There is No Such Thing as Narrative Art - Paul Barolsky

http://www.bu.edu/arion/volume-18-barolsky-narrative-art/

What can be shown cannot be said.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

• 'pictorial artists obviously do not narrate stories in the same way that writers do. In a certain sense, they do not narrate at all. To speak of an artist as a teller of stories is a figure of speech, since painters and sculptors do not “tell,” they “show.” As some critics have observed, pictorial artists imply a narrative by referring to what has been said in words, but surely such allusions are not the same thing as a narrative in words.'
• 'The idea of such similitude has been sustained over a period of nearly three millennia by the notion of painting as “mute poetry” or “visible speech,” and it is still very much alive.'
• 'In Renaissance art, pictorial composition, the arrangement of figures in space, often conflicts sharply with an image’s implicit associations with the temporal character of a literary narrative. This is so because the episodes of the story that a painter or sculptor presents are not always placed in an obviously identifiable sequence within the space defined by the painter. The figures of a single episode or series of episodes in a “continuous narrative” so-called are dispersed through space, above all, as a way of making the spatial composition harmonious and not necessarily or primarily as a means of making the allusion to a narrative obvious.'
• 'It is important to keep in mind those cases where the chronological narrative is at odds with the pictorial composition, because these instances remind us of fundamental differences between literature and art that we can too easily forget or ignore.'

Example

• '..canonical Renaissance historia of Jacob and Esau, which Ghiberti made for the Gates of Paradise at the very moment when Alberti wrote about painting as historia (Fig.1). This scene is widely appreciated as a tour de force of Renaissance perspective, which is an ideal vehicle for rendering the subject, since it provides a space, indeed a stage upon which the artist can arrange his figures or actors.'
• 'The Jacob and Esau panel is especially fascinating because its historia or “story” is not always fully obvious in the way of many so-called “continuous narratives,” where one can easily recognize the suggestion of a narrative through time.'
• '..one of the fundamental differences between a pictorial image and a text. When we read a work of literature, we read word by word, line by line, across and down the page. Our activity is precisely prescribed. When we look at a pictorial image, however, our eye is led in various directions by the forms of things, by the shapes of buildings, the grouping of figures, the degree of relief of the figures, or the perspective construction, and we encounter a multiplicity of ways of seeing the image as we gaze upon it and look in the different directions in which it guides us.'