…several sequential events are happening at once? For example, an old woodcut of a Shakespeare’s King Lear in a book I’m looking at has the king in full regalia in one corner, the storm in another, and the gouging of Gloucester’s eyes in another, but the whole seems to be one artwork rather than a storyboard; I have a similar drawing of Paradise Lost in which numerous parts of the poem are happening at once, and I suppose it could be argued the Bayeaux Tapestry is this type of work.
Collage would seem semi-appropriate, but I’m guessing that this has a name.
I’m not sure “montage” is quite right: I think what the OP is talking about is a single picture that shows multiple images of its subject at different moments in time.
Indian miniature paintings of large-scale events like processions or tiger hunts are often in this form: you see the king arriving and being received by his host in one part of the picture, then in another the royal hunters are getting on their elephants, then in another they’re shooting the tiger, then tracking the wounded animal through the woods, and so on. The multiple images depict a sequence of events in time, but they’re not shown in “multiple frames”, as it were. They’re all located in the same large-scale setting which is a single landscape or cityscape.
That make any sense? What is the name for this form of visual presentation, anyway?
They’re serial artworks. A serial painting, a serial drawing, a serial embroidery, etc. I don’t know if there’s a more unusual term of art, but this is how everyone referred to it in my searches.
PM:definition of montage
“A single pictorial composition made by juxtaposing or superimposing many pictures or designs.”
I think that would do it.
No, I don’t think so. All the montages I’ve seen are juxtapositions of separate images, each in its own “frame”, so to speak. Where the composition is deliberately “choppy”, and the separate images just bump into or overlap one another. We’re talking about multiple images that are all integrated into the same background or pictorial setting.
To see what I mean, check out these examples of photographic montage (wedding photographer ad). Then see the picture and description of the tiger-hunt painting I linked to above. See the difference in composition that I’m talking about?
“Continuous narrative” sounds like the term we’re looking for here: “pictoral convention of a continuous narrative in which a series of activities occur within the same frame”. Thanks, capybara.
PM:Maybe the OP is thinking of frontispiece.
I don’t think “frontispiece” has anything to do with this particular “pictoral convention” that we’re talking about here. A frontispiece is just an introductory illustration at the start of a book. You may be right that many frontispieces use the convention of “continuous narrative”, but I’ve never seen one that did. I don’t think the term “frontispiece” in any way implies the use of continuous narrative in the composition of the picture.
Here’s an example, a frontispiece from a Bible. It shows several scenes from the bible all happening at once, there’s Adam & Eve, the Crucifixion, possibly Lazarus, and I’ll let Bible scholars identify the rest.
I’ve often seen this type of illustration used as a frontispiece. This is the sort of thing you mean, isn’t it?
A few more images described as *montage *by their creator.
