Bross Lecture | Metalepsis: a trespassing.

Please join us for what promises to be a ground-breaking lecture series focusing on the theme of “Violations of hierarchy in premodern painting,” presented by Christopher Woods, Professor, Department of German, New York University.

This lecture series: The lectures trace an alternative morphology of European art structured by neglect of the rules of perspective; trespassing across frames; intrusion of the still-unnarrated world into the narration; prophecies and other foldings of time; and the limitless contagions of pathos. The urgent or drastic approach especially to narrative painting generated effects of inevitability and emotional intensity. The scope is 1250 to 1650, from the late medieval period to the Baroque: a sea of time navigated with the help of three technical terms that describe such “violations”: metalepsis (the inapproprate inhabiting of one rhetorical trope by another); parenthesis (an interruption understood either as a side-by-side arrangement or as a hierarchical embedding); and epiphany (the manifestation of the radically Other).
This lecture: An early fifteenth-century German panel in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago is the starting point for inquiry into the unheard-of expressive devices developed by European painters of that period. The searchlight of the lecture falls on mural, panel, and miniature painters who sought principally to saturate with feeling and so dramatize the stories they were called upon to narrate. Bodies are pulled forward, close to the picture plane, in violation of recently established but already prevalent conventions of picture-making guided by optical perception. Frames, illogically, are made to exert pressure on the compositions they host.

Apocryphal and folkloric scenarios are narrated into being, revising theology and inviting beholders themselves to complete the sacred forms by exposing themselves to the new contagions of feeling initiated by poetic approaches to pictorial storytelling. The urgent mode of painting was well-suited to depictions of Christ’s Passion.

The pictorial idioms and idiosyncracies surveyed here were deplored by the art theorists and critics of the neo-classical centuries, between 1550 and 1750, and neglected by early collectors. But the truant artworks were rehabilitated and prized by some Romantic and conservative art historians who regretted the rationalization of vision brought about by perspective. This lecture responds to the cue offered by the Romantic partisans of the severe and affecting styles of the late middle ages.

In this end which is a beginning, we find ourselves in a position to grasp the morphological genealogy of the Baroque painting we started with