Transposing Art into Texts in French Romantic Literature (review)

There has been a close relation between the visual arts and poetry since antiquity ("ut pictura poesis"). Renaissance and post - Renaissance painters used subjects from mythology and history that had been dramatized in poetry and historical writing in their paintings in an effort to capture visually a well-known dramatic moment. Poets have always taken advantage of language's ekphrastic capacity to evoke in the mind's eye scenes capable of provoking strong emotive or intellectual response. Nineteenth-century artists were fascinated not only by the relationship between painting and poetry, but between the innate link between poetry as sound and rhythm and music. As Majewski notes, Wagner sought in the music drama a synthesis of all the arts, using poetry, music, representation through acting, visual moments, and stills that remain motionless as in painting, to create the artistic whole. But Wagner's idea of collaborative use of the arts in a kind of summa work of art is different from the idea of the "transposition d'art," which might better be described in terms of the romantic's interest in synaesthesia, the transposition of one sense modality in terms of another. For it is essentially the Pythagorean or Neo-Platonic idea of the philosophical connection between the physical and the intellectual world, that "tout se tient," that makes this connection provocative. Each art attempted by its means to capture the essence of the scene or moment it presented. As words are signifiers of thoughts and thoughts can be internal visual images of things, then words as sound and visual signifier were thought to bear an inherent relationship to the ideas and images they evoked. Exploring this hidden connection drew one nearer the mystery of things.

Henry Majewskis's book explores aspects of this relationship between literature and painting. He is interested in the "transposition d'art" in its precise sense, where one specific work of art transposes another, but the five chapters of his book do not focus primarily on this form of the relationship between the arts; rather he looks at a broader connection between writers and painters, poetry and painting.

In Chapter 1 Majewski focuses his attention on the work of Theophile Gautier, perhaps the foremost early romantic poet who was preoccupied with the link between painting and poetry, yet he does not select poems to analyze which directly transpose a particular painting; rather he wishes to elucidate a more general role that painting played in Gautier's artistic production: the function of painting in Gautier's poetry as a kind of artistic screen. Majewski argues that between the poetic voice in Gautier's work and the poem lies the artistic screen, a work of art that shapes Gautier's perspective of reality, that enhances his vision through unusual insight into the significance and value of experience. In other words, paintings which had an artistic impact on Gautier the writer shaped his vision of reality and the poetry composed about it. Gautier's "Le Triomphe de Pétrarch," addressed to the painter Louis Boulanger, interprets the painting by giving voice to the thoughts of the Renaissance poet" (24). Thus the painting of Boulanger is the poetic screen through which Gautier perceives the function of poetry, its spiritual meaning, and the universal value of art. In the Comédie de la Mort the painter Raphael alone transcends time through his search for ideal beauty and his success in combining love and faith in paintings that immortalize himself and his subjects. In España Majewski notes that Gautier's visit to Spain did not remove the essential lens (paintings of Zurbarán) through which he saw Spanish reality. Although his poems do not transpose any specific Zurbarán painting, it is a kind of composite vision of the painter's portraits that dominates Gautier's vision of Spain.

Chapter 2 probes the influence on the romantic imagination of the figure of "melencolia" in Durer's engravings. Although the works...