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In Roland Barthes’s ‘Michelet, l’histoire et la mort’ (1951), Michelet’s linear journey through centuries of French history is contrasted with the panoramic ‘tableau’ that holds together, in a moment of euphoric understanding, otherwise unconnected points in time. This chapter moves from this play of reversible and irreversible time to that of centred and decentred spaces in an unpublished section of Barthes’s 1966–7 seminar, ‘Le discours de l’histoire’. It suggests that Barthes’s discussion of time and space, which draws on the work of Vernant, Levêque, and Vidal-Naquet, and is applied to Michelet, Machiavelli, and Bossuet, can be mapped onto a shift from a structuralist focus on intra-relations between elements of a structure (as in Lévi-Strauss’s account of totemism) to the nascent post-structuralist emphasis on excentric structures associated with Derrida’s notion of ‘play’. The excentric centre is shown to underpin Barthes’s analysis of Michelet’s Tableau de la France, whereby Jakobson’s account of the poetic function of language is applied to Michelet’s rhetorical construction of the geography of France: the sequential ordering of the outlying regions according to their antithetical characteristics is ‘poetic’ in its form; by contrast, the ‘prosaic’ centre (the Île de France) absorbs and neutralises these differences.

This chapter translates the definitions of the Weyl group multiple Dirichlet series into the language of crystal bases. It reinterprets the entries in these arrays and the accompanying boxing and circling rules in terms of the Kashiwara operators. Thus, what appeared as a pair of unmotivated functions on Gelfand-Tsetlin patterns in the previous chapter now takes on intrinsic representation theoretic meaning. The discussion is restricted to crystals of Cartan type Aᵣ. The Weyl vector, denoted by ρ‎, is considered as an element of the weight lattice, and the bijection between Gelfand-Tsetlin patterns and tableaux is described. The chapter also examines the λ‎-part of the multiple Dirichlet series in terms of crystal graphs.

It is generally assumed that a ‘triumphal painting’ glorified and commemorated the general's martial deeds by way of a twofold display: first in his triumphal procession, later in a temple or a public place. This chapter argues that commemorative paintings placed in temples and public places were made directly for static display and not for show in the triumphal processions. Battle scenes in the triumphs were other kinds of representations, produced in various media, such as models, sculptures, and dramatic tableaux. Besides war scenes, the triumph included personifications of peoples and rivers that were staged as living captives. Representations of cities, on the other hand, were shown primarily as models of rich materials, such as ivory and silver. The preference for models over personifications reveals a Roman fear of offending the gods by displaying divine, or quasi-divine beings such as cities as living creatures in fetters.

The symmetric group S_r and Young tableaux are defined. It is shown that the actions of the symmetric group and unitary group commute, therefore SU(n) tensors can be classified by the symmetric group. The cycle notation is described. Symmetrizer and antisymmetrizer are defined and expressed in terms of Young tableaux. Rules are given for forming Young tableaux for a given Young pattern. The general Young pattern provides an irreducible representation of the symmetric group and can be specified by the partition (f ₁, f ₂,…, f_n ). The number of different tableaux for a given pattern gives the dimension of the corresponding representation of the symmetric group S_r . Biographical notes on Young are given.

In his famous photographs of children and in the Alice books, Lewis Carroll often displays a surprising willingness to jettison the solitary Child of Nature paradigm and explore instead the complex relationship that links children to adults, himself to his beloved child friends. Rather than single-mindedly insisting that a firm barrier separates young from old, Carroll frequently blurs this line, characterizing the child not as an untouched Other, but as a collaborator enmeshed in a complicated relationship with the adults who surround her. As in the case of the female children’s authors studied in Chapter 1, his work reveals a keen awareness of the fact that children are always already involved with (and influenced by) adults. But whereas they seem comfortably certain that children can nevertheless develop into creative agents who help shape their own life stories, Carroll remains unsure. He hopes that children can function as empowered collaborators, but—like Stevenson—he fears that the power imbalance inherent in the adult-child relationship ensures that all adults can offer children is a fraudulent illusion of reciprocity. Even his own cherished brand of nonsense literature, he suggests, can function as a form of coercion that pushy adults foist upon profoundly uninterested children.

