Fragments (Studies in Iconology) 9789042937246, 9789042937338, 9042937246

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S T U D I E S I N I C O N O L O G Y 

Fragments Barbara Baert

P EE T ER S

FRAGMENTS

FRAGMENTS

Barbara Baert Edited by Stephanie

Heremans

PEETERS LEUVEN–PARIS–BRISTOL, CT 2018

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

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization.

ISBN 978-90-429-3724-6 eISBN 978-90-429-3733-8 D/2018/0602/101 © 2018 – Peeters, Bondgenotenlaan 153, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium)

This celebration book is being published within the series of Studies in Iconology upon the occasion of the symposium The R ight Moment. A Symposium on Kairotic Energies. The symposium was organized with and for Barbara Baert at the Francqui Foundation on 18 and 19 October 2018 in Brussels, Belgium.

Yes, everything becomes attenuated, but it’s also true to say that nothing entirely disappears, there remain faint echoes and elusive memories that can surface at any moment like the fragments of gravestones in the room in a museum that no one visits (...). We never eliminate all vestiges, though, we never manage, truly, once and for all, to silence that past matter, and sometimes we hear an almost imperceptible breathing. Javier Marías, The Infatuations, transl. Margaret Jull Costa, 2014, p. 310-311.

Contents Acheiropoieton (1) ◆ Amulet (3) ◆ Annunciation (9) ◆ Archetype (17) ◆ Astrology (19) ◆ Athempause (21) ◆ Back (23) ◆ Beheading (27) ◆ Besonnenheit (29) ◆ Bilderatlas (31) ◆ Blood (33) ◆ Blush (35) ◆ Body (39) ◆ Bowl/jar/pitcher (41) ◆ Breath (43) ◆ Butterfly (45) ◆ Camouflage (51) ◆ Capricious (57) ◆ Chaos (59) ◆ Chrysalis (61) ◆ Chthonic art (63) ◆ Corner (65) ◆ Dance (67) ◆ Death (71) ◆ Démon de midi/zenith (73) ◆ Désir mimétique (79) ◆ Detail (81) ◆ Ear/hearing (83) ◆ Echo (89) ◆ Emotion (93) ◆ Empathy (95) ◆ Engramm (97) ◆ Enthusiasm (99) ◆ Erinnerungsspuren (101) ◆ Fireflies (103) ◆ Folds (105) ◆ Fragment (113) ◆ Fragrance/scent (117) ◆ Gallop! (125) ◆ Garden (127) ◆ Gaze (133) ◆ Gender (139) ◆ Genius loci (141) ◆ Glimpses (145) ◆ Grid (147) ◆ Grisaille (149) ◆ Grotto (153) ◆ Hair (157) ◆ Hands (167) ◆ Head/face (169) ◆ Hem (173) ◆ Honeycomb/bees (177) ◆ Iconogenesis/Incarnation (179) ◆ Interruptions & Transitions (181) ◆ Interval (185) ◆ Kairos (189) ◆ Khōra (193) ◆ Knot (197) ◆ La scienza senza nome (199) ◆ Lace (201) ◆ Laocoön (203) ◆ Lozenge (205) ◆ Magnet (211) ◆ Making/materiality (213) ◆ Mandylion (217) ◆ Marble (219) ◆ Matrix/matrixial (223) ◆ Melancholy/acedia (225) ◆ Mithras (229) ◆ Mnemosyne (233) ◆ Monstrum (235) ◆ Narcissus (241) ◆ Navel (243) ◆ Nepesh (245) ◆ Nest (247) ◆ Net (249) ◆ Neurosis (253) ◆ Ninfa Fiorentina/Nymph (259) ◆ Odor/smell (267) ◆ Owl (269) ◆ Pathosformel (271) ◆ Pause (273) ◆ Psychomachia (275) ◆ Ruach (RWH) (277) ◆ Saturn-Vater (285) ◆ Sea (287) ◆ Shadow (289) ◆ Sieve (291) ◆ Silence (293) ◆ Skin-Ego/Moi-Peau (295) ◆ Skull (299) ◆ Sleep (301) ◆ Snail (305) ◆ Solstice (307) ◆ Sophrosyne (309) ◆ Stain (311) ◆ Stumbling block (313) ◆ Symmetry (315) ◆ Tearing (317) ◆ Teichoscopia (319) ◆ Throat (321) ◆ Tongue (325) ◆ Trellis (329) ◆ Uncanny space (331) ◆ Vera icon/Veronica (333) ◆ Void (339) ◆ Web (341) ◆ Wind (343) ◆ Woman with an issue of blood/Haemorrhoïssa (349) ◆ Zwischenraum (353) Illustrations ...................... Bibliography...................... Index of Names .................... Index of Subjects .................... Colophon.......................

357 363 387 397 401

Fig. 1. The Black stone of Paphos in Cyprus venerated as Aphrodite, example of so-called Argoi lithoi or baitulia: meteorites considered as divine acheiropoieta

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Acheiropoieton The phenomena of the acheiropoieta or non manufactum (‘made without → hands’), the iconography contained-in-nature or a natura depicti and marbre faux or ‘stained picturality’ are deeply rooted in the Christian theory of images. Within (but also beyond) Western art history there are different variations on the phenomenon and we can encounter multifarious applications of this aesthetic-philosophical concept. It is a concept that airs the idea that the visual arts and the artist’s → hand are a continuation (and perhaps only the humble completion) of an artistically animated and thus pneumatically shaped nature. Or again: the conviction that a divine → hand – present, preserved and consolidated in nature – is at work. This relates to the theme of → wind, as the commentaries and the primary sources show that this mental world is considered the materialization of a supernatural drive: as the imprint of the → wind, as the fossilization of → ruach, as the pneuma captive in nature, as the interior and enclosed rule of the Spiritus Divinus. This notion of materialization attaches to stones in particular, and especially to → marble. There is a connection between the most ancient acheiropoieta and litholatry (stone-worship): diipetes, i.e. meteor fragments with a coincidental human form, were believed to have been hurled to the earth by the Gods. Near Paphos in Cyprus, for example, an aniconical black stone was venerated as Aphrodite (fig.  1). When Pausanias (second century ad) visited Pharae in Achaea, he recorded the veneration of thirty squared stones, which he referred to as Argoi lithoi or baitulia (‘animated stones’, i.e. meteorites). The sacred aspect was rooted in the material itself. Arnobius (late third century-327) described the stone that was said to represent Cybele as rather small and faintly resembling a → face. The meteorite was inherent in Cybele and had been animated by the Magna Mater, but it had no → face or limbs.1 In her Descrizione e percezione delle immagini acheropite sui marmi bizantini Maria Luigia Fobelli compiled a number of literary sources that describe the splendor of the → marble slabs with which buildings in Byzantium were veneered.2 In 563, Paul the Silentiary (d. before 581) paints a word-picture of the Hagia Sophia: “Upon the carved stone wall curious designs glitter everywhere. These have been produced by the quarries of sea-girt Proconnesus. The joining of the cut → marbles resembles the art of painting for you may see the veins of

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acheiropoieton

the square and octagonal stones meeting so as to form devices: connected in this way, the stones imitate the glories of painting.”3 The recognition of images – of animals, landscapes, even people and → faces – in a building’s material surfaces becomes a Leitmotif in the travel diaries of visitors to Constantinople, Ravenna and Venice.4 Fobelli explains the popularity of this ‘visual rhetoric’ by referring to the Byzantine definition of the image.5 To contemporary Byzantines the difference between a representational image and the suggestion of an image was much more multifaceted. → Marble is a plastic miracle; it contains ‘living images’ and thus takes the viewer to a higher level of seeing.6

Oliver C. Farrington, The Worship and Folklore of Meteorites, in Journal of American Folklore, 13, 1900, p. 199-208; David Freedberg, The Power of Images. Studies in the History and Theory of Response, Chicago IL, 1989, p. 66, notes 36-37: Pausanias, 7, 22-24; Alphons A. Barb, Diva matrix. A Faked Gnostic Intaglio in the Possession of P.P. Rubens and the Iconology of the Symbol, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 16, 1953, p. 193-238. 2 Maria L. Fobelli, Descrizione e percezione delle immagini acheropite sui marmi bizantini, in Immagine e Ideologia. Studi in onore di Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, eds. Arturo Calzona, Roberto Campari & Massimo Mussini, Milan, 2007, p. 27-32. 3 John Onians, Abstraction and Imagination in Late Antiquity, in Art History, 3, 1980, p. 1-23, p. 8; Paul Vandenbroeck, Matrix Marmorea. De subsymbolische iconografie van de scheppende energieën in Europa en Noord-Afrika, in Materie & Beeld,

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eds. Lut Pil & Trees De Mits, Ghent, 2010, p. 51-78, p. 60. 4 John Mitchell, Believing Is Seeing. The Natural Image in Late Antiquity, in Architecture and Interpretation. Essays for Eric Fernie, eds. Jill A. Franklin, T.A. Heslop & Christine Stevenson, Suffolk, 2012, p. 16-41; Joshua O’Driscoll, Visual Vortex. An Epigraphic Image from an Ottonian Gospel Book, in Word & Image, 27, 3, 2012, p. 309-321; Bissera V. Pentcheva, Hagia Sophia and Multisensory Aesthetics, in Gesta, 50, 2, 2011, p. 93-111; Fabio Barry, Walking on Water. Cosmic Floors in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, in The Art Bulletin, 89, 4, 2007, p. 627-656. 5 Fobelli, Descrizione e percezione delle immagini acheropite sui marmi bizantini, p. 31. 6 Ibid., p. 30; James Trilling, Medieval Art without Style? Plato’s Loophole and a Modern Detour, in Gesta, 34, 1, 1995, p. 57-62, p. 60.

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Amulet A peculiar amulet from a private collection in Asia Minor represents the → Haemorrhoïssa with the caption ‘emoroyc’ on one side and a → head with seven protruding snakes on the other (fig.  2).1 The → head with snakes for → hair is the Gorgon, and it connects the → Haemorrhoïssa with the ‘hysteria’ motif in amulets.2 Medusa was, after all, seen to be one of the appearances of the womb.3 According to Jeffrey Spier, amulets featuring the Gorgon should not be interpreted as a threat to the womb, but rather as its portrait. In this capacity, they were considered to dispel and to exorcise, much as a demon could be dispelled by its own name. Uterine amulets often bear the short inscription Hystèrikôn phylaktèrion.4 Many others have inscriptions derived from a longer Byzantine incantation: “Womb, black, blackening, as a snake you coil, and as a serpent you hiss, and as a lion you roar and as a lamb, lie down.”5 The magic formula was supposed to calm down the uterus and help it shrink.6 A sixth-century Coptic papyrus contains a charm to control hysteria: “Make the womb of so-and-so, who bore so-and-so, relax into the natural position, and be uninflamed.”7 Yet another possible formula was: “Set the womb of so-and-so in its proper place, you who lifts up the disk of the sun.”8 The charms and incantations were used for a variety of uterine problems: childbirth, contraception, afterbirth, labor pains, severe menstrual bleeding, etc.9 Such amulets should be seen in the context of the belief that the womb is animate, a demon, an animal that constantly needs to be tamed.10 A bronze amulet in the British Museum (fifth-sixth century) asks:11 “Why do you munch like a wolf; why do you devour like a crocodile, why do you bite like a lion, why do you gore like a bull, why do you coil like a serpent, why do you lie down like a tame creature?” Occasionally, the hysteria formula is followed by the phrase “Eat and drink → blood!”12 Stopping the bleeding was often essential, for example to save an unborn child. The purpose of the formula was to make the ‘demon hysteria’ ‘devour’ the → blood.13 A uterus can swell dangerously and either retain or discharge large quantities of → blood. It was seen as a creature with tentacles that can reach out to other parts of the → body, including the → throat.14 In view of this combination of swelling and tentacles, the womb came to be symbolized by, among other creatures, octopuses and sea urchins.

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Fig. 2. Bronze amulet from a private collection in Asia Minor, representing the Haemorrhoïssa (emoroyc) on one side and the Hysteria motif (i.e. a head with seven protruding snakes) on the other. From: Jeffrey Spier, Medieval Byzantine Magical Amulets and Their Tradition, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 56, 1993, p. 25-62, p. 44, pl. 3d, no. 38

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They are ‘gorgonian’ representations of the uterus, which also appear on paraand proto-Christian amulets and in feminine incantation culture, including in Berber textiles.15 In his St. Zacharias the Prophet and Martyr. A Study in Charms and Incantations, Barb analyses a group of formulas that may also be associated with the → Haemorrhoïssa.16 They are all connected with the prophet Zecheriah and were believed to help against sudden bleeding, e.g. from the nose. Nose bleeding was seen as a demonic sign that called for exorcism-like incantations. Besides the vagina, the nose is arguably the only → body orifice from where → blood can flow ‘spontaneously’.17 The Jewish priest Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, had come to be associated with bleeding since the shedding of his → blood in the temple by King Herod’s soldiers. His → blood was believed to have turned into stone. The Itinerarium Burdigalense reads: “In the building, where Solomon’s temple was, on the → marble (stones) before the altar, the blood of Zacharias (was to be seen) as if just spilled there to-day.”18 The Talmud recounts how the blood of Zechariah found no rest for many years. The red water that bubbled up warm in the ducts and springs of Jerusalem, such as the tides of the Piscina Probatica, was traditionally regarded to have been the → blood of Zechariah.19 In Tertullian (160-230), we read: “Zacharias [was] killed between temple and altar, marking the stones with the perennial → stains of his → blood; the very consummation of the Law and the Prophets, who was called not a prophet but an angel, [was] → beheaded in foul murder as salary for a girl dancer” (the author confuses Zecheriah with his son, John the Baptist).20 The notion of ‘solidified → blood’ is again conducive to the association of haematite with Zecheriah. Many incantations used to refer to haematite as ‘bloodstone’ or ‘petrified → blood’.21 Etymologically, too, haematite – haimatithenai – means ‘→ blood that stops’.22 The history of haematite as a kind of ‘mineral → blood’ runs deep. In Orphica, a fourth-century poem about the magical qualities of stones that originated in ancient Asia, haematite is referred to as the petrified → blood of Kronos. The verses on haematite begin with the words: “A leech come down from heaven.”23

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1

2 3

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5 6 7 8 9

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Jeffrey Spier, Medieval Byzantine Magical Amulets and Their Tradition, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 56, 1993, p. 25-62, p. 28, p. 30, p. 44, p. 56; p. 44: “the bronze token with the haemorhoissa suggests that it had to help women in some way.” Ilza Veith, Hysteria. The History of a Disease, Chicago IL, 1965. Marcia Pointon, Interior Portraits. Women, Physiology and the Male Artist, in Feminist Review, 22, 1986, p. 5-22. Spier, Medieval Byzantine Magical Amulets and Their Tradition, see figs. 40-4d: silver ring, and also on a lead amulet, both from Corinth. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 43. Often, the portrait represents an octopus-like creature. Ibid. Ibid. The literature on the womb and menstruation in the pre-medical world is extensive: Helen Lemay, Women and the Literature of Obstetrics and Gynecology, in Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History, ed. Joel T. Rosenthal, Athens GA, 1990, p. 189-209; Susan E. Cayleff, She Was Rendered Incapacitated by Menstrual Difficulties. Historical Perspectives on Perceived Intellectual and Physiological Impairment among Menstruating Women, in Menstrual Health in Women’s Lives, eds. Alice J. Dan & Linda L. Lewis, Urbana IL, 1992, p. 229-235; Lesley D. Jones, Menstrual Bleeding according to the Hippocratics and Aristotle, in Transactions of the American Philological Association, 119, 1989, p. 177-192; Monica Green, Female Sexuality in the Medieval West, in Trends in History, 4, 4, 1990, p. 127-158; Ann E. Hanson, Hippocrates. Diseases of Women I, in Signs, 1, 2, 1975, p. 567-584; Maryanne C. Horowitz, Aristotle and Woman, in Journal of the History of Biology, 9, 2, 1976, p. 183-213, reveals Aristotle’s biological and political sexism. For another view-

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11 12 13

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point, see: Johannes Morsink, Was Aristotle’s Biology Sexist?, in Journal of the History of Biology, 12, 1, 1979, p. 83-112; Danielle Jacquart & Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, transl. Matthew Adamson, Princeton NJ, 1988; Janice Delaney, Mary J. Lupton & Emily Toth, The Curse. A Cultural History of Menstruation, Urbana IL, 1988; Ruth Formanek (ed.), The Meanings of Menopause. Historical, Medical and Clinical Perspectives, Hillsdale NJ, 1990. According to Alphons A. Barb, Three Elusive Amulets, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 27, 1964, p. 1-22, pl. 6a, this notion originated in Mesopotamian → archetypes. Amulets could also protect men who had been ‘infected’ by a womb, as in the case of the amulet (pl. 6a) for the Russian Basileos. See also: Jean-Jacques Aubert, Threatened Wombs, Aspects of Ancient Uterine Magic, in Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 30, 3, 1989, p. 421-449; Charles W. Bodemer, Historical Interpretations of the Human Uterus and Cervix Uteri, in The Biology of the Cervix, eds. Richard J. Blandau & Kamran Moghissi, Chicago IL – London, 1983, p. 1-11; Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature. The Roaring Inside Her, New York, 1978. Spier, Medieval Byzantine Magical Amulets and Their Tradition, p. 45. Ibid., p. 46. Other examples in Robert K. Ritner, A Uterine Amulet in the Oriental Institute Collection, in Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 43, 3, 1984, p. 209-221, passim. Blake Leyerle, Blood Is Seed, in The Journal of Religion, 81, 1, 2001, p. 26-48; Paul Vandenbroeck, Azetta. Berbervrouwen en hun kunst, (exh. cat), Ghent – Amsterdam, 2000, p. 141. The → throat is a ‘tube’, a gorgo, a transit which in the early-mediaeval medical and magical perception was seen as a mirror of the uterus.

amulet 15

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It is beyond the scope of the present study to describe the genealogy that ultimately connects the uterine phantasm as a symbol and an anthropomorphous shape with the Gorgon/Medusa. The visual genealogy of hysteria starts in the → stain, an amorphous pulsating darkness that is exteriorized through aspects of nature that are likewise associated with pulsating, spasmodic movements, as in the case of the octopus. The uterine imagination makes use of protrusions, extensions, flaring → hair, snakes, etc. This imagination arguably corresponds with the uterus’ capacity to swell and shrink, to expand and shrivel. Paul Vandenbroeck (Azetta, passim) argues that, once the phantasm of the frightful uterus has moved from abstraction to recognizable image (animal, human), the rupture becomes visible between matrilinear and patrilinear patterns of sensation. The former belongs to the order of the proto-figurative, the latter to that of the delineation, the form, mimesis. From a psychoanalytical perspective, this dichotomy corresponds with the duality of the phallic and the → matrixial analysis. On this implication, see: Elisabeth Bronfen, Das verknotete Subjekt. Hysterie in der Moderne, Berlin, 1998, p. 53, passim; Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, The Matrixial Gaze, Leeds, 1995; Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, Minneapolis MN, 2006; Catherine de Zegher (ed.), Inside the Visible. An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine, Cambridge, 1996. Alphons 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. Irven M. Resnick, Medieval Roots of the Myth of Jewish Male Menses, in Harvard Theological Review, 93, 2000, p. 241-263.

