Applications of visual and linguistic metaphor
Visual metaphor and its narrative function
Jacek Malczewski’s parabolic painting
The paper aims at analyzing visual metaphors and allegories in the fine arts – particularly in the symbolic
paintings by J. Malczewski – as creative tools of both artistic expression and discourse storytelling in which they play a vital
role. Visual metaphors are suggestive and effective in artistic performance and, therefore, in communicating abstract ideas to the
individual viewer and the public. Such paintings (symbolic and surrealistic), whilst encompassing concrete (source) and universal
(target) domains in their depicted metaphoric structures, can be powerful enough to create possible and alternative courses of
events. Based on the analysis of R. Arnheim’s concept of openness of fine art works, J. Bruner’s theory of narrative mind,
storytelling and possible worlds, and Ch. Forceville’s analyses of visual metaphors, the paper will attempt to answer the
following two philosophical and epistemological questions: (1) how universal themes are depicted, perceived, conveyed, and
comprehended in metaphorical paintings; and (2) what is the difference between the structures of the visual metaphors
characteristic for these paintings and merely literary parabolic means. Both conceptual metaphors and blending theories are used
in the analyses of selected symbolic and metaphoric paintings by Malczewski to explain in what scope his painting methods and
their narrative structures are entangled in Polish national-cultural history, and how important they are in cognitive studies as
well as in the history and theory of fine arts.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Metaphors which we perceive and embrace
- 3.Perceptual metaphors in fine arts: Their structure and functions
- 4.Narrative perceptual metaphors and possible worlds
- 5.Time structure of painting works
- 6.Narrative minds in possible worlds of art
- 7.Jacek Malczewski and narrative pictorial metaphors
- Notes
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References