The contribution of the Physiocratic School and the Italian School (Milan and Naples) is analysed. This is followed by a thorough investigation of Smithian's theoretical system, at both the philosophical level and the economic one. The Smithian orthodoxy is compared to the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham.

This chapter discusses François Quesnay's contributions to macroeconomics. The “Tableau économique”, the “Economic Picture”, was Quesnay's visual representation of the macroeconomy. The “Tableau économique” clearly shows a visual circular flow of income, expenditure, and output. It was the first macroeconomic diagram showing the importance of expenditure, the interrelationships between income, expenditure, and output, and the interdependencies between different sectors of the economy.

Sir William Hamilton’s Greek vase collection, assembled at Naples between the 1760s and 1790s, became a turning point in the reception of ancient material culture and hence in perceptions of classical antiquity. This chapter compares three angles of approach to the collection, each corresponding to a strand of distributed cognition. Extended cognition is represented by the catalogue which made the collection available to the reading public; embodied cognition is represented by the dance performances of Emma Hamilton, Sir William’s wife, who based her tableaux vivants of ancient life around the images represented on the vases; and enactive cognition by the aesthetic theory of the ‘feeling imagination’ developed by philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who visited the Hamiltons at Naples and commented unfavourably on Emma’s performances. I argue that Herder’s rejection of Emma’s kinetic reception of ancient artwork was predicated in part on his reluctance to place physical limitations on simulated movement.

According to Rudolf Arnheim, “much sculpture lacks the essential quality of life, namely, motion.” This is why, no doubt, marble statues and plaster casts played such an important role in the works of early photographers of the late 1830s and 1840s, who had to cope with long exposure times. Given this perspective, what can be said about the relation between sculpture and film, a medium often first and foremost characterized by motion? This book deals with a wide range of magical, mystical, cultural, historical, formal, and phenomenological interactions between the two media. Apart from the contrast between stillness and movement, sculpture and film can be seen as opposites in other ways. Whereas sculpture is an artistic practice that involves not only static but also material, three-dimensional, and durable objects, the cinema produces kinetic, immaterial, two-dimensional, and volatile images.

Some compositions of this period emerged from an inscrutable, sheltered corner of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's mind, while most were affected by what he called “servitude,” or work obligations. Progress and delay marked the Second Piano Concerto, which was sketched in two weeks, composed in less than two months but delayed for another five, in part by a hurried commission early in 1880 for a piece called “Montenegro at the Moment of Receiving Russia's Declaration of War against Turkey” to accompany a program of tableaux vivants comprising a “Dialogue of the Genius of Russia and History.” It celebrated the 25th anniversary of Alexander II's reign, to which others contributed. Tchaikovsky wrote “Montenegro” in six days, just to have the performance canceled and the score lost. He composed nothing else before June 1880 and no new orchestral work until September. He was still uncertain about the 1812 Overture in late September.

This chapter presents the fashion for tableaux vivants in nineteenth-century culture as a prefiguration of cinema. Apart from including literal representations of tableaux vivants performed on the stage, the cinema of the early 1900s appropriated the aesthetics of tableaux vivants in its attempts to develop a new model of narrative cinema. Strikingly, these practices were revived in post-war European modernist cinema, which often included tableaux vivants in line with its interest in duration and stillness. By incorporating tableaux vivants into their films, modernist filmmakers attempted at determining the specificity of their medium – movement was juxtaposed to stasis, pictorial or sculptural space to cinematic space, iconic immediacy to filmic duration, and so forth. These issues are particularly dealt with in the context of a discussion of Pasolini's La Ricotta and Godard's Passion, which both are films about the making of a film. In both works, the self-referential aspect is thus explicit and, strikingly, both films-in-the-film consist of tableaux vivants based on famous paintings.

This chapter talks about mise-en-scène as a French phrase that best translates in English as 'put into the scene', which includes setting, décor, costume, props, body language, and make-up. It explains how mise-en-scène conveys meaning and includes information concerning character emotion, psychological state, mood, atmosphere, historical time, genre, and point in the narrative. It also points out ways in which mise-en-scène dominates some films as they are constructed as cinematic tableau, such as a series of pictures or paintings. The chapter describes Guillermo Del Toro's vision of the world of Pan's Labyrinth, in which there are clear parallels between the real-world characters and sets and the imaginary ones. It explores how Pan's Labyrinth gives centre stage to the power of the imagination and the need to retain imagination in order to counter point the horrors of the real-world.

