Patterns of Orientation: Lateral Deixis and Viewer Positioning in Early Modern Art Writing

This project investigates early modern art description as a historically situated practice that shaped spatial orientation, viewer positioning, and perceptual engagement through language. Focusing on the 17th and 18th centuries, it examines how lateral deixis ‒ verbal references to “left” and “right” ‒ functioned as a key rhetorical and cognitive device in verbal renderings of artworks. It addresses one central research question: How did early modern practices of art writing use lateral deixis to structure spatial orientation, configure viewer positioning, and shape the ontology of the image? Drawing on a multilingual corpus of texts by authors such as Giovan Pietro Bellori, Denis Diderot, and the Schlegel brothers, as well as lesser-known writers, the project pursues four main objectives: (1) to develop a systematic typology of lateral deixis in art descriptions, distinguishing viewer-based from artwork-based orientation strategies; (2) to analyze how these deictic patterns reflect and shape historically specific ways of engaging with artworks, ranging from immersive involvement to detached observation; (3) to examine how these strategies were adopted across different periods, languages, and social settings, including how they intersect with gendered modes of perception and distinct rhetorical traditions; and (4) to investigate how such deictic practices contributed to shaping the ontological status of artworks, configuring them as animated bodies, performative spaces, or epistemic objects within early modern regimes of visuality and knowledge. Combining close reading of historical texts with linguistic annotation, digital corpus analysis, and contextual approaches from art history and cultural anthropology, the project ultimately aims to ground a historical investigation of orientation at the crossroads of artworks, artists, and beholders – as well as writers and readers, their mental images and imaginative frameworks. By exploring the role of the body in shaping image orientation through verbal description, the project offers new empirical and theoretical insights into the conception of description as a mode through which language actively stages, structures, and enacts the viewing experience. It thus opens new transdisciplinary perspectives on the historical dynamics of spectatorship and on the rhetorical construction of artistic agency. Its conceptual framework not only sheds new light on early modern art writing, but also engages directly with current debates on mediality and embodied perception, gaining renewed urgency as AI reshapes how words generate images.