This chapter provides new insights into Neoclassicism, Nazarene art, and translational printmaking through an overview of the long-neglected prints of three female artists from German-speaking countries. Angelika Kauffmann, a central figure of Neoclassicism was active in many countries. Prints by her own hand as well as reproductive prints by others after her original paintings helped spread her fame as a history painter. Her success set an example for younger women artists such as Marie Ellenrieder, who admired Kauffmann, even as she moved beyond Neoclassicism to become an important Nazarene creating numerous works for the Catholic Church, including devotional prints and altar paintings. While Kauffmann and Ellenrieder both worked as painters and printmakers, the older artist Maria Katharina Prestel worked exclusively as an interpretive printmaker. With her husband, she maintained a workshop in which she reproduced drawings, sometimes using newly developed graphic techniques.

The images of Alexander deriving from his own lifetime fall into two main categories: on the one hand, representations without attributes, which are more or less what we would now term ‘portraits’; and on the other hand, representations with attributes, which have an allegorical function, their purpose being to give out a message about Alexander, to tell a story about him, rather than merely to convey his likeness. Images of Alexander in sculpture tended towards ‘realism’, while images of him in painting and glyptics tended towards allegorization. The attributes given to Alexander in art during his own lifetime are restricted in their epistemological content, being predominantly of a military sort, such as a spear or armour. But a much richer repertoire of attributes emerges for him in the posthumous representations of the king generated by and for his successors in the Hellenistic age. Above all, these allowed for his direct association with the divine: the aegis associated him with Zeus and Athena; ram’s horns with Zeus-Ammon; goat’s horns with Pan; bull’s horns with Dionysus; the lion-scalp with Heracles; the elephant-scalp with Dionysus; and the radiate crown with Apollo-Helios.

Early Christian theologians regarded the sense of sight, along with the other bodily senses, as an essential aid for comprehending invisible and transcendent realities. Although Christ’s incarnation was regarded as divine condescension to the human need for eyewitnesses, a profound and complex theory, partly influenced by ancient and contemporary philosophical sources, judged visual perception of the external, material world as playing a key role in judging, retaining, and transmitting knowledge about the immaterial realm. The essential connections between physical sight and spiritual cognition were seen as pathways that engendered appreciation both for the divine presence and for the human potential for enlightenment, in this life and in the age to come. Such cognition thus depended not only on words read or heard, insofar as the action of seeing became an equally dynamic and effective means for attaining knowledge of the nature and purposes of God.

This chapter provides a brief historical review of the philosophy of the image and a basic introduction to phenomenology. It then discusses how the phenomenological aesthetics of Hans-Georg Gadamer opens up a new way of understanding the artwork: it can present the truth of the original more clearly. This is demonstrated through examples of figurative art in general and the portrait in particular. In addition to Gadamer’s insights into the nature of an image, Gadamer also provides a new way of understanding mediation. I draw out this insight through the metaphor of sonic resonation, where finite limits need not be seen as the negative constraint of containment, but a positive condition for a particular voice, whose uniqueness adds to the symphonic beauty of the whole.

Portrait statues and busts of Homer were made from the fifth century b.c. to the Hellenistic period and are known today in many Roman copies. In addition, he appears on coins, a marble relief from Pergamon, and in the minor arts into the Roman period and beyond.

Whitman adopted photography as a model for literary practice. By emulating the immediacy effects and truth claims of photography, Whitman developed an innovative style that aimed to endow his poems with the same qualities he valued in the new medium—particularly directness, accuracy, naturalness, and inclusiveness of representation—and the cumulative experience of these qualities by the beholder as a sense of authenticity, media transparency, and immediate encounter. Comparing the representational powers of photography and literature helped Whitman to gauge the spiritual, cultural, and political function of literature. The chapter presents Whitman’s turn towards immediacy as part of his attempt to renew and democratize American poetry. It argues that Whitman’s engagement with photography led him to create a poetic style that allowed him to address the particulars of time and place, to take the details of everyday life as his subject matter, and to invest them with an egalitarian ethos by staging the dynamics of literary communication as a model for democratic social interaction. In Whitman’s work, the appeal to immediacy thus gains a decidedly political momentum.

