Laura Messina-Argenton Tiziano Agostini Tamara Prest Ian F. Verstegen Showing Time: Continuous Pictorial Narrative and the Adam and Eve Story In Memory of Alberto Argenton Showing Time: Continuous Pictorial Narrative and the Adam and Eve Story Laura Messina-Argenton • Tiziano Agostini Tamara Prest • Ian F. Verstegen Showing Time: Continuous Pictorial Narrative and the Adam and Eve Story In Memory of Alberto Argenton Laura Messina-Argenton Tiziano Agostini Senior Scholar Full Professor of Psychology University of Padua Department of Life Sciences Padova, Italy University of Trieste Trieste, Italy Tamara Prest Independent Researcher Ian F. Verstegen Padova, Italy Associate Director Department of Visual Studies University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA, USA ISBN 978-3-031-13661-0 ISBN 978-3-031-13662-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13662-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: The image on the cover is drawn from: Alberto Argenton, It can’t be love, 1988, oil on canvas, 47.5 × 63 cm. Private collection. Courtesy of the owner. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Art can be considered as ‘narration of stories’ – real, fantastic, imaginary, happy or sad, gentle or cruel, comic or tragic, entertaining or challenging; stories that recount events and experiences of human beings, speak of their thoughts, feelings, passions, emotions, aspirations, desires. Alberto Argenton, Arte e cognizione (1996, p. 286) v Introduction About This Book Laura Messina-Argenton Padova, Italy In dedicating this book to Alberto Argenton, we wanted not only to honour the scholar of the psychology of art, but also, rightly, to acknowledge his authorship of the conception and design of the study on continuous pictorial narrative, which is the subject of the book itself. Fate halted Alberto Argenton’s life and scientific endeavours, moreover at short notice, and, together with Tiziano Agostini, Tamara Prest and Ian Verstegen, we assumed the task of developing and completing this study, designed by Argenton to investigate the ways of showing time in pictures. In fact, the study has “as a broad reference the representation of time realised through pictorial media” and, as a specific object, the representation of stories con- tained in “a single image” and narrated in the “continuous mode” (Argenton, 2003–2014). The study is based on a repertoire of 1000 artistic works referring to many differ- ent stories, collected by Argenton with the collaboration of Tamara Prest over sev- eral years, and deepens the analysis of 100 artworks, concerning the story of Adam and Eve. All these works were realised in the continuous narrative mode (Robert, 1881, 1919; Wickhoff, 1900; Weitzmann, 1947), in the period from the third to the seventeenth century – mainly paintings and frescoes (more than 800 works), but also miniatures, prints, watercolours, mosaics, reliefs and intarsia. Essentially, the study was driven by a primary question: “how does the artist solve the problem of narrating a story and its unfolding, the episodes that compose it, which have a sequential and therefore temporal progression, using a static medium that both perceptually and representationally is distinguished only by spa- tial sign-elements?” (Argenton, 2003–2014). This question – which is addressed in this book with specific attention to the perceptual aspect of artistic works – refers to the issue of the representability of time vii viii Introduction in the pictorial arts, widely discussed especially in the art-historical field (Lessing, 1766/2013), and subsumable under the debate developed within the psychology of art on differences and analogies between “spatial arts” and “temporal arts” (Arnheim, 1986; Verstegen, 2018), which has its roots in classical culture and in the reflections made by scholars on the canons of the arts. In his Poetics, Aristotle, reasoning about arts, also touches on images: “to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures [hēdiston], not only to the philoso- pher, but also to the rest of humanity, however small our capacity for it. The reason of the delight [khairousi] in seeing the picture [eikōn] is that one is at the same time learning [manthanein] – gathering the meaning of things [sullogizethai], e.g. that the man there is so-and-so; for if one has not seen the thing before, one’s pleasure [hêdonê] will not be in the picture as an imitation [mimêmapoiêsei] of it, but will be due to the execution [apergasian] or coloring [chroia] or some similar cause” (Poetics, 4, 1448b, 4–19).1 It would be beyond our scope to go into the examination of this argumentation, which refers also to the important question of the “active and intelligent” function that Aristotle attributes to perception and to the relationship between perception, “phantasia” and intellect (Ferrarin, 2005); what we are interested in highlighting here is the clear distinction made by Aristotle between two types of pleasure: one, of an intellectual type [manthanein kai sullogizethai], linked to the recognition of the thing represented – “that the man there is so-and-so”; the other, linked to com- positional aspects, to the perception of shape (morphe)2 – “the execution or colour- ing or some similar cause” – which we might also understand as aesthetic pleasure (aisthêsis, i.e., sense-perception). Aristotle’s argumentation in fact seems to allude, albeit indirectly, to a funda- mental question in the psychological study of art in general, which Argenton (1996, 2019) synthesises in the distinction between two types of meaning conveyed by the form of the artistic work: the “perceptual meaning” – immediate for any observer and in the enjoyment of whatever artwork – and the “representational meaning”. The “perceptual meaning”, which can also be qualified as “essential or primary” meaning, consists of what the shape of an artistic work, “considered as Gestalt, contains and transmits” (Argenton, 1996, p. 209) and which “we first and spontane- ously grasp, even if we know nothing about the subject, the style or the culturally given meanings that the shape itself might represent” (Argenton, 2019, p. 48). This meaning is to be distinguished from the “representational meaning”, also conveyed by the shape and corresponding to “what the artist ‘wanted to say’ or ‘wanted to express’ with his work”, which allows a complete understanding of the artistic work, but “cannot be grasped without the concurrency of the understanding of the 1 The quotation is from Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, tr. by I. Bywater, ed. by G. Murray. