Abstract Among the numerous puzzles posed by Blake's final epic poem, Jerusalem, the relationship between words and other elements of the illuminated page has proven the most resistant to resolution. The difficulty tends to arise at the representational level: sometimes the pictorial elements of a given plate appear to have no connection with the verbal elements; sometimes a visual image that seems to function as an illustration for a particular part of the poem does not appear there; on several occasions, Blake seems to have missed opportunities to provide any illustration for the most powerful narratival moments in his poem. Efforts to treat the pictorial elements of the poem representationally or iconographically, epitomized by Erdman's monumental work, The Illuminated Blake, have succeeded in pointing out the possibility of connecting one part of Blake's corpus to another on the basis of a visual repetition; nonetheless, these interpretations do not supply the principle by which the connections can be made to signify within the particular local contexts of the poem.l Although this approach suggests that the work may have a visual as well as a verbal organization — that the images may have their own narrative — it is still taken for granted that the visual and verbal elements are related, while the decision to interpret a particular visual element representationally, iconographically, or as a sign of equivalence or contrast is occulted. Because Blake does not work within a stable iconographic system, the explanations that link a particular visual image with a referential meaning often appear arbitrary.

Abstract In the vast savanna grasslands of West Africa, among Mande language-speaking societies such as the Bamana and Maninka, bards, jeliw, and blacksmiths, numuw, are joined in an elaborately structured, art-oriented institution.1 They are members of the nyamakalaw, a special segment of society that is professionally, politically and spiritually distinct from the rest of the populace. Historically there were two other such segments. The hàrànw, who still exist, consist of freemen and nobles who together constitute the great majority of the citizenry. The jònw, now extinct, consisted of salves. A principal distinction between the two remaining groups is professional. The hàrànw are mostly farmers.2 The nyamakalaw may do some farming, but they are essentially full-time practitioners of special trades. These trades, however, are not just jobs. They are grounded in a constellation of social and spiritual beliefs that permeate Mande life. This sets the nyamakalaw apart as central and irreplaceable societal members.

Abstract To say that Hans Holbein's portraits are one of the glories of Western art is a commonplace. It also follows naturally that much critical ingenuity has been expended in trying to understand what makes these works so compelling. Holbein's portraits have been said to surround the sitters with intriguing symbolic objects, to convey penetrating psychological insights, and to witness the stylistic predicament (commonly referred to as ‘mannerist’) of later sixteenth-century art. While doing all these things, the works at the same time clearly reflect the historical context in which most of them were created, the court of the English king, Henry VIII.

Abstract The Counter-Reformation emblem book in English in the seventeenth century, which Freeman, Lewalski and Daly have studied in the general contexts of emblem history, deserves to be considered in its own right.1 English Catholic emblem books had distinctive characteristics that justify their consideration as a separate group. There were only five such books: the Jesuit Henry Hawkins' Partheneia Sacra published in Rouen in 1633; his translation of the FrenchJesuit Etienne Luzvic's Le Coeur Devot as The Devout Heart published in the following year, again in Rouen; the Protestant Christopher Harvey's. verse translation of the last three of the four books of the Benedectine Benedict van Haeften's Schola Cordis as The School of the Heart, printed in London in 1647; Ashrea: or, The Grove of Beatitudes (London, 1665) by ‘E. M.’, who is held to be either the Jesuit Edward Mico or else Edward Manning; and, finally, Jeremias Drexel's The Christian Zodiak: or Twelve Signes First Written in Latin. Zodiak appear...

Abstract Plato recognized dance as ‘poetic’ in essence. His view of the poetic (and choric) nature of dance is stated in Laws, Book II and VII, and in his short dialogue Ion! quoted above, where he also granted dance an integral place in the cosmological order of the arts.

Abstract Although sonnets on the subject of contemporary portraits were common in Renaissance Italy, the genre as a whole has been neglected by art historians. Individual examples have been briefly alluded to, or used as an aid to dating, but rarely have the poems been examined for what they reveal about Renaissance attitudes to portraiture.1 Literary historians have been equally dismissive: Colasanti, for example, in his fundamental article on Renaissance poems on works of art, condemns the writers for their lack of sincerity and their unoriginal repetition of similar motifs, such as the artist in contest with Nature;2 and more recently Hagstrom has described the sixteenthcentury sonnets, with their heavy dependence on Petrarchan models, as ‘of interest only on grounds of historical continuity’.3 This study, while not attempting a general defence of the poems' aesthetic merits, will argue that they can amount to more than banal re-shuffiings of stale motifs from an enclosed literary tradition. If looked ...

Abstract Bruegel's 1956 painting, known variously as The Harvesters, the Corn Harvest, Wheat Harvest or August, has two modes oforganization. 1 It is, firstly, structured by a grid of diagonals. The strongest diagonal consists of the broad band of brilliantly golden wheat snaking its way from lower left to upper right, defined by the line ofharvesting and the contour of the hill, and continued in the field by the church. This is intersected by a much less clearly defined diagonal comprising the dark green bushes and trees that march up the hill and mark the boundary of the field. These diagonals are echoed by the pattern of roads in the valley; by the hill of wheat in the middle distance, itself intersected by trees and a path; by the receding shoreline; and, in the foreground, by the criss-cross lines of the furrows and the unstooked sheaves, by the path cut through the wheat, and by the splayed legs of the sleeping man.

Abstract Before the World of Ad, aren't most of us divided between suspicion and desire? On the one hand, we are always already forewarned that ads image forth an ideal world, so as to confer upon the commodity the aura of a totemic object, which becomes a secular fetish with magical transforming powers. We all ‘know’ that the ad is nothing more than a fabulous construction, a most seductively coordinated artifice of sound, word and image; and yet, in spite of this scepticism, well-cultivated in virtually every child of the Symbolic of advanced capitalism, we are all at times mesmerized into spectatorship before the World of Ad. And few of us, I would venture to say, are left with our desires unmodified by its dazzling flux and reflux of representations. This strange double relationship to advertising - what might be called our ‘sceptical engulfment’ - might be illuminated by a reading of one remarkable cycle of ads, the print campaign for Christian Dior products that appeared in three phases in the fall ...

Abstract I. THE BOOK OPENED The dynamic experience of the medieval book as its layers of skin unfold ‘flesh side’ to ‘hair side’, recto to verso - each opening a verbal and visual revelation ordered for the viewer's gaze - is nowhere more evident than in manuscripts of the Book of Revelation itself, written ‘o show unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass’ (Rev. I. I.). As we move through the great mid thirteenth-century English Apocalypse in Trinity College Library, Cambridge, 1 Cambridge, Trinity College MS R. I6. 2. Facsimiles available in M. R. James, The Trinity College Apocalypse (London: Roxburghe Club, I909), and in The Trinity College Apocalypse, introduction by P. Brieger, transcription and translation by M. Dulong, (London: Evgrammia Press, I967). our eyes are attuned to the integration of text and picture to such an extent that when we come to the beginning of Chapter 10 on fol. 10v, where the picture appears at the bottom of the page, there is no need to look up at the text an...