The relation of the visual arts to linguistic artifice – poetry or rhetoric – has long been an issue of fundamental art-theoretical and art-historical concern, with roots in antiquity. Filtered through varied conceptual vocabularies and disciplines through the centuries, it has been framed and re-framed in terms of « figure » and « discourse, » « image » and « word, » and « iconicity » and « narrativity” or “discursivity. » Closely related are more recent attempts to redefine the study of art history around the distinctive “power” or “force” of visual images, drawing upon fields such as anthropology and phenomenology. A new . . . → En lire plus