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Paul Geyer (ed.), Itinera Hierosolymitana: saeculi IIII-VIII, (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 39), Vienna, 1898, p. 22. 19 A physiological → detail in Eusebius, Onomasticon 58, 21; Ferdinand Larsow (ed.), Eusebius Caesariensis. Onomasticon. Urbium et locorum sacrae scripturae, Berloni, Frederici Nicolae, 1862; Nicolaas van der Vliet, Sainte Marie où elle est née et la piscine probatique, Jerusalem – Paris, 1938, p. 139, who mentions the striking reddish color of the water. This was most probably due to the soil, but the Church Fathers associated it with the → blood of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, who had been slain in the temple and whose spilt → blood had discolored the groundwater forever. 20 Barb, St. Zacharias the Prophet and Martyr, p. 49; Tertullianus, Scorpiace, 8: Patrologia Latina 2, col. 160. 21 Barb, St. Zacharias the Prophet and Martyr, p. 63, p. 67. 22 Christel Meier, Gemma Spiritualis. Methode und Gebrauch der Edelsteinallegorese vom frühen Christentum bis ins 18. Jahrhundert, Munich, 1977, p. 394: Hematites (…) dicitur ab hema, quod est sanguis, et tithein, quod est sistere, quasi sistens sanguinem, after Petrus Berchorius (ca. 1290-1362), Reductorium morale, XI, 440a. In the same passage, Berchorius attributes the bleeding to luxuria, and to carnalis voluptas, mundana prosperitas, fluxusque cujuscunque iniquitatis, and he refers in this context to Mark: Figura de haemorrhoissa, quae ad tactum vestimenti Christi a fluxu sanguinis est sanata. Vestimentum Christi est abstinentia, quae re vera sanat ab istis fluxibus animam peccatricem. The precise association between the illness and sin, at least in the late Middle Ages, requires further research. 23 Eugenius Abel (ed.), Orphica, Lipsiae, 1885, mp. 131n., verses 642ff; Barb, St. Zacharias the Prophet and Martyr, p. 67. 18

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Fig. 3. Annunciation as acheiropoieton, 13th century. Florence, Santissima Annunziata

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Annunciation An unusual thirteenth-century Annunciation has been venerated in the church of Santissima Annunziata in Florence right up until the present. According to legend, the painter fell asleep at his task, and when he awoke an angel had miraculously completed the → face of Mary (fig.  3). The legend is a variant of the so-called → acheiropoieta : ‘images not made by human → hands’.1 The belief in miraculously given or finished images, of which the → mandylion is the prototype, arose in Byzantium. The cloth bears the imprint of the visage of Christ, which in his mercy he gave to an artist for the Syrian King Abgar, who suffered from leprosy. Another variant is the Hodegon icon, a half-length portrait of Mary, the original of which was supposed to have been painted by Luke the Evangelist himself (fig.  4). The Florentine miracle is related to the latter type of → acheiropoieton. The altar in the Santissima Annunziata represents paradigms relating to the creation of images, a process known as ‘→ iconogenesis’. In Byzantine tradition, it was believed that icon painters received divine inspiration through the → ear, whispered by an angel or the Holy Spirit. Only by virtue of the grace thus granted could the icon assume its function as a gateway to the invisible God. In Byzantium, an icon was defined as a process of continual → incarnation, and painting by extension as an activity that ran parallel to the Annunciation itself, in which the words in Mary’s → ear also led to an image: the Son of God. The representation of Christ is after all legitimated by the visibility of the divine plan of Salvation, which is called oikonomia. Nicephorus (758-828) recognizes in this theological term the word eikon, the homophonic relationship strengthening his iconophile position.2 John of Damascus (675-749) knows that he who ignores the image, ignores the → Incarnation:3 If we made an image of the invisible God, we should in truth do wrong. For it is impossible to make a statue of one who is without → body, invisible, boundless, and formless. (…) But in → making the image of God, who became incarnate and visible on earth, a man amongst men through His unspeakable goodness, taking upon Him shape and form and flesh, we are not misled.

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Fig. 4. Berlinghiero Berlinghieri (1175-1235), Virgin Hodegetria, ca. 1230. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Fig. 5. Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), Annunciation, 1489. Florence, Uffizi

At the Annunciation the angel Gabriel appears all of a sudden – like a sigh, like a breeze blowing into the room (fig. 5). The angel interrupts: he disrupts a space, a time. The sudden irruption causes commotion and changes the emotional experience. In this case he alarms Mary (“Fear not”), just as the → wind can. The angel is God’s messenger and therefore the medium of His speech and of Theophany, corresponding to the meaning of → ruach. In his Opacité de la peinture, Louis Marin (1931-1992) devotes a chapter to the Annunciation.4 In essence, the Annunciation has to represent something inconceivable – the → Incarnation – and do this in the visual world of the bodied, of color and composition. In this regard Marin writes:5

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Il reste que cette fonction essentielle de l’irreprésentable et de l’indicible, dans la configuration du corps ecclésial et de son corpus de textes et de dogmes comme lieu et ressources de croyance, est dans les fables instauratrices de ce corps et de ce lieu, confiée aux mystérieuses et énigmatiques rencontres de l’Ange figure, de toutes les formes et de tous les procès de transit et de la femme figure de l’ouverture d’un espace possible, pour les impossibles traces du désir.

The visual medium is a sensual medium that will provide the mystery of the → Incarnation with its own artistic aura that mirrors just this taking on of form and matter (from nothing, from an ‘idea’) and repeatedly reinstates it. Consequently, the visual medium will most be able to interrogate itself in the theme of the Annunciation.6 Quattrocento humanism provided an exuberant and refined intellectual climate in which to do so. Mary’s question – “How shall this happen?” – is now transposed to the artist, becoming the artist’s question. → Wind is used as a sublimated mode to conceive the → Incarnation pictorially and to make reflection upon the medium possible. The conventional compositions of the Annunciation show an angel entering the pictorial space from the left. This conforms to our Western direction of reading.7 Marin calls this horizontal schema the narratif.8 The composition tells a story. We see that there is something happening: an angel enters and speaks to a woman.9 The two-part and symmetrical composition that the Annunciation demands also accentuates the two-part division between the messenger and the receiver of the message, between the emanation of a divine, immaterial reality, and a material reality. The axis, the space between Mary and the angel, holds a threshold, an → interval, a snapshot (fig. 6). This locus intervallus is pictorially and iconographically signaled by the lily, articulated by a spatial border of the dwelling (such as a loggia, the border between open → garden and enclosed chamber), or accentuated by the vanishing points of the spatial perspective itself.10 For these reasons, the pictorial space of the Annunciation is the figurabilité du mystère. The dichotomy between messenger and receiver also has a temporal dimension. The composition’s vertical axis, unlike the horizontal, is not diachronic but synchronic. The vertical axis is the compact and compressed momentum: the split second. Such threshold motifs as the lily, the loggia, the angle of perspective, and so forth, are also the carriers of this section. They generate a hermeneutic

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Fig. 6. Fra Angelico (1395-1455), Annunciation, 1437-1446. Florence, Convent of San Marco

of rupture:11 l’entre-deux, l’invisible et l’inaudible, le lieu d’entrée du spectateur dans le tableau.12 With the help of the angel, → wind and pneuma have the power to bring about such a rupture. For Marin, the angel is: un mouvement et transit, franchisseur d’espace et passeur de seuils, il ne se fait pas voir; il n’est pas vu;13 and at the same time: une figure du secret du mystère de l’incarnation.14 This makes the angel, in my view, twice over derived from the concept of the → wind. Firstly due to the sudden irruption into space, and secondly due to its function, which is of a prophetic nature. This last aspect – divinely inspired speech – is characteristic of archetypal → ruach. 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 pneuma, by upgrading the epigraphy to a sacral → tongue. This is done through a double inversion of the direction of reading: the golden letters are upside down and have to be read from right to left.

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annunciation

Fig. 7. Fra Angelico (1395-1455), Annunciation, detail with boustrophedon, ca. 1433-1434. Cortona, Museo Diocesano

The text at the same time both hides and reveals: it is what is known as a boustrophedon (fig. 7). 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. Claudia Benthien writes: So wird beispielsweise in der biblischen Verkündigungsszene Maria als Hörende gestaltet: sie sitzt, blickt und legt das Buch nieder, in dem sie gerade las. Demgegenüber hat der Erzengel als Zeichen seines Sprechen die Gestik der Hände und des Gesichts zur Verfügung, zudem steht er gewöhnlich. Manchmal, etwa auf einem Gemälde Fra Angelicos [1395-1455], gibt es zudem ein Spruchband, das aus seinem Mund kommt,

annunciation

15

worauf sich in goldenen Lettern der Wortlaut dessen befindet, was er Maria verkündet (…) Sitzen und Hören bilden die Rezeptionshaltung, wie das Stehen und Sprechen eine Produktionshaltung suggeriert. Vielleicht nehmen aus diesem Grund auch die meisten Personifikationen des ‘Stillschweigens’ eine stehende Pose ein – weil dies den ikonographischen Bezug zur ‘actio’ des Sprechens herstellt.15

Mary is sitting reading. In → silence. She is startled. She → hears words. Then she herself speaks. She asks: “How shall this happen?” The process of becoming flesh has installed itself as the punctum, as the revolution, as the → knot in the Christian history of Salvation. We cannot know this → knot, but we can sense it in part. Only in unarticulated intuition does the → knot unfold itself, untangle itself before our eyes through the vigilance of an insight that resides in the chamber of mystery. When the angel entered the room and startled its occupant, something that had long remained hidden collapsed time and space. Only → scent can evoke such deep anamnesis. This interlacing of past, present and future escapes the ocular, the auricular, the sense of touch, and binds itself to the pneumatic in humankind: its ability to → breathe, to live and hence to → smell.

Gerhard Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel. Traditionen des Christusbildes und die Bildkonzepte der Renaissance, Munich, 2002. 2 Marie-José Mondzain-Baudinet (ed.), Nicéphore. Discours contre les iconoclastes, Paris, 1989; Marie-José MondzainBaudinet (ed.), Image, Icône, Économie. Les sources byzantines de l’imaginaire contemporain, Paris, 1996. 3 Patrologia Graeca 94, col. 1288; English translation from Saint John Damascene, On Holy Images, transl. Mary H. Allies, London, 1898, p. 58-59. See also: Herbert L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing. Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art, Philadelphia PA, 2000, p. 35. 4 Louis Marin, Opacité de la peinture. Essais sur la représentation au Quattrocento, Paris, 2006, p. 159-220. 1

5 Ibid., p. 162. 6 See also Christiane Kruse, Fleisch werden und Bild werden. Bilder vor dem Bild, in Wozu Menschen malen. Historische Begründungen eines Bildmediums, Munich, 2003, p. 203-224. 7 In some compositions Mary and the angel swap positions. On these inversions, see also Barbara Baert, Noli me tangere. Narrative Space and Iconic Space, in Jerusalem as Narrative Space, (Visualising the Middle Ages, 7), eds. Gerhard Wolf & Annette Hoffmann, Leiden, 2013, p. 323-350. 8 Ibid., p. 182. 9 Ibid., p. 189. 10 Herman Parret, De l’invisible comme présence, in Visio, 7, 3/4, 2003, p. 63-91.

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annunciation

11 On the hermeneutic of rupture, see my reflections in: Barbara Baert, Notes to the Pact between Veil and Wound, in Bild-Riss. Textile Öffnungen im ästhetischen Diskurs, (Textile Studies, 7), ed. Mateusz Kapustka, Berlin, 2014, p. 39-58. The meaning of → tearing and splitting as a life-, loveand wisdom-generating event (like the → tearing of the temple curtain) is profoundly rooted in the visual and literary ‘body’ of Ancient and Christian thought. On biblical hermeneutics and lire au-delà du verset (Lévinas), see: Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Lire aux éclats. Éloge de la caresse, Paris, 1994, p. 37, p. 136, p. 283. The split is the epiphany of radical alteration, revolution and → transition to the beyond. 12 Marin, Opacité de la peinture, p. 189.

13 Ibid., p. 164. 14 Ibid., p. 166. 15 Claudia Benthien, Die Absenz der Stimme im Bild. Personifikationen des ‘Stilschweigens’ in der frühen Neuzeit, in Quel Corps? Eine Frage der Repräsentation, eds. Hans Belting, Dietmar Kamper & Martin Schulz, Paderborn, 2002, p. 325347, p. 345-346. See also: Hajo Eickhoff, art. Sitzen, in Vom Menschen. Handbuch historische Anthropologie, ed. Christoph Wulf, Weinheim – Basel, 1997, p. 489-500; Horst Wenzel, Die Schrift und das Heilige, in Die Verschriftlichung der Welt. Bild, Text und Zahl in der Kultur des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Horst Wenzel, Vienna, 2000, p. 14-57.

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Archetype Interest in the artefact as part of a social network of rituals and bodily interactions such as touching, kissing, → dancing, joined with the study of the object in the context of its → gendered, ethnographic and intercultural archetypes is today an accepted part of art history and iconology in terms of both research and teaching. It was in fact Belting’s own answer to his 1983 question: Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte?; when he stood at the cusp between a crisis and a new future for the study of art and the visual medium: so-called ‘visual studies’ or the ‘visual turn’.1

1

Hans Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte?, Munich, 1983.

