The Magic of Images:
Word and Picture in a Media Age
CAMILLE PAGLIA
Education has failed to adjust to the massive transformation in
Western culture since the rise of electronic media. The shift from the era of
the printed book to that of television, with its immediacy and global reach,
was prophesied by Marshall McLuhan in his revolutionary Understanding Media,
which at its publication in 1964 spoke with visionary force to my generation of
college students in the
Interest in and patience with long, complex books and poems
have alarmingly diminished not only among college students but college faculty
in the
The extraordinary technological aptitude of the young comes
partly from their now-instinctive ability to absorb information from the
flickering TV screen, which evolved into the glassy monitor of the omnipresent
personal computer. Television is reality for them: nothing exists unless it can
be filmed or until it is rehashed onscreen by talking heads. The computer, with
its multiplying forums for spontaneous free expression from e-mail to listservs
and blogs, has increased facility and fluency of language but degraded
sensitivity to the individual word and reduced respect for organized argument,
the process of deductive reasoning. The jump and jitter of
Knowing how to "read" images is a crucial skill in
this media age, but the style of cultural analysis currently prevalent in
universities is, in my view, counterproductive in its anti-media bias and
intrusive social agenda. It teaches students suspicion and paranoia and, with
its abstract European terminology, does not offer an authentic anthropology of
the North American media environment in which they came to consciousness.
Post-structuralism and postmodernism do not understand magic or mystique, which
are intrinsic to art and imagination. It is no coincidence that since
postmodernist terminology seeped into the art world in the 1980s, the fine arts
have receded as a major cultural force. Creative energy is flowing instead into
animation, video games, and cyber-tech, where the young are pioneers.
Character-driven feature films, on the other hand, have steadily fallen in
quality since the early nineties, partly because of
Computer enhancement has spread to still photography in
advertisements, fashion pictorials, and magazine covers, where the human figure
and face are subtly elongated or remodeled at will. Caricature is our ruling
mode. In the last decade in the us, there has also been a relentless speeding
up of editing techniques, using flashing, even blinding, strobe-like effects
that make it impossible for the eye to linger over any image or even to fully
absorb it. There has been a reduction of spatial depth in image-making: one can
no longer "read" distance in digitally enhanced or holographic films,
where detail has a uniform, lapidary quality rather than the misty atmospherics
of receding planes, so familiar to us from post-Renaissance art based on
observation of nature. Movies have followed the TV model in neglecting
background, the sophisticated craft of mise-en-scène. Distorting lenses and
camera angles producing warped, tunnel-like effects (as in Mannerism or
Expressionism) deny the premise of habitable human space. Subtlety and variety
in color tones have been lost: historical stories are routinely steeped in
all-purpose sepia, while serious dramas and science-fiction films are often
given a flat, muted, shadowless light, as if mankind has fled underground.
The visual environment for the young, in short, has become
confused, fragmented, and unstable. Students now understand moving but not still
images. The long, dreamy, contemplative takes of classic
Education must strengthen and discipline the process of visual
attention. Today's young have a modest, flexible, chameleonlike ability to
handle or deflect the overwhelming pressure of sensory stimuli, but perhaps at
a cost to their sense of personal identity. They lack the foolish, belligerent
confidence of my own generation, with its egomaniacal quest for the individual
voice. In this age dominated by science and technology, the humanities
curriculum should be a dynamic fusion of literature, art, and intellectual
history. Because most of my career has been spent at arts colleges, I have been
able to experiment with a wide range of images in the classroom. The slide
lecture, with its integration of word and picture, is an ideal format for
engaging students who are citizens of the media age. Discourse on art works
should be open to all humanities faculty. No specialist "owns" the
history of art, which ultimately belongs to the general audience.
