MEDIEVAL NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND VISUAL TIME (A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE)

For decades, thinking about structures within the Viennese School of Art history has continued without comprehensively embracing and rethinking Wickhoff ’s reflections on pictorial narrative and time. Sedlmayr’s notion of structure was associated with the author’s authoritarian emphasis on abandoning “vulgar time” and achieving a connection with timelessness, which limited his ability to understand the historical formalism established by Riegl. Otto Pächt shifted the focus of his thinking to the problem of visual language and its historical contexts. Creatively developing ideas of Viennese thinkers, Wolfgang Kemp elaborated notion of narrative structures, whose historical anchoring in the analysis of systems of reasoning and representation makes it possible to productively describe the hermeneutic paradoxes associated with developing a visual grammar of pictorial narrative.