1 - The enigma of depiction

Summary

Pictures are my theme, what they are and how we understand them. Anyone who reflects on pictorial experience cannot fail to sense that pictures are both like and unlike literary works. A Dutch landscape painter and a travel writer can give us, each in his own way, an idea of what a town or river looks like, but while the painter makes us see his town, the writer can at best inspire us to imagine our seeing it. Vermeer's View of Delft is just that: a view of Delft: we seem to see through his canvas to a small Dutch town, its dark reflection shimmering in the river. No doubt the gifted writer can ‘paint’ such a scene with a few deft words, but reading her will not remotely resemble a Vermeerian view of Delft.

To get a feel for the importance of this distinction, imagine replacing various depictions by descriptions. Take down the portrait of grandfather judge and replace it by a description of his appearance; replace the altarpiece by a passage that describes the crucifixion; take down the poster of Bakunin or Colette and put a description in its place. Pictures, one finds, are more apt than descriptions to stand in for what they symbolise or denote. Nor is the representational virtue of depiction due to any aesthetic inferiority of description, for not even the most moving description of the crucifixion could take over the function of the meanest provincial altarpiece. Icons and not prose arouse the ire of purist and puritan, Christian and Muslim. Pictures, not descriptions, steal away the soul of the depicted one. Jonas Barish has documented a two-thousand-year anti-theatrical streak in Western thought.