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Elizabeth Abel
         Redefining the Sister Arts: Baudelaire's Response to the_Art_of
            Delacroix
         Baudelaire's response to Delacroix's art and theories provides a
            particularly fruitful focus for a study of the new rapport between
            the former sister arts. There is little similarity between
            Delacroix's action-filled exotic subjects and Baudelaire's more
            intimate and private poetry; their arts must therefore be related
            in some domain apart from content. We are aided in deciphering this
            domain by Baudelaire's extensive commentary on Delacroix. Moreover,
            perhaps because of its subtlety, the relationship between these
            arts has not received the attention it deserves.1 Yet no sooner is
            the possibility for such a study recognized than the problems it
            entails become apparent. Without the focus of common subjects,
            where does one begin? The dangers of impressionistic comparisons of
            study are readily apparent in the tendency of Geistesgeschichte
            studies to transfer stylistic terms from one art form to another,
            creating such bizarre transpositions as "the visible chamber music
            of the bent furniture" or the "Titian style of the madrigal" in
            Spengler's Decline of the West or Wylie Sypher's suggestion that a
            Shakespearean play is like a Renaissance painting because it makes
            use of "perspective" to create a real and believable world.2 And
            indeed it would be misleading to look for particular stylistic
            similarities between Delacroix and Baudelaire. Delacroix's
            dissolution of solid color masses into separate strokes of
            different colors, for example, would appear to be closer to
            Rimbaud's disjointed language than to Baudelaire's carefully
            interwoven sentences. Only by viewing the two art forms as
            interconnected systems can we determine their relationship. If the
            new affiliation of poetry and painting in the Romantic period
            derives from the expression of imaginative unity, a critical
            approach to their relationship must be attuned to different ways of
            expressing unity. The theoretical framework that accounts most
            completely for the kind of relationship existing between Delacroix
            and Baudelaire is provided by the structuralists, although, as we
            shall see, even this approach has limitations.
             
            ·  1. There are several studies of Baudelaire's aesthetics and
            criticism, such as André Ferran's L'Esthétique de Baudelaire
            (Paris, 1968), Margaret Gilman's Baudelaire the Critic (New York,
            1943), and Jean Prévost's Baudelaire: essai sur l'inspiration et la
            création poétiques (Paris, 1953), which contain sections on the
            influence of Delacroix but do not extend their analysis into
            Baudelaire's poetry as a whole. More specific works, such as Lucie
            Horner's Baudelaire critique de Delacroix (Paris, 1973), provides a
            detailed study of their relationship based on their correspondence
            and references to one another, but no analysis of the relationship
            between their two art forms. Some studies of Baudelaire's poetry,
            such as Lloyd James Austin's L'Univers poétique de Baudelaire:
            symbolisme et symbolique (Paris, 1956) and Martin Turnell's
            Baudelaire: A Study of His Poetry (London, 1953), point out aspects
            of Baudelaire's poems that appear relevant to the relationship with
            Delacroix, but they do not make these connections themselves. Most
            commentary on the relationship of Delacroix to Baudelaire's poetry
            is limited to those few poems that Baudelaire wrote on Delacroix's
            paintings.
            ·  2. Wellek and Warren quote the comments on Spengler in Theory of
            Literature, p. 131. Sypher's comments are in Four Ages of
            Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature 1400-1700
            (Garden City, N.Y., 1955), pp. 79-80.
             
