The gaze from above : reflections on cosmic eyes in visual culture 9789042946156, 9789042946163, 9042946156

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ART & RELIGION 11 The Gaze from Above Reflections on Cosmic Eyes in Visual Culture by Barbara Baert

PEETERS

THE GAZE FROM ABOVE

ART&RELIGION

The series Art&Religion was founded in 2011 by the Iconology Research Group. The editor-in-chief is Barbara Baert (Leuven). The series welcomes monographs and themes in the interdisciplinary field of Christian iconography and religion of the Middle Ages and Early Modernity. Art&Religion focuses on how iconology as a field and method relates to recent developments in the humanities. Beyond methodological reflection, Art&Religion highlights the production of paintings and the techniques used (i), the significance and agency of images (ii), and the transfer and migration of motifs (iii) in Christian visual and material culture. The editorial board consists of Claudia Benthien (Hamburg), Ralph Dekoninck (Louvain-la-Neuve), James Elkins (Chicago), Jeffrey Hamburger (Cambridge, MA), Bianca Kuehnel (Jerusalem), Ann-Sophie Lehmann (Utrecht), John Lowden (London), Anneke Smelik (Nijmegen), Victor Stoichita (Fribourg), Jeroen Stumpel (Utrecht), Paul Vandenbroeck (Leuven), Jan Van der Stock (Leuven), Gerhard Wolf (Florence). The advisory editors are Reimund Bieringer (Leuven), Ivan Gerát (Bratislava), Victor Schmidt (Groningen), Hedwig Schwall (Leuven), György Endre Szönyi (Budapest) and Marina Vicelja (Rijeka).

— Art & Religion 11 —

THE GAZE

FROM

ABOVE

REFLECTIONS ON COSMIC EYES IN VISUAL CULTURE

by Barbara BAERT

PEETERS Leuven – Paris – Bristol, CT 2021

Cover image: Middle circle as oculus, Genesiscycle, mosaic in the atrium dome, 13th century, Venice, Saint Mark’s Basilica

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-90-429-4615-6 eISBN 978-90-429-4616-3 D/2021/0602/110 © 2021, Peeters, Bondgenotenlaan 153, 3000 Leuven – Belgium No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage or retrieval devices or systems, without prior written permission from the publisher, except the quotation of brief passages for review purposes.

In memoriam Paul Peeters

The natural phenomena described here have actually occurred, but some of the characters portrayed and their acts are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

CONTENTS  1.  2.  3.  4.  5.  6.  7.  8.  9. 10. 11.

Prologue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The archaeologist’s daughter . . . . . . . . . The glance from Hereford and the Venetian dance The spiral and the boustrophedon . . . . . . . The iconic gaze of the new lamb . . . . . . . Bilderatlas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  By Julia VAN ROSMALEN Oculi! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Galileo touches the moon . . . . . . . . . . Mnemosyne, Giordano Bruno and the ox plough. Close your eyes, Leo! . . . . . . . . . . . The vanishing point . . . . . . . . . . . .

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“Ray and beam, I suggest, afford alternative ways of thinking about light: what it is, how it moves, and how it is apprehended. On the one hand, as ray, it is an energetic impulse that connects a point source to the eye of a recipient, across of what could be an immense void of space; on the other hand, as beam, it is an affectation of visual awareness — an explosion that ignites as much in the eye of the beholder as in the world beholden. For in the moment of its apprehension, eye and cosmos become one. If a tree could see, its leaves would be miniature eyes, and the glimmer in each — as it strains to find its place in the sun — would be drawn down twigs and branches into a great beam. Where we onlookers would see a solid trunk, the tree would open in its vision to a world on fire. It would be a creature of the light.” (Timothy Ingold, Correspondences).

Fig. 1. Master Bartolomé (1450-1493), Chaos (Cahos), late 15th century, Tucson, Arizona, The University of Arizona Museum of Art

Chapter 1. PROLOGUE “It’s the stars that are imprisoned in their own power, and they cannot really help us. They merely design the nets, and on cosmic looms they weave the warp thread that we must complete with our own weft.” (Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead).

In the desire to understand the creation of ‘something’ out of ‘nothing’, humankind possesses the unique ability to express this mystery through plastic means. The amount of creation myths that were shaped into stunning objects and ingenious symbols are endless. The central split in the depiction of the universe is chaos versus cosmos.1 Chaos is a primordial condition that lacks order and precedes the cosmos (fig. 1).2 Still, the shapelessness is a necessary predecessor to the genesis of the cosmos: ordo ab chao. Chaos is thus no less important to express than the harmony that follows. The chaotic primordial stage that is represented as a sucking swamp, as a foul soup, or as dark waters is usually assigned to the female or hermaphrodite primordial principle.3 In the Mesopotamian creation myth, the goddess Tiamat embodies the primordial chaos, but she is fought by her son Marduk, who creates order. An ancient Babylonian version puts it as follows: “Tiamat makes the cosmogony possible by splitting her body, the god Marduk, open like a shellfish, and he set half of her up and ceiled it as sky…”4 In Germanic mythology, that which preceded order was a deep chasm with no end: the Ginnungagap. On both sides, fire and ice fought to be reunited into a harmonic universe. The chasm or ‘abyss’ (from the Greek abismos) is an unbridled, endless depth. The abyss is a kind of black hole: it swallows everything

 Stuart Chandler, When the World Falls Apart. Methodology for Employing Chaos and Emptiness as Theological Constructs, in The Harvard Theological Review, 85, 4, 1992, p. 467-491. 2  Master Bartolomé, Chaos (Cahos), Spain, late 15th century, Tucson (USA), The University of Arizona Museum of Art; Paul Vandenbroeck, Master Bartolomé. Chaos, in In Search of Utopia. Art and Science in the Era of Thomas More, ed. Jan Van der Stock, (exh. cat.), Leuven-Amsterdam, 2016, p. 374-376, cat. no. 70. 3  Alfons A. Barb, Diva Matrix, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 16, 1953, p. 193-238. 4  Alfons A. Barb, op.cit., p. 199. 1

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and spits out monsters weaned of form and order. It is a wild and terrifying precursor to creation, that which must be fought by the gods. The abyss is dangerous: it is the nightmare of the cosmic vanishing point, the psychotic return and the engulfment of the ancient mother goddess.5 The word cosmos dates back to Homeric times (ca. 800 BC) and means order, jewel. The cosmos is the universe that is controlled by intelligent laws. The cosmos escapes the flightiness of the gods, but answers to its imminent first principle. Anaximander (ca. 610-ca. 546 BC), one of the so-called preSocratics, defines this early ordering principle as the apeiron.6 Along with Thales of Miletus (ca. 624/623-ca. 548/554 BC) and Anaximenes (active around 585526 BC), Anaximander was one of the philosophers to first think about the creation of the universe and the elements it is made up of (the kosmiotès). There, in Greece, a way of thinking arose that detached itself from the phantasmal mythologies and introduced a new, fragile, kind of natural science. Chaos is not turned into order by the gods, but by a lawfulness within nature itself: the physis. Mystery becomes a problem, and that problem requires empirical experience from everyday life. Because even in our surroundings, we recognize processes like evaporation, burning, melting, and freezing. There in the distance, the logos of Plato (427-347 BC) and Aristotle (385-323 BC) awakens.7 This essay will explore the rich spectrum of the mythical primordial forms and their plastic symbols. People are fascinated by these image traditions to this day, because they offer us visual access to the cosmos and stimulate the contemplation of humankind’s place within creation. There is perhaps no greater challenge for the artist than pushing their artistic capabilities to the limit and falling over the edge of their abilities into their own creating reality. And when infinity asks for a visual solution, can it not be found in the images that express exactly that imminent becoming?8 Artists become proficient in expressing the universe through imagery full of figuration, swollen with potential. They experiment with the imagery of ‘almost’, the image ‘within’ the image as a reflection of 5  Carl Gustav Jung, Collected Works of C.G. Jung, eds. Gerhard Adler & Richard Francis Carrington Hull, vol. 5, Princeton, 1967, p. 39-75. 6  David Leith, Pores and Void in Asclepiades’ Physical Theory, in Phronesis, 57, 2, 2012, p. 164-191. 7  Sylvia Berryman, Horror Vacui in the Third Century BC. When is a Theory not a Theory?, in Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. Supplement (Aristotle and After), 68, 1997, p. 147-157. 8  Barbara Baert, About Stain(s), in Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, 7, 2, 2016, p. 29-45.

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the universe itself. That artistic quest for the image before the image is a plastic pars pro toto for the creation of the cosmos. Thus, the image ‘before’ the image blooms into the countenance of that majestic, astonishing, black pupil that we call the ‘cosmos’. This brings me to the title of my essay: The gaze from above. Since Homer’s time (ca. 800-ca. 750 BC) there has been a conviction that eye contact could bring things to life. The girl of the creator-sculptor Pygmalion (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X) sees the light of the universe and the eyes of her creator (lumen means both light as well as eye) at the same time.9 And consider that the newly born child sticks to the pupil of its mother in a unique, hypnotic blue. Like humans are nowadays able to see exceptionally far into deep space, thus eye contact in the arts is aimed at insight and intensity. Only the gaze shared between humankind and the universe can help create and legitimize thinking, science, the arts. In this essay, I will look for the exchange of gazes in our story. On the one hand, the gaze of the creator-artist who brings their artwork to life through their eyes. On the other hand, the gaze of the reader, who travels along in a unique, complex choreography of imagination and desire. Yes. The image blooms into the countenance of that majestic, astonishing, black pupil that we call the cosmos. Yes, that is how we meet with the cosmic eye high in the sky. Yes. All these eyes, human and divine, climb the Heavenly Stairs between above and below and built their zigzag pattern of human encounters with the Universe and vice versa. And hence you and I will travel along the vestiges of the ox plough or the phenomenon of the boustrophedon.10 That is how we will encounter the Hereford mappa mundi and the genesis cycle of the Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice. That is how we will reconsider the iconic gaze of the Van Eyck’s new lamb. That is how we will read the infiniteness of the spiral as a gigantic cosmic boustrophedon and the cosmogony of the Native Americans. That is how we will listen to Erwin Panofsky and his fascination with Galileo Galilei’s telescope. That is how we watch Lars von Trier and his movie Melancholia again, who, like Aby Warburg, tried to give a voice to the wonder and cruelty of our universe. A voice that ab origine belonged to the mother of all Muses: Mnemosyne. * 9  Barbara Baert, Pygmalion and Creative Enthusiasm, in Predella. Journal of Visual Arts, 43-44, 2018, p. 75-92. 10  A term and a use from scriptural history — the so-called ox turning script or ox plow script (βουστροφηδόν, turning like a plowing ox), where the text takes turns per line being written from left to right and from right to left — with the globally used and archetypical zigzag motif.

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I find the satellite pictures and the curvature of the Earth very moving. So is it true that we live on the surface of a sphere, exposed to the gaze of the planets, left in a great void, where after the Fall the light was smashed to smithereens and blown apart? It is true. We should remember that every day, for we do tend to forget. We believe we are free, and that God will forgive us. Personally I think otherwise. Finally, transformed into tiny quivering photons, each of our deeds will set off into Outer Space, where the planets will keep watching it like a film until the end of the world. Speaking is Janina Duszenko (she detests her first name).11

11  Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, (Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych, 2009), transl. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, London, 2019, p. 52.

Chapter 2. THE ARCHAEOLOGIST’S DAUGHTER “That look is so powerful that is wears down even the strongest man. It is as powerful as the touch of a hand.” (Sándor Márai, Embers).

It is said that in 1879, when amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautolo (1831-1888) visited the caves of Altamira, on his land in the hopes of finding remains of prehistoric tools (he’d become fascinated with prehistory after visiting a world exposition in Paris in 1878), he did not find any traces of humans.12 That is because Sautolo was looking in the wrong place. He was looking at the floor. His twelve-year-old daughter who went with him, María Sanz de Sautolo (1871-1946), however, looked up. What was discovered there after millennia is now well-known: an over twenty-meter-long stretch of nearly lifesized bison and other animals. Prehistoric paintings became a fact. A stream, a herd, their hooves thundering across the stone expanse. The prehistoric painterly arts broken out of their silence in the most fierce, stunning, and masterful way possible. The experts of the time did not believe the amateur. Later, sadly after Sautolo had already passed away, the amateur would be posthumously be recognized: these paintings did indeed date back to between 11,000 and 19,000 BC.13 I am interested in the daughter, María. She did not look at the world as an archaeologist, but as a child. Spontaneously looking up. Just like the endearing prehistoric sculpture (fig. 2).14 Searching for the limits of the space. Searching for comfort in the dark. Gaze going upward until it reached the ceiling of the cave. Maria walked into a room; her father walked into a site. The truthseeking amateur scientist was caught up in his presumptions; the imagination of the child revealed the truth of the function of the cave. * 12  Johan Braeckman & Maarten Boudry, De ongelovige Thomas heeft een punt. Een handleiding voor kritisch denken, Antwerp-Amsterdam, 2011, p. 28-31. 13  Emile Cartailliac, Mea culpa d’un sceptique, in L’anthropologie, 13, 1902, p. 349-353. 14  One of the two Hamangia Thinkers, found in Cernavodă, Romania, 5000-4600 BC, Bucharest, National History Museum of Romania, inv. 15906 & 15907.

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Fig. 2. The gaze upward, one of the two Hamangia Thinkers, found in Cernavodă, Romania, 5000-4600 BC (Neolithic Era), Bucharest, National History Museum of Romania

The readers of this essay surely know the illustrations hung up in many living rooms of the previous generations, which featured the eye of God inside a triangle. Under this all-seeing eye of the Judge, humankind shall be stimulated to do what is right. However, the godly eye that looks down from above is a much older motif. Humans feel like they are being ‘watched’ by the galaxy. The cosmos possesses a scorching eye: hot as the sun, introverted as the moon. But if the cosmic eye looks at us, we can meet its gaze. Is there a space where the cosmic eye meets ours? And how can we visualize that meeting, that wondrous optic copulation? What scopic regimes have humans developed to be able to handle the kinetic clash with the giant gaping pupil from above? What type of gaze is that glowing gaze to the vertical axis of the universe? Is that gazing unbearable and destructive, or does it in fact celebrate the victory of humankind with its iconic and technical capacity? I want to now focus on humans’ abilities to tame the universe through imagery. But I will also research how pre-scientific symbols surrounding eyes

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and sight, as well as the ever-expanding ideas within optics are used as a gigantic lens focused on the dizzying iris of the cosmos. We will see that the position of the humans gazing upward — astonished to see so much happening in the celestial sphere — has generated descriptive, architectural, and ritualistic forms of expression. The cosmic activity of solar systems, of the breathtaking northern light, and the comforting certainty of the continuous alternation between sun and the moon, with its repeating patterns in time, and in iconographic schemata and prehistoric temples. Recently, one of the presumably oldest cosmic Mayan structures was discovered in the Mexican state of Tabasco. The ceremonial building was built between 1000 and 800 BC based on the solstices in June and December. The positioning of the platforms allowed the Mayan people to mark the seasons in a very precise manner.15 In Proto-Indo-European, moreover, sun means eye (séhul).16 It is one of the oldest semantic groups when it comes to human language. In old Irish, sun, or suil, also means eye. Moon, in Proto-Indo-European, means ‘measure’ (méh-not) from the verb root meh-. This proves that since time immemorial, the moon had a functional use as a measure of time: moon is month.17 Mircea Eliade called the fascination with heavenly bodies and their cosmic eye la terreur du temps.18 The cosmogony is experienced over and over again, and must be exorcized by rites and ceremonies: the mysterium tremendum must be tamed. The zenith of the sun is the most dangerous tipping point. The eye hovers in one place for a moment; it stares down from the nunc stans, and must be helped to tip over into the nunc fluens.19 Within the space of the ceremony, the temple, the dolmens, yes, there the highest connection between eyes will take place. I do not yet know if the eye will win out over the ear. (Is the universe silent, or does it sing?) However, I do know that the spiral and the boustrophedon will come up. And that Danaë waits for us in her unheimliche room, below her oculus: the phallic opening of her destiny. And we will also travel past the black murkiness that gradually sharpens in its quest for the most flawless pupil: the 15  For more on the Mayan complex; See: Alexander Geurts, Nieuw ontdekt platform in Mexico blijkt oudste bouwwerk maya’s, https://www.demorgen.be/tech-wetenschap/nieuw-ontdekt-platform-in-mexico-blijkt-oudste-bouwwerk-maya-s~b65d059f/, Consulted on 10/06/2020. 16  James P. Mallory & Douglas Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo European World, Oxford, 2006, p. 128. 17  James P. Mallory & Douglas Q. Adams, Proto-Indo-European, op. cit., p. 128. 18  Mircea Eliade, Images et symboles. Essais sur le magico-religieux, Paris, 1952, p. 92-93. 19  Mircea Eliade, Images et symboles, op. cit., p. 97.

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telescope. Who would have thought that Galileo Galilei (1546-1642) would there find the heavily bespectacled and ‘frantic’ founder of iconology: Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968). But first, I want to meditate on the cosmic eye that blinks between evil and its counterpart, the power of the gaze bringing something to life: animals symbolically mirror these abilities. Then, I will isolate two spaces where that iconic gaze of humankind and the cosmic gaze of the universe meet one another: the famous Hereford mappa mundi (ca. 1250), and the atrium dome with genesis in Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice (13th century). Both form unique wormholes through which we can fall into the emptiness of that which lies above. * One of the first images that humankind ever made was that of an owl: found on 18 December 1994 by Jean-Marie Chauvet in the prehistoric caves of the Ardèche. They were made by two human hands over 30,000 years ago (fig. 3).20 In the documentary Christian Tran made for Arte — Les Génies de la Grotte Chauvet (2014) — which is about the ambitious creation of a copy of the cave, the Catalan painter Miquel Barceló talks about the artistic qualities and techniques of the murals. Barceló is trying to learn how to make the owl. The painter practices and practices, but he cannot discover its secret. Until he realizes that the owl was drawn in a manner of seconds: with the speed and synchronicity of four fingers. Woosh, now the body, woosh, now the wings, woosh, now the eyes: two thumbs pressed to the rock wall. Such virtuous simplicity and such a brilliant origin of the plastic arts as such. Fingertips and rock walls. You don’t need anything else. Fingers create lines, thumbs create dots. Of this soft-gazed, silent, listening owl, Barceló says the following: Tout est déjà là. The owl’s eyes cut through the opaque blackness of the night. The owl has the courage to conquer the dangerous, thick emptiness with its piercing pupil and thus is a symbol for the fears conquered by humans. The owl is apotropaic and comforts humans in their fragile exposure to the confounding silence of the deep black hole we call the cosmos.

 Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, Cologne, 2010, p. 254; For the owl: JeanMarie Chauvet, et. al., Dawn of Art. The Chauvet Cave. The Oldest Known Paintings in the World, New York, 1996. 20

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Fig. 3. The owl in the cave, Magdalenian 17,000-12,000 BC, Dordogne, Chauvet cave

Opposite of the night’s owl eye, we find the falcon eye, which burns like the sun.21 With its scorching heat, it has the capacity to generate life from cold, shapeless waters. The falcon possesses the eye that assimilates the chaotic primordial sea into creating order. The falcon controls the light, and like the sun, humans have a vital relationship with this light: together with the moon it is the most important heavenly body that the universe has given them. The third animal associated with the cosmic eye is the snake.22 It is impossible to escape this primordial animal: guardian of the world egg,23 shuddering 21  Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, op. cit., p. 252; The falcon is often combined with the snake, Egyptian grave, ca. 3000 BC. The inscription reads that the Pharaoh possesses the eye of the snake under the gaze of the falcon (the sun). 22  Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, op. cit., p. 194-197; Two men and a woman worship a giant snake (possibly Zeus Meilichios, the chthonic counterpart of the Olympian god), marble votive platter, Greek, 400-375 BC, Berlin, Altes Museum. 23  Anna‐Britta Hellbom, The Creation Egg, in Ethnos. Journal of Anthropology, 28, 1, 1963, p. 63-105; In ancient Egypt, people believed that the world came into being from a swampy wetness that brought forth a cosmic egg. That egg, in turn, created the sun and the Earth. In other versions, Thoth, the god of wisdom and the moon lays an egg that Ra, the sun god,

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avatar of the spiral and the ritualistic symbol of lightning and disaster for the Native Americans. But the snake also has a very special eye. The eyes of a snake have a membrane, but no eyelid. The snake looks through the membrane that the Greeks call the amnion:24 the membrane surrounding a child in the uterus and the bowl used to catch sacrificial blood (Isaiah 53:7-8).25 The eye with the membrane connects the cosmic snake with the birthing capabilities of the mother goddess, like how the egg has a sturdy membrane below the shell. The snake stares without blinking and thus has the unique power to ward off evil, like the Pharaoh’s cobra eye. Its universal vigilance partially places the snake outside of time and throws it back to the primordial state of the universe: the zero point. With its circular and spiral shaped character, the snake also graphically represents the moment of creation.26 But there is more. When the snake sheds its skin — a symbol of cyclical rebirth of the world — the eye also changes and gets a milky, opaque blue sheen, as if the snake is withdrawing into itself, and from that meditative state finds access to the secret, the wisdom, the riddle, the gnosis. And finally: the snake is phallic in shape.27 Phallic imagery stands for creative impulse: fast, sudden, and obsessive. The snake is metaphorically charged with the flash of the spermatozoon and it sinuously guards the center of the world, the Omphalos of Delphi.28 In Dionysian cosmogonic rites, the head of the penis is a winking, all-penetrating Cyclops eye.29 In her book Le symbolisme du corps humain, French-Jewish theologian Annick de Souzenelle descends into the semantic origin of our body parts. The eye forms an important cosmic reflection.30 In Hebrew, eye means Ayin -. It is the sixteenth letter for godly sight, and in Latin and Cyrillic it became the letter ‘O’, in which one can still find the icon for the eye. Ayin carries the mystical number 70, which in the Kabbalah means dying to rise again. Ayin is connected brooded out, and his heat created the world. The cosmogonic egg became the matrix of things and cleared the chaos (the swamp) and brought forth many other egg-matrixes. I am working on a study on the swamp in the plastic arts. 24  Arthur Bernard Cook, Zeus. A Study in Ancient Religion, Cambridge, 1925, p. 517. 25  Barbara Baert, About Sieves and Sieving. Motif, Symbol, Technique, Paradigm, Berlin, 2019, p. 39-40. 26  Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, op. cit., p. 197; Snake as spiral, tantric, Indian, gouache, 18th century, Punjab, India. 27  Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, op. cit., p. 406-407. 28  Barbara Baert, Iconogenesis, or Navel, in Folded Stones, (Cahiers van het Ivok, 16), eds. Barbara Baert & Trees De Mits, Leuven, 2009, p. 5-15. 29  Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, op. cit., p. 198, p. 698-699. 30  Annick de Souzenelle, Le symbolisme du corps humain, Paris, 1991, p. 383.

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to Zaïn, which carries the number 7 and the ideogram of an arrow shooting through an animal pelt. The eye also shoots through the visible world like an arrow, into a higher seeing. Ayin is also linked to the godly that lets itself open to the light, as Job experiences in 42:5: “Now I have seen you with my own eyes.” It’s interesting that Ayin is also the word for ‘well’: the sight comes from the deep. The eye is both overseeing and in-seeing. Exactly that internal eye introduces the last archaic ‘eye animal’: the fish. The fish eye is found in the dark primordial waters and lights up in a flash from its depths.31 On the glistening of the fish eye, Paul Klee (1879-1940) writes: “From the uncertain a something shines not from here, not from me. But from God.”32 In the Old Testament story, Tobias places the bile of a fish on the eyes of his blind father (Tobit 11:10-5).33 The father sees and from the eyes, a white, smooth egg appears. That is the birth of the sacred foundation, which leads to the fundamental seeing: seeing with the third eye.34 The eye has the ability to create. In Genesis 1:13 it says: God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.35 The visual approval in the Bible is connected to a much deeper power of the eye: the eye as both air-pneumatic as well as fire-spark. In the phenomenal work The Origin of European Thought, where the Homeric roots of our interaction with the world and the universe are explained, Richard Broxton Onians shows that breath not only acts as a life elixir that works through the mouth and the lungs, but remarkably also through the eyes. This has everything to do with another opinion on the anatomy of the head.36 Our skull is full of holes that form entrances and exits for the air elixir: the nose, the ears, the mouth, but also the eyes. In Homeric views, seeing something is actually ‘taking it in’ with your eyes, like breathing in and out. I see you, so I ‘breathe’ you in and out.37 Eyes do not possess the one-way  Ami Ronnberg (ed.), Book of Symbols, op. cit., p. 202.  Félix Klee (ed.), The Diaries of Paul Klee. 1898-1918, Berkeley, 1964, p. 312; Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, op. cit., p. 203, fig. 1; Paul Klee had this metaphysical experience in the Naples Aquarium, where a goldfish swam towards him in the most purest form, as if the animal came straight from paradise. Starting in 1925, Paul Klee painted a series of goldfish. 33  Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, op. cit., p. 389. 34  Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, op. cit., p. 392; De cyclops dethrones Chronos for Ouranos, heaven. The third eye is a spark, a burning flame. 35  Silvia Schroer & Thomas Staubli, Die Körpersymbolik der Bibel, Gütersloh, 2005, p. 86-98. 36  Richard Broxton Onians, The Origin of European Thought. About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate, Cambridge-London, 1951, p. 73-74. 37  Richard Broxton Onians, op. cit., p. 75. 31 32

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communication of the ear. The eye can do more than the ear, which only receives. In the Homeric hymn for Demeter, the breath that escaped her eyes is honored.38 This breath from the eyes is also described with the ancient topos of the intoxicating scent, also an element of the air. But Demeter’s eyes also contain a sparkle: the light that guides the breathing eye. Onians recognizes this in the Latin word aura — the glowing exhalation around eyes, around objects — a trace of this Homeric principle. The spark, the glimmer escaped from the eye.39 The spark is the smallest part of the fire, but also possesses the power to ignite a fire. According to IndoEuropean etymology, the spark is connected to the eye on the one hand and to sex on the other.40 It contains a quality like that of the spermatozoon — like the phallus, flashy and quick. In the Song of Songs, the bride wounds (stabs) with one of her eyes. “You have stolen my heart, my sister, my bride! You have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes, with one jewel of your necklace.” (Song of Songs 4:9)! In Greek, the spark is derived from the word spargan: swelling, taming, breaking through, and bursting out of, like the sprouting of plants from the ground. In Germanic and Indian origin myths, the spark is a cosmogonic image related to the axe or anvil, to the blacksmith as creator.41 And finally, there is the cosmic spark of the comet that strikes the Earth and seals the marriage between the lightning and the Earth. In Book II of the Liber Scivias, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) refers to the spark of creation:42 And I, a person not glowing with the strength of strong lions or taught by their inspiration, but a tender and fragile rib imbued with a mystical breath, saw a blazing fire, incomprehensible, inextinguishable, wholly living and wholly Life, with a flame in the color of the sky, which burned ardently with a gentle breath and which was as inseparably within the blazing fire as the viscera are within a human being. And I saw that the flame sparked and blazed up. And behold! The atmosphere suddenly rose up in a dark sphere of great magnitude, and that the flame that hovered over it and gave it one blow after another, which struck sparks from it, until that atmosphere was perfect and so Heaven and earth stood fully 38  See also: Simon Goldhill, The Erotic Eye. Visual Stimulation and Cultural Conflict, in Being Greek under Rome. Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, Cambridge, 2001, p. 154-194. 39  Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, op. cit., p. 86. 40  Sergey Anatolevitsj Starostin (1953-2005), The Tower of Babel, https://starling.rinet.ru/; Copyright 1998-2003, Consulted on 30/06/2020. 41  Mircea Eliade, Images et symboles, op. cit., p. 29. 42  Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, op. cit,, p. 87.

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Fig. 4. The spark of creation, Hildegard of Bingen (10981179), Liber Scivias (1151-1152), Book II, reconstructed by the sisters of the Abbey of St. Hildegard, Eibingen formed and resplendent. Then the same flame was in that fire, and that burning extended itself to a little clod of mud which lay at the bottom of the atmosphere, and warmed it so that it was made flesh and blood, and blew upon it until it rose up a living human. When this was done, the blazing fire, by means of that flame which burned ardently with gentle breath, offered to the human a white flower, which hung in that flame as dew hangs on the grass. Its scent came to the human’s nostrils, but he did not taste it with his mouth or touch it with his hands.43

43  Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, transl. Mother Columbia Heart & Jane Bishop, Mahwah, 1990, p. 149 — See also the topos of scent and flavor as wisdom and gnosis in the prologue of the Liber Floridus of Liber Floridus by Lambert of Saint-Omer (12th century); Karen De Coene, Navelnacht. Regeneratie en kosmologie in de middeleeuwen, (unpublished doctoral thesis), Leuven, 2006, p. 68.

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The accompanying miniature shows the creating round eye with golden spheres in the middle of the waters, from which a spark descends like a giant tongue which splits through the still dark mass and makes creation possible (fig. 4). The tip of the ‘spark-tongue’ touches the head of the human that ‘swells’ forth like a plant from the red clay: a fragrant lily. The human smells and remembers creation: the sweet breath of all beginnings that unites fire and wind and sticks so wondrously close to the Homeric archetypes.44 But also in the gnosis tradition, it is said that Adam is allowed to smell a twig from the Tree of Life before he dies. In this comforting gesture, he once again understands Everything. Perhaps also the origin of the universe. Adam took this gnosis to the grave.45 Hildegard of Bingen compresses the double look in the textual and pictorial space: the cosmic eye tips over into the iconic gaze, and the iconic gaze reaches a cosmic synesthesia. The ancient boustrophedon has been installed and defies gravity. Again, we fall into the dizzyingly high universe.

44  Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis. The Nature and History of Gnosticism, ed. & transl. Robert McLachlan, San Francisco, 1983. 45  Barbara Baert, Hierotopy, Jerusalem and the Legend of the Wood of the Cross, in Archaevs. Study in the History of Religions, 11-12, 2007-2008, p. 95-116; Annick de Souzenelle, Le symbolisme du corps humain, op. cit., p. 382; Le parfum des fleurs n’est que le reflet symbolique du parfum de l’homme parvenu à la plus haute expression de sa virilité de l’homme déifié participant des vibrations lumineuses, sonores et odorantes de Dieu.