My students at the University of the Arts—painters, sculptors,
ceramicists, photographers, animators, Web and industrial designers,
screenwriters, dancers, actors, musicians, composers, and so forth—come from an
unusually wide range of backgrounds, from working farms to affluent suburbs or
the inner city. I have gotten good pedagogical results over the past two
decades with canonical works of art that can be approached from the point of
view of iconography. This method of art-historical analysis, sometimes called
iconology, was formalized in the 1920s and 1930s by Erwin Panofsky from earlier
theorizing by Aby Warburg and was further developed by Rudolf Wittkower and Ernst
Gombrich. Iconography requires the observational skills and fine attention to
detail of literary New Criticism but sets the work into a larger social
context, consistent with late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century German
philology. To help focus scrutiny, one must find images in art that are more
vivid than what the students see around them every day. The point is not just
to show pictures but to seek a commentary that honors both aesthetics
and history. This is an exercise in language: the teacher is an apostle of
words, which help students find their bearings in dizzy media space.
Works that make the most immediate as well as the most
lasting impact on undergraduates, I have found, usually have a magic,
mythological, or intensely emotional aspect, along with a choreographic energy
or clarity. Here is a quick overview of objects from the Western tradition that
have proved consistently effective, as assessed by student performance on
midterm and final exams. Among ancient artifacts, the bust of queen Nefertiti,
with its strange severity and elegance; the monumental Hellenistic sculpture
group of the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons being strangled by
serpents; and the Varvakeion Athena, our small Roman-era copy of the colossal,
chryselephantine statue of the armed Athena from the Parthenon. The latter in
particular, with its dense iconography of coiled serpent, winged Victory,
triple-crested helmet, and aegis with gorgon's head medallion, seems to burn
its way into student memory. Images from the Middle Ages, aside from elegant
French Madonnas and Notre Dame's gargoyles and flying buttresses, have proved
less successful in my experience than the frankly carnal images of the Italian
Renaissance. A dramatic contrast can be drawn between Donatello's sinuously
homoerotic, bronze David and his late,
carved-wood Mary Magdalene, with its
painful gauntness and agonized posture of repentance. Two standards never lose
their power in the classroom: Botticelli's Birth of Venus, where the nude goddess of love stands in the dreamy S-curve of
a Gothic Madonna, and Leonardo's eerie Mona Lisa, with its ambiguous lady, barren landscape, and mismatched
horizon lines. From Michelangelo's huge body of work, the deepest response,
independent of the students' religious background, has been to his marble Pietà, where a ravishingly epicene dead Christ slips from the lap of a
heavily shrouded, strikingly young Mary, and second to a surreally dual panel
in the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Temptation and Fall: on one side of the robust tree wound by a fat, female-bodied
serpent, sensual Eve reaches up for the forbidden fruit, while on the other, an
avenging angel drives the anguished sinners out of paradise.
Because of its inherent theatricality, the Baroque works
resoundingly well with undergraduates. Paramount exhibits are Bernini's designs
for St. Peter's Basilica: the serpentine, 95-foot high, bronze pillars of the Baldachino
(canopy) over the main altar; or the elevated chair of Saint Peter—wood encased
in bronze and framed by a spectacular Glory, a solar burst of gilded
beams. Next is Bernini's Cornaro Chapel in Rome's Church of Santa Maria della
Vittoria, with its opera-box stage setting, flamboyant columns of multicolored
marble, and over the altar the wickedly witty marble-and-bronze sculpture
group, Ecstasy of St. Teresa, where spiritual union and sexual orgasm
occur simultaneously.
Nineteenth-century Romantic and realist painting offers a
staggering range of image choices. Standouts in my classes have included the
following: Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, a grisly intertwining of
the living and the dead, bobbing on dark, swelling seas against a threatening
sky. Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapalus, inspired by a Byron poem,
with its swirl of luxury and butchery around the impassive king of
Twentieth-century art is prolific in contrasting and
competitive styles but less concerned with the completeness or autonomy of
individual images. Two exceptions are Picasso's still intimidatingly
avant-garde Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, with its brothel setting,
contorted figures, and fractured space, and second, his monochrome mural, Guernica,
the most powerful image of political protest since Goya, a devastating
spectacle of fire, fear, and death. Also unfailingly useful are
But an education in images should not simply be a standard
art-survey course—though I would strongly defend the pedagogical value of
survey courses, which are being unwisely marginalized or dismantled outright at
many American colleges. Thanks to postmodernism, strict chronology and
historical sweep and synthesis are no longer universally appreciated or
considered fundamental to the graduate training of humanities professors. But
chronology is crucial if we hope, as we must, to broaden the Western curriculum
to world cultures. To maintain order, the choice of representative images will
need to be stringently narrowed. I envision a syllabus based on key images
that would give teachers great latitude to expand the verbal dimension of
presentation, including an analysis of style as well as a narrative of personal
response. I will give three examples of prototypical images for my proposed
course plan. They would play on students' feeling for mystery yet ground them
in chronology and encourage them to evaluate historical evidence. The first
example is from the Stone Age; the second from the Byzantine era; the third
from pre-Columbian
Among and sometimes boldly on the prehistoric
paintings of animals found in the caves and rock shelters of southern France
and northern Spain are eerie stenciled hands captured in circles of color (fig.
