Visual culture in the Renaissance was very different from that today. When a modern artist wants to show more than one scene from a story, they now generally split it into frames and show the scenes sequentially, as in a comic, graphic novel, manga or BD. For the Renaissance viewer, seeing the same actors more than once in a single frame was quite normal, whereas today it appears confusing.
Various terms have been used to describe this popular Renaissance technique of visual storytelling. Because those readily become confusing, I prefer to call them multiplex narrative, as that’s what it is, as I’ll demonstrate in this and the next article.
Duccio’s The Healing of the Man born Blind, from his Maestà Predella Panels of about 1310, is an excellent example of a narrative painting as art emerged from the Middle Ages. Much of the panel is taken up by the first scene, in which Christ is healing a man we know from the Gospel source is blind. Back to back with him being healed as a blind man, he is shown healed and sighted to the right. The before and after have simply been united in a single image.
A more complex example is Masaccio’s account of The Tribute Money painted in 1425-8.
This contains three images of Saint Peter, and two of the tax gatherer, each carefully set and coherently projected into the same single view. Although each is spaced apart from the next, no pictorial device is used to separate them into frames, and they form multiplex narrative.
His literary reference is to the Gospel of Matthew, in a story in which Christ directs Peter to find a coin in the mouth of a fish so that he can pay the temple tax. In the centre, the tax collector asks Christ for the temple tax. At the far left, as indicated by Christ and Peter’s arms, Peter (for the second time) takes the coin out of the mouth of a fish. At the right, Peter (a third time) pays the tax collector (shown a second time) his due.
Verbal narratives have the benefit of a medium which is read or heard over time, and has specific semantic markers of time: in language, tenses, for example. For an artist working in a visual medium on a two-dimensional surface like a painting, the only device they can use is space, to express time using spatial composition.
Masaccio makes the entry point the dominant group in the middle foreground, with the figure of Christ at its centre. As Christ and Peter 1 show with their arms, the second scene in the story is the figure at the left edge of the image.
Peter 2 is seen here in the same clothing, a fairly common means of telling the viewer that he’s the same figure as Peter 1. There’s the subtle twist that, when taking the coin from the mouth of the fish, he has removed his golden cloak and laid it on the bank beside him.
Having looked at the centre and left, the viewer’s eye now looks at the opposite side, where they see Peter 3 and Tax Collector 2, following their respective dress code, as the saint pays the tax using the coin he has just retrieved from the fish.
This use of space to depict time comes into conflict with the Renaissance objective of realism, though. To ensure this story looks consistent, Masaccio has therefore set each of those three scenes in the same coherent landscape and perspective projection. What we read as three separate scenes now forms a whole image. That’s an unusual combination of painting and narrative genius.
Although not a hard and fast rule, you should always suspect multiplex narrative when you see one or more of the actors appear more than once in a painting.
Benozzo Gozzoli’s The Dance of Salome (1461-62) tells the story of Salome’s dance before King Herod, and the presentation to her of the head of John the Baptist. Salome is shown twice in the single frame: once dancing in front of Herod, and again giving Herodias the head of John at the back of the room. The middle event in the chain, the beheading of John, is shown in a side-room at the left.
Here, it’s possible to deduce the story without already knowing it. There must be at least two scenes included, as one actor appears twice. This allows the viewer to establish the three scenes, but not the order in which to read them. Knowing that the man at the left is about to be beheaded, and that his head appears on a plate at the back of the view, places those two in order, and it’s then not hard to guess that the scene of Salome dancing must have preceded those.
Sometimes the layout of scenes is linear, making them easy to read.
This superb panel by Jacopo da Sellaio, showing Orpheus, Eurydice and Aristaeus dates from 1475-80. This is one panel of a series, which is sadly now dispersed across continents. It employs multiplex narrative to show the start of the story, with Orpheus left of centre, tending a flock of sheep, as his bride is bitten by the snake. At the far right, Orpheus, with the assistance of Aristaeus, puts the dead body of Eurydice into a rock tomb.
The spatial order of scenes may not be as simple, though, where they have to be integrated into a single coherent composition.
Sandro Botticelli’s textbook demonstration of both perspective projection and multiplex narrative is in one of his lesser-known works, The Story of Lucretia, painted in 1500-01.
This tells its story in three scenes integrated into its architectural whole. At the left, Lucretia is raped at knifepoint by Sextus Tarquinius. She then commits suicide in shame, and anger erupts through Rome. Her body is carried from her house (right) and placed in the Forum. There, her husband and his friends swear to overthrow the king (centre), and this brings about the new constitution for the city of Rome.
Piero’s Andromeda freed by Perseus from about 1510-15 is a careful account taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, using multiplex narrative in freer form.
Centred on the great bulk of Cetus, Perseus stands on its back and is about to hack at its neck with his sword. At the upper right, Perseus is shown a few moments earlier, as he was flying past in his winged sandals. To the left of Cetus, Andromeda is still secured to the rock by a prominent red fabric binding (not chains), and is bare only to her waist.
In the foreground in front of Cetus are Andromeda’s parents, the King and Queen, still stricken in grief. Near them is a group of courtiers with ornate head-dress. But in the right foreground is a celebratory party already in full swing, complete with musicians and dancers, to feast their delivery from the attacks by Cetus.
Recognising multiplex narrative is even easier when it’s not one but two actors who appear several times, as with the five different sets of Adam and Eve shown in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s The Garden of Eden from 1530.
Tomorrow I’ll look at some more difficult examples.