Chapter 3. THE GLANCE FROM HEREFORD AND THE VENETIAN DANCE “Surrounded by a world full of wonder and forces — whose laws he is aware of and strives to resolve, yet never unravels, laws that thrust towards him as individual fragmentary harmonies and sustain his feelings in a continuous state of unfulfilled excitation — man conjures up the perfection that eludes him through play and builds for himself a miniature world in which the cosmic laws appear in their most narrow and compact form, yet complete in themselves, and in this respect perfect. And it is through such play that man fulfills his cosmogonic instinct.” (Gottfried Semper, ‘Prolegomena’ to Style).

In her book Art and Optics in the Hereford Map. An English Mappa Mundi, expert Marcia Kupfer shines new light on the meaning and function of this famous map from ca. 1300 (fig. 5a-b).46 The Hereford mappa mundi follows the iconographical tradition in the manuscripts of the commentaries of the Apocalypse by the monk Beatus of Liébana (ca. 730-ca. 800).47 The Hereford mappa mundi is also close to the exemple of Ebstorf (1234).48 However, the Hereford version is unique, because it is the only T-O-map of this monumental size (163-137 cm.). Originally, it was placed in an alcove of the cathedral with two side panels that, when closed, showed the Annunciation. The giant animal skin was painted with inscriptions in red and black — some gilded — and shows compressed events, places, and mythical creatures from Salvation history. The streams and seas were carefully applied to the map. And in the margins around the round circle depicting the Earth, there are complex additions, explanatory drawings, and different legendae. The map was signed by Richard of Haldingham and Lafford (also known as Richard de Bello) (ca. 1278). The map forms a synthesis between theological ideas and the budding principles 46  Marcia Kupfer, Art and Optics in the Hereford Map. An English Mappa Mundi, c. 1300, Yale, 2019. 47  For example, the miniature in the so-called Saint-Sever Beatus, ca. 1050, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Lat 8878, fols. 45bisv-45ter; Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez, Medieval Imagery and Knowledge of the World in Spanish Cartography, in Imago Mundi, 58, 2, 2006, p. 238-239. 48  Armin Wolf, The Ebstorf “Mappamundi” and Gervase of Tilbury. The Controversy Revisited, in Imago Mundi, 64, 1, 2012, p. 1-27.

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Fig. 5a. Mappa mundi, ca. 1300, Hereford, Cathedral

within cosmography and optics by Roger Bacon (1214-1292). Bacon based his work on that of the Arab scientist al-Haytham of Alhazen (965-ca. 1040). We know that Bacon’s work was known at Hereford: the Franciscan William Herebert (ca. 1270-1333) collected his works. As is usual in medieval cartography, Jerusalem is at the center of the world. In the East, at the top, we read: “Last Judgment showing, on one side, Christ

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Fig. 5b. Mappa mundi, ca. 1300, Hereford, Cathedral, Reconstruction

and his angels beckoning toward Paradise, and on the other, the devil and dragon summoning to another place.” The Hereford map has its own pictorial raison-d’être: a feast for the eye and a game of Memory that was both time consuming and educational. For a long time, the world map was explained as a moralistic history of time and space for those who could not read. However, Kupfer highlights new nuances that are quite interesting in the context of the cosmic eye.49 There is an anomaly on the map, which may have embarrassed the researchers, that until now they have not mentioned: the gold inscriptions reading Asia, Africa, and Europe are (when it comes to our geographical norms) placed wrong. In more concrete terms, Europe is in fact taking up part of the  Marcia Kupfer, Art and Optics in the Hereford Map, op. cit., p. 4-11.

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African continent in this map. A mistake that is not a mistake, demystifies, according to Kupfer, the strategy and function of the mappa mundi. We should be viewing this map through the gaze of Christ himself. The boustrophedon calls for a different perspective, an inversion.50 We must see the installation in a radically different matter, especially as the difference between our human vision on the world — Imperfect, temporary, flawed — and the almighty, all-seeing position of God from up in the universe. 51 While we look up at God’s creation like tadpoles, He looks down at us as a bird and the ultimate Judge. The meeting of both points of view happens in the gold letters of Europe, as if our map is the Zaïn, the animal skin through which the divinistic eye shoots like an arrow, to prevent us from a too-earthly reading. Then there is a second nuance. The map seems to play with the notion of specio — I look — which has a semantic and exegetic sound relationship with specula or lookout, watchtower, mountain view on the one hand and speculum, mirror, mental reflection, or contemplatio on the other. Within the cartographic genre, the Hereford mappa mundi reflects a new monastic geography and the visual strategies required of it. Here the visual exegesis channels the gaze from above — the boustrophedon. The map that intrinsically knows its graphic translation from up above — the kataskopos — embraces the eye of the godly seeing. Humans can only receive the higher perspective from the cosmic apex — the specula position — by using knowledge to order it into a speculum. When both come together, a third space and thus a third function are created: contemplation. And finally, there is a third nuance. Kupfer points out the tension between the orbis terrarum and all its microfiber details — homo ludens — opposite of the monumental map as such, surrounded by the angel and Mary on equal heights on the side panels. This also pertains to the boustrophedon. God looks down, and in that meeting, he makes the Eva/ave inversion possible. The world is hidden behind the Annunciation and once opened unfolds into an incarnated world, a cartographic ‘shrine’ that connects time and space with a fraction: that one moment of greeting, when the ancient word was finally allowed to become flesh, when a cosmic spark descended through a passive ear canal only to stay and grow and swell like spargan. *  Marcia Kupfer, Art and Optics in the Hereford Map, op. cit., p. 6.  Marcia Kupfer, Art and Optics in the Hereford Map, op. cit., p. 7.

50 51

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With his exhaustive analysis of the 13th-century Genesis cycle in the atrium dome of Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice, Herbert Kessler adds an especially subtle note to the cosmic eye and the iconic gaze (fig. 6).52 He incomparably proves the different influences of the program, including the prototypical Cotton Genesis from the 5th century,53 a fascinating 12th-century miniature of the In principio type (notice the juxtaposition of the Hebrew ‘talking’ Yahweh next to his Christian Son of God) (fig. 7)54 and the famous Genesis from the San Paulo fuori le mura Bible (ca. 870).55 According to Kessler, the Saint Mark’s dome attempts to create a narrative harmony between the Byzantine and Roman models on the one hand, and between the cyclical and linear creationist iconographies on the other. And thus, we connect, here at the end of the line, the cosmic eye with the iconographic stories from the beginning of our journey. Kessler discovered that the frequent use of circles in the atrium with the apex being the dome as great layered celestial sphere made allusions to contemporary astronomical writings. One book was even found in Saint Mark’s Basilica itself: the Anglo-Saxon convolute with the Liber Nemroth de Astronomia, an apocryphal translated from Syrian (791-826) that attributes the first astronomical knowledge to the Biblical king Nimrod.56 On folio 1, we read Incipit liber de astronomia (fig. 8). The I in Incipit is the pendant of the tripod of a gigantic telescope that is being used by what is suspected to be the mythical Nimrod. His eye forms the pars pro toto for the large ‘eye’ of the heavens that clings to his lens, enlarged. This heavenly body — the sun? — has an orange core, in which a star with six points is hidden. From orange center, twelve beams of light radiate out. The red ‘s’ on the second hour is enigmatic. It connects to the  Herbert Leon Kessler, Conclusion. La Genèse Cotton est morte, in Les stratégies de la narration dans la peinture médiévale. La représentation de l’Ancien Testament aux IVe-XIIe siècles, (Culture et société médiévales, 37), ed. Marcello Angheben, Turnhout, 2020, p. 373- 464. 53  Herbert Leon Kessler, Conclusion. La Genèse Cotton est morte, op. cit., p. 377, fig. 3; The British Library, Cotton MS Otho B VI, f. 026v, 5th-6th century, Greek, possibly made in Egypt. 54  Herbert Leon Kessler, Conclusion. La Genèse Cotton est morte, op. cit., p. 391, fig. 12: Montalcino, Archivio comunale, Bibbia atlantica, fol. 6v. 55   Herbert Leon Kessler, Conclusion. La Genèse Cotton est morte, op. cit., p. 389, fig. 11: Rome, Abbazia San Paulo fuori le mura, fol. 8v. 56  Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, Ms. Lat. VIII 22, fol. 1; Steven John Livesey & Richard Hunter Rouse, Nimrod the Astronomer, in Traditio, 37, 1981, p. 203-266; In other traditions, Seth, Adam’s third son, is the first astronomer; Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek Albert I, Chronica Regia Coloniensis, 13the century, ms. 467, fol. 1v; Barbara Baert, Adam, Seth and Jerusalem. The Legend of the Wood of the Cross in Medieval Literature and Iconography, in Adam, le premier homme, (Micrologus Library, 45), Firenze, 2012, p. 69-99. 52

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Fig. 6. Genesiscycle, mosaic in the atrium dome, 13th century, Venice, Saint Mark’s Basilica

other red ‘s’ on the shaft of the telescope in a diagonal line. The tripod is green like the tree of life, the shaft of the telescope is blue like the heavens. The astronomer is an orange-red color and is thus connected to the ruber-color of the initial and the medium of the text that the reader will soon start. Because the miniaturist uses the same color of pigment for the subject of the astrophysical science — the heavens — a glowing mise en abyme within the treatise itself arises. Nimrod’s lens is the spark that burns through the parchment in the blink of an eye.

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Fig. 7. In principio, so-called Bibbia atlantica, 13th century, Montalcino, Archivio comunale, fol. 6v

The miniature infiltrates the ancient iconographic tradition surrounding the genesis story with a new type of seeing: the searching eye of an almost all-seeing instrument. And the artists of the dome’s mosaic answer this all-seeing eye with their callused hands that have placed down thousands of tesserae before — facere to creare57 — by creating a dizzying cosmographic whole. There once was the 57  Peter Lombard (1100-1160) defended a sharp distinction between creating (creare) and making (facere). The first is a concept that relates to the creation process of something out of

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Fig. 8. Incipit liber de astronomia, Anglo-Saxon convolute with the Liber Nemroth de Astronomia, late 13th century, Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, Ms. Lat. VIII 22, fol. 1r

ambitious owner of the instruments and the delighted artist, and they met each other in colorful circles, in bundles of light as beams, in glistening marble. We are also a delighted viewer.58 Not through the joys of being able to see sharply through the lens, but by the rapture of the dance. Herbert Kessler has nothing (ex nihilo), like how God created the world. The second relates to the creation process from matter (ex aliqua materia), like how the artist makes an image from clay or paint; Gerhard May, Die Erschaffung aus dem Nichts. Die Entstehung der Lehre von der creatio ex nihilo, BerlinNew York, 1978, passim. 58  Herbert Leon Kessler, Conclusion. La Genèse Cotton est morte, op. cit., p. 393.

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tested in situ what it takes to follow the story lines of this Creation cycle: it is a perfectly circular dance, yes, all 360 degrees are needed, an orbis terrae, a double boustrophedon ox dance to be able to go through it. The joy of the choros. The reading dance with your head tilted up, like a prehistoric sculpture, like María Sanz de Sautolo. And this great cosmic dance of our gazing is reflected in the rotunda of the mosaic floor, the circles that enclose the universe. And I think back to that gigantic embroidery on the other coast of that same Mediterranean Sea. And I think back at the words of a 12th-century visitor to Saint Mark’s Basilica: “What is spread on the floor, and what clothes the whole space like a dress worked in colors might at first sight be called a sea, which, moving on all sides in the gentlest waves, is suddenly petrified.” And while dancing, we take in the text along the bottom of the dome that is sung by the angels. Their top wings like pens dipped in golden rain, that support the punctuation and the rhythm of our movements: Hic arden cherubim Christi flam(m)a (t) A calore Semer et eternisolis radiata nitore Mistica stant cherubim alas monstrancia Sena Qu(a)e dominum laudant voces Promendo serenas59 “Here burns flaming cherub in Christ’s love always shining the brilliance of the eternal sun the mystic cherubs stand there and show their six wings their soft voices praising god”

The sunlight through the windows and archways illuminate the angel. Movement enters the images into the viewer’s soul!60 The circular dance shoots its cosmic energy out until the outer most point of the dome. Now there is the calm of the eternal silent opening. The most vulnerable architectural part: the oculus, the sparking eye of God, the closed opening of the navel (fig. 9). A sphere lined in red, with its train of alternating red, green, and blue gemstones  Herbert Leon Kessler, Conclusion. La Genèse Cotton est morte, op. cit., p. 396, n. 67.  Herbert Leon Kessler, Conclusion. La Genèse Cotton est morte, op. cit., p. 397.

59 60

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Fig. 9. Middle circle as oculus, Genesiscycle, mosaic in the atrium dome, 13th century, Venice, Saint Mark’s Basilica

for the Heavenly Jerusalem.61 And then the pattern. That which stretches, repetitive, the paradox of space and emptiness at the same time: the lobed grid that defines visible invisibility.62 We stand dancing on the edge of our capacities: the heavens are blocked from our view, but its grid carries the semantics of permeability. One day, our eyes will become owl’s eyes and they will unite with the sparkling tesserae. This is also the boustrophedon space: the meeting of sparks from below with the glittering from above. We can still hear the airy voices of the cherubs, but who still wants another story? Who still wants words? We shook off speech back there, down below. Now there is only the final center:

61  For more on the train of God, see; Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Saum & Zeit, Berlin, 2005, p. 94-105; Sul is the train of Yahweh’s robe. Isiah 6:1 says it filled the temple. 62  On the grid as carrier of the godly behind it, See: Herbert Leon Kessler, Spiritual Seeing. Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art, Philadelphia, 2000, p. 53-54; Barbara Baert, About Sieves and Sieving, op. cit., p. 66-70.

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Fig. 10. Negative hand prints, 13,000-9000 BC, Perito Moreno, Argentina, Cueva de las Manos

the concentration of light, the concentration of numbers. (Three times three gems. Nine lenses from Nimrod’s dream. The nine Arabic spheres of heaven). Look, the plastic medium has dissolved itself and the great black unfolds for us. And with dismay, we understand: heaven is written in Braille and millions of red hands wait in their damp prehistoric caves trying to decipher it through touch (fig. 10). * “So often has your silence thwarted me/ The only hope that I can cling to now/ Is that you have not told me not to speak”, Murusaki Shikibu sings in The Tale of Genji.63

 Murusaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, transl. Dennis Washburn, vol. 1, Amsterdam, 2013.

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Chapter 4. THE SPIRAL AND THE BOUSTROPHEDON Qui voit quoi, dans une telle expérience? Qui regarde. Qui est regardé? ‘Qui expecte?’ Qui est attendu? Nous sommes sans doute devant l’image – pour autant qu’elle soit souveraine – comme le phalène devant sa flamme. (Georges Didi-Huberman, Phalènes).

The touching, graphic simplicity of a circle with a dot in the center, nothing more than the ephemeral touch of a brush, the circle decisive and perfect, opens this chapter about the role of ornament, decoration, and icons in the portrayal of the universe and the desire of artistic humans to structure these in both the most simple and complex manners at the same time (fig. 11).64 What speaks to me in this phase of our journey is the way in which we approach ‘abstraction’ in an art scientific sense. Not in the way we use this concept as a period in arthistory, like for example the American ‘abstract expressionism’ from the midtwentieth century, but in the meaning of the most minimalistic shape needed, no, I will correct myself on the spot, in the meaning of the shape that suffices and creates ‘something’ out of ‘nothing’ with one stroke of the wrist, boiled down to a single color. The prestigious Austrian scholar Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich (19092001), who was the director of the famous Warburg Institute in London for many years, was the founder of the psychology of viewing. In 1979, Gombrich wrote his The Sense of Order. A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art on the subject: an ambitious study of the roots of the human psyche and their ability to express things to their surroundings using abstract morphologies.65 Since the prehistoric age, the human spirit longs for order-creating visual systems, that they impose on nature to better understand and structure it. In that sense, the nature-culture dichotomy is simply a diversion: the icon is the comfort for as well as the tribute to the incomprehensible, where the origin of

64  Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, op. cit., p. 707; Tantric symbols, pigment on paper, 18th century, Rajasthan, India. 65  Ernst Gombrich, The Sense of Order. A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, London, edition of 1994; See also: Richard Woodfield, Gombrich on Art and Psychology, Manchester, 1996.

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Fig. 11. Tantric symbols, paper and paint, 18th century, Rajasthan, India, From: Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, Cologne, 2010, p. 707.

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the universe is the first and foremost challenge.66 Icons often consist of simple shapes that when using more complex patterns become elegant ornaments.67 But each prototypical form — dot, line, circle, spiral — has an underlying message. Or, as Ernst Gombrich and English painter and graphic artist William Hogarth (1697-1764) write about the line: “The serpentine line by its waving and winding at the same time different ways, leads the eye in a pleasing manner along the continuity of its variety, if I may be allowed the expression; and which by its twisting so many different ways, may be said to enclose (tho’ but a single line) varied contents.”68 In its potential to endlessly branch off into different shapes and by analogy able to branch off to related meanings, the line is the image of what the hand, the movement of the hand, the graphé as act of creation is capable of.69 There is a reason that entangled lines — strings — form a unique pattern that is found in music waves and what the universe beams towards us every day even now. * In his Myth and Symbol, Ariel Golan discusses the graphic patterns that he had first collected in the Caucasus Mountains, but then expanded into a unique reference book, which clustered and explained ‘floating’ symbols in our global world.70 He did not let himself be impeded by the millennia that these graphemes span. Golan looks at abstract motifs both on façades, wooden doors, and relic shrines as well as in cave art and ceramics, and combines these into analogue sets, regardless of their origin and date. The author collects semantic image groups of ornaments, signs, symbols, and ideograms.71

66  Stanisław Iwaniszewski, Geometric Motifs in Rock Art as a System of Visual Communication, in Indigenous Graphic Communication Systems. A Theoretical Approach, eds. Katarzyna Mikulska & Jerome A. Offner, Colorado, 2020, p. 257-273. 67  Grzegorz Sztabinski, Concrete Elements and Abstract Thought. Problems in Non-Mimetic Composition of Pictorial Elements in Paintings and Drawings, in Leonardo, 21, 2, 1988, p. 155-160. 68  Ernst Gombrich, The Sense of Order, op. cit., p. 137, fig. 149; William Hogarth, The Analysis of beauty, written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of taste, London, 1753, p. 38-39. 69  Timothy Ingold, Lines. A Brief History, London-New York, 2007. 70  Ariel Golan, Myth and Symbol. Symbolism in Prehistoric Religions, Jerusalem, 1991. 71  Ariel Golan, Myth and Symbol, op. cit., p. 7; Similarity between ancient graphic symbols as well as between related cult and mythological phenomena in various ethnic communities is not unusual in human culture. A distant but undeniable common origin has been revealed in languages like those of Berbers, Finns and Mongols.

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One of the oldest icons humans have attached to the universe and the primary movement of the cosmos is the spiral. Because the spiral does not have a beginning or an end, it portrays a continuum of becoming. The spiral is a symbol of creative energy that bursts out of the cosmos: swirling, invisible, but as powerful as a storm. The double spiral moves to and fro between beginning and end, between nothing and something.72 Humans have recognized spirals in nature since the beginning, for example in ammonite fossils and seashells.73 From a pure graphical point of view, the spiral is connected to the lying or standing S or Z shape. According to some authors, this is meant to represent time that continues on uninterrupted, like how the universe and its celestial bodies’ existence is mysterious and eternal.74 The spins and swirls of spirals also mirror the cosmic dance.75 Paul Vandenbroeck writes: The spiral, the volute and the curl, whether or not double or symmetrical, were essential motifs at subsymbolic and symbolic level in the history of European art. In Mediterranean and ‘Western’ art in the Hellenistic East, the spiral column arose possibly in a Dionysian/Bacchic context: ecstatic movement, spinning, dizziness, trance and participation in cosmic energies played a central role in these rites. The spiral was an externalized expression of this.

It is fascinating that spirals also encompass auditive schemata. The spiral did not only have a visual dimension, but an auditory one too. Helical shells or conches have been used as wind instruments since prehistoric times. They produce a deep, hollow, ‘rolling’ tone, a sound that is experienced as a sonorous version of the primordial spiral. Consequently, the blowing of shells like this has been part since prehistory of rites relating to creation, renewal/rebirth and marriage (creation of new life).76

Even human DNA is based on the spiral.77 In short, the world and the universe seem to be mysteriously filled with this pattern.  Ariel Golan, Myth and Symbol, op. cit., p. 7, p. 93.  Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, op. cit., p. 719; Pink seashell, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), pastels, ca. 1938. 74  Ariel Golan, Myth and Symbol, op. cit., p. 95. 75  Paul Vandenbroeck, The Solomonic Column. A Rubenesque Motif in the Light of Tradition, in Rubensbulletin, 5, 2014, p. 25-91, p. 86. 76  Paul Vandenbroeck, The Solomonic Column, op. cit., p. 69. 77  Paul Vandenbroeck, The Solomonic Column, op. cit. p. 87; Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, op. cit., p. 718-721. 72 73

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Fig. 12. Angel with the heavens as a spiral, 14th century, Istanbul, Chora Church

The 14th-century fresco in the Chora Church in Istanbul summarizes this perfectly (fig. 12).78 The angel unrolls the universe in the scene with the Last Judgement. However, this roll of parchment as carrier of the universe — we see the stars, the sun, and the moon — unfurls like the spiral of an ammonite. This intuition about the universe from the hands of a 14th-century Byzantine painter is astonishing. The spiral also depicts that which is twisted: the torsion and twist of the rope or the action of spinning fibers. Spirals are also able to be read from two sides: they contain the double point of view.79 Spirals are also connected to snakes and thus refer to the cosmogonic animal of creation.80 In what follows, I will discuss three cases from Native American culture, where the spiral (as well as the snake and the weather gods) play an important role. *  Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, op. cit., p. 721.  Michel Cazenave (ed.), Encyclopédie des symboles, Paris, 1989, p. 656. 80  Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, op. cit., p. 720; Indian drawing with a snake curled up like a rope. This spiral snake is a symbol for energy. 78 79

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In his On the Dangers of Serpents in the Mind, Alexander Marshack (1918-2004) discusses another vision on the creation, dispersion, and the meaning of the zigzag rain motif and in particular the snake in prehistoric Asia, the Pacific, and North-America between 40,000 and 12,000 BC.81 The author starts a polemic against the important studies on the snake symbol by Balaji Mundkur (°1924) such as The Cult of the Serpent in the Americas (1976) and The Cult of the Serpent (1983).82 Marshack disputes that the zigzag originally referred to the snake, and, if so, that the possible analogy was actually rooted in fear. He writes: As a ‘materialist-biologist’, Mundkur addresses himself primarily to the affective, reactive aspects of the discriminatory capacity and to the available psychological data on limbic stress reactions. His data derive from psychological testing, hallucinogenic and dream imagery, and diverse but highly selected myths of serpentine terror. In this sense, for all its claims of novelty, his approach is a traditional, earlier 20th-century one of seeking biological and genetic explanations for both symbol and myth. Addressing, instead, some of the cognitive and historical aspects of the serpentine form as a cultural image and shape present us with symbolic complexity of a different order. In a number of analytic studies, I have shown that the serpentine was a widely used ritual marking motif in the Upper Paleolithic. In none of the Upper Paleolithic or late Mesolithic or Neolithic uses does the serpentine have reference to the snake or to fear and awe. (…) We are dealing with different peoples and different periods, ecologies, regions, and historical developments. Nevertheless, we are dealing with the same human capacity to read meaning into the serpentine form. My studies have suggested that the European Upper Paleolithic and derived traditions and the American Indian traditions were waterrelated. In the iconography of almost all the Eurasian and American cultures to which Mundkur refers in his studies the image of water is serpentine or zigzag. The Egyptian sign for water is [drawing of double zigzag line] and the image for water is [drawing of triple zigzag line].83

Marshack is less interested in the ritualistic, even hallucinogenic explanation for the omnipresent zigzag serpent motif, but instead opts for a cognitive-formalistic explanation that the zigzag line was meant to evoke primordial ‘movement.’ 81  Alexander Marshack, On the Dangers of Serpents in the Mind, in Current Anthropology, 26, 1, 1985, p. 139-152. 82  Balaji Mundkur, The Cult of the Serpent in the Americas. Its Asian Background, in Current Anthropology, 17, 1976, p. 429-455; Balaji Mundkur, The Alleged Diffusion of Hindu Divine Symbols into Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. A Critique, in Current Anthropology, 19, 1978, p. 541583; Balaji Mundkur, The Cult of the Serpent. An Interdisciplinary Survey of its Manifestations and Origins, Albany, 1983. 83  Alexander Marshack, On the Dangers of Serpents in the Mind, op. cit., p. 140-141.

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The serpentine or zigzag as an image and symbol of linear flow or process, for instance, exists at many levels in our modern cultures. I refer to the simplest of examples: The “S” sign on a highway indicates the danger of a series of sharp turns ahead and warns one to slow down; the zigzag and the serpentine are used in graphs and flow charts as a visual indication of processual variance, temporal change, and so on. Lewis-Williams (1983)84 provides a “primitive” instance in his description of the linear red flow-line that passes between trance dancer and eland in Sān rock art. The concept of linear, directional flow occurs in the Greek word boustrophedon, which refers to the serpentine manner in which the ox plows, turning back 180° at the end of each line or furrow.85

Marshack’s reference to the boustrophedon principle is fascinating. According to the author, it is first of all the formal boustrophedon principle that resonates behind the snake symbol, which means it is a universal sign that can be read and visually experienced from every side. To this sign of ‘something’ that moves, waves, undulates, other imagery and symbols would start to attach themselves. “In the English language the verb ‘to snake’ means to move forward in a serpentine manner. Like ‘boustrophedon,’ it is the linguistic abstraction of a visual.”86 Marshack explains how this works. The cognitive processes involved in such image formation can, however, lead to the creation of the serpentine as a snake. Granted the human capacity to see motion, process, time, sequence, and flow as a linear zigzag, spiral, or serpentine, then the equally human tendency to anthropomorphize or zoomorphize may produce the image of a serpentine creature that is itself symbolic of periodic, continuous process, time, flow, and change. (…) The serpent of time, of process and continuity, the serpent of self-birth and origins, the serpent of death, birth, and rebirth, the cosmic serpent, the serpent of such processes as water, rain, and lightning, the ouroboros that bites its own tail in perpetuity, the guilloche serpent of endless continuity and turns (…). To such images there will be attached, develop mentally and historically, other layers of cultural and even limbic reference.87

In closing, Marshack gives an example of annotations from the Hopi calendar. The observation calendar of the Hopi tribe uses the zigzag snake for cosmological purposes: the sun travels to and fro and behaves like a boustrophedon. Marshack 84  James David Lewis-Williams, Science and Rock Art, in South African Archaeological Society. Goodwin Series, 4, New Approaches to Southern African Rock Art, 1983, p. 3-13. 85  Alexander Marshack, On the Dangers of Serpents in the Mind, op. cit., p. 141. 86  Alexander Marshack, On the Dangers of Serpents in the Mind, op. cit., p. 141. 87  Alexander Marshack, On the Dangers of Serpents in the Mind, op. cit., p. 142.

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places the origin of this type of symbolic linking during the emergence of the bigger agricultural civilizations, when the zigzag and snake motifs apparently were intended to express an astronomical reading and cosmological experience of the landscape, where ceremonial rites became increasingly important.88 To summarize: the ever ‘thickening’ boustrophedon, strengthened by new meanings, thus formed in principio a movement and wave pattern made up of wind, water, clouds, speech, and smoke, which as time went on deepened and expanded into the “metaphorical serpent.” A well-defined scriptural and writing style, based on an ancient agricultural custom, bursts forth onto the world of symbolic (natural) experiences (fears, nodes), where it receives the statute of motif and eventually imagery. From that statute, the ancient movement pictogram receives the capacity to multiply, duplicate endlessly often and long — which is very apt for the snake symbol — and shed its skin until the present turns into an analogue spectrum of symbols on countless of artistic mediums. The second case in this chapter concerns a manuscript from 1579 that was created in Mexico, which remarkably enough was created within an intercultural collaboration between an Aztec scribe and illuminator, called a tlacuilo, from the Nahua peoples, and a Spanish advisor and client, the Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590).89 The manuscript discusses and illustrates the history of the New Spain: Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España. This so-called Florentine Codex is extremely interesting when it comes to our topic — rain, clouds, and medium — because it shows the syncretic image culture balancing on the edge between ancient abstract symbols of indigenous people that we learned about in the previous chapter (so the zigzag for rain and lighting, the spiral for water, etcetera) on the one hand, and the

 Alexander Marshack, On the Dangers of Serpents in the Mind, op. cit., p. 145.  In Mexico, the Tlacuilos were highly esteemed and were part of the aristocracy; Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana/Donato Pineider, Florence; Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain (Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, 1579), transl. Arthur James Outram Anderson & Charles E. Dibble, Santa Fe, 1953: part 8, 20. 2. The codex was produced at the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco by seven Nahua elders under Sahagún’s direction; Gauvin A. Bailey, Art of Colonial Latin America, London, 2005, p. 215-217; Sahagún’s indigenous informants were members of the former ruling class who had been trained in glyphic inscription and were given humanist educations in a missionary school. Bernardino de Sahagún was a Spanish missionary, monk, and mexicanist. He was born in the Kingdom of León, studied theology, and then joined the Franciscans. He was sent to Mexico as a missionary in 1529. 88 89

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16th-century iconographic tradition of Western Europe, on the other hand.90 In what follows, I will look at how the medium and the drawing technique express this syncretism. Where are the compromises between the indigenous artist and his Spanish client? Where does the Native visual language resonate more? And which motifs are not understood by Westerners or are suppressed by the tlacuilo himself? In the manuscript, which had the goal “to salvage a visual culture and religious practices largely extinguished by the first wave of conquest,”91 it is not coincidental that there is special attention paid to rain, water, and clouds. The chapter “which telleth of the clouds” includes an image that guides the phonetic transcription of the Nahuatl god of rain and clouds, Tlalocatecutli.92 The manuscript has a formal tension, but also a negotiation about how the clouds of the deplored (by the client) ‘heathen’ rain god should be portrayed (fig. 13). Clouds do not have limits; they consist of fluffy, strange volumes that do not tolerate threads, lines, or liminality. Nevertheless, the tlacuilo derives the spiral, the abstract shape that is essential for the rain god from his ancient ancestors and his deep visual memory. Applying with a brush the opaque pigment suspended in liquid, the tlacuilo iterated the spiral glyph for water, creating a horizontal and vertical pattern. Each cloud-unit in the rough grid is a variant on the glyph based on the manual gesture of the tlacuilo. As in other survivals of pre-conquest codices, the glyph constitutes a contour line; that is to say, the glyph assumes a shape with a bounded extension. A figure is circumscribed by a continuous line and paint is applied to the interior.93

But besides the ‘symbolic’ spiral dynamic of the god for the cloud, the tlacuilo also contemplates the ‘mimetic’ character of the clouds that he sees in nature. He fills the contours with hatchings and loose brush strokes. The hatchings create depth;94 the brush strokes create volume. Now the Franciscan also knows  Todd Olson, Clouds and Rain, in Representations, 104, 1, 2008, p. 102-115.  Todd Olson, Clouds and Rain, op. cit., p. 102. 92  Andrew D. Turner, Unmasking Tlaloc. The Iconography, Symbolism, and Ideological Development of the Teotihuacan Rain God, in Anthropomorphic Imagery in the Mesoamerican Highlands. Gods, Ancestors, and Human Beings, eds. Brigitte Faugère & Christopher S. Beekman, Colorado, 2020, p. 205-237. 93  Todd Olson, Clouds and Rain, op. cit., p. 103. 94  On the subject of ‘hatching’ as a reproductive symptom of printing press and graphic drawing techniques; See Todd Olson, Clouds and Rain, op. cit., p. 110-111: “The reader should be aware that the description of hatching as a system of parallel marks is inadequate to the 90 91

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Fig. 13. Clouds and rain, Florentine Codex, vol. 2, 1575-1577, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana/ Donato Pineider, libro 7, fol. 12r

that the drawing is depicting clouds. Later in the manuscript, the tlacuilo again uses clear contours for the devastating rain, snow, and hail, to show how dangerous the cloud god Tlalocatecutli can be when it comes to the grain harvest (fig. 14).95 Contours thus stand for solid, materialized water (ice), but also possibly have a deeper underlying meaning, namely the ability to outline fear: the catastrophe and the power of the god who turns against the community.96 What is outlined becomes a reservoir, and makes this great complexity of the picture. In fact, the disjunction of form and local material requirements is amplified by the disruption of one system of parallel lines by another. In key passages—inside the contours on the left and most significantly below the cloud bank—we find two perpendicular systems of parallel lines. The cross-hatching is adapted from print technology, but more specifically from engravings or etchings rather than woodcuts.”, “Importantly, for the tlacuilo, the differences between the clouds and the gods were subsumed by the discipline of the imported forms;” Todd Olson, Clouds and Rain, op. cit., p. 112. 95  Todd Olson, Clouds and Rain, op. cit., p. 103. 96  From Ancient Greek καταστροφή (katastrophḗ), from καταστρέφω (katastréphō, “I overturn”), from κατά (katá, “down, against”) + στρέφω (stréphō, “I turn”).