            Elizabeth Abel is an assistant professor of English at the
            University of Chicago. A coeditor of , she is
            currently writing a book on literary and psychoanalytic
            representation of female identity.
Ernest B. Gilman
         Word and Image in Quarles' Emblemes
         In Quarles' world the emblem as traditionally conceived must strain
            across a widening gap between the verbal and the visual. Rosemary
            Freeman's criticism of Quarles, that in a mechanical "imposition of
            meaning" the text of the emblem applies an interpretation to,
            rather than discovers a significance within, the image, is more apt
            than Freeman realized. With the semantic congruence between word
            and image no longer guaranteed, artists attempting to yoke the two
            would have to reconceive the relationship between them. Seen as a
            response to this need, Blake's illuminated books complicate the
            emblem tradition in an art of dazzling improvisatory
            juxtapositions. Indeed, his revaluation of the ties between "body"
            and "soul" may be taken in one sense as a revision of the
            emblematist's traditional distinction. Words, once the soul of the
            emblem, now become truly animate for Blake - flowing, sprouting,
            multicolored - while their quirky energy, no longer restrained by
            standardized print, is embodied on sensual, quasi-pictorial shapes;
            images speak in a new and private vocabulary of emblematic birds,
            curling tendrils, and other forms that gesture allusively from
            plate to plate. These frame, underscore, celebrate, intrude upon,
            parody, or oppose themselves by "contraries" to the meaning of the
            adjoining text. If Quarles' work signals the failure of the emblem
            in England, its success in probing the problems of combining
            language and imagery points toward the renewal of the form in
            Blake.
             
            Ernest B. Gilman, assistant professor of English at the University
            of Virginia, is the author of The Curious Perspective. He is
            currently working on a book on joint literary and pictorial forms
            in the Renaissance.
Leo Steinberg
         The Line of Fate in Michelangelo's Painting
         Let us agree, to begin with, that we are not shown [in Last
            Judgment], as Life Magazine long ago phrased it, a Saint
            Bartholomew who "holds his own mortal skin, in which Michelangelo
            whimsically painted a distorted portrait of himself."1 The
            face was sloughed with the rest of the skin and goes with it. What
            we see is a Saint Bartholomew with another's integument in his
            hand. We next consider an aspect of the self-portrait which even La
            Cava left out of account - its relative siting. This has to matter
            since the portrait lies in the path of Christ's imminent action.
            More than that, it lies on a diagonal that traverses the fresco
            like a heraldic bend chief to base - from left top to right bottom.
            The twofold competence thus assumed by the self-portrait - in its
            concrete location and in the range of its influence - is something
            to marvel at. A hangdog face flops to one side, helpless and limp.
            But the tilt of its axis projected upward across the field strikes
            the apex of the left-hand lunette, the uppermost point of the
            fresco. And if, departing once again from the skin's facial axis,
            we project its course netherward, we discover the line produced to
            aim straight at the fresco's lower right corner. Such results do
            not come by chance. To put it literally, letting metaphor fall
            where it may: it is the extension of the self's axis that strings
            the continuum of heaven and hell.
             
            ·  1. Life Magazine, 6 December 1949, p. 45. So also Redig de
            Campos speaks of the lifeless Apostle's own skin, "dove il
            Buonarroti ha nascoto un singolare autoritratto..in caricatura
            tragica della sua 'infinita miseria'" (Il Giudizio Universale di
            Michelango [Rome, 1964], p. 39). Tolnay sees the matter correctly:
            "It is the artist's empty skin which the saint holds in his hand"
            (The Final Period, p. 44.)
             
            Leo Steinberg is Benjamin Franklin Professor and University
            Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania.
            His publications include Other Criteria: Confrontations with
            Twentieth-Century Art, Michelangelo's Last Paintings, Borromini's
            San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, as well as studies of Leonardo,
            Pontormo, Velazquez, and Picasso.
Gerald Mast
         Kracauer's Two Tendencies and the Early History of_Film_Narrative
         If narrating the feeling of stories, fictional or
            otherwise is an inherent possibility of motion pictures (in
            fact, the first possibility to be realized in the history of film),
            then Kracauer's distinction between the realist and formative
            tendencies must be questioned and, in effect, the two must be
            synthesized. Wasn't the practical problem for the earliest films
            how to construct a formative sequence of events within an
            absolutely real-looking visual context? Wasn't the paradox of film
            narrative the combination of an obviously unreal sequence of events
            with an obviously real visual and social setting? And isn't that
            paradox the most intriguing and complex problem of narrative film
            today, when the visual and social setting have become increasingly
            real-seeming? And doesn't this paradox have something to do with
            the fact that narrative film today seems richer and more important
            than it did a decade ago, at a time when various admirers of both
            cinéma vérité and cinéma pur had announced the death of fictional
            filmed narrative?
             
