Table Of ContentLaura Messina-Argenton
Tiziano Agostini
Tamara Prest
Ian F. Verstegen
Showing Time:
Continuous Pictorial
Narrative and the
Adam and Eve Story
In Memory of Alberto Argenton
Showing Time: Continuous Pictorial Narrative
and the Adam and Eve Story
Laura Messina-Argenton • Tiziano Agostini
Tamara Prest • Ian F. Verstegen
Showing Time: Continuous
Pictorial Narrative
and the Adam and Eve Story
In Memory of Alberto Argenton
Laura Messina-Argenton Tiziano Agostini
Senior Scholar Full Professor of Psychology
University of Padua Department of Life Sciences
Padova, Italy University of Trieste
Trieste, Italy
Tamara Prest
Independent Researcher Ian F. Verstegen
Padova, Italy Associate Director
Department of Visual Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA, USA
ISBN 978-3-031-13661-0 ISBN 978-3-031-13662-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13662-7
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Cover illustration: The image on the cover is drawn from: Alberto Argenton, It can’t be love, 1988, oil
on canvas, 47.5 × 63 cm. Private collection. Courtesy of the owner.
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Art can be considered as ‘narration of stories’ – real, fantastic, imaginary, happy or sad, gentle or
cruel, comic or tragic, entertaining or challenging; stories that recount events and experiences of
human beings, speak of their thoughts, feelings, passions, emotions, aspirations, desires.
Alberto Argenton, Arte e cognizione (1996, p. 286)
v
Introduction
About This Book
Laura Messina-Argenton
Padova, Italy
In dedicating this book to Alberto Argenton, we wanted not only to honour the
scholar of the psychology of art, but also, rightly, to acknowledge his authorship of
the conception and design of the study on continuous pictorial narrative, which is
the subject of the book itself.
Fate halted Alberto Argenton’s life and scientific endeavours, moreover at short
notice, and, together with Tiziano Agostini, Tamara Prest and Ian Verstegen, we
assumed the task of developing and completing this study, designed by Argenton to
investigate the ways of showing time in pictures.
In fact, the study has “as a broad reference the representation of time realised
through pictorial media” and, as a specific object, the representation of stories con-
tained in “a single image” and narrated in the “continuous mode” (Argenton,
2003–2014).
The study is based on a repertoire of 1000 artistic works referring to many differ-
ent stories, collected by Argenton with the collaboration of Tamara Prest over sev-
eral years, and deepens the analysis of 100 artworks, concerning the story of Adam
and Eve. All these works were realised in the continuous narrative mode (Robert,
1881, 1919; Wickhoff, 1900; Weitzmann, 1947), in the period from the third to the
seventeenth century – mainly paintings and frescoes (more than 800 works), but
also miniatures, prints, watercolours, mosaics, reliefs and intarsia.
Essentially, the study was driven by a primary question: “how does the artist
solve the problem of narrating a story and its unfolding, the episodes that compose
it, which have a sequential and therefore temporal progression, using a static
medium that both perceptually and representationally is distinguished only by spa-
tial sign-elements?” (Argenton, 2003–2014).
This question – which is addressed in this book with specific attention to the
perceptual aspect of artistic works – refers to the issue of the representability of time
vii
viii Introduction
in the pictorial arts, widely discussed especially in the art-historical field (Lessing,
1766/2013), and subsumable under the debate developed within the psychology of
art on differences and analogies between “spatial arts” and “temporal arts” (Arnheim,
1986; Verstegen, 2018), which has its roots in classical culture and in the reflections
made by scholars on the canons of the arts.
In his Poetics, Aristotle, reasoning about arts, also touches on images: “to be
learning something is the greatest of pleasures [hēdiston], not only to the philoso-
pher, but also to the rest of humanity, however small our capacity for it. The reason
of the delight [khairousi] in seeing the picture [eikōn] is that one is at the same time
learning [manthanein] – gathering the meaning of things [sullogizethai], e.g. that
the man there is so-and-so; for if one has not seen the thing before, one’s pleasure
[hêdonê] will not be in the picture as an imitation [mimêmapoiêsei] of it, but will be
due to the execution [apergasian] or coloring [chroia] or some similar cause”
(Poetics, 4, 1448b, 4–19).1
It would be beyond our scope to go into the examination of this argumentation,
which refers also to the important question of the “active and intelligent” function
that Aristotle attributes to perception and to the relationship between perception,
“phantasia” and intellect (Ferrarin, 2005); what we are interested in highlighting
here is the clear distinction made by Aristotle between two types of pleasure: one,
of an intellectual type [manthanein kai sullogizethai], linked to the recognition of
the thing represented – “that the man there is so-and-so”; the other, linked to com-
positional aspects, to the perception of shape (morphe)2 – “the execution or colour-
ing or some similar cause” – which we might also understand as aesthetic pleasure
(aisthêsis, i.e., sense-perception).