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Fig. 14. Ice, snow, and hail, Florentine Codex, vol. 2, 1575-1577, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana/ Donato Pineider, libro 7, fol. 13r

fear more manageable. The art of drawing as a cage for the untamable wild animal. And is that line, there between hand and concept, also not a thin boundary between two cultures that are trying to meet one another on parchment and ink? Those who have to reach an agreement within the ‘contours’? And finally, my third case brings us to the Lakota people. The Lakota of North America see the air as something ‘dense’ that can be touched like matter.97 Audrey J. Butt dedicated a case study to another indigenous group, the Akawaio.98 She studied a custom in which the uttering of a wish or a curse is accompanied by blowing. Even over time and distance, the expulsion of air projects a particular request or cure. The author explains this custom by the fact that the Native Americans see the individual breath or respiration as the 97  Gertrude P. Kurath, Calling the Rain Gods, in The Journal of American Folklore, 73, 290, 1960, p. 312-316; David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a MoreThan-Human World, New York, 2007, p. 229. 98  Audrey J. Butt, Ritual Blowing.’Taling’, a Causation and Cure of Illness among the Akawaio, in Man, 56, 1956, p. 49-55.

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bearer of spirit or spirits.99 Spirits escape from us in a sigh and in ritual contexts this can have a magical impact. The Navajo people see the wind as a unique life principle, an elixir that descends at the fertilizing of the embryo, and at birth escapes in the form of breath.100 It is at that moment that the surrounding winds ‘fill’ the child.101 To the Navajo, wind is a pluralist principle that accompanies the person at various stages of life, just as changes in life relate to the changing winds.102 One consequence of this animist anthropology of the wind is that the Navajo read the winds of personality from the way in which the hair falls from the head and spirals into curls, even from the whorls of toe- and finger-prints that are unique to each individual. In other words, how the wind has shaped and influenced an individual person can be seen in their appearance, and especially in the bodily extremities: the growth of hair (wriggling, waving, moving, and changing), the intimate and sensory border of skin (the tactile) and the contact of the foot with the earth (in dancing, hopping). Thus, the cosmos leaves its imprint on fingertips, those sensitive to touch, fingers that draw lines, that can sculpt, draw in the sand, and can encompass the universe in a wavy line. I think there are no better examples of the relationship between humankind and the universe than the spirals that they carry as an imprint of Everything on their own fingertips. The spiral is an attempt at controlling the chaos. It has two directions. Where do you place yourself, at the periphery or at the vortex? Beginning at the outside is the fear of losing control; the winding is a tightening, a retreating, a compacting to the point of disappearance. Beginning at the center is affirmation, the move outward I a representation of giving, and giving up control; of trust, positive energy, of life itself. Spirals — which way to turn — represent the fragility in an open space,

writes Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010).103

 Audrey J. Butt, Ritual Blowing.’Taling’, op. cit., p. 49.  Franc Johnson Newcomb, A Study of Navajo Symbolism, (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology Papers, 32), 1956, passim. 101  David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, op. cit., p. 223: “Wind is believed by the Diné to be present within a person from the very moment of conception, when two winds, one from the bodily fluids of the father and one from those of the mother, form a single Wind within the embryo. It is the motion of this Wind that produces the movement the growth of the developing fetus. When the baby is born, the Navajo say that the Wind within it ‘unfolds him’. And it is then, when the infant commences breathing, that another surrounding Wind enters into the child”. 102  David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, op. cit., p. 233. 103  Ellen Robinson (ed.), Louise Bourgeois. Spiral, (exh. cat.), New York, 2018, p. 7. 99

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Chapter 5. THE ICONIC GAZE OF THE NEW LAMB “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” (Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207-1273))

When the 16th-century overpainting of the lamb on the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (1430-1432) was removed, another animal was found (fig. 15 a-b).104 The lamb appeared to have not a snout, but a face with forward facing eyes, instead of eyes placed on the side of the head. These original characteristics of the lamb were later criticized to be a démarche, a medieval naiveté which had to be painted over and corrected with 16th-century expertise.105 Nevertheless, Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441) and Hubert van Eyck (ca. 1370-1426) had extraordinary observation skills and possessed an unfailing knowledge of flora and fauna. Instead of the ‘natural’ lamb, the Masters painted the ‘theological’ lamb of the Revelation, including a halo of golden rays.106 104

 Special thanks to Till-Holger Borchert, Luc Dequeker, Hélène Dubois and Maximiliaan Martens. 105  The still-ongoing conservation-restoration project of the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb is being done by the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK/IRPA, Brussels). The most recent research results from the conservation-restoration project are: Hélène Dubois, The conservation history of the Ghent Altarpiece, in The Burlington Magazine, 160, 2018, p. 754-765; Danny Praet & Maximiliaan P.J. Martens (eds.), Het Lam Gods. Van Eyck. Kunst, Geschiedenis, Wetenschap en Religie, Veurne, 2019; Bart Fransen & Cyriel Stroo (eds.), The Ghent Altarpiece. Research and Conservation of the Exterior, (Contribution to the Study of Flemish Primitives, 14), Turnhout, 2020; Maximiliaan P.J. Martens, Till-Holger Borchert, Jan Dumolyn, Johan De Smet & Frederica Van Dam (eds.), Van Eyck. Een optische revolutie, Veurne, 2020. 106  Luc Dequeker, Ecce Agnus Dei. Jan Van Eyck’s Hidden Diamond. The Ghent Altarpiece Restored, (unpublished open access), 2019, p. 1-17, p. 6-7; See: https://limo.libis.be/primo-explore/ fulldisplay?docid=LIRIAS2905281&context=L&vid=Lirias&search_scope=Lirias&tab=default “Today, after the discovery of the original Lamb, I would emphasize particularly the solemn message, the apotheosis of the Apocalypse: ‘Happy are those who are invited to the weddingsupper of the Lamb’ (Rev. 19, 9), fulfilling prophet Isaiah’s divine promise: ‘On this mountain (Sion) the Lord of Hosts will prepare a banquet of rich fare for all the peoples, a banquet of wines well matured and riches fare, well-matured wines strained clear’ (Is. 25, 6). Van Eyck’s newly discovered Lamb of God is clearly the Lamb of the Apocalypse. Not the warring and victorious Ram with seven horns authorized ‘to open the scroll in the right hand of the One sitting on the throne, breaking the seven seals’ (Rev. 5, 1- 6). Nor ‘the Ram that will judge the peoples with a sword in the mouth and rule them with an iron rod’ (Rev. 19, 15). Van Eyck painted a victorious Lamb proclaiming ultimate victory over evil and the universal salvation of humanity.”

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Fig. 15. a-b. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441) and Hubert van Eyck (ca. 1370-1426), Detail of the head of the mystic lamb before (a) and after (b) being painted over, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1430-1432, Ghent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral

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With the van Eycks, the lamb of the apocalypse becomes a unique, piercing figure, bestowed with an almost human gaze as if it were that of the Son of Man himself. The painters did bestow the lamb’s eyes with one animal detail: the horizontal pupils that goats, sheep, and deer have. Because they are vulnerable prey animals, the horizontal pupil offers them a broader range of sight. And if the van Eycks’ lamb already sees more than humans, this optical advantage also connects with the impact of the direct, frontal eye contact. The lamb’s gaze is piercing from the middle panel. The eye contact between humans and the face of God was a familiar iconographic, theological, and optic principle during the van Eycks’ era. Iconographically, the frontal gaze is also an important characteristic of the vera icon or the acheiropoietos that originated in the art of icons.107 Acheiropoietoi are images of which it was believed that they were created without intervention by humans.108 Often they are connected to so-called ‘iconogenetic’ legends, which offer an explanation for the creation of the (figurative) image as such. The gaze outward in this Byzantine tradition is also part of the iconographic characteristics of the acheiropoietos. I will expand upon the example of the mandylion and the Abgar legend. In the 6th century, the legend of king Abgar of Edessa is born.109 The Syrian king was a contemporary of Christ and had thus heard of the Messiah. One day, the king falls ill, and sends an artist, Ananias, to Jerusalem to create a portrait of Christ. The king believes that this portrait will heal him, but the artist is blinded by the countenance of Christ. In response, Christ himself presses his image onto the cloth: the mandylion. At first, the cloth did not show anything, but on the way back to Edessa, first blotchy shadows started to appear, followed by contours, and finally color. Back home, the peculiar image relic heals the 107  Ernst von Dobschütz, Christusbilder. Untersuchungen zur christlichen Legenden, 1, Leipzig, 1899, p. 41; Gilbert Dragon, Holy Images and Likeness, in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 45, 1991, p. 23-33, p. 24; James Trilling, The Image Not Made by Hands and the Byzantine Way of Seeing, in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, eds. Herbert Leon Kessler & Gerhard Wolf, Bologna, 1998, p. 110-127; Giovanni Morelli & Gerhard Wolf, Il volto di Cristo, (exh. cat.), Milan, 2000; Barbara Baert, The Gendered Visage. Facets of the Vera Icon, in Annual of the Antwerp Royal Museum, 2000, p. 10-43. 108  Ernst Kris & Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist. A Historical Experiment, New Haven-London, 1979, p. 61-90. 109  Alain Desreumaux, Histoire du roi Abgar et de Jésus. Présentation et traduction du texte syriaque intégral de la doctrine, (Apocryphes, 1), Turnhout, 1993, p. 138-145; Hans J.W. Drijvers, The Image of Edessa in the Syriac Tradition, in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, op. cit., p. 13-33, p. 29; Andrea Nicolotti, From the Mandylion of Edessa to the Shroud of Turin. The Metamorphosis and Manipulation of a Legend, Leiden, 2014.

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Fig. 16. Abgar and the mandylion, Byzantium, panel, after 944, Sinai, Saint Catherine’s Monastery

Fig. 17. Mandylion, Byzantium, miniature from John Climacus, ca. 1100, Rome, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Ross. Gr. 251, fol. 12v

king of his leprosy. In 944, the mandylion is said to have been transferred from Edessa to the imperial palace in Byzantium, where it presumably disappeared during the 4th crusade in 1204 (fig. 16).110 Eye witnesses in Byzantium speak of a ‘blinding’ light that radiates from the mandylion.111 The True Image was said to be indescribable, in the same way that the mystery of the double nature of Christ is indescribable. The mandylion of Abgar has ‘captured’ the face of Christ (fig. 17). Augustine (354-430) calls the image (imago) capax: that which is extensive and tangible.112 The cloth effectuates an iconic transference of the assumed godly origin of  Kurt Weitzman, The Mandylion and Constantine Porphyrogenetos, in Cahiers archéologiques, 11, 1960, p. 163-184; Herbert Leon Kessler, Il mandylion, in Il volto di Cristo, op. cit., p. 67-99. 111  Gerhard Wolf, From Mandylion to Veronica. Picturing the “disembodied” Face and Disseminating the True Image of Christ in the Latin West, in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, op. cit., p. 153-197, p. 165. 112  Augustine, De Trinitate Dei, XII, XI, 16; Julia Kristeva, Visions capitales, Paris, 1998, p. 59. 110

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Fig. 18. ‘Authentic’ mandylion on cloth, 14th century (presumed), Rome, Vatican City, Palazzi Pontifici, Lipsanotheca

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Fig. 19. ‘Authentic’ mandylion on panel, 14th century, Genoa, San Bartolomeo degli Armeni

images to the human artistic practice. In the legend, this process is depicted quite literally in the different phases of development from a formless shape to the figurative form of the portrait. Because the mandylion was bestowed by Christ himself, this also legitimizes all other icons that will come forth from this ancient source and will flood the Christian world.113 These days, both the Vatican (fig. 18) as well as the San Bartolomeo degli Armeni in Genoa (fig. 19) claim to have the most accurate (possibly 14th-century) copy of the authentic, lost mandylion.114 These mandylia are characterized by the rather dark image of Christ — referring to the ‘living’ image in ‘process’ — and the prying eyes placed in what seems to be a  The mandylion is an important iconophile argument in the iconoclastic debate of 787 that the Byzantine empress Irene (752-803) settled in favor of the figurative arts; Herbert Leon Kessler, Configuring the Invisible by Copying the Holy Face, in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, op. cit., p. 130-151, p. 150. 114  Ian Wilson, Holy Faces, Secret Places. The Quest for Jesus’ True Likeness, Toronto, 1991, p. 112-113, fig. 10, imgs. 14, 21, 111. 113

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Fig. 20. Showing of the vera icon, Mirabilia Romae, block printed book, 1481, Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek, 8° xyl. 50, fol. 27v

template: a round face contour with three points at the bottom for the hair and beard. The eyes’ pupils are at the very center, meaning that Christ’s eyes optically seem to follow the viewer when they move. Until the 11th-12th century, we do not have any documentation about the image cults that mention the existence of a native ‘true image’ of Christ.115 But in 1216, a miracle takes place at Saint Peter’s Square in Rome. In his Chronica Major (after 1245), Matthew of Paris (ca. 1200-1259) says that the image of Christ on the cloth was shown to pilgrims when it suddenly turned upside down (fig. 20).116 According to Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) the reversal of the image was a holy prophecy, and he composed a prayer that granted an indulgence of ten days. Such an indulgence is still seen in the background of  Gerhard Wolf, From Mandylion to Veronica, op. cit., p. 153-179; Amanda Murphy, Herbert Leon Kessler, et al. (eds.), The European Fortune of the Roman Veronica in the Middle Ages, (Convivium. Supplementum), Turnhout, 2017. 116  Hans Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum im Mittelalter, Berlin, 1981, p. 35 & p. 200203, considers this miracle as a metaphor for a ‘reversal’ in Western image tradition that has come to be influenced by Byzantium iconographically, technically, and theologically. 115

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Fig. 21. a-b. Petrus Christus (ca. 1410-1475), Portrait of a young man with Indulgence for the vera icon, ca. 1450, London, National Gallery of Art

the Portrait of a young man (ca. 1450) by Petrus Christus (ca. 1410-1475) which is kept at the National Gallery of Art in London (fig. 21a-b). The image that turned upside-down in Rome was from then on known as the sudarium (the sweat cloth) of the holy Veronica.117 The cloth was said to be 40 by 37 centimeters and was kept in a ciborium.118 The relic was said to be lost in 1527 during the sacco di Roma. In his Speculum Ecclesiae (ca. 1215), Gerald of Wales (1146-1223) claimed: “Some say that Veronica is a play on words, meaning the true icon”.119 The homonym connection between the object and the incarnation in Veronica was thus made early on. Veronica was also associated with the woman that Christ healed of her issue of blood 117  Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and her Cloth. History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True” Image, Cambridge, 1991; Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary. Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany, New York, 1998. 118  After Benedict of Soracte (11th century), who described such an object in Saint Peter’s relic collection, Joseph L. Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, Chicago-London, 1993, p. 81. 119  Joseph L. Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, op. cit., p. 82.

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(Mark 5: 25). In the pseudo-gospel of Nicodemus (4th century), this woman was called Berenice, from which phere-nike (she who carries victory) could be derived.120 It is known that the apocryphal tradition of Veronica who soothed the face of Christ as told in Jacobus da Voragine’s (1229-1298) Legenda Aurea,121 was widely spread in both texts and imagery, and an incisive Western answer to the mandylion of Abgar.122 * During the Van Eycks’ time, the vera icon-iconography had countless of variations on panels, in the miniature arts, and in objects such as seals and pilgrim’s badges. We differentiate between the narrative iconography (Veronica depicted during the carrying of the cross) (fig. 22), the front-facing ‘iconic’ iconography (the isolated face of Christ, building on the strict Byzantine template) (fig. 23) and a type in between, where Veronica with the cloth is isolated from the story (fig. 24).123 In this typology, the face of Christ itself shifts between a perfect mandylionfähig image and the suffering face that appeared on the cloth according to the Legenda Aurea. The Van Eycks were familiar with the far-reaching tradition of the True Image.124 On the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, you can see a vera icon souvenir with the typical Roman/Genovese template on the left shoulder of one of the pilgrims (fig. 25). Possibly this is Saint Judoc, the patron saint of the person who commissioned the altarpiece, Judocus Vyd, who not only aligns himself with 120  There are different women in ancient Christianity who carry the name Berenice, one of which is Salome’s daughter, See: Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and her Cloth, op. cit., p. 114 ff.; Barbara Baert, Interruptions & Transitions. Essays on the Senses in Medieval and early Modern Visual Culture, (Art and Material Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, 14), Leiden, 2018, p. 73-130; Barbara Baert, Liesbet Kusters & Emma Sidgwick, An Issue of Blood. The Healing of the Woman with the Haemorrhage (Mark 5.24B-34, Luke 8.42B-48, Matthew 9.19-22) in Early Medieval Visual Culture, in Blood, Sweat and Tears. The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe, (Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture, 25), ed. Manfred Horstmanshoff, Leiden, 2012, p. 307-338. 121  William Granger Ryan (ed. & transl.), Jacobus de Voragine. The Golden Legend. Reading on the Saints, part 1, Princeton, 1995, p. 202. 122  Gerhard Wolf, La vedova di Re Abgar. Uno Sguardo comparatistico al Mandilion e alla Veronica, in Les images dans les sociétés médiévales. Pour une histoire comparée, (Bulletin de l’institut historique belge de Rome, 69), Turnhout, 1999, p. 215-244. 123  For an extensive catalogue about these different types, see: Gerhard Wolf, ‘Or fu si fatta la sembianza vostra?’ Squardi alla ‘vera icona’ e alle suie copie artitiche, in Il volto di Cristo, op. cit., p. 103-114, p. 115-211. 124  For countless examples, see: Noa Turel, Living Pictures. Rereading “au vif,” 1350-1550, in Gesta, 50, 2, 2011, p. 163-182.

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Fig. 22. Cavalry with Veronica, miniature from the Grandes Heures de Duc de Berry, Jacquemart de Hesdin (1355-1414, active between 1384-1413), 1409, Paris, Musée du Louvre, Ms. lat. 919, fol. 71

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Fig. 23. Unknown Czech painter, Madonna of Saint Thomas, vera icon on the recto side, ca. 1400-1410, Brno, Moravian Gallery Fig. 24. Veronica and the sudarium, Master of Saint Veronica, (active between ca. 1400-1420), ca. 1420, London, National Gallery of Art

Rome this way, but also with the sudarium as such.125 Such smaller parchment versions with dark ‘templates’ of the vera icon were also found in nunneries as loose parchments or as Kussbilder in manuscripts (fig. 26).126 In short, vera iconimagery and badges were prevalent during that time in both homes and studios.

 Examples of such badges can be found in: Adrianus Maria Koldeweij, Lijfelijke en geestelijke pelgrimage. Materiële “souvenirs” van spirituele pelgrimage, in Geen povere schoonheid. Bijdragen over laat-middeleeuwse kunst in verband met de Moderne Devotie, ed. Cees Veelenturf, Nijmegen, 2000; Adrianus Maria Koldeweij, Geloof en geluk. Sieraad en devotie in middeleeuws Vlaanderen, Arnhem, 2006. 126  Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, op. cit., p. 328: “The sheet in Copenhagen extends the logic of the icon in a way that diminishes its power, even as it multiplies the original, by suggesting that several representations of the same subject seen simultaneously were more efficacious than just one;” See also similar vera icons as ‘kissing images’ in the article by 125

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Fig. 25. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441) and Hubert van Eyck (ca. 1370-1426), Vera icon pilgrim souvenir from Rome, detail of one of the pilgrims, possibly Judocus, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1430-1432, Ghent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral

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Fig. 26. Four vera icons on parchment, added to psaltery for Cistercian nuns, before 1462, Copenhagen, Det Kongelige Bibliothek, Ms. Thott 117, 8°, fol 4

Some years after the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, in 1438, Jan Van Eyck personally adds a fourth type to the iconographic genealogy. The panel, which is only known through copies of the original, shows a portrait of Christ that signifies the tipping point to a humanist interpretation of the archetypes of the mandylion and the vera icon (fig. 27).127 Van Eyck pushes the face of Christ just over the edge into the portrait genre. By giving Christ a neck and bust and by removing him from his archaic carrier — the (sweat) cloth — he becomes an Kathryn M. Rudy, Eating the Face of Christ. Philip the Good and his Physical Relationship with Veronicas, in The European Fortune, op. cit., p. 168-179. 127  Gerhard Wolf, The Origins of Painting, in RES. Anthropology and Aesthetics, 36, 1999, p. 60-78; For the copy at the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, see: Till-Holger Borchert, Andreas Beyer & Marijke van der Glas, De eeuw van Van Eyck. 1430-1530. De Vlaamse Primitieven en het Zuiden, Ghent, 2002, p. 239, fig. 100.

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Fig. 27. Copy after a work by Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441), Vera effigies, 1438, Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie

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individual.128 In Van Eyck’s times, the individual features of Christ were spread through the so-called Letter of Lentulus: a 13th-century apocrypha from Byzantium which would refer back to a letter by Pilate to the Roman governor Publius Lentulus (27 BC-14 AD) which describes the face of Christ. In the source, it is said that Christ had hazel colored hair which he wore in a center part, and that he had a beard with two points. The latter is what distinguishes the Lentulus type, like in the portrait of Jan Van Eyck, from the mandyliontemplate.129 Iconographically, the Lentulus type was usually depicted en profile, as seen in the version at the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht (fig. 28). This is another convention Van Eyck dared to evolve into a different branch. He still uses the frontal view, so deeply rooted in the vera icon, and thus creates an in-between type, a vera effigies (‘true portrait’). This modern vera effigies, arisen from the 15th-century mimesis of the North, presents itself as the painterly art of the window, freed from the ancient paradigms of textile and imprint. (A window that is also reflected in Christ’s pupil.) Seeing as how the iconography of this crucial panel is in the hybrid space between humankind and the Son of Man, between portrait and acheiropoietos, Jan van Eyck in turn explores the medium of the painterly arts and what it is capable of during his lifetime.130 Shadow and potential become the possibilities of the paint itself: the incarnation of the Son of Man enveloped in oil and an artist-creator able to artistically activate this incarnation. The painterly arts are now unsurpassed in the reflection of their own essence. In this work, the roots of the figurative image found in Byzantium — Iconogenetically charged with the magic of the acheiropoietos — are tested to their limits in what one hand and the finest brush are capable of. That is where it happens, at the end of an iconophilic journey that stretches between the alpha and the omega (the letters connected to the halo), between the initium (beginning) and finis (end) of the 128

 In Matthew of Paris’ manuscript, Christ is also illustrated as a bust portrait; Matthew of Paris, Chronica Major, 1245-1253, Cambridge, Corpus Christi, Ms. 26, fol. VIII; Nigel Morgan, ‘Veronica’ Images and the Office of the Holy Face in Thirteenth-Century England, in The European Fortune, op. cit., p. 85-99, fig. 2. 129  Ernst von Dobschütz, Christusbilder, op. cit., supplement, p. 308-329; Jaques-Noel Pérès, Untersuchungen im Zusammenhang mit der sogenannten Epistula Lentuli, in Apocrypha II, 2000, p. 59-75; Hans Preuss, Das Bild Christi im Wandel der Zeiten, Leipzig, 1932. 130  Gerhard Wolf, The Origins of Painting, op. cit., p. 64: “Accessible only by means of copies, the “true image” was a symptomatic phenomenon in a period of transition, when veristic modes of representing or constructing reality appeared in Western paintings.” See also: Amy Powell, A Point “Ceaselessly Pushed Back.” The Origin of Early Netherlandish Painting, in The Art Bulletin, 88, 4, 2006, p. 707-728.

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Fig. 28. Unknown master from the south of the Netherlands, Lentulus diptych, 14901499, Utrecht, Museum Catharijneconvent

epigram from the Book of Revelation 22:13.131 And what theme is better suited than the vera icon itself — the capax of the image that was brought into the world by Christ himself with his own DNA — to serve as a lauding of the painterly arts? What a paragone, before that word even existed!132 And this all took place in the small, flourishing city north of the Alps.

 Gerhard Wolf, The Origins of Painting, op. cit., p. 64: “On 28 January 1438, the day when Jan van Eyck perfected his first version of the “true image.” He renounced the veil and put the bust of Christ within a frame as if we or he were looking through a window. And, indeed, a window is mirrored in the Savior’s eyes.” 132  Christiane Kruse, Wozu Menschen malen. Historische Begründungen eines Bildmediums, Munich, 2003. 131

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Fig. 29. Robert Campin (1378/9-1444), Veronica, ca. 1410, Frankfurt, Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie

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Robert Campin (1378/9-1444) did something similar (fig. 29). Veronica not only shows Christ’s image, clearly taking after the dark archetype of the mandylion; she also shows the virtuosity of the painterly arts as such. The painter is capable of realizing the seemingly impossible: a completely diaphanous handkerchief, the five folds still visible, and floating on top of that highly delicate textile, the image of Christ, looking amazed by the sheer amount of mimetic ability.133 Here, Veronica is the actual phere-nike of the painterly arts, her sudarium forms the mise en abyme of the medium itself, and her spiritual example competes with the artistic amazement over a shining gazzatum that was ‘woven’ from the brush. * The lamb shares the act of staring out of the frame with the Christ/God of the Deisis at the top panel (fig. 30) of the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb — at least for now, because phase III of the restoration has not yet given a definite answer to that query — and with the two singing angels on the right hand panel (fig. 31). Is there any kind of hierarchy to be found in the eye contact? The road to ultimate beholding in the spirit is cumulative, or has been described since Augustine as the road to the spiritual seeing.134 The hierarchy and anagoge of seeing God is in an exegetic conflict within two Biblical texts but which — so we shall see — can be reconciled with iconographic, theological, and optical means. In Exodus 33:18-20 God says to Moses: “But you may not look directly at my face, for no one may see me and live.” But with the coming of a visible Son of God, Paul says in his First Epistle to the Corinthians (Corinthians 13:12-13): Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

 Herbert Leon Kessler, The Literary Warp and Artistic Weft of Veronica’s Cloth, in The European Fortune, op. cit., p. 13-30, p. 30: “Saint Veronica’s cloth is, as Robert Campin understood, made of shimmering gazzatum in which doubled wefts of text constantly cross each other and hold the warp of images in place.” 134  Augustine, De civitate Dei, CCSL 448, p. 856; See also: Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médièvale, Paris, 1959, passim. 133

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Fig. 30. Jan van Eyck (ca. 13901441) and Hubert van Eyck (1370-1426), God/Son of Man of the Deisis, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1430-1432, Ghent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral

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Fig. 31. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441) and Hubert van Eyck (1370-1426), Singing angels of the right panel, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1430-1432, Ghent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral

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Paul alludes to a typological transition from the Old Covenant into the New Covenant, which he further explained in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians (Corinthians 3:7-18): The old way, with laws etched in stone, led to death, though it began with such glory that the people of Israel could not bear to look at Moses’ face. For his face shone with the glory of God(…). So if the old way, which has been replaced, was glorious, how much more glorious is the new, which remains forever! We are not like Moses, who put a veil over his face so the people of Israel would not see the glory, even though it was destined to fade away (…). But the people’s minds were hardened, and to this day whenever the old covenant is being read, the same veil covers their minds so they cannot understand the truth. And this veil can be removed only by believing in Christ. (…) So all of us who have had that veil removed can see and reflect the glory of the Lord. And the Lord - who is the Spiritmakes us more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image.

