Art & Perception 7 (2019) 238–250
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 DOI:10.1163/22134913-20191113
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: verstege@sas.upenn.edu /
laura.messina@unipd.it
Pictorial Continuous Narratives: Perceptual–
Representational Strategies
Ian Verstegen
1,*
, Tamara Prest
2
and Laura Messina Argenton
3,*
1
University of Pennsylvania, USA
2
Independent Scholar, Italy
3
University of Padova, Italy
Received 30 March 2019; accepted 30 July 2019
Abstract
This qualitative report concerns a larger study on pictorial continuous narrative devised by Alberto
Argenton and developed by the authors in his memory, reporting only a synthesis of the main fndings
obtained through the study of a corpus of 100 artworks on the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. The
study was aimed at identifying the perceptual–representational strategies used by artists to visually
tell this story in the continuous narrative mode. The pilot study, accomplished by three independent
judges (the authors) on the corpus of artworks, adopting phenomenological observation, highlights
four strategies used by artists to distinguish and link the episodes or events constituting the story:
segmentation of episodes or events, time/space separating cues, vectors of direction and repetition of
principal fgures. A description of the above categories accompanied by some illustrative examples
is given.
Keywords
Visual continuous narrative, perceptual organization, representational strategies
In memory of Alberto Argenton
1. Introduction
Studies on narrative, largely developed from the middle of the last century,
have gradually shaped a multidisciplinary feld that includes diferent perspec-
tives of study such as literary criticism, linguistics, philosophy, art history,