder’s share.” (Gombrich 1960, p. 393)
Iconology. Approach to a work of art that focuses on subject matters, themes, ideas, symbols, imagery, medium and historical context (as opposed to the morphology of form). It is based on the principle that works of art are symbolic expressions of the cultures in which they were created. Aby Warburg introduced the term iconologisch, but it was Erwin Panofsky who articulated the iconological method as a three-level analysis: 1) formal analysis (style and composition); 2) iconographical analysis (subject matter); 3) iconological interpretation (symbolic meaning). Iconology ultimately concerns itself with the intrinsic meaning of the work of art as a reflection of “those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion – qualified by one personality and condensed into one work” [Erwin Panofsky, ‘Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York 1955), p. 55]. The term originally referred to a compendium of emblems and symbols for the use of poets, painters and sculptors written by Cesare Ripa (Iconologia, overo Descrittione Dell’imagini Universali cavate dall’Antichità et da altri luoghi, 1593).
period eye 