Substitution by Image: The Very Idea

The aim of this article is to provide a plausible conceptual model of a specific use of images described as substitution in recent art-historical literature. I bring to light the largely implicit shared commitments of the art historians’ discussion of substitution, each working as they do in a different idiom, and I draw consequences from these commitments for the concept of substitution by image—the major being the distinction between nonportraying substitution and substitution by portrayal. I then develop an argument that substitution by image in the desired, nonportraying sense needs to be thought of in terms of a figurative representation of an image’s subject as a generic object, what I will call its figurative instantiation.