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Quiet Bell: seeing silence in Millet's The Angelus

by John Harvey

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Quiet Bell: seeing silence in Millet's The Angelus 23:33
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'An Acoustic Angelus' 01:32

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The Angelus (1857–9) portrays two peasants. They are standing still, prayerfully reciting bible verses (aloud, possibly) against an acoustic backdrop: the sound of the church bell that summons them to worship. The painting conveys only a partial account of the scene, for we hear neither their speech nor the ringing.

These aspects of the narrative can no more escape the vacuum of two-dimensional space than the picture-plane accommodate the third dimension, literally. Whereas physical volume and spatial relations may be rendered, illusionistically, by the conventions and techniques of perspective, the implied acoustic volume in some representational images has no comparable artifice to assist. Sound can only be connoted through the depiction of its source, course, and effect, or else ‘heard’, by a receptive imagination, in the mind’s ear.

The paper discusses several interrelated aspects of the relationship between sound and figurative representation suggested by this painting. It examines: visual signifiers of sound (objects, substitutions for speech acts, and non-verbal communicators such as gestures and physiognomics); silence as a function, theme, and attribute, and as a dysfunction, limitation, and abstraction of images; silence as a condition for religious reflection; stillness (both as a represented subject and as a condition of painting – the frozen moment of time) and silence; the percipient’s/audient’s reception of silence in images; and comparisons between the visualization of quietude (in paintings such as The Angelus) and of sound in representations of, for instance, conversations, musical performance, and scenes of battle and riot. (Some images are more silent than others.)

The paper is followed by a recording of the sound presentation.

credits

released May 3, 2021

Personnel: John Harvey and two French students (on 'An Acoustic Angelus').

Instrumentation for sound presentation: Adobe Audition CS6.

Context: Paper presented at ‘The Listening Art Historian’, Art History and Sound Workshop Series, III, Research Forum, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London (30 May 2013).

Sources for sound presentation: originated and derived field recordings.

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John Harvey Aberystwyth, UK

I’m a practitioner and historian of sound art and visual art, and Emeritus Professor of Art at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University, UK. My research field is the sonic and visual culture of religion. I explore the sonic articulations of the Christian religion by engaging visual, textual, and audible sources, theological and cultural ideas, and systemic and audiovisualogical processes. ... more

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