Moving images tell story but also still images can tell story. While moving images are telling story in a long way, still images do this by short-path. Images broaden our imagination, arouse emotions and capture universal cultural truths. We can tell story oral, written,performed and visual.
Narrative art
Narrative art is art that tells a story through imagery. Viewer understands the story by reading the image instead of reading a text word by word. It can be a moment in an ongoing story or a sequence of events. Painters and sculptors main aim was telling the entire story in a single glance. Narrative art is as old as humanity. When we examine art history we see that people told stories of heroes, gods and rulers with pictures. Storytelling has an important part in history of visual art. The concept of history painting contain most narrative scenes in traditional Western art since the Renaissance. Painters generally accented the narrative at their paintings by using some technical tactics as using of light and shadow or choice of a medium. However, the most typical narrative paintings made after the Renaissance. For instance Caravaggio’s paintings contain religious contents.He tells stories from bible as a stage.
Narrative art is not only limited to history paintings. From about the seventeenth century we see genre paintings which also tells story from daily life.
So why do we tell stories? When we look at to the past we find political reasons. They generally told stories in order to maintain the power of the ruling class, to educate the society but also to inform the next generations. In the past, aristocrats prefer employed painters instead of writers to tell their stories for them. One of the reason is that there are too many illiterates in the past. But also power of an image to tell stories can not be ignored. Narrative art conveyed the messages differentiation between right and wrong, showed the ideal type of behaviour and evoking a sense of self- regulation in the viewer.
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