When Space is Time. The Rhetoric of Eternity: Hierarchy and Narrative in Medieval and Renaissance Art (original) (raw)

The role played by temporality in the affectivity and interpretation of art has been, in general, an area long and unjustly neglected. This is an omission that I wish to begin to redress in the course of this article. I want especially to comment upon medieval and renaissance art, treating them as key periods in the history of Western art in terms of their open and frequent use of temporal potentials for the furtherance of narrative and other rhetorical, that is, persuasive, ends. Such potentials were to become hidden, employed with terms of temporal presence and belief (and not simply as the external witness of a given narrative process or sacral event). (iii) The two previous stages should permit historians and cultural anthropologists to work upon reconstructions of devotion, meditation, the mentalité of a given artwork's implied audience, and their relations of collective self-recognition or construction of identity. The issue is one of achieving a viewpoint from within a community sharing a pattern of rhetoric, a code of communication.