Visual metaphor and its narrative function

Abstract

Abstract 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.