Proverbs in Visual Form
From ancient times, people around the world have recorded proverbs in visual form. This has been done in two ways. First, proverbs have been written to be displayed, oftentimes in a decorative manner, such as on pottery, cross-stitch, murals, kangas (East African women's wraps), and quilts.
Secondly, proverbs have often been visually depicted in a variety of media, including paintings, etchings, and sculpture. Jakob Jordaens painted a plaque with a proverb about drunkeness above a drunk man wearing a crown, titled The King Drinks. Probably the most famous examples of depicting proverbs are the different versions of the paintings Netherlandish Proverbs by the father and son Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Pieter Brueghel the Younger, the proverbial meanings of these paintings being the subject of a 2004 conference, which led to a published volume of studies (Mieder 2004a). Another famous painting depicting some proverbs and also idioms (leading to a series of additional paintings) is Proverbidioms by T. E. Breitenbach. Corey Barksdale has even produced a book of paintings with specific proverbs and pithy quotations. The British artist Chris Gollon has painted a major work entitled "Big Fish Eat Little Fish]", a title echoing Bruegel's painting Big Fishes Eat Little Fishes.
Sometimes well-known proverbs are pictured on objects, without a text actually quoting the proverb, such as the three wise monkeys who remind us "Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil". When the proverb is well known, viewers are able to recognize the proverb and understand the image appropriately.
A bibliography on proverbs in visual form has been prepared by Mieder and Sobieski (1999).
In an abstract non-representational visual work, sculptor Mark di Suvero has created a sculpture titled "Proverb", which is located in Dallas, TX, near the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center.
Some artists have used proverbs and anti-proverbs for titles of their paintings, alluding to a proverb rather than picturing it. For example, Vivienne LeWitt painted a piece titled "If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?", which shows neither foot nor shoe, but a woman counting her money as she contemplates different options when buying vegetables.
Read more about this topic: Proverb
Famous quotes containing the words proverbs, visual and/or form:
“A glad heart makes a cheerful countenance, but by sorrow of heart the spirit is broken.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Proverbs 15:13.
“I may be able to spot arrowheads on the desert but a refrigerator is a jungle in which I am easily lost. My wife, however, will unerringly point out that the cheese or the leftover roast is hiding right in front of my eyes. Hundreds of such experiences convince me that men and women often inhabit quite different visual worlds. These are differences which cannot be attributed to variations in visual acuity. Man and women simply have learned to use their eyes in very different ways.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)
“I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single—and singular—piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.”
—Joseph Epstein (b. 1937)