Scenic engravings

The scenic type, which appeared at the end of the sixteenth century but only became widespread in the eighteenth, is marked, in contrast to the narrative type, by a desire to unify the performance space, which becomes a single stage, but also the moment represented, a moment without duration coming as close as possible to the immediacy that is the hallmark of the gaze and opposed to the means of speech and text.

It's clear that these three types - performative, narrative, scenic - appear successively in the history of representation. But a good analysis of printmaking is not content to assign a single, definitive type to it. Types are in a perpetual state of flux: a performative engraving from Ferrari or Rampazetto's Giolito edition already develops a second episode in the background, tending to narrativize the performance. Another engraving from the Valgrisi or Franceschi editions, more of a narrative type, is characterized by a desire to unify the space, for example by hypertrophying one episode to the detriment of the others, and by building a platform and steps for it, in the direction of theatricalization. Lastly, even in the eighteenth century, when the stage type became widespread, the moment represented generally appeared as an artificial concentration of several episodes, so that the spectator's imagination, faced with a static image, could restore the impression of movement. This artificial, concentrated moment, which Lessing calls " instant prégnant " certainly constitutes the culmination of the process of semiological transformation initiated since the Renaissance. But it maintains to the very end a residue of narrative in the scene, a remnant of spatial heterogeneity (or, if we prefer, multiple space) in the place of representation.