The exegetic solution for the impasse — the disappearance of Moses’ veil through spiritual seeing — is portrayed in a unique fashion in the last folio of the Grandval Bible (Tours, ca. 840) and was explained impressively in Herbert Kessler’s Spiritual Seeing.135 Fol. 449 has two halves and depicts the Book of Revelation (fig. 32). At the top, the closed book is flanked by the lamb and the lion of Judah, after verse 5:1. The closed book is a well-known metaphor for the Old Testament, which shall be unlocked in the New Covenant. The total opening will only take place during the End Times.136 The lower half shows a gray-haired man on a throne. He holds a veil above his head and is flanked by the symbols of Matthew and Mark. The figure on the throne represents the fulfilment of Moses in Paul and at the same time is the ‘portrait’ of one cumulative persona: the Son of Man who is described as sitting on the throne in Revelation 4 and again appears in the  London, British Library, Add. Ms. 10546, fol. 449; Herbert Leon Kessler, Spiritual seeing. op. cit., p. 158-189. 136  Alcuin (ca. 735-804) explains the metaphor. “As for the book written within and without, it seems to contain both Testaments, namely the Old and the New. Alternatively, written within, the book represents the allegory, and written without it represents the history. The reason why the Old and the New Testament are said to be one book is that neither can the New be separated from the Old nor the Old from the New.” Commentariorum in Apocalypsin, IV, 5, PL 100, col. 1120: Liber autem scriptus “intus et foris”, utrumque testamentum, Vetus scilicet et Novum, continere videtur; et Vetus quidem iuxta litteram foris patebat, sed iuxta mysticum intellectum intus Novum occultabat. Sive intus liber scriptus ostenditur allegoria, foris historia. Idcirco autem Vetus et Novum Testamentum unus liber dicitur, quia nec Novum a Veteri, nec rursum Vetus a Novo valet distingui. 135

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Fig. 32. Miniature from the book of Revelation, Grandval bible, ca. 840, London, British Library, Add. Ms. 10546, fol. 449

verses 22:3-4. “No longer will there be a curse upon anything. For the throne of God and of the Lamb will be there, and his servants will worship him. And they will see his face, and his name will be written on their foreheads.” The triad in the Biblical exegesis — Moses in Exodus, Paul in the Corinthians, and the Son of Man who appears in Revelation — is mirrored in the triple ‘sight’ that has remained an enduring subject since the writings and opinions of Pope Adrian I (†795) until deep into the 15th century. First there is the purely physical seeing. Then there is the seeing where one interprets words and images.

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And finally, there is true intellectual sight. That seeing takes place in the mind, removed from the senses, such as line, color, sound, scent, or taste. That is where God can be seen. According to Augustine, this seeing requires the intellectual prowess to detach things from their material nature and thus to create room for the virtue of the purely spiritual. In the Greek language, three different words remain, that can be lexically divided into this hierarchy:137 blepô: physical perception, theôreô: observing attentively and intellectually and horaô/ heôraka: the transcendent seeing with the eyes of faith.138 * During the van Eycks’ era, both the iconography of the True Image of Christ and the exegesis surrounding the spiritual seeing are connected to a third pillar: the study of optics. Thanks to the most recent thorough studies by Marc De Mey and Maximiliaan Martens we now understand how the van Eycks were able to connect the idea of, for example, the beata visio with the contemporary scientific insights about light and eyes.139 Since the vital work by Christian Trottmann, we know that the desire to see God after death ran very deep in medieval and early modern times.140 The vera icon was as popular as the Andachtsbild, because it was a precursor with plastic means of the Great Visual Happening. During the van Eycks’ time, there was also theological speculation if the beata visio would take place immediately 137  These insights arose during the interdisciplinary research project surrounding the exegesis and iconography of the Noli me tangere motif at the KU Leuven; Barbara Baert, An Odour, a Taste, a Touch. Impossible to Describe. Noli me tangere and the Senses, in Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, (Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture, 26), eds. Wietse de Boer & Christine Goettler, Leiden, 2013, p. 111-151; Reimund Bieringer, ‘They have taken away my Lord.’ Text-Immanent Repetitions and Variations in John 20,1-18, in Repetitions and Variations in the Fourth Gospel. Style, Text, Interpretation (Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, 223), eds. Gilbert Van Belle & Pieter Maritz, Leuven, 2009, p. 609630; Barbara Baert, Interruptions & Transitions, op. cit., p. 36-72. 138  Reimund Bieringer, ‘They have taken away my Lord’, op. cit., p. 618; Joost Smit Sibinga, Towards Understanding the Composition of John 20, in The Four Gospels 1992. Festschrift Frans Neirynck, (Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, 100), eds. Frans Van Segbroeck, Christopher M. Tuckett, Gilbert Van Belle & Joseph Verheyden, Leuven, 1992, p. 2139-2152, p. 2139; See also: G.L. Phillips, Faith and Vision in the Fourth Gospel, in Studies in the Fourth Gospel, ed. Frank Leslie Cross, London, 1975, p. 83-96, p. 91-92. 139  Marc De Mey, De visione Dei. Optica, theologie en filosofie in het Lam Gods, in Het Lam Gods, op. cit., p. 202-215; Maximiliaan P.J. Martens, Jan van Eycks optische revolutie, in Van Eyck. Een optische revolutie, op. cit., p. 141-203. 140  Christian Trottmann, La vision béatifique. Des disputes scolastiques à sa définition par Benoît XII, (Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 289), Rome, 1995, passim.

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after death, or only during the Last Judgement, or if it possibly happened in phases. In the last case, one would see the Son of Man after they die, and only see the overwhelming face of God during the Last Judgement, perhaps bathing in the ultimate light of creation, like how Dante Alighieri (ca. 1265-1321) imagined it.141 The beata visio is connected to the remarkable phrase in the book that Mary holds in her lap during the Annunciation: De visione Dei (fig. 33). Marc De Mey has a brilliant analysis of this detail.142 He says that the phrase refers to the desire for the beata visio and that the optics the van Eycks used is aimed at introducing this precursor in the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb through the obtained optical knowledge and the pictorial effects of light on all of creation, seen in things such as reflection and shine. De Mey noticed that the light source in the Annunciation lights up that phrase in the book, which moreover was not a natural light source, and thus is meant to be the light of God.143 The world of the creation bathes in the wonder of God as a light source, and if this can also be rendered artistically, then the painterly arts offer pre-figurative access to God himself. The pictorial light signifies the elusive, formless iconogenesis of the acheiropoietos, and in touching the world, that light also makes the plastic world possible: through shadow, line, color, volume, shine… The treatise that Nicholas Cusanus (1401-1464) wrote decades later, also under the title De visione Dei (1453), connects the iconographic and theological obsessions with the seeing of god and the painted pupil of an icon.144 Cusanus asked the monks at a monastery near the Tegernsee to walk past the countenance of the vera icon. And look: the icon does not break eye contact. This is in actuality a simple painter’s technique where one places the pupils in the dead center of the painting, just as with the mandylion, which had the same 141  Alessandro Parronchi, La perspettiva Dantesca, in Studi su la dolce prospettiva, ed. Alessandro Parronchi, Milan, 1964, p. 3-90. 142  Marc De Mey, De visione Dei, op. cit., p. 202-215, p. 203-205. 143  Marc De Mey, De visione Dei, op. cit., p. 213-214, noticed that the three onlookers in the alley in the background of the Annunciation are gazing in wonder at an unnatural light source in the sky, a direct reference by the Van Eycks to this heavenly point of view. 144  Inigo Bocken & Harald Schwaetzer (eds.), Spiegel und Porträt. Zur Bedeutung zweier zentraler Bilder im Denken des Nicolaus Cusanus, Maastricht-Aachen, 2005; Louis Dupré, The Mystical Theology of Cusanus’s De Visione Dei, in Eros and Eris, (Phaenomenologica, 127), eds. Paul van Tongeren, Paul Sars, Chris Bremmers & Koen Boey, Dordrecht, 1992; Arianne Conty, Absolute Art: Nicolas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei, in Religion and the Arts, 16, 15, 2012, p. 461-487; Michel de Certeau, The Gaze: Nicholas of Cusa, in Diacritics, transl. Catherine Porter, 17, 3, 1987, p. 2-38.

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Fig. 33. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441) and Hubert van Eyck (1370-1426), De visione Dei, phrase in the book Mary is holding in the scene of the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1430-1432, Ghent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral

miraculous effect. For Cusanus, however, the trick becomes empirical evidence that the seeing of God surpasses a single perspective and this is absolute and infinite. We see God from all sides, just like the van Eycks gave the lamb horizontal pupils, eyes facing forward, with the pupil right at the center. This is the contemplative genius of the van Eycks: they made métier, consciousness, medium, mimesis, paragone, emulatio, exegesis, and spirituality all intersect with modern optics. That is how they became the painters who single-handedly dismantled Exodus 33:18-20 and opened the way for Paul’s letter 1 Corinthians 13:12-13 through mimetic means: a road paved with gems and bathing in creationist sunlight. Or, as Astrid Harth and Frederica Van Dam aptly describe it: “Basically, the mimesis principle undermined the

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contemplative function of religious depictions. But by perfecting the painterly illusionist techniques to depict optical phenomena that are connected to spiritual seeing, the van Eycks gave the artistic mimesis doctrine an allegorical dimension that facilitated the contemplative function of religious depictions.”145 * What kind of eye contact does the audience experience when they view the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb? Is the audience optically-physically touched by the lamb, do they then travel upwards and there, meet the attentive gazes of the angels, to end with the ultimate ecstasy: God himself? Have we passed over the lamb step by step, past the angels — the beings in between — until we reach God, and thus become transcendent in the purest spiritual seeing of horaô/ heôraka? Can we, through the van Eycks’ limitless mimesis when it comes to the details and light reach the beata visio now, in this material world? The eye contact with God, made observable in oils? And finally, the phrase de visione Dei was lifted from the genitivus objectivus and ‘turned around’ into the genitivus subjectivus: the all-encompassing seeing of God that in turn becomes ours? What artist dares to take on such an emulatio of the reversal miracle of 1216? One démarche here: the other angel of the Annunciation room invites us too (fig. 34 a.). For Louis Marin the angel of the room is un mouvement et transit, franchisseur d’espace et passeur de seuils, il ne se fait pas voir; il n’est pas vu;146 and at the same time: une figure du scécret du mystère de l’incarnation.147 The angel’s speech weaves to Mary’s ear and passes through the border that divides immateriality and materiality. Where speech and hearing, mouth and ear bounce back and forth, is where the threshold arises in the iconography. Artists furthermore show that the voice of the angel is a voice from above, the voice of ruach, by upgrading the epigraphy to a sacral tongue. This is done through the double inversion of the direction of reading: the golden letters are upside down and have to be read from right to left. The text at the same time both hides and reveals: exactly what happens in the van Eycks’ boustrophedon (fig. 34 b.).148 145  Astrid Harth & Frederica Van Dam, Visio Dei. De weerklank van de eyckiaanse optische revolutie in de zestiende eeuw, in Van Eyck. Een optische revolutie, o.c., p. 186. 146  Louis Marin, Opacité de la peinture. Essais sur la représentation au Quattrocento, Paris, 2006, p. 164. 147  Louis Marin, Opacité de la peinture, op. cit., p. 166. 148  For examples of the boustrophedon during the Annunciation (the text is written backwards and is read from a godly perspective) like on the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (1430-

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Fig. 34. a-b. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441) and Hubert van Eyck (1370-1426), Boustrophedon in the Annunciation from the angel (a) to Mary (b), the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1430-1432, Ghent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral

Where the angel as messenger utilizes speech, Mary is the receptive hearer. This receptivity is what she needs to provide for the Incarnation to be possible. For all the Arts to be possible. Look! Mary is sitting reading. In silence. She is startled. She hears words. Then she herself speaks. She asks: “How shall this happen?” The van Eycks have answered that question in the infinity of their paintbrushes. Under the eye of the new lamb. Again. What artist dares to take on such an emulatio of the book of Luke? Isn’t this android lamb with its correct optical expansion on the limitations of humans combined with the ‘theological’ lamb and its bold artistic resonance of a human gaze and ears not an incredible metaphor for the iconography of the altarpiece as a whole? And is the small black horizontal stripe of the 1432) by the Van Eyck brothers; See: Barbara Baert, The Annunciation and the Senses. Late Medieval Devotion and the Pictorial Gaze, in The Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Northern Europe, Images, Objects and Practices, eds. Henning Laugerud, Salvador Ryan & Laura Skinnebach, Dublin, 2015, p. 121-145; Barbara Baert, The Annunciation and the Senses: Ruach, Pneuma, Odour, in Between Jerusalem and Europe: Essays in Honour of Bianca Kühnel, (Visualizing the Middle Ages, 11), Leiden, 2015, p. 197-216.

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pupil- the detail of all details – not pars pro toto for perhaps the world’s most courageous and impressive restoration in the painterly arts? But there is more. Be quiet. Listen! God’s breath — his creative ruach — is whispering to you. Additionally, the mouth of the angel that looks at us is singing: a mouth as an eye and an eye as a mouth. The altarpiece is not wrapped in silence, it speaks its Divine Words to us. We, the humanoids that invented the science of optics are now invited to partake in the final sense: hearing. Just as gazes intertwine in the Altar, sounds and voices intermingle in the final step of Intercessio: the listening capacity of God / The Son of Man. Our mumbling prayers are not in vain. Words enter in that beautiful cosmic wormhole: the ear canal of our Creator. And now we may understand that one anomaly nobody wants to speak about: the new ears of the lamb… No. They are not positioned incorrectly. They are planted on both sides of the skull, between eyes and mouth, between seeing and speaking, at the same altitude where the human ear is located. The lamb is listening. He has just opened his tender ears as a flower, and full of diligence they blossom towards the praying beholder.

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And somewhere in painterly time and space another small ear unfolds. The tiny black pistil receives a beam of light that penetrates deep down in a blooming womb. * In the painterly arts, the eye does not blink: not those of the animals nor those of the humans. The front facing gaze is forever frozen in the oil paint and draws its unending and apotropaic power from it. This broader and deeper seeing of the lamb only came back to the surface after the restoration. There, from the center of the middle panel, the figure gazes out and musters149 its yellow almond eyes to us. The lamb has surpassed its animal species, and thanks to the Masters, its tiny horizontal black slits of pupil give a glimpse — subtle but undeniable — of a psyche that is capable of answering our gaze. The Son of Man resonating in a lamb becomes the démarche of a vera effigies agni through a plastic action. There may be a second démarche: the blood that pours out of the chest of the lamb. The wound leaks blood from the stomach of the animal, not with a heavy flow that fills the Eucharistic chalice, but drop by drop, in a messy, spotted fashion (fig. 35). The blood stains the white immaculata altar cloth in tiny splotches, uncontrolled and almost coincidentally.150 But in the van Eycks’ painted world, where the eye does not blink, there is no such thing as accidental spills. The allegory of the Eucharistic sacrifice — the chalice — subtly branches 149  In the 15th to 17th century, the word musters was used to mean ‘to show, exhibit’. The word can be traced back directly to the Latin verb monstrare which meant: showing, pointing. This monstrare in turn is derived from another verb: monere which meant: to warn. Monstrum is a derivative of monere. A monstrum is thus a warning, an omen, a miraculous sign, and thus: a miraculous appearance, a monstrosity. muster in WordSense.eu Online Dictionary, https://www. wordsense.eu/muster/, Consulted on: 20-8-2020, and Rob Kyff, Latin verb is the monster behind many words, https://archive.triblive.com/lifestyles/more-lifestyles/latin-verb-is-the-monsterbehind-many-words/, Consulted on: 20-8-2020. 150  Luc Dequeker has an excellent theological read of the second, smaller stream of blood onto the cloth. “The traces of blood splashing from the chalice and dripping onto the altar cloth reveal the specifically sacrificial character of the Ghent Altarpiece. As far as I know, little if any attention has been paid by scholars to the meaning of this motif. Dripping blood on the altar refers to the traditional biblical ‘blood rite’, the slaughter of the sacrificial animal and the purifying shedding of sacrificial blood, prior to the burnt offering in honour of God. In biblical times, on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), the high priest offered animal sacrifices to cleanse the people of their sins. The detailed description of the rite in Leviticus (Lev. 16) specifically refers to the ritual shedding of the animal’s blood on the edges of the Ark of the Covenant inside the temple and the subsequent burnt offering in honour of God on the altar in the open air;” Luc Dequeker, Ecce Agnus Dei, op. cit., p. 3.

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Fig. 35. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441) and Hubert van Eyck (1370-1426), Detail of the bleeding lamb, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1430-1432, Ghent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral

off into an allegory of the acheiropoietos. The red imprint on textile, blood on the crisp white linen: images of potential as well as impregnation. The arrival of the figuration announced in a drop of blood, the incarnation already growing and theologically deeply hidden behind an undamaged white membrane.151 The genius of the van Eyck brothers lives in a wound and in a pupil. The mandylion and sudarium united thanks to the horizontal lens that can see both the East and the West at once. “The wound is the place where the Light enters you,” the Persian poet and Sufi mystic Jalal ad-Din Rumi (12071273) wrote. And then, at the End of Times, at the end of this chapter, all mouths become eyes and all the eyes become ears.  Barbara Baert, Stains. Trace-Cloth-Symptom, in Textile. Journal of Cloth and Culture, 15, 3, 2017, p. 270-291; Barbara Baert, About Stains or the Image as Residue, (Studies in Iconology, 10), Leuven-Walpole, 2017, passim. 151

Chapter 6. BILDERATLAS By Julia van Rosmalen

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Fig. 1. Eyes of Christ, Pantocrator icon, 6th-century, Sinai, Saint Catherine’s Monastery Fig. 2. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441) and Hubert van Eyck (1370-1426), Detail of the eyes of the lamb, Adoration of the mystic lamb, 1430-1432. Ghent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral Fig. 3. Cave called the Eyes of God, Bulgaria, Prohodna Cave, photograph: Yolanda Dimitrova Fig. 4. Detail of Eye Idol from Tell Brak, Syria, ca. 3700-3500 BC, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art Fig. 5. Eyes of Buddha on the Swayambhunath Stupa, ca. 640, Kathmandu, Nepal Fig. 6. Eye of Re and Eye of Horus on the pyramidion of Amenemhat III, late middle kingdom (ca. 1991-1782 BC), Cairo, Egyptian Museum Fig. 7. Eye of God on monastery entrance, 15th-century, Vânători-Neamț Romania, manastirea neamț Fig. 8. Eye of the great spirit petroglyph, Mojave culture, Hayfield, Joshua Tree National Park Fig. 9. Hand-eye and Cosmic serpents, Rattlesnake disk, Mississippian culture (1000-1450 AD), Moundville, Hale County Fig. 10. NGC 7293 Helix Nebula, Eye of God, Through Hubble telescope, Baltimore, Maryland, Nasa, Space Telescope Science Institute Fig. 11. Mexican Votives God’s Eye, Ojo de Dios, Photograph: Douglas P. Perkins Fig. 12. So-called ‘eye of the great spirit’ motif in Navajo blanket, ca. 1850, Denver, Denver Art Museum Fig. 13. Eye of providence votive with text “God sees all”, 1824, Bregenz, Vorarlberg Museum Fig. 14. ‘Evil eye’ (nazar) tree in Uçisar, Cappadocia, Turkey Fig. 15. Hand of Fatima (Khamsa), 20th century, Leiden, Museum of World Cultures Fig. 16. Fragment of a Wedjat Eye Ring, ca. 1390-1352 BC, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art Fig. 17. Mosaic from the ‘house of the evil eye’. Weapons and animals are shown attacking the evil eye, accompanied by an apotropaic horned dwarf, Greek annotation kai su meaning ‘and you (too)’, 2nd century BC, Antakya, Turkey, Hatay Arkeoloji Müzesi Fig. 18. Light coming through the dome’s oculus, 4th century, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, Photo by: Radomir Vrbovsky Fig. 19. Stylized eye of providence combining a circle and triangle, Studio Notarile Bianchini, Cannaregio, Venice Fig. 20. Anonymous Russian artist, Eye of providence, 19th century, Russia, provenance unknown, image in public domain

Chapter 7. OCULI! “That’s a secret, private world you’re looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private they couldn’t possibly explain in public.” (Detective Doyle in the movie Rear Windows (1954) by Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

The story of Danaë was a frame story for the Perseus myth.152 Danaë, Perseus’ mother, was locked away in an impenetrable tower of bronze (or in some versions of the story, iron) by her father Acrisius, king of the Greek city-state Argos. An oracle had warned Acrisius that he would one day be killed by his grandson. As a precaution, the king locked up his only daughter, planning to keep her there until she was too old to have children. But Zeus had become interested in the beautiful virginal Danaë, and penetrated the tower in the form of a golden shower of dust through the opening (in other versions, through a grate) in the upper vault of the tower — the classic oculus153 — and impregnated her womb. Danaë gave birth to Perseus. Acrisius, still fearing the oracle’s prediction, had mother and child locked into a wooden chest, and cast them into the sea. They eventually washed ashore on the island of Seriphos, where a friendly fisherman named Dictys took them in and cared for them. When Perseus grew up, Danaë told him the truth about his birth and his childhood.154 152  The earliest relatively complete story of Danaë that was passed down is the one written by Apollodorus, probably no earlier than the middle of the first century BC (Apollodorus, The Library II. ii. 1-2, (Loeb Classical Library), London, 1954: I, 147. Publius Ovid’s Metamorphoses (43 BC-17 AD) also tell of the story of the conception in Book IV; Publius Ovid, Metamorphoses, transl. by Anthony S. Kline, http://www.gleeditions.com/metamorphoses/students/toc. asp?lid=108; Last accessed 12 February 2021; Madlyn Millner Kahr, Virtuous, Voluptuous, Venal Woman, in The Art Bulletin, 60, 1, 1978, p. 43-55. 153  “The main historic base for an oculus is its use as a sundial. Although not a very conventional sundial, the hole in the roof does give varying shadows throughout the day, which can be calculated precisely to give human beings an idea of time. The oculus is also a source of light and rain in ways that windows cannot offer. This is very practical in the case of vegetation growing directly underneath the oculus or to simply give a simple architecture a natural touch. However, perhaps the most useful historic base for an oculus is its use as a ventilation system”; Zeyna Sanjania, The Significance of the Oculus in Architecture, (unpublished essay at Wyggeston and Queen Elizabeth I College), 2010, p. 10. 154  Madlyn Millner Kahr, Virtuous, Voluptuous, Venal Woman, op. cit., p. 43: “In the myth of Danaei there are some specific psychological ramifications that do not frequently find their

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The Danaë by Jan Gossaert (fig. 36) is one of the earliest Renaissance interpretations of the myth, and precedes more famous versions by Correggio (14891534), Titian (1490-1567) and Tintoretto (1518-1594).155 Gossaert’s Danaë was presumably painted for Philip of Burgundy (1464-1524), admiral of the Burgundian-Habsburg fleet, Bishop of Utrecht and Lord of Utrecht from 1517 onwards.156 He died in 1524, several years before the painting was finished. Gossaert’s interpretation of the myth was underappreciated for a long time.157 In 1923, Achille Segard (1872-1936) described the Danaë as a mindless woman, incapable of thought, whose only job was to sit still and look pretty for the nude genre.158 Max Friedländer (1876-1958) considered Gossaert’s painting as unbalanced when it came to quality.159 In the 1965 exhibition in Rotterdam, the work isn’t even mentioned.160 Robert Wolf and Roland Millen (1968) are the harshest with their criticism. According to the authors, this Danaë is a peasant girl in disguise, a farmer amidst a mess of architectural elements, painted by a man who was lost in his own urban memories.161 Only Wolf-Dieter Dube’s book on the collection of the Alte Pinakothek of Munich (English version 1974) shows an appreciation for the complex architecture in the background, which shows a lot of expertise on late-Gothic and Renaissance architecture across Mediterranean and North-European borders.162 Dube notices that due to the lack of landscape, Danaë is portrayed as crushingly way overtly into literature or art, because they express profoundly disturbing fantasies. If we only scent incest in the story of Danaei, we can understand that deep-seated taboos have generally prevented candid expression of this aspect of the myth. The tale of a young woman impregnated by a god — and not just any god, but the Father of the Gods — hints at an erotic relationship between father and daughter. We remember that Apollodorus wrote that “some say” Danaë was seduced by her uncle, Proetus, her father’s brother, who was thus evidently a surrogate for her father. Moreover, if we were to discount the divine miracle as the source of her pregnancy, we would have to account for it naturalistically, with the recognition that her father was the only man who had access to her.” 155  Antonio da Correggio, 1531, Rome, Galleria Borghese; Titian, 1553-1554, Madrid, Museo del Prado; Tintoretto, 1578, Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts. 156  Eric Jan Sluijter, Emulating Sensual Beauty. Representations of Danaë from Gossaert to Rembrandt, in Simiolus. Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 27, 1999, p. 4-45, p.10. 157  André Corboz, La “Danae” di Mabuse (1527) come testimonianza dell’idea di Sancta Antiquitas, in Artibus et Historiae, 21, 42, 2000, p. 9-29. 158  Achille Segard, Jean Gossart dit Mabuse, Brussels-Paris, 1923, p. 49. 159  Max Friedländer, Jan Gossart and Bernart van Orley, Berlin, 1930, p. 33. 160  Henri Pauwels, Hans R. Hoetink & Siegfried Herzog, Jan Gossaert genaamd Mabuse, (exh. cat.), Rotterdam, 1965, passim. 161  Robert E. Wolf & Roland Millen, Geburt der Neuzeit, Baden-Baden, 1968, p. 174. 162  Wolf-Dieter Dube, The Pinakothek Munich, New York, 1974, p. 122-124.

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Fig. 36. Jan Gossaert van Mabuse (1478-1532), Danaë, 1527, Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek

lonely. The painting is literally bursting at the seams, which combats the sensual meaning of the mythological subject. Despite the ambivalent reaction to the aesthetics of the painting, Gossaert’s Danaë did influence the broader iconological interpretation of the theme. In his Der gefesselte Eros, Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968) makes a connection between Gossaert’s Danaë and the late-Medieval, early-Humanist use of purity allegories.163 Panofsky recognizes a typology between Danaë and the virgin 163  Erwin Panofsky, Der gefesselte Eros (Zur Genealogie von Rembrandts Danae), in Oud Holland, 50, 1933, p. 193-217, p. 206, note 1: Dass Jan Gossaert der Vorstellungsweise des Fulgentius

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conception of Mary, supported by 15th-century treatises and their illustrations.164 The tower that protected her virtue represented Chastity.165 Danaë became a symbol of modesty, of Pudicitia, but conversely, she also became a moralizing exemplum for the distressing violation of this chastity.166 The Dominican monk Franciscus de Retza (ca. 1343-1425/7) wrote in his Defensorium Inviolatae Virginitatis Mariae: “If Danaei conceived from Jupiter through a golden shower, why should the Virgin not give birth when impregnated by the Holy Spirit?” A block book of this treatise (Basel, 1490) shows a woodcut in which Danaë receives beams of sunlight as a Christian, ‘cleaner’ version of Zeus’ original golden raindrops (fig. 37). Larry Silver delves deeper into the chastity allegories, and sees a connection in the iconography of Gossaert’s Danaë with the Annunciation, where gold beams of light shine at the head, ear, or stomach of the Virgin Mary.167 He writes: “The golden shower of the god’s presence falls directly down on this young virgin’s lap, just as the Virgin herself miraculously conceived at the time of the Annunciation. Often this conception, too, is depicted in religious paintings by means of golden rays of light.”168 Metaforalis verpflichtet ist, bedarf kaum der Erörterung: auch bei ihm trifft der goldene Regen, in dichter Tropfenfolge senkrecht herabströmend, eine recht dezent bekleidete, sitzende Danae, deren überkuppeltes halbrundes Wohngemach durch die Eigenart der Fensteraussicht noch immer eine Erinnerung an das „Situ sublimata” des alten Textes vorauszusetzen scheint. 164  Erwin Panofsky, Der gefesselte Eros, op. cit., p. 206-207. 165  Madlyn Millner Kahr, Virtuous, Voluptuous, Venal Woman, op. cit., p. 44.- See also: William S. Heckscher, Recorded From Dark Recollection, in De artibus opuscula XL. Essays in honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. Millard Meiss, New York, 1961, p. 187-200, p. 192: “And yet, it is Pudicitia at bay.”; Salvatore Settis, Danae verso il 1495, in I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 1, 1985, p. 207-237. 166  Jeanne Morgan Zarucchi, The Gentileschi “Danaë”. A Narrative of Rape, in Woman’s Art Journal, 19, 2, 1999, p. 13-16, p. 16: “If the Danae myth is thus interpreted as a metaphor for the physical subjugation of prostitution, then the link becomes clear between this painting and Artemisia’s other portrayals of sexual violence. Like Artemisia’s [Artemisia Gentileschi (15931652), 1612, Saint Louis, Saint Louis Art Museum] other female protagonists, Danae is an exquisitely rendered beautiful human form, yet she is uncomfortable to view. The painting itself is disquieting. We are intruding into a space where an emotional and physical violation has recently occurred, and we see an aftermath from which the tension has not yet dissipated. Artemisia Gentileschi has rightly been recognized by Garrard, Mann, and other scholars as a painter of outstanding technical skill and, most importantly, a powerful narrative voice. The St. Louis Danae portrays an emotionally complex narrative of female disempowerment and acquiescence to sexual violence that is psychologically consistent with the experience of many women, in Artemisia’s time as well as today. Far from being a thematic anomaly in the artist’s oeuvre, Danae represents one of her more stunning achievements.” 167  Larry Silver, “Figure nude, historie e poesie.” Jan Gossaert and the Renaissance Nude in the Netherlands, in Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, 37, 1986, p. 1-40. 168  Larry Silver, “Figure nude, historie e poesie.”, op. cit., p. 20.

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Fig. 37. Franciscus de Retza (1343-1427), Danaë in a tower, illustration from Defensorium Inviolatae Virginitatis Mariae, ca. 1490, Basel, Spencer Collection, fol. 12

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, published by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1499 for Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino (1472-1508), contains a woodcut with Danaë riding an antique carriage in a triumphant procession, surrounded by Christian chastity symbols, like the unicorn (fig. 38).169 At the bottom, the impregnation of Danaë takes place on her bed, and next to it, we can see the birth of Perseus. Within the hybrid storm of fiery rain filling the 169  Francesco Colonna, Hypnotomachia Poliphili, eds. Giovanni Pozzi & Lucia A. Ciapponi, Padua, 1964, I, p. 162.