In its theatricality, caricature-style book illustration approximates the tableau style popular in the nineteenth century. This chapter examines book illustrations by George Cruikshank, Phiz, Richard Doyle, John Leech, and Robert Cruikshank that, like tableaux, capture a dramatic moment in works by Dickens, Ainsworth, and Thackeray. With lighting, props, clever casting, and detail-laden backdrops, the caricaturists staged scenes ranging from the sensational to the sentimental, from the deeply psychological to the broadly comic. “Caricature: A Theatrical Development” adds two Victorian author-illustrators to this list of recognized caricaturists. Better known as an author than an illustrator, William Makepeace Thackeray designed theatrical pictorial capital letters, vignettes, tailpieces, and full-page engravings for his best-known Vanity Fair (1848) and cast his heroine Becky Sharp in various stage roles. To dramatize Alice’s transformations, Lewis Carroll recalled popular caricature techniques in his illustrations for the first version of Alice in Wonderland (1865) entitled Alice’s Adventures Underground(1864) at a time when realistic illustration held sway. This chapter also examines artistic limitations and scandals (e.g. Robert Seymour’s suicide, Cruikshank’s claim of authoring Dickens’s works) that led to a dismissal or devaluation of the caricaturists and a privileging of the Academy trained artists who entered the field of illustration in the 1850s.

This analysis of two of Jeff Wall's most important early photographic transparencies highlights the fact that his subject matter can be understood as a male artist's control of what is imagined as female-gendered physical and theoretical space. The initiation and subsequent extension of this operation in European and American critical discourse about his work is discussed in relationship to anthropological research on settler colonial societies’ territorial conflicts; specifically settlers’ need to develop cultural narratives that rationalize their control over other populations within a given geographic area. Such an approach contrasts with the prevailing commentaries by other critics, some of which are discussed at length (Donald Kuspit, Arielle Pélenc, Kaja Silverman and Michael Fried). These critics’ analyses of Wall’s work downplay or ignore the feminist subject matter in the work in favour of discussing the images' relationship to the avant-garde potential of technical reproduction or to the history of modern painting.

Vancouver artists’ concerns with discourses of theatricality and female gendered spaces are argued as important links between the defeatured landscapes of the 1968-1971 period and the development of large narrative photographs after 1975. The importance of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades to this historical thread are covered in detail, including the documented impact of his work Étant donnés: 1. La chute d/eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage(1946-66) on Jeff Wall’s transition towards the tableau format. Using Étant donnés as a fruitful formal and conceptual segue, the feminist content in several of Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace’s works from the mid-to-late 1970s are analysed. This demonstrates how both artists actively integrated feminist theory and ideas into their visual work, even as they directed critical attention away from it by instead stressing their works relationship the history of European avant-garde critique within modernism.

In brief, we may conclude that Shaw incorporates these two settings, which recur with regularity throughout his works, as a way of providing a complete dramatic experience, these settings becoming an extension of the characters, conflicts, and themes as well as a supplement to the language experience of his plays. So while a study of Shaw’s use of gardens and libraries is a rather limited, focused study of Shaw’s use of settings, it does portray Shaw as going beyond mere language for his dramatic affects and reveal other dimensions of Shaw’s dramaturgy such as his visual acumen, his sense of performance values, his use of setting as metaphor, and his revelation of characters through settings, showing him to be the complete playwright.

The Delsarte movement expanded the oratorical poses of elocutionists into tableaux of Grecian statuary performed to poetic recitation or music, justified by the belief that a spiritual essence could be expressed through women’s bodies. Over one hundred Delsarte performances took place ca. 1888-1920 in fifty Iowa communities, often as benefits for community betterment. Music was essential to these exhibitions, pacing movements, and clarifying meaning, through the use of popular songs. Amateur female practitioners’ attempts to associate their bodies with the highest art of Western European culture through tableaux and pantomime were satirized in Meredith Willson’s 1957 Broadway musical, The Music Man.