Aristotle’s argumentation in fact seems to allude, albeit indirectly, to a funda-
mental question in the psychological study of art in general, which Argenton (1996,
2019) synthesises in the distinction between two types of meaning conveyed by the
form of the artistic work: the “perceptual meaning” – immediate for any observer
and in the enjoyment of whatever artwork – and the “representational meaning”.
The “perceptual meaning”, which can also be qualified as “essential or primary”
meaning, consists of what the shape of an artistic work, “considered as Gestalt,
contains and transmits” (Argenton, 1996, p. 209) and which “we first and spontane-
ously grasp, even if we know nothing about the subject, the style or the culturally
given meanings that the shape itself might represent” (Argenton, 2019, p. 48). This
meaning is to be distinguished from the “representational meaning”, also conveyed
by the shape and corresponding to “what the artist ‘wanted to say’ or ‘wanted to
express’ with his work”, which allows a complete understanding of the artistic
work, but “cannot be grasped without the concurrency of the understanding of the
1 The quotation is from Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, tr. by I. Bywater, ed. by G. Murray. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1920, p. 29.
2 In another work, Politics, Aristotle writes: “[For example], if someone delights in looking at the
image of something for no other reason than because of its shape [morphe], it must necessarily be
pleasant for him to look at the thing in itself, the image of what he is looking at” (Politics, 1340a,
25). The quotation is from Aristotle’s Poetics, tr. by R. Janko. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing,
1987, p. 58.
Introduction ix
perceptual meaning”. The representational meaning, usually, for mainly cultural
reasons – referring in particular to Western culture – “is believed to be the ‘true’ and
‘unique’ or, in any case, the ‘most relevant’ meaning that the artistic work contains
and on which we believe we can or indeed have to exclusively base the understand-
ing or ‘enjoyment’ of the work itself”. On the other hand, in order to understand the
representational meaning – not always clearly identifiable, as shown, for example,
by divergent critical-artistic readings of the same work – “the perceptual aspect or
meaning must necessarily have been grasped” (Argenton, 1996, pp. 209–217).
Inquiring into the “perceptual meaning” and the “perceptual reasonings” by
which it originates has been a constant in Argenton’s scientific research, grounded
on the assumption that artists, in order to conceive the mental representations of
their works, mainly resort to visual thinking and elaborate their own “perceptual
reasonings”, based on the handling of relations between “sensory qualities, such as
size, movement, space, shape, or color” (Arnheim, 1966, p. 287), and between “the
compositional elements of the visual language” (Argenton, 2019, p. 51).
Argenton’s investigation into perceptual reasoning focuses principally on the
analysis of the “perceptual-representational strategies” that “make explicit the
results of its functioning” and that find evidence in the “compositional solutions
devised by the artists to represent themes or meanings” (Argenton & Prest, 2008a,
p. 289). And his studies of the close interaction existing between these two funda-
mental factors – perceptual reasoning and representational strategies – are pursued
with a twofold purpose: “to ascertain the universal character and intentionality in
the use of such strategies and the correspondence between said effects and the visual
cognitive categories to which their employment can be traced back” (Argenton,
2019, p. xix), and with the ultimate goal “to understand, as far as it is possible, the
functioning of the mind” (Argenton, 2019, p. xvii).
The assumptions underpinning Argenton’s research, recalled here very briefly,
and his studies, in particular those based on the analysis of extensive thematic rep-
ertoires of artistic works (Argenton, 2008, 2019), together with other theoretical
contributions from the psychology of art, primarily by Arnheim (1969, 1974), and
the psychology of perception, have guided the development of this study.
The hypotheses investigated in the study are those already formulated by
Argenton. The basic hypothesis is that “in the continuous pictorial representation of
a story the arrangement of episodes or events is substantially based on the spatial
configuration conceived by the artist first of all through perceptual-representational
criteria of a spatial type”. The more specific hypothesis is that “from the analysis of
an adequate number of pictorial representations of stories, it is possible to identify
significant recurrences of perceptual-representational procedures or strategies of a
spatial type that can be traced back to the functioning of ‘visual thinking’ (Arnheim,
1969)” (Argenton, 2003–2014).
The methodological approach adopted in the study is that of phenomenological
observation, in the mode suggested by Argenton, following Arnheim (1974) and
Bozzi (1978, 2019a), aimed at investigating “the structure, configuration and form
of the artistic image – the object under scrutiny – involving more observers […]
with the aim of obtaining accurate descriptions and producing possible interpreta-
tions of the object itself” (Argenton, 2019, p. xx).
x Introduction
The book consists of two interconnected parts. Part I presents the study and is
composed of four chapters.
Chapter 1 outlines some theoretical aspects concerning continuous pictorial nar-
rative, as dealt with in the domains of art history, psychology and its neighbouring
fields, and psychology of art, not with the intention of offering a classical theoretical
background, but only of considering selected studies useful for framing issues rel-
evant to this work.
Chapter 2 goes into the substance of the study project on continuous pictorial nar-
rative by describing the aims, hypotheses, method, and the phases of the study.