            Kracauer's realist aesthetic, concentrating exclusively on the
            photographic surfaces of things in the material world (as neither
            Bazin's nor Cavell's aesthetic does), overlooks this paradox
            altogether. It overlooks the fact extremely relevant to the
            cinema that the term "realist" means one thing in its common
            application to a painting or photograph and quite another thing in
            its equally common application to a novel or play. A realistic
            visual image is one that is said to "look like," "resemble,"
            "reproduce," "iconically represent" the surfaces of the visual
            world. We see or think we see in a painting what we
            see or think we see in the real world.1 But a realistic
            story is one that is said to chronicle "credibly," "probably," and
            "believably" the way we think people feel, think, or act, the way
            things happen, and the reasons they happen, all of which are
            consistent with the reader-audience-society's beliefs about
            psychology, motivation, and probability. The standard of one sense
            of realism is primarily visual while the standard of the other is
            primarily psychological. One might see the early films groping,
            then, toward a synthesis of the visual realism of late-nineteenth-
            century painting/photography with the psychological realism of
            late-nineteenth-century novel/drama.
             
            ·  1. This equivocation deliberately avoids the question of whether
            there is anything actually real about what one sees in a painting
            or photograph. The fact is that a very large number of viewers
            operate in this assumption because they think there is something
            real about what they see, despite the theoretical imprecision of
            their holding such a belief.
             
            Gerald Mast is the author of, among other works, A Short History of
            the Movies, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, and Film/Cinema/
            Movie: A Theory of Experience. His previous contribution to
            , "What Isn't Cinema?," appeared in the Winter 1974
            issue.
John R. Searle
         Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation
         Now, back to the picture. On the illusionist reading the spectators
            have become identical with Philip IV and Maria Ana. Given its
            position across the room and our position at the front of the
            scene, we would have to see ourselves in the mirror, but we only
            see the royal couple. Now what exactly is the painter on the left
            painting? Well it is obvious that he is painting us, that is,
            Philip IV and his wife. He looks straight at us, scrutinizing our
            features, before applying the brush to the canvas. We have plainly
            caught him in the very act of painting us. But in what sort of
            picture is he painting us? The standard interpretation is that he
            is painting a full length portrait of what we see in the mirror.
            But there is an objection to that interpretation which seems to me
            fairly convincing. The canvas he is painting on is much too large
            for any such portrait. The canvas on which he is painting is indeed
            about as big as the one we are looking at, about 10 feet high and 8
            feet wide (the dimensions of Las Meninas are 3.19 meters by 2.67
            meters). I think that the painter is painting the picture we are
            seeing; that is, he is painting Las Meninas by Velazquez. Although
            this interpretation seems to me defensible on internal grounds
            alone, there are certain bits of external evidence: as far as we
            know, the only portrait Velazquez ever painted of the royal couple
            is the one we are looking at, Las Meninas. Velazquez is plainly
            painting us, the royal couple, but there is no other picture in
            which he did that; and indeed he seldom used such large canvases
            for interiors. The Spinners is a large-scale interior but most of
            his big canvases are equestrian portraits of Spanish royalty.
             
            John R. Searle, professor of philosophy at the University of
            California at Berkeley, is the author of Speech Acts, The Campus
            War, and Expression and Meaning.
Rudolf Arnheim
         A Plea for Visual Thinking
         The habit of separating the intuitive from the abstractive
            functions, as they were called in the Middle Ages, goes far back in
            our tradition. Descartes, in the sixth Meditation, defined man as
            "a thing that thinks," to which reasoning came naturally; whereas
            imagining, the activity of the senses, required a special effort
            and was in no way necessary to the human nature or essence. The
            passive ability to receive images of sensory things, said
            Descartes, would be useless if there did not exist in the mind a
            further and higher active faculty capable of shaping these images
            and of correcting the errors that derive from sensory experience. A
            century later Leibnitz spoke of two levels of clear cognition.1
            Reasoning was cognition of the higher degree: it was distinct, that
            is, it could analyze things into their components. Sensory
            experience, on the other hand, was cognition of the lower order: it
            also could be clear but it was confused, in the original Latin
            sense of the term; that is, all elements fused and mingled together
            in an indivisible whole. Thus artists, who rely on this inferior
            faculty, are good judges of works of art but when asked what is
            wrong with a particular piece that displeases them can only reply
            that it lacks nescio quid, a certain "I don't know what."
             
