Spring 2000
Volume 26, Number 3

Slide lectures, like the photographic technology that made them possible, have had a profound impact on art history; indeed, for many who have passed through university classes, art history is the illustrated lecture. Thus, for several reasons, now is an appropriate moment to consider the rhetorics employed and the knowledges produced by the slide lecture, first, as it is represented and practiced today and, second, as it came to be constituted in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The concern here is for art history as oral practice, an all but ignored subject for this and most other academic disciplines. How do art historians make arguments with slides? Why do audiences accept speaker and reproduction and the conclusions they offer? And, above all, what is a slide, and how does its presence condition the entire presentation?

Art history lectures, as in Wasserstein's play, normally move between the forensic and the epideictic, depending upon the relative proportions of historical detail and critical reaction: the more visual the analysis, the more epideictic the rhetoric. In either mode, language affirms the presence of the visual, so the slide, although a photograph, creates not the "perception of having been there," Roland Barthes's notion of the ontology of a photograph, but a reality that is there, Christian Metz's description of a movie. 6 The projected image is thus less a sign and more a simulacrum of the art object, an entity that in some way is that object itself, or, rather, a thing in itself, a past made present, even as it is understood to be past--hence the rhetorical utility of the forensic and the epideictic.

6. Roland Barthes, "The Rhetoric of the Image," The Responsibility of Forms (New York, 1985), p. 33. See also Christian Metz, "On the Impression of Reality in the Cinema," Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York, 1974), pp. 3Ð15.

Robert S. Nelson teaches in the department of art history and the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago. He has edited Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance (forthcoming 2000). Currently he is working on a book tentatively titled Remembering Holy Wisdom: Hagia Sophia as Medieval Church and Modern Monument.