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astrology

Fig. 8. Cosimo Tura (ca. 1430-1495), Allegory of June, detail from the Hall of the Months frescocycle for Duke of Ferrara Borso d’Este (1413-1471), 1469-1470. Ferrara, Palazzo Schifanoia

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Astrology On 25 April 1925, Aby Warburg (1866-1929) holds a lecture in memory of his friend the astrologist, titled Franz Boll zum Gedächtnis.1 Franz Boll’s (1867-1924) Sphaera. Neue griechische Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Sternbilder from 19032 was of great importance to Warburg when it came to decoding the enigmatic astrological cycle of the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara (1469-1470) for his 1912 lecture in Rome (fig. 8). The fresco cycle with characters from the zodiac and allegorical portrayals of the months of the year were painted amongst others by Francesco del Cossa (1430-1477) for Duke Borso d’Este (1413-1471), and was said to be inexplicable. But Warburg explains this complex fifteenthcentury iconography with an expansive look at art history that was completely innovative for his time.3 The reading on Palazzo Schifanoia was such a key moment in the development of Warburg’s Denkraum, that I will allow myself to include a long quote from it. My fellow students: I need hardly say that this lecture has not been about solving a pictorial riddle for its own sake especially since it cannot here be illuminated at leisure, but only caught in a cinematographic spotlight. The isolated and highly provisional experiment that I have undertaken here is intended as a plea for an extension of the methodological borders of our study of art, in both material and spatial terms. Until now, a lack of adequate general evolutionary categories has impeded art history in placing its materials at the disposal of the – still unwritten – ‘historical psychology of human expression’. By adopting either an unduly materialistic or an unduly mystical stance, our young discipline blocks its own panoramic view of history. It gropes toward an evolutionary theory of his own, somewhere between the schematisms of political history and the dogmatic faith in genius. In attempting to elucidate the frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, I hope to have shown how an iconological analysis that can range freely, with no fear of border guards, and can treat the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds as an coherent historical unity – an analysis that can scrutinise the purest and the most utilitarian of arts as equivalent documents of expressions – how such a method, by taking pains to illuminate one single obscurity, can cast light on great and universal evolutionary processes in all their interconnectedness. I have not tried to find a neat solution so much as to present a new problem,

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astrology

which I would formulate as follows: ‘To that extent can the stylistic shift in the presentation of human beings in Italian art be regarded as part of an international process of dialectical engagement with the surviving imagery of Eastern Mediterranean pagan culture?’ Our sense of wonder at the inexplicable fact of supreme artistic achievement can only be enhanced by the awareness that genius is both a gift of grace and a conscious dialectical energy. The grandeur of the new art, as given to us by the genius of Italy has its roots in a shared determination to strip the humanist heritage of Greece of all its accretions of traditional ‘practice’, whether medieval, Oriental, or Latin. It was with this desire to restore the ancient world that ‘the good European’ began his battle for enlightenment, in that age of internationally migrating images that we – a shade too mystically – call the Age of the Renaissance.4

Aby M. Warburg, Per Monstra ad Sphaeram. Sternglaube und Bilddeutung. Vortrag in Gedenken an Franz Boll und andere Schriften 1923 bis 1925, eds. Davide Stimilli & Claudia Wedepohl, Munich – Hamburg, 2008. 2 Franz Boll, Sphaera. Neue griechische Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Sternbilder, Leipzig, 1903. 3 Wolfgang Hübner, The Culture of Astrology from Ancient to Renaissance, in A Companion to Astrology in the Renaissance, ed. Brendan Dooley, Leiden, 2014, p. 17-58, p. 46; Marco Bertozzi, Aby Warburg e lo 1

schema del ciclo astrologico di Palazzo Schifanoia, in La Rivista di Engramma (online), 100, (settembre/ottobre), 2012. 4 Aby M. Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity. Contributions to the Cultural History of the Renaissance, introduction by Kurt W. Forster & transl. David Britt, Los Angeles CA, 1999, p. 585-586, fully quoted in Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg. His Aims and Methods. An Anniversary Lecture, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 62, 1999, p. 268282, p. 270.

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Athempause Aby Warburg was interested in the space between activa and passiva: the → Zwischenraum. In his illustrierte psychologische Geschichte des → Zwischenraums zwischen Antrieb und Handlung,1 he describes the need to surpass dualistic hermeneutics (Contrasto-Spiel) between vita activa and vita contemplativa.2 Davide Stimilli recognizes this urge for the ‘in between’ in his 1926 lecture about Rembrandt (1606-1669), where he ends with the suggestion that one should listen to the Athempause (the → interval between impulsion and action, between → breathing in and → breathing out). In short, to listen to → ruach and → Kairos’ occasion. I quote Aby Warburg from Stimilli: L’ascension vers le soleil avec Hélios et la descente dans les profondeurs avec Proserpine symbolisent deux étapes qui appartiennent aussi inséparablement que les alternances de la respiration au cycle de la vie. Tout ce que nous pouvons emporter dans ce périple, c’est l’intervalle toujours fugitif entre impulsion et action (die ewig flüchtige Pause zwischen Antrieb und Handlung); il nous appartient de prolonger plus ou moins longtemps cet espace de respiration avec l’aide de Mnémosyne.3

Stimilli continues: La Mnémosyne invoquée ici n’est certainement pas le gardien bienveillant d’un trésor de délicatesses bibliophiles (Schatzhaus für bibliophile Kostbarkeiten), mais plutôt ‘le grand sphynx’ dont Warburg souhaitait ‘soutirer, sinon le secret, au moins la formulation de son énigme (wenn auch nicht ihr Geheimnis, so doch die Formulierung ihrer Rätselfrage)’.4

Aby M. Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, (Gesammelte Schriften, II 1.2), eds. Claudia Brink & Martin Warnke, Berlin, 2012, p. 3. 2 Aby M. Warburg, Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg, (Gesammelte Schriften, VII), eds. Karen Michels & Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Berlin, 2001, p. 429. 1

Davide Stimilli, L’énigme de Warburg, in Revue française de psychanalyse, 79, 4, 2015, p. 1100-1114, p. 1110; Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg. Une biographie intellectuelle, Paris, 2015, p. 237-238. 4 Stimilli, L’énigme de Warburg, p. 1110. 3

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back

Fig. 9. Puccio di Simone (active ca. 1340-1362), Noli me tangere, 1340. Florence, Santa Trinita

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Back In a recent exegetical study, Reimund Bieringer has analyzed the linguistic frequency and intensity of words for seeing in the Bible and more specifically in the story of the Noli me tangere.1 The verb parakyptô or inclinasset (‘inspect’, ‘bending over’, John 20:5.11) forms a Klammer, a link between the verbs of movement and the verbs of seeing. Verbs of seeing proper are blepô: ‘noticing’ the empty tomb (20:1.5). Theôreô – to ‘observe’ something with continuity and attention, often with the implication that what is observed is something unusual – is used for looking carefully at the gardener (20:6.12.14). And horaô (esp. perfect: heôraka) is seeing the risen Christ with the eyes of faith, as if in a flash (20:8.18). “This latter form expresses a seeing that transcends the mere physical seeing to a seeing with the eyes of faith and thus forms the climax of the pericope.”2 However, in the Vulgate these three terms of sight were all translated with the verb videre, which means a loss of the nuances in John’s original Greek text. Nevertheless, it is clear that the verb of seeing in view of its frequency and its position in the narrative structure remains very significant. At least we can say that Mary’s important role was her eye-witnessing the risen Christ.3 A second important text-immanent element is the rupture in the narrative at verse 11 concerning action and movement. Before verse 11, the tomb is the point of reference to which and from which all the movement occurs. The noun to mnêmeion or, in the Vulgate, monumentum occurs for the last time in 20:11. The tomb progressively recedes into the background and Jesus comes to the fore, as typical for the dual compositions of the Noli me tangere. This rupture in localization is emphasized by another feature that is marked in the text as well as in the image. It has to do with the bodily dynamics of Mary. Verse 14 says that Mary Magdalene turns her back when she answers the angels just before seeing Christ for the first time. As such she doesn’t recognize him yet: conversa est retrorsum et videt Iesum. The Latin phrase literally means to turn around (with a dynamic sometimes to flee) in a backwards direction (which means the movement is doubly stressed). In verse 16, Mary Magdalene turns a second time. This is the moment when she recognizes her master: “Rabbouni.” The turning around adds a nervous energy to the narrative and mirrors the woman’s panic. Each conversa is connected to a specific → gaze and a specific manifestation. The first is a conversion towards the gardener she sees, the second towards the master she recognizes.

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back

In Puccio di Simone’s (active by ca.  1340-1362) fresco (ca. 1340, Florence, Santa Trinita), the dorsal position of Mary Magdalene towards the sepulcher strengthens the polarity in the composition, marking the sepulcher as an element to forget, to negate, to turn one’s back on, and instead announcing the next phase – that of the → gaze toward and, finally, the recognition of the Resurrected (fig.  9). This is the third manifestation of Christ. Ulrike Tarnow interprets the double ‘conversion’ as a mirror of the Magdalene’s inner conversions: Über Wiederholung […] wird die Notwendigkeit einer inneren, hier jedoch auch als konkret äusserlich zu vollziehende Wendung vom falschen zum richtigen Objekt betont.4 Isn’t the Magdalene of the Noli me tangere indeed the very third conversa, but now the inner one? It is as a conversa, not towards the gardener, not towards Rabbouni, but towards the Resurrected, that she finally sees with the eyes of faith.5 Ever since the Cluny sermo, the aspect of conversion is strongly rooted in the Mary Magdalene figure.6 But the conversion in the Noli me tangere is not only conversion of penitence, but conversion of final insight.7 It is a conversion towards the ‘essential’ and the unspeakable.8 Noli me tangere is as it were an iconic turn. In the shift from the sepulcher to the → body of Christ, indeed in the conversa est retrorsum, a new pact is made: the pact between place and → gaze. This new pact leaves the importance of the spot, the emptiness, behind in favor of a new paradigm: the untouchable yet visible → body. The iconic turn glorifies sight as insight and generates a → transition from the historical and objectified locus, the sepulcher, the → garden – the narrative – to the Noli me tangere as a locus beyond – the iconic. On the level of visuality, we touch upon the deepest epistemology of Noli me tangere: the threshold between presence and absence, or between physical seeing and spiritual seeing.

1

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), ed. Gilbert Van Belle, Louvain, 2008, p. 609-630.

2 Ibid., p. 610; Joost Smit Sibinga, Towards Understanding the Composition of John 20, in The Four Gospels. Festschrift Frans Neirynck, (Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, 100), eds. Frans Van Segbroeck, et al., Louvain, 1992, p. 2139-2152, p. 2139. On the intensity of seeing and its relationship to believing, see G.L. Phillips, Faith and Vision in the

back Fourth Gospel, in Studies in the Fourth Gospel, ed. Frank L. Cross, London, 1975, p. 83-96, p. 91-92. 3 Rosemarie Nürnberg, Apostolae Apostolorum. Die Frauen am Grab als erste Zeuginnen der Auferstehung in der Väterexegese, in Stimuli. Exegese und ihre Hermeneutik in Antike und Christentum, (Festschrift für Ernst Dassmann, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum, 23), eds. Georg Schöllgen & Clemens Scholten, Munich, 1996, p. 228242. 4 Ulrike Tarnow, ‘Noli me tangere’. Zur Problematik eines Visuellen Topos und seiner Transformationen im Cinquecento, in Topik und Tradition. Prozesse der Neuordnung von Wissensüberlieferungen des 13. bis 17. Jahrhunderts, ed. Thomas Frank, Göttingen, 2007, p. 209-225, p. 213. 5 The idea of the Magdalene’s backwards position is explained by Ruth Mellinkoff as a sign of outcast. I don’t think this idea is relevant for the Noli me tangere; Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts. Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, Berkeley CA – Los Angeles CA, 1993, p. 220-222. In a miniature of the M.R. James memorial Psalter, late fourteenth century (London, British Library, Ms. Add. 44949, fol. 4r) Mary Magdalene of Noli me tangere is turned with her back

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towards us. She shows her pixis towards Christ. In this position, she seems to embody the narrative of the conversa est retrorsum. 6 Dominique Iogna-Prat, La Madeleine du ‘Sermo in veneratione sanctae Mariae Magdalenae’ attribué à Odon de Cluny, in Mélanges de l’école française de Rome. Moyen Âge, 104, 1992, p. 37-79. 7 The tears of Mary Magdalene become the liquid symbol of her penitence. Geoffrey of Vendôme (d. 1132) states in his sermon: “We do not read that she spoke, but that she wept. Despite this, we believe that she was eloquent, but with tears and not with words.” The moisture that wells up in the eyes brings forth the torrent of confession. See Piroska Nagy, Le don des larmes aux moyen âge, Paris, 2000, p. 388-412. 8 The Canticle of Mary Magdalene is a monologue written in the thirteenth century in Provence: Franciscus A. Brunklaus, Het Hooglied van Maria Magdalena, Maastricht, 1940, p. 89; and it says about Noli me tangere: “My → body glowed from a glorious fire, trembling with sensuality I have never known like this. And all the goodness of which I longed to be capable, filled me, as with a new soul. And my whole dark past flowed out of me in tears.”

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Beheading John’s → head has absorbed all energies: it tumbles into the → corner like a black hole and cuts into the deepest fabric of our anthropological spectrum: → death and the cosmic cycle itself. Beheading is the only taboo able to bear and to convey the significance of this spectrum.

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besonnenheit

Fig. 10. Tafel 74 from the Bilderatlas. From: Martin Warnke & Claudia Brink, Aby Warburg. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, (Gesammelte Schriften. Aby Warburg, 2, II, 1), eds. Horst Bredekamp, et al., Berlin, 2008, p. 123

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Besonnenheit Davide Stimilli digs deeper into the so-called mysterious self-healing of Aby Warburg in a recent article in Revue française de psychanalyse. For Stimilli, the German Besonnenheit is a key term.1 In fact, the term Besonnenheit (cf. → sophrosyne [Plato, ca. 427-347 bc], level-headedness) appears at Tafel 74 (fig. 10) of the Atlas in the context of Heilung ohne Berührung.2 The first important introduction of the term in a therapeutic context was by psychiatrist Dr. Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813).3 Stimilli writes about this introduction: Pour sa part, la Besonnenheit est ‘le compas [der Compass] qui dirige l’action de l’âme [Thatkraft der Seele] vers la fin de sa félicité [den Zweck ihrer Glückseligkeit]’, sans ‘adhérer à un seul objet’ ou errer ‘sans Étoile polaire pour la guider’; de façon encore plus éloquente, Reil appelle cela ‘l’oreille de l’esprit [das Ohr des Geistes], une oreille que nous pouvons intentionnellement diriger’, avant d’être saisie par un objet et transformée en attention [Aufmerksamkeit].4

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) has also reflected upon therapeutic Besonnenheit.5 She considers the archetypical Aristotelian distinction between vita activa and vita contemplativa as responsible for the implication that: théorie ou ‘contemplation’ [qui] désigne l’expérience de l’éternel, distinctes des autres (…) ne peut durer, qu’elle ne peut être qu’une réalisation momentanée de l’éternel.6

Davide Stimilli, L’énigme de Warburg, in Revue française de psychanalyse, 79, 4, 2015, p. 1100-1114. 2 Aby M. Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, (Gesammelte Schriften, II 1.2), eds. Claudia Brink & Martin Warnke, Berlin, 2012, passim. 3 Johann C. Reil, Rhapsodieen über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode 1

auf Geisteszerrüttungen, Halle, 1803, p. 98, p. 101. 4 Stimilli, L’énigme de Warburg, p. 1105. 5 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago IL, 1958, p. 15. 6 Ibid., p. 20, p. 75.

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bilderatlas

Fig. 11. Image of the Bilderatlas at display in the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (K.B.W.) in Hamburg

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Bilderatlas Aby Warburg’s fascinations, obsessions, techniques and desires to chart his → Pathosformeln culminated in the → Mnemosyne project or Bilderatlas (fig. 11). He launched the project in 1924 together with Gertrud Bing (1892-1964). As Giorgio Agamben has argued, it would be a misconception to read the Bilderatlas as the iconographic development of a repertoire on an art-historical timeline: this is not Chronos at work. Instead, argues the author, Warburg’s → Pathosformeln are autonomous hybrids of → archetypes. They possess an equivalent for ‘first-timeness’ (the primavoltità). Every photo of the → Mnemosyne project constitutes an archè and is therefore archaic. Georges Didi-Huberman wrote the following in this respect: Quel espace de pensée l’atlas Mnémosyne invente-il exactement? (…) L’atlas Mnémosyne ne signe pas une ‘sortie’ de l’inquiétude ou une réassurance tranquille de la recherche ‘scientifique’. Bien au contraire, il constitue la géniale reformulation de cette inquiétude même, sa recomposition pratique et théorique, sa reconduction sous de nouvelles formes, son remontage. Il porte en lui, vivace, cette ‘connaissance du souffrant’ qu’incarne bien le titan Atlas (au plan mythologique et dont Nietzsche aura fait la pointe de toute pensée au plan philosophique).1

1

Georges Didi-Huberman, Science avec patience, in Images Re-vues (online), 4, 1, 2013, p. 1-29, p. 7.

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blood

Fig. 12. Healing of Haemorrhoïssa, fluxus habens, Codex Egberti, Reichenau, 977-993. Trier, Stadtbibliothek, ms. 24, fol. 90v

33

Blood The Bible speaks simply of a woman “who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years” (mulier quae erat in profluvio sanguinis annis duodecim, Mark 5:25) (fig. 12). The evangelists seem reluctant to specify from which part of her → body she was bleeding. Still, Mark 5:29, in a literal translation, refers to a “fountain of blood:” fons sanguinis eius (siccatus est). Similar references are found in Leviticus 12:7, 15:19-33 and 20:18, where the zabâ is discussed. The zabâ is a pathologically menstruating woman, who must be isolated. Leviticus prescribes purity rules for those who have touched the zabâ,1 but it says nothing about the zabâ who touches; this aspect is only discussed in the later Mishna, where the touching zabâ is also considered to transfer impurity.2 Still, there can be no doubt whatsoever that menstrual blood was regarded as impure in the Jewish tradition. Menstruating women were, for example, banned from entering the temple.3 Nonetheless, in the Synoptic Gospels, it is the sickness of the → Haemorrhoïssa that causes the tapping of the dynamis from Christ. In sum, the exegetical literature sheds light on some crucial aspects of the biblical text as well as on important cultural and historical backgrounds, such as the menstrual taboo and the nature of the touch.

1

Charlotte Fonrobert, The Woman with a Bloodflow (Mark 5.24-34) Revisited. Menstrual Laws and Jewish Culture in Christian Feminist Hermeneutics, in Early Christian Interpretation of the Scriptures of Israel. Investigations and Proposals, (Journal for the Study of the New Testament. Supplement Series, 148 – Studies in Scripture in Early Judaism and Christianity, 5), eds. Craig A. Evans & James A. Sanders, Sheffield, 1997, p. 121-140, p. 130: On zabâ (zvaha) and Leviticus: touching and being touched are quite different propositions. “The menstruant woman does transfer impurity by being touched (Lev 15:19).

