Stanisław Czekalski
Intertextuality and Painting.
Problems of the Analysis of Interpictorial Relationships
The present book is an attempt to confront art history's practice of analyzing relations between paintings and the theory of intertextuality. The starting point is a reading of this theory in terms which most radically challenge the meaning and functions of works and their relationships both in literary studies and in art history. Intertextuality is a domain in which the meaning of any text, also a painting, stems from intelligible references to other texts or paintings.
The first part of the book is theoretical in its character. It begins with an analysis of Jacques Derrida's grammatology, which reveals conclusions implied for the meaning of pictorial representations by the deconstruction of the semiological, representational, and communicational concept of sign as an image representing some meaning present at its origin, as well as the related concept of text as an image of the author's intention understood as its origin. An approach to meaning in terms of iteration and trace, the intelligibility of sign made possible due to the recognition of a quotation or an anagram of another sign that is already known, derived from the critique of the "mimetological" paradigm, allows one to apply the Derridean definition of text also to painting: a painting means not because it is subject to an originary vision or the artist's intention, but due to the traces of other paintings, intelligible regardless of the painter's will, which turn it into a kind of visual anagram.
Inspired by the ideas of Derrida, an approach to painting as a specific language which does not communicate the artist's intention but means something independently of his or her control, in reference only to other paintings "summoned" from the lexicon of the pictorial tradition, is supported by the reflection on language that opposes reducing it to the role of an obedient instrument of representing and communicating states of consciousness. In this respect, an intertextual approach to painting draws on the thought of de Saussure, Heidegger, and Lacan with which a separate subchapter associates the theories of literary language developed by Kristeva and Barthes. In his study, S/Z, the latter analyzed the effect of the illusion of reference of literary and pictorial representations to some extratextual and extrapictorial reality, revealing instead reference to a number of texts and paintings, pictorial models and patterns which had been accepted as natural. Barthes' observations are developed in another subchapter, focusing on Girodet's painting, Sleeping Endymion. An account of the theory of intertextuality in a version proposed by Barthes emphasizes the status of reading as establishing a field of intertextual relations triggered in the reader's mind. Similarly, quotations identifiable in paintings may come only from the visual memory of the spectator as effects of the interplay of his or her interpictorial associations. This leads to approaching the practices of art history's analysis of related paintings as products of the discipline's received procedures of analyzing artworks in terms of their alleged affiliations and ways of writing about those affiliations. The "pragmatic turn" facilitated by the theory of intertextuality, resulting in recognizing in the works of art the effects of reading instead of the testimony of origin, makes it possible to appropriately interpret relationships between paintings, usually defined as influences, sources, borrowings, quotations or allusions. Inferred from visual resemblances, they are simply reflections of the scholars' associations translated into the opposite idiom of origin. While from the point of view of art history what matters are those relations of paintings to other paintings which took place in the past, according to the principle of genetic derivation, in practice meanings are constructed ex post in the process of interpretation: the painting's origin is a product of the semiosis of its interpictorial readings.
This conclusion of the first chapter has been confirmed by analyses conducted in the second chapter of the theoretical part of the book, which focuses on the received methods of motivating claims concerning the derivation of a painting from its pictorial origin. The starting point has been provided by the considerations of Göran Hemerén who questions the verifiability of such hypotheses. The basic category for all kinds of genetic relations between texts or paintings has been influence understood as a cause-and-effect link connecting the fact that the painter of Y must have known painting X with the fact that one may recognize in certain features of the structure of Y the effect of its author's consciously or unconsciously referring to painting X. Hemeren's analyses demonstrate that neither the factual similarity of both works in question, as well as certainty that the maker of Y knew X, must prove such an influence, nor the reverse, i.e., the lack of such similarity plus doubts whether the maker of Y remembered X must exclude it. In fact, a genetic relationship cannot be either fully confirmed or excluded – one may only try to persuade the others about it with greater or lesser probability, using all the knowledge that can be used for such persuasion. The force of argument for the hypothesis of influence lies in its internal coherence. Hence, the following subchapter focuses on various strategies of persuasion adopted in art history to achieve the effect of correct reconstruction of the relations between a given painting and its pictorial tradition. In respect to alternative explanations of the artistic origin of Girodet's Sleeping Endymion, the author has presented a strategy of the logocentric myth of submitting the work to the artist's intention which combines the intelligible references to other works in the unity of an explanatory idea. On the other hand, a review of all the alternative reconstructions of the visual sources of Titian's Danae allows one to recognize the practice of constructing a coherent picture of the work's ties with the artistic tradition through deriving the intelligible influences from the historical context of the work's origin made up of properly selected pieces of information. The fashioning of the contextual frame by the scholar reveals a particular set of the interpictorial references and their meanings, at the same time concealing all the others.
