Full Description
Though English has no word for the visual counterpart to literacy, Heffernan argues that the capacity to interpret pictures must be cultivated and deserves a name: picturacy. Using examples such as the pre-historic cave paintings of Lascaux, film versions of Frankenstein, the provocative photographs of Sally Mann, and the abstract canvases of Gerhard Richter, the volume illustrates how learning to decode the language of pictures resembles the process of learning to read. While words typically frame and regulate our experience of art, the study also explains how pictures can contest the authority of the words we use to interpret art.
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Literacy and Picturacy: How Do We Learn to Read Pictures?
2. Speaking of Pictures: The Rhetoric of Art Criticism
3. Alberti on Apelles: Word and Image in De Pictura
4. Text and Design: Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience
5. Marginal Language: Word and Image in Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion
6. Painting Against Poetry: Reynolds' Discourses and the Discourse of Turner's Art
7. Wordsworth, Constable, and the Poetics of Chiaroscuro
8. Self-Representation in Byron's Poetry and Turner's Art
9. Looking at the Monster: Frankenstein and Film
10. Love, Death, and Grotesquerie: Beardsley's Illlustrations of Wilde's Salome and Pope's Rape of the Lock
11. Hockney Remakes Hogarth: A Gay Rake Progresses to America
12. Peter Milton's Turn: Painting, Photography, and Printmaking at the Turn of the Millennium
13. Reza, Pollock, Richter: Language and Abstract Art
Notes
Works Cited
Index