However, Leviticus does not mention that she communicated impurity by touching. Her → hand in fact does not transmit impurity.” The zvaha may not be touched indirectly either (linen, etc.: Leviticus 15:27). The Mishna is stricter when it comes to the zvaha: “He who touches a zav, or he whom a zav touches, transfers a status of impurity to food, drink and vessels that can be purified by immersion” (ibid., p. 131). 2 Shaye Cohen, Menstruants and the Sacred in Judaism and Christianity, in Women’s History and Ancient History, ed. Sarah B. Pomeroy, Chapel Hill NC, 1991, p. 273-

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blood 299, p. 278ff; Charles T. Wood, The Doctor’s Dilemma. Sin, Salvation, and the Menstrual Cycle in Medieval Thought, in Speculum, 56, 4, 1981, p. 710-727; Helen Lemay, Women and the Literature of Obstetrics and Gynecology, in Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History, ed. Joel T. Rosenthal, Athens GA, 1990, p. 189-209; Caroline W. Bynum, Wonderful Blood. Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond, Philadelphia PA, 2007; David Biale, Blood and Belief. The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians, Berkeley CA, 2007; Charlotte Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity. Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender,

3

Stanford CA, 2000; Peggy McCracken, The Curse of Eve. The Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender and Medieval Literature, (The Middle Ages Series), Philadelphia PA, 2003; Joan R. Branham, Blutende Frauen und blutige Räume. Menstruation und Eucharistie in der Spätantike und im Frühen Mittelalter, in Vorträge Warburg-Haus, 3, p. 129-161; Thomas Buckley & Alma Gottlieb, Blood Magic. The Anthropology of Menstruation, Berkeley CA, 1988; Richard W. Whitekettle, Levitical Thought and the Female Reproductive Cycle. Wombs, Wellsprings, and the Primeval World, in Vetus Testamentum, 46, 3, 1996, p. 376-391. Biale, Blood and Belief, p. 104-106.

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Blush In Pygmalion’s myth, Ovid granted the metamorphosis a rare happy end. Usually, his figures trade in their vital lives for a phlegmatic existence in the → shadow of → death. The positive ending can be explained from a narrative standpoint.1 The myth of Pygmalion was supposed to be in contrast of the story before it, of the Propoetides. These women did not believe in Venus and thus prostitute themselves, which turned them into stone (vs. 238-242). The theme of Pygmalion is the opposite. The girl arises out of the hard ivory weak and blushing, thanks to the power of Venus and the authentic love that the prostitutes lacked (fig. 13). In this context, the blush is an interesting motif. The blush colors the white ivory: now the material becomes incarnadine. Secondly, the blush is an instantaneous uncontrollable expression of → emotion. Thirdly, blushing is a response to the ‘being watched’. It is a sense of self, a physical sign of self-awareness. The blush references the realization of being desired. The blush mirrors the male → gaze. The blush is also an auto-referential motif: the person blushing will be embarrassed precisely because they are blushing. But in the Pygmalion myth, the → archetype of the blush goes even deeper than the psychologization of shame. The artistic creation comes to life when the artist touches it and the ‘it’ becomes ‘she’ and she answers this with the blush. This blush is cosmogonical in the myth: the burning fire of creation itself and the artist’s ability to give life to sculpture.2 This last point is indeed a topos for the Ancients. The Sophist Callistratus (died 355 bc) wrote the following about Lysippos’ famous statue of → Kairos: “(...) though it was bronze, it blushed; and though it was hard by nature, it melted into softness.” 3 The statue of → Kairos lives – it blushes – and it lets his powers gently glow to the surface for those who recognize him. Also Galatea’s blushing is the mimesis of that power of creation, the fire that is also ignited in the girl – the realization of being created and the awakening of self-awareness – just before she sees her actual creator.4 In the classical Antiquity, the blush is an externalization of the often invisible psychè. The psychè lives in one’s → head, with the watchful consciousness. This consciousness can disassociate or suddenly manifest itself in an uncontrolled physical action of the → head, such as nodding off, sneezing, or blushing. These unexpected symptoms are seen as prophetic, as an entheos, and as a possible signal of a supernatural inspiration that is in that moment descending into the psychè.5

36

blush

Fig. 13. Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572), Pygmalion, 1529-1530. Florence, Uffizi

blush

1

For a literary analysis of the subject, see: Joseph H. Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, Cambridge – London, 1990, p. 1-12. 2 Quote from Ovid, Metamorphoses: Miratur et haurit pectore Pygmalion simulati corporis ignis (vs. 252-253). 3 Callistratus, Ekphraseis, in Descriptions, (Loeb Classical Library, 256), transl. Arthur Fairbanks, London, 1931, p. 395-399. See also: Évelyne Prioux, Regards Alexandrins. Histoire et théorie des arts dans l’épigramme hellénistique, (Hellenistica Groningana, 12), Louvain, 2007, p. 214-243.

37

4 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; Deborah Tarn Steiner, Images in Mind. Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature and Thought, Princeton NJ, 2001, p. 3-26. 5 Richard B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought. About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate, Cambridge, 1988, p. 104.

38

body

Fig. 14. Haematite amulet with the Healing of the Haemorrhoïssa, Egypt, Late Antiquity. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art

39

Body In 597, Gregory the Great (d. 604) asserted the following in response to Augustine of Canterbury’s (d. 604) question of whether a menstruating woman could take communion: A woman must not be prohibited from entering a church during her usual periods, for this natural overflowing cannot be reckoned a crime. If the woman who was suffering from the issue of → blood humbly came behind the Lord’s → back and touched the → hem of his garment (...) [and] was justified in her boldness, why is it that what was permitted to one was not permitted to all women? A woman ought not be forbidden to receive the mystery of the Holy Communion at these times. (…) If they do not venture to approach the sacrament of the Body (...) when they are in their periods, they are to be praised for their right thinking.1

However, in 688, Theodore of Tarsus (602-690), the Bishop of Canterbury, expressed quite a different opinion: he prohibited women from entering church and taking communion and moreover established a waiting period after childbirth.2 A century later, Jonas of Orléans (ca. 760-843), in his De institutione laicali, maintained that women in the West “do not enter church during their times of carnal impurity.”3 In sum, a conceptual bridge was built from the PalaeoChristian era to early mediaeval Western Europe whereby “symbolically bloody realms remain[ed] inaccessible to physically bloody women” (fig. 14).4

Charles T. Wood, The Doctor’s Dilemma. Sin, Salvation, and the Menstrual Cycle in Medieval Thought, in Speculum, 56, 4, 1981, p. 710-727, p. 713; Epistola 64, Patrologia Latina 77, col. 1183-1199. 2 Pierre J. Payer, Sex and the Penitentials. The Development of a Sexual Code 550-1150, Toronto ON, 1984, p. 36. 1

3 Patrologia Latina 187-188, Ch. 2, col. 106. 4 Joan R. Branham, Bloody Women and Bloody Spaces, in Harvard Divinity Bulletin (online), 30, 4, 2002, p. 15-22, p. 18.

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bowl/jar/pitcher

Fig. 15. Tomb of Verena of Zurzach, 1613, presumable after a 14th-century prototype. Münster, Zurzach, crypt

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Bowl/jar/pitcher Symbolically, these bowl-shaped objects are by no means neutral concepts in Christianity. Its shape and content refer to the female → archetype (fig. 15).1 Mary is the honorabile vas that preserves the Godly child. And, in the same vein, the baptismal font is the venter ecclesiae. The pitcher is sometimes also seen as a symbol of the human → body in which the word is contained, as in 2 Corinthians 4:7: “but we have this treasure in earthen vessels.” The pitcher is, in other words, not a neutral or ‘empty’ object in early-medieval perception. It is used for containing and pouring. In the Song of Songs 7:2, we read “Thy → navel is like a round goblet” and, according to Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the female is the vas viri. In other words, the pitcher represents the ability to receive and conceive. It symbolizes conception. Consequently, the pitcher obviously also refers to the broader context of fertility wells. And like the → sieve, it ‘leaks’ as well!2

Manfred Lurker, art. Gefäss, in Wörterbuch der Symbolik, Stuttgart, 1991, p. 232-233; Erich Neumann, Die Grosse Mutter. Der Archetyp des grossen Weiblichen, Darmstadt, 1957, p. 51, p. 123-146. 2 See also my analysis of the attributes of St Verena von Zurzach: the comb and the jar (jug, pitcher); Barbara Baert, Jar and Comb. Verena of Zurzach as an Example for the Limits and the Possibilities in Iconology, in Annual of the Antwerp Museum, 2006, p. 9-25; in translation as: Barbara Baert, Wasserkrug und Kamm. Die Darstellung der

1

Verena von Zurzach, ein Beispiel für neue Tendenzen in der ikonologischen Methodik, in Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 60, 109, 2006, p. 35-62. Both objects can be understood within the feminine pattern of (pre)-Christian symbols for hygiene (comb) and fertility (the pitcher, the well). The comb, like the → sieve, has a purifying function: it removes dirt and lice. And the comb is also an image of the womb given its ‘teeth’ referring to the vagina dentata.

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breath

Fig. 16. Creation of Adam, 12th century, mosaic. Monreale, Cathedral

43

Breath The ways that the visual arts represent, evoke and suggest the → wind touch on fundamental ideas relating to the anthropology of the senses and their descent into the visual medium. → Wind is a natural phenomenon that plays on the full sensorium of the → body. → Wind is tactile. → Wind can be → heard. → Wind carries → scents. → Wind is a cosmic breath that envelops and penetrates us. → Wind nourishes or destroys.1 Even our own → bodies produce and inhale → wind. The → wind is related to the breath that exits and enters our → bodies, even to the gases our organs emit (fig. 16). → Wind is both the lower – the anal eruption – and the higher – the air we breathe. There is also a third → wind in our → body. In the Greek philosophy of Aristotle (384-322 bc), the concept of pneuma is central to both breath and spirit. It is, literally, the vital energy of life, the gas that occupies the brain and is responsible for thought, perception and movement. This vital energy is received at birth and is continually refreshed by the drawing of breath. In the history of Greek culture there are five terms for → wind, including derivatives from air and breath: aer, aither, pneuma, phusa and anemos (fig. 17).2 Anemoi is the term for the four → winds and refers to the four cardinal directions: Euros (East), Notos (South), Zephyros (West) and Boreas (North). It was said of these → winds that they were endowed with the power of fertility and the ability to impregnate living beings. Phusa (phusao, to blow) is a term leading to → wind instruments, but also to the crater of a volcano. The term pneuma (breath or air) was extended to spirit, inspiration. Aither and aer are related to mist and the open air, respectively. The pneuma in the → body is phusa. The pneuma outside the → body is aer (air). Pneuma is thus the genus from which phusa splits off for breath and aer for air.

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Fig. 17. Andronicus of Cyrrhus, Horologium (the so-called tower of winds). 2nd century or 50 bc, Athens

1

For general introductions to the → wind as a cultural, religious and scientific phenomenon, see: Jan Deblieu, Wind. How the Flow of Air Has Shaped Life, Myth, and the Land, Boston MA – New York, 1998; Ivetta Gerasimchuk, Wörterbuch der Winde, in Lettre. Europas Kulturzeitung, 7, 1999,

p. 7-17; David E. Newton, Encyclopedia of Air, London, 2003. 2 Kora Neuser, Anemoi. Studien zur Darstellung der Winde und Windgottheiten in der Antike, (Archaeologica, 19), Rome, 1982, p. 1-25.

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Butterfly Humans have been fascinated with butterflies since the days of old.1 A butterfly’s beauty is unheimlich,2 because as insects, they also disturb humans. In most Indo-European languages, the word for butterfly is an onomatopoeia that refers to the rustling beating of its wings.3 Butterflies suddenly appear, and disappear just as abruptly. They mislead.4 They have a fundamentally polarizing nature, because the species is subdivided into diurnal and nocturnal butterflies. Sometimes, they are ephemeral, sweet, but also frighteningly Medusan with their fluttering and the peculiar ‘eyes’ on their wings.5 Furthermore, butterflies follow a particular biological-genetic process: from larva to pupa (also called → chrysalis or → nymph) (fig. 18) to the butterfly itself (also called ‘imago’). This cycle is completely different from our own knowledge and experiences when it comes to life and → death.6 One could even say that the butterfly’s cycle is the complete opposite of humans – humans die, become a mummy wrapped in textile, and then ‘becomes one with the worms’ in the earth – while the butterfly starts as a worm in the earth, then becomes a mummy (pupation) and finally flourishes into an exuberant ‘imago’. Butterflies start off meaty, puny and shapeless in the element earth, only to burst free into a unique beauty into the element air. The symbolism that remains universally connected to the butterfly is that of the soul.7 The Finnish believe that the soul of someone who has passed becomes a butterfly. The Romanians know that those who kill a butterfly, kill their own heart. Otto Immisch (1862-1936) discusses the etymological complexity of the butterfly in the world of the Greeks.8 The astonishing transformation captured their imagination as well.9 For Plato the → chrysalis – σκῆνος – was the symbol for the human → body, connected to the egg, house, even the → honeycomb containing → bee larvae.10 Vergeleiche die ganz analoge Entwicklung bei der Biene selbst, wie der σκῆνος zur Nymphe wird und προειρημένος in der verklebten Zelle (κύτταρος) sitzt, bis zum Ausbruch. So war σκῆνος für das κηρίον mit der sich umbildende Made drin ein passender Ausdruck. The caterpillar, the worm, and the maggot, with its ailing little curled up form, were all symbols for the embryo to the Greeks, and by extension, of the soul im gekrümmten Greisenleib.11 The butterfly that emerges from the → chrysalis is the freed soul: the highest possible Platonist state of being.

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butterfly

Fig. 18. Chrysalis (owned by author)

The Greek poet Pindar (522-443 bc) says that the psyche comes from the gods and → sleeps when a person’s limbs are active.12 But when that person is asleep, the psyche is freed and manifests itself in a dream or in a butterfly.13 Like the dream spirit, the ὄνειρος, the psyche of a deceased person can appear during → sleep, always near the → head. If the psyche resides in the → head and has the opportunity to disassociate from the alert consciousness, one can see how sneezing was quite fascinating when it came to magical thinking: a sudden physical occurrence that had no explanation.14 The Greeks thought that sneezing took place within the → head as a prophecy, a signal, an expression of the psyche coming out for just a moment.15 After all, psychein means ‘blowing’.16 Thus, the psyche is deeply connected with → breath, with the dynamics of → breathing in and out, which is mirrored in the dynamics of a butterfly’s wings opening and closing.17

butterfly

47

According to another Ancient Greek tradition, the deceased soul is a moth, a nocturnal butterfly. Psyche operates as the vital principle of life in those metaphors, concepts and personifications that have to do with volatility. The winged siren and the bird are also part of this age-old iconography. But the oldest concepts from the Homeric era picture the psyche as smoke, dreams, → bees, bats, flies and, of course, butterflies. Aristotle and later Hesychius of Alexandria (late sixth century), in his lexicon of Ancient Greek, start by simply calling the moth, and by extension the butterfly, psyche. Later, butterfly’s wings became an attribute of Psyche, Cupid’s lover (fig. 19).

Fig. 19. Antonio Canova (1757-1822), Psyche Revived by the Kiss of Eros, 1787-1793. Paris, Musée du Louvre

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butterfly

Aby Warburg had a special fascination with butterflies and moths. There is a well-known → fragment from a draft letter to his friend André Jolles (1874-1946) that was published by Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001). In this letter from 1900, he talks about his own collection of butterfly display cases, and of how a butterfly escaped just as he wanted to pin it down. This made him muse the following: The most beautiful butterfly [Seelentierchen] that I ever mounted suddenly escaped through the glass and flew playfully away, upwards into the blue sky. Now I should try to catch her again, but I am not equipped for this kind of powerful movement in place. Or, more precisely expressed, I would like to, but my intellectual education does not permit me to do so (…) I should so like, upon approaching our light-footed girl, to flutter about playfully with her, but such high-flown movements are not for me.18

While this → fragment is more of a personal note, he would later repeatedly reference butterflies in a scientific context. In 1905, Warburg published a piece about the Florentine woodcuts of Baccio Baldini (1436-ca. 1487) (fig. 20).19 A quote from Philippe-Alain Michaud: Le papillon antique est sorti de la chenille bourguignonne; la robe ondule triomphalement et les ailes de Méduse se sont substituées à la lourde coiffe. Ainsi se manifeste l’idéalisme autochtone archaïsant que Botticelli a élevé à son expression la plus haute, de sorte que l’on pourrait penser que l’auteur de cette estampe est le jeune Botticelli.20 Aby Warburg recaptures this motif during his lecture in Rome in 1912, on the Palazzo Schifanoia frescoes in Ferrara.21 La chenille bourguignonne étroitement enfermée dans son cocon, a donné naissance au papillon florentin, la Nynfa (sic) à la coiffure ailée et au vêtement flottant de la Ménade grecque ou de la Victoire romaine.22 In these → fragments, it becomes apparent that Aby Warburg saw the butterfly as the cultural carrier of the Renaissance → Pathosformeln of Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445-1515) and the Florentine graphics. He also saw the butterfly as an image of stylistic ‘emergence’, and thus of emancipation within Italian humanism. He feminizes and idealizes the butterfly: she is his → nymph, his Göttin im Exil, his personal Seelentierchen. She can be cherished, but she will always fly away again. The butterfly therefore essentially partakes in the energetic bipolarity.

butterfly

49

Fig. 20. Attributed to Baccio Baldini (1436-ca. 1487), Punizione di Amore, copper engraving. Collection unknown

Once upon a time, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting about happily enjoying himself. He did not know that he was Zhou. Suddenly he awoke, and was palpably Zhou. He did not know whether he was Zhou, who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhou. Now, there must be a difference between Zhou and the butterfly. This is called the transformation of things (Zhuangzi, China, third century bc, Chapter 2).