Moreover, in this chapter the 1000 artworks of the general repertoire are analysed –
considering author, title, date, technique, type of artefact, dimension, location, and
themes dealt with in the narrated stories – also making a comparison between its
configuration and that of the thematic repertoire containing the 100 works on the story
of Adam and Eve, from which we chose to start verifying the hypotheses formulated.
Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to presenting the specific research on the story of
Adam and Eve, in its two constituent phases, and the results obtained.
Chapter 3 regards the first research phase on this story, which was dedicated to
identifying the episodes and events narrated in the 100 works of the thematic reper-
toire on the basis of the biblical text and the reference literature, especially the art-
historical literature, recording the frequency with which they are represented in the
artworks, and then to analysing their configuration through predefined descriptors:
context of the work, number of scenes, narrative progression, and spatial disposi-
tion, reporting the quantitative results of these analyses.
Chapter 4 presents the second research phase on the story of Adam and Eve,
aimed at analysing the perceptual-compositional arrangement of the artworks in this
thematic repertoire, entering more directly into the merits of the hypotheses formu-
lated and above described, which have found timely confirmation. The data col-
lected from the analysis of the perceptual-compositional organisation of the 100
works – based on four categories, i.e., segmentation of episodes, space/time separat-
ing cues, identification of repeated protagonists, and vectors of direction – show, in
fact, that all the artists resort to analogous perceptual-representational strategies of
a spatial type, which can be traced back to the functioning of visual thinking, in
order to distinguish and connect the scenes depicted in the works and succeed in
representing continuous narrative. At the same time, the data analysis shows a vari-
ability in the spatial configurations conceived by the artists to narrate this story,
recurring above all to perceptual-representational criteria of a spatial type. This last
aspect is also exemplified through the examination of a group of works depicting the
same two episodes, namely, the Temptation and Fall and the Expulsion from the
Garden of Eden, and further explored through a more detailed observation of
Michelangelo’s fresco on this subject, in the Cappella Sistina in Rome.
Part II comprises the reference materials of the study and is composed of three
chapters.
Chapter 5 regards the general repertoire of artworks of pictorial continuous nar-
rative, curated especially by Tamara Prest, and contains the list of 1000 works
included in it, which are subdivided by theme and are provided with ‘certain’ data
for their identification: author, title of work, date, technique, dimension and location.
Introduction xi
Chapter 6 presents the 100 colour images of the continuous narrative artworks
used in the research on the story of Adam and Eve and discussed in Chaps. 2,
3 and 4.
Chapter 7 contains the images of the artworks reproduced in Chap. 6 on which
the codes used to classify the biblical scenes depicted in them are superimposed. For
ease of reading, before the images of the 100 artworks, the chapters of the Bible to
which they refer and a table showing the correspondence between Bible verses,
scenes and codes are reported.
Although we are aware that the research could have been much richer if it had
been carried out by the person who had planned it, we have attempted to develop it
also with the intention of proposing a procedure, certainly perfectible, to study in
depth continuous pictorial narrative and to stimulate a psychological approach to
art, namely the phenomenological one of the Gestalt matrix, which continues to
appear, to this day, “the royal road” to the study of works of art (Arnheim, 1992,
p. 177).
We hope that this ‘legacy’ will be welcomed by the scientific community and can
also promote one of the scientific and cultural values that permeates Alberto
Argenton’s work, which can be condensed in the closing of his Arte e cognizione
(Argenton, 1996, p. 319):
Art is problem solving, creation of worlds, invention, executive ability, use of intelligence
and sentiment, aesthetic need, educational means, historical memory, pleasure, catharsis,
suffering, fatigue, research, fantasy, communication, expression of values, qualities, ideas,
feelings, conceptions, hypotheses and many other things that make it a privileged place of
exercise, training, strengthening, manifestation of human cognition.
Art is knowledge and understanding of the world, and the psychological knowledge and
understanding of the artistic phenomenon is indispensable to contribute to knowing and
understanding human nature.
A Note on Alberto Argenton
Ian Verstegen
Philadelphia, PA, USA
I first learned the name Alberto Argenton (1944–2015) around 1990 when Rudolf
Arnheim gave me a copy of his Italian Festschrift (Garau, 1986). Argenton’s (1986)
essay on style was among a small group of excellent essays by psychologists like
Argenton that were both psychologically rigorous and also aesthetically sensitive. I
knew that Erwin Panofsky had quoted an American who had pronounced of the his-
tory of art that “its native tongue is German” (Panofsky, 1955, p. 322). Reading
Argenton’s essays and some others, I felt that the native tongue of the psychology
of art was Italian.
Argenton was Professor of the Psychology of Art in the Department of Developmental
Psychology and Socialisation at the University of Padua. He, and a number of col-
leagues primarily at the Universities of Padua, Trieste and Verona, applied Gestalt-
theoretical ideas to the study of art. Alberto’s work stands out for its scope (Argenton,
