The Doubly-Deictic Gaze in a Renaissance Portrait: A Study on Pictorial Narrativity and Storyworld Possible Selves

This study explores pictorial narrativity in Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of a Young Man in his Studio (ca. 1527), with attention to the visual representation of mental activity as a prompt for the projection of viewers’ storyworld possible selves. The study discusses the extent to which the portrayed gentleman’s intriguing gaze, lost in introspection but at the same time seemingly fixed on viewers, can be considered a pictorial equivalent to the doubly-deictic you in verbal narratives. The doubly-deictic effect of the character’s gaze is further argued to provide access to the careful, dazzling accumulation of pictorial symbolism in the depicted studio as a pictorial stream-of-consciousness representation of the character’s frame of mind— memories, hopes, dreams, and fears—functioning in ways similar to paratactic accumulation in verbal narratives.