Manfred Lurker, art. Schmetterling, in Wörterbuch der Symbolik, Stuttgart, 1991, p. 651. 2 Georges Didi-Huberman, Phalènes. Essais sur l’apparition, 2, Paris, 2013, p. 14. 3 Richard Riegler, art. Schmetterling, in Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 7, Berlin – Leipzig, 1937, cols. 1237-1254. 1

4 Didi-Huberman, Phalènes, p. 16. 5 Roger Caillois, Méduse et Cie, in Œuvres, ed. Roger Caillois, Paris, 2008, p. 479-558. 6 Didi-Huberman, Phalènes, p. 15. 7 Massimo Leone, Signs of the Soul. Toward a Semiotics of Religious Subjectivity, in Signs and Society, 1, 1, 2013, p. 115-159, esp. p. 125-135.

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8 Otto Immisch, Sprachliches zum Seelenschmetterling, in Glotta, 6, 3, 1915, p. 193-206. 9 Ibid., p. 198ff. 10 Ibid., p. 200. 11 Ibid., p. 202-203. 12 Fr. 131b (ed. Herwig Maehler), 1-4 (cf. Plutarch, Consol ad. Apoll. 35.120C): σῶμα μὲν πάντων ἕπεται θανάτῳ περισθενεῖ, | ζωὸν δ᾽ ἔτι λείπεται αἰῶνος εἴδωλον: τὸ γάρ | ἐστι μόνον | ἐκ θεῶν. εὕδει δὲ πρασσόντων μελέων, ἀτὰρ | εὑδόντεσσιν ἐν πολλοῖς ὀνείροις | δείκνυσι τερπνῶν ἐφέρποισαν χαλεπῶν τε κρίσιν (“The → body of all men is subject to overpowering → death, but a living image of life still remains, for it alone is from the gods. It slumbers while the limbs are active, but to men as they → sleep, in many dreams, it reveals an approaching decision of things pleasant or distressful”). Translation after William H. Race. With special gratitude to Prof. Dr. Han Lamers (University of Oslo). 13 Richard B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought. About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate, Cambridge, 1988, p. 229. 14 Ibid., p. 103. 15 → Blushing, nodding off, shivers and flatulence are also part of the spectrum of the psyche; ibid., p. 112, note 2. 16 Audrey J. Butt dedicated a case study to another Indian people, the Akawaio. 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 Indians see the individual → breath or respiration as the bearer of spirit or spirits; Audrey J. Butt, Ritual Blowing. ‘Taling’, a Causation and Cure of Illness among the Akawaio, in Man, 56, 1956, p. 49-55. 17 Onians, The Origins of European Thought, p. 120. Besides (blowing) an old meaning

18

19

20 21

22

of psyche is also feeling ‘cold’, in contrast to its counterpart – → blood (thumos) – which is warm. People assume that the psyche does not live in the warm → blood but in the cold brain. Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography, London, 1986, p. 110. Aby M. Warburg, Delle ‘Imprese amorose’ nelle più antiche incisioni fiorentine (1905), in La Rinascità del Paganesimo antico, ed. Gertrud Bing & transl. Emma Cantimori, Florence, 1966, p. 179-191, p. 189; Aby M. Warburg, Artistic Exchanges between North and South in the Fifteenth Century, in Aby M. Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity. Contributions to the Cultural History of the Renaissance, introduction by Kurt W. Forster & transl. David Britt, Los Angeles CA, 1999, p. 275-280. Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg et l’image, Paris, 1998, p. 189. Aby M. Warburg, Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Geschichte der europäischen Renaissance, ed. Gertrud Bing, Leipzig, 1932, p. 184; Aby M. Warburg, Essais florentins, transl. Sybille Muller, Paris, 1990, p. 214. Michaud, Aby Warburg et l’image, p. 189. The butterfly also manifests itself in the heuristics of the → Bilderatlas. → Mnemosyne atlas 39.11 places a → detail of a cupid from Botticelli’s Primavera next to Baccio Baldini and his woodcut of the Punizione di Amore (location unknown); Giulia Bordignon, et al. (eds.), L’espressione antitetica in Aby Warburg, in La Rivista di Engramma (online), 114, (marzo), 2014; Werner Rappl, La clef des songes. Il materiale per mnemosyne di Aby Warburg e il linguaggio della memoria, in Quaderni Warburg Italia, 1, 2003, p. 39-94, fig. 3-4. See also Tafel 48/12 featuring Baccio Baldini: http://warburg.library.cornell. edu/panel-image/panel-48-image-12.

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Camouflage In his text Camouflage and Mimesis, Bernd Hüppauf formulates interesting reflections about the paradigmatic importance of camouflage.1 Like mimesis, camouflage enmeshes one reality onto another: the chameleon changes its skin to take on the texture of a branch; the grapes that Zeuxis (after about 425 bc in Athens) painted look just as if they are real, seemingly dismantling the boundary between the painted reality and reality.2 But there is a difference. Camouflage ‘transcends’ mimesis. Camouflage goes beyond the mimicking quality of deception and falsification. Camouflage is an affect, perhaps even an antimimesis. Camouflage is aimed at the dynamic transformation and → transition of boundaries, while mimesis remains focused on the sharp duality between the other and the self. Camouflage, in other words, is an unarticulated fault line between the outside world and the self, while mimesis recognizes the insurmountable paradigm between the other and the self. In short, camouflage has the visual finality of fading; it possesses the alienating obscurity that counters the category of limitations between various parts. When you extrapolate that to a visual anthropology, camouflage is part of the world of disorder, trance and ecstasy (the product of the ‘marginal spirit’) while the mimesis belongs to the world of order and trust (a product of the ‘ocularcentrism’). Camouflage is aimed at deception, mimesis at perception. This brings us to the Rotterdam artist Desirée Palmen, who turned camouflage into an artistic challenge in her photography and performances. To Palmen, the disappearing act of the artistic self-body is both an interrogation of the feminine auto-medium as well as a political statement (for example, her dissolution performances in Jerusalem) (fig. 21).3 Die Fotografien von Palmen sind zum einen ein mimetischer Prozess zum Zweck der Provokation (Venedig-Reihe), zum anderen Camouflage-Praktik mit dem Ziel der Flucht vor Überwachung von geforderter Mimesis. Dabei teilt ihr Verfahren durchaus Merkmale der klassischen Methode der Visuellen Anthropologie, nämlich der teilnehmenden Beobachtung mit der Kamera – jedoch mit einem über die Arbeitsweise des cinéma verité hinausgehenden, experimentellen Anspruch. Im Fokus der Visuellen Anthropologie standen bisher Fragen nach der (Selbst- und) Fremdrepräsentation von Gesellschaft, der Authentizität, der Subjektivität und Objektivität. Im weitesten

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camouflage

Fig. 21. Desirée Palmen, Police in Jerusalem, 2005

camouflage

53

Sinne ging es also um die Frage nach der Darstellung fremder Kulturinhalte durch EthnologInnen, wobei der materiellen Kultur, ihren Bräuchen, Werten und Praktiken des Zusammenlebens in den Anfängen der Visuellen Anthropologie, und allgemein der ethnologischen Forschung, die größte Bedeutung beigemessen wurde 4 (...) Der Mensch wird in Palmens ‘Mimesis-Fotografie’ sozusagen zu den von ihm selbst erschaffenen Zeichen und Objekten und damit zugleich, durch das Verschwinden darin, ein wenig von ihnen erlöst.5

In his book Camouflage, Neil Leach proves that the dissolving syndrome (or visual inertia) can expand our horizon of visual understanding. According to Leach, camouflage has affinities with thirteen paradigms that in one way or the other are also explicated in the myth of → Echo and → Narcissus: Mimesis, Sensuous Correspondence, Sympathetic Magic, Mimicry, Becoming, → Death, Narcissism, Identity, Paranoia, Belonging, Sacrifice, → Melancholy and Ecstasy. Camouflage is a life principle and a sacrifice strategy that interweaves life and → death closely. The action that seems nihilist pays off in the self-sacrifice to the world. From a visual standpoint, camouflage is firstly a manifestation, but secondly ‘latent’ enough to remain exchangeable. There is a certain ‘pre-figurability’ in the carriers and materials that mimesis has not yet ‘attained’. → Marble, for example, vacillates between abstraction and figuration, between liquid and solid. The image ‘is being shaped in the cocoon’.6 Camouflage teaches us about another and completely new relation between medium, self-identification (→ Echo’s ‘self ’ as loss, or at least as repetition of the other voice), and a visual (re)presentation as ‘blending into the world’. The world becomes the carrier of the image as loss and an empty space, and the medium becomes an act of ‘dissolving’, of vaporizing. (That is why the diaphanous – even in the animal world: for example deep-sea jellyfish – is perhaps the most pure form of camouflage).7 Camouflage in this sense involves a form of ‘surrender’ – a becoming one with the other – and a subsequent ‘overcoming’ – a differentiation of the self from the other. It involves a form of ‘dying’ – of taking a step backward – and a subsequent form of ‘living’ – a reinforcement of our élan vital, and a consolidation of our sense of self. It is precisely through a tactic of feigned → death that life is secured. The principle behind this strategy is that of the ‘sacrifice’, whereby

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camouflage

life folds into → death, and vice versa. Maggots thrive off the dead, while all vital energies are premised on their own extinction, like fireworks fading in the night sky. Just as life is born of → death, so → death is the end-product of life. The desire for life or → death is ultimately grounded in its opposite. Camouflage therefore operates within a double moment from a temporal perspective. It involves a primary operation which appears wasteful and nihilistic, but ultimately prepares the ground for a secondary operation that is productive and beneficial. In economic terms, it is a form of ‘investment’ – an initial ‘loss’ offset against a long-term ‘gain’. Camouflage also operates at different levels, a manifest level and a latent level. It involves a play between the two, where the manifest level becomes a decoy for the latent level. Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the latent level may be disguised by the manifest level. The latent level may, of course, never be revealed – just as a spy may never be detected – but it remains the primary horizon of operations. (…) Camouflage can therefore be read as an interface with the world. It operates as a masquerade that re-presents the self, just as self-representation through make-up, dress, hairstyle, and so on, is a form of self-re-presentation. But this need not be a temporary condition. The surface masquerade may have a lasting impact on questions of identity. Far from denying any true sense of self beneath, it may actually contribute to a sense of self. Camouflage should therefore be seen as a mechanism for constituting human identity through the medium of representation.8

Bernd Hüppauf, Camouflage and Mimesis. The Frog between the Devil’s Deceptions. Evolutionary Biology, and the Ecological Animal, in Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie, 23, 1, 2014, p. 132-155. 2 Donald Kunze, The Art 3 Idea. A Third Way to Study Art, 2000, passim. 3 Urte U. Frömming, Mimesis und Camouflage. Die Arbeiten von Desiree Palmen im Kontext der Visuellen Anthropologie, in Mimesen. Ilinx-Berliner Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft, 2, 2011, (http://www. 1

desireepalmen.nl/publications/froemming.pdf ); see also Gioia Mori, Narciso, in Lo specchio e il doppio. Dallo stagno di Narciso allo schermo televisivo, (exh. cat.), eds. Giulio Macchi & Maria Vitale, Milan, 1987, p. 112-129; Susan Fischman, ‘Like the Sound of His Own Voice’. Gender, Audition, and Echo in Alastor, in Keats-Shelley Journal, 43, 1994, p. 141-169; see also James Clifton, The Voice Remains. Joo Yeon Park’s Mirror Writing Love and Other Works, in Joo Yeon Park. Echo of Echo, (exh. cat.), Seoul, 2013.

camouflage 4 Frömming, Mimesis und Camouflage, p. 226-227. 5 Ibid., p. 229. 6 See also: John Onians, Abstraction and Imagination in Late Antiquity, in Art History, 3, 1980, p. 1-23, p. 8; Paul Vandenbroeck, Matrix Marmorea. De subsymbolische iconografie van de scheppende energieën in Europa en Noord-Afrika, in Materie & Beeld, eds. Lut Pil & Trees De Mits, Ghent, 2010, p. 51-78. 7 Diaphanos has a very deep and rich semantic genealogy. Aristotle (285-322 bc) calls diaphanos the portal between humankind and the world; Terrell Ward Bynum, A New Look at Aristotle’s Theory of Perception, in History of Philosophy Quarterly, 4, 2, 1987, p. 163-178; Anca Vasiliu, Du

55

Diaphane. Image, milieu, lumière dans la pensée antique et médiévale, Paris, 1997, p. 277-300. Of course, the diaphanous has also a very intense paradigmatic energy when it comes to visual hermeneutics, which would bring me too far off topic; Francesca Dell’Acqua Boyvadaoğlu, Between Nature and Artifice. ‘Transparent Streams of New Liquid’, in RES. Anthropology and Aesthetics, 53/54, 2008, p. 93-103; Emmanuel Alloa, Das durchscheinende Bild. Konturen einer medialen Phänomenologie, Zürich, 2011; Victor I. Stoichita, Maria Portmann & Dominic-Alain Boariu (eds.), Le corps transparent, Rome, 2013. 8 Neil Leach, Camouflage, New York, 2006, p. 246-247.

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capricious

Fig. 22. Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), The Birth of Venus, ca. 1486. Florence, Uffizi

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Capricious → Wind brings together and blows apart, it flows onward and changes direction; in a word, → wind is dynamic, capricious, unpredictable. And due to this unpredictability, it embodies an exceptional hermeneutics of association, freedom and the unexpected. But is an iconology of such quintessential capriciousness at all imaginable? Is it in any way possible to capture pictorially a natural phenomenon that surrounds and pervades us, that penetrates into and escapes from our own → bodies? How has the → wind impacted on the tradition of the image? Is there evidence of a visual pneuma? And how, then, does this ‘airiness’ manifest itself in the visual arts: through content or form? One brief period in the history of art – restricted in time to a single generation – celebrates all the virtuoso aspects of the pictorial representation of the → wind in most exuberant fashion, with upswept costumes, swaying trees and fluttering → hair. We refer to the Quattrocento generation of Sandro Botticelli, Filippo Lippi (1406-1465) and Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1549).1 In his article Bewegende Bewegungen, Georges Didi-Huberman explores in greater depth Aby Warburg’s 1893 interpretation of this artistic expression on the basis of Botticelli’s Venus (ca.  1486) (fig.  22) and Primavera (ca. 1482-1485) (fig.  23).2 Aby Warburg was fascinated with the ‘living motion’ at the edges of the → body. He speaks of an eingehende Ausmalung des bewegten Beiwerks.3 Nachdem er Botticellis Venus betrachtet hatte und – wie jeder – deren blasse Blöße, deren schöne Gesichtszüge und deren große Ruhe bewundert hatte, verschob er leicht den Blick: auf das flüssige Auseinanderfallen der Haare im Wind, auf den → Zwischenraum der Luft, auf die einladende Wölbung des blumenbestickten Tuchs, das der jungen Göttin dargebracht wird. In eben jenen Bewegungsformeln, in jenen fließenden Gestalten erkannte er, fraglos, das grundsätzliche Pathos des Bildes.4 The notion that most fittingly captures this pictorial effect of the ‘moving accessory’ is the parergon: the shifting, apparently secondary → detail. The moving accessory unfocuses the → gaze and in the near impossible undertaking of trying so scrupulously to follow so much dynamism, so many → folds – so much → wind – there arises a capricious way of looking that impregnates the subject anew, much as the → wind Zephyr impregnated Flora.5 The embodiment of this → Pathosformel and capricious way of looking in the Florentine Quattrocento was Warburg’s pièce de résistance: the dancing → nymph. The → nymph is the Markenzeichen of the maniera antica; she is its keystone in the context of ekphrasis.6

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capricious

Fig. 23. Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), Primavera, ca. 1482-1485. Florence, Uffizi

David Summers, ‘ARIA II’. The Union of Image and Artist as an Aesthetic Ideal in Renaissance Art, in Artibus et Historiae, 10, 20, 1989, p. 15-31. 2 Aby M. Warburg, Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Geschichte der europäischen Renaissance, (Gesammelte Schriften, I 1.2), eds. Horst Bredekamp & Michael Diers, Berlin, 1998: Sandro Botticellis Geburt der Venus und Frühling. Eine Untersuchung über die Vorstellungen von der Antike in der italienischen Frührenaissance (1893). 3 Warburg, Sandro Botticellis Geburt der Venus und Frühling, p. 10. 1

4 Georges Didi-Huberman, Bewegende Bewegungen. Die Schleier der Ninfa nach Aby Warburg, in Ikonologie des Zwischenraums. Der Schleier als Medium und Metapher, eds. Johannes Endres, Barbara Wittmann & Gerhard Wolf, Munich, 2005, p. 331-360, p. 331. 5 On looking as a meaning-activating, performative act, see: Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts, Berlin, 2010. 6 Didi-Huberman, Bewegende Bewegungen, p. 343.