1). Powdered minerals—white, black, brown, red, violet, or yellow—were mixed
with water and blown by the unknown artist through a reed or hollow bone over
his or her own hand. At the Castillo cave complex in Santander, Spain is the
so-called Frieze of Hands, a series of forty-four stenciled images—thirty-five
left hands and nine right. In some cases, as at the Gargas cave in the French
Pyrenees, mutilated hands appear with only the stumps of fingers. It is unclear
whether the amputation was the result of frostbite or accident or had some
ritual meaning of root, primal power.
These disembodied hands left on natural stone 25,000 years ago
would make a tremendous impression on students who inhabit a clean, artificial media
environment of hyperkinetic cyber images. The hand is the great symbol of man
the tool-maker as well as man the writer. But in our super-mechanized era, many
young people have lost a sense of the tangible and of the power of the hand. A
flick of the finger changes TV channels, surfs the web, or alters and deletes
text files. Middle-class students raised in a high-tech, service-sector economy
are several generations removed from the manual labor of factories or farms.
The saga of the discovery of the cave paintings can also show
students how history is written and revised. The first cave found, at Altamira
in northern Spain, was stumbled on by a hunter and his dog in 1868. The
aristocratic estate owner, an amateur archaeologist, surveyed the cave but did
not see the animals painted on the ceiling until, on a visit in 1879, his
five-year-old daughter looked up and exclaimed at them. Controversy over dating
of the paintings was prolonged: critics furiously rejected the hypothesis of
their prehistoric origin and attributed them to forgers or Roman-era Celts. The
discoveries of other cave paintings in Spain and the Dordogne from the 1890s on
were also met with skepticism by the academic establishment. Funding for the
early expeditions had to come from Prince Albert of Monaco. The most famous
cave of them all, Lascaux, was found in 1940 by four adventurous schoolboys who
tipped off their schoolmaster. Thus children, with their curiosity and freedom
from preconception, have been instrumental in the revelation of man's primeval
past.
Cave paintings recreate a subsistence world where human beings'
very survival was at stake—a situation that can come again in war or after
severe climatological change. Was the stenciled prehistoric hand a tribal badge
or a symbol of possession and control over the painted animals?—whose real-life
originals constituted a critical food supply in the Ice Age. Cave paintings
usually follow strict realism: minutely varied species of horses, deer, bison,
and mammoths, delicately painted with improvised brushes of grass or fur, can
be identified. The fragility yet willed strength of human power symbolized by
the stenciled hand is suggested by the sheer size of animals depicted. For
example, seventeen images of the long-horned steppe bison (bison priscus)
appear in the cave at Lascaux: speedy climbers and leapers, they were 6'6"
in height at their hump. If one were trapped or speared, it could provide up to
1,500 pounds of meat for an extended family. The fierce, prehistoric aurochs,
whose descendants include the ox and the Spanish fighting bull, were of even
greater size, sometimes weighing over 2,800 pounds. There are fifty-two aurochs
depicted on the walls at Lascaux: one is eighteen feet long.
