Ce projet de recherche prendra cours en octobre 2007 pour une durée d'un an. John Baines, professeur d’égyptologie à la Faculty of Oriental Studies de l’Université d’Oxford et Fellow du Queen’s College a bien aimablement accepté de superviser ce travail. Le professeur Baines est un spécialiste de l’analyse de l’iconographie égyptienne et est en outre aguerri aux notions de sémiotique et à l’approche structurale de l’image égyptienne, ainsi qu’aux problèmes méthodologiques qui y sont liés. Le projet a été soutenu à l'ULB par le professeur Thierry Lenain, philosophe, historien de l'art et directeur du Groupe de recherche pluridisciplinaire sur l'image et le texte.

Ce projet est financé par la Fondation Wiener-Anspach.

• Research program:

This project seeks to examine the possibility of applying to ancient Egyptian iconography, the categories of schemes and tropes of the ancient rhetoric, as they have been reinterpreted in modern times by theoreticians of visual semiotics.

In classical rhetoric, the recourse to schemes and tropes was mainly dictated by aesthetic considerations: figures of speech were indeed regarded as “ornatus”, that is to say that they were used with the aim of adorning and enhancing the argumentation of the orator.

Nevertheless, the use of tropes could also pertain to diverse kinds of constraints such as faults in vocabulary. In language, the lack of proper term to denote an object or a concept may necessitate the use of a tropologized term instead (e.g. the term “[bird’s] wing” for a an airplane’s wing or the term “[human] leg” for a table leg). In iconography, a similar constraint due to the lack of proper “iconic term”, often lead to the tropologization of some images. In most cases, it was a matter of depicting abstract ideas or concepts through the tropologization of concrete objects. Thus the depiction of the so-called sandal strap would stand for the abstract notion of “life”. Although it is quite impossible to ascertain nowadays what kind of association of ideas prevailed to mitigate this transfer, there is no doubt that it was of tropological order. Cases of support constraints may also have lead to the use of tropes such as the synecdoche: a bull’s head being used to signify a (whole) bull , or three bulls to signify the herd, for example.

My belief is that a deepened study of the question might reveal other kinds of constraints, this time connected to the search for typicality or decipherability of the image, or also to such ideological filters —harder to identify— as are constituted by cultural conventions, moral prohibitions or taboos.

Thus, the two primary reasons for the use of tropes and schemes in iconography would be (1) of AESTHETIC order and (2) connected to depiction CONSTRAINTS.

As regards, more specifically, the Egyptian image, some of my previous research demonstrated that the use of figures of speech may also reveal (3) INTENTIONS —on the part of the artist— aiming at making the figure of speech participate in the efficiency of the discourse itself. I found two examples of the use of metalepsis (trope) as a bridge leading to the decipherment of hermeneutical levels of signification. And I found one example of the use of chiasmus (scheme) to magically repeat a cyclical sequence connected to cosmological and metaphysical considerations.

This research project is an extension of my previous research on Egyptian iconography that nevertheless presents an original aspect and a completely new development. It takes into account notions that have hardly been explored by Egyptology, although they happened to be most edifying for the study of other disciplines dealing in the competence of both art history and semiotics (that is to say associating aesthetics and discourse) such as propaganda arts, cinema, advertisement or comics.

My aim with this project is to expand and bring a synthetic coherence to what I have until now only partially explored. Therefore it would shed light on our knowledge and understanding at the same time of ancient Egyptian iconography and —through it— of the general mechanisms of thought and epistemology of ancient Egypt.