The Journal of Aesthetic Education

An Education

Among the harshest critiques ever received during my doctoral coursework came from a professor who was noticeably perturbed that I had researched and written a paper on an artwork without considering the title in the interpretation and analysis of the work. The professor insisted that the title is necessary to understand the piece. As a diligent student, the lesson was learned, and the following semester I wrote a different paper for a different professor including the title as part of the interpretation and analysis. The professor's response asserted that the sections of the paper discussing the title should be deleted to improve the paper because a title is a name only—a linguistic referent to speak and write about the work that has no other relationship to the work. The discussions that followed with the two professors evolved into a permanent interest in the relationship between appellations and the works they represent. The debate of whether titles are or are not important is not a two-sided argument but rather a maze. This article is not a specialized theoretical argument but an explication of this maze of disjointed relationships among images, their appellations, and the theories espoused by various artists, art critics, art historians, and philosophers. Nevertheless, the clearest exits from the maze are found by treating the appellations as literature and applying literary theory to them.

Between Text and Image

Much of the world we live in is visual and linguistic in nature: visual to the extent that seeing is associated with knowing, and linguistic to the extent that we can communicate through the use of words and letters. For thousands [End Page 29] of years there has been a close relationship between images and language. Both are commonly represented through the use of pigments on a two-dimensional surface. While we know of no literary relationships in early paintings, it is extremely rare today to find paintings without a literary appellation attached. Today we study paintings through words, but only on the most elementary levels do we study words through paintings. It appears that literate cultures give dominance to textual symbols over those in paintings, while illiterate cultures reverse these relationships. The problem is that words have culturally agreed upon meanings, often more so than visual images. We read and listen and then write and speak about those things we have read and heard. Historically, it may be that the relationship between language and images has reversed itself, and perhaps even reverses itself in our own educational process as we begin teaching children letters and words through the use of pictures. After all, which came first: image or language?

There has been little written on the use of word associations with iconographic images during the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, it is clear that identification characteristics other than linguistic ones existed. Hazard Adams is one of the few to raise this issue in his essay on titles: "Before I turn to literary titles it might be well to ask whether . . . I am correct in assuming that there has never been a nonverbal title of a literary work or of anything else for that matter, the word-objects relation of a title being irreversible. There are certainly nonverbal labels like coats of arms and crowns that imply title in a related sense."¹ It may be true that titles are typically thought of as word associations identifying objects, but it may also be possible that medieval imagery was at least as communicatively accurate as our present textual system. For example, a man with arrows fixed in his flesh would still be recognized by a medieval illiterate as St. Sebastian, yet most of the depictions of this Catholic saint are simply titled St. Sebastian. Would hanging the text St. Sebastian next to these depictions have created more meaning or a deeper understanding to a medieval Catholic? Often sacred personages and other important visual images have their own identifying characteristics that make a correlative text unnecessary. These identifying characteristics, to those familiar with them, remain very effective nonverbal symbols that conjure the stories they represent.

Furthermore, during the medieval...