Meyer Schapiro

On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs

My theme is the non-mimetic elements of the imagesign and their role in constituting the sign. It is not clear to what extent these elements are arbitrary and to what extent they inhere in the organic conditions of imaging and perception. Certain of them, like the frame, are historically developed, highly variable forms; yet though obviously conventional, they do not have to be learned for the image to be understood; they may even acquire a semantic value. We take for granted today as indispensable means the rectangular form of the sheet of paper and its clearly defined smooth surface on which one draws and writes. But such a field corresponds to nothing in nature or mental imagery where the phantoms of visual memory come up in a vague unbounded void. The student of prehistoric art knows that the regular field is an advanced artifact presupposing a long development of art. The cave paintings of the Old Stone Age are on an unprepared ground, the rough wall of a cave; the irregularities of earth and rock show through the image. The artist worked then on a field with no set boundaries and thought so little of the surface as a distinct ground that he often painted his animal figure over a previously painted image without erasing the latter, as if it were invisible to the viewer. Or if he thought of his own work, perhaps, as occupying on the wall a place reserved for successive paintings because of a special rite or custom, as one makes fires year after year on the same hearth over past embers, he did not regard this place as a field in the same sense in which later artists saw their figures as standing out from a suitably contrasting ground. The smooth prepared field is an invention of a later stage of humanity. It accompanies the development of polished tools in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages and the creation of pottery and an architecture with regular courses of jointed masonry. It might have come about through the use of these artifacts as sign-bearing objects. The inventive imagination recognized their value as grounds, and in time gave to pictures and writing on smoothed and symmetrical supports a corresponding regularity of direction, spacing and grouping, in harmony with the form of the object like the associated ornament of the neighboring parts. Through the closure and smoothness of the prepared picture surface, often with a distinct color of the reserved background, the image acquired a definite space of its own, in contrast to the prehistoric wall paintings and reliefs; these had to compete with the noise-like accidents and irregularities of a ground which was no less articulated than the sign and could intrude upon it. The new smoothness and closure made possible the later transparency of the picture-plane without which the representation of threedimensional space would not have been successful.1 With this new conception of the ground, the art of representation constructs, I have said, a field with a distinct plane (or regular curvature) of the surface and a definite boundary that may be the smoothed edges of an artifact. The horizontals of this boundary are at first supporting ground lines which connect the figures with each other and also divide the surface into parallel bands, establishing more firmly the axes of the field as coordinates of stability and movement in the image. We do not know just when this organization of the image field was introduced; students have given little attention to this fundamental change in art which is basic for our own imagery, even for the photograph, the film and the television screen. In scrutinizing the drawings of children for the most primitive processes of image-making, one forgets that these drawings, made

The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh

In his essay on The Origin of the Work of Art (3, 4), Martin Heidegger interprets a painting by van Gogh to illustrate the nature of art as a disclosure of truth.1

“Muscipula Diaboli,” the Symbolism of the Méarode Altarpiece

In the Merode altarpiece by the Master of Flemalle, the figure of Joseph appears in a wing beside the Annunciation as an artisan who fashions mousetraps (Fig. 1).1 Not only is the presence of Joseph in the context of the Annunciation exceptional in Christian art; we are surprised also that his craft of carpentry should be applied to something so piquant and marginal in his metier. The writers on Flemish painting have seen in this singular detail the mind of the author, who shows in other parts of his work an unmistakable disposition to the domestic, the intimate and the tiny; his pictures represent a cozy, well-kept bourgeois world in which the chief actors are comfortably at home. He has been called the “Master with the Mousetrap,”2 and a recent critic has regretted the now accepted name, since the former one is “prettier and more characteristic.”3

From Mozarabic to Romanesque in Silos

In Spain, unlike France, the Romanesque styles of architecture and imagery were formed in almost abrupt transition from the preceding native styles. Whereas in France it is difficult to demarcate, even roughly, a Romanesque from a pre-Romanesque art because of the slow and continuous growth of the forms since the tenth century, in Spain, outside of Catalonia, it is evident that a new art appears in the second third of the eleventh century, and that the traditional native style is soon replaced by it. The sudden emergence of Romanesque art in Spain has been explained by circumstances outside art: the activity of French Cluniac monks in Spain transformed the Spanish church and, together with the French alliances of the Spanish kings, made possible the introduction of the Romanesque style of France into Leon, Galicia, Aragon and Castille.

