We have been fruitfully discussing the advantages and
disadvantages of using the image as a source. This
includes the kind of knowledge—in
Vivian’s
terms, historical or symbolic—to
be gained from the image, Warren’s caution about
the truth-value of images and the need to supplement
visual with textual evidence, Wayne’s question
about the creator’s
intent, as well as Barbara’s proviso that the
image always belongs to a wider frame—in
this case, the visual culture of Roman and Gallic Catholicism.
In addition, Lynn asks about meaning, messages, and
guidelines for the interpretation of an image. These
remarks pose three interrelated issues, deserving of
our attention: First, what is a source? Second, is
the meaning of a source yielded fully only where authorship
can be attributed, the artist’s intent established,
and all authoritative (contemporary) readings exhausted?
Third, why do images appear to pose more interpretive
challenges than textual sources?
On the first issue, I am persuaded by Peter Burke’s
argument that historians are misled by the frequently
employed metaphor of documents as sources, “as
if they were filling their buckets from the stream
of Truth, their stories becoming increasingly pure
as they move closer to the origins;” and “implying
the possibility of an account of the past which is
uncontaminated by intermediaries.” Of course,
the contamination that historians worry about most
is our own imposition of a “presentist” agenda
on the past by way of extraneous questions or theoretical
perspectives unavailable to past actors. But as Burke
adds, “it is of course impossible to study the
past without the assistance of a whole chain of intermediaries,
including not only earlier historians but also the
archivists who arrange the documents, the scribes who
wrote them and the witnesses whose words were recorded.”
Concerning the second set of concerns, I am surprised
to find so much emphasis placed on creative intent,
long after literary critics have debated the “death
of the author.” Interest in individual agency,
including the biographical study of an individual figure,
as demonstrated by Warren’s valuable work on
Prieur, has led to a modification if not outright rejection
of this influential thesis. Still, even the most convincing
account of authorial/artistic intent would fail to
exhaust the meanings to be derived from an image, for
the simple reason that no author (of a picture or a
text) can control its meaning. This leads historians
to seek evidence of contemporary readings, but it is
less the anonymity of a work than the impossibility
of an exhaustive search that should concern us: Not
only is the archived written record fragmentary, but
additionally a great deal of contemporary response
was not recorded in writing in a society still composed
of massive numbers of illiterate persons. For the latter,
primary exposure to revolutionary ideas most likely
occurred through oral and visual means, for example,
by acquaintance with printed engravings and ephemera.
Even if scholars had sources available to them comparable
to the salon livrets or contemporary critical commentary
used in the study of “high” art, we would
still need to account for the gap between audience
and public, noted by Thomas Crow in his influential
study of the eighteenth-century art public. The aim
of the critic was to substitute himself [sic] for the
public, to speak in its name. Yes, texts – including
the print’s own title and accompanying passages,
as well as newspapers, published works, legislative,
court and police records – can assist in interpretation,
and will help especially to identify authoritative
and hegemonic meanings that circulated in print culture.
Yet, images can be a useful resource in retrieving
both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic views.
Concerning the third problem, therefore, I am proposing
that we resist the search for one stable meaning and
instead seek to identify multiple meanings. Similarly,
instead of searching for “sources,” we
might view historical materials as what Peter Burke
calls “traces” or what Vivian suggestively
terms “souvenirs” and “memory triggers” in
the production of symbolic events. Furthermore, we
should approach textual evidence circumspectly to avoid
unwittingly privileging the text over the image, and
thus further encouraging the tendency of words to “police” images.
Although we may not all be products of a strictly Protestant
(North American) upbringing, Barbara’s remarks
point to a more general unease experienced by those
trained to work with—and,
therefore, privilege—written
sources when confronted by visual evidence, a response
that surprisingly includes even many art historians.
Like the objects of our research during the revolutionary
period in eighteenth-century France, perhaps we too
remain overly suspicious of images, for their disturbing
ability to beguile and seduce, or, in a completely
contradictory manner, for their mute silence, a stubborn
refusal to say what they mean. As W.J.T. Mitchell insists, “spectatorship
(the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation,
surveillance and visual pleasure) may be as deep a
problem as various forms of reading (decipherment,
decoding, interpretation, etc.) … [so] that ‘visual
experience’ or ‘visual literacy’ might
not be fully explicable in the model of textuality.”
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