You're not moved by painted portraits of Lincoln because no American portrait painter was good enough in Lincoln's day to do the job. Sculpture, that's another topic. Agustus St. Gaudens probably made the best sculptures of Lincoln. Gravitas portraiture aside, some of the best and most compelling drawn likenesses of Lincoln are in caricatures and political cartoons. The absolutely best collection of those is in the Lincoln Museum in Springfield IL. I have two photos of Lincoln taken directly from Hesler's original glass plates from 1860 (200 copies were made in c. 1960). I agree that the photographs of Lincoln, and probably these Hesler images, are unmatched by any paintings of him (and most painted images of Lincoln are copied from photos, then and now).
Roy Harris argues that communication precedes signs; that signs are created in the communication process. If that's so then all words are "nesting words" insofar as their use is what determines their meanings and functions as signs. The traditional notion is that signs are a-priori there, that they have meanings and we use them to communicate. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, January 19, 2011 5:31:56 PM Subject: Re: representation and its sgnification I've been catching up on recent postings, and my overriding impression is that terms like 'signify', 'represent', 'mean', 'stand for', 'sign' are regularly what I'll call "facade" words, or "nesting doll" words, but that's entail a long argument. One narrow but, for me intriguing, question came to mind. My feeble visualizing ability aside, why do I find it hard to imagine any painting of Abraham Lincoln having the impact on me that some of his photographs do?