The prehistoric hand, whether personal signature or communal
avowal of desire, is clearly a magic image with copious later parallels. It
might be juxtaposed with other upraised hands, such as the gesture of peace and
blessing made by Buddha and Jesus or the signal of formal address (ad
locutio, representing the power of speech) of Roman orators and generals,
as in the restored Prima Porta statue of Augustus Caesar or Constantine's
fragmentary colossus in the Capitoline Museum. There is a constellation of
associations with the "speaking" hand movements of South Asian dance,
called mudra in India and even more intricately refined in classical
Khmer dance (aspara) in Cambodia. Then there are the operatic gestures
of fear and awe made by wind-blown saints in Baroque art as well as folk motifs
of the magic hand, such as the archaic Mediterranean charm with two fingers
extended, still worn by Italians to ward off the malocchio (evil eye).
My second exemplary image is the Byzantine icon, in an early
medieval style that survives in Eastern rite or Greek and Russian Orthodox
churches (fig. 2). It was born in the great capital of Byzantium, renamed
Constantinople (modern Istanbul). In late-medieval and early Renaissance Italy,
this style was called la maniera greca, the Greek manner or style.
Insofar as Byzantine religious art is commonly reproduced on Christmas cards
and museum-shop curios, the Byzantine style remains part of contemporary
culture in Europe and North America. The classic icon is a rather stern, even
glowering image of Jesus, Mary, or a saint set against a gold or blue
background. It may be a mosaic panel bonded to a church wall or dome or a
portable image painted in shiny egg tempera on wood. Icons were paraded in
cities on feast days and carried into battle to protect the armies.
The figure in icons is always static and seen in strict
frontality (in contrast to cave paintings, where animals are depicted only in
profile). Space is compressed, and composition is shallow, with the figure
pressed against the picture plane. Even when a floor is shown, figures seem to
hover. The human dimension is inconsequential. The Byzantine emperor and his
queen, clad in heavy brocade robes studded with jewels and pearls, may appear
but primarily as a conduit to the divine. Usually floating somewhere in the
image is a vertical or horizontal strip of Greek letters, a sacred name or
fragment of Scripture. This elegant black calligraphy, outlined against gold,
presents words as magic. It seems to show sound soaring through the air—a
ritual incantation, an abstract idea being transformed into words. The
Byzantine icon, therefore, is an ideal marriage of word and picture. Church and
basilica, with their architecturally embedded images, were living books for the
masses. The soaring Byzantine domes emblazoned with the enthroned Virgin or
Christ Pantocrator ("Ruler of All") recall the painted ceiling of
Lascaux's Great Hall of the Bulls, a rotunda that has been called "the
Sistine Chapel of Prehistory."
The glittering Byzantine icon seizes student attention: its
aggressive stare forces us to stare back. It also provides an excellent entree
to long, tangled lines of cultural history. Until the late nineteenth century,
Byzantine art was dismissed as a degenerate or barbarous form of classical art.
The ornate Byzantine style actually originates in the luxurious ostentation of
the ancient pagan Near East—notably the great capitals of Alexandria and
mercantile Antioch. The figures in Byzantine icons exist as head and hand: if
the bodies seem stiffly imprisoned or encased in their robes, perhaps it's
because their distant ancestors were Egyptian mummies. The watchful, wary eyes
of Byzantine icons, which seem to drill through and see past the viewer,
descend from mummy masks of Roman-era Egypt, such as those found in a Hawara
cemetery in the Fayum oasis southwest of Cairo. These vividly painted encaustic
(wax) portraits, set into linen body wrappings, show only the dead's bustlike
head and shoulders. The individualism of Fayum faces descends from Roman
culture, with its stress on realistic portraiture. Stone busts—originally clay
death masks—of Roman ancestors were kept in the family atrium and carried in
procession once a year. The Fayum figures' enlarged, almost bulging eyes and
dilated pupils (sometimes described as "haunting" or "insomniac")
reflect the mystical importance of the eye, identified with the god Horus, in
Egyptian culture. The soulfulness of the Fayum portraits, whose originals were
urban sophisticates in an anxious period of social change, survives in the
ascetic faces of Byzantine saints: Osiris' promise of resurrection and eternal
life has become Christ's.