The Religious Meaning of the Ruthwell Cross

In the most thorough study that has been made of the Ruthwell Cross (Fig. 1), the late Baldwin Brown came to the conclusion that this imposing work of the seventh century was erected to symbolize the triumph of the cross.1 His interpretation is supported by the Anglo-Saxon verses inscribed on its side in runic characters, a poem of the Dream of the Rood, in which the cross of Christ, speaking in the first person, recounts in passionate language its own experience and testimony of the Crucifixion:

The Romanesque sculpture of Moissac

The study here undertaken consists of three parts. In the first is described the style of the sculptures; in the second the iconography is analyzed and its details compared with other examples of the same themes; in the third I have investigated the history of the style and tried to throw further light on its origins and development. The study of the ornament, because of its variety, has attained such length that it will be published as a separate work.

The Miniatures of the Florence Diatessaron (Laurentian ms Or. 81): Their Place in Late Medieval Art and Supposed Connection with Early Christian and Insular Art

In an article on the Persian manuscript of Tatians Diatessaron in Florence (The Art Bulletin, l, 1968, 119–140), Carl Nordenfalk draws two conclusions which, if true, would radically affect certain of our ideas about the beginnings of both Early Christian and medieval art. He believes that the four decorated pages at the end of this codex, made for an Armenian bishop in 1547, preserve the types and even detailed forms of the ornament and pictures in a Greek manuscript produced in Rome about a.d. 170 under Tatians eyes (Figs. 1–4). They are then an evidence of the character of Christian art fifty years before the oldest surviving examples of Christian painting and sculpture. In the second place, the decoration and images of the Tatian manuscript in Florence appear to Nordenfalk so similar to the ornament and figures in the earliest Hiberno-Saxon manuscripts – the Books of Durrow, Echternach, Kells and others – that the genesis and certain peculiarities of that insular art – so isolated among the works of...

New Documents on St.-Gilles

In this article I wish to offer new documentary proof of a dating of the facade of St.-Gilles which has already been loosely proposed by several writers, but has been accepted by no French scholar because of the lack of evidence other than that based on analysis of style.

A Note on the Mérode Altarpiece

In writing on the symbolism of the Merode Altarpiece in 1945,1 I left unexplained the wooden board in which Joseph is drilling holes (Fig. 1). I could not relate it to the mousetraps that he has already made, which I had interpreted through a sermon of St. Augustine: “The devil exulted when Christ died, but by this very death of Christ the devil was vanquished, as if he had swallowed the bait in the mousetrap…. The cross of the Lord was the devils mousetrap; the bait by which he was caught was the Lords death.”2

Notes on Castelseprio

THE THREE-RAYED NIMBUS, In an article in Cahiers Archeologiques (VII, 1954, pp. 157–159), Professor Grabar writes that in citing his observation of the peculiar symptomatic cross nimbus in the frescoes of Castelseprio, with the lines of the cross extending beyond the circle of the nimbus, “M. Schapiro a pense pouvoir en reduire la portee en joignant aux exemples carolingiens et ottoniens de ce genre de nimbe crucifere deux exemples byzantins.” He goes on to argue that these two examples are not at all relevant to the problem, for in one case—the Cotton Genesis (Fig. 1)1—the arms of the cross are broad bands and not thin lines as in the frescoes (Fig. 3), and in the other case—Athens Ms 211, a work of the tenth century—there is not even a cross nimbus, but rather a candlestick in the form of a cross, independent of the nimbus and illustrating a sermon of St. John Chrysostom (Fig. 2).2 Hence the detail at Castelseprio remains a Western peculiarity and an evidence of the late date of the frescoes, since it i...