The Unassembled Grammar of the Drawing in the Era of Reform

Abstract

In Reformation debates about the role of images, order was everything. Arguments for the preservation, steady removal, or total eradication of church art were constructed around the careful arrangement of nouns: God, material thing, and the person paying devotion could be related to one another in different permutations. Polemics of the period often construed one of these three nouns as the subject of the sentence, under threat by the other two. The selection of scriptural passages by preachers and pamphleteers required consideration of whether to establish fi rst the Hebraic command, Judaic example, Messianic pronouncement, Incarnational theology, or a portion of the Epistles' socially constructive advice. The exchanges between Martin Luther and Andreas Karlstadt scrutinized biblical syntax and dissected sentences in efforts to describe the possible relationships between tangible matter and divine presence. Proximity to God, as mediated through devices such as a sculpture, a wafer, or the human body itself, was measured across the separation of phrases found in different biblical books or clauses adjacent to one another within a given Gospel. Grammar was the battleground on which the two Wittenberg preachers fought.Luther and Karlstadt deliberated about the revised role of long-utilized devices of Christian worship through an analytics of prose. As a literary format, continuous prose -written communication as opposed to orally delivered speech -employs capital letters, conjoining words, and punctuation marks. 1 The ancient versions of the Bible's source languages, Hebrew and Greek, did not separate sentences with spaces nor distinguish between upper and lower case. Their praxis utilizes linking terms rather than semicolons or full stops, such as the repetition in the Old Testament of the Hebrew letter vav, which attaches to the beginning of a word to mean 'and'. In translation, biblical text conforms to vernacular convention. Annotations are an exercise in human freedom, Luther averred, 'but faith should and must rest on certainty, not on punctuation marks'. 2 Yet it was upon these inserted pauses, periods, and small linking words that his arguments hinged.In his analysis of the literary impact of the Bible, Northrop Frye observes that the structure of continuous prose lends itself well to the sequencing of cause and effect. Whereas in inner thought, the mind apprehends what has happened and then seeks explanation -processing effects before determining cause -in the composing of text authors tend to reverse the order, establishing fi rst the reasons for what will happen, then describing the events. 3 Frye's connecting of continuous prose with causality and his contrasting of this mode of writing with thought serves as a useful paradigm for Detail from Giacomo Rocca, Study for a Deposition, c. 1575 (plate 8). 314The Unassembled Grammar of the Drawing in the Era of Reform establishing the terms of the argument that will follow, which is concerned with the communicative potential of a particular form of artistic re...

Computer Vision Applications for Art History: Reflections and paradigms for future research

“…Recognising biblical figures and religious symbols are utilised to analyse the changes in perception and religious depiction through time. These include the depiction of Mary and Christ (Brisman 2017;Flora 2017), Moses and Aaron (Merback 2017), nuns (González 2017), worshippers (Rowe 2018), as well as religious decoration (Morrall 2017). A similar analysis is performed by detecting the mythological figures of Cyclops Polyphemus, Perseus, and Andromeda (Jones 2018).…”