Pinney, C; (2021) Prophetic Pictures Or: What Time is the visual? In: Carroll, T and Walford, A and Walton, S, (eds.) Lineages and Advancements in Material Culture Studies Perspectives from UCL Anthropology. (pp. 158-170). Routledge: London, UK.

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Abstract

This chapter attempts to anchor the dialectic between the representation of antecedent signifiers and futurity in the specific context of a corpus of illustrated nineteenth-century astrological almanacs before then striking out to attempt to explore the unlikely prophetic echoes apparent in photography. The Pythoness of the East, and Raphael’s nominalist appropriation of a Jewish identity, points to the Prophetic Messenger’s role as an agent of cultural critique. In fact, Raphael’s usage owed more to the Renaissance fantasy of picture-writing descended from Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili first published by Aldus Manutius in 1499 in Venice. Raphael’s almanacs were striking for the prominence given to a ‘prophetic hieroglyphic’ published as a frontispiece to each annual issue. This nineteenth-century usage echoes Walter Benjamin’s sense of a ‘picture-writing’ descended from the great Renaissance text Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. For Benjamin, as for Pierre Bourdieu, photographs are allegories, but they are portents of a future for which there might be a key.

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