PICTURES VERSUS WORDS

design

"There are two sorts of talkative fellows whom it would be injurious to confound,, and I, S/.T.Coleridge, am the latter. The first sort is of those who use five hundred words, more than needs to express an idea - that is not my case. Few men, I will be bold to say, put more meaning into their words than I or chose them more deliberately and discriminately. The second sort is those who use five hundred more ideas, images, resons, etc , than there is any need of to arrive at their object, till the only object arrived at is that the mind's eye of the bystander is dazzled with colours succeeding so rapidly as to leave one vague impression that there has been a greta blaze of colours all about something. Now this is my case, and a grievous fault it is. My illustrations swallow up my thesis. I feel too intensely the omnipresence of each in all, platonically speaking..."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Anima Poetae.

iconoclasm

Moses' Second Commandment."Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any likeness of any form that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath..."

Psalms 97.7 "Confounded be all that worship carved images"

� Phillips 1973 p.127 The Dean of St.Paul's had presented Queen Elizabeth I with a new prayer book,"You know I have an aversion to to idolatry: to images of this kind." - "Wherein is the idolatry, may it please your majesty ?" - "In the cuts resembling angels and saints ; nay, grosser absurdities, pictures resembling the Blessed Trinity... Have you forgotten our proclamations against images, pictures and Romish relics in the churches ?"

Phillips 1973 p.12 "... basic to the Christian defense of images is the general acceptance of things of this world as necessary bridges to the next."

Phillips 1973 p.150 John Donne's sermon, that images "That if the true use of pictures be preached to them there is no danger of an abuse; and so as remembrances of that which had been taught in the pulpit, they may be retained."

Phillips 1973 p.178 Bishop Laud, "Though Calvin does not approve images in churches; yet he doth approve very well of them which contain a history... in teaching and admonishing the people..."

Casey, 1976 "Preoccupied by logocentric concerns, philosophers have been consistently sceptical of imagining and its products. Their skepticism stems largely from a conception of philosophical thinking as image free. "

Gilam 1986 quotes Ben Jonson's attack on Inigo Jones Theatrical Spectacles,

"O Showes ! Showes ! Mighty Showes "

The Eloquence of Masques ! What need of Prose

Or Verse or sense t'Express Immortall you ?.."

Glasgow, Narayanan and Chandrasekaran 1995 "There has been a tradition in psychology and philosophy that dismisses mental images as epiphenomenal, 1.e. that they do not causally participate in reasoning or problem solving."