An interpretation of the siginificance of one painting's similarity to another determines the choice of a concept from the repertoire of the received specifications of the influence, such as reminiscence (a trace of unintentional influence, unrelated to the explicit meaning of the work), quotation (a borrowing which belongs to the semantic aspect of the work) or allusion (a discreet reference to another painting to direct to it the spectator, communicating the painter's allusive intention). While the very statement of any influence is doubtful enough, even more doubtful are any attempts at classifying it in the above terms, since actually they describe something that cannot be known: the relationship between the artist's intention and the fact that his or her painting resembles to the scholar another one. The concepts of reminiscence, quotation, and allusion are inscribed in the logocentric and communicational model of the work's meaning, identifying it with the creative intention of the artist, reconstructed in the process of reception. To be precise, however, the traces of resemblance between paintings, interpreted in such terms, are just an effect of a specific interpretive perspective adopted by the scholar; a result of an unverifiable projection of a reading on the originary meaning; an outcome of the "productivity" of the painting, which is realized through reading, i.e., the cooperation of the object and subject. The place and meaning of the interpictorial tropes in the structure of the work under scrutiny results from its interpretation, and not conversely.
The second part of the study, consisting of three chapters, brings an account of the most important, at least in the author's opinion, theoretical perspectives which determined the approach of the late twentieth-century art history to relationships between paintings. Chapter Three focuses on those variants of the reconstruction of the artistic origin of artworks, which immediately preceded the rise of the theory of intertextuality in literary studies, approaching the pictorial tradition in terms of structure and language. Optimistic in respect to their strictly scholarly status, the proposals of Hans Sedlmayr and George Kubler, both suggesting a possibility of ordering the works of art in genetic sequences, stem from doubtful logocentric premises which allow for identifying intelligible effects of the continuity of the development of pictorial structures with the processes of artistic thinking treated as their proper origin. The same problem pertains to the conception of Ernst Gombrich, most interesting from the point of view of the theory of intertextuality. A closer look at the model of pictorial communication adopted in Gombrich's book, Art and Illusion, which defined painting as a kind of language based on a lexicon of patterns of representing reality, reveals two unsolved problems. One is related to the basis of the response to paintings in terms of the representation of nature: while Gombrich stresses the necessity of the artists to use borrowed patterns of representation which function as a code translating perceptions into an intelligible pictorial message, he does not explain the significance of this code for the process of reception and suggests a possiblity to interpret paintings without its mediation, exclusively through the pure perception of reality itself, which the spectator pojects upon the painting in question. Under the circumstances, the code of sending would not be equivalent to that of reception. Second, Gombrich's theory wants us to consider each painting as an effect of the correction of the original model, and even though it privileges artists with an ability to transform the models radically, art historians are still supposed to identify the model that has actually been used in each case, no matter if a far-reaching correction blurs the similarity of the two paintings under scrutiny. In fact, a transformation of the originary model may result in an unpredictable effect of similarity to some other model than the one actually taken into consideration by the artist. Then the lexicon of the representational forms to which the art historian should refer every analyzed painting takes the function of not so much communication, but dissemination – the proliferation of intelligible traces of the work's origin all over the pictorial repertoire.
The ambiguity left behind by Gombrich (whether the spectator contributes to the reading of a painting the memories of his or her immediate perception of the visible world or those of its representations) has been solved in a specific way by Wolfgang Iser who derived from Gombrich's theory the premises of the literary aesthetics of reception. For Iser, an equivalent of the lexicon of representational models is the repertoire of well-known works and conventions of literature together with the corresponding world pictures. This repertoire is a code of communication between the writer who writes his or her work in relation to it and the audience who has read the work against its background. Thus, Iser acknowledged the identity of the repertoire code on both sides of the literary communication process. His theory paved the way for a modification of Gombrich's ideas referring to painting that would assign to the repertoire of the pictorial tradition the role of a language mediating the reception of the representations of reality. Still, with such an assumption it is impossible to claim that the code really plays the alleged communicative role, i.e. that the interpictorial associations triggered by the work in the process of reception remain under the artist's control.
