Read art or how reading teaches us painting

This article is a proposal for an analysis of reading competence based on five texts about the art world. It presents an approach to the analysis of texts that speak of painting with a double objective: to improve the reading competence and artistic knowledge of readers. The approach of the article is to verify how reading texts about painters, artistic movements, and artistic epochs gives us the preliminary knowledge necessary to contemplate, admire, and understand a painting. Reading about art teaches us art and, in parallel, how to read a painting generated by cognitive mechanisms, similar to the reading strategies that are in place when we read a written text. Reading about art gives us the technical knowledge that makes possible the reading of the painting and its contextualized understanding. On the other hand, reading poetry based on a pictorial work not only helps to understand the picture more, but it also involves an analysis of the creative processes the poet has triggered to transfer the sensations of the painting to the paper, which allows a better reading and understanding of the poetic text because it enables the discovery of the literary resources that hide behind the poetic creation. This fact also highlights how reading about the art world enhances the development of creativity and imagination, both pictorial and poetic. The article analyzes three illustrated albums on picturesque and art history and a novel, and shows how they makes the reader aware of the processes of understanding the text and the picture. It then examines a series of poems about paintings by the Catalan poet Agelet i Garriga that highlight the mechanisms of poetic creation and, consequently, of poetic reading.