Structural Analysis of Intertextual relationships in Baroque Painting(based on Gérard Genette’s Explicit and Implicit Intertextuality)

According to the idea of intertextuality no text is formed by itself separated from other parts; no text is comprehensible without being related with other texts. Accordingly, all branches of science are interlinked to previously existent sciences. Similar to written texts, there is an intertextual relationship governing in painting in general and in classic paintings in particular. This intertextual relationship, during the course of art history, has been represented in certain artworks more vividly than in others. This study aimed to identify and analyze different kinds of intertextual relationship in paintings. On this basis, two paintings of Baroque era were analyzed based on general forms of intertextuality, that is explicit and implicit, posed by Gérard Genette, This study specifically aimed to discover whether it is possible, by analyzing the arrangement of elements and structural parts, to identify the two forms of intertextual relationship creating a semantic relationship between two texts leading to new interpretations. Accordingly, several outstanding Baroque paintings in which signs of one or more paintings are visible were grouped in terms of intertextuality quality by analyzing the structure of the paintings. In this regard, having adopted a deconstructivist approach to read a text, Ali Asghar Gharebaghi(2001) has analyzed one of the paintings of Johannes Vermeer in his article Genealogy of Postmodernism and by raising certain questions, has studied a kind of intertextual discourse between Vermeer’s work and the painting shown in the original work yielding a wider range of interpretations. Again, in Intertextuality in Painting by Wendy Steiner (1985) and in Influence and Intertextuality by Adem Genç (2016), pictorial similarities among the paintings of various perspectives have been examined. Notwithstanding, what has been particularly studied in this research is appreciation of relationship between two pictorial texts in terms of content and intertextuality based on their visual structure. As such, the approach adopted is not only helpful in the analysis process of a painting, but also in how to make references to other visual works.