Springer has just published the book Showing Time: Continuous Pictorial Narrative and the Adam and Eve Story. In Memory of Alberto Argenton, by Laura Messina Argenton, Tiziano Agostini, Tamara Prest and Ian Verstegen.
This book develops a study designed by Alberto Argenton to investigate the perceptual-representational strategies used by artists to show time in pictorial images, which derives from a specific research question: How does a visual artist manage to narrate a story, which has a sequential and therefore temporal progression, using a static medium consisting solely of spatial sign elements and, what is more, in a single image?
The special case of images of continuous pictorial narrative was used to address this problem. The hypotheses formulated by Argenton in this regard have been verified in several stages of research, developed in accordance with theories of Gestalt psychology, Argenton’s own previous studies, in particular those based on thematic repertoires (Argenton, 2008/2019), and art-historical findings on continuous narrative.
The research analysed 1000 pictorial narratives of stories ─ from the 3rd to the 17th century, contained in individual pictures and pertaining to 123 thematic repertoires ─ deepening the study of the thematic repertoire concerning the story of Adam and Eve.
Book presentations and contents here