At the end of Chapter Three the author considers the position of Jan Białostocki who claimed that a number of paintings may demonstrate relations based on the so-called "frame theme," i.e. some fundamental idea bringing together various iconographic themes as a kind of archetype. In Białostocki's view, such fundamental ideas corresponded to some basic, archetypal schemas of representation, concretized in different ways in particular artworks and connected with various represented stories, still remaining their common "frame background," just like the "frame themes" themselves. Nevertheless, Białostocki seems not to have realized that the same paintings may be interpreted as variants of different fundamental ideas and consequently perceived as individual concretizations of different elementary representational schemas within which they might be related to various groups of other artworks. The scholar himself was interested in another problem connected with his theory: whether the perceptible analogies between paintings should be explained by the relations of origin, based upon the influence of one painting on another, or by a relationship that is purely "archetypal," i.e. the common root of independent works sharing the same basic schema of the representation of the "frame" ideas. That problem was approached by Białostocki with reference to Goya's Shootings of May Third 1808 - he hesitated between his own idea of deriving it directly from the pictorial archetype framing a number of representations of various executions, not influenced by one another, and Gombrich's claim, particularly forcibly articulated in relation to this painting by Goya, that it is necessary to identify its concrete pictorial source, since no painting can come into being without a correction of some preceding model. Considering this dilemma, Białostocki acknowledged its unresolvability.
Chapter Four confronts the problematic of relations between paintings, approached in the context of the theory of intertextuality, with the methodological developments in art history which took place in the 1980s, when intertextuality was widely accepted in literary studies. An account of the aesthetics of the painting's reception proposed by Wolfgang Kemp, inspired by the ideas of Iser and Gombrich, focuses on a fact that according to Kemp the participation of the spectator in the process of reception would have to consist in the projection of his or her presence in front of the painting on the presence in front of the represented situation, and not in the projection of the remembered "repertoire" of images which would constitute the code of the work's reception in relation to other, similar works. Thus, the status of the interpictorial references which Kemp includes in his analyses of the tendency of particular paintings to involve the spectator as a participant in a scene belonging to the represented reality remains unclear. If one takes into consideration the references to other paintings valid for the process of reception, there is still a problem of alternative directions of interpictorial associations which may be triggered by one and the same work. Doubts as regards Kemp's assumptions have been confirmed by an analysis of David's Oath of the Horatii which reveals intelligible and persuasive reference of that painting (not necessarily grounded in a genetic relationship) to The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. In comparison to Kemp's reading of David's composition, it changes its meaning quite essentially.
Another theory considered in reference to the problem of identifying the painting's artistic origin is a theory of historical explanation of paintings proposed by Michael Baxandall. Its analysis reveals internal contradictions as regards this particular problem. On the one hand, the relationship between a painting and the pictorial tradition which provides the painter with a set of possible options available for creative adoption for his or her own purposes has been recognized by the scholar as crucial for the practice of interpretation. On the other hand, criticizing the idea of influence as the artist's submission to ready-made models, and emphasizing the role of his or her invention in modifying the available options, Baxandall rejected the criterion of resemblance, traditionally accepted as the basis of any claims of the genetic relations between paintings and postulated searching for the models adopted contrary to the closest visual analogies, among the works which are not similar to the painting recognized as an effect of their modification. Accepting this postulate, one might derive a given painting from many different works, depending on the assumed direction of the alleged model's modification. Denying the status of resemblance as a trace pointing to the origin results in abolishing any limits for unverifiable speculations as regards the artwork's artistic genealogy.
