Pictorial Continuous Narratives: Perceptual-Representational Strategies

This qualitative report concerns a larger study on pictorial continuous narrative devised by Alberto Argenton and developed by the authors in his memory, reporting only a synthesis of the main findings obtained through the study of a corpus of 100 artworks on the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. The study was aimed at identifying the perceptual-representational strategies used by artists to visually tell this story in the continuous narrative mode. The pilot study, accomplished by three independent judges (the authors) on the corpus of artworks, adopting phenomenological observation, highlights four strategies used by artists to distinguish and link the episodes or events constituting the story: segmentation of episodes or events, time/space separating cues, vectors of direction and repetition of principal figures. A description of the above categories accompanied by some illustrative examples is given.