Week 3: For Better or For Worse

Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434, oil on oak,
32.4 x 24 in,The National Gallery, London

While thinking about this week’s blogging question I was immediately drawn to digital reproductions/representations of artworks. When I was studying Art History the majority of the images we looked at, whether in class or individually, were enlarged, projected onto a screen, and/or arranged in various ways using PowerPoint. This was very effective, for obvious reasons, but namely because we were not often able to access the artifacts themselves, up close and personal. Digital copies enabled us to focus on specific components of the work, by zooming in and out, cropping, etc. in order to analyze it and thereby occasionally allowing us to discover hidden symbols or elements that we may not have otherwise noticed. The Arnolofini Portrait by Jan van Eyck (1434) is a perfect, albeit timeworn, example of this. Behind the couple and above the mirror we can see “Jan van Eyck was here 1434” inscribed in Latin. Then when we zoom in we are able to see the reflection of two people standing in front of the couple. The discovery of this information has altered the interpretation of the cultural and historical significance of the painting, as it is now considered a visual testimony to the artist’s bearing witness of an event rather than solely as a wedding portrait. 

Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke, 1858-64, oil on canas,
21 x 15 in., Tate Gallery, London.

Because of the possibilities offered up by digital technologies for the study of art, it serves as an excellent example of the relationship between functionality and format that Johanna Drucker describes—in some ways more can be ascertained about certain images because their value as digital objects is that they can be manipulated and distorted (Drucker, 2009, p. 174). Without this particular function, the task of analyzing the goings-on of say, Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke or just about any painting by Hieronymus Bosch, certainly seems more intimidating.

Hieronymus Bosch, Triptych of the Last Judgment, 1504,
oil on wood, 65 x 50 in,, Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Wien, Vienna. 

But thinking about all of this also had me curious about how fore-edge paintings are digitized. Is the painting digitized first and placed at the beginning of the text? At the end? Is it included at all? I investigated this briefly and discovered that the issue is not about what these digitization projects have done wrong so much as what they haven’t done at all; about what is missing. The Boston Public Library has a stunning collection of over 200 books with fore-edge paintings never before seen until the On the Edge: The Hidden Art of Fore-Edge Book Painting virtual exhibition was developed. Yet while the paintings are now digitized and available for viewing online, the books themselves are not. The separation of one from the other decontextualizes the paintings and the printed book to which they belong and forces the viewer/reader to study one in isolation of its counterpart.

James D.D. Hurdis, St. Paul's Cathedral, 1810, portrait, 8vo, gilt edges

Looking through the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Materials for Electronic Access: Creation of Production Master Files – Raster Images as an example of ‘Best Practices’, I did not find any prescribed methods or established protocols for digitizing illustrated books. While issues such as quality control, cropping, and metadata are outlined in the document, graphic materials are referred to primarily in the context of technical parameters: grayscale versus colour, resolution, and size (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, 2004).

In all honesty I can’t say how I would digitize these paintings differently because I am not entirely sure now that there is only one best approach in capturing both the textual and visual content. However I would suggest that if one aspect of the book is being captured digitally to highlight its particular form (i.e. fore-edge painting) then all aspects of its form, content aside, should be taken into account. This could mean that in addition to the fore-edge painting, the front and back covers, the spine and the book in a fanned position could also be digitized to provide a more comprehensive and beneficial rendering of the artifact for any audience.

References

Drucker, Johanna, "Modeling Functionality: From Codex to e-book." In SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing, 165-75. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Technical Guidelines For Digitizing Archival Materials For Electronic Access: Creation Of Production Master Files – Raster Images. College Park, MD: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, 2004.

Links

Boston Public Library On the Edge virtual exhibition:

http://foreedge.bpl.org/gallery

Beauties of the Bosphorus—fore-edge painting & Google Books

http://foreedge.bpl.org/node/733#http://foreedge.bpl.org/node/733%20

https://books.google.ca/books?id=TWUGAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA5-IA1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=true