The subject of Byzantine icons is inextricable from that of
iconoclasm—the destruction of images because of their alleged solicitation to
idolatry. Nothing could be more relevant to the dominance of images in our
celebrity culture, which strives to turn us all into pagan idolators. Suspicion
of or hostility to images persists in the American Puritan tradition, which
surfaced at both extremes of the political spectrum in the 1980s: first, in the
attempted legal suppression of sex magazines, including mainstream Playboy
and Penthouse, by anti-pornography feminists Andrea Dworkin and
Catharine MacKinnon; and second, in the attack by Christian conservatives on
the National Endowment for the Arts for funding blasphemous, homoerotic, or
sadomasochistic photographs by Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe. Literal
iconoclasm was undertaken in Afghanistan in 2001 when the Taliban ordered the
pulverizing by artillery fire of ancient colossi of Buddha, carved out of a
cliff at Bamian.
Iconoclasm originates in the Old Testament's prohibition of
making pictures—called "graven images" or "idols" in the
Ten Commandments—of God, man, or animal. In Judeo-Christianity and its
ancillary descendant, Islam (which forbids depiction of the figure in mosques),
God is pure spirit and cannot be reduced to material form. During the bitter
debate about this issue in early Christianity from the second century on, pagan
image-making often won out, thanks to the momentum of Mediterranean cultural
tradition. Protestant reformers such as Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin were
severe critics of the image-intoxicated style of late-medieval Roman
Catholicism. There was smashing of church statues and stained-glass windows in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries throughout Northern Europe, as there
also was in England after Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and
during Cromwell's Puritan Revolution. The austere, white Protestant church in
the seventeenth-century neoclassical style of Christopher Wren (the fount of
American church design) is a temple to reason, with no images to distract the
worshippers from Holy Scripture, the word of God.
Hence the battle in Western culture between word and picture
can be traced over 2,500 years. The first outbreak of iconoclasm in the
Byzantine empire occurred in 726 AD: when Leo III, the emperor and pope,
ordered that a beloved icon of Christ be removed from its place above the
Chalke Gate, the main entrance to the imperial palace, there was a violent riot
by women, whose leader was later martyred and canonized as St. Theodosia. An
edict by Leo four years later reinforced his ban on use of the figure in church
art because images, in his view, were being blasphemously worshipped. Leo's
son, the emperor Constantine V, convened a council in 754 that
institutionalized iconoclasm; he attacked the monasteries and persecuted
iconodules (venerators of icons). Many icons were destroyed outright: mosaic
images were hacked from the walls and crosses put in their place. Women,
particularly among the imperial family, were fervent iconodules. The banning of
images in Byzantium lasted, with several breaks, for over a century until the
restoration of the icons in 843, after the death of the last iconoclast
emperor, Theophilos, the prior year.
Portable icons were carried along medieval trade routes into
Russia. At the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, many of
the city's precious objects were dispersed even further into Russia and Italy.
There was long controversy among Russian theologians about whether the
iconostasis (from eikonostasion, medieval Greek for
"shrine"), a partition or picture screen separating the altar from
the nave in an Orthodox church, detracted attention from the Holy Eucharist as
the center of the Christian service. The modern Orthodox iconostasis consists
of fold-out screens with stacked registers (rows) of gilt wooden images of
Christ, the Virgin, archangels, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, evangelists,
and other saints, which the faithful read like posters. It resembles a modern
newsstand, with its linear array of glossy magazine covers featuring
celebrities and pop stars. A little area facing the front door in Russian
Orthodox homes—krasnyi ugolok, the "red or beautiful
corner"—was devoted to icon display. Bowing and crossing themselves,
visitors saluted the icons even before greeting the host. Once again we detect
female influence, since it was Russian women, who could not be ordained as
priests, who created and tended the icon corners.
Byzantine icons hugely influenced European culture: their
arrival in medieval Italy revived Italian art and, through their
reinterpretation by Duccio di Buoninsegna and his student Simone Martini in
Siena, began the evolution toward the Renaissance. I recommend three Byzantine
icons in particular that might intrigue students: the tenth-century mosaic
panel of St. John Chrysostom ("Golden Mouth") of Antioch in the north
tympanum of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul; a twelfth-century tempera-on-wood icon of
St. Gregory Thaumaturgus ("Wonder Worker") in the Hermitage Museum in
St. Petersburg; and a thirteenth-century tempera-on-wood icon of St. Nicholas
of Myra in Bari, where the saint's relics are preserved (this is the Saint Nick
later identified with Santa Claus). In each case, a fiery-eyed figure, ornately
robed, is standing against a gold background inscribed with floating Greek
letters. Each saint is holding a book, a Bible studded with jewels. He catches
it in the crook of his arm and steadies it with a shrouded hand, as if it were
too sacred or numinous to touch. A book, in other words, is represented as the
burning source of spiritual power.
