Female portrait in Polish painting 1897-1956 : heritage as context for interpretation

The article considers the way in which visual texts are interpreted firstly against the pragmatic background called broadly heritage and secondly, according to the rules of the rhetoric of the image, the idea forwarded by R. Barthes but well-grounded in theoretical considerations of art historians (Panofsky, Gombrich, Porębski). The author describes a corpus of 12 paintings created between 1897 and 1956 by outstanding Polish artists related to the Cracovian milieu, all united by the common theme of womanhood. She analyses the import of the local cultural, social and religious contexts (the component parts of the Polish national heritage) on the "reading" of those pictorial texts. In what concerns the rhetoric of the image, the author utilizes her own three-layered model of interpretation close in spirit to Barthesian taxonomy, and which consists of: a) literal, b) figurative and c) allegorical level. Extending G. Vico's troplogical circle (1744), she postulates ten master tropes of artistic imagination that shape both verbal and visual texts (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, simile, antithesis, catachresis, euphemia, hyperbole and suppression), treating them as stylistic universals operative on the level of figuration (cf. Chrzanowska-Kluczewska 2013, 2017). The appearance of new ways of representing reality (e.g. Cubism-Formism or Expressionism juxtaposed with Impressionism or Symbolism) can be likened to Lotmanian explosions in the semiosphere. Heritage must be perceived as a dynamic phenomenon, a cluster of ideas evolving in time and helping in recontextualization of previously produced texts of culture.