The Look of Speech

Abstract

This paper examines the visual representation of speech, and of the act of speaking, in early modern Europe. It analyses the use of speech-scrolls (rather than modern speech balloons) in theatrical frontispieces and religious paintings as an instance of the transition oral to literate culture, focusing in particular on conceptual paradoxes arising out of that transition which are largely neglected in standard accounts such as Walter Ong's. As the essay argues, instead of understanding these images in terms of the shift from sound to visual space, they should rather be read as signifying in multiple, and multiply contradictory ways: in the sixteenth century, writing could stand for spoken words, and the written was still frequently figured as a form of speech-in fact, the images discussed in this essay show that the more the visual representation of utterances was made to resemble an actual document (a carefully rendered scroll), the more effectively it could represent vocal utterance. The depiction of speaking as the production of a document does not simply register a complex cultural practice (reading aloud, say), as Ong might argue, but rather constitutes a mimetic strategy arising out of a culture in which reading continued to be conceived in terms of hearing rather than seeing.

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