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Fig. 38. Attributed to Francesco Colonna (1433-1527), Triumph of Danaë, illustration from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499, Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana

room, at the same time, the syncretic space between medieval purity ideals and the emancipation of Danaë as embodiment of Ancient virtues shone through. The humanist Pierio Valeriano (1477-1558) explains: “The poets related that gold poured into the lap of Danaei, the most beautiful of women. They mean by Danaei the beauty of the soul, which comprises the natural virtues that God loves; indeed, they signify by the ‘golden shower’ the abundant flow of heavenly favor, which must be sought from the love and mercy of God. In truth, the

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Fig. 39. Adriano di Giovanni de’ Maestri, also known as Adriano Fiorentino (1440-1499), Medallion for Elisabetta Gonzaga (1471-1526), 1495, London, British Museum

abundance of all Blessings is given by God alone.”170 In her article Elisabetta Gonzaga come Danae, Monica Centanni takes a closer look at the exemplary function of Danaë through examining a medallion by Adriano Fiorentino (1495) made for Elisabetta Gonzaga (1471-1526) (fig. 39).171 The Duchess of Urbino, a loving and faithful wife and a ‘golden virgin’ was doomed to sterility because of her husband’s known impotence, but she hoped for a miraculous impregnation.172 The motto on the medal — HOC FUGIENTI FORTUNAE DICATIS — is an expression of her hope, suggesting that Elisabetta, like Danaë, had dedicated herself to Fortuna fugiens: the instant and unexpected Fortune.173 170  Madlyn Millner Kahr, Virtuous, Voluptuous, Venal Woman, op. cit., p. 44-45, note 16: Ioannis Pierii Valeriani Bellunensis, Hieroglyphica, (Basel, 1556), Leiden, 1626, p. 632. 171  Monica Centanni, Elisabetta Gonzaga come Danae nella medaglia di Adriano Fiorentino (1495), in La Rivista di Engramma, 106, 2013 (online). 172  Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) dedicated a eulogy to them — De Guido Ubaldo Feretrio et Elisabetha Gonzaga Urbini Ducibus — in which he revealed in detail Elisabetta’s unhappiness due to infertility: in the eulogy Bembo called his beloved friend Elisabetta “a golden virgin”, like Danaë; Monica Centanni, Elisabetta Gonzaga come Danae, op. cit. (online). 173  For more on this rich tradition of the fickleness of fate in the Quattrocento; See: Philine Helas, Fortuna-Occasio. Eine Bildprägung des Quattrocento zwischen ephemerer und ewiger Kunst,

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In 1495, Elisabetta still hoped she would share Danaë’s fate. Here, Danaë has emancipated herself into a woman who, between modern virtue and Christian virginity, desires a late pregnancy. In her catalogue Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures. Jan Gossart’s Renaissance (2010), Maryan W. Ainsworth follows the humanist readings of Gossaert’s Danaë, as they were championed by Eric Jan Sluijter.174 Sluijter completely pushes the religious interpretation from Panofsky’s article aside and claims that the original Ancient myth was consciously being made erotic. Sluijter thinks that the suspected client — Philip of Burgundy — must have felt a connection to the theme for some reason, as a purist-humanist.175 Philip took a profound interest in classical texts and surrounded himself with humanists and artists. Moreover, Philip was a collector of gems and antique jewels himself, an important medium through which the Danaë iconography had been spread even during the Antiquity.176 I am of the opinion that the religious and humanist typology do not have to exclude one another. The contrast between the two is cancelled out within the ‘psycho-spatial space’ (Raumlichkeit).177 In Gossaert’s Danaë, this space concerns the sophisticated articulation of an outer and inner discourse: the hard, dry, external space with its eclectic architecture, in contrast to the sweltering, moist, internal space of her naked body. I will develop Gossaert’s complex fantasmata surrounding architecture, decoration, and the female body in three phases: the space that allows access, the gendered space as (un)heimlichkeit, and finally the petrifying gaze. *

in Städel-Jahrbuch, 17, 1999, p. 101-124; Barbara Baert, Afterlife Studies and the Occasio Grisaille in Mantua (School of Mantegna, 1495-1510), in Ikon, 13, 2020, p. 95-108; Stephanie Heremans, Fritz Saxl as Reader of Aby Warburg’s Sassetti Essay, in Ikon, 13, 2020, p. 121-134. 174  Eric Jan Sluijter, Emulating Sensual Beauty, op. cit., p. 4-45. 175  Maryan W. Ainsworth, art. Jan Gossart. 35. Danae, in Maryan W. Ainsworth (ed.), Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures. Jan Gossart’s Renaissance. The Complete Works, (exh. cat.), LondonNew York, 2010, p. 232-235. 176  Countless examples in: Eric Jan Sluijter, Emulating Sensual Beauty, op. cit., p. 4-45. 177  See: Baldine Saint Girons, Spatier, architecturer, penser, in Revue des Deux Mondes, 2007, p. 128-138, p. 131: Freud traçait un programme de travail qu’il faudrait faire nôtre, quand il écrivait peu avant sa mort. La spatialité [Räumlichkeit] peut être la projection de l’appareil psychique. Aucune autre dérivation n’est plausible. À la place des conditions a priori de Kant de notre appareil psychique, la psyché est étendue, je ne sais rien de plus à ce sujet [weiss nichts davon]; Sigmund Freud, Résultats, idées, problèmes (1938), Paris, 1985.

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Fig. 40. Filippo Lippi (1406-1469), The Annunciation, ca. 14481450, London, National Gallery of Art

I will discuss the first phase — the space that allows access — based on her paradigm itself: the Annunciation. In his Le détail Daniel Arasse (1944-2003) directs our attention to Filippo Lippi’s (1406-1469) Annunciation, which features a buttonhole without a button right at the navel (fig. 40).178 This minuscule opening can barely be seen with the naked eye. In his book, Arasse studies several details that are nearly invisible to the audience, and thus — so the author explains — should be seen as the enigmatic and intimate interwoveness between the painter and his art, which means this specific lost button could very well have a symbolic meaning. The tiny tear, opening — exactly on the same horizontal line as the dove, the one who turns word into flesh — is for those who look for it a refined suggestion of the navel as a paradox of the closed 178

 Daniel Arasse, Le détail. Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture, Paris, 1996, p. 338.

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opening.179 But there is more: from the opening, small golden rays can be seen that in turn seem to answer those from the mouth of the dove. This would mean that Lippi suggests that the light of the word turned flesh is escaping from the stomach. The double beams of light also echo the 15th-century ideas about optics: sight comes from physical radiation that emerges from both the eye, as well as the object. The meeting of these rays is what leads to visibility, which is repeated in the fertilizing energy radiating outward and that of the Holy Spirit. The strange consequence is that the opening at the navel seems to act as a third eye (blind yet still visionary), as an internal way of looking (endoscopic) and as a uterine, virginal look. Because the closed opening that is the navel is the mark and scar of that which we cannot remember: fetal life within the mother’s womb. Filippo Lippi’s detail of the navel was possibly a virtuous refinement of an old Tuscan tradition. On the altarpiece by Gentile da Fabriano (ca. 1370ca. 1427) a beam of light escapes from God’s chest and penetrates Mary’s room through a skylight, ending just below her heart, while the six-lobed oculus shines a light on her lower body (fig. 41). The ‘eye’ of Mary’s room is repeated as an optic photogram: she carries the divine light of the supernatural impregnation in a pictorial manner. The light has descended in painterly virtuosity: the subtle golden rays, the hidden energy of the dove, and the optical echo of the window on the textile. This also makes Mary’s womb a type of ‘receiving eye’. The belly looks. It receives from the eye that looks and touches. The eye, that black, dangerous pupil with its illuminating particles follows the then contemporary ideas on optics with Danaë and Mary as a permeable ‘window eye’. Here, we can find a relationship to the Song of Songs. Canticle 2:9-10 says: “Look, there he stands behind our wall, gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice. My beloved speaks and says to me: ‘Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away’.” Origen (184-253) interpreted this passage of the Canticum as follows. The word of God, the bridegroom, is found not in the open courtyard but covered over and as it were hiding behind the wall as in a

179  There are authors who recognize the model as Lucrezia Buti (°1435). She was a lady-inwaiting at Prato, where the cintula, Mary’s waistband, was also kept. The waistband is seen as one giant knot around the stomach over the navel, and thus symbolizes the tying off and decomposing of fertility. Filippo Lippi, we know, had an unbridled passion for this woman. As hidden detail, it represents the visible invisibility of Lippi’s pictoriality itself. Le désir du peintre dans la peinture même; nombril-oeil, oeil caché dans le corps de la peinture; Daniel Arasse, Le détail, op. cit., p. 340.

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Fig. 41. Gentile da Fabriano (ca. 1370-ca. 1427), The Annunciation, ca. 1421-1425, Vatican City, Vatican Museums

teichoscopia.180 He would first look through the window at the Bride. With a leap he reaches the window of the house, having in mind to peep at her. This is peeping ‘in the time’ when she will unveil her face to go outside and to find him.181 Moreover, the word ‘window’ originates from the Old Norse vindauga, 180  Teichoscopy or teichoscopia meaning ‘viewing from the walls’, is a recurring narrative strategy in ancient Greek literature. One famous instance of teichoscopy occurs in Homer’s (ca. 800 BC) Iliad, Book 3, verses 121-244. Teichoscopia makes it possible to describe an event taking place in the distance while integrating it into the narrative frame. 181  Patricia Cox Miller, Pleasure of the Text, Text of Pleasure. Eros and Language in Origen’s ‘Commentary on the Song of Songs’, in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 54, 2, 1986, p. 241-253; The same conceptual osmosis between novel and love, body and erotic readership,

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from vindr, ‘wind’, and auga, ‘eye’; that is, ‘wind eye’. In Norwegian Nynorsk and in Icelandic, the Old Norse form has survived to this day (in Icelandic only as a less used synonym to gluggi); in Swedish the word vindöga remains as a term for a hole through the roof of a hut, and in Danish vindue and in Norwegian Bokmål vindu, the direct link to ‘eye’ is lost, just as it is in ‘window’.182 Back to Gossaert’s Danaë. The scene takes place in a splendid Antique hemicycle with red marble tiles and ionic columns with Corinthian capitals. Above it is a golden frieze with bucrania that opens up with several oculi. A lintel finishes off the room, with a border at the top of the painting featuring a golden cherub, who watches the mysterious happenings from above happen below him, with the eyes of the gods and the boustrophedon, as it were. Here in this space, Danaë waits. The parallels with the Annunciation are clear. In both cases, the impregnation is passed along through the air, expressed as a golden material. In both cases, the woman is ‘surprised’ by it (Luke 1:30: Do not be afraid! Luke 1:34 How can this be?). Especially in the case of Gossaert’s Danaë, the architecture facilitates these ‘elements of surprise’ — bay windows, pillars, grates, openings, windows — and thus demands entrance into the womb as if it were a matter of course. How closely does Gossaert’s work resemble that of Ferrara painter Francesco del Cossa (1436-1478) (fig. 42)? His Annunciation preserved in Dresden (1470-1472) is also a lively, even an idiosyncratic event that takes place in a complex architectural setting with numerous vistas.183 Behind a double arcade is analysed by Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, transl. Richard Miller, New York, 1975; See further: Henri Couzel, Origène et la Connaissance Mystique, Paris, 1961; On biblical hermeneutics and lire au-delà du verset (Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995)); See: Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Lire aux éclats. Éloge de la caresse, Paris, 1994, p. 37, p. 136, p. 283; Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, Paris, 2000, p. 12, writes: On a demandé: comment toucher au corps? Mais ce qu’il faut dire, c’est que cela — toucher au corps, toucher le corps, toucher enfin — arrive tout le temps dans l’écriture. 182  From The Webster Dictionary, 1828: “Window is first recorded in the early 13th century, and originally referred to an unglazed hole in a roof. Window replaced the Old English eagþyrl, which literally means ‘eye-hole,’ and eagduru ‘eye-door’. Many Germanic languages however adopted the Latin word fenestra to describe a window with glass, such as standard Swedish fönster, or German Fenster. The use of window in English is probably because of the Scandinavian influence on the English language by means of loanwords during the Viking Age. In English the word fenester was used as a parallel until the mid-18th century and fenestration is still used to describe the arrangement of windows within a façade. Also, words such as “defenestration” are in use, meaning to throw something out of a window.” 183  Joseph Manca, Style, Clarity, and Artistic Production in a Courtly Center. Some Myths about Ferrarese Painting of the Quattrocento, in Artibus et Historiae, 22, 43, 2001, p. 55-63. The article nuances the ‘neurotic’ reputation of Ferrara paintings in Quattrocento. This assumption

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arch with a monumental column that seems to be supporting a portico, we see Mary in a private chamber of the time.184 The bedstead is open and a stone fountain can be seen, perhaps a reference to the epithets of the Blessed Virgin, Canticle’s “sealed fountain” (4:12) and “spring of living waters” (4:15). In the distance a dog is strolling past a palace. The young mother and her infant looking out the window have no inkling of what is taking place a little further, closer towards the viewer. They are in the present, but (as of yet) unaware that in the foreground a new era is tearing open: when the angel landed gently and spoke fittingly. When Mary was jolted from her concentration.185 Now we have arrived. The impregnating space is the mythical space drenched with the secret: impregnation, threats, loneliness, the curse of the past, hope for the future. This space filled with the mist of ancient patterns, questions the origin of that secret, but also frames it in a story, controls its effect, and keeps it safe from harm in isolation.186 *

was partly due to the hegemony of the Florentine stylistic model in Art History in the first half of the 20th century. 184  The double gate supports the typically symmetrical composition of the Annunciation. Nevertheless, there might be a hint to the porta aurea, the double gate in Jerusalem which remains closed until the Parousia, and where it is said the Visitation between Mary and Elisabeth took place. The time of the Parousia is namely God’s time (Mark 1:15). 185  Patricia Simons, Salience and the Snail. Liminality and Incarnation in Francesco del Cossa’s Annunciation (c. 1470), in Religion, the Supernatural and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe. An Album Amicorum for Charles Zika, eds. Jennifer Spinks & Dagmar Eichberger, Leiden, 2015, p. 305-329; Barbara Baert, The Critical Moment. Revisiting the Annunciation in the Quattrocento. Wind, Kairos, Snail, in Marian Images in Context. Doctrines, Devotions, and Cults (Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History), eds. James Clifton, Barbara Haeger & Elliott Wise, Leiden, 2021 (at press). 186  Baldine Saint Girons, Spatier, architecturer, op. cit., p. 131-132, discussed the fundamental question: Qu’est-ce que penser l’architecture? She writes: Penser n’est pas juger ou, du moins, ce n’est juger qu’en un temps ultérieur. Penser, c’est d’abord soupeser, sentir actuellement un poids. Pensare est le fréquentatif de pendere, qui signifie « laisser pendre les plateaux d’une balance » : observer, donc, mais en provoquant l’observation. Avant de signifier « tâche » ou « devoir ennuyeux », le pensum était d’ailleurs le poids de la laine qu’il fallait à l’esclave dévider en un laps de temps déterminé sous peine de châtiment. Entre le pensum et le momentum, lui-même issu par contraction de movimentum (mouvement), la liaison est intime, puisque tous deux signifient « poids » ; mais momentum désigne plus particulièrement le poids qui fait pencher la balance et déter mine son impulsion. Disons donc, en songeant à l’étymologie, que penser l’architecture, c’est, au premier chef, en éprouver le poids physique et en saisir l’action, au présent.

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In his article Drop Form. Freud, Dora, and Dream Space, Spyros Papapetros asks the following questions: Does psychoanalysis have a theory of space? Is there any relation between the origin of modern theories of architectural space in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the institutionalization of Freud’s therapeutic practice around 1900? If yes, how does his dream interpretation move beyond the symbolic identification between interior organs of the body and the interior spaces of a building to offer a new form of correspondence between subjects, objects, and the architectural settings that enclose them? (…) In other words, would architectural objects cover up (like added ornamental layers) or expose the inner core of psychoanalytic constructions?187

These questions bring me to the second phase. Through the windows of the elegant tower, which was Danaë’s vengeful prison all the same, we can see an eclectic collection, or better yet, an extravagant amassment of architecture that functions more like a cabinet of curiosities: a Renaissance palace, flamboyant Gothic façades, Italian domes, and lanternae. Gossaert touches on an écriture that pays homage to decentralization, fragmentation, proliferation, fluttering contours and the intangible. These traits of side effects in motion may seem seductive at first, but deeper down they are perceived as disturbing. The hypermotility of these ‘surges’ appears to translate into a corporeality that no longer fits into the old formal language. Paul Vandenbroeck has explored the possibilities of this opening further on the basis of the stylistic fault line, or locus, of the threshold in a ‘forming-feeling’.188 187  Spyros Papapetros, Drop Form. Freud, Dora, and Dream Space, in Private Utopia. Cultural Setting of the Interior in the 19th and 20th Century, eds. Inge Scholz-Strasser & August Sarnitz, Berlin, 2015, p. 58-88, p. 59; Papapetros starts with the notes by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) about Dora’s ‘hysterical’ dream: “A house was on fire. My father was standing beside my bed and woke me up. I dressed quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewel-case; but father said: ‘I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewel-case.” We hurried downstairs, and as soon as I was outside I woke up;” Sigmund Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905 [1901]), (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud), London, 1953: 7, 64. The entire passage in the original German text reads: “I.Traum: “In einem Haus brennt es, erzählte Dora, der Vater steht vor meinem Bett und weckt mich auf. Ich kleide mich schnell an. Die Mama will noch ihr Schmuckkästchen retten, der Papa sagt aber: Ich will nicht, daß ich und meine beiden Kinder wegen deines Schmuckkästchens verbrennen. Wir eilen herunter, und sowie ich draußen bin, wache ich auf.”“ Sigmund Freud, Bruchstück einer HysterieAnalyse (1905 [1901]), in Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, vol. VI, Frankfurt, 1971, p. 136. 188  Paul Vandenbroeck, Late Gothic Mannerism in Antwerp. On the Significance of a ‘Contrived’ Style, in Antwerp Royal Museum Annual, 2004/2005, p. 301-330; See also: Robert Muchembled, The Order of Gestures. A Social History of Sensibilities under the Ancien régime in

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According to Vandenbroeck, such (apparent) anomalies or transitions along the artistic timeline arise when a controlling gaze is no longer considered sufficient, and the artistic psyche rages out of control in search of new outlets. This process — which actually entails a stylistic revolution — ensures that new artistic autonomous zones must be explored and exploited: a new genius loci of style. Paul Vandenbroeck compares the new genius loci of style with pictorial chora189: the site of the artist’s contribution, autonomous and charged with meaning, but at the same time a new site that can be mined for spontaneous, partly unconscious expressive forms: the parergon and Beiwerk.190 This new, rebellious écriture pays tribute to rampant growth, thereby becoming a wild, almost neurotic pictorial language. Gossaert created a world within the chora with the immanent secret and the impossible, utopian, shamelessly exhibitionist world outside of it. Through the uncompromising windows we see façades, bay windows, balconies, and different marbles accelerate in a frantic choreography of Ancient taste, while at the same time the lust, the excess, and the impertinence are brewing, much like that of the Supreme God, who will soon discharge his gleaming seed. This astonishing impregnation is made possible against the phallic background, which reproves any sublimation, any attempt at metaphorical readings. The explicit dominates the implicit. And there, painfully alone, an IonicCorinthian ‘possession’ takes place. She who looks up calmly — quomodo, surprised — at how this golden pillar of light drenches her. Light pouring through the grate. Seed from the oculus. A woman’s body exposed between the pillars, membranes, openings. This brings me to the interesting study by Ernst Fischer, Writing Home. The author introduces the female domestic space as the uncanny space with particular ‘spatial-markings’.191 “Architecture introduces a necessary third term, namely France, in A Cultural History of Gesture, eds. Herman Roodenberg, et al., Cambridge, 1991, p. 129-151; Alessandro Nova, Folengo and Romanino. The ‘Questione della lengua’ and its eccentric trends, in The Art Bulletin, 76, 1994, p. 664-679; Karl Öttinger, Laube, Garten und Wald. Zu einer Theorie der süddeutschen Sakralkunst 1470-1520, in Festschrift für Hans Sedlmayr, Munich, 1962, p. 201-228; Henry C. Koerper & Edwin Gary Stickel, Cultural Drift. A Primary Process of Cultural Change, in Journal of Anthropological Research, 36, 4, 1980, p. 463-469. 189  Chora (Khora), according to Plato (427-347 BC) in his Timaeus, is a place, a potent interval, such as the matrix and the uterus; See also: Jacques Derrida, Khôra, Paris, 1993, passim. 190  Maria Margaroni, The lost foundation. Kristeva’s semiotic Chora and its ambiguous legacy, in Hypatia, 20, 2005, p. 78-98. 191  Ernst Fischer, Writing Home. Post-Modern Melancholia and the Uncanny Space of LivingRoom Theatre, in Psychoanalysis and Performance, eds. Patrick Campbell & Adrian Kear, London-

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‘house’ in addition to ‘space’ and ‘home’. (…) The house is a fiction made concrete, a perspectival grid that shapes and marks the bodies in houses according to the very ideology of visibility in the name of which it is itself constructed.”192 Spatial-markings — demarcations between inner and outer discourse/architecture — possess the capacity to be linked to the intimacy and spatial demarcation in the house/household or the notions of Heimlichkeit and secrecy. It is interesting to see that precisely the notion of Heimlichkeit/secrecy derives from secretum, which in turn is derived from segregation, separation. It seems pertinent in this connection to recall the Latin definition of Heimlichkeit/ secrecy as an act of separation, and to note that according to Arnaud Levy, the word originates with the sifting of grain with the purpose to separate the edible from the non-edible, the good from the bad.193 The separation is effected by a hole, an orifice, whose function is to allow something to pass or not pass, depending on the relation of the objects shape and size to the shape and size of the hole. Hence, the sifting process allegedly constitutes a metaphorical representation of the anal function. (…) The production of Heimlichkeit in the sieve of the house is achieved through a process of excretion: the separation of the homely from the abject.194

The voiding function of architecture as ‘home’ arises with Alberti’s reference to the metaphor of chastity.195 Entering the house as spouse is immobilized and secreted through confinement in a hierarchically arranged sequence of private spheres. Within this spatial order, the woman is further sub-divided and ultimately effaced as sexual, desiring subject by being put in her proper place among her husband’s possessions. She is declared pleasing for knowing her limits defined by: ‘… surveillance over a particular space, whether it be the dinner table, the threshold, the church, the fingertips, the bath, the face, the street’.196

New York, 2001, p. 115-131; This passage is borrowed from Barbara Baert, About Sieves and Sieving, op. cit., p. 78-81. 192  Ernst Fischer, Writing Home, op. cit., p. 123. 193  Ernst Fischer, Writing Home, op. cit., p. 124; Arnaud Levy, Evaluation etymologique et semantique du mot “secret”, in Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, 14, 1976, p. 117-130; See also: Gérard Vincent, The Secrets of History and the Riddle of Identity, in A History of Private life, 5, eds. Antoine Prost & Gérard Vincent, Cambridge-London, 1991, p. 539-592. 194  Ernst Fischer, Writing Home, op. cit., p. 124. 195  Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in ten Books, transl. Neil Leach, Joseph Rykwert & Robert Tavernor, Cambridge, 1988; Mark Wigley, Untitled: the Housing of Gender, in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina, Princeton, 1992, p. 327-377, p. 332: patriarchal authority, spatial order, and surveillance. 196  Ernst Fischer, Writing Home, op. cit., p. 125.

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This reminds me of Origen’s comments on the earlier discussed passage in the Song of Songs: “Behold, he stood behind our wall, leaning against the windows, looking through the nets.” In his commentary, Origen struggles with the spatial settings of the song. It’s true that inside and outside are confusingly muddled, such as noted here, ‘behind the wall’ and ‘through the nets’.197 The exegete explains this with the classical gender contrast. Because the groom, as a man, is not always home, whereas the bride is always at home waiting for him, the groom sometimes speaks as though he is inside the house, and sometimes as if he is outside of the house. The verse “looking through the lattice” is in this sense a ‘scopic mediator’: a grid between male and female framing, a border that is only crossed visually, through a loving gaze, in this case.198 The grid structure of the lattice adds to the ambiguity of the privacy and permeability, of keeping out and opening up. Fischer radicalizes these positions. According to Fischer, womanhood means vanishing. The female dissolves into intimate space. Her clothing can no longer be distinguished from the interior wall coverings onto which the man projects himself.199 “The woman is thus paradoxically not only locked up in the architectural grid, and abjected through the holes of the sieve, she becomes those very holes. In the domestication of space as place, its unbroken expanse is punctuated by row upon row of orifices. The art of husbandry in this sense lies in the cultivation of, to use [Gilles] Deleuze [1925-1995] and [Félix] Guattari’s [1930-1992] term, ‘a field of anuses’.”200 Besides the permeable screen, the woman also becomes the dissolving screen. She evaporates into the walls of the house and becomes a writeable, definable canvas for male desires and anxieties. In his Della famiglia, Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) writes that it strikes him as “somewhat demeaning to me to remain shut up in the house among women when I have manly things to do among  Ruth Penelope Lawson (ed.), Origin, The Song of Songs. Commentary and Homilies, (Ancient Christian Writers, 26), Westminster, 1957, p. 230. 198  In the 11th-century magisterial epic by the Japanese lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, Kyoto, 1000-1008, these ambiguous and eroticizing limitations within the space are often topoi. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, transl. Royall Tylor, London, 2002. 199  Ernst Fischer, Writing Home, op. cit., p. 125; the dresses match with the white and unadorned walls (after Alberti) as blank surfaces on which the man projects himself. 200  Ernst Fischer, Writing Home, op. cit., p. 125: Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, London, 1988, p. 32; See also the highly recognizable grille that separates priest and penitent in the confessional. The grille (or curtain) ensures anonymity, but from the FischerDeleuze perspective this ‘sieve’ of separation, secrecy, can also be read like the dissolving wall. 197

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men,” in contrast to “those idle creatures who stay all day among the little females.”201 Staying indoors apparently has an ‘unmanning’ effect. “The confinement of the interior space is transferred in an optical shrinking process onto the occupant, turning him into a tiny inside-out projection of himself: ‘a little female’ occupied with ‘trifles’. The immobilized phallus shrinks and shrivels and wastes away through the sieve’s hole, to become a hole itself.”202 In relation to that, I would like to refer to Mona Hatoum’s (Beirut, 1952) sculpture Grater Divide from 2002 (fig. 43).203 The installation consists of a giant kitchen grater.204 Hatoum often uses the grid or geometric forms to reference systems of control within society. Also, in this case, she uses a household object that is scaled to make it familiar yet uncanny.205 At the same time, this grater/grid is shaped like a room divider, a foldable paravent, used to create private spaces within a room. The above-mentioned Heimlichkeit, or the space of the secrecy, is literally enlarged. Because of the absurd scale of the grater, Grater Divide posits the paradigm of limitation as a threat (amplified by the wordplay between grater and greater). This architectural grid, with its obscenely large openings, derived from commonplace kitchenware, confronts us with pain and destruction in an audacious manner. The normally so refined and distinguished room divider, part of the intimate world of the woman and her body, is now a weapon from the depths of the kitchen cabinets. The erotic ‘performative’ paravent that used to invite people to sneak a peek becomes a perversely ‘perforated’ paravent. The world of food preparation — also classically seen as women’s domain — is now part of the intimate space of the bedroom, and that clash, this ‘blowing up’ does away with the “separation of the homely from the abject:” Heimlichkeit becomes Unheimlichkeit. The holes are threatening; they’re not soft eyes, but the mal occhi that stare at us from the lands of Sodom and Gomorrah. In Fischer’s approach we learned about architecture and membranes into which female intimacy can empty itself (emission), but into which it can also

 Leon Battista Alberti, Family in Renaissance Florence, ed. & transl. Renée N. Watkins, Columbia, 1969, p. 207. 202  Ernst Fischer, Writing Home, op. cit., p. 125. 203  Special thanks to Dr. Avinoam Shalem (Columbia University) who told me about this work. 204  Grater in the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press, http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/grater, consulted on: 30/06/2020. 205  Janine Antoni & Mona Hatoum, Mona Hatoum, in BOMB — Artists in Conversation, 63, 1998, p. 54-61. 201

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Fig. 43. Mona Hatoum (°1952), Grater Divide, 2002, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts

disappear, as into the hollows of tectonics itself. In Hatoum’s interpretation, these hollows of tectonics became abject, aggressive, wounds even, as well as an absurd blurring between kitchen and the privacy of the private room, two feminine spaces par excellence. * Gossaert and his Danaë had come to the third phase. The final act. Reverberating, echoing, shrill inner and outer windows. Never enough. Panic-Escherian engulfing each other. The window of the painting we come through as the sharp, clinical intersection of an eyeball. Who wants to see this? Not yet enough. The window above: the impregnator, the black Magna Mater pupil through which Zeus spews his rain of seed. Look, it is falling. A female body placed directly under the leak of the Pantheon. Marian cobalt blue for the tempering (such hypocrisy). Not yet enough. Golden rain drops, a viral aerosol of prying

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eyes and twittering beaks. Zeus as the impregnating boustrophedon: the look from above like Mary being greeted by the angel in golden letters, being moaned down into her ear, from behind. (Look, the cherub on the lintel has demanded the scene; we do not know from what iconography he has wrestled himself free.) Not yet enough. The worst is yet to come. The explosion of windows in the outside discourse. The mannerist perversion. A multitude of eyes: balustrades, glass windows, open roof lanterns, plazas, bay windows, window frames, corner windows: oculi, oculi, oculi! And then: the echo in the glass work, the prisms of sunlight, the rainbow on a wall, the cold white marble that soaks up all the light, veins like scars of sun beams that did not manage to escape — the vengeful prison of faint rays of sunshine — and the crust, matte, opaque, flakiness of a once shiny golden drop of semen. The trail of slime of Francesco del Cossa’s slow snail as rebuttal for the softly cascading plume (fig. 44).206 How much complexity, how many thick, cold walls with refined protruding bay windows, how much beautifully displayed architecture is needed to be able to handle the thinnest, most delicate, permeating membrane of a woman? How poignant is this male counterbalance, how ridiculous is this over the top attack on this bit of tissue, a transparent membrane? Who can endure such a thing? Who wants to see this? This is the ruthless space in which Danaë is held hostage. Gossaert did not close off her tower like in the Song of Songs, but has shamelessly opened it up — Ionic, Corinthian — and abandoned Danaë to a million prying eyes. Everyone from outside can look in. And everyone sees us, readers, hesitating, shuffling at the threshold of this painting. Who wants to see this? Who wants to be part of so much ejaculating voyeurism and horny gravity? Who? “That look is so powerful that is wears down even the strongest man. It is as powerful as the touch of a hand, as if you were constantly being stroked. It drives you mad (Sándor Márai).” 207

206  Daniel Arasse discusses the snail’s position on the edge of the frame of Francesco del Cossa’s Dresden Annunciation. The snail, he continues, is not part of the painting. It is placed in our reality and literally marks the transition of our gaze into the world of figuration. The snail’s illusionistic presence on (but not in) the painting is an invitation to enter the world of the painting. It asks us to be conscious of the boundary between the viewer’s surroundings and the painted representation of another time and place. Il signe il re-marque le lieu de l’échange invisible entre le regard du spectateur et le tableau: il signale le lieu d’entrée de ce regard dans le tableau. (…) Il ne dit pas ce qu’il faut regarder, mais comment regarder ce que nous voyons. Daniel Arasse, On n’y voit rien. Descriptions, (Collection Folio Essais, 417), ed. Éric Vigne, Paris, 2000, p. 27-45, p. 37. 207  Sándor Márai, Embers, transl. Carol Brown Janeway, New York, 2001, p. 71.