Stein used film as a model to explain the avant-garde poetics of her literary portraits to her perplexed readers. The chapter examines two early portraits, “Picasso” and “Orta,” in the context of chronophotography and early film. It also considers Stein’s theoretical reflections on her insistent style, particularly “Portraits and Repetition” and “How Writing Is Written.” Stein’s early portraits are in orientation temporal and performative (like film) rather than visual and static (like photography). They advance through sequences of similar, serially varied sentences that create the impression of an ongoing present. Stein’s cinematic form of serial variation locates meaning in the movement of its sentence permutations rather than in its mimetic capacities. Her serial sentences keep readers focused on the workings of language and the text’s temporal unfolding and thus manage to turn an awareness of representational processes into a tool to center our attention on the always elusive present moment. Stein’s use of self-reflexivity to create a sense of temporal and perceptual immediacy radicalizes the cinematic strategy of embedding immediacy effects in overtly self-referential texts.

This little-known work of the great Florentine artist has only recently been re-identified (by me) as the portrait of a professional canterino. It is of great interest both for the status accorded to the sitter, a well-dressed individual in the preoccupied act of tuning his lira da braccio, as if about to perform, and for the Petrarch inscription etched into the back of the instrument which faces the viewer. It dates from the early 1480s, and so dates from a period when both civic and humanist practices of singing to the lyre were in full flood in Florence. The sitter could be a practitioner of either, or perhaps the distinction did not matter at the time. This short essay explores this ambiguity.

The second chapter, “Paris Recognized,” shows that Joyce’s discoveries in Paris shape his subsequent understanding of Dublin life. The chapter traces a series of meetings between Stephen Dedalus and Emma Clery in Stephen Hero and Portrait, culminating in an encounter in the colonnade of the museum library that undoes the transactional relations that mar their earlier encounters. In tracing their relations, the chapter uncovers Joyce’s development of a desublimated and unconscious aesthetic practice. Even though Stephen rehearses Joyce’s earlier aesthetic theory, in the scene in the colonnade he is an artist in a way that has been overlooked. Joyce draws on the synesthesia of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles” to present Stephen and Emma as engaged in a sensory exchange that defies calculation; in their encounter, the Thomistic integritas, consonantia, claritas of the artwork are replaced by a transient expression of physically digested material

Readers of Chaucer’s poetry hear in it a distinctive and individual voice. More than any other medieval English poet, Chaucer seems to invite the question ‘what was he like?’. The many official records about him have no occasion to shed light on this question. Though Thomas Hoccleve arranged that a lifelike portrait of his dear master should appear in copies of his Regiment, this does not carry us too far into knowing what the poet was really like. Chaucer, for example, despite apparently always saying the best, seemed to have reserved his true opinions, leaving both contemporaries and readers alike to wonder what he really thought – be it about fellow-writers like Hoccleve and Lydgate, or Criseyde, or about his fictional Merchant. Moreover, not only does he persistently credit others with the best that can be said of them, he also discredits himself. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that the ironic Chaucer should represent himself as a reserved and private sort of person – one conceivably well equipped to cope with the many vicissitudes of his time, as the poet evidently did.

Readers of Chaucer’s poetry hear in it a distinctive and individual voice. More than any other medieval English poet, Chaucer seems to invite the question ‘what was he like?’. The many official records about him have no occasion to shed light on this question. Though Thomas Hoccleve arranged that a lifelike portrait of his dear master should appear in copies of his Regiment, this does not carry us too far into knowing what the poet was really like. Chaucer, for example, despite apparently always saying the best, seemed to have reserved his true opinions, leaving both contemporaries and readers alike to wonder what he really thought – be it about fellow-writers like Hoccleve and Lydgate, or Criseyde, or about his fictional Merchant. Moreover, not only does he persistently credit others with the best that can be said of them, he also discredits himself. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that the ironic Chaucer should represent himself as a reserved and private sort of person – one conceivably well equipped to cope with the many vicissitudes of his time, as the poet evidently did.