In Boston, on March 21 2025, four scholars and an engaged audience explored the topic of “Text-in-Image” during our session at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. Panel co-organizers Nicholas Herman and Barbara Williams Ellertson had invited work that explored the unique affordances of script within a visual field, dealt with the synergies of image and script, or considered writing as a blurred medial zone within a visual work of art.
Each of the four panelists approached the phenomenon of “text-in-art” from a different perspective. Considered in concert, their studies illuminated the conceptual complexity of the topic.
In “Book and Paper in Bruegel’s Land of Cockaigne,” Art DiFuria explored the “stage set” of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s image of a mythical place of luxuriant contemplation. In this view, the unopened book and un-read paper combine to signify a crux, an interrogative, open moral dilemma. The refractive function of the book and paper mean that only the viewer can determine the book’s meaning: has it been consumed? Is it a call to action? In this image, DiFuria finds that the artist’s use of text-bearing objects requires intellectual engagement beyond the visual analogies of this scene of surfeit. See BASIRA artwork 1531.
Marsha Libina presented “Sacrilegious Hands: The Burning of Idols in Diego Munõs Carmago’s History of Tlaxcala.” In this 1581–84 account of the conquest of Tlaxcala, Nahua illustrators portray the destruction of their god-images by Franciscan friars. The drawings bear two sets of inscriptions, one in Spanish, and one in Nahuatl; the different languages interpolate fire as either destruction or renewal. Written language in this context defines and steers the meaning of the image; the interpretation encoded in Nahuatl might not have been legible to Spanish authorities. This leads us to a conclusion that we can best understand the relationship between text and image in this collaboratively-narrated history as one of interdependent dialogue.
Gregor Meinecke’s paper, “Spheres of Legibility: The Inscribed Halos of Bergognone” focused on the incised script with which Bergognone not only makes his script oscillate between legibility and illegibility, but dissolves the borders between script and ornament. Engaging the viewer, Bergognone forces a deciphering process of the hidden inscription. One wonders whether the artist has used this partial obscurity to evoke the process of revelation through prayer. See BASIRA artwork 506.
In “Pseudo-Mongol Codices in Assisi,” presented remotely, Yuefeng Wu identified potent cultural connections in the vault fresco of the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi. Here, in the Isaac Master’s portrait of Saint Jerome, an open book displays a mystifying script, similar to pseudo-Kufic (imitation Arabic) inscriptions found in other medieval images (Giotto). By identifying the script as Phagspa, however, Wu revealed the artist’s tacit connections between the Umbrian town of Assisi and Mongolian culture as well as lands further east. The text functions in a meta-visual fashion far beyond the narrative of the image itself, one which Wu ascribes to the ambitions of the Roman church to extend its influence globally.
DeFuria and Meinecke, then, presented us with text used to engage or make demands of the viewer. Libina explicated multi-layered dialogues embedded in an image’s texts, where language enacts a tacit dynamic of interpretation. And Yufeng Wu’s identification of a script used far from the hills of Umbria demonstrates the cultural leaps that “text-in-image” can make.
