Literary Theory Today

Writing on Giorgione

WRITING ON GIORGIONE Stephen Bann What is the reIationship between paintir豆豆 and writing on painting? Immediately the qu的tion is posed, we are aware of a multitude of different answers that might be proffered. Many of these answers however would fall within two separate families of response. Writing on painting, we mi惡ht say, is in the last resort completely superfluous: painting has no need of it, would be better off without it, or might even come to harm as a result of 1t. At the opposite pole from this response is the proposition that writing on painting is strict1y necessary: without it, p肘nting is defective or lacking in fullness of meaning. Would it be premature to assert from the outset that both of these positions, and their possibJe variations and ramifications, are equal1y unconvincing? They start from the assumption that painting and writing on paintin皂 are， as it were, discrete and distinct practices: as they move in reJation to one another, like pJanets in a solar system, they 侃n be observed at times to be far apart, and at other times to b包 conjoined in an ec1ipse. But there is no invariant and mutuaHy satisfactory relationship between them. Georges Bataille ingeniously cut this particular Gordian. knot with the simple formula: "1a peinture fait ecrire."l This intimation, nonetheless, needs to be qualifled by the reservations placed upon it by Marce1in Pleynet: la peinture peut faire bavarder. J、jouterais que: la p~inture fait 至crire parce qu'elle ne pa叫e paS."L [Paintin皂 can lead to idle chatter. 1 would add: painting leads to writing bec恥Jse p'ainting itself does not 'speak.] Louis Marin no doubt expresses' this relationship both of entai1ment and of difference when he d的cribes the activity of wrlting on p剖nting in the fol1owing way: 每每 Transcribing this type of c1amour that 1have, that you have, in the head, when 1 (you) look at pictures, this "noise" which sweeps alon在 with it a bit of poetry, a fragment of history, a section of an article, an interrupted reference, an echo of a conversation, a sudden memory, etc.: a noise which is there merely to alleviate the suffering which is indissolubly mixed with the pJeasure of seeing 鵬岫dumbly'…the forms and colours assembled on the canvas.-' This essay seeks to test, and in a certain sense to extend, the principle embodied in ßataiUe's formula, and εlossed by Pleynet and Marin. A control must be es話說話hed from the start, however, in the choice of "painting" and the type of "writin惡 on painting," T0 selec:t Giorgione for this purpose is obviously not a matter of randomness; Giorgione might be said to concentrate in their most vivid and accessible form the issues of "transcription" between a body of paintings and a body of writings that occupy us here. And if Giorgione is chosen for his special significance, so the writers on Giorgione are chosen because of the fact that they are indeed-in the precise rather 直han the general sense…writers. Of the very considerable amount of historical and iconographic work on Giorgione, epitomised by a. study like 在dgar Wind's monograph on the Tempesta，每 no mention wilJ be made except in so far as it is CÌted and utHised in the work of our writers. Such an exdusive concentration on what might be caUed the "dem卜mondaines" of the art historical world wiJl brin巷， 1be1ieve, its own evident rewards. Two points remain to be darified. It is perhaps a rather cavalier assertion that there are, on the one hand, writers and, on the other, iconographers and art historians. But if Roland ßarthes' programmatic distinction between 11至crivains" and "至crivants" has not retained its cogency, 1 sug囂的t a very' simple, heuristic criterion for defining the two categories. All of my writers on Giorgione have what Pleynet once il1uminatingly called "a certain relationship to poetic language." John Ruskin, who reserved his most sustained and brilliant writing on Giorgione for the last 可 45 volume of his most considerab1e work, Modern Painters, was producing in his youth (according to Har-ûJcrBloom) "good Wordsworthian yerse, better perhaps than Wordsworth was writing"5 at t'he same tim~. O~ Ruskin's re1ationship, as a 1ate-comer, to High Romantic poetry, Bloom is exceptionally revealing. And he has diagnosed a similar, no less intense re1ationship in Walter Pater, who also submerged Words~orthian proclivities in his...