paintings are narrated and narrative is pictorialized

"Written by 2006 Nobel Prize laureate Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red suggests a new reading in the light of the new ekphrastic poetics.
(...)
The novel takes place in sixteenth century Istanbul, which was then the capital city of the Ottoman Empire. The sultan requires his artists to prepare a secret book that contains Western style pictures in it. However, that was problematic at the time as painting except for miniature was forbidden in the Ottoman Empire, which had adopted Islamic tradition. A miniature did not stand for itself but only ornamented and completed writing. In other words, the word was superior to the image and the image served the word. However, being of an interdisciplinary nature, the novel searches for a way to collapse the word-image hierarchy (2011: 144). The paintings are narrated and the narrative is pictorialized. The two interlace and the boundaries blur. In that aspect, the statement of one of the major characters of the novel is striking: ‘Poetry and painting, words and colo[u]r, these things are brothers to each other, as you well know’

(daqui)

também aqui, no Guardian, painting with words-