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Chaos For Aby Warburg, the conflict between the dramatic, chaotic image and the mild, loving image is a personal truth.1 To him, images are a threat as well as an embrace. In every image, there is also → death. “In other words, Warburg’s aptitude for the astra (concepts) always brought him in proximity to the monstra (chaos).”2 Formen des sich Verlierens in d[as] Bild. I – Verharren bei dem Gefühl des Überbewältigtwerdens durch die Vielheit der Dinge, he writes.3 Warburg felt mentally and academically torn between these poles and could think of no other way to dress this gaping wound than through an Aufklärungsversuch in his inner dualistic and cosmogonic struggle.4 Aby Warburg writes about this cultural-schizophrenic oscillation: Urprägewerk in der Ausdruckswelt tragischer Ergriffenheit; → Pathosformeln sind ‘Dynamogramme’. His desire to bring order to chaos gave rise to an Ikonologie des → Zwischenraums : the space where the energy shoots between the polarities of the → Pathosformeln (Aby Warburg: Das Problem liegt in der Mitte).5 This brings him towards the idea of Distanzierung. In one of his notebooks from 1901, the so-called → Fragmente, Warburg writes about the power of the image: Du lebst und thust mir nichts – Ahnung von der Entfernung – Distanzierung. (“You live and do me no harm – Presentiment of distance – Distantiation as basic principle”). “This Grundprinzip prescribes that he remains both near and distant from the perilous phenomena.”6

See Barbara Baert, Nymph. Motif, Phantom, Affect. A Contribution to the Study of Aby Warburg (1866-1929), (Studies in Iconology, 1), Louvain – Walpole MA, 2014, passim. 2 Georges Didi-Huberman, Warburg’s Haunted House, in Common Knowledge, 18, 1, 2012, p. 50-78, p. 50; Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, transl. Graham Burchell & Hugh Tomlinson, New York, 1991, p. 20: “It is as if one were casting a → net, but the fisherman always risks being swept away and finding himself in the open → sea.” 1

3

Warburg Institute Archive (WIA) III 43.1.2.1, TS of MS 43.1.1 Grundlegende Bruchstücke zu einer pragmatischen Ausdruckskunde (Monistischen Kunstpsychologie), 1888-1895, 1901, [§137]; my special thanks to colleague Prof. Dr. Joacim Sprung (Lund University, Sweden). 4 Georges Didi-Huberman, Science avec patience, in Images Re-vues (online), 4, 1, 2013, p. 1-29, p. 8. 5 Marianne Koos, et al. (eds.), Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne. Begleitmaterial zur Ausstellung im Hamburger Kunsthaus. 63 Bild- und

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chaos

Texttafeln, Hamburg – Munich, 1994, Tafel 32/32b. 6 Christopher Johnson, Metaphors, Memory and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images, Ithaca NY, 2012, p. 28; Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography,

London, 1986, p. 71: “The deeper power in contradictions and in the subtle challenge that images could pose to the viewer’s own detachment. You live yet you do me no harm.”

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Chrysalis A contemporary of Aby Warburg, the famous French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre (1823-1915) wrote the following about the → butterfly’s cycle of larva to → nymph to imago: Au sortir de l’œuf, ils ont une forme provisoire qu’ils doivent remplacer plus tard par une autre. Ils naissent en quelque sorte deux fois: d’abord imparfaits, lourds, voraces, laids; puis parfaits, agiles, sobres, et souvent d’une richesse, d’une élégance admirables.1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) also wrote a study on the → butterfly’s transformation process.2 There was historian and romantic Jules Michelet (1798-1874) who focused on perhaps the most mysterious part of the → butterfly: the cocoon.3 Ouvrez la nymphe peu après qu’elle a filé; dans son linceul vous ne trouverez qu’une sorte de fluide laiteux, où rien n’apparaît, à peine de douteux linéaments qu’on voit ou que l’on croit voir. (...) Elle sent une force en elle, et une raison d’être, une cause de vivre encore, causa vivendi. (...) Fabre adds: C’est mort, et ce n’est pas mort; c’est, si l’on veut, mort partielle.4

Georges Didi-Huberman, Phalènes. Essais sur l’apparition, 2, Paris, 2013, p. 22. 2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Entomologischen Studien, (1796), in Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, I, 24, eds. Dieter Borchmeyer, et al., Frankfurt am Main, 1987, p. 314-340. 1

Jules Michelet, L’insecte, I: La métamorphose, (1857), Tours, 2004, p. 109-122. 4 Jean-Henri Fabre, Récits sur les insectes, les animaux et les choses de l’agriculture, 1862-1879, ed. Yves Delange, Arles, 2002, p. 48-49. 3

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chthonic art

Fig. 24. Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), Couples, 2007, gouache. Collection unknown

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Chthonic art The psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe introduced the notion of chthonic art in the context of a study into the oeuvre of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) (fig.  24). Chthonic is derived from a classical Greek term meaning ‘belonging to the earth’.1 He argues that this should not be interpreted metaphorically, but rather ‘phorically’, i.e. as ‘bearing’, as ‘carrying’, as a first and necessary step in a confrontation with what is deemed ‘unimaginable’ within the Real. A processing of the unimaginable makes it bearable, prepares signification, so that it becomes bearable. (…) It tries to shape the unutterable. (…) Chthonic art differs from and contrasts with oedipal art, which in one way or another always involves a sexual genital processing of this originally undifferentiated and terrifying force. The oedipal development is the final phase of this process, as it channels and socialises eros and thanatos (…). Sigmund Freud calls this mourning process Trauerarbeit, and equates it to analytical Arbeit, the work performed in psychoanalysis.2 In both cases, the identity of the person may be deconstructed by destroying the identification layers that form the ego. Either through the mourning process that removes the deceased from the identity of the person mourning, or through analysis, whereby free association pulverises identity as such. Thus, in chthonic art, one undergoes a deconstruction and subsequently a reconstruction whereby the → making process serves as an aid.3

These ‘chthonic’ hermeneutics of artistic expression (Trauerarbeit) between oppression and expansive energy come close to what Sofie van Loo wrote in her book Gorge(l): The term ‘insight’ is actually misleading: an insight is rather a sort of seeing-in-between, a seeing by feeling. The in-sight occurs in the margin of the visual field. An insight does not come naked. It presupposes a skin, multilayeredness, a covering. One cannot point to it directly in the work of art, nor can one focus on it. Something shows itself, becomes visible, withdraws, but between these two or more realms a link has been made possible. This borderlinking of the insight requiring (escape) potential of the artwork lends it a peculiar intensity. Precisely the encounter with the intensity created may be experienced as a hovering between oppression and relief.4

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chthonic art

Perhaps it’s an attempt by all things to leave their mark, to make it harder for them to be denied or glossed over or forgotten, it’s their way of saying ‘I was here’, or ‘I’m still here, therefore I must have been before’, and to prevent others from saying ‘No, this was never here, never, it neither strode the world nor trod the earth, it did not exist and never happened’. Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow, 1: Fever and Spear, Vintage 2006, English translation by Margaret Jull Costa, 2005, p. 139 (first published in Spain as Tu rostro mañana, 1 Fiebre y lanza, 2002).

Paul Verhaeghe, Louise Bourgeois. Chtonische kunst of de weg naar het Reële en Terug, in For Your Pleasure? Psychoanalyse over esthetisch genot, eds. Marc De Kesel, Sjef Houppermans & Mark Kinet, Antwerp, 2013, p. 69-90, p. 78. 2 George Hagman, Beyond Decathexis. Towards a New Psychoanalytic Understanding and Treatment of Mourning, in Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss, ed. Robert A. Neimeyer, Washington DC, 2001, p. 13-31. 3 Verhaeghe, Louise Bourgeois, p. 74. 4 Readers can learn more about this in my About Stains or the Image as Residue, (Studies in Iconology, 10), Louvain – Walpole MA, 2017, p. 57. Sofie van Loo, Gorge(l). Oppression and Relief in Art, Antwerp, 2007, p. 37. The author is acquainted with the → matrixial borderlinking psychoanalysis and art theory of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. The → matrixial space is a space that may be characterized first and foremost as containing an energy or potentiality that has ‘not yet’ manifested itself at the phallic level, only at the feminine, internal, uterine level. So called in-sight is located in a liminal zone where transfer between the 1

‘I’ and the ‘Other’ are able to originate; it is a locus of a certain transformational potentiality. This conception could be said to correlate to, or be a concrete and culture-specific expression of, what was psychoanalytically (or, even better: from the perspective of a correction on classical, orthodox Lacanian psychoanalysis) identified as ‘ → matrixial borderspace’, a transsubjective psychic sphere, that can be grasped according to the model of the maternal womb ( → matrix) and its co-emergence-in-differentiation (fusion nor separation) of an I and an uncognized non-I, and their ‘borderlinking’ as a nonfusional transmission, connectivity. In the → matrixial perspective, frontiers become co-poietically transgressive and limits become thresholds. A → matrixial borderspace is as such a mutating co-poietic → net with a co-poietic transformational potentiality, where co-creativity (‘metramorphosis’) might occur. As such it equally entails a particular mode of meaning and knowledge production, and is able to describe certain aspects of human symbolic experience; Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, Minneapolis MN, 2006, passim.

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Corner In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) writes the following about the corner: Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house.1 The corner becomes a negation of the Universe. It is a curve as shelter.2 Why is it worse for us to say that an angle is cold and a curve warm? That the curve welcomes us and the over sharp angle rejects us? That the angle is masculine and the curve feminine? A modicum of quality changes everything. The grace of a curve is an invitation to remain. We cannot break away from it without hoping to return. For the beloved curve has → nest-like powers; it incites us to possession, it is a curved ‘corner’, inhabited geometry. Here we have attained a minimum of refuge, in the highly simplified pattern of a daydream of repose. But only the dreamer who curls up in contemplation of loops understands these simple joys of delineated repose.3

The corner (of a field, of an architectural space) has anciently been a focus of magical and ‘implosive’ forces, precisely because it is the joining of two sides. This intersection is both connection and separation, comparable to the magic of the → knot.4 This ambiguity charges the corners of the house, of the field with magical energies: Die Eck ist als äusserste Grenze des Ackers oder Hauses, als Schlupfwinkel von Dämonen, ein gefährdeter und für Zauber geeigneter Ort. Die vier Ecken bedeuten z.B. bei der Besitzergreifung ‘das ganze Gebiet’.5 In folk beliefs, household spirits, demons and energies inhabit the corners. This is where sacrifices should be buried and this is where the broom should sweep the most. This ‘nervousness’ of the corners of the room finds expression in popular sayings: to turn the corner (to pass a critical point in a process); to be set in a corner (punishment); or in Dutch to come out of the corner (to appear), to go around the corner (to die) and even a ‘dead corner’ (a blind spot). Because the corner forms the borderline of the space and at the same time comprises an end and a beginning, in short a hinge within the house, it is also the place of Janus, the god of the beginning of the new and of the end of the old.

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corner

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, transl. Maria Jolas, et al., New York, 2014, p. 155. With thanks to Dr. Jack Hartnell, Harvard University, for pointing me towards this reference. 2 Ibid., p. 156. 3 Ibid., p. 166. 4 Ulrike Zischka, Zur sakralen und profanen Anwendung des Knotenmotivs als magisches Mittel, Symbol oder Dekor. Eine vergleichende volkskundliche Untersuchung,

1

5

(Tuduv-Studien, Reihe Kulturwissenschaften, 7), Munich, 1977, passim; Tim Ingold, Bauen Knoten Verbinden, in Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, 6, 1, 2015, p. 81-100. A. Weiser, art. Ecke, in Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 2, ed. Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli, Berlin, 1929, cols. 544550, col. 544.

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Dance In all cultures the performative character of dance is charged with a connection to celebration, to giving thanks, or to reconciliation with the gods, but also with a connection to excess and the enormity of the trance.1 Even in Christianity, dance has always retained its ambiguity. On the one hand, it is preserved as a psalmodic medium of praise. In the Proto-evangelion of James (ca. 150) Mary dances in the Temple, and Athanasius of Alexandria (295-273) calls dance the soul’s means of rising to God.2 But dance can also be diabolical, expansive and – according to the Church – dangerous.3 In spite of notions like these, dance nevertheless continued to be an ineradicable component of liturgical and other popular religious celebrations – including those concerning John the Baptist.4 In the narrative context of John the Baptist’s → beheading (Mark 6:14-29), dance also becomes a perversion, and the close relationship between dance and the sacral is diverted toward horror and excess. This passage in Mark shows the rising tension and the trophy – → death itself – to which dance can lead. This ambiguity with respect to dance constitutes its very strength, and is emphatically expressed in the advice of Gregory of Nazianzus (329-389): dance not like the daughter of Herodias, but like David.5 The arch or the ‘bridging’ is a recurrent position of the → body in spastic episodes as documented in the Middle Ages in the therapeutic dance of the tarantella (fig. 25).6 This therapeutic dancing is connected to Saint John. John was invoked against epilepsy, cramps, fear of heights and choreomania, a mental illness related to tarantism (known as St John’s Dance or Johanneskrankheit).7 According to popular belief epilepsy began with “lightning striking the eyes.”8 On the eve of the feast of the Nativity of St John, June 24, it was customary to plait crowns of crosses (from laurel, for example) and place them on the → head or → body while dancing around St John’s fire. Upon casting the wreaths into the fire one would ask protection against epilepsy, among other things: “Depart, you misery, and burn with this cross.”9 The earliest mention of such St John’s dancers goes back to the year 1021. The phenomenon gained in strength from the fourteenth century onward and was extinguished by the seventeenth century. There were ‘epidemics’ of ecstatic dancing. Some see the original link between John and dance in Luke 1:41-42: “When Elizabeth → heard Mary’s greetings, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the

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dance

Fig. 25. Banquet and Salome’s Dance, festal missal for Johannes de Marchello, abbot of the Premonstratensian abbey of St. Jean-sur-la-Celle, Amiens, Garnerus de Morolio (scribe), Petrus de Raimbaucourt (illuminator), 1323. The Hague, National Library of the Netherlands, Ms 78 D 40

dance

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Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb’.”10 In fact, saltasset, from saltare, is also related to the Latin saltus: to jump. Thus the therapeutic dance on John’s dies natalis also recalls the foetus in the womb that leapt to the sound of a voice.

Louis Debarge, De la danse sacrée aux liturgies dansantes, in Mélanges de science religieuse, 49, 3-4, 1992, p. 143-161. 2 Claudine Gauthier, Saint Jean et Salomé. Anthropologie du banquet d’Hérode, Tours, 2008, p. 131. 3 Eugène L. Backman, Religious Dances in the Christian Church and in Popular Medicine, London, 1952. 4 Justus F.C. Hecker, La danzimania. Malattia popolare nel Medioevo, transl. Valentino Fassetta, Florence, 1838. 5 Ruth Webb, Salomé’s Sisters. The Rhetoric and Realities of Dance in Late Antiquity and Byzantium, in Women, Men and Eunuchs. Gender in Byzantium, ed. Elizabeth James, London, 1997, p. 119-148, p. 135; Contra Julianum, 2, Patrologia Graeca 35, col. 709c. 6 Paul Vandenbroeck, De kleuren van de geest. Dans en Trance in Afro-Europese tradities, Antwerp, 1997, p. 85-97. Tarantism is derived from tarant(ol)a, a name given to a spider in Italy and Spain. According to popular belief, the mysterious malady was caused by a spider bite. In the four-

1

teenth century, a treatise on different types of poison, Sertum papale de veneris, explained that the ‘tarantulated’ suffered from an extreme form of → melancholy and could find solace in sounds and tones, colors and dance. 7 According to the medieval legends, Herod and Herodias were punished with the disease of epilepsy; Maurits Smeyers, Sint-Jan-in-disco, in Schatten der Armen. Het artistiek en historisch bezit van het O.C.M.W.-Leuven, ed. Hubert Gysembergs, Louvain, 1988, p. 144-147; Léon van Liebergen & Gerard Rooijakkers (eds.), Volksdevotie. Beelden van religieuze volkscultuur in Noord-Brabant, Uden, 1990, p. 151; Jan Erftemeijer, Middeleeuwse Johannesschotels in Nederland, in Antiek, 19, 1984, p. 241-253. 8 Backman, Religious Dances in the Christian Church and in Popular Medicine, p. 264. 9 Ibid., p. 273. 10 Denis Hüe, Le Baptiste et Marie. Images et résonances, in Jean-Baptiste le précurseur au Moyen Âge. Actes du 26e colloque du CUER MA, Aix-en-Provence, 2002, p. 111-130.

