Artificial Language Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This article examines the Netherlandish chapter of the Renaissance fascination with pictograms, or beeldletteren, as a key aspect of the scientific enterprise to decode, represent and master the Book of Nature. What did Van Hoogstraten mean when he wrote that painting speaks ‘hieroglyphically’? Clearly, he should not be interpreted according to the twentieth-century trend of highlighting the ‘textual’ nature of artistic utterances, but rather an opposite approach: the idea that communication through images is more fundamental than that through alphabetic signs. When Renaissance writers on the visual arts used the formula ut pictura poesis, they elaborated upon Aristotle’s assumption that ‘the mind never thinks without images’. Pictography was just one expression of a more general desire to sidestep the contingency of alphabetic signs and arrive at pure communication of knowledge. Although Plato had rejected the idea of a natural language ‘in which the shapes and sounds of letters indicated the essential nature of things’, Dutch scholars forgot his conclusions and focused on isolated statements that suggested idea of a language that directly mirrored reality. To quote Descartes, they aimed at the identification of ‘simple ideas that (...) form the basis of all the things that man can think (...) [these] would help the judgement to represent things so distinctly that it would be impossible to be mistaken about them, whereas the words that we actually use have mostly confused meanings’. Thus, just like Dutch painters saw their art as a ‘mirror of nature’, so Descartes envisioned a specular doctrine of knowledge and language denoting individual things ‘similar to a picture or mirror that represents with absolute precision the image of the universe and its parts’.
As we shall see, ideas of pictography touched on a wide range of speculations about the essence and origin of language, remote civilisations, memory, logic, and finally the study of the natural world and how it could be ‘read’ by scientists. Combining different strands of scholarship with the skills of painters and engravers, pictography was a consummate effort to arrive at encyclopaedic knowledge joining art, language, history, geography, and philosophy, which, like many of the century’s other encyclopaedic projects, did not fulfil its scientific promises but had striking spin-offs especially from an artistic point of view. Studying this phenomenon by zooming in on the Netherlands is somewhat problematic, as it had a broad European scope linking scholars and artists in the Low Countries to their counterparts in Rome, the German states, and England. Nevertheless, the Netherlands was fertile ground not only for a sophisticated visual culture but also for innovative linguistics and alternative interpretations of divine revelation, which were interwoven with the revolution of knowledge that pictography promised.
Without aspiring to be comprehensive or incontrovertible, I will focus on four interrelated aspects. The first is the hieroglyphic argument. Archaeological remains and documents suggested that pictograms were revelatory of lost, ancient, or geographically remote ‘hidden knowledge’. Second, when joined to ideas about non-European languages this historical research inspired a linguistic argument. Ideas about a primitive vocabulary from which the modern languages were spurious offshoots were widely popular in the Netherlands; in a related context, the notion of Real Characters – signs that stand in direct relation to the things they represent – explored the art-theoretical commonplace that drawing and writing were fundamentally identical activities. The third argument is the encyclopaedic one. Ideas about the ‘alphabet of nature’, or the visible world as a text in which God addresses humankind, inspired the organisation of encyclopaedic collections according to a similar alphabetic structure. The fourth argument, finally, is logical. Crucial here is the importance of images in the tradition of mnemonic logic, as well as the idea that the creative process resides in the combination of primitive concepts.