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Fig. 44. Francesco del Cossa (1436-1478), The Annunciation, detail of the snail, 1470-1472, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister

And now, I think of the back side of the window. The black pane that we cannot see, the wall against which the cold backs lean of those thousands of frightful eyes that pry into Danaë’s back. Again. What look survives this cold back side, what look is powerful enough to escape from Danaë’s look, our look, Zeus’ pay-by-the-hour room, from the merciless multiplication of this delirious phantom architecture? What look is powerful enough to be able to survive these endless replicas? The answer is the greatest taboo possible. The taboo that Danaë created for her son: Medusa. Gossaert painted the prolepsis of this genius trap around her neck, which would spawn the snake pit of all the arts.208 And thus, it is not only the rain that slips in like golden drops, but also the rain in its most ancient grapheme: the snake as boustrophedon. The catastrophic look outwitted by Danaë’s son. The doom that was called down upon him, but was averted in time. Danaë still guards over her son. What her father wanted to do to Danaë, Perseus did to Medusa. Two fatalities thwarted in one generation. The look is irrevocably diverted by the trick with the mirror. And thus, the world was saved from inevitable sclerosis in one fell swoop. That look that is so taboo one 208

 The severed head becomes the symbol of the open wound that affects the visible world; After: Julia Kristeva, Visions capitales, op. cit., passim; Alice Barale, Perseus and Medusa. Between Warburg and Benjamin, in La Rivista di Engramma, 105, 2013 (online).

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cannot speak its name, nor depict it. But the gift, yes, the ‘immanent secret’ is the birth of form from red coral, of the arts themselves. As Marisa Bass writes in her Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity: “Danaë’s womb, according to the windy trajectory of classical myth, was the origin of artistic invention. (…) Gossart’s Danaë assertively dramatizes its own material origins. As Danaë lifts the luscious swath of blue fabric draped across her thighs and welcomes the god’s descending bounty, Gossart figures the womb of concealed beneath those heavy folds, the mythical point of inception for all artistic inspiration and, by extension, for his painting itself.” 209 We can also add Kostas Tsiambaos’ interesting point: “And, if considering the ground plan as the “birthplace” of architectural form speaks to us about the earth as a matrix of forms and shapes, then this movement of return to the past is identified with an initial desire of return to an ancient chora, the primitive Mother-Earth.”210 And even further away, back in time. The 4th-century Orphica says that when the blood of Chronos dripped down on the earth hematite was formed: “A leech come down from heaven.”211 What drips and impregnates shall become form: wet golden beams on a lap. The pearl drops absent from Dora’s jewel-box are not marginal details in Freud’s analytic reconstruction of her dreams — they are models of their inner space, or even kernels presaging the ultimate dissolution of that space. These tropfenförmig pendants are then not only shaped like “drop forms” but their very purpose is to drop form: to drop the very concepts of space and form entirely by shifting the meaning of “[t]ropfen” from a plural noun into an active verb that both collapses and enfolds dream space towards a radical re-form of human subjectivity.212

Not yet finished. Looking back again at Danaë. On the edges of the taboo that overcame Orpheus.

 Marisa Bass, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity, Princeton, 2016, p. 116. 210  Kostas Tsiambaos, Pikionis’ Unattainable Wish, in La Rivista di Engramma, 159, 2018 (online); After: Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language. A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, New York, 1982. 211  Jenötöl Abel (ed.), Orphica, Leipzig, 1885, verses 642ff; Alfons A. Barb, St. Zacharias the Prophet and Martyr. A Study in Charms and Incantations, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 11, 1948, p. 35-67, p. 67. 212  Spyros Papapetros, Drop Form, op. cit., p. 87. 209

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I see the light that splashed into the tower from left to right. The light that is needed to light up the transparent, sticky semen, to transform it into the gold that descends deeply and perfectly into just the right place. This light which also bathes the hard marble eyes of the outside in a midday sun. Silent, Mediterranean, scorching heat. Our southern facing window. Again, we have the démon de midi: for a single moment time freezes because of a supernatural rain that falls from the heavens. You and I, with our curious, wrinkled looks, are placed in the north just like that. The compass turned upside-down. Zeus’ discharging gravity — his rain — shoots from south to north. The geographic convention tipped from the divine cosmological point of view: again, we have the boustrophedon. The eastern breeze brings with it the light by way of Eurus’s chariot, and subtly lifts Danaë veil. There is no gold here. No male stain, but the millennia old aegis fluttering down, delicate and transparent like a spider’s web. And Homer sings: “So saying he smote upon her tasseled aegis [or: her aegis with many a tassel fraught] — the awful aegis against which not even the lightning of Zeus can prevail — thereon blood-stained Ares smote with his long spear” (Iliad, XXI, 400).213 And what is Danaë’s hand doing there in its velvet limbo? A hand measuring the heat of the sultry seed? A hand as blindfold against so many oculi? A hand that becomes one with the luxurious moist drapes within the calm unrest of the secret? The inside of the woman turned inside-out in cobalt blue? L’inflecton inhérence du pli, Gilles Deleuze writes.214 And Gabriele Brandstetter adds: Der jeweilige Zustand der Faltung in einem Stoff-Material, seine Imprägnierung mit Energie und Spannung überträgt sich in den Fall des Faltenwurfs, entlädt sich in den Knicken und Schwüngen des drapierten Gewands.215 The implicit dominates the explicit. Danaë and her pressing burden of what cannot be seen. Not yet finished: the corner of the pillow with its round, red head drones past: the cul-de-sac of our moving gaze. Now we have arrived. Here, Medusa banishes us

213

 Full text available at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/.  Gilles Deleuze, Le pli. Leibniz et le Baroque, Paris, 1988, p. 31: le pli c’est une enveloppe d’inhérence (…) ce qui est plié, c’est inclus, l’inhérent. (…). On dira que ce qui est plié est seulement virtuel et n’existe actuellement que dans une enveloppe, dans quelque chose qui l’enveloppe. 215  Gabriele Brandstetter, “Ein Stück in Tüchern”. Rhetorik der Drapierung bei A. Warburg, M. Emmanuel, G. Clérambault, in Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus, ed. Wolfgang Kemp, et al., 4, Hamburg, 2000, p. 107-139, p. 113. 214

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from the painting. And the black tassels of Athena’s aegis still murmur about the shame of that much male opportunity.216 * Ogni giorno veniamo colpiti da centinaia di sguardi. A nostra volta, colpiamo con lo sguardo centinaia di persone. Il più delle volte nessuno ci fa caso: noi non ci accorgiamo di essere guardati, gli altri non si accorgono che noi li guardiamo. Perciò non succede niente, e questi sguardi non producono conseguenze — ma non c’è nessuna ragione di considerarli meno pesanti di quelli che ho citato poco fa. E, anzi: siamo poi così sicuri che gli sguardi non ricambiati non producano niente? C’è gente che s’innamora guardando ogni giorno dalla finestra una certa persona che passa per strada (Sandro Veronesi, Il colibrì).217

216  Read more about the symbolism of tassels and opportunity: Barbara Baert, Life is Short, Art is Long, Crisis is Fleeting. Kairos or Weaving the Right Moment, in Textile. Cloth and Culture, 2021, p. 26-48. 217  Sandro Veronesi, Il colibrì, Milan, 2019, p. 203.

Chapter 8. GALILEO TOUCHES THE MOON “One lives in the phenomenon, and tries to connect to it.” (Sandro Veronesi, The Hummingbird (Il colibrì, 2020)).

On 13 March 1610, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) published his influential Sidereus Nuncius (‘Siderial Messenger’) through a Venetian printing press. His observations of the moon, the starry sky, the Milky Way, and the moons of Jupiter using an optimized telescope, which he had actually developed for military purposes for the Venetian Doge Leonardo Donato (1536-1612) (fig. 45), proved once again that the universe indeed adhered to Copernican heliocentrism.218 Galileo also discovered that the moon’s surface was rough, and that Jupiter had several moons. He was also the first person who spotted ‘something’ — what turned out to be the rings — around Saturn. This led to the famous anagram smaismrmilmepoetalevmibvnenvgttavira, sent to the German astronomer-mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), famous for his calculations on planetary motion and the laws of the ellipses. Kepler wrongly decoded the anagram as Salve umbistineum geminatum Martia proles (Be greeted, double knob, children of Mars). When in actuality, it meant: Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi (I have observed the highest of the planets [Saturn] three-formed).219 In this chapter, I want to expose a less well-known facet of Galileo Galilei: the role that the astronomer played in the artistic context of his time. As a humanist, Galileo was friends with many artists. That is how his telescopic eye came into contact with the plastic eye of his time. It is also known that he was very interested in the technical possibilities concerning an objective rendering of his spectacular discoveries. Galileo considered his telescopic observations — such as the craggy surface of the moon and the spots on the sun — as a challenge for the artistic disciplines: for drawing, painting, graphical design, and sculpting. In his notes and books, Galileo wanted to reconcile what he saw

218

 The first telescope by Galileo Galilei from 1609-1610 is kept in Florence, Museo Galileo, Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza. 219  Math pages, Galileo’s Anagrams and the Moons of Mars, https://www.mathpages.com/ home/kmath151/kmath151.htm, Consulted on: 30/06/2020.

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Fig. 45. Galileo Galilei’s (1564-1642) telescope for the Venetian Doge Leonardo Donato (1536-1612), 1609-1610, Florence, Museo Galileo, Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza

through the lens with plastic virtuosity. The tension between eye, lens, and the arts, with an extra energetic factor of the then-raging paragone battle between the different arts is the subject of this chapter. I will start by discussing Erwin Panofsky’s important article Galileo as a Critic of the Arts.220 But I want to do more in this chapter. I also want to discuss the tension between the eye, the lens, and the arts in relation to the vulnerability of our discipline. Because it is with our eyes that we earn scientific credit. Eyes that claim objectivity, but behind the iris swims the sweet desire to find what is still yet unfindable: the ultimate treasure. Eyes that embrace historicity, but the opaque mists of time mercilessly cloud the lens of the past. The art historian is dazzled by their ambition to restore the connection between the eye of the ‘now’ and the eye of the genius who changed astronomy forever. But sadly, one cannot travel through time. And because of that overwhelming melancholy, I decide to end rather radically. With the enfant terrible that bashes and blows and howls until there are no more eyes and lenses and arts left: Lars von Trier and his 2011 film Melancholia. * 220  Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts. Aesthetic Attitude and Scientific Thought, in Isis, 47, 1, 1956, p. 3-15.

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It is well known that Erwin Panofsky, the both famous as well as possibly too often criticized founder of iconology221 was incredibly fascinated by Galileo Galilei. Panofsky’s interest in the Italian Renaissance combined with his ambition to defend art history as a glorious humanist discipline explains his ‘telescopic’ ability to both focus on iconography in detail, as well as being able to seek out the broader cultural horizons. With this double gaze, Panofsky looked at Galileo as a scientist and an artist. Because of his deep friendship with Ludovico Cigoli (1559-1613), Galileo Galilei was closely involved with the métier of the painterly arts.222 He often visited his friend’s studio in Florence, and they exchanged opinions where they, as it befits friends, did not go easy on one another. In turn, Cigoli was fascinated by Galileo’s telescopic observations.223 The fresco cycle of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome was tangible proof of their intellectual interests in each other’s work.224 Cigoli placed the Madonna of the Immacolata Assunta in the dome of the Pauline chapel (1612) according to the iconographic convention on the moon (crescent), but he paints this moon according to the most recent scientific observations: a jagged line of the advancing shadows, including the craters and seas that Galileo, much to the disconcertion of many, had identified and illustrated in the Sidereus Nuncius (fig. 46).225 (I will come back to the Sidereus Nuncius below). However, this is not the only example of the exchanging of ideas between the two humanists. Galileo Galilei also helped Ludovico Cigoli when it came to arguments for his side in the paragone debate: the battle between the disciplines about their superiority in mimetic ability that had been raging since the 15th century.226 Galileo demonstrated a small empirical test in defence of the

221  Extensive and recent bibliography in: Barbara Baert, Signed PAN. Erwin Panofsky’s (1892-1968) “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline” (Princeton, 1938), (Studies in Iconology, 18), Leuven-Walpole-Paris-Bristol, 2020. 222  Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts, op. cit., p. 3. 223  Contemporaries did not believe that Galileo had seen solar spots. They even mocked his new instrument; Hugh G. Dick, The Telescope and the Comic Imagination, in Modern Language Notes, 58, 1943, p. 544-548. 224  Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts, op. cit., p. 4. 225  Steven F. Ostrow, Cigoli’s Immacolata and Galileo’s Moon. Astronomy and the Virgin in Early Seicento Rome, in The Art Bulletin, 78, 2, 1996, p. 218-235. 226  Leonard Barkan, The Beholder’s Tale. Ancient Sculpture, Renaissance Narratives, in Representations, 44, 1993, p. 133-166; Mary Pardo, Memory, Imagination, Figuration. Leonardo da Vinci and the Painter’s Mind, in Images of Memory. On Remembering and Representation, eds. Susanne Küchler & Walter Melion, Washington (DC)-London, 1991, p. 47-73.

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Fig. 46. Ludovico Cigoli (1559-1613), Madonna of the Immaculata Assunta on a crescent moon painted according to observations from Galileo Galilei’s (1564-1642) affresco, 1612, Rome, Santa Maria Maggiore, Pauline chapel

painterly arts.227 He proved in favour of his friend’s medium that the painterly arts could produce just as much depth and relief as sculpture. In fact, sculpture could actually lose this ability. When one takes away the natural light from sculpture by ‘filling it in’ with dark pigment, the essence of the medium — the third dimension — is immediately dismantled: a weakness that the painterly 227  Panofsky redid the test with painted balls; Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts, op. cit., p. 4; Letters exchanged between Galileo and Cigoli on 26 June 1612.

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arts lacks. Thus, the painterly arts are more sophisticated in its technical possibilities and moreover more durable when it comes to its capacity for optical illusion. Furthermore, the painterly arts require more scientific study to be able to achieve depth on a flat surface. The conclusion: painting is superior to sculpting and thus is the best humanist medium.228 Here, Galileo compares the superiority with musical theory, which is not only supposed to please the audience, but also penetrate deeply into the intellect and the soul. The painterly arts and its mimetic ability are able to uniquely impact emotions just as masterfully as musical theory. Panofsky finds a final aspect of Galileo’s reflection on the plastic possibilities and its aesthetic experience in a ‘blind spot’. Galileo seems to ignore the findings of his colleague Kepler. Nowhere in Galileo’s work do we read anything on how he tried to reconcile Kepler’s axiomata of the ellipse shaped orbits of planets and their variable initial speeds with the Copernican system of circular orbits with uniform speeds.229 Moreover, in his Dialogo (1632), Galileo supports the circle as the only absolute form of planetary orbits.230 Galileo’s aesthetic eye for shapes that evoke greater emotional beauty and empathy seem to hinder him in embracing the mathematically proven necessity of the ellipse as a scientist.231 Meanwhile, Kepler had the courage to break the spell of the circle as the absolute shape.232 He considered the straight (line) to be the mathematical building block of the universe.233 Galileo and Kepler both find the basis for their argument in the mobility of the human body. Kepler recognizes the torque, the bending of the head, the movement of the foot as principles that point to a straight line being the first principle. While Galileo recognizes the bending of the feet, the knees, and the elbow as a primordial circular ability,

 Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts, op. cit., p. 5.  Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts, op. cit., p. 11, note 6; Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo, Chicago, 1955, p. 106, note 29: “Galileo seems to have heard from someone (Cesi or Cavallieri) a casual mention of the elliptical orbits, but it must have set in motion a protective mechanism in his own mind, for his theory needed circles as a physical reality.” 230  In 1630, Galileo requested permission to publish his Dialogo in Rome. After he met the demands to make some changes, the book received the imprimatur and was published in Florence in 1632. However, in October of 1632, Galileo was still summoned to appear before the church court in Rome to justify himself for publishing the Dialogo. 231  Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts, op. cit., p. 11. 232  Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts, op. cit., p. 13. 233  Alexandre Koyre, Attitude esthétique et pensée scientifique, in Critique, 9, 12 (100-101), 1955, p. 835-847, p. 844. 228 229

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which enables the body to run and jump, for example.234 Here we can again observe deeply rooted aesthetic sensibilities, such as in Leonardo’s Trattato della pittura (published ca. 1540 by Francesco Melzi (ca. 1491-1570), based on Leonardo’s notes) wherein the circle forms the base of both the proportions of the human body, as the reflections between the macro- and microcosms.235 * In his Sidereus Nuncius, Galilei Galileo describes his telescopic observations of the moon and the Milky Way and the four moons of Jupiter. This book made Galileo famous, and along with Kepler’s Astronomia nova (1609) and Isaac Newton’s (1643-1727) Philosophiae naturalis principio mathematica (1687) it became known as the most groundbreaking astronomical tipping points. The full title page of the Sidereus Nuncius reads: The Siderial Messenger, unfolding great and very wonderful sights and displaying to the gaze of everyone, but especially philosophers and astronomers, the things that were observed by Galileo Galilei, Florentine patrician and public mathematician of the University of Padua, with the help of a spyglass lately devised by him, about the face of the Moon, countless fixed stars, the Milky Way, nebulous stars, but especially about four planets flying around the star of Jupiter at unequal intervals and periods with wonderful swiftness; which, unknown by anyone until this day, the first author detected recently and decided to name Medicean stars.

Galileo’s friend Ludovico Cigoli criticized the much too long title on 1 October of that year. And although Galileo’s name and the word perspicilli (telescope, or spyglass) was perhaps made larger on purpose, Cigoli is annoyed by the use of different font sizes on the title page of the 1610 edition (fig. 47). The illustrations of the phases of the moon and their differing shadows on the surface of the moon in the Sidereus Nuncius not only created new roads within cosmology, but also questioned the use of plastic means in contemporary  Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts, op. cit., p. 13.  Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts, op. cit., p. 13-14; Alexandre Koyre, Attitude esthétique et pensée scientifique, op. cit., p. 844; “Galileo could hardly have known of Leonardo’s ideas; but it is noteworthy that his conception of human movement as completely agrees with that of the first High Renaissance painter as it differs from that of the greatest contemporary astronomer. In fact, this difference evinces, beyond the question of circularity and rectilinearity, a basic contrast between a cinematic and a dynamic interpretation of movement as such — a contrast which, as Alexandre Koyre [Russian philosopher of science, 18921964] has pointed out, applies to Galileo’s and Kepler’s astronomical as well as to their anatomical notions.” 234 235

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Fig. 47. Title page of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) Siderius nuncius, 1610, Venice, Tommaso Baglioni, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, Adams.5.61.1 f. 1r

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scientific communication.236 One specific visual source played a very famous role in that. In the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze the so-called Gal. 48 convolute is stored.237 It contains Galileo’s notes, astronomical calculations, illustrations, and the preliminary studies he made for the Sidereus Nuncius. People assume that most of the documents in the Gal. 48 are from the year 1609. In the convolute, we also see Galileo as an artist. He knew how to etch and use the sharp, dry needle. Galileo experimented with graphic hatching to show depth and shadow on the plate, and by extension on the moon’s surface. The current art scientific eye sees, in short, a man searching for a visual language and technique to visually complement his astronomical thinking.238 However, Galileo is most comfortable using watercolors. In the Gal. 48 manuscript (1610) a smaller format Einblatt was added — it measured 25.5 by 18 centimeters — with six phases of the moon that the astronomer observed between November and December of 1609 (fig. 48). The drawings are extremely high quality and painted in brown tones.239 Galileo masterfully succeeds in artistically translating a subtle and accurate depiction of what he saw through the lens with just water, pigment, and a brush. The painterly approach to what he saw objectively and illustrated pro memorie shows how Galileo cuts through the dark night of the universe in search of the light of the artistic eye.240 The pockmarked geology of the moon was met with disbelief due to the prevailing conviction that the heavenly bodies were all smooth and ethereal. The heavenly bodies and by extension the universe were burdened with an aesthetic of polished beauty until deep into the 17th century. The perfection of creation could only be matched by the beauty of shine, refinement, and meticulous finish. What Galileo saw smashed those expectations to pieces. What our eyes are used to — the moon’s surface as geological wasteland — was an avant-garde tour de force for Galileo and his audience. Heavenly bodies should not have these shapeless stains. So, no matter how precisely and

 Horst Bredekamp, Galileis denkende Hand. Form und Forschung um 1600, in Galileis “O”, ed. Horst Bredekamp, Berlin, 2015, p. 7. 237  Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Gal. 48. 238  Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Gal. 48, fol. 10v; Sven Dupré, Galileo’s Telescope and Celestial Light, in Journal for the History of Astronomy, 34, 2003, p. 369-399. 239  Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Gal. 48, fol. 28. 240  Horst Bredekamp, Galileis denkende Hand, op. cit., p. 156; Damit ergibt sich das Phänomen, dass das tiefste Dunkel außen, am unteren und am oberen Bildrand genutzt ist, als solle der im Weltraum schwebende Trabant eine Art Farbachse als visuellen Halt bekommen. 236

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Fig. 48. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Watercolors of the phases of the moon, Einblatt, 1610, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Gal. 48, fol. 28

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aesthetically pleasing and artful Galileo portrayed this new reality, the newly proven rough surfaces of the heavenly bodies remained an absolute shock. Galileo the artist had to empty his scientific eye through his telescope: the parallel universe in the arts. Galileo’s hand takes over from the cruel, infallible telescope and softens the pain of connecting the moon as art brut with the aesthetic possibilities of what he had already whispered to the painter Cigoli beforehand: the superior abilities of portraying the three-dimensional world on a flat surface. In other words, here we witness the ultimate paragone: the third dimension of the black, hard, silent universe, which manages to transform itself into a new ‘modern’ aesthetic based on sharp observations, and bringing together lens and wrist in light, color, paint, yes, even circle. It is the ultimate paragone, because Galileo enlarged the heavenly bodies to their unaesthetic circumstances, but also reduced them to the sophisticated beauty and technical virtuosity of the details of the painterly arts, wherein the empathic ability between imagery and the universe is restored. That is what Galileo achieved: he reconciled the expectations with beauty. Galileo the scientist used the praxis of the arts to comfort himself and us about the outrageous truth of the non-finito and the lifeless roughness out there in the Great Black Monster. (There might not be any ethereal beauty at the end of the telescope, but there is at the end of the paint brush.) As ‘Siderial Messenger’, Galileo has to be more than the master of objective observation, of ekphrasis, of anagrams and a long title; as thinking hand he must also maintain being the messenger of image-ination. The moon’s surface is again shown to be as smooth as a mirror in the painterly arts as it has been heralded since Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472). The water surface of Narcissus reflects the moon in ethereal smoothness, which it lacks in the reality of the telescope. The painterly arts are capable of transcending reality and still give our most loyal heavenly body, which in 1610 was flung roughly from our expectations, the damp and sultry wetness of the watercolors and the irrevocable perfection of the circle. * The Einblatt quickly received a separate status of almost mythical proportions, because it was the autographic prototype of the Venetian copy and thus most tangibly showed the master’s touch.241 The beauty and the importance of this 241  Sven Dupré, De hand van Galilei, in De gids, 8, 2008 (online), is critical about the current mythography of Galileo Galilei’s work, and by extension about the museological hagiography in Florence.

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one small page made art historians and collectors wish for more. More watercolors. The dream of the treasure. The dream that has to fulfil itself. In June of 2005, Horst Bredekamp personally received an as-of-then still unknown copy of a manuscript of the Sidereus Nuncius by the New York antiquarian shop Martayan Lan.242 It contained the signature Io Galileo Galilei f. and the stamp with the lynx of the Accademia dei Lincei, which Galileo was a member of in 1612. The manuscript contained several watercolor paintings as well as a similar page with the phases of the moon. Bredekamp and several other specialists were not only stunned by the quality of the watercolors, but also delirious with excitement at this long-awaited missing link. Not an Einblatt, but a fully hand illustrated copy, that according to Bredekamp might have been the sample copy before the printing in 1610. The master draws what the printer should print. The historical desire is met. I cannot tell the entire epic here (one can read it in the 2013 edition of The New Yorker243), but I can reveal the following denouement. In 2008, a prestigious fully financed project by 14 institutes is set up in Berlin to research the manuscript. All the specialists claimed the work to be original based on historical and computer technical grounds, and thus painted by the master himself. A book was being prepared and would appear in 2011. But when art historian Nick Wilding was allowed to review the advanced copy for the The Renaissance Quaterly, he had suspicions. The author saw irregularities in the seal, in the format of the moons, and calculated the time anomaly between this manuscript and the print made on 13 March 1610.244 Wilding unmasked Mr. Lan’s copy as a forgery. The New York antique shop was set to ask ten million dollars for the book. The historical desire is not being met. But everyone squares their shoulders immediately. The story itself becomes the topic which is studied. Colleagues work together to research the causes of the dream that burst like a bubble.245 Thus a mistake shows the resilience of Art Science and its ability for selfreflection. The discipline carries its nobility. Because eyes breathe. 242  Horst Bredekamp, Die Geschichte von Galileos O, in Sterne und Weltraum, 2012, p. 42-43, p. 42. 243  Special thanks to Annelies Vogels and her research on the forgery; Nicolas Schmilde, A Very Rare Book. The mystery surrounding a copy of Galileo’s pivotal treatise, https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/16/a-very-rare-book, Consulted on 7/09/2020. 244  Nick Wilding, Forging the Moon, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 160, 1, 2016, p. 37-72. 245  Horst Bredekamp, Irene Brückle & Paul Needham (eds.), Unmasking the New York Sidereus Nuncius, Berlin, 2014; Nick Wilding, A Galileo Forgery, in The Renaissance Quarterly, 67, 4, 2014, p. 1337-1340.

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Fig. 49. Middle finger of the right hand of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), 1737, Florence, Museo Galileo, Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza

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The ruach of a thinking hand still lies in one singular Einblatt in Florence. One sheet and so many expectations. A gust of wind from a decade in the twenty-first century — only a fraction when seen in the light of the cosmic time, less than a breeze, the movement of a butterfly’s wings, perhaps — suddenly awakens the right hand. One finger slowly lifts up, like a telescope — long and refined — or like a cobra — slow and focused. The nail is sharp as a lens and blinking like the blue snake eye. And that slender finger was a middle finger (fig. 49).246 The irony of astrophysics knows no bounds.

246  Middle finger of the right hand of Galileo Galilei, Florence, Museo Galileo, Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Inv. 2432. The finger was removed from the body by antiquarian and priest Antonio Francesco Gori (1691-1757) on 12 March 1737, when Galileo’s grave was moved to a new tomb in the Santa Croce of Florence. The finger was owned by librarian Angelo Maria Bandini (1726-1803) and was kept at the Biblioteca Laurenziana until 1841. In 1929 the relic was moved to the Museo di Storia della Scienza: Museo Galileo, Middle finger of Galileo’s right hand, https://catalogue.museogalileo.it/object/MiddleFingerGalileosRightHand.html, Consulted on: 7/09/2020.

Chapter 9. MNEMOSYNE, GIORDANO BRUNO AND THE OX PLOUGH “One never writes a book of fragments. What one ends up with is less than a book. Or more than a book. A black glow in the deepest sleepwalking seas, invisible like our crystalline joints and our fibrous limbs and as tangible as our tenebrous theaters of doubt.” (Eugene Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism).

Aby Warburg (1866-1929) reportedly said: “Contemplation of the sky is the grace and curse of humanity.”247 It’s known that Warburg dedicated his entire life to finding out what drives people to express themselves artistically. He was so convinced this drive was based on polar opposite emotions (he was bipolar himself): between fear and delight, between Dionysus and Apollo.248 He was especially interested in the way prototypes of images lived on. Although he focused mostly on the Nachleben of the Ancients in the quattrocento, he also expanded his focus to the Ancient Near East and connected his insights to studies of the image culture of the Hopi people. Warburg’s ambition was to understand image genealogies and to also be able to describe them. This cumulated in the famous Mnemosyne project, or the Bilderatlas, where he grouped pictures of objects and artworks from the famous canon and the Babylonian and Mesopotamian cultures, but also objects from daily life or contemporary technological advancements, into themes on 82 different panels. These panels had an ordered, pedagogic, and possibly even therapeutic function, but are to this day the only iconographic montage that dared to trace the DNA of images defined as psychological reservoirs of humanity’s history. The Bilderatlas is a cross section of humankind’s creativity. Warburg called that the Pathosformeln  Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, transl. & ed. Michael P. Steinberg, Ithaca, 1995, p. 16; See also: Barbara Baert, Nymphe (Wind). Der Raum zwischen Motiv und Affekt in der frühen Neuzeit (Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Aby Warburg-Forschung), in Ars, 46, 1, 2013, p. 16-42. 248  Barbara Baert, Nymphe (Wind), op. cit., p. 16-42; Barbara Baert, Nymph. Motif, Phantom, Affect. A Contribution to the Study of Aby Warburg (1866-1929), (Studies in Iconology, 1), LeuvenWalpole-Paris-Bristol, 2014, passim; Barbara Baert, Aby Warburgs (1866-1929) „Nymphe”. Ein Forschungsbericht zu Motiv, Phantom und Paradigma, in Imago. Interdisziplinäres Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse und Ästhetik, 4, 2017, p. 39-62. 247

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of the artistic ability. Perhaps Warburg’s plastic sensitivity combined with the boldness of the Mnemosyne-project has never been matched again. 249 Warburg’s own introduction to the project reads: The conscious creation of distance between oneself and the external world can probably be designated as the founding act of human civilization. When the space between the “I” and the external world becomes the basis of artistic production, the conditions for awareness of this distance to achieve an enduring social function will have been met. The rhythmical alternation between identifying with the object and a return to self-control expresses the oscillation between the cosmology of images and that of signs. This circular motion acts as a more or less exact spiritual instrument of orientation, and eventually determines the fate of human culture.250

The Atlas consists of 79 numbered panels and three panels named A, B, and C as a prologue251 that sketch out the boundaries within which the Atlas positions itself when it comes to method and content.252 Panel A carries the (German) inscription:253 Verschiedene Systeme von Relationen, in die der Mensch eingestellt ist, kosmisch, irdisch, genealogisch. Ineinssetzung aller dieser Relationen im magischen Denken, denn Sonderung von Abstammung, Geburtsort und kosmischer Situation setzt schon eine Denkleistung voraus. 1) Orientierung; 2) Austausch; 3) Soziale Einordnung.254 Panel A shows only three images (fig. 50): an image of the macrocosm, and two schematics Warburg drew himself.255 The first image at the top is a colored in copper engraving from 1684 with the symbolic star signs and an extensive legend (fig. 51).256 The second and middle drawing is a map of Europe: the 249  Giulia Bordignon, Monica Centanni, et. al., Orientation. Cosmology, Geography, Genealogy. A Reading of Panel A of Mnemosyne Bilderatlas, in Engramma, 135, 2016 (online), http://www.engramma.it/eOS/index.php?id_articolo=2831, Consulted on: 30/06/2020. 250  Giulia Bordignon, Monica Centanni, et. al., Orientation, op. cit., Consulted on: 30/06/2020. 251  Engramma, Mnemosyne Atlas, http://www.engramma.it/eOS/core/frontend/eos_atlas_ index.php, Consulted on: 30/06/2020. 252  Giulia Bordignon, Monica Centanni, et. al., Orientation, op. cit., Consulted on: 30/06/2020. 253  Engramma, Mnemosyne Atlas A, http://www.engramma.it/eOS/core/frontend/eos_atlas_ index.php?id_tavola=10001, Consulted on: 30/06/2020. 254  In English: Different systems of relations with which man is connected: cosmic, earthly, genealogical. 255  Mnemosyne Atlas A, http://www.engramma.it/eOS/core/frontend/eos_atlas_index.php?id_ tavola=10001; Consulted on 30/06/2020. 256  Giulia Bordignon, Monica Centanni, et. al., Orientation, op. cit., Consulted on: 30/06/2020. Panel A was used by Warburg’s assistant Fritz Saxl (1890-1948) in a lecture for the opening of the Hamburg Planetarium one year after Warburg’s death in 1930.

