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The topic of intertextuality in painting is almost as broad as the field of art history itself, for even the most formalistic pictorial analysis makes reference to painting-painting or painting-literature relations. Yet there is a commonly held belief that paintings are texts whose closure and self-sufficiency are indisputable. Their material finitude seems so much more marked than that of the other arts. You can pick up a painting or statue in a much more literal sense than you can a novel or a symphony, and a painting appears to be visible all at once rather than abstractly unfolding over time. Moreover, paintings have what might be termed a "hyper-semantic" quality. Since the Renaissance, they have been understood as equivalents of arrested moments of visual perception. Their primary semiotic mode is assumed to be iconic, red paint signifying red objects, the size and position of shapes signifying the relative size and disposition of objects in space. Even those features of the painting that seem obviously conventional-the relations of up and down, right and left, frame and canvas, the size of brush stroke, shape of canvas, and so forth-have semantic value as rich as Jakobson shows rhyme scheme, metrics, and phonological structure to have in literature.1 In no sense is the conventional component of painting arbitrary or semantically indifferent to the degree, say, that pagination or print-type or size of page is for the novel.
This a-temporality and hyper-semantic quality-if one might so call it-have given rise to the naive view of painting as a mirror of nature, a perfect equivalent of a visual field, a complete vision of the beautiful. Interestingly, semioticians who have taken this position seriously, inquiring into the exact nature of iconicity, have deduced that painting is severely limited in its semantics. Sol Worth has accused painting of an incapacity for negation, contrary-to-fact statements, and ultimately any propositional meaning (Worth 1975). Meyer Schapiro points out cases of its inability to be vague or general (Schapiro 1973). Seemingly, the very semantic intensity of pictorial an restricts the sphere in which it can function semantically. And yet, as any interpreter of visual art knows, paintings can give rise to meanings that are propositional, tensed, and general, and that, moreover, rival literature in their richness and...