Prague School

This chapter focuses on important “prefigurations” of parts of linguistic pragmatics from the late nineteenth century to around 1970 which were informed by a “functional” view of language. We view “functional linguistics” as the study of language that starts its research with a focus on the functions of language in social life: the effects of language use, differentiated as to types of communicators, types of contexts and types of language uses. This includes the analysis of the primarily intended goals of the speech participants in their speaking and reacting as well as the study of the long-time effects of language use in the life of the individual and in the history of the language.
We will confine ourselves to results of functional linguistics that have actually been transmitted to linguistic pragmatics and may be counted among its foundations. Such results are found foremost in the works of four theorists: the German psychologist Karl Bühler (1879–1963), the Czech scholar of English Vilém Mathesius (1882–1945), the Russian general linguist and scholar of Slavonic languages Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and the British general linguist Michael Halliday. Of these, we will discuss the relevant theories of the first three.  Bühler proposed an influential model of three fundamental “language functions”, which Jakobson came to extend to the model with six such functions that has had a strong impact on pragmatics, the ethnography of communication and social semiotics.  Furthermore, both Bühler and Jakobson analysed the functioning of the deictic elements of language, emphasising their role in the “situated” nature of language use. Mathesius, who was more specifically concerned with the comparison of living languages as to their possibilities of expression, provided the foundations of the functional analysis of utterances in terms of the notions “theme” and “rheme” (“topic”–“comment”), which has become one of the stock items of pragmatic analysis. For their ideas in this domain, both Bühler and Mathesius were indebted to the work of the older and less well-known psychologically oriented German linguist Philipp Wegener (1848–1916), who held views that also show a strong affinity to those of modern linguistic pragmatics. In our view, these insights still provide valid reasons to integrate the description of elements of the situational context into linguistic analysis itself and thus to question the wisdom of completely separating research into the system of language from pragmatics, the study of its use.

Many questions remain open on the long stays in Italy of Joseph Heintz the elder (Basel 1564-Prague 1609), although it has been the subject of a rich bibliography that has extensively investigated his activities as draftsman, painter and architect.
This study aims to offer a contribution to the reconstruction of the painter’s relationships with artists and collectors, and the culture that deeply changed his painting and, through him, influenced his contemporaries in Basel and at the court of Prague.
The first long visit to Italy of the painter began in Rome (from 1584 to 1587) at the workshop of the Flemish Antonis Santvoort, where he studied the collection of drawings by Hans Speckaert, and mainly the works of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance (Michelangelo, Raphael, Polidoro, Federico Zuccari). It is, however, surprising that the visit to Florence  (in 1587) did not  lead to studies taken from paintings or frescoes, but only from works by Giambologna, witnessing the very familiar relationship between the sculptor and the swiss painter.
The numerous drawings of Heintz the Elder from the antiquities and the best known models by Giambologna attest that he acquired awareness of the infinite variety of attitudes that a painter could have found in a sculpted figure. The practice of «paragone delle arti», together with the precepts theorized by Benvenuto Cellini, were spread by Heintz the Elder upon his return to Basel, involving his teacher, Hans Bock, as evidenced by two drawings by the latter which provide eight points of view of Giambologna’s Venerina.
In addition to the derivations from works by the Flemish master already reported by several scholars, four more works are added in this study. In particular, in the drawing of an athlete attributed to Heintz the Elder and dated 1589, we recognize the model of Giambologna’s Ercole with the club, seen from behind, the only graphic memory known in the sixteenth century.
Reconsideration of a previously neglected testimony, the artist's biography written by Marco Boschini in the Carta del navegar pittesco (1660), provides new light on the favorite painters of Heintz the Elder during his stay in Venice (1587-1588/89): Pordenone, Titian and Tintoretto. Both, Heintz and Tintoretto,  shared the interest for the study of a small seated and naked male sculpture (from Giuliano de’ Medici by Michelangelo). The same model was also taken up later by Palma the Younger, as here identified.
The second long visit to Rome (from 1592 to 1595) of Heintz the Elder, sent, as his court painter, by Emperor Rudolf II, opened him the doors of the great collections of Roman antiquities. His acquaintance  with the Cesi collection is proved by the group of Pan and Dafni drawing, signed and dated 1593; to it is here added evidence of his knowledge, in the same place, of the Leda and the swan group, reproduced in a series of drawings and in an unpublished painting which we cautiously propose to include among his works.
The persistent success of the graphic corpus of images collected in Rome by Heintz the Elder gave rise, in the following decades, in Prague and Augsburg, to a series of copies by his students (in particular by Hans Friederich Schorer). Some of these drawings, in turn, testify about his lost ones, and help to expand his repertoire. In the same way, it has been possible to identify traces of his works in his son’s, Joseph Heintz the younger. This occurs in the triple representation of the statue of Cincinnato, which Heintz the Elder had seen and studied in the Montalto collection, of which only two printed representations are known in the XVI century.
Finally, this study examines a small painting attributed to Heintz the Elder - Venus, Cupid and a male figure - as an example of a work built around a model by Giambologna and two figures from ancient sculptures, attesting Heintz's knowledge of the Farnese collection and of another Roman one not yet identified. The painting, whose history remains obscure until 1741, enjoyed such a great success in the eighteenth century, to be reproduced, in large size, in an unpublished canvas by Anton Franz Hampisch representing an ideal picture gallery.

In the late 1960s, Yuri Lotman, a founder of the Tartu-Moscow Scool of Semiotics, prepared, in coperation with his colleagues, a two-volume edition of selected writings of Jan Mukařovský, a founder of Czech literary structuralism and semiotic aesthetics. Although Mukařovský claimed allegiance to Marxism as early as the 1950s and was considered politically acceptable in the USSR, both his structuralist past and Lotman’s structuralist backround were too alien and suspicious for the ruling orthodox Marxists and Soviet censorship authorities, especially after the 1968 “Prague Spring”. The Russian edition of Mukařovský saw the light of day only after the collapse of the Soviet Union (and Lotman’s death). The article offers a detailed reconstruction of the history of the initial, unrealized edition based on numerous archival documents.