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Fig. 50. Tafel A from the Bilderatlas, From: Martin Warnke & Claudia Brink, Aby Warburg. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, (Gesammelte Schriften. Aby Warburg, 2, II, 1), Berlin, 2008.

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Fig. 51. Colored copper engraving with symbolic star signs, 1684, Hamburg, Planetarium

Mediterranean world and the far East that Warburg sketched in preparation for his lecture at The Conference of German Orientalists.257 In this personal mappa mundi Warburg shows the cultural exchanges between north and south, between east and west, with in the center of it all the sweltering Mediterranean as the perfect place to pass on Ancient knowledge and views to Europe. And finally, at the bottom, the Medici-Tornabuoni family tree was added. The images in Panel A zoomed in on the dynamic relationship with culture: orientation, exchange, and social integration respectively. The cosmography 257

 September 1926; The Warburg Institute Archive (WIA), III.96.3.4.

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with star signs illustrates humans’ desire to position themselves with respect to the universe. This entire essay also concerns humankind’s desire to orient themselves within the mysterious structure of the universe through the arts. The second map featuring the Mediterranean in a key position illustrates the geographic transmission of ideas. Warburg was convinced that the visual prototypes drifted along demonstrable spatial and temporal routes of our cultural fabric. This mapping (Wanderkarte) of image genealogies was the objective of the Atlas. The genealogy of the Florentine merchant family, finally, affirms and makes one time period concrete, the floating motifs and their artistic explosion within the quattrocento patronage. Panel A reaffirms the role of cosmography and the desire to understand what cannot be understood — our relationship with the universe. There is a reason Warburg dedicated this imagery project to the mother of all muses, Mnemosyne, she who first used language. She who taught us to use words to express things in the world: dixit. For Mnemosyne the cosmos was silent, but from Panel A, she is celebrating the eloquent drift between Apollo and Dionysus to use words to answer one of the most difficult questions there is: the delight and the fear of humans on Earth and their capacity to look up. What we see on Panel A is cosmos and zodiac; topography and meandering routes; genealogy and kinship. All three of them form the matrix wherein culture and the arts originate and find meaning. The ability to discuss these three means of access — orientation, transmission, and social integration — forms the hermeneutic base of a new way of looking at human expression.258 Humans’ relationship with their artistic and mental abilities navigates between dangerous blending together — the fear of the Hopi people for lightning and their sublimation of it in the snake — and the distance needed to get perspective and comprehend the greatest things — Galileo’s watercolors, the spiral on prehistoric dishes, the darkening of marble, the breath of God, the blackness of the origin and the egg that finally broke. Everything else can now ensue from Panel A. The title of Panel B reads: Verschiedene Grade der Abtragung des kosmischen Systems auf den Menschen. Harmonikale Entsprechung. Später Reduktion der  Gertrud Bing (1864-1992) writes the following on the subject: As regards the psychological concept of polarity as a heuristic principle, we need to add a debate on the idea of transformation implicated in distancing and absorption [Einverleibung]”; Giulia Bordignon, Monica Centanni, et. al., Orientation, op. cit., Consulted on: 30/06/2020; Laura Tack, The Fortune of Gertrud Bing (1892-1964). A Fragmented Memoir of a Phantomlike Muse, (Studies in Iconology, 16), LeuvenWalpole-Paris-Bristol, 2020. 258

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Harmonie auf die abstrakte Geometrie statt auf die kosmisch bedingte (Lionardo). Firstly, it shows the microcosm miniature by Hildegard of Bingen, beside that of Leonardo (fig. 52).259 Panel C as “The Children of Mars” reads: Entwicklung der Marsvorstellung. Loslösung von der anthropomorphistischen. Auffassung Bild — harmonikales System — Zeichen. And who does Aby Warburg feature first on this Panel? Kepler and his battle between the circle and the ellipse (fig. 53).260 Warburg appears to be trying to express the following: the cosmos is either in crisis with the implosions of the last myths, or in progress, heading straight toward heliocentrism, or in dismay about the loss of the circle in favor of the ellipse, or numbed by the optimism of a flying Zeppelin. But each time, the “Children of Mars” seem to claim the central position of humans in the universe. And in the midst of this optimistic claim, two special children of Mars meet each other in person: Aby Warburg and Albert Einstein (1879-1955) met on 4 September 1928 — the day that the calendar celebrates the prophet Moses — a conversation near the Ostsee in Scharbeutz (Germany, SchleswigHolstein) (fig. 54). It was Warburg who initiated the meeting, and it is said that he talked to Einstein for four hours about the Bilderatlas, especially the panel with Johannes Kepler’s mysterium cosmographicum.261 The sketch where Einstein shows Warburg how the ellipse-shaped orbit of the Earth can be explained by the position of Mars has been preserved (fig. 55). According to Einstein, this was Kepler’s most important discovery… The next day, Warburg writes to his brother Max (1867-1946): Das allgemein Bedeutsame besteht nun darin, daß ich dadurch Material zur Selbsterkenntnis des denkenden Menschen einliefere, daß ich den Weg von der Konkretion zur Abstraktion nicht als ausschließende Gegensätzlichkeit sondern als organischen Kreislauf im menschlichen Denkvermögen auffasse und nachweise.262 Apparently, Warburg wanted to test his cosmologic knowledge with the master. And in a letter to Fritz Saxl (1890-1948), Aby’s loyal assistant and librarian, also dated

 Panel B Microcosm: Engramma, Mnemosyne Atlas B, http://www.engramma.it/eOS/ core/frontend/eos_atlas_index.php?id_tavola=10002; Consulted on 30/06/2020. 260  An image from Johannes Kepler, Mysterium cosmographicum, Tübingen, 1621. 261  Horst Bredekamp & Claudia Wedepohl, Warburg, Cassirer und Einstein im Gespräch. Kepler als Schlüssel der Moderne, Berlin, 2015; Lecture by Horst Bredekamp & Claudia Wedepohl, Aby Warburg meets Albert Einstein. Mars as a Lantern of the Earth, 2012, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ro1eE9T69w, Consulted on: 16/10/2020, Special thanks to Stephanie Heremans. 262  WIA, FC [Family Correspondence], Aby Warburg to Max Warburg, 5 September 1928. 259

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Fig. 52. Tafel B from the Bilderatlas, From: Martin Warnke & Claudia Brink, Aby Warburg. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, (Gesammelte Schriften. Aby Warburg, 2, II, 1), Berlin, 2008.

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Fig. 53. The identification of the orbits of the planets with regular solid bodies. From: Johannes Kepler, Mysterium cosmographicum, Tübingen, 1621, Cambridge, Queen’s Library, D.1.9.

5 September 1928, he writes that Einstein had stared at his Bilderatlas like a fascinated schoolboy: as if it were a movie. (Rather wonderfully, this was described as such by Einstein himself: the Bilderatlas wants to move like a spider web — strong and fragile at the same time — echoing and murmuring throughout cultural history.) (Also wonderful is the cinema bursting into our text: Lars von Trier waves and joins the two scientists as the third, special child of Mars.) But Warburg also writes that Einstein peppered him with many critical questions. Gespannt wie ein Schuljunge im Kino meinen Bildern folgte

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Fig. 54. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) in Scharbeutz, 1928, From: Horst Bredekamp & Claudia Wedepohl, Warburg, Cassirer und Einstein im Gesprach. Kepler als Schlüssel der Moderne, Berlin, 2015, p. 61.

und unter steten unerbittlichen Nachfragen die Stichhaltigkeit meiner Schlüsse prüfte. Nur bei Kepler und der Ellipse habe ich, glaube ich, nicht gut bestanden; sonst war er mit mir zufrieden.263 I wonder if Warburg talked with Einstein about his latest obsession: Giordano Bruno (1548-1600).264 The Dominican, born in Nola near Naples, was said to have an exceptionally good memory,265 and became both famous and criticised for his cosmology. He described the universe as an eternal, pantheistic system that could not have a centre due to its cosmic pluralism, and where in principle other life should be possible. This progressive vision on the universe — Bruno’s heliocentrism was shared by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1553) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) — together with his writings on reincarnation (the transmigration of the soul) led to Bruno being denounced, and in 1600, 263

 WIA, GC [General Correspondence], Aby Warburg to Fritz Saxl, 5 September 1928; See also: Jürgen Renn, Galileo in Context, Cambridge, 2001, p. 185, no. 74. 264  See also: Barbara Baert, What about Enthousiasm? A Rehabilitation. Pentecost, Pygmalion, Pathosformel, (Studies in Iconology, 13), Leuven-Walpole-Paris-Bristol, 2019, p. 73-76. 265  Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, London, 1984, p. 199-307 (Chapter IX: Giordano Bruno: The Secret of Shadows).

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Fig. 55. Albert Einstein’s (1879-1955) sketch to explain the calculation of the orbit of Mars to Aby Warburg, 4 September 1928, From: Horst Bredekamp & Claudia Wedepohl, Warburg, Cassirer und Einstein im Gesprach. Kepler als Schlüssel der Moderne, Berlin, 2015, p. 94.

he ended up being burned at the stake on the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome (which nowadays still has a statue of him). Giordano Bruno, the heretic, the activist of the free word. Admirer of Nicholas Cusanus whom we met before in this essay. More esotericus than mysticus maybe, but always wandering, searching.266 266  Paul Colilli, The Astrological Signs Left to Posterity, in Annali d’Italianistica, 23, 2005, p. 121-131.

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Aby Warburg had his important moment of clarity — Wir müssen Giordano Bruno lesen 267 — on 22 November 1928 in Rome, when he invited Italianist Leonardo Olschki (1885-1961) to hold a lecture on this almost inaccessible philosopher, theologian, and astrologist. A few days later, Warburg notes: Nachmittags um circa 6 angefangen Giordano Bruno zu lesen. Zuerst mühselig durch die Wüste der Allgemeinheiten gepflügt. Dann begreift College Bing plötzlich mit bildschöner Sicherheit das immens complizierte Problem der Heiden-Götterwelt bei Giordano Bruno als explizierbar.268 (“Afternoon around 6 began to read Giordano Bruno. At first laboriously ploughed through the desert of commonplaces. Then suddenly colleague Bing comprehends with beautiful certainty how to explicate the immense, complicated problem of the pagan pantheon of gods in Giordano Bruno”). We still have the notes Warburg collected on Bruno between December 1928 and June 1929. “He [Warburg] wants him to talk about the function of classical mythology in Bruno’s thought as he hoped that it might demonstrate a link between pagan image-based thought and modern symbol-based thought. For him Bruno is the pivotal thinker of the 16th century, an ‘antenna’, a receptor of European thought.”269 During this time, Warburg bought a collection of 350 books on Bruno. Ausserordentlich weit-tragende zweckdienliche Erwerbung: wird Folgen haben.270 (“Extraordinarily far-reaching, purposive acquisition: it will have consequences”). Bruno’s Spaccio (“Expulsion”) is a dialogue between Sophia (wisdom), Saulino, and Mercurio, in which they discuss a hybrid world of philosophy, virtues, and astrology. The subjects of furor, enthusiasm, and a cosmological fire that fulfils the inner soul are mentioned frequently throughout the text.271 The esoteric Spaccio wanted to develop a new civilisation and cosmology, a riforma, which takes time: a spacciare that would lead mankind in an orbit 267  Aby M. Warburg, Tagebuch der kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg (1926-1929), (Gesammelte Schriften, VII), eds. Karen Michels & Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Berlin, 2001, p. 350. This after his reading: Leonardo Olschki, Giordano Bruno, in Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 2, 1924, p. 1-79. 268  Aby M. Warburg, Tagebuch, op. cit., p. 373-375. 269  As written on the website of The Warburg Institute with an image of the Giordano Bruno diary: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/research/research-projects/giordano-bruno/aby-warburgand-giordano-bruno. This unpublished manuscript with forty-five pages is conserved in The Warburg Institute Archive with the signature 121.1.1; Maurizio Ghelardi & Giovanna Targia (eds.), Aby Warburg, Giordano Bruno, in Iconology and Philosophy. Cassirer Studies, 1, 2008, p. 13-58. 270  Aby M. Warburg, Tagebuch, op. cit., p. 387. 271  Giordano Bruno, Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante, ed. Michele Ciliberto, Milan, 2000, p. 16.

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around the sun and bring them eternal truth. The path towards this ideal is described in dual terms: between light and darkness, between chaos and order. And in the chthonic darkness of chaos and the underworld, the truth of the light can be found.272 The De gl’heroici furori is also a dialogue, this time between Tansillo and Cicada, who try to understand the fire of love as a mystical unification and ascent towards the sun. For example, in the first dialogue it says: Cicada: Why is love symbolized by fire? Tansillo: Putting aside many other reasons for the moment, let this suffice for you now. Love converts the thing loved into the lover, as the fire, among all the most active elements, is able to convert all the other simple and complex elements into itself. (…) My sweet pain, new in the world and rare, when shall I ever escape from your burden, since the remedy is weariness to me, and the pain delight? Eyes, flames, and bow of my lord, twofold fire in the soul, and arrows in the heart, because the languishing is sweet to me, and the fire is dear.273

Nicolas Mann summarises Bruno’s ideas of entheos and furor as follows: A central theme of all Bruno’s writings is his ferocious opposition to Aristotelian theories of the division of form and matter, for he held that they were inseparable. He portrays the philosopher as driven by admiration for the unity of all natural life towards a progressive revelation of the power of the human mind. This desire for knowledge can only be achieved through human action and speculation, a heroic frenzy distinguishing the new freedom of mankind from the passivity of earlier generations enslaved by the monstrous forms of determinism.274

The studies on the Giordano Bruno-Universe were so inspiring for Aby Warburg that he was in danger of losing himself again. 275 Nevertheless he developed a (idiosyncratic) vocabulary to connect Bruno with the chthonic world of the Capua mithraeum he and Gertrud visited on the 17th of May in the year he would die: 1929.

272  Nicolas Mann, Denkenergetische Inversion. Aby Warburg and Giordano Bruno, in Publications of the English Goethe Society, 72, 2003, p. 25-37, p. 29. 273  Giordano Bruno, The Heroic Frenzies, (North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures), ed. & transl. Paul E. Memmo, Chapel Hill, 1966, p. 19. 274  Nicolas Mann, Denkenergetische Inversion, op. cit., p. 28-29. 275  Claudia Wedepohl, Mnemonics, Mneme and Mnemosyne. Aby Warburg’s Theory of Memory, in Bruniana & Campanelliana, 20, 2, 2014, p. 385-402.

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Das Monstrum als Lichtsymbol Erleuchtung Die gegabelte Wünschelruthe bog sich auf Neapel nieder G. B. nach S. Domenico — Hygin A. W. nach Capua — Heliotropismus u. Trionfo della notte.276 (The monstrum as light symbol of illumination The forked dowsing rod bent down toward Naples G. B. to S. Domenico — Hyginus A. W. to Capua — heliotropism and Trionfo della notte.)

Back to the Ostsee. Albert and Aby are still talking. Both men feel challenged by each other. Alas. We will never know all the details about their conversations. But what we do know is that they agreed on the unparalleled impact of Kepler’s mysterium cosmographicum. And they might have agreed also that the development of telegraphy comes close to that particular impact, close enough to close indeed the A-B-C introduction to the Atlas. Now the letters can make way for numbers. Incipit Panel 1 with Abtragung des Kosmos auf einen Teil des Körpers zu Weissagungszwecken. Babylonischer Staats-Sternglaube. Originäre orientalische Praktik. (fig. 56). Thus, the first step in the Mnemosyne project is the magical object: the transfer of the cosmos to the body and the control of the universe through predictions and the calculation of time. That is how Mnemosyne, mother of all Muses, started speaking in Babylon: with a liver and a clay tablet.277 There, the time started again and unfolded into an endless circular movement — starting the ox-tail dance — and the instrument for orientation — spiritually, mythically, and astrophysically. There in the Atlas, the heart-rending assignment to give the fate of humans and their universe a voice through a 276  Christopher Johnson, Metaphors, Memory and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images, Ithaca, 2012, p. 211; WIA, III.121.1.2. Giordano Bruno, fol. 9. 277  Georges Didi-Huberman, Hepatische Empathie. Die Affinität des Inkommensurablen nach Aby Warburg, in Trivium, 2, 2010, p. 2-17.

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Fig. 56. Tafel 1 of the Bilderatlas, From: Martin Warnke & Claudia Brink, Aby Warburg. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, (Gesammelte Schriften. Aby Warburg, 2, II, 1), Berlin, 2008, p. 15.

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Fig. 57. Hummingbird Geoglyph at the Nasca lines, ca. 500 BC-500 AD, Nazca desert, Peru

gigantic cosmic boustrophedon started.278 A voice under the all-seeing milky blue eyes of Mnemosyne: zigzagging between memory and language, between mother and snake. And Mnemosyne ploughs her deep geoglyphs in the earth to guide us, we, the humble travelers on the Heavenly Ladder between above and below, between monstrum and astra, between fear and delight. And look what Mnemosyne created with her plough: a gigantic hummingbird (fig. 57)!279  Barbara Baert, Kairos or Occasion as Paradigm in the Visual Medium. Nachleben, Iconography, Hermeneutics, (Studies in Iconology, 5), Leuven-Walpole-Paris-Bristol, 2016, p. 65-66; Barbara Baert, From Kairos to Occasio along Fortuna. Text / Image / Afterlife, Turnhout, 2021. 279  I refer of course to “the animal mounds found in a region famous for a series of ancient geolyphs, called the Nazca Lines, which are now considered a World Heritage Site in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. The Nazca (also spelled Nasca) Lines are geoglyphs located in an arid coastal area of Peru that cover an estimated 170 square miles (450 square kilometers). Scratched on the ground, they number in the thousands and depict creatures from both the natural world and the human imagination. They include animals such as the spider, hummingbird, monkey, 278

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The bird that makes time flutter in one point, in the cyclopic black pupil of the universe. And in the fluttering of a fragile bird the impossible becomes possible: the unflinching creativities of the cosmos burst loose and fall down to us. And now Mnemosyne sings together with the hummingbird and all the Muses have gathered dancing in Venice. And each one — goddess, bird, Muse — jubilates our o so vulnerable planet.

lizard, pelican and even a killer whale. Also depicted are plants, trees, flowers and oddly shaped fantastic figures. Also illustrated are geometric motifs such as wavy lines, triangles, spirals and rectangles. The vast majority of the lines date from 200 BC to 500 AD;” Owen Jarus, Nazca Lines: Mysterious Geoglyphs in Peru, https://www.livescience.com/22370-nazca-lines.html, consulted on: 21/10/2020; “Indeed, the designs were believed to have been created when ancient Peruvians scraped off a dark and rocky layer of earth, which contrasts with lighter-colored sand underneath. Researchers believe that the figures once served as travel markers;” Tiffany May, 2,000-Year-Old Cat Etching Found at Nazca Lines Site in Peru, https://www.nytimes. com/2020/10/19/world/americas/peru-cat-nazca-lines-nasca.html, consulted on 21/10/2020.

Chapter 10. CLOSE YOUR EYES, LEO! “In the light of the universal terror, we behold all that has been and all that will be. So artistically is the moment chosen.” (Thomas Davidson (1840-1900))

In the film Melancholia (2011) by Danish director Lars von Trier, the solitary planet Melancholia collides with the Earth. Melancholia unexpectedly changed course and had remained hidden behind the sun for some time. (A gigantic sun dial at the start of the film shows two shadows: one caused by the sun, and one caused by Melancholia (fig. 58)). The primal fear becomes reality: the collision takes place and the world is destroyed by the cruelest possible coincidence of the universe. While this book started with the origin of the universe, and then meandered past abstraction and gazing, I wish to end with a tabula rasa.280 The horror and fear of this unavoidable disaster is too much to even be able to empathetically fathom as a viewer, even as a Siderial Messenger. Still, Lars von Trier attempts to, through the different and layered psyches of the sisters and protagonists of the film: Justine, the phlegmatic, who awaits this inescapable fate fatalistically; and Claire, the fearful, who attempts to live life to the fullest in the ultimate days before the Apocalypse in an all-consuming sense of despair.281 And then there is John, the optimistic scientist, avatar of Galileo, and Claire’s husband, whose house they preside in. The film starts with Justine’s wedding, which is being held on the estate under the constellation of the red star Antares. This star disappears, the horses become restless, danger is near. John explains why Antares was hidden: a planet named Melancholia has hidden it from sight. However, there is no need to worry. Science has already calculated that the planet will continue on through space after flying by the Earth. Yet the sisters still suspect that Melancholia will collide  Anna Katharina Schaffner, Exhaustion. A History, Columbia, 2016, p. 68-72.  Spencer Golub, Incapacity. Wittgenstein, Anxiety, and Performance Behavior, Evanston, 2014, p. 79: Von Trier “imagines the worst thing possible” as a normative reality — the fictional planet “Melancholia” that is on course to collide with Earth serves as an objective correlative for the protagonist Justine’s obsessively depressive state and exacerbates her sister Claire’s intense anxiety; Anna Katharina Schaffner, Exhaustion, op. cit., p. 67: Trier assigns one of the age-old core symptoms of melancholia, sadness and fear, to each sister, thus acknowledging the different guises in which melancholia can manifest itself. 280 281

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Fig. 58. Double sun dial, still from Melancholia, 2011, Lars von Trier

with the Earth. John reassures them with a simple optical principle that was made by his son, Leo. Leo made a circle with iron wire and attached it to a stick. This is now the Eye: the mise en abyme of the projector on the screen and cinema as a whole. An iron circle as pars pro toto of the human desire to look into the cosmos and to refine our iconic gaze. The iron eye becomes a mould for the circumference of Melancholia, and to everyone’s relief, the planet grows smaller inside the eye. The disastrous planet seems to be moving away from the Earth. But Claire checks on Melancholia a second time, and now the planet exceeds the lines of the eye. Melancholia’s course is headed towards the Earth (fig. 59). John takes his own life in the stables with his horses. His suicide proves that the optimistic scientist does not believe in a reversal of the ultimate disaster and that the gigantic Apocalypse is inevitable. Justine, Claire, and her son Leo are now alone and have to deal with the unthinkable. They can only wait for death, but how does one await such imminent, all-encompassing destruction?282 Nicolas Rapold writes in Film Comment: In the second half of the film, as Claire, along with Justine, John, and their son maintain a vigil that spans curiosity, nerves, and terror, Justine alone grows more secure, even stable, in her bitterness. “I think it’s a piece of shit,” she says evenly of her sister’s attempt facing the end with some measure of style. “She’s kind of calling for this planet somehow,” said von Trier. “Maybe it’s more a feeling than a planet. And I think that with melancholia, there’s a bittersweetness to the feeling.283

282 283

 Anna Katharina Schaffner, Exhaustion, op. cit., p. 170-171.  Nicolas Rapold, The End, in Film Comment, 47, 5, 2011, p. 32-35, p. 34-35.

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Fig. 59. Claire sees through Leo’s eye that Melancholia is approaching, still from Melancholia, 2011, Lars von Trier

Indeed, what kind of wake can endure this type of waiting? “We shall make a cave that keeps us safe.”284 Leo makes a tipi-structure in the garden with brittle branches (fig. 60). The idea of the protective hut is an interesting metaphor for the cosmic drama that takes place here. In the chapter The Blob or The Bubble of his book Apocalypse-Cinema, Peter Szendy delves into the metaphor of the hut as a

284  Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone Book. An Ecology of the Inhuman, Minnesota, 2015, p. 71-72: The final scene features a feeble “cave” made not of stone but of thin sticks where three of the protagonists huddle. One of them is a child who has been told he will be safe. He is incinerated with his mother and aunt. The End.

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Fig. 60. Leo’s magic cave, still from Melancholia, 2011, Lars von Trier

“magic cave.”285 In actuality, Leo has been begging his parents to be allowed to make a (play) fort for the entirety of the film. The adults keep postponing the child’s request; they don’t have time and they do not want to. Running parallel to the postponement of creating the fort, the cosmic eye grows, Melancholia and its mysterious blue moonshine grows — the eye of a shedding snake — ever closer towards its inevitability. It is during this ‘postponement’ that Leo creates the eye to ‘kill’ time by gazing at the mysterious (harmless?) planet that will cross paths with the Earth. Leo connects the ‘eye’ with time, boredom with danger, child with the universe. Without his yet knowing it, the child holds in his hands an apparatus for counting down the time that remains: By framing the threatening planet with this rudimentary, apprentice astronomer’s toy, he creates a visual enclave within the film’s field, where the cause of the coming end of the world is contained and enclosed. But the image in the hoop — that gigantic celestial sphere surrounded by a ridiculous skinny enclosure — will continue to grow, overflowing this frame within the frame where it is encircled. In other words, the astral globe’s blob swells up and bloats like an on-screen tumor. And it will pursue its dilation until the final explosion. Until its luminescence, unfurling beyond every limit and every framing, produces a general fade to white followed by the darkness of the cineworld’s extinction.286

285  Peter Szendy, Apocalypse-Cinema. 2012 and Other Ends of the World, Fordham, 2015, p. 117-118. 286  Peter Szendy, Apocalypse-Cinema, op. cit., p. 119.

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The child only receives the fort when it is too late: when the eschatology has been fulfilled and the katechon — that which withholds as in 1 Thessalonians 2:6-7 — can only be expressed in bundles of sticks. It is almost too cosmic to express, that in this fort, three people with their hands intertwined try to seek shelter against the Greatest Primordial Disaster. Here, the ‘not-fort’ is also a dismantling of the destruction of cinema itself. The tipi without canvas is like the iron eye without a lens. Basic and naive, childish, but also containing the naked truth.287 They remind us of the moment when Galileo saw that the moon was not ‘beautiful’. Apocalypse-cinema, we were saying, is, each time unique, the end of the world and the end of the film, both the one and the other [l’une comme l’autre], the one in the guise of the other. Yet since neither the one nor the other unveils a revealed otherworld, they thus open the world onto itself by bringing bubbles, fractures, and fissures to emerge within it. Blobs and “cracks in the world,” in sum. This is in fact why cinema is not Plato’s cave and a cinema’s blinding heliography is not that of ideas, the copies of whose copies we would see on screen. And if the cineworld has the structure of a cave, it is much more that of the “magic cave” that Lars von Trier magnificently evokes in Melancholia.288

“Close your eyes!”, Justine tells Leo.289 She also tells us, with her back facing the approaching disaster. She gives us the option of visually avoiding the unbearable impact. With her words, she prefigures the endless black void: a back like a wall, a bulwark, even the missing screen that is temporarily aimed at the catastrophe itself.290 But the scared and hysterical Claire does look. Her gaze remains unflinching in the face of the abyss that falls from the universe. She stares at the absolute end in its hell mouth. The last thing we see is a firestorm destroying everything in its wake, right down to the pellicle (fig. 61). This is the end of cinema and also the iconic gaze.291

 Peter Szendy, Apocalypse-Cinema, op. cit., p. 120-121.  Peter Szendy, Apocalypse-Cinema, op. cit., p. 117. 289  Christopher Peterson, The Magic Cave of Allegory. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, in Discourse, 35, 3, 2013, p. 400-422, p. 418-419. 290  From the Greek καταστροφή (katastrophḗ), καταστρέφω (katastréphō, “I overturn”), from κατά (katá, “down, against “) + στρέφω (stréphō, “I turn”). 291  S. Brent Plate, Visualizing the Cosmos. Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” and Other Visions of Life in the Universe, in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 80, 2, 2012, p. 527-536, p. 528-529: The cosmic imagery is not just out there, it is “back then,” in illo tempore, and it impacts life the spatial metaphors begin to tell us something about the imagery constructed in and through these films, and through our cosmic language. 287 288

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Fig. 61. The destruction and final image, still from Melancholia, 2011, Lars von Trier

“Then the dazzling clarity comes. And then universal night”.292 Even the démon de midi cannot go against that. 293 I am in front of the black screen. In the black screen. I disappeared at the same time the last image did. I melted into darkness. I, too, exploded, and my remains have been dispersed into the universal night. I am the darkness. I no longer am. This is what, speechless, I was saying to myself—this is what each one says to himself or herself, I think, without the words or breath to say so—in that ever so brief and yet infinitely distended instant that, at the end of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), separates the last image from the credits. It is ten seconds, a tiny bit more, of total darkness. We first hear the dissipation of the echo of the orchestral rocket fire from the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde—that mesmerizing ascension, those incessant irruptions of sound that prepared and accompanied the catastrophe. The last trails of the sound of the planet’s explosion that just took place also die away; they expire bit by bit. And then there is silence. Silence and profound darkness, and they last. Never, to my knowledge, has a film so closely conformed to what would be the strictest law of the apocalyptic genre that the end of the world is the end of the movie.294

What remains is a saturated, thick, quiet black.  Peter Szendy, Apocalypse-Cinema, op. cit., p. 121.  The so-called démon de midi or the Acedia demon; Roger Caillois, Les démons de midi, in Revue de l’histoire des religions, 48, 1, 1937, p. 143-171; 48, 2, 1937, p. 54-81; 48, 3, 1937, p. 143-185; Barbara Baert, Démon de midi/Zenith, in Fragments, (Studies in Iconology, 14), ed. Stephanie Heremans, Leuven-Walpole-Paris-Bristol, 2018, p. 73-77. 294  Peter Szendy, Apocalypse-Cinema, op. cit., p. 1-2. 292 293

CLOSE YOUR EYES, LEO !

