Art and new media: Vermeer's work under different semiotic sistems

Abstract

The twentieth century was responsible for the revival of the visual arts, lending techniques to literature, in particular, after the advent of cinema. This visual revival is illustrated by the intersemiotic translations of "Girl with a Pearl Earrign": a recent low-budget movie was responsible for the revival of ordinary public interest in an art masterpiece from the seventeenth century. However, it was the book about the portrait that catalyzed this process of rejuvenation by verbalizing the portrait and inspiring the cinematographic adaptation, thereby creating the intersemiotic web. The objective of this dissertation is to analyze the visual revival via the intersemiotic translations of the work of the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. The relationship between verbal and non-verbal texts is deemed translation, and includes the process of intersemiotic translation of verbal text adaptations to other media. The literary work, built on ekphrastic descriptions, is a type of novel called a Künstlerroman. Concerning the movie adaptation, in addition to the study of ekphrasis, I intend to show how cuts, additions and shuffling of scenes affetcted, or not, the core of the story. Additionally, I shall investigate the effect of the painter's works on the film's photography from the point of view of Gérard Genette and his proposed concept of transtextuality, which has been appropriated and applied to film studies by Robert Stam. Finally, I will confirm the study of recycling within a general theory of repetition proposed by James Naremore through an overview of Vermeer's influence on contemporary art and media production.