The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: Painting
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Marek Zasempa THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD: PAINTING VERSUS POETRY SUPERVISOR: prof. dr hab. Wojciech Kalaga Completed in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD. UNIVERSITY OF SILESIA KATOWICE 2008 Marek Zasempa BRACTWO PRERAFAELICKIE – MALARSTWO A POEZJA PROMOTOR: prof. dr hab. Wojciech Kalaga UNIWERSYTET ŚLĄSKI KATOWICE 2008 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 1: THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD: ORIGINS, PHASES AND DOCTRINES ............................................................................................................. 7 I. THE GENESIS .............................................................................................................................. 7 II. CONTEMPORARY RECEPTION AND CRITICISM .............................................................. 10 III. INFLUENCES ............................................................................................................................ 11 IV. THE TECHNIQUE .................................................................................................................... 15 V. FEATURES OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM: DETAIL – SYMBOL – REALISM ......................... 16 VI. THEMES .................................................................................................................................... 20 A. MEDIEVALISM ......................................................................................................................................... 20 B. RELIGION ................................................................................................................................................. 21 C. SENSUOUSNESS AND FEMININITY ...................................................................................................... 22 CHAPTER 2: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI'S DOUBLE WORK OF ART AS A DYNAMIC REPRESENTATION OF THE POEM-PAINTING FUSION ......... 26 I. THE HOLOGRAPHIC NATURE OF THE DOUBLE WORK OF ART ...................................... 26 II. PARALLEL RELATIONS IN THE DOUBLE WORK OF ART: COORDINATION AND SUBORDINATION ..................................................................................................................... 29 III. DISPARATE RELATIONS IN THE DOUBLE WORK OF ART: EXPLANATIONS, MANUALS AND ADDITIONS ................................................................................................ 47 CHAPTER 3: SPECTATORSHIP AND TEMPORALITY IN DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI'S SONNETS FOR PICTURES ....................................................................... 63 CHAPTER 4: PAINTERLY REFLECTIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS OF POETRY ........................................................................................................................ 84 I. ROSSETTI’S DANTESQUE THEME OF THE DEATH OF BEATRICE ................................. 84 II. PRE-RAPHAELITE REFLECTIONS OF SHAKESPEARE’S CHARACTERS ...................... 89 III. LINGERING MOMENTS IN PRE-RAPHAELITE RENDITIONS OF KEATS’S POETRY . 95 IV. EROTICISM AND CONFINEMENT IN PRE-RAPHAELITE PAINTERLY VERSIONS OF TENNYSON’S POEMS ....................................................................................................... 105 CHAPTER 5: POETIC QUALITIES OF PRE-RAPHAELITE PAINTING ................... 115 I. THE TITLE AS A VERBAL HEGEMON ................................................................................... 115 II. THE PICTURE WITHIN AND BEYOND THE FRAME: LIMITS AND LIMITLESSNESS IN PRE-RAPHAELITE ART ...................................................................................................... 121 III. THE NARRATIVE FEATURES OF VISUAL EXPRESSION – SPATIALITY AND TEMPORALITY IN PAINTING ................................................................................................ 127 A. THE NARRATIVE SITUATION ................................................................................................................ 128 B. LEVELS OF VISUAL NARRATIVES ......................................................................................................... 133 C. VISUAL TEMPORALITY .......................................................................................................................... 134 IV. ELEMENTS OF POETIC STYLE IN PAINTING: RHETORICAL FIGURES, MOOD- AND EMOTION-SETTING ...................................................................................................... 138 A. METAPHORICAL EXPRESSION IN PAINTING ..................................................................................... 138 B. VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF OTHER RHETORICAL FIGURES ................................................... 142 C. EVOCATION OF MOOD IN PAINTING ................................................................................................. 146 D. VISUALIZATION OF EMOTION ............................................................................................................. 149 CHAPTER 6: PAINTERLY FEATURES OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY ............... 153 I. SPATIALITY IN PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY AS AN INTERARTISTIC CONNECTION . 153 A. BEYOND THE TEMPORALITY OF POETRY .......................................................................................... 153 B. THE STATIC SPACE OF PRE-RAPHAELITE POETIC LANDSCAPES ................................................. 156 C. THE ENLIVENED LANDSCAPES IN PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY ...................................................... 164 D. VIEWERS AND VIEWING IN POETIC SPACES ..................................................................................... 170 II. PICTORIALITY AS A RESULT OF PARTICULARISATION IN PRE-RAPHAELITE POETRY ...................................................................................................................................... 176 A. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF IRRELEVANT PARTICULARS: THE POETIC DETAIL AS A MEANS OF ACHIEVING PICTORIALITY ............................................................................................................. 176 B. METICULOUSNESS OF THE PHYSICAL AND THE NATURAL DETAIL ............................................ 177 C. PARTICULARISATION IN SENSUAL IMAGES ...................................................................................... 182 D. THE NATURAL DETAIL AS A REFERENCE TO VISUAL PERCEPTION ............................................ 193 E. VISUAL DRAMATISATION OF HUMAN ACTIONS ............................................................................... 199 CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................... 206 BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................... 210 APPENDIX .............................................................................................................................. 219 INTRODUCTION The present study is an analysis of the relationships between painting and poetry in the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Relying on the long- researched ut pictura poesis tradition, the argument demonstrates that parallelism between the arts still remains open to discussion as an issue that is not fully established theoretically. Modern interdisciplinary theories are used in this study to facilitate exploration of the painting-poetry correlation in a way that leads, as I believe, to new findings. These findings are made possible by an approach to the correspondence of the arts that treats poetry and painting as codification systems; such a line of study emphasises the process of generating and functioning of the resulting structures in both arts. Throughout the argument, poetry and painting are analysed from the perspective of their representational value. Therefore, the study does not merely identify visual features of verbal language or linguistic features of visuality. It is not the aim of the present research to pursue the recurrence and imitation of themes in the two arts, but to investigate the intellectual operations that allow artists to achieve similar or identical goals by means of dissimilar tools, methods and material. Concurrently, the study shows how each of these two forms of artistic expression translates into the other medium, how they share each other’s features, and how each of those forms can imitate the other. * * * The general method of this thesis is the application of similar intellectual tools to a comparative study of two seemingly dissimilar arts. This requires a series of theoretical assumptions of which the most important is the treatment of poetry and painting as “secondary modelling systems.”1 The distinction between primary and secondary modelling systems, which was introduced by Jurij Lotman in the 1960s, has been recently proposed by, for instance, Seweryna Wysłouch, as a method which leads to a valid comparative study of painting and poetry.2 The primary systems, i.e. 1 “The term ‘secondary modelling systems’ should be understood in the following way: the term is used in the descriptions of systems which are founded on language, but they develop a supplementary structure of a specific type. In this way, ‘secondary modelling systems’ unavoidably embrace whole sets of language relations and supplement them with more complex constructional relations of a different order.” [own translation] (Yurij Lotman, Trudy po znakowym sistiemam [Studies in sign systems], vol. II, Transactions of Tartu University, no. 181, 1965, p. 6.);