Abstract
Recent discussions of portraiture have stressed the fact that the goal of a portrait is not so much iconicity or mimesis, for in that case a full-length mugshot would be superior, but rather in “rendering present” the subject for the viewer. Wendy Steiner, in her article on the semiotics of this genre, has suggested that this “rendering” is due to the indexicality, rather than the iconicity, of the sign.1
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Notes
W. Steiner, The Semiotics of a Genre: Portraiture in Literature and Painting Semiotica 21:1/2, pp.113–119.
Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce,” C. Hart-shorne and P. Weiss, ed., The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1965), 2. 9.
Cf. E. Gombrich, “Art and Illusion,”, Pantheon Books, New York (1960).
B. Uspenskij, “A Poetics of Composition: The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of Compositional Form,” V. Zavarin, S. Wittig, tr., University of California Press, Berkeley (1973), pp. 102–103.
C. W. Morris, Esthetics and the Theory of Signs, in: “Writings on the General Theory of Signs,” Mouton, The Hague (1971), pp. 415–533.
M. Schapiro, “Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text,” Mouton, The Hague (1973) p. 38.
D. G. Rossetti, “The Works,” W. M. Rossetti, ed., Adler’s Foreign Books, Inc., New York (1911, 1972 ), p. 226.
Quoted in R. Jakobson, Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry, Lingua 21, Amsterdam (1968), p. 600.
Cf. J. H. Miller, The Critic as Host, Poetics Today 1:3 (1980), pp. 107–118; and A Guest in the House, Poetics Today 2:1b (1980/81), pp. 189–191.
R. L. Stein, “The Ritual of Interpretation: The Fine Arts as Literature in Ruskin, Rossetti, and Pater,” Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1975)y p. 21.
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© 1983 Plenum Press, New York
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Mostow, J.S. (1983). Indexicality in Esthetic Signs and the Art of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In: Deely, J.N., Lenhart, M.D. (eds) Semiotics 1981. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-9328-7_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-9328-7_24
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