“PAINTURE” AND “PAROLE”

The importance of visual images as memorial hooks and cues is a basic theme in all memory-training advice and practice from the very earliest Western text we possess, the Dialexeis. In that pre-Socratic fragment, one is advised to fashion rebuses, or visual riddles based on homophonies, to recall the sound of particular words (memoria verborum) such as personal names, and also heraldic images, such as Ares for anger, to remember themes (memoria rerum). In a study of the architectural mnemonic, Herwig Blum sought to link this technique to the plentiful use of decoration, such as mosaic, frieze, and painting, in ancient buildings, both domestic (as at Pompeii) and monumental. We have always known that certain classes of allegorical images, such as those in Renaissance emblem books, were to be used for meditational reminiscence, for their authors tell us so.

The function of picturae in medieval cultures has been, I think, rather misunderstood. In 600 Pope Gregory the Great wrote a letter to the hapless bishop, Serenus of Marseilles, who had become concerned that some of his flock might be engaged in superstitious worship of the holy images in his church. To prevent this, he destroyed all the pictures, thereby scandalizing his entire congregation, which deserted him on the spot. This story has been understood as an early indication that medieval images were a strict form of iconography, pictorial writing. The art historian Emile Mâle analyzed the function of Gothic images as the literature of the laity, laicorum litteratura. The Gothic cathedral, Mâle argued, was essentially a Bible in stone and glass, its images designed to substitute for the written word in communicating the stories of the Bible to a lay congregation which could not read and therefore, Mâle assumed, had no other access to their content. The notion that the medieval laity as a group could not read at all has now been largely discredited by the accumulation of contrary evidence, from even the earliest medieval centuries. Explanations such as Mâle’s also played down the fact that books and churches restricted to learned groups and clerical use were also profusely pictured. But Mâle was not wrong to say that the cathedral was a non-verbal textual form, only in his understanding of what that statement meant to a culture that did not share the bias ingrained in our notion of representational realism.