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death

Fig. 26. The monumental cemetry of the Hertz family in Hamburg (Friedhof Ohlsdorfer) where Aby Warburg (1866-1929) was buried in 1929

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Death “In every image, there is also death.” (Aby Warburg) Denn sein [Warburgs] Blick ruhte nicht in erster Linie auf den Werken der Kunst, sondern er fühlte und sah hinter den Werken die großen gestaltenden Energien. Und diese Energien waren ihm selbst nichts anderes, als die ewigen Ausdrucksformen menschlichen Seins, menschlicher Leidenschaft und menschlichen Schicksals. So wurde alle bildende Gestaltung, wo immer sie sich regte, ihm lesbar als eine einzige Sprache, in deren Struktur er mehr und mehr einzudringen und deren Gesetze er sich zu enträtseln suchte. (…) Sein Blick haftete nicht am Einzelwerk als solchen, weder an der Form der Darstellung, noch am Inhalt des Dargestellten, sondern er drang durch bis zu Jenen energetischen Spannungen, die im Werk ihren Ausdruck und ihre Entladung gefunden hatten. Diese Spannungen waren es, die er immer wieder aufzuspüren wußte, in wie vielfältige Formen sie sich auch verstecken mochten, und die er mit einer wahrhaft visionären Sicherheit durch die Jahrhunderte verfolgte.

Ernst Cassirer (1974-1945) delivering his eulogy for Aby Warburg. The entombment is in the Hertz family grave at the Ohlsdorfer Friedhof in Hamburg (fig.  26).1 Before his death, Aby Warburg had warned his friend against das Klopfen auf der andern Seite des Tunnels.2

1

Ernst Cassirer, Worte zum Beisetzung von prof. dr. Aby Warburg, in Mnemosyne. Beiträge zum 50. Todestag von Aby M. Warburg, ed. Stephan Fussel, Göttingen, 1979, p. 15-22, p. 17.

2 Maurizio Ghelardi, Aby Warburg e Franz Boll. Un’amicizia stellare, in Aby Warburg e le metamorfosi degli antichi dèi, ed. Marco Bertozzi, Modena, 2002, p. 141-151.

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démon de midi/zenith

Fig. 27. Dancing Maenade, drawing after attic frieze. Paris, Musée du Louvre

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Démon de midi/zenith Since archaic Greece, noon has been a sacred hour; more than just a special moment in the day.1 It is the hour in which Pan, the sirens and the → nymphs appear and send their affects unto man. According to ancient beliefs of the Homeric time, the day consists of morning, midday and night. Considering the time was calculated by a gnomon instrument – a stick placed upright in the ground that measures → shadows – only one hour of the day could be determined without a doubt: the moment with the least amount of → shadow. This determination made midday an anchor point. In Rome, people spoke of ante meridiem, meridies and post meridiem. The hour in the middle mirrors the zenith of the sun. The sun positions itself in the middle of the sky. It is also the hottest moment of the day. The heat is ‘oppressive’ atmospherically. It is the hour of meridiare: holding a siesta. Because of all these traits, noon received a mythological and religious meaning. Firstly, noon is the cusp between the rising sun when the light grows stronger, and the moment the sun starts to descend from the sky and the light starts to diminish. This moment splits the day in two and is thus dedicated to the gods of both the heavens and the underworld. It is only during this moment that the shift between going up and going down can take place, between the heavens and the chthonic world. It is the hour that breaks open hierophanically. In the tear of the afternoon, apparitions take place. In ancient Rome, only noon was announced. In the city, no important meetings would take place after noon, let alone signing contracts. Noon also carries the sign of the scales, when the day is split into two perfectly even parts. The spatial counterpart of noon forms the idea of the → navel of the world, and in houses is located in the space just below the center of the roof. Secondly, noon is the hour with the least amount of → shadow. For the ancients, → shadow was a substance of ‘seed’, but also the medium of the soul.2 Souls need → shadows to travel and to show themselves. The → shadows are pregnant. When these vanish due to natural causes, the soul is not magically filtered away. According to the Greeks this is the time and place of the askia. The askia time and place are dangerous for humans: they can lose their own soul as well. The → shadow zone is also the zone of the dead and the resting place for the underworld. This explains a second ‘rupture’ in the midday hour.

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In the shadowless → interruptus, humans can slip away (or be sucked away) to another dimension, another world. The midday hour even stimulates dangerous desires in humans. They form a demonic danger. Sirens and → nymphs are the symbols of choice to portray the dangerous desires and temptations of the zenith (fig. 27).3 Pan and his → nymphs appear from the rupture of the midday hour. The sun factually becomes immobile for a moment, causing an astronomical → silence and a → sleep that is brought on and bewitched by the → dance of the → nymph, according to the polarized philosophy. This immobility of the cosmos gives off a heavy heat, a sense of depression, and is narcoleptic in nature. Socrates (ca. 469-399 bc) described a feeling of being filled with something powerful, an influx.4 There are poets that were blinded by the démon de midi. Nowadays in Cretes, people still believe that this hour of the day can harm men if they fall asleep near a spring or in a tree. They will wake up in a chronic state of madness. Children are not allowed outside during that time of day. Aspects of these → archetypes and the way they live on in folk beliefs are tightly interwoven with the concept of the → acedia or the → melancholy. In her Les chambres de l’esprit, Anne Larue wrote an essay about these ‘infections of the soul’ that used ‘→ sleeping’ as a religious, philosophical and pathological medium.5 → Acedia, from the Latin acedia (also: accidie, accedie) derived from the Greek ἀκηδία, which means neglect, is a term that describes a general sense of apathy of even the pathology of torpor.6 This form of apathy and the decrease in responsiveness can result in a mode of → sleep or even a comatose state. → Acedia was described by the first Church Fathers as a real and negative condition, which the desert anchorites were especially sensitive to. Le temps est immobile. Le moine pratique un travail manuel monotone, répétitif. Dans sa tête, les litanies en boucle. Une seule attente, la mort. (Il reste qu’une malédiction mélancolique, hantise inguérissable. L’acedia est le compromis qui résulte de ce deuil refusé. On s’ingénie à étouffer les voix intérieures, les voix de mémoire qui voudraient oser voir la souffrance en face et mesurer avec désolation l’ampleur de la perte. L’acedia naît de cette plaie maintenue ouverte, de cette douleur insurmontée.7

And Giorgio Agamben writes: Toutes les Vitae patrum retentissent du cri des moines et des anachorètes confrontés par la solitude à la monstruosité et à la prolifération de

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l’imagination galopante.8 The Byzantine Greeks call → acedia a sin, λογισμοί (logismoi), which in Latin patristics becomes cogitationes vitiosae (unsound thoughts).9 John Cassian (360/70-435) says that → acedia has two faces: anxietas cordis (instabilitas) and taedium cordis (torpor of the soul, the soul insolently falls asleep).10 In the edifying literature by Gregory the Great (ca. 540-604) → acedia was equated with ‘sloth’ and even declared as one of the seven cardinal sins.11 Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) incorrectly saw the etymology of → acedia as a combination between cadere (falling) and acidus (sour).12 Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) also chooses an affliction of tristitia, however, this sadness can harden into harmful sin if it makes religious men turn away from God (fuga, flight). After all, those affected by → acedia could lose themselves in an excess of unsound imaginations. Hildegard of Bingen (1089-1179) has an exceptionally sharp view on the subject from a → gendered standpoint.13 The abbess sees those who suffer from → acedia as typical male sadists, who suffer from sexual delusions and are perverse and deadly to their surroundings, like wolves.14 Moreover: during his carnal lusts, the sufferer from → acedia presents a physical danger to women. In the Hebrew folkloric-religious tradition, there is a sexed → acedia demon: Qètèb.15 It is thus not surprising that this demon appears during the zenith. According to Hebrew tradition, this demon disguises itself in a ball of animal fur with wings that unexpectedly rolls in front of its victim’s feet. Qètèb makes its prey stumble so that it falls flat on its → face in the dirt, which forms a chthonic connotation. In Jewish and Christian beliefs, the noonday demon is the worst and most powerful.16 His impact is both mentally and physically overwhelming and is affixed to the temperature and atmosphere of ‘the oppressive heat’. Evagrius Ponticus (345-399) is even very concrete about these effects or affects.17 The noonday demon, according to his own experience, can attack monks as early as ten in the morning and starts to wane from two in the afternoon on.18 Thankfully this threat from the underworld is limited in time. The monk shall wait calmly in his cell until this form of threat and possession has passed.

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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; Roger Caillois, Les spectres de midi dans la démonologie slave. Interprétation des faits, in Revue des Études slaves, 16, 1-2, 1936, p. 18-37; 17, 1-2, 1937, p. 81-92; See also: Karl Haberland, Die Mittagsstunde als Geisterstunde, in Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, 13, 1882, p. 288-327; William H. Worell, The Demon Noonday and Some Related Ideas, in Journal of the American Oriental Society, 38, 1918, p. 160-166; Joseph E. Gillet, Mediodia y el demonio meridiano en España, in Nueva Revista de Filologia hispanica, 7, 1953, p. 298-319; Reinhard Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide. Ennui in Western Literature, Princeton NJ, 1976; Nicolas J. Perella, Midday in Italian Literature. Variations on an Archetypal Theme, Princeton NJ, 1979; Philippe Ménard, L’heure de la méridienne dans la littérature médiévale, in Convergences médiévales. Épopée, lyrique, roman. Mélanges offerts à Madeleine Tyssens, Brussels, 2001, p. 327-338. 2 In Semitic traditions, → shadow is a symbol of fertility. It is also a feminine aspect, as opposed to the male aspect of light. In the Indo-European languages → shadow – such as the → shadow (of the Holy Spirit) in the biblical source that slides across Mary’s → body, impregnating her – has three semantic fields: (1) fine material, fine dust, such as pollen of flowers and trees; (2) vegetative growth in the forest; (3) and finally → wind itself. The first relates to the conviction that dark → shadow consists of matter (in the way that light is also supposed to be matter). → Shadow is thus a substance, something material and immaterial, like → odor. The relationship between dust and pollen connects → shadow and 1

3 4 5 6

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8

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flowers – in this case the lily – as ‘impregnators’. Vegetative growth in the forest evokes the dark place as a fertility symbol, as a feminine principle. → Wind is related to → shadow thanks to its mobility; → wind brings forth → shadows. → Shadow and → wind were seen as equally phantom-like phenomena among indigenous peoples in the Americas, who cultivated a highly developed, animistic vision of countless → wind spirits; Annick de Souzenelle, Le symbolisme du corps humain, Paris, 1991, p. 377-378. Everything below: Caillois, Les démons de midi, 48, 1, 1937, p. 54-81. Ibid., 48, 1, 1937, p. 71. Anne Larue, Les chambres de l’esprit. Acedia, ou l’autre mélancolie, Paris, 2001. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of the Christian Church defines → acedia (or accidie) as “a state of restlessness and inability either to work or to pray.” Torpor is also a term for hypothermia in animals, where they go into hibernation to survive the winter: http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Torpor. Lucien Regnault, La vie quotidienne des Pères du désert en Égypte au IVe siècle, Paris, 1990, p. 125-126. See also: Jean Daniélou, Les démons de l’air dans la Vie d’Antoine, in Studia Anselmiana, 38, 1956, p. 136-147. Giorgio Agamben, Stanze. Parole et fantasme dans la culture occidentale, transl. Yves Hersant, Paris, 1994, p. 30; Larue, Les chambres de l’esprit, p. 17. Gustave Bardy, Acedia, in Dictionnaire de spiritualité acétique et mystique, ed. Marcel Viller, Paris, 1931, part 1; Julien Gracq, En lisant, en écrivant, Paris, 1981, p. 203. Larue, Les chambres de l’esprit, p. 33; John Cassian, The Institutes, ed. & transl. Boniface Ramsey, New York, 2000: 10:2; Quoted in Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve. How the World Became Modern, New York, 2011, p. 26; Jean-Louis

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11 12

13 14

15

Chrétien, L’acédie de saint Jean Cassien à Simone Weil, in De la fatigue, ed. JeanLouis Chrétien, Paris, 1996. Larue, Les chambres de l’esprit, p. 32. Albertus Magnus, Summa teologica, II; Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth, Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature, Chapel Hill NC, 1967, p. 54. Larue, Les chambres de l’esprit, p. 42. Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky & Fritz Saxl, Saturne et la mélancolie, Paris, 1994, p. 190; Hubertus Tellenbach, La mélancolie, Paris, 1979, p. 123. See Psalm 90 (91), 6; Larue, Les chambres de l’esprit, p. 13; Simon Landersdorfer,

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Das daemonium meridianum (Ps. 91,6), in Biblische Zeitschrift, 18, 1929, p. 294-300; Jean de Fraine, Le démon du midi (Ps. 91 (6)), in Biblica, 40, 1959, p. 372-383. 16 Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth, p. 4; Rudolph Arbesmann, The Daemonium Meridianum and the Greek and Latin Patristic Exegesis, in Traditio, 14, 1958, p. 17-31. 17 Larue, Les chambres de l’esprit, p. 32. 18 Gabriel Bunge, Akèdia. La doctrine spirituelle d’Évagre le Pontique sur l’acédie, Cologne, 1983; See also: Sophia M. Jacamon, Saint Nil Sorsky (1433-1508). La vie, les écrits, le skite d’un starets de trans-Volga, Bellefontaine, 1980.

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Désir mimétique René Girard writes: Bien sûr, tous les types de sexualité peuvent surgir dans un contexte de rivalité mimétique, comme toutes les problématiques sociales d’ailleurs, mais ce qui nous intéresse ce sont les configurations mimétiques qui restent les mêmes, mis à part leur contenu spécifique.1

1

René Girard, Géometries du désir, Paris, 2011, p. 46-47.

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detail

Fig. 28. Filippo Lippi (1406-1469), Annunciation, detail, ca. 1440. New York, Frick Collection

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Detail In Le détail, the French art historian Daniel Arasse (1944-2003) draws the reader’s attention to a painting of the → Annunciation by Filippo Lippi in which the buttonhole at Mary’s → navel is rendered without a corresponding button (fig. 28).1 The minuscule opening is barely discernible to the naked eye. As with the other barely visible details that Arasse discusses in his book, and which he invariably interprets as expressions of the enigmatic and intimate connection between the painter and his art, he argues that the missing button could have a symbolic significance. The small slit, at the same horizontal as the dove, the impregnator of the flesh by the word, could be seen as subtly suggestive of the → navel as a paradoxically closed opening. It is virginal, as the iconography demands, yet sensual and erotic, as painting requires. Some critics recognize in the model the features of Lucrezia Buti (1433/34-after 1504), a nun from a convent in Prato, the Tuscan town where Mary’s cintula, or waistband, was kept as a relic. This band, with its → knot across the → navel, is a traditional symbol of the ‘tying’ and ‘untying’ of fertility.2 As a sunken detail it serves as a visible invisibility in Lippi’s pictorial universe. As Arasse puts it: “the longing of the painter lies contained in the actual painting.”3

Daniel Arasse, Le détail. Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture, Paris, 1996, p. 338. 2 On the relationship between waistband and → knot, as well as its magical implications, see also: Ulrike Zischka, Zur sakralen und profanen Anwendung des Knotenmotivs als magisches Mittel, Symbol oder Dekor. Eine vergleichende volkskundliche Untersuchung, (Tuduv-Studien,

1

3

Reihe Kulturwissenschaften, 7), Munich, 1977; Douglas Q. Adams, art. Knot, in Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, eds. Douglas Q. Adams & James P. Mallory, London, 1997, p. 336. Le désir du peintre dans la peinture même; Arasse, Le détail, p. 340: ombril-oeil, oeil caché dans le corps de la peinture. This is a variant of the → Narcissus paradigm.

