Working Thesis.

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for those of you who were asking about my thesis: this is the bare-bones precis.

"My final project pivots on the words “original” and “translation:” I am interested in translations of portraits that break stylistically and theologically from their archetype. The two archetypes and their translations I will be analyzing in this project are:

1.      Albrecht Durer’s 1500 Munich Self-Portrait, for which I have selected my object analysis 1. (translation of Christ Pantocrator)

2.      Francis Bacon’s 1953 portrait of Pope Innocent X, for which I have selected my object analysis 2. (translation of Diego Velazquez’s 1650 portrait of Innocent X)

I am interested in telling the story of these translations of religious art. I do not wish to merely compare the original to the translation, but I want to show how the original informs its translation and how the translation completes the original. My theoretical platform, therefore, approaches the correspondence as one that could operate within a number of historical trajectories. Specifically, I am interested in the overlap of two histories: a stylistic/artistic one and a theological one. I hope that in telling the story of these pieces of art, the reader also hears a religious story. I wish to communicate that visual literacy informs, supplements, and, at its greatest heights, is theological literacy.

I will mainly be using Benjamin to organize my paper. The two essays I have in mind are “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “The Task of the Translator.” I also anticipate drawing upon other aesthetic texts that envision art (or everything) historically – so Germanic aesthetics mostly. Lessing, Hegel, Nietzsche, Adorno, etc. are possibilities.

Also, I am in the habit of titling my papers after I have finished them, so unfortunately I do not have a title yet." 

Velazquez/Bacon

Christ Pantocrator/Durer