Pazienza in His Limits: Living Experience and Iconotextual Practice

The analysis of the relationship between verbal and visual textualities can find a favored object of study in the comics: an “iconotextual” device characterized by features comparable to other traditional artistic works – in order to limit ourselves to the “narration by images” mechanically copied we can think about the “moral series” by William Hogarth –, it shows, in the comparison between its figurative elaboration and at least a meaningful part of its verbal solutions, some differential specificities: beyond the inscription of the words in the balloon – with voices and thoughts of the represented subjects – the writing often attends the images with an evident descriptive intention – irreducible to the didactic “reason” – in this way configuring as a form of èkphrasis wherein the correspondence with the other medium doesn’t limit itself only to its relationship with an effective or imagined picture – as in each case of “modern” èkphrasis (“actual” or “notional” èkphrasis) – or to the coincidence between the writer and the visual artist, in other occasions already emerged and found , but it involves also the lead time of the two texts.