The Text is a Picture

Charles Lock comments, “Linearity of reading is the fundamental principle by which the text is established in modernity as a text. That is to say, when we read a text we do not see an image: the type and size of font, the disposition of words on the page, the very look of the page, are entirely accidental features. A text might be defined as that which, while being visual, is entirely independent of image, scale and perspective. Yet texts were not always thus. We have learnt to speak of the interaction between text and image in medieval illuminated manuscripts. It might, however, be more accurate to say that before modernity — and especially before the development of printing — there was no fixed distinction between text and image. Both text and image were to be read, as they were likewise each to be written : the Greek verb graphein exemplifies the unity of what we now take to be separate activities of writing and drawing, the one pictorial, the other textual.”