Temporality as a Hidden Structural Axis of Visual Art

Art historical methodology possesses sophisticated tools for analyzing iconography, style, patronage, and symbolism, yet has tended to treat temporality either as the historical period of an artwork’s production or as the narrative time depicted within it. This paper proposes an additional analytical perspective: temporality as a hidden structural axis through which visual form itself organizes meaning, manifest in space, light, colour, memory, and presence rather than confined to represented content. Drawing on Erwin Panofsky’s account of perspective as symbolic form, Paul Ricœur’s theory of narrative time, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics of the artwork as event, Hans Belting’s shift from a history of art to a history of the image, Umberto Eco’s concept of the open work, and Keith Moxey’s account of heterochronic reception, the paper argues that each artistic era does not simply paint differently but visualizes time differently. This claim is tested across a range of traditions — the contrast between Renaissance and Baroque spatial organization, Caravaggio’s use of light as a kairotic rupture, the temporal ontology of Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic sacred space, and the compressed, multi-perspectival temporality of Cubism and Expressionism — establishing temporality not as one thematic category among others but as a productive analytical framework with implications for emerging methodologies in Digital Art History and computer vision. This working paper forms part of an ongoing research programme on time as an organizing principle of visual form in art. It develops methodologically a claim traced historically in D. S. Georgieva, The Problem of Time in Painting (Zenodo, 2026), DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21325537, and narrows toward the sacred-temporality framework of D. S. Georgieva, Visual Chronotypes of Christian Art (Zenodo, 2026), DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21297721.