ABSTRACT
Examining Masaccio's Rendering of the Tribute Money, Norman Bryson observes that the image sets up a relationship between a semantic grouping that is part of an overall 'textual' function and a seemingly 'innocent' collection of bits and pieces that constitute an excess, a semantic irrelevance. Images used for the purposes of advertising are a case in point, as Bryson observes: Next to an image of a glass of beer, the campaign that the author has in mind juxtaposes further images that are apparently unrelated to the product: a bow, an arrow, and the muscular arms of an archer in leather. Thus the work of art for both Kant and Diderot is a site of formation and deformation. Its mimesis is such that it disrupts the stable functioning of an opposition between nature and art. The notion that still life constitutes the apogee of the 'primacy of the syntagm' is something of an art-historical commonplace.
