Showing Time: Continuous Pictorial Narrative and the Adam and Eve Story

This book concerns a research, originally designed and initiated by Alberto Argenton, on pictorial continuous narrative, understood as a composition comprising at least two scenes, enclosed in the ‘same space’, which represent episodes or events, consisting of actions and/or happenings related to a specific character or characters repeated in the scenes or in some of the scenes that constitute the composition itself. The research was developed assuming as its main theoretical reference the psychology of art of a Gestalt matrix and adopting a phenomenological approach and the interobservational method. The research was meant to answer a specific question: how does the artist solve the problem of telling a story and its unfolding – the episodes that compose it, which have a sequential and therefore temporal progression – using a static medium that both perceptually and representationally is distinguished only by spatial sign-elements? For this purpose, 1000 images of pictorial works of continuous narrative, which can be ascribed to 123 thematic repertoires, were collected, and one of the thematic repertoires, concerning the story of Adam and Eve and consisting of 100 works, was studied in depth.