Relating Renaissance Narrative Painting And Sequential Art: The Creation Of A Hybrid Form

Larkin Ford (Blake Hobby), Honors Program, UNC Ashevile, Asheville, NC 28804

This undergraduate research project investigated the relationship between the narrative techniques used in Renaissance representational painting and those used in contemporary sequential art.  While Renaissance narrative paintings traditionally depicted a single moment, inviting the viewer to decode symbols and create a narrative framework, graphic novels of the late 20^th century employed sequential panels to record multiple moments in time connected by narrative. Despite their essential differences, both forms conveyed used graphic representations to tell stories. Interestingly, some Renaissance paintings depicted characters multiple times within one image, functioning as sequential art without panel divisions. Much of the current perceived difference between the mediums reflects a cultural divide rather than a formal one, since the two forms can be said to exemplify the polarities of “high” and “low” art. In order to research the commonalities and contradictions between these two forms, this project produced a sequential narrative by combining formal and cultural elements of Renaissance narrative painting and sequential art of the past century. Since Renaissance painters developed a nuanced narrative language around recurring Classical and Christian themes, this tradition provided a useful template for the expansion of sequential art’s vocabulary. In bridging the gap between graphic novels and Renaissance painting, this project addressed the following question: How can contemporary sequential art fuse both the Renaissance narrative painting tradition and conventions of the contemporary graphic novel?