Text/Image Mixtures

Texts integrated into images fulfill purposes ranging from identifying and classifying to creating narrative or supplying interpretation. Whether in the form of labels, poems, or titles, the text within an image encourages viewer interaction. 

By including a topographical legend in The Palazzo Barberini, for example, Piranesi uses text to document history, as well as to solicit a response from the viewer.  Similarly, in the plates of the Encyclopédie, text is used to identify and to label the objects, actions, and processes shown in the prints.  Unlike Piranesi’s works, however, these prints do not contain legends within the images; instead, a legend precedes these plates in the bound volumes of the work. 

The print The Household Accounts illustrates another use of the text/image mixture.  Here, image is coupled with text through the inclusion of a poem in the lower margin of the print.  While this text is not within the image proper, the placement of the poem on the print incites a dialogue between the image and the text, while it simultaneously privileges a specific interpretation of the image. 

Thus, when text is introduced into an image or its margins, the viewer is no longer confronted by the techniques of artistic illusion alone; text adds another level on which the viewer must interact with the work, complicating the visual experience letter by letter.