Finally, I would invoke one of my favorite works of art, Andy
Warhol's Marilyn Diptych (Tate Gallery), which clearly demonstrates
the childhood influence on Warhol of his family's Eastern rite church. It is a
modern iconostasis: fifty images of Marilyn Monroe are lined up in registers on
two large screens. On one, the orange-yellow riot of Marilyn's silk-screened
images illustrates her cartoon-like stardom. On the other, her photos have
faded to smudged black and white, like newsprint washed by rain or tears. Marilyn
Diptych suggests that in a media age, words melt away, and nothing is left
but images.
My third and last exemplary image is that of the skull in
pre-Columbian art (fig. 3). This is another area of tremendous controversy:
life-size crystal skulls continue to be touted on New Age Web sites as Aztec,
Mayan, or Incan artifacts that allegedly function as archaic magnets or radio
receivers to capture cosmic energy and confer prophetic power (fig. 4). These
weird objects, I submit, would be highly useful for warning students of the
still-unreliable state of Web resources. My commitment to the Web as a new
frontier is unshaken. (I was a columnist for Salon.com for six years
from its inaugural issue in 1995.) Nevertheless, I still believe that only
through prolonged, comparative study of books can one learn how to assess
ambiguous or contradictory evidence and sort through the competing claims of
putative authorities.
Though most major studies of Meso-American culture acknowledge
the enormity of human sacrifice that occurred, particularly in the two
centuries before the Spanish conquest, the issue has been de-emphasized over
the past thirty years in the ideological campaign to convict Christopher
Columbus of genocide. Otherwise well-produced picture books of Chichén Itzá,
for example, the mammoth Mayan complex in the Yucatán, document the great step
pyramid, the ball court, the domed observatory, and the temple of a thousand
pillars crowned by a raffish Chac-Mool statue holding a belly plate on which
freshly extracted, still-quivering human hearts were laid. But it is difficult
to find photographs, much less comprehensive ones, of Chichén Itzá's centrally
situated Platform of the Skulls, where the severed heads of sacrificed
prisoners, ritual victims, and even losing ballplayers were displayed on wooden
racks to bake in the sun. Around that imposing stone platform, which I have
personally inspected, runs a complex frieze of stone skulls still bearing
remnants of bright red paint. The widespread view of the Maya as peaceable,
compared to the bloodthirsty Aztecs, certainly needs adjustment.
Such platforms, called tzompantli, date from the prior
Toltec era in
These authentic Aztec masks, which have circulated in
There is a Canadian connection here. The world's most
celebrated crystal skull—the so-called Skull of Doom—is owned by Anna
Mitchell-Hedges, who lived as a child in Port Colborne, Ontario. Her
stepfather, a British-born adventurer, claimed she had discovered the skull at
a Mayan ruin in Belize on her seventeenth birthday in 1924. From 1967 on, the
skull, which weighs eleven and a half pounds, was kept in a felt-lined case in
her house in Kitchener, to which pilgrims came from all over the world. A
Toronto medium did work with the Skull of Doom and reported on its prophecies
in a 1985 book, The Skull Speaks. The BBC producers traveled to
Toronto to interview Mrs. Mitchell-Hedges, but she did not allow the skull to
be tested. Its present whereabouts are unknown.
An expanded version of a lecture delivered on
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Figure 1. Hand
stencil in the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave |
Figure 2. St.
Gregory Thaumaturgis, tempera on wood, 81 x 53 cm. The State Hermitage
Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. |
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Figure 3. Turquoise
and shell encrusted mask of Quetzalcoatl, the |
Figure 4. Rock
crystal carving. Possibly Aztec or |
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