            · 1. Leibnitz, Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain (Paris,
            1966), bk. 2, chap. 29.
             
            Rudolf Arnheim is the author of Art and Visual Perception: A
            Psychology of the Creative Eye, Toward a Psychology of Art, The
            Dynamics of Architectural Form, and Visual Thinking. His previous
            contributions to  are "On the Nature of
            Photography" (Autumn 1974) and "A Stricture on Space and Time"
            (Summer 1978).
Joel Snyder
         Picturing Vision
         I find it more than merely suggestive that we call many different
            kinds of pictures "realistic." As a category label, "realistic" is
            remarkably elastic. We cheerfully place into the category pictures
            that are made in strict accordance with the rules of linear
            perspective, pictures that are at slight variance with those rules
            but that nonetheless look perfectly "correct" (e.g., paintings that
            have been "fudged" so that certain "distortions" generated by
            strict adherence to the stipulated geometry have been "softened" or
            corrected), and pictures made in flagrant contravention of
            perspective geometry (e.g., pictures that look likethey were made
            with one point perspective but that have two vanishing points). We
            accept as realistic pictures that are made in strict accordance
            with the rules of perspective construction that we could never
            judge as being similar to anything we might or could ever see
            (e.g., a picture done in three point perspective looking down at
            skyscrapers). We accept as realistic pictures that are in sharp
            disagreement with what we now take to be the facts of vision (e.g.,
            an architectural view across a plaza in which all objects in every
            plane are in focus; a brief look around the room he is sitting in
            will convince the reader that we cannot see that way.) . . . There
            is something charming and yet nasty about the belief in the special
            relation of picture to world. It is charming because it allows us
            to "enter" with ease into pictures and allows them to "extend" into
            our world. It allows us to think of pictures as "true to life," to
            use [Ernst] Gombrich's beguiling term, to look at a picture and ask
            questions of it, as if we were looking at the world through a
            window. It allows us to treat pictures as substitutes for the
            objects they represent (I do not mean to imply that they represent
            only objects) and so, for example, to buy clothing from an
            illustrated catalogue, or to analyze architectural styles from
            pictures of buildings. In brief, it allows us to feel proximity to
            what is depicted and urges us to conclude that in certain important
            respects looking at a picture is equivalent to looking at what is
            pictured.
             
            Joel Snyder, associate professor of humanities and of art and
            design at the University of Chicago, teaches aesthetics, and theory
            and history of photography. A practicing photographer, he is
            currently completing a monograph on the photographer Timothy H.
            O'Sullivan. His contributions to  include
            "Photography, Vision, and Representation" (written with Neil Walsh
            Allen)( Autumn 1975) and "Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost",
            written with Ted Cohen in the Winter 1980 issue.
Robert P. Morgan
         Musical Time/Musical Space
         There is no question, of course, that music is a temporal art.
            Stravinsky, noting that it is inconceivable apart from the elements
            of sound and time, classifies it quite simply as "a certain
            organization in time, a chrononomy."1 His definition stands as part
            of a long and honored tradition that encompasses such diverse
            figures as Racine, Lessing, and Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer, putting
            the case in its strongest terms, remarks that music is "perceived
            solely in and through time, to the complete exclusion of space,"
            thus making explicit the opposition between time and space and
            ruling out the latter as a possible area for legitimate musical
            experience.
             
