Note 28 to Chapter 4 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
E. H. Gombrich has argued, contra Lessing, that the visual arts can, within limits, represent movement and temporal sequences of events, and that our perception of painting is a more time consuming process than Lessing allowed. Gombrich contends that Lessing's denial of time to painting is based upon the false premise of a punctum temporis, a static point in time. See "Moment and Movement in Art," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 27 (1964), 293-306. See also Etienne Souriau, "Time in the Plastic Arts," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 7 (1949), 294-307, and Bender, Spenser and Literary Pictorialism, pp. 25-27.
Last modified 20 September 2000