Contrary to Baxandall, Oskar Bätschmann, whose conception of the historico-artistic hermeneutics has been discussed in the following subbchapter, insisted on the criterion of the visual similarity of paintings, taking it as a cornerstone of any claims about the genetic relations between artworks. The other condition of acknowledging such claims as legitimate is, in his opinion, a confirmation of contact of the maker of painting Y with the alleged model X. Both criteria do not, however, provide a sufficient basis for the identification of pictorial sources, since many suggestions concerning specific relations may actually meet them. In his analyses of paintings, Bätschmann himself pointed to probable sources, following still another premise – the possiblity of adjusting a claim of an interpictorial relationship to a coherent interpretation, logically connecting the inherent meaning of the work under scrutiny with contextual references, which allowed him to explain the motivation of the artist's specific solutions, corroborating one another. Just like Baxandall, Bätschmann pictured in this way the figure of the artist as a perfectly self-conscious subject whose coherent artistic intention controls every aspect of the work, including references to other artworks. For the sake of such a status of the artist's personality, the scholar would ignore those perceptible interpictorial relations which did not confirm the assumed logic of the creative process, even if they fulfilled the initially specified criteria of legitimacy. The analyses of the paintings of Poussin and David, polemical with respect to Bätschmann's readings, show the multiplicity of such alternative relations, challenging the genetic reconstructions made according to the Swiss scholar's logocentric assumptions.
Chapter Four closes with a critique of Richard Wollheim's way of reconstrucing pictorial borrowings. Wollheim uncritically acknowledges his own associations as correctly identifying not just the models which have been adopted by the artist, but also the artist's intentions behind his or her borrowings. Falling prey to the illusion of insight into the painter's mind, Wollheim on the one hand interprets the message intended through the interpictorial allusion motivated by the work's theme, while on the other, he identifies the artist's complexes related to the achievement of his or her predecessors, which dictated a specific response to their art.
Eventually, the analysis of the approach to the problem of interpictorial relationships taken by art history in the 1980s leads to a conclusion that it chose the direction opposite to that shown by the theory of intertextuality. While the latter questioned the author's control over the work, consisting in managing the meanings conveyed by its structure, as well as meaningful references to other works, Kemp, Baxandall, Bätschmann, and Wollheim – each of them in his own way – stressed the control of the authorial intention over the reconstructed relationship of a given work to the pictorial tradition. In the intertextual perspective, the text did not allow the reader to reduce the traces of its being marked by the multiplicity of other texts to the unity of meaning identifiable as a source idea of the author, and the reader became a subject which brought that multiplicity together in an act of reading, while art history adamantly identified the interpictorial relations constructed in the process of interpretation with the genetic relations of the works under consideration.
Chapter Five is a debate with two attempts at relating the theory of intertextuality to painting, proposed by Norman Bryson and Mieke Bal. Bryson tried to adopt that theory through semiology, assuming an essentially semiological division of the painting into a discursive level, subject to the language which makes the medium of understanding meanings (an equivalent of the signified), and a figural level connected with the inherently visual and sensible properties of the painting (an equivalent of the signifier). The intertextual aspect has been located by Bryson on the discursive level, where its lexical meaning would be intertwined not only with the meaning of specific texts, but also with the whole system of discourse as a set of language practices functioning within a given social formation and determined by the relations of power. On the other hand, the figural aspect of the painting belongs, according to Bryson, to the dimension of its visual presence which does not enter any intertextual relations and marks the painting with its unique idiom. This version of the "intertextualization" of painting on the level of the siginified differs from the assumptions of Derrida's grammatology which challenges the semiological model of sign and connects the process of acquiring meaning with the effects of repetition, iteration, and anagrammaticality taking place on the level of the signifier - the visual form of the sign. Still another approach to interpictorial relations has been introduced by Bryson in his book, Tradition and Desire, where he observes the play of formal resemblances between paintings but interprets them by means of Harold Bloom's theory of the "anxiety of influence" as symptoms of the strategies of defense which younger artists adopt to resist the pressure of their predecessors. (Such symptoms can be correctly identified by scholars.) Thus, in this case Bryson returns to the traditional study of influence, assuming the identifiability of source works by the effects of resemblance, making his approach somewhat more penetrating due to references to psychoanalysis.
