ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 examines how human figures are often used to tell a story; to narrate an event, as Lessing described in his analysis of Laocoön; or to explain a step-by-step process. Methods for doing so appear in fine arts pictures of recurring activities and in Hogarth’s visual narratives, as well as in practical pictures in early engineering books and in illustrations in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie that visualize a division of labor. Practical narratives with human forms range from complex, large-scale tasks and processes with multiple agents to contemporary instructional narratives with individual agents and narrowly focused tasks. Visual narratives with human forms have immense temporal elasticity: they can extend over broad stretches of time, integrate past and future, and unfold rapidly as micro-narratives.
