Ars: časopis Ústavu Dejín Umenia Slovenskej Akadémie Vied (2003)

5. Portrait of Meyer Schapiro. Courtesy Prof. Rosemary Haag-
Blette, New York.

the medium in which they appeared underwent grave
changes.
David Rosand, one of Meyer Schapiro’s pupils,
referred to this accurately: “The ambivalence of the
alternating fonction of the work, mimetically refer-
ring to the fact it dénotés or graphically declaring its
own independent existence, epitomizes the situation
of the surface as a basic focus of tension and con-
flict — which constitute such a central part of the aes-
thetic expérience.26
In a lecture at Columbia University on April 2,
1973 under the title “An Experiment with Forms in
Art”, Meyer Schapiro gave a démonstration of his
Professional skills by guiding the audience from Hi-
berno-Saxon works to early 15th Century painting
with the resuit that the famous painting by Jan van
Eyck “The Madonna of the Chancellor Rolin” was
seen new in the context of its medieval precedents.

In regard to this reading of the van Eyck masterpiece
Schapiro said: “...above ail, what is interesting to us
are the tinier correspondences in which what had
formerly been a frame-figure relation or a ground-
figure relation appears in such an unexpected way,
as in the similarity of fingers pointing upwards diag-
onally and the very distant hills, miles away, which
form a set of fingers with growth of them like the
wrinkling of the fingers: likewise the hair of this fig-
ure is related to the forms of the shrubbery, of the
trees. Many éléments of the architecture are projec-
tions into depth of features that one finds in the fore-
ground. These are not relations of schematic corre-
spondence but highly particulized ones. It is a type
of density of the field as an environment of the fig-
ures such as we do not know in ancient classical rep-
résentations.”
He then concluded: “The recovery of nature, so
to speak, in the art of the fifteenth Century does not
simply recapifolate a stage in the discovery of na-
ture and élaboration of a landscape environment in
Greek art; there is a new standard here of minute-
ness of observation of the environment, which, what-
ever its immédiate sources in social life and in new
conceptions of the world, has also its new means, its
devices of représentation which were originally de-
vices of construction of form, devices which we can
compare with musical ones in the rhythms and the
patterning of forms, and which hâve developed within
an entirely different context in the art of the book in
the seventh and eight Centuries.”27
In 1973 Meyer Schapiro published a small book
“Words and Pictures” (The Hague 1973) with the
subtitle “On the Literary and Symbolic in the Illus-
tration of a Text”, in which he reiterated his long es-
tablished method and at the same time critically ex-
amined it. By means of contrasting categories of
a general nature, such as absolute/relative, perma-
nence/transience, stasis/movement, he tried to corne
to grips with the reality of the works in question.

26 ROSAND, David: Semiotics and the Critical Sensibility: Ob-
servations on the Examples of Meyer Schapiro. In: Social Re-
search, 45, 1978, p. 1.
27 Quoted after: ROSAND 1978 (see in note 26), p. 1.

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