Article
What Is a Parergon?
PAUL DURO,
PAUL DURO
Department of Art History/Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, 14627-0001
Search for more papers by this authorPAUL DURO,
PAUL DURO
Department of Art History/Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, 14627-0001
Search for more papers by this authorABSTRACT
Despite important recent work, the rehabilitation of parergon as a critical concept in the history of art has yet to be fully broached. From the time Jacques Derrida introduced the term into contemporary critical theory in The Truth in Painting, its character and function have been largely understood as referencing a threshold or boundary—in particular, that of the border of the artwork. Yet a review of the term's long history suggests a meaning that differs in significant ways from its current near-univocal characterization as a synonym for a frame. In particular, premodern art theory and criticism identifies a parergon with matters such as the background action in a history painting, the inclusion in a landscape of picturesque embellishments, or, following Kant, the addition of ornament to a painting, a statue, or a building. This article therefore proposes we ask again: What is a parergon?
REFERENCES
- Alberti, Leon Battista. 1991. On Painting. Translated by Cecil Grayson, introduction and notes by Martin Kemp. London: Penguin.
- Aristotle. 1987. The Poetics of Aristotle. Translation and commentary by Stephen Halliwell. University of North Carolina Press.
- Auden, W. H. 1991. Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson. New York: Vintage International.
- Bernstein, J. M. 1992. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. Pennsylvania State University Press.
- Blount, Thomas. 1656. Glossographia, or, A Dictionary … With Etymologies, Definitions and Historical Observations on the Same. London: Humphrey Moseley and George Sawbridge.
- Cassell's German-English English-German Dictionary. 1978. London: Cassell.
- Cassirer, Ernst. 1992. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. Yale University Press.
- Degler, Anna. 2015. Parergon: Attribut, Material und Fragment in der Bildästhetik des Quattrocento. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink.
10.30965/9783846757567 Google Scholar
- De Piles, Roger. 1743. The Principles of Painting. London: J. Orborn.
- De Vigenère, Blaise. 1999. La Renaissance du regard: textes sur l'art, edited by Richard Crescenzo. Paris: ENSBA.
- Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. University of Chicago Press. (First published in 1978 as La Vérité en peinture. Paris: Flammarion.)
- Dubos, Jean-Baptiste. 1748. Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music. Translated by Thomas Nugent. 3 vols. London: John Nourse.
- Paul Duro, ed. 1996. The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork. Cambridge University Press.
- Paul Duro. 2005. “Giving Up on History? Challenges to the Hierarchy of the Genres in Early Nineteenth-Century France.” Art History 28: 689–711.
- Galen. 1968. On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body. Translation and introduction by Margaret Tallmadge May. 2 vols. Cornell University Press.
- Gilpin, William. 1792. Three Essays on the Picturesque. London: R. Blamire.
- Gombrich, E. H. 1966. “ The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape.” In Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, Vol. I, 107–121. London: Phaidon.
- Grasskamp Anna. 2015. “ Frames of Appropriation: Foreign Artifacts on Display in Early Modern Europe and China.” In Qing Enounters: Artistic Exchanges Between China and the West, edited by Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu and Ning Ding, 29–42. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute.
- Heidegger, Martin. 1993. “ The Origin of the Work of Art,” In Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), edited by David Farrell Krell, 143–212. San Francisco: HarperCollins.
- Heller-Andrist, Simone. 2012. The Friction of the Frame: Derrida's Parergon in Literature. Tübingen: Franke verlag.
- Heuer, Christopher P. 2009. The City Rehearsed: Object, Architecture, and Print in the Worlds of Hans Vredeman de Vries. New York: Routledge.
10.4324/9780203866009 Google Scholar
- Holt, Elizabeth Gilmore. 1958. Michelangelo and the Mannerists, the Baroque and the Eighteenth Century. Vol. 2 of A Documentary History of Art. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
- Jonietz, Fabian. 2016. Review of Parergon: Attribut, Material und Fragment in der Bildästhetik des Quattrocento by Anna Degler. Renaissance Quarterly 69: 1042–1044.
10.1086/689059 Google Scholar
- Kant, Immanuel. 1960. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Translated by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson. New York: Harper.
- Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge University Press.
10.1017/CBO9780511804656 Google Scholar
- Lee, Rensselaer W. 1967. Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting. New York: Norton.
- Mérot, Alain, ed. 2003. Les Conferences de l'Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture au XVIIe siècle. Paris: ENSBA. 130–139.
- Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Federico Ferrari. 2014. Being Nude: The Skin of Images. Translated by Anne O'Byrne and Carlie Anglemire. Fordham University Press.
- Norgate, Edward. 1919. Miniatura or the Art of Limning, edited by Martin Hardie. Clarendon Press.
- Owens, Craig. 1994. “ From Work to Frame, or, Is There Life After ‘The Death of the Author’?” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, edited by by Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock. Introduction by Simon Watney. University of California Press. 122–139.
- Oxford English Dictionary. 2018. “ parergon, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/137856.
- Paleotti, Gabriele. 2012. Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images. Introduction by Paolo Prodi, translated by William McCuaig. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute.
- Peacham, Henry. 1612. Graphice, or The Most Ancient and Excellent Art of Drawing and Limning. London: John Browne.
- Pliny the Elder. 1601. The Historie of the World, commonly called the Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus. 2 vols. Translated by Philemon Holland. London: Adam Islip.
- Poussin, Nicolas. 1911. Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin, edited by Charles Jouanny. Paris: Jean Schemit.
- Puttfarken, Thomas. 2005. Titian and Tragic Painting: Aristotle's Poetics and the Rise of the Modern Artist. Yale University Press.
- Sharpe, Matthew. 2016. “In the Margins of Philosophy; Plato to Footnotes.” The Conversation. August 13. https://theconversation.com/in-the-margins-of-philosophy-plato-to-footnotes-63918.
- Strabo. 1857. The Geography of Strabo. 3 vols. Translated by H. C. Hamilton and W. Falconer. London: G. Bohn.
- Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. 1850. The History of Ancient Art Among the Greeks. Translated by G. Henry Lodge. London: John Chapman.
- Wood, Christopher S. 2014 (1993). Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape. London: Reaktion Books.
