Reading images

The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Opinion | Reading images: "

READING IMAGES

Venus and Adonis Word, Image, Text: Studies in literary and Visual culture: Edited by Shormishtha Panja, Shirshendu Chakrabarti and Christel R. Devadawson, Orient, Rs 445 There has always been a close relationship between literature and the visual arts — a relationship not well explored. The editors of Word, Image, Text: Studies in Literary and Visual Culture deserve praise for venturing into new areas, for extending the study of literature beyond the written word and to the image — that in painting and sculpture. The four sections in the book, “The Renaissance in Europe”, “Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, “The Indian subcontinent” and “Art and Philosophy” put together 13 articles that explore the close relationship between the written word and art at different points of time as well as in different locations. The book encompasses “…not only the literature and art of Europe from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries”, but also “…includes an examination of the art and literature of the Indian sub-continent”, to quote from the preface. The area covered by the book is vast, but within that area it takes up selective topics. The first section on Renaissance in Europe is this reviewer’s favourite, as it takes up a period marvellously rich in all the arts — a richness that the articles succeed in conveying. Shormishtha Panja sensitively compares Shakespeare’s word picture in “Venus and Adonis” to Titian’s paintings, Venus of Urbino and Venus and Adonis, as well as to Giorgione’s Dresden Venus. She also compares Shakespeare’s poem, The Rape of Lucrece, to Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia, and to other contemporary representations of the poem. The comparison is enhanced by the photographs of some of the paintings taken up in the book. Without the illustrations, the representation would not have been satisfactory. The second section focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe. The neo-classical age was marked by a response divided between nostalgia and hope, between idealism and realism. The juxtaposition of patrician and plebeian perspectives led to the coining of the phrase, “the world of coffee and the world of gin”, which indicated the literary, cultural and aesthetic divide of the age. One would have liked the introduction to this section and the last section, “Art and Philosophy”, to be a little more elaborate. The section on the Indian subcontinent is different from the first two sections. To quote from the introduction to this section, “South Asia is presented here as a continuing cultural space despite wild discontinuities of time.” John Lockwood Kipling’s illustrations of India are taken up by Christel Devadawson with a few accompanying visuals. It is a very interesting article in an age when Rudyard Kipling and his characters have regained popularity. This section also has an article titled “Representations of Nature and Time in south Asian Sculpture: Lord Gommateshwara and the Fasting Buddha”. The writer, Vincent Villafranca, is a sculptor, and one finds his perspective on Indian sculpture interesting. The interrelationship between literary and visual forms of autobiography is taken up by Loris Button, a practising artist, in the concluding section on art and philosophy. He finds that the written language is a more dominant discourse. He provides a visual response in a series of self portraits, titled Facing Time. He says, “Facing Time can be seen as a visual response to the issue of describing identity in contemporary culture by the means of using physiognomy…” One remembers the self portraits by Rabindranath Tagore.The book is very readable and thought provoking. It should be of interest to students of literature and to lay readers.

PURABI PANWAR

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Reading images