Pictura, Inscriptio and Subscriptio

As a final note to my 'traveling' panorama, today I realized that I intuitively employed some of the theoretical strategies that Hanno Ehses and Ellen Lupton suggest in their joint article Design Papers: Rhetorical Handbook.

When I created the panorama, I used principles of the didactic emblem books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (see Ottavio Scarlattini (1623-1699) image on this post for an example). Those principles were pictura, inscriptio, and subscriptio. Pictura refers to images; inscriptio, refers to titles or mottos; and, subscriptio refers to narrative text.

Ehses and Lupton say that, "The combination of image and narrative usually results in a riddle, the solution of which comes about through an explanatory third part, the narrative text. An emblematic image is not simply a mute representation but refers to didactic and moral meanings" (Ehses and Lupton 5-6).

While I realized that my rhetorical strategy for this module was not new, it was interesting to see that the intuitive process I used could be justified on another level than the way I justified it in my memo.

Ehses, Hanno and Lupton, Ellen. "Design Papers: Rhetorical Handbook." Cooper Union, NY. 1988. Call letters: P 93.5 . R54, 1988.