            Yet anyone familiar with the philosophical and theoretical
            literature dealing with music must be struck by the persistence
            with which spatial terminology and categories appear. Indeed, it
            would seem to be impossible to talk about music at all without
            invoking spatial notions of one kind or another. Thus in discussing
            even the most elementary aspects of pitch organization and
            among the musical elements, only pitch, we should remember, is
            uniquely musical one finds it necessary to rely upon such
            spatially oriented oppositions as "up and down," "high and low,"
            "small and large" (in regard to intervallic "distances"), and so
            on. Space, then, pace Schopenhauer, apparently forms an inseparable
            part of the musical experience.
             
            ·  1. Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons,
            trans, Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, Mass., 1947), p.
            28.
             
            Robert P. Morgan is active as both a music composer and theorist. A
            professor of music at the University of Chicago, he is currently
            composing a concerto for flute, oboe, and string orchestra to be
            performed at Swarthmore College. His previous contribution to
            , "On the Analysis of Recent Music," appeared in
            the Autumn 1977 issue. Anthony Gilbert responds to the current
            essay in "Musical Space: A Composer's View" (Spring 1981).
W. J. T. Mitchell
         Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory
         Although the notion of spatiality has always lurked in the
            background of discussions of literary form, the self-conscious use
            of the term as a critical concept is generally traced to Joseph
            Frank's seminal essay of 1945, "Spatial Form in Modern
            Literature."1 Frank's basic argument is that modernist literary
            works (particularly by Eliot, Pound, and Joyce) are "spatial"
            insofar as they replace history and narrative sequence with a sense
            of mythic simultaneity and disrupt the normal continuities of
            English prose with disjunctive syntactic arrangements. This
            argument has been attacked on several fronts. An almost universal
            objection is that spatial form is a "mere metaphor" which has been
            given misplaced concreteness and that it denies the essentially
            temporal nature of literature. Some critics will concede that the
            metaphor contains a half-truth, but one which is likely to distract
            attention from more important features of the reading experience.
            The most polemical attacks have come from those who regard spatial
            form as an actual, but highly regrettable, characteristic of modern
            literature and who have linked it with antihistorical and even
            fascist ideologies.2 Advocates of Frank's position, on the other
            hand, have generally been content to extrapolate his premises
            rather than criticize them, and have compiled an ever-mounting list
            of modernist texts which can be seen, in some sense, as
            "antitemporal." The whole debate can best be advanced, in my view,
            not by some patchwork compromise among the conflicting claims but
            by a radical, even outrageous statement of the basic hypothesis in
            its most general form. I propose, therefore, that far from being a
            unique phenomenon of some modern literature, and far from being
            restricted to the features which Frank identifies in those works
            (simultaneity and discontinuity), spatial form is a crucial aspect
            of the experience and interpretation of literature in all ages and
            cultures. The burden of proof, in other words, is not on Frank to
            show that some works have spatial form but on his critics to
            provide an example of any work that does not.
             
            ·  1. Frank's essay first appeared in Sewanee Review 53 (Spring,
            Summer, Autumn 1945) and was revised in his The Widening Gyre (New
            Brunswick, N.J., 1963). Frank's basic argument has not changed
            essentially even in his most avante-garde statements; he still
            regards spatial form "as a particular phenomenon of modern avante-
            garde writing." See "Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics," Critical
            Inquiry 4 (Winter 1977): 231-52. A useful bibliography, "Space and
            Spatial Form in Narrative," is being complied by Jeffrey Smitten
            (department of English, Texas Tech University).
            ·  2. This charge generally links the notion of spatial form with
            Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the imagist movement, the
            "irrationality" and pessimistic antihistoricism of modernism, and
            the conservative Romantic tradition. Frank discusses the complex
            motives behind these associations in the work of Robert Weimann and
            Frank Kermode in his "Answer to Critics," pp. 238-48.
             
            W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of , is the author of
            Blake's Composite Art,and The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and
            Times of a Cultural Icon. The present essay is part of Iconology:
            The Image in Literature and the Visual Arts. "Diagrammatology"
            appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of . Leon Surette
            responds to the current essay in "&lsquo;Rational Form in
            Literature'" (Spring 1981).
