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IV

What is our response upon viewing an effectively conceived and executed visual representation? Writing on narrative painting, Leonardo da Vinci states that if the work

represents terror, fear, flight, sorrow, weeping, and lamentation; or pleasure, joy, laughter and similar conditions, the minds of those who view it ought to make their limbs move so that they seem to find themselves in the same situation which the figures in the narrative painting represent.¹¹ (italics mine)

As an audience before the Troy painting Lucrece herself does this, and more. We need to observe, however tritely, that she must have walked by this artwork, glanced at it, and doubtless viewed it at length on countless occasions during the years she lived at Collatium. Yet on this occasion she deliberately seeks it out. Faced by a representation-as-event, one that exerts a gradually intensifying, cathecting hold on her,...

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1. Introduction
2. I
3. Ii
4. Iii
5. Iv
6. V
7. Copyright