Pictures of Romance: Form Against Context in Painting and Literature by Wendy Steiner (review)

Book Reviews263 passages in French. Despite the fact that the book is described as one which will appeal to scholars, students, and general readers, the density of critical terminology would make it difficult reading for the general public. Steele uses vocabulary and concepts from post-modern criticism which would leave all but the most informed reader somewhat perplexed (perhaps defining certain terms would have been helpful). The use ofcomplex, erudite language to express often obvious points can detract from the strength of an argument. This reservation aside, scholars ofthis period as well as those interested in theoretical approaches to the novel can only benefit from such a work. WALTER C. PUTNAM, III University of New Mexico WENDY STEINER. Pictures of Romance: Form Against Context in Painting and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. 218 p. This book, like Steiner's earlier The Colors ofRhetoric (1982), is both interesting and important for understanding the complex relationships between art and literature. While addressing the problem of formalism versus contextualism, she examines the changing concepts of narrative in painting from the middle ages through the modern period and explores their parallels or divergences in the romance, using Keats, Hawthorne, Joyce, and a wide variety ofartists from the Renaissance period through Picasso, Lichtenstein, and Warhol in the modern period. In many ways the complexity of this work cannot be summarized adequately in a brief review since Steiner engages in an important synthesis of major ideas involving art, perspective, narrative, and romance that is reminiscent of the best in a Wylie Sypher, for example. In her first chapter, Steiner explores the problems of narrative in the visual arts in order to establish some definitions while also redeeming the concept of narrative from Lessing's attempt to separate the spatial (visual) from the temporal (verbal) arts. Her argument is that "the institutionalization ofpictorial realism in the Renaissance made pictorial narrative as we have defined it an impossibility" (23). According to Steiner, medieval art with its lack of perspective had the ability to depict the same subject at different viewpoints within the same pictorial space and, thus, could encourage a sense of narrative. The discovery ofvanishing point perspective, combined with the use of chiaroscuro, created the illusion of realism by viewing a scene from a fixed perspective and at one moment oftime and, thus, tended to preclude narrativity from the visual arts. Steiner traces aspects of the change by analyzing paintings by Benozzo Gozzoli and Sassetta, pointing out various strategies that eschewed spatial unity for narrative or, in turn, opted for atemporal configuration over narrative. The Renaissance weakening or suppression of narrativity creates a demarcation between narrative and design and becomes an early indication of the pictorial abstraction prominent in modernism. 264Rocky Mountain Review In her second chapter, Steiner analyzes the qualities ofand tensions between the demand for pictorial realism and narrative in the romance. Relying on Hayden White, Bakhtin, Norman Bryson, Eugene Vinaver, and others, Steiner shows how and why romances "signal the difference between configuration and succession byjuxtaposing inconsistent temporal modes." In effect, the romance "pits formalist against contextualist aesthetics by means ofvisual art symbols, to which it has a very contradictory relation" (54). Although Steiner's first two chapters provide an interesting historical and theoretical account, one aspect of her thesis is not quite historically accurate. Numerous Renaissance artists were aware of the difficulties presented by the new perspective for narrative and attempted to create narratives within paintings governed by single point or fixed perspective. These experiments ranged from Mannerist revivals of medieval conventions to works such as Jerome Nadal's (and other religious or liturgical paintings) in which "simultaneous narratives" depicting the passing oftime were created within the limitations ofperspective. Steiner's thesis would greatly benefit from and perhaps be modified by the important art historical work of Sixten Ringbom, Michael Baxandall, and James H. Marrow, among others. Far from precluding narrativity, perspective and requirements for realism forced painters to grapple with the problem of depicting a given istoria as narrative in new and imaginative ways, which frequently involved the active participation ofthe viewer. It is this latter concept that Steiner is very perceptive about in arguing that both pictures and romances...