Mieke Bal, having adopted the pragmatic semiotics of Peirce and acknowledged the performative status of interpretation which by its very nature reveals interpictiorial relations not as evidence of genetic dependency but as its own products, takes an approach that comes the closest to the actual theory of intertextuality, connecting the text with an act of its reading. She analyzes the painting of "Rembrandt," putting the artist's name in parentheses to stress the fact that the imagined authorial subject is essentially a reflection of the reception of his work, inevitably mediated by the historical and cultural placement of the interpreter, which determines his or her point of view and way of reading "Rembrandt" in relation to other paintings and texts. A discussion with the interpretations included in Bal's book, Reading "Rembrandt," addresses the problem of the instrumentalization of such acts of intertextual reading in terms of her feminist ideological stance. An account of Bal's other study, Quoting Caravaggio, reveals its theoretical premises related to the idea of the "preposterous" history of paintings, conscious of the production of interpictorial relations by the visual memory and associations of the contemporary scholar. Even though Bal herself opposed her views to those of the traditional art history, one might say that the academic reconstructions of the genetic relations between paintings conceal – as the analyses included in the book indicate – essentially the same mechanics of producing interpictiorial connections which the author of Quoting Caravaggio described in terms of the "preposterous" history.
The third part of the book applies the conclusions from the deconstruction of the discourse of influence and the approach to the interpictorial relations in terms of the theory of intertextuality to the painting of Jan Matejko. The restitution of the painting's artistic origin the principles of which have been discussed in relation to the debate on van Gogh's Shoes, clearly reveals its problematic character in reference to Matejko's achievement, since from the beginning its reception has been split between attempts to derive his painting from foreign sources and opposite claims of the genuineness and uniqueness of Matejko's talent. An overview of the alleged sources of the Polish artist's paintings, pointing to various components of the artistic tradition, closes with a debate with Teresa Grzybkowska concerning the origin of Matejko's Stańczyk [Court Jester] in Alfred Rethel's drawing, Sloth. On the one hand, the author asks whether it is indeed necessary to assume that Stańczyk must be a modification of some similar painting, and not an independent work of an artist using an actual sitter, on the other, he refers to a number of paintings which would have to be taken into consideration as alternative sources, but then it would turn out that identification of the "true" origin is impossible.
An analysis of Skarga's Sermon opposes several earlier attempts to connect Matejko's painting with specific fragments of the text of the Rev. Piotr Skarga's Parliamentary Sermons to a reading of an "anagrammatical" kind, tracing some other paintings the marks of which may be seen in its visual form. This reading reveals some interpictiorial relations leading to counter-Reformation, in this way pointing to different passages from Skarga's writings than those quoted in all the previous interpretations, namely his diatribes against Protestantism and the equality of creeds as factors contributing to the decline of the state.
An analysis of the Virgin of Orleans in terms of the identifiable visual traces meets the criteria of Iser's theory of "repertoire" as a basis of the author's communication with the audience. It is known that Matejko planned donating the painting to the French people in an act of apology for the commitment of some Poles to the Paris Commune. In the context of this unfulfilled intention the painting reveals a whole chain of significant references to well-known works of French art on patriotic subjects, which allows the spectator to interpret Matejko's heroic figure of Jeanne of Arc, leading the King and the people to the cathedral, as a positive, Roman Catholic incarnation of the French virtues, alternative to the national, but also revolutionary ideology of the figure of Marianne.
Finally, an analysis of the Constitution of May Third, addressing the theses of Jarosław Krawczyk, identifies in the painting's structure the effects of references to a set of other works in the context of which Matejko's representation of passing the constitution bill acquires a critical and even strongly ironic overtone. On the one hand, the scene appears to be a modification of the representations of events of the French revolution, on the other, is seems a quote of an engraving which illustrates a fragment of Don Quixote focusing on the introduction of the enlightened rules of Sancho Pansa on the island of Barataria. Such a derogratory underpinning of Matejko's painting may be connected with his portrait drawn in the notes of his private secretary, Marian Gorzkowski, which cannot be separated from the "actual" artist.
Translated by Marek Wilczyński
Abstract
In the present study an attempt has been made to apply the theory of intertextuality to the analysis of relationships between paintings. The efforts of art history to reconstruct genetic ties between paintings used as models and those made in result of their modification have been challenged by a claim that such ties are produced in the process of interpretation influenced by the acknowledged effects of resemblance which, however, do not necessarily imply derivation of one painting from another. An opinion, supported by the theory of intertextuality and pragmatic semiotics, that the relationships of origin are of no signifacance, contrary to those traces of interpictorial references which actually influence reception, on the one hand provides the basis for a critique of unverifiable judgments indentifying in painting the relations of genetic influence, borrowing, quotation or allusion, while on the other is makes a starting point for several readings of specific works of art, revealing in them the "annagrammatical" effects of resembling other paintings.
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