The Portrait's Subject

Between the invention of photography in 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, portraiture became one of the most popular and common art forms in the United States. In The Portrait's Subject, Sarah Blackwood tells a wide-ranging story about how images of human surfaces came to signal expressions of human depth during this era in paintings, photographs, and illustrations, as well as in literary and cultural representations of portrait making and viewing. Combining visual theory, literary close reading, and archival research, Blackwood examines portraiture's changing symbolic and aesthetic practices, from daguerreotype to X-ray. Portraiture, the book argues, was a provocative art form used by writers, artists, and early psychologists to imagine selfhood as hidden, deep, and in need of revelation, ideas that were then taken up by the developing discipline of psychology. The Portrait’s Subject reveals the underappreciated connections between portraiture's representations of the material human body and developing modern ideas about the human mind. It encouraged figures like Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Eakins, Harriet Jacobs, and Henry James to reimagine how we might see inner life, offering a rich array of metaphors and aesthetic approaches that helped reconfigure the relationship between body and mind, exterior and interior. In the end, Blackwood shows how nineteenth-century psychological discourse developed as much through aesthetic fabulation as through scientific experimentation.

The Influence of the Painting Tradition on Derek Jarman’s Films

The article aims at revealing intertextual references to paintings woven into feature films by the British director Derek Jarman (1942-1994). The author explores various manifestations of intertextuality from direct citations to reminiscences, which allow to emphasize the continuity of film-directors work, the connection of its aesthetics, composition, film mood with the original fine art source paintings. The target is to enhance the emotional impact on the viewer. The concept of intertextuality has undergone significant changes since its introduction to the research usage by the poststructuralist French theorist Julia Kristeva. This term has gone beyond the literary discourse and has begun to be used in the analysis of all the semiotic formations to describe the interaction of both verbal and non-verbal texts. In this regard, it is important to analyze and reveal the intertextual references to paintings woven into feature films made by a British director Derek Jarman whose works are insufficiently explored in Russia. Intertextuality is a characteristic feature of Jarmans creative style that seeks to blur the clear distinction between painting and cinema. Analysing the influence of such artists as Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Piero della Francesca, William Turner, Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Eakins and Francis Bacon on Jarman, the author reveals the interconnection between the directors aesthetics, composition, mood, light and shade frame modeling and the original paintings. Derek Jarman uses a variety of intertextual references from direct citations to reminiscences affecting the visual associative row of the audience and their film perception, emphasizing the continuity of his work. The intertextual references seek to enhance the emotional impact on the viewers, to recreate the mood of the epoch and its atmosphere, to aggravate the tragedy of the situation. The metaphors and allusions greatly expand the spatial and temporal characteristics of Jarmans films. Numerous intertransitions from one semiotic system to another fill his films with inner dialogue and strengthen semantic polyphony of meaning.