Here you can read online Mark W. Roskill - The interpretation of pictures full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 1989, publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, genre: Romance novel. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
The interpretation of pictures: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The interpretation of pictures" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Mark W. Roskill: author's other books
Who wrote The interpretation of pictures? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
The interpretation of pictures — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The interpretation of pictures" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Copyright 1989 by The University of Massachusetts Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America LC 88-22112 ISBN O-87023-661-X (Pbk) Designed by Edith Kearney Set in Linotron Sabon by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. and bound by John H. Dekker & Sons, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roskill, Mark W, 1933 The interpretation of pictures / Mark Roskill. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 087023661X (pbk.: alk. paper) I. ArtHistoriography 1. Title. N380.R66 1989 701'.1'8Dc19 88-22 1 1 2 CIP
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data are available.
Supplement I, "Iconography," is reprinted from International EncyclopediaofCommunications, edited by Erik Barnouw. 1989 by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
Page v
Contents
Preface
vii
Chapter One The Rhetoric of Art Historical Writing: Emplotment, Tenor, Tropology
3
Chapter Two The Study of Imagery and Creative Processes
36
Chapter Three Indeterminacy and the Institutions of Art History
62
Conclusion Revisionist Interpretation and Art History Today
86
Supplements
1. Iconography
94
2. Style As a Tool of Interpretation
99
Notes
103
Index
121
Page vii
Preface
This book is a series of essays on the way that pictures are interpreted. It uses examples, from the Renaissance to the modern period, to bring out the principles and problems that govern the bringing into being of a considered text that, if generally accepted, causes the work of art that is its subject to be viewed in a certain light. Any such text has a specific focus: thematic, structural, or a hoped-for combination of the two. It has as its most basic function the highlighting of certain components of the work, in a way that enhances responsiveness to the roles that they play and so leads to a sense of perception gained as to why they are featured in that fashion. Together, the choice of focus and the highlighting function amount to a presentation of the work in words, contrived so that prevailing or emergent conventions of discourse about visual images impart the conviction of an appropriate and insightful fit between the two.
Do pictures need interpretation? Today, doing this represents a professional field of activity familiarly marked by the presence of conflicting viewpoints and rival ways of proceeding. Selected works are judged capable of being suggestively enriched, in their perceived character, by the projection of alternative meanings onto them. But with no prescribed form that discourse of this kind should takebut rather a plurality of approaches that aim to open the work to the understandinginterpreta-
Page viii
tion may, more simply, serve as a way of getting discussion going; provided only that institutionalized practices and constraints of the discipline seem to justify such a paying of attention, as opposed to withholding it.
Before the emergence of art history as a discipline in the nineteenth century and its assumption of professionalized lines of inquiry in publications devoted to individual works or artists, interpretation took three expository forms. There was ekphrasis, a term deriving from ancient theory of rhetorical persuasion, which in the case of pictures carried the implication of an evocation in words of what the artist had chosen to bring out in representing his or her subject. There was hermeneutics, understood to mean (in the older sense of the term) the use of hypotheses about the agency of the artist's inner character and beliefs to determine how the body of his or her work is to be understood. And there was divination, which treated images as coded communications like oracular tablets or the sealed books of sects, yielding themselves to the understanding only of those with privileged access to the key.
A leading example of ekphrasis, from the mid-sixteenth century, is provided by the letter of Lodovico Dolce to Alessandro Contarini on the subject of Titian's
Look at similar books to The interpretation of pictures. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Discussion, reviews of the book The interpretation of pictures and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.