A cosmic eye that stares without the energy of the boustrophedon. There is nothing left to legitimize this text. Nobody reads.

141

Chapter 11.

THE VANISHING POINT

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/video/ligo20160211v2 “The Sound of Two Black Holes Colliding”

23/05/2020…When Pythagoras determined the length of the strings of a lire as a paradigm for the universe — 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 (octave, perfect fifth, perfect fourth) — and he mirrored the harmony of the cosmos to numbers and music, he did not yet know that strings would one day be considered the building blocks of the universe, and while the Greeks came ever closer to the elements — water, air, apeiron — the gigantic monster expanded further. * How many eyes: one virulent pupil or millions of irises; how many metaphors: one brittle world egg or the filthy black swamps subject to the tides of the invisible breath of God; how many injuries: the collision between Melancholia and Earth or the astounding sense of Hildegard of Bingen ‘for the fire felt within itself the turbulence of the thunder.’ * And then the night unthinkable: the black holes that crush each other and the sound that this cruelty emits, wondrously enchanting like the heartbeat of an embryo, the greatest next to the smallest in their chilling rhythmic owl call for comfort, but there is no comfort in the barren land that Galileo Galilei saw through the blue eye of a shedding snake, gazing at the beauty that the heavens promised, but which it turned out to lack, except the circle, but the circle was also a lie made up by humans to try and forget the cosmic ellipse. * And will Danaë have to pay for this uncovering of gilded godly lies in her frigid lap; is it Danaë’s destiny to sublimate the Antique, ruthless cosmic lust with iconographic sclerosis in oil paint? * Yes, from now on we will be humble in our gaze upwards, like how Nimrod was selective and Seth had compassion for his father, because ‘it’s the stars that are imprisoned in their own power, and they cannot really help us. They merely design the nets, and on cosmic looms they weave the warp thread that we must complete with our own weft.’ (Olga Tokarczuk). * And when I write that the stars offered themselves up like Braille for red cave hands, was this the waxing rhetoric of pretentious authorship? * ‘In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous.

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At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind — that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality — its inexpressibility. (Olga Tokarczuk).’ From Sandro Veronesi’s epic love story ‘The Hummingbird’ I learned that the Aztecs believe that souls hit by lightning and storm spend four years with the sun god, a unique privilege. But after that period, they become a hummingbird. Luisa, Marco’s great love, writes in a letter to him: ‘These days the entire Aztec civilization has sunk down to Mictlan, and we still wonder what kind of people they were, for who the greatest gratification after a heroic death would be to be changed into a hummingbird.’ * Can comfort be found in the tesserae of a Venetian snake dance; in the hummingbird that hovers in place in the cosmic boustrophedon? *Can we understand that: the smallest creature fluttering and far away two gaping black monsters — ruthless and majestic — tearing each other apart into one giant abyss; the pupil of a lamb; the genius of three children of Mars — Aby, Albert and Lars — giggling deep down in the caves of Mithras… 21/10/2020

“It’s clear that the largest things are contained in the smallest. There can be no doubt about it. At this very moment, as I write, there’s a planetary configuration on this table, the entire Cosmos, if you like: a thermometer, a coin, an aluminium spoon and a porcelain cup. A key, a mobile phone, a piece of paper and a pen. And one of my grey hairs, whose atoms preserve the memory of the origins of life, of the cosmic Catastrophe that gave the world its beginning.” (Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead).295

295

 Olga Tokarczuk, o.c., p. 160.

ILLUSTRATIONS Master Bartolomé (1450-1493), Chaos (Cahos), late 15th century, Tucson, Arizona, The University of Arizona Museum of Art Fig. 2. The gaze upward, one of the two Hamangia Thinkers, found in Cernavodă, Romania, 5000-4600 BC (Neolithic Era), Bucharest, National History Museum of Romania Fig. 3. The owl in the cave, Magdalenian 17,000-12,000 BC, Dordogne, Chauvet cave Fig. 4. The spark of creation, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), Liber Scivias (1151-1152), Book II, reconstructed by the sisters of the Abbey of St. Hildegard, Eibingen Fig. 5a. Mappa mundi, ca. 1300, Hereford, Cathedral Fig. 5b. Mappa mundi, ca. 1300, Hereford, Cathedral, Reconstruction Fig. 6. Genesiscycle, mosaic in the atrium dome, 13th century, Venice, Saint Mark’s Basilica Fig. 7. In principio, so-called Bibbia atlantica, 13th century, Montalcino, Archivio comunale, fol. 6v Fig. 8. Incipit liber de astronomia, Anglo-Saxon convolute with the Liber Nemroth de Astronomia, late 13th century, Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, Ms. Lat. VIII 22, fol. 1r Fig. 9. Middle circle as oculus, Genesiscycle, mosaic in the atrium dome, 13th century, Venice, Saint Mark’s Basilica Fig. 10. Negative hand prints, 13,000-9000 BC, Perito Moreno, Argentina, Cueva de las Manos Fig. 11. Tantric symbols, paper and paint, 18th century, Rajasthan, India, From: Ami Ronnberg (ed.), The Book of Symbols, Cologne, 2010, p. 707. Fig. 12. Angel with the heavens as a spiral, 14th century, Istanbul, Chora Church Fig. 13. Clouds and rain, Florentine Codex, vol. 2, 1575-1577, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana/Donato Pineider, libro 7, fol. 12r Fig. 14. Ice, snow, and hail, Florentine Codex, vol. 2, 1575-1577, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana/Donato Pineider, libro 7, fol. 13r Fig. 15. a-b. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441) and Hubert van Eyck (ca. 1370-1426), Detail of the head of the mystic lamb before (a) and after (b) being painted over, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1430-1432, Ghent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral Fig. 1.

148

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Abgar and the mandylion, Byzantium, panel, after 944, Sinai, Saint Catherine’s Monastery Fig. 17. Mandylion, Byzantium, miniature from John Climacus, ca. 1100, Rome, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Ross. Gr. 251, fol. 12v Fig. 18. ‘Authentic’ mandylion on cloth, 14th century (presumed), Rome, Vatican City, Palazzi Pontifici, Lipsanotheca Fig. 19. ‘Authentic’ mandylion on panel, 14th century, Genoa, San Bartolomeo degli Armeni Fig. 20. Showing of the vera icon, Mirabilia Romae, block printed book, 1481, Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek, 8° xyl. 50, fol. 27v Fig. 21. a-b. Petrus Christus (ca. 1410-1475), Portrait of a young man with Indulgence for the vera icon, ca. 1450, London, National Gallery of Art Fig. 22. Cavalry with Veronica, miniature from the Grandes Heures de Duc de Berry, Jacquemart de Hesdin (1355-1414, active between 1384-1413), 1409, Paris, Musée du Louvre, Ms. lat. 919, fol. 71 Fig. 23. Unknown Czech painter, Madonna of Saint Thomas, vera icon on the recto side, ca. 1400-1410, Brno, Moravian Gallery Fig. 24. Veronica and the sudarium, Master of Saint Veronica, (active between ca. 1400-1420), ca. 1420, London, National Gallery of Art Fig. 25. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441) and Hubert van Eyck (ca. 1370-1426), Vera icon pilgrim souvenir from Rome, detail of one of the pilgrims, possibly Judocus, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1430-1432, Ghent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral Fig. 26. Four vera icons on parchment, added to psaltery for Cistercian nuns, before 1462, Copenhagen, Det Kongelige Bibliothek, Ms. Thott 117, 8°, fol 4 Fig. 27. Copy after a work by Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441), Vera effigies, 1438, Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie Fig. 28. Unknown master from the south of the Netherlands, Lentulus diptych, 1490-1499, Utrecht, Museum Catharijneconvent Fig. 29. Robert Campin (1378/9-1444), Veronica, ca. 1410, Frankfurt, Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie Fig. 30. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441) and Hubert van Eyck (1370-1426), God/ Son of Man of the Deisis, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1430-1432, Ghent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral Fig. 31. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441) and Hubert van Eyck (1370-1426), Singing angels of the right panel, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1430-1432, Ghent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral Fig. 16.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 32.

149

Miniature from the book of Revelation, Grandval bible, ca. 840, London, British Library, Add. Ms. 10546, fol. 449 Fig. 33. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441) and Hubert van Eyck (1370-1426), De visione Dei, phrase in the book Mary is holding in the scene of the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1430-1432, Ghent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral Fig. 34. a-b. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441) and Hubert van Eyck (1370-1426), Boustrophedon in the Annunciation from the angel (a) to Mary (b), the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1430-1432, Ghent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral Fig. 35. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441) and Hubert van Eyck (1370-1426), Detail of the bleeding lamb, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1430-1432, Ghent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral Fig. 36. Jan Gossaert van Mabuse (1478-1532), Danaë, 1527, Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek Fig. 37. Franciscus de Retza (1343-1427), Danaë in a tower, illustration from Defensorium Inviolatae Virginitatis Mariae, ca. 1490, Basel, Spencer Collection, fol. 12 Fig. 38. Attributed to Francesco Colonna (1433-1527), Triumph of Danaë, illustration from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499, Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Fig. 39. Adriano di Giovanni de’ Maestri, also known as Adriano Fiorentino (1440-1499), Medallion for Elisabetta Gonzaga (1471-1526), 1495, London, British Museum Fig. 40. Filippo Lippi (1406-1469), The Annunciation, ca. 1448-1450, London, National Gallery of Art Fig. 41. Gentile da Fabriano (ca. 1370-ca. 1427), The Annunciation, ca. 1421-1425, Vatican City, Vatican Museums Fig. 42. Francesco del Cossa (1436-1478), The Annunciation, 1470-1472, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister Fig. 43. Mona Hatoum (°1952), Grater Divide, 2002, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts Fig. 44. Francesco del Cossa (1436-1478), The Annunciation, detail of the snail, 1470-1472, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister Fig. 45.  Galileo Galilei’s (1564-1642) telescope for the Venetian Doge Leonardo Donato (1536-1612), 1609-1610, Florence, Museo Galileo, Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza Fig. 46. Ludovico Cigoli (1559-1613), Madonna of the Immaculata Assunta on a crescent moon painted according to observations from Galileo Galilei’s (1564-1642) affresco, 1612, Rome, Santa Maria Maggiore, Pauline chapel

150 Fig. 47.

Fig. 48. Fig. 49. Fig. 50.

Fig. 51. Fig. 52.

Fig. 53.

Fig. 54.

Fig. 55.

Fig. 56.

Fig. 57. Fig. 58. Fig. 59. Fig. 60. Fig. 61.

THE GAZE FROM ABOVE

Title page of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) Siderius nuncius, 1610, Venice, Tommaso Baglioni, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, Adams.5.61.1 f. 1r Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Watercolors of the phases of the moon, Einblatt, 1610, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Gal. 48, fol. 28 Middle finger of the right hand of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), 1737, Florence, Museo Galileo, Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza Tafel A from the Bilderatlas, From: Martin Warnke & Claudia Brink, Aby Warburg. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, (Gesammelte Schriften. Aby Warburg, 2, II, 1), Berlin, 2008. Colored copper engraving with symbolic star signs, 1684, Hamburg, Planetarium Tafel B from the Bilderatlas, From: Martin Warnke & Claudia Brink, Aby Warburg. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, (Gesammelte Schriften. Aby Warburg, 2, II, 1), Berlin, 2008. The identification of the orbits of the planets with regular solid bodies. From: Johannes Kepler, Mysterium cosmographicum, Tübingen, 1621, Cambridge, Queen’s Library, D.1.9. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) in Scharbeutz, 1928, From: Horst Bredekamp & Claudia Wedepohl, Warburg, Cassirer und Einstein im Gesprach. Kepler als Schlüssel der Moderne, Berlin, 2015, p. 61. Albert Einstein’s (1879-1955) sketch to explain the calculation of the orbit of Mars to Aby Warburg, 4 September 1928, From: Horst Bredekamp & Claudia Wedepohl, Warburg, Cassirer und Einstein im Gesprach. Kepler als Schlüssel der Moderne, Berlin, 2015, p. 94. Tafel 1 of the Bilderatlas, From: Martin Warnke & Claudia Brink, Aby Warburg. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, (Gesammelte Schriften. Aby Warburg, 2, II, 1), Berlin, 2008, p. 15. Hummingbird Geoglyph at the Nasca lines, ca. 500 BC-500 AD, Nazca desert, Peru Double sun dial, still from Melancholia, 2011, Lars von Trier Claire sees through Leo’s eye that Melancholia is approaching, still from Melancholia, 2011, Lars von Trier Leo’s magic cave, still from Melancholia, 2011, Lars von Trier The destruction and final image, still from Melancholia, 2011, Lars von Trier

COPYRIGHTS – Basel, Spencer Collection (Fig. 37) – Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie (Fig. 27) – Boston, Museum of Fine Arts (Fig. 43) – Brno, Moravian Gallery (Fig. 23) – Bucharest, National History Museum of Romania (Fig. 2) – Cambridge, Cambridge University Library (Fig. 47) – Copenhagen, Det Kongelige Bibliothek (Fig. 26) – Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Figs. 42, 44) – Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana/Donato Pineider (Figs. 13, 14) – Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (Fig. 48) – Florence, Museo Galileo, Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza (Figs. 45, 49) – Frankfurt, Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie (Fig. 29) – Genoa, San Bartolomeo degli Armeni (Fig. 19) – Ghent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral — KIK/IRPA (Figs. 15a-b, 25, 30, 31, 33, 34a-b, 35) – Hamburg, Planetarium (Fig. 51) – Hereford, Cathedral (Figs. 5a-b) – Istanbul, Chora Church (Fig. 12) – London, British Library (Fig. 32) – London, British Museum (Fig. 39) – London, National Gallery of Art (Figs. 21a-b, 24, 40) – Montalcino, Archivio comunale (Fig. 7) – Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek (Fig. 36) – Munich, Bayerisches Staatsbibliothek (Fig. 20) – Paris, Musée du Louvre (Fig. 22) – Rome, Santa Maria Maggiore, Pauline chapel (Fig. 46) – Rome, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Fig. 17) – Rome, Vatican City, Palazzi Pontifici, Lipsanotheca (Fig. 18) – Rome, Vatican City, Vatican Museums (Fig. 41) – Sinai, Saint Catherine’s Monastery (Fig. 16) – Tucson, Arizona, The University of Arizona Museum of Art (Fig. 1) – Utrecht, Museum Catharijneconvent (Fig. 28) – Venice, Saint Mark’s Basilica (Figs. 6, 9) – Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (Figs. 8, 38)

BIBLIOGRAPHY ABEL, Jenötöl (ed.), Orphica, Leipzig, 1885. ABRAM, David, The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a More-ThanHuman World, New York, 2007. AINSWORTH, Maryan W., art. Jan Gossart. 35. Danae, in Maryan W. Ainsworth (ed.), Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures. Jan Gossart’s Renaissance. The Complete Works, (exh. cat.), London-New York, 2010, p. 232-235. ALBERTI, Leon Battista, Family in Renaissance Florence, ed. & transl. Renée N. Watkins, Columbia, 1969. ALBERTI, Leon Battista, On the Art of Building in ten Books, transl. Neil Leach, Joseph Rykwert & Robert Tavernor, Cambridge, 1988. ANTONI, Janine & Mona HATOUM, Mona Hatoum, in BOMB — Artists in Conversation, 63, 1998, p. 54-61. APOLLODORUS, The Library II. ii. 1-2, (Loeb Classical Library), London, 1954. ARASSE, Daniel, Le détail. Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture, Paris, 1996. ARASSE, Daniel, On n’y voit rien. Descriptions, (Collection Folio Essais, 417), ed. Éric Vigne, Paris, 2000, p. 27-45. AUGUSTINE, De Civitate Dei, eds. Bernhard Dombart & Alfons Kalb, (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 47), Turnhout, 1955. BAERT, Barbara, About Sieves and Sieving. Motif, Symbol, Technique, Paradigm, Berlin, 2019. BAERT, Barbara, About Stain(s), in Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, 7, 2, 2016, p. 29-45. BAERT, Barbara, About Stains or the Image as Residue, (Studies in Iconology, 10), LeuvenWalpole, 2017. BAERT, Barbara, Aby Warburgs (1866-1929) „Nymphe”. Ein Forschungsbericht zu Motiv, Phantom und Paradigma, in Imago. Interdisziplinäres Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse und Ästhetik, 4, 2017, p. 39-62. BAERT, Barbara, Adam, Seth and Jerusalem. The Legend of the Wood of the Cross in Medieval Literature and Iconography, in Adam, le premier homme, (Micrologus Library, 45), Firenze, 2012, p. 69-99. BAERT, Barbara, Afterlife Studies and the Occasio Grisaille in Mantua (School of Mantegna, 1495-1510), in Ikon, 13, 2020, p. 95-108. BAERT, Barbara, The Annunciation and the Senses. Late Medieval Devotion and the Pictorial Gaze, in The Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Northern Europe, Images, Objects and Practices, eds. Henning Laugerud, Salvador Ryan & Laura Skinnebach, Dublin, 2015, p. 121-145.

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BAERT, Barbara, The Annunciation and the Senses: Ruach, Pneuma, Odour, in Between Jerusalem and Europe: Essays in Honour of Bianca Kühnel, (Visualizing the Middle Ages, 11), Leiden, 2015, p. 197-216. BAERT, Barbara, The Critical Moment. Revisiting the Annunciation in the Quattrocento. Wind, Kairos, Snail, in Marian Images in Context. Doctrines, Devotions, and Cults (Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History), eds. James Clifton, Barbara Haeger & Elliott Wise, Leiden, 2021 (at press). BAERT, Barbara, Démon de midi/Zenith, in Fragments, (Studies in Iconology, 14), ed. Stephanie Heremans, Leuven-Walpole-Paris-Bristol, 2018, p. 73-77. BAERT, Barbara, From Kairos to Occasio along Fortuna. Text / Image / Afterlife, Turnhout, 2021. BAERT, Barbara, The Gendered Visage. Facets of the Vera Icon, in Annual of the Antwerp Royal Museum, 2000, p. 10-43. BAERT, Barbara, Hierotopy, Jerusalem and the Legend of the Wood of the Cross, in Archaevs. Study in the History of Religions, 11-12, 2007-2008, p. 95-116. BAERT, Barbara, Iconogenesis, or Navel, in Folded Stones, (Cahiers van het Ivok, 16), eds. Barbara Baert & Trees De Mits, Leuven, 2009, p. 5-15. BAERT, Barbara, Interruptions & Transitions. Essays on the Senses in Medieval and early Modern Visual Culture, (Art and Material Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, 14), Leiden, 2018. BAERT, Barbara, Kairos or Occasion as Paradigm in the Visual Medium. Nachleben, Iconography, Hermeneutics, (Studies in Iconology, 5), Leuven-Walpole-Paris-Bristol, 2016. BAERT, Barbara, Life is Short, Art is Long, Crisis is Fleeting. Kairos or Weaving the Right Moment, in Textile. Cloth and Culture, 2021, p. 26-48. BAERT, Barbara, Nymph. Motif, Phantom, Affect. A Contribution to the Study of Aby Warburg (1866-1929), (Studies in Iconology, 1), Leuven-Walpole-Paris-Bristol, 2014. BAERT, Barbara, Nymphe (Wind). Der Raum zwischen Motiv und Affekt in der frühen Neuzeit (Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Aby Warburg-Forschung), in Ars, 46, 1, 2013, p. 16-42. BAERT, Barbara, An Odour, a Taste, a Touch. Impossible to Describe. Noli me tangere and the Senses, in Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, (Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture, 26), eds. Wietse de Boer & Christine Goettler, Leiden, 2013, p. 111-151. BAERT, Barbara, Pygmalion and Creative Enthusiasm, in Predella. Journal of Visual Arts, 43-44, 2018, p. 75-92. BAERT, Barbara, Signed PAN. Erwin Panofsky’s (1892-1968) “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline” (Princeton, 1938), (Studies in Iconology, 18), LeuvenWalpole-Paris-Bristol, 2020. BAERT, Barbara, Stains. Trace-Cloth-Symptom, in Textile. Journal of Cloth and Culture, 15, 3, 2017, p. 270-291.

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INDEX NOMINUM A Abgar, 43, 44, 48, 148 Acrisius, 79 Adam, 16 Adrian I (Pope), 61 Ainsworth, Maryan W., 86 Akawaio, 39 Alberti, Leon Battista, 95, 96, 114 Aldus Manutius, 83 al-Haytham of Alhazen, 18 Amenemhat III, 78 Ananias, 43 Anaximander, 4 Anaximenes, 4 Antares, 135 Apollo, 119, 123 Arasse, Daniel, 87 Aristotle, 4 Athena, 103 Augustine, 44, 57, 62 B Bacon, Roger, 18 Baglioni, Tommaso, 111, 150 Barceló, Miquel, 10 Bass, Marisa, 101 Beatus of Liébana, 17 Berenice, 48 Bernardino de Sahagún, 36 Bing, Gertrud, 129 Bourgeois, Louise, 40 Brandstetter, Gabriele, 102 Bredekamp, Horst, 115, 127, 128, 150 Brink, Claudia, 121, 125, 132, 150 Bruno, Giordano, 119, 127, 128, 129, 130 Buddha, 78 Butt, Audrey J., 39 C Campin, Robert, 56, 57, 148 Centanni, Monica, 85 Chastity, 82, 83, 95

Chauvet, Jean-Marie, 10, 11, 147 Christ, 18, 20, 25, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 52, 54, 55, 57, 60, 62, 78 Christus, Petrus, 47, 148 Chronos, 101 Cigoli, Ludovico, 107, 108, 110, 114, 149 Claire (Melancholia, Lars von Trier), 135, 136, 137, 139, 150 Colonna, Francesco, 84, 149 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 127 Correggio, 80 Cossa, Francesco del, 90, 91, 99, 100, 149 Creator (God, Pantocrater), 67, 78, passim Cusanus, Nicholas (Nicolas), 63, 64, 128 D Danaë, Danaei, 9, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 90, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 143, 149, 150 Dante Alighieri, 63 Davidson, Thomas, 135 De Mey, Marc, 62, 63 Deisis, 57, 58, 148 Deleuze, Gilles, 96, 102 Demeter, 14 Detective Doyle (Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock), 79 Dictys, 79 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 29 Dionysus, 119, 123 Donato, Leonardo, 105, 106, 149 Dora (Ida Bauer), 101 Dube, Wolf-Dieter, 80 E Einstein, Albert, 124, 126, 127, 128, 150 Eliade, Mircea, 9 Eurus, 102 F Fiorentino, Adriano, 85, 149 Fischer, Ernst, 94, 96, 97

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Fortuna, Fortune, 85 Friedländer, Max, 80 G Galilei, Galileo, 5, 10, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 115, 116, 143, 149, 150 Gentile da Fabriano, 88, 89, 149 Gerald of Wales, 47 God, passim Golan, Ariel, 31 Gombrich, Ernst, 29, 31 Gonzaga, Elisabetta, 85, 149 Gossaert, Jan, van Mabuse (also Gossart), 80, 81, 82, 86, 90, 93, 94, 98, 99, 100, 149 Guattari, Félix, 96 Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, 83 H Harth, Astrid, 64 Hatoum, Mona, 97, 98, 149 Herebert, William, 18 Hesdin, Jacquemart de, 49, 148 Hildegard of Bingen, 14, 15, 16, 124, 143, 147 Hitchcock, Alfred, 79 Hogarth, William, 31 Holy Spirit, 82, 88 Homer, 4, 5, 13, 14, 16, 102 Hopi (Native Americans), 35, 119, 123 Horus, 78 I Ingold, Timothy, 1 Innocent III (Pope), 46 Isaiah, 12 J Jacobus da Voragine, 48 Jalal ad-Din Rumi, 41, 69 John Climacus, 44, 148 John (Melancholia, Lars von Trier), 135, 136, 148 Judah, 60 Jupiter, 82, 105, 110 Justine (Melancholia, Lars von Trier), 135, 136, 139

K Kepler, Johannes, 105, 109, 110, 124, 126, 127, 128, 131, 150 Kessler, Herbert Leon, 21, 24, 60 Klee, Paul, 13 Kupfer, Marcia, 17, 19, 20 L Lakota (Native Americans), 39 Lan, Martayan, 115 Lentulus, Publius, 54, 55, 148 Leo (Melancholia, Lars von Trier), 136, 137, 138, 139, 150 Leonardo da Vinci, 110, 124 Lippi, Filippo, 87, 88, 149 Lord (God), 60, 130 Luke (Evangelist), 66, 90 M Magna Mater, 98 Mann, Nicolas, 130 Márai, Sándor, 7, 99 Marduk, 3 Marin, Louis, 65 Mark (Evangelist), 48, 60 Mars, 105, 124, 126, 128, 144, 150 Marshack, Alexander, 34, 35 Mary (Virgin), 20, 63, 64, 65, 66, 82, 88, 92, 99, 149 Master Bartolomé, 2, 147 Matthew (Evangelist), 60 Matthew of Paris, 46 Medici-Tornabuoni family, 122 Medusa, 100, 102 Melancholia, (Melancholia, Lars von Trier), 5, 106, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 143, 150 Melzi, Francesco, 110 Mercurio, 129 Millen, Roland, 80 Mithras, 144 Mnemosyne, 5, 119, 120, 121, 123, 125, 131, 132, 133, 134, 150 Moses, 57, 60, 61, 124 Mother-Earth, 101 Mundkur, Balaji, 34 Muse, Muses, 5, 123, 131, 134

INDEX NOMINUM

N Nahuatl, 37 Narcissus, 114 Navajo (Native Americans), 40, 78 Newton, Isaac, 110 Nicodemus, 48 Nimrod, 21, 22, 27, 143 O Olschki, Leonardo, 129 Onians, Richard Broxton, 13, 14 Origen, 88, 96 Orpheus, 101 Ovid, Publius, 5 P Panofsky, Erwin, 5, 10, 81, 107, 109 Papapetros, Spyros, 93 Paul (Apostle), 57, 60, 61, 64 Perseus, 79, 83, 100 Pharaoh, 12 Philip of Burgundy, 80, 86 Pilate, Pontius, 54 Plato, 4, 139 Pudicitia, 82 Pygmalion,5 R Rapold, Nicolas, 136 Re, 78 Retza, Franciscus de, 82, 83, 149 Richard of Haldingham and Lafford (Richard de Bello), 17 Ronnberg, Ami, 30, 147 S Sanz de Sautolo, Marcelino, 7 Sanz de Sautolo, María, 7, 25 Saturn, 105 Saulino, 129 Saxl, Fritz, 124 Segard, Achille, 80 Semper, Gottfried, 17 Seriphos, 79 Seth, 144 Shikibu, Murasaki, 27

169

Silver, Larry, 82 Sluijter, Eric Jan, 86 Son of God, 21, 57 Sophia, 129 Souzenelle, Annick de, 12 Szendy, Peter, 137 T Tansillo and Cicada (Giordano Bruno), 130 Thacker, Eugen, 119 Thales of Miletus, 4 Tiamat, 3 Tintoretto, 80 Titian, 80 Tlalocatecutli, 37, 38 Tobit, 13 Tokarczuk, Olga, 3, 143, 145 Tran, Christian, 10 Tsiambaos, Kostas, 101 V Valeriano, Pierio, 84 Van Dam, Frederica, 64 van Eyck, van Eycks, 5, 41, 42, 43, 48, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 78, 147, 148, 149 Vandenbroeck, Paul, 32, 93, 94 Veronesi, Sandro, 103, 105, 144 Veronica, 47, 48, 49, 50, 56, 57, 148 von Trier, Lars, 5, 106, 126, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 150 Vyd, Judocus, 48, 51, 148 W Wagner, Richard, 140 Warburg, Aby, 5, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 150 Warburg, Max, 124 Warnke, Martin, 121, 125, 132, 150 Wedepohl, Claudia, 127, 128, 150 Wilding, Nick, 115 Wolf, Robert, 80 Z Zeus, 79, 82, 98, 99, 100, 102

COLOPHON This book was written during a pandemic when keeping distance became necessary. For Aby Warburg, Distanzierung meant the best relationship between humans and images. Without the necessary distance, there would be no art history, but also no compassion between humans and their environment. Du lebst und thust mir nichts was one of his famous mottoes. It spoke of the mildness between things. And the comfort that what surrounds us — the universe — beholds us from the right distance. The chapter The iconic gaze of the new lamb is based on my lecture at Brussels, BOZAR for the symposium Icons in the West from the 15th Century to Nowadays (11 December 2020). The episode on the boustrophedon and the Native Americans was written for my book Looking Into the Rain. Magic-MoistureMedium (De Gruyter-Berlin, 2021). The chapter on Danaë will be expanded to a monograph for Studies in Iconology (Peeters Publishers - Leuven & Walpole). The chapters The glance from Hereford and the Venetian dance, Galileo touches the moon and Close your eyes, Leo! are framed in the exhibition and catalogue Big Bang. Imagining the Universe in Museum M Leuven (October 2021). I would like to thank Lien De Keukelaere, Stephanie Heremans, Thomas Hertog, Koen Kwanten, Lizzy van Rijswijck (translations), Julia van Rosmalen (copy-editing and Bilderatlas), Paul Vandenbroeck, Jan Van der Stock, Marc Vervenne and Annelies Vogels.

The manuscript of this book was finalised only some days before the unexpected and untimely passing of Paul Peeters, Managing Director of Peeters Publishers. I want to offer every word in The Gaze from Above as a deep and respectful in memoriam.