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920, p. 29. 2 In another work, Politics, Aristotle writes: “[For example], if someone delights in looking at the image of something for no other reason than because of its shape [morphe], it must necessarily be pleasant for him to look at the thing in itself, the image of what he is looking at” (Politics, 1340a, 25). The quotation is from Aristotle’s Poetics, tr. by R. Janko. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987, p. 58. Introduction ix perceptual meaning”. The representational meaning, usually, for mainly cultural reasons – referring in particular to Western culture – “is believed to be the ‘true’ and ‘unique’ or, in any case, the ‘most relevant’ meaning that the artistic work contains and on which we believe we can or indeed have to exclusively base the understand- ing or ‘enjoyment’ of the work itself”. On the other hand, in order to understand the representational meaning – not always clearly identifiable, as shown, for example, by divergent critical-artistic readings of the same work – “the perceptual aspect or meaning must necessarily have been grasped” (Argenton, 1996, pp. 209–217). Inquiring into the “perceptual meaning” and the “perceptual reasonings” by which it originates has been a constant in Argenton’s scientific research, grounded on the assumption that artists, in order to conceive the mental representations of their works, mainly resort to visual thinking and elaborate their own “perceptual reasonings”, based on the handling of relations between “sensory qualities, such as size, movement, space, shape, or color” (Arnheim, 1966, p. 287), and between “the compositional elements of the visual language” (Argenton, 2019, p. 51). Argenton’s investigation into perceptual reasoning focuses principally on the analysis of the “perceptual-representational strategies” that “make explicit the results of its functioning” and that find evidence in the “compositional solutions devised by the artists to represent themes or meanings” (Argenton & Prest, 2008a, p. 289). And his studies of the close interaction existing between these two funda- mental factors – perceptual reasoning and representational strategies – are pursued with a twofold purpose: “to ascertain the universal character and intentionality in the use of such strategies and the correspondence between said effects and the visual cognitive categories to which their employment can be traced back” (Argenton, 2019, p. xix), and with the ultimate goal “to understand, as far as it is possible, the functioning of the mind” (Argenton, 2019, p. xvii). The assumptions underpinning Argenton’s research, recalled here very briefly, and his studies, in particular those based on the analysis of extensive thematic rep- ertoires of artistic works (Argenton, 2008, 2019), together with other theoretical contributions from the psychology of art, primarily by Arnheim (1969, 1974), and the psychology of perception, have guided the development of this study. The hypotheses investigated in the study are those already formulated by Argenton. The basic hypothesis is that “in the continuous pictorial representation of a story the arrangement of episodes or events is substantially based on the spatial configuration conceived by the artist first of all through perceptual-representational criteria of a spatial type”. The more specific hypothesis is that “from the analysis of an adequate number of pictorial representations of stories, it is possible to identify significant recurrences of perceptual-representational procedures or strategies of a spatial type that can be traced back to the functioning of ‘visual thinking’ (Arnheim, 1969)” (Argenton, 2003–2014). The methodological approach adopted in the study is that of phenomenological observation, in the mode suggested by Argenton, following Arnheim (1974) and Bozzi (1978, 2019a), aimed at investigating “the structure, configuration and form of the artistic image – the object under scrutiny – involving more observers […] with the aim of obtaining accurate descriptions and producing possible interpreta- tions of the object itself” (Argenton, 2019, p. xx). x Introduction The book consists of two interconnected parts. Part I presents the study and is composed of four chapters. Chapter 1 outlines some theoretical aspects concerning continuous pictorial nar- rative, as dealt with in the domains of art history, psychology and its neighbouring fields, and psychology of art, not with the intention of offering a classical theoretical background, but only of considering selected studies useful for framing issues rel- evant to this work. Chapter 2 goes into the substance of the study project on continuous pictorial nar- rative by describing the aims, hypotheses, method, and the phases of the study. Moreover, in this chapter the 1000 artworks of the general repertoire are analysed – considering author, title, date, technique, type of artefact, dimension, location, and themes dealt with in the narrated stories – also making a comparison between its configuration and that of the thematic repertoire containing the 100 works on the story of Adam and Eve, from which we chose to start verifying the hypotheses formulated. Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to presenting the specific research on the story of Adam and Eve, in its two constituent phases, and the results obtained. Chapter 3 regards the first research phase on this story, which was dedicated to identifying the episodes and events narrated in the 100 works of the thematic reper- toire on the basis of the biblical text and the reference literature, especially the art- historical literature, recording the frequency with which they are represented in the artworks, and then to analysing their configuration through predefined descriptors: context of the work, number of scenes, narrative progression, and spatial disposi- tion, reporting the quantitative results of these analyses. Chapter 4 presents the second research phase on the story of Adam and Eve, aimed at analysing the perceptual-compositional arrangement of the artworks in this thematic repertoire, entering more directly into the merits of the hypotheses formu- lated and above described, which have found timely confirmation. The data col- lected from the analysis of the perceptual-compositional organisation of the 100 works – based on four categories, i.e., segmentation of episodes, space/time separat- ing cues, identification of repeated protagonists, and vectors of direction – show, in fact, that all the artists resort to analogous perceptual-representational strategies of a spatial type, which can be traced back to the functioning of visual thinking, in order to distinguish and connect the scenes depicted in the works and succeed in representing continuous narrative. At the same time, the data analysis shows a vari- ability in the spatial configurations conceived by the artists to narrate this story, recurring above all to perceptual-representational criteria of a spatial type. This last aspect is also exemplified through the examination of a group of works depicting the same two episodes, namely, the Temptation and Fall and the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and further explored through a more detailed observation of Michelangelo’s fresco on this subject, in the Cappella Sistina in Rome. Part II comprises the reference materials of the study and is composed of three chapters. Chapter 5 regards the general repertoire of artworks of pictorial continuous nar- rative, curated especially by Tamara Prest, and contains the list of 1000 works included in it, which are subdivided by theme and are provided with ‘certain’ data for their identification: author, title of work, date, technique, dimension and location. Introduction xi Chapter 6 presents the 100 colour images of the continuous narrative artworks used in the research on the story of Adam and Eve and discussed in Chaps. 2, 3 and 4. Chapter 7 contains the images of the artworks reproduced in Chap. 6 on which the codes used to classify the biblical scenes depicted in them are superimposed. For ease of reading, before the images of the 100 artworks, the chapters of the Bible to which they refer and a table showing the correspondence between Bible verses, scenes and codes are reported. Although we are aware that the research could have been much richer if it had been carried out by the person who had planned it, we have attempted to develop it also with the intention of proposing a procedure, certainly perfectible, to study in depth continuous pictorial narrative and to stimulate a psychological approach to art, namely the phenomenological one of the Gestalt matrix, which continues to appear, to this day, “the royal road” to the study of works of art (Arnheim, 1992, p. 177). We hope that this ‘legacy’ will be welcomed by the scientific community and can also promote one of the scientific and cultural values that permeates Alberto Argenton’s work, which can be condensed in the closing of his Arte e cognizione (Argenton, 1996, p. 319): Art is problem solving, creation of worlds, invention, executive ability, use of intelligence and sentiment, aesthetic need, educational means, historical memory, pleasure, catharsis, suffering, fatigue, research, fantasy, communication, expression of values, qualities, ideas, feelings, conceptions, hypotheses and many other things that make it a privileged place of exercise, training, strengthening, manifestation of human cognition. Art is knowledge and understanding of the world, and the psychological knowledge and understanding of the artistic phenomenon is indispensable to contribute to knowing and understanding human nature. A Note on Alberto Argenton Ian Verstegen Philadelphia, PA, USA I first learned the name Alberto Argenton (1944–2015) around 1990 when Rudolf Arnheim gave me a copy of his Italian Festschrift (Garau, 1986). Argenton’s (1986) essay on style was among a small group of excellent essays by psychologists like Argenton that were both psychologically rigorous and also aesthetically sensitive. I knew that Erwin Panofsky had quoted an American who had pronounced of the his- tory of art that “its native tongue is German” (Panofsky, 1955, p. 322). Reading Argenton’s essays and some others, I felt that the native tongue of the psychology of art was Italian. Argenton was Professor of the Psychology of Art in the Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialisation at the University of Padua. He, and a number of col- leagues primarily at the Universities of Padua, Trieste and Verona, applied Gestalt- theoretical ideas to the study of art. Alberto’s work stands out for its scope (Argenton,