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Ear/hearing Annick de Souzenelle indicates that in the Semitic thought-world the ear, due to its similarity of shape, was regarded as a pars pro toto for the embryo. But there is another reason for this particular analogy: Dans le ventre de la mère, l’enfant n’est qu’une grande oreille, il reçoit l’information totale du monde des archètypes dans lequel il baigne, ainsi que les sons, qui lui parviennent du monde maternel. Il entend, enregistre, mais ne le sait pas encore.1 The foetus is, as it were, an ‘ear’ in the womb (one that actually ‘hears’). Here too the → ruach → archetype is relevant. For the foetus is the bearer of a → breath that ‘calls’ by name, and by that calling and that name the foetus lives. The heart beats to (be able to) hear, and hearing it will go on to see. L’homme devient alors la grande oreille qui entend son NOM (sic); il est prêt à naître. Parce qu’il connaît son nom, il devient verbe.2 In the Hebrew word for ear – ozen – lies the root for opening and obeying. This obedience is not enforced, but a liberating and emancipating ‘giving ear’.3 Ozen furthermore derives from the root zan, which means sort. The ear obeys to receive the name and the sort.4 In I see a voice, Jonathan Rée writes about how near the end of the eighteenth century in Weimar, Johann Gottfried Herder uses his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit to frame the human voice as a divine problem: the mysterious movement of a → breath and “if this divine → breath had not inspired us, and floated like a charm on our lips we should all have been wanderers in the woods (…). By speech alone the eye and ear (...) are united in one, and centre in commanding thought, to which the → hands and other members are only obedient instruments.”5 The virtue of speech comes from its capacity to mimic and repeat, creating syntax and language. → Echo is more on the auditive spectrum, where speech and voice are the epistemological carriers of an acoustic knowledge.6 “She was a mouth as well as an ear, but → Narcissus was only an eye.”7 Jonathan Rée also adds that the losing of one’s voice, mutism, is usually seen as a negative, while the losing of one’s sight is sometimes shown in a positive light. Mutism points to infantility, to being dumb (stumm, dumb, etc.) and is a punishment for women and victims.8 Blindness is a condition that the hero is struck with, and points to a higher seeing: prophets, seers and visionaries.9 In her work The Latest Word from Echo, Anne-Emmanuelle Berger writes: “The coming of speech/language is the desire of the other.”10 “This is what

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→ Echo does:11 She expects to hear; she waits and hears.” Elle s’attend à entendre.12 Traditionally, hearing has been a very primary sense.13 It is not only a sense that is open in the absolute meaning of the word (the → body can close its eyes and mouth, but not its ears). The ear is also in essence passive and receptive: a tube connected to the mind, where the intellect is kept. Mary conceived through the words of the Holy Spirit per aurem.14 John the Baptist recognized Christ’s voice in the womb.15 Hearing is the sense that the foetus first masters in the womb: the foetus hears the mother’s voice.16 It is also said that hearing is the last sense to fall away during the process of dying, and with comatose patients the only sense to remain latent. At any rate, speech and hearing work together in a knowledge-generating system that precedes the visual-literary epistemology of Plato. Da der Hörsinn rückbezüglich ist, hört sich der Sprechende selbst. Sein Hören folgt seinem Sprechen… also nachdenklich zu sein.17 Speech and aural communication belong to oral culture, in which acoustic mimesis – the passing on of values and insights – predominates over written and hence visible laws.18 In the words of Edith Wyschogrod: “Human persons find it difficult to close themselves off from sound. (…) Hearing leaves the impression that it takes place within the person. The sound is alienated from its origins.”19 Or as Walter Ong formulates it: Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time. When I hear, however, I gather sound from every direction at once: I am at the centre of my auditory world, which envelops me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence. You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight.20

The fluid boundaries between speech, hearing, and → silence that → Echo so delicately moves through, which make her capable of thematizing extra-sensory phenomena such as enveloping, dissolution and immersion, are part of the repressed substrata of the western scopic way of thinking. In my lemma about → Echo, I explore how she with her inversions of the ingrained conventions – imago vocis against imago, dissolution against mirror – can offer an alternative

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epistemology. I connect → Echo with the epistemology of weaving. The textile approach shows a technicality, an emotional need and a cultural underlayer that seriously questions → Narcissus’ mimesis, in favor of a feminine aphonic, aquatic and → matrixial model.

Annick de Souzenelle, Le symbolisme du corps humain, Paris, 1991, p. 351. 2 Ibid., p. 356. 3 Ibid., p. 357. 4 Ibid., p. 359. The following association can be made. In 1 Kings 19:8, Elijah ascends Mount Horeb. He retreats to a cave and suddenly a great storm arises at the mouth of the cave. God was not in the → wind. Then an earthquake. God was not in the earthquake. Then a fire. God was not in the fire. And after the fire: a still, small voice. When Elijah heard that he went outside and hid his → face in his mantle (1 Kings 19:11-13). 5 Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1, Leipzig, 1841, p. 295-296; Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice. A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses, London, 1999, p. 65-81. 6 There is the divine and liturgical ‘voice’ in the acoustic context of the rites. In the past year there has been more focus on the visual arts and the acoustics within the Christian iconography and perception of space; Eric Palazzo, La dimension sonore de la liturgie dans l’Antiquité chrétienne et au Moyen Âge, in Archéologie du son. Les dispositifs de pots acoustiques dans les édifices anciens, eds. Bénédicte Palazzo-Bertholon & Jean-Christophe Valière, Paris, 2012, p. 51-57; Bissera V. Pentcheva, Hagia Sophia and Multisensory Aesthetics, in Gesta, 50, 2, 2011, p. 93-111. It is well known that acoustics depend on the shape of the space and its furnishing. The mingled human 1

7 8

9 10

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voices of Greek Orthodox liturgical hymns enter into synergy with the → marble. Acoustic tests at the Hagia Sophia produced an especially long bouncing echo (reverberation) of ten to eleven seconds. In the context of speech it would make the words incomprehensible, but when it comes to song, the echoes make for long and ethereal dissonance. The effect would have been an auditive parallel for the pneumatic glistening of the → marble. Or even: emphysos is completed with an auricular pneuma, which in combination with the visual lifts man up to a metaphysical level, to ‘psycho-acoustics’. I discussed → wind and acoustics in: Barbara Baert, Pentecost in the Codex Egberti (c. 980) and the Benedictional of Archbishop Robert (Late 10th Century). The Visual Medium and the Senses, in Convivium, 2, 2015, p. 82-97. Rée, I See a Voice, p. 72. Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative. The Metafictional Paradox, Waterloo ON, 1980, p. 1-28: → Narcissus’ fate is interwoven with resonabilis → Echo: she who cannot remain silent and thus cannot be ignored, but she is also the → nymph who loses her autonomous creative principle. Rée, I See a Voice, p. 90. Anne-Emmanuelle Berger, The Latest Word from Echo, in New Literary History, 27, 4, p. 621-640, p. 631. Ibid., p. 621: “Ovid says nothing, and perhaps knows nothing about the birth of → Echo (..) it is because she does not become ‘herself ’ until the moment she is

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condemned by Juno never again to pronounce a word other than by repeating those of others that Ovid makes her he mythical figure (originary but without origins) of what has no origin and is not original.” 12 Ibid., p. 631. 13 See also Barbara Baert, Vox clamantis in deserto. The Johannesschüssel: Senses and Silences, in Open Arts Journal, 4, 2, 2015, p. 143-156; translation with actualized bibliography and extended footnotes: Barbara Baert & Georg Geml, Vox clamantis in deserto. Die Johannesschüssel: Sinne und Stille, in Das Münster. Zeitschrift für Christliche Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft, 3, 2014, p. 194-206. 14 In the Hebrew word for ear – ozen – lies the root for ‘opening’ and ‘obeying’. This does not mean obeying as in being oppressed, but as liberation; de Souzenelle, Le symbolisme du corps humain, p. 357. We would get too off topic discussing the → silence and receptivity through the ear in relation to the → Annunciation ex aurem; For more on this, see: Leo Steinberg, ‘How Shall This Be?’ Reflections on Filippo Lippi’s ‘Annunciation’ in London, in Artibus et Historiae, 8, 16, 1987, p. 25-44, p. 26, and my ideas in other works: Barbara Baert, The Annunciation Revisited. Essay on the Concept of Wind and the Senses in Late Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture, in Critica d’arte, 47/48, 2011 (printed in 2013), p. 57-68; Barbara Baert, Wind und Sublimierung in der christlichen Kunst des Mittelalters. Die Verkündigung, in Das Münster. Zeitschrift für Christliche Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft, 66, 2, 2013, p. 109-117; 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), eds. Renana Bartal & Hanna Vorholt, Leiden, 2015, p. 197-216.

15

16 17 18

Augustine asserts the following in his Sermo de Tempore, XXII: Deus per angelum loquebatur et Virgo per aurem impraegnebatur; Agobardus (ca. 775-840) in his De correctione antiphonarii, cap. VIII: Descendit de coelis missus ab arce patris, introivit per aurem Virginis in regionem nostram indutus stola purpurea et exivit per auream portam lux et Deus universae fabricae mundi. Ephrem the Syrian (In selecta S. Scripturae loca Sermones exegetici XI, Opera omnia, II, 324): Ita in novam Mariae aurem penetravit, fuditque se vita, et quemadmodum lignum mortem intulit. Claudia Benthien writes the following about Mary’s silent ‘receptivity’: So wird beispielsweise in der biblischen Verkündigungsszene Maria als Hörende gestaltet: sie sitzt, blickt und legt das Buch nieder, in dem sie gerade las. (…) Sitzen und Hören bilden die Rezeptionshaltung, wie das Stehen und Sprechen eine Produktionshaltung suggeriert. Vielleicht nehmen aus diesem Grund auch die meisten Personifikationen des ‘Stillschweigens’ eine stehende Pose ein – weil dies den ikonographischen Bezug zur ‘actio’ des Sprechens herstellt; Claudia Benthien, Die Absenz der Stimme im Bild. Personifikationen des ‘Stillschweigens’ in der Frühen Neuzeit, in Quel Corps? Eine Frage der Repräsentation, eds. Hans Belting, Dietmar Kamper & Martin Schulz, Paderborn, 2002, p. 325-347, p. 345-346. Christoph Wulf, Das mimetische Ohr, in Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie, 2, 1-2, 1993, p. 9-15. de Souzenelle, Le symbolisme du corps humain, p. 357. Wulf, Das mimetische Ohr, p. 9-10. It is moreover an epistemology that is rooted in magic, such as the reading aloud of spells in order to control nature. According to Christoph Wulf: Die Mimesis der Natur vollzieht sich über

ear/hearing das ‚Hören‘ der menschlichen Stimme durch das ‚Ohr‘ der Natur. Wulf, Das mimetische Ohr, p. 12. 19 Edith Wyschogrod, Doing before Hearing. On the Primacy of Touch, in Textes pour

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Emmanuel Levinas, ed. François Laruelle, Paris, 1980, p. 179-203, p. 193. 20 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word, London, 1982, p. 82.

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echo

Fig. 29. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Echo and Narcissus, 1628. Paris, Musée du Louvre

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Echo Nicolas Poussin’s (1594-1665) Echo and Narcissus (1628) at the Louvre,1 chooses not to portray the typical moment when → Narcissus first notices his reflection, but the fatal result of it (fig. 29).2 → Narcissus lies stretched out next to the pool, starved and wasting away. Behind him, leaning against a rock, Echo has succumbed to the same fate. Between them both a Cupid figure had been placed, emblem of the (impossible) love that (also from a compositional point of view) still seems to want to connect Echo and → Narcissus. But it is all for naught; Echo and → Narcissus will still meet their fatal and lonely end. According to Frédéric Cousinié, the seventeenth-century interpretation has to do with the renewed fascination for acoustics: le statut d’Echo en tant que représentation sonore, and the scientific fascination for la transmission du son et de la lumière.3 The transmission of the echo in particular received renewed interest, for example in the scientific studies of Josepho Blancano (alias Giuseppe Biancani (1566-1624)).4 There was at the time much discussion of echometry, referring to the curious echoes at the Tuileries Palace, in the wells of the Vatican palaces and in the ancient tomb of Caecilia Metella (first century bc).5 From that perspective, Poussin’s Echo should be viewed as a paradoxical image: as an image de la voix and thus aimed at Poussin’s limits and the possibilities of voir la voix, or donner à voir la parole.6 The poet Decimus Magnus Ausonius (ca. 310-ca. 395) alludes to this in a striking ekphrasis about Echo in his thirty-second epigram.7 Vane, quid adfectas faciem mihi ponere, pictor, ignotamque oculis sollicitare deam? Aeris et Linguae sum filia, mater inanis indicii vocem quae sine mente gero, extremos pereunte modos a fine reducens, ludificata sequor verba aliena meis. Auribus in vestris habito penetrabilis Echo: et, si vis similem pingere, pinge sonum.

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Fond painter, why dost thou essay to limn my face, and vex a goddess whom eyes never saw? I am the daughter of Air and Speech, mother of empty utterance, in that I have a voice without a mind. From their dying close I bring back failing strains and in mimicry repeat the words of strangers with my own. I am Echo, dwelling in the recesses of your → ears: and if thou wouldst paint my likeness, paint sound.

In his Galeria, Giovanni Battista Marino (1569-1625) devotes a similar ekphrasis to the Echo of Sienese painter Ventura Salimbeni (1568-1613).8 Vedi il crin, vedi gli occhi e vedi il viso, vedi la bocca replicar gli accenti; ma le voci non senti. Ben sentiresti ancor le voci istesse, se dipinger la voce si potesse!

En quoi cette figure, ainsi picturalement définie, peut-elle être effectivement perçue non seulement comme l’expression évidente du destin de la nymphe (sa disparition progressive), mais également comme une expression visible de sa nature sonore? 9 The first, the motif of gradual → camouflage, was solved by Poussin pictorially by painting the → hands and feet in a vague flou. The extremities of her → body are dissolving into the surrounding nature. The second is in line with scientific belief that sound moves like minuscule particles in the air, or even: moving the air aids the transmission of sound. Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) recognizes a synaesthesia between seeing and → hearing: une vue par les oreilles et d’une écoute par les yeux.10 Louis Marin speaks of a convertibilité du dire et du voir : the one spectrum can tip into the other through the air and vice versa.11 The use of flou and non finito are the key to Echo’s voix in the visual space.

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La figurabilité visuelle d’Écho serait ainsi réalisée en la présentant bien comme un corps visible, mais comme un visible dégradé, résultat d’une convertibilité imparfaite du son et de la lumière. C’est du cumul même d’une sorte de mise ‘bord à bord’ des limites et des moyens extrêmes et la représentation, que va se révéler à la perception cette limite absolue de la représentation visuelle, la Voix.12

Frédéric Cousinié, Imago Vocis. Écho, “Image de la voix”, dans Écho et Narcisse de Nicolas Poussin, in Mélanges de l’École française de Rome, Italie et Méditerranée, 108, 1, 1996, p. 281-317; Bernice Iarocci, Poussin’s Echo and Narcissus. Painting as Lamentation, in Artibus et Historiae, 33, 65, 2012, p. 203-230. 2 Dora Panofsky, Narcissus and Echo. Notes on Poussin’s ‘Birth of Bacchus’ in the Fogg Museum of Art, in The Art Bulletin, 31, 2, 1949, p. 112-120. 3 Cousinié, Imago Vocis, p. 300-301; Oskar Bätschmann, Poussin. Dialectiques de la peinture, Paris, 1994, p. 37-52. 4 Josepho Blancano, Sphaera mvndi, sev, Cosmographia demonstratiua ac facili methodo tradita: in qva totivs mvndi fabrica, vna cvm novis Tychonis, Kepleri, Galilaei, aliorum[que] astronomorum adinuentis continetur. Accessere, I. Breuis introductio ad geographiam, II. Apparatus ad mathematicarum studium, III. Echometria, id est geometrica traditio de echo, Bologna, 1620, p. 415-443. 5 Cousinié, Imago Vocis, p. 302. See also Marin Mersenne, Harmonie universelle contenant la théorie et la pratique de la musique, Paris, 1636, p. 50-56; Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis sive Ars Magna consoni et Dissoni, 1, Rome, 1650; Athanasius Kircher, Phonurgia nova sive Coniugium meccanico-physicum artis et naturae, Kempten, 1673. 1

6 Cousinié, Imago Vocis, p. 307. 7 Hugh G. Evelyn White (ed. & transl.), Ausonius, 2, London, 1919, p. 174-175. 8 Giambattista Marino, La galeria del cavalier Marino. Distinta in pitture e sculture, Venice, 1620, p. 8; see also: Calvin R. Edwards, The Narcissus Myth in Spenser’s Poetry, in Studies in Philology, 74, 1, 1977, p. 63-88; Luciana Borsetto, Narciso ed Eco. Figura e scrittura nella lirica femminile del Cinquecento. Esemplificazioni ed appunti, in Nel cerchio della luna. Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo, eds. Virginia Baradel & Marina Zancan, Venice, 1983, p. 171-233; Joseph Loewenstein, Responsive Readings. Versions of Echo in Pastoral, Epic, and the Jonsonian Masque, New Haven CT, 1984; Kári Driscoll, Copia Nostri. Echoes of a Poetic Self in Kafka’s ‘Der Ausflug ins Gebirge’, in The German Quarterly, 84, 3, 2011, p. 275-291. 9 Cousinié, Imago Vocis, p. 312. 10 Mersenne, Harmonie universelle contenant la théorie et la pratique de la musique, p. 45-46. 11 Louis Marin, À l’éveil des métamorphoses. Poussin (1625-1635), in Corps écrit, 7, 1983, p. 31-43; Cousinié, Imago Vocis, p. 316. See also Oskar Bätschmann, Poussins Narziss und Echo im Louvre. Die Konstruktion von Thematik und Darstellung aus den Quellen, in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 42, 1979, p. 31-47. 12 Cousinié, Imago Vocis, p. 317.

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Emotion “We are here treading on dangerous ground. Perhaps nothing has been as hotly disputed as the power of the Fine Arts to render emotions,” says Gertrud Bing (1892-1964) in her lecture on Aby Warburg at The Warburg Institute in 1962. Siri Hustvedt defends the integration of emotional patterns and affects in the art sciences in A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women : Art can speak to what falls outside theory, and it can also embody felt ideas.1 One can argue that there is a synesthetic quality to all art experiences, that art revives a multimodal-sensory self. While looking at a painting, for example, don’t we feel the brush? Studies have shown that mirror systems are active when people look at visual art and are also activated by written accounts of actions or emotional situations. If we do not feel our way into works of art, we will not understand them. I do not sense the touch of persons depicted in paintings, but I do have strong felt responses to the marks left by the painter’s brush, but then arguably this is a common experience, one hardly limited to people with mirror touch.2

“I believe art is born in the world of the Between, that is bound up with the rhythms and music of early life, as well as in a form of transference that moves from inner life out onto the page, from me to an imaginary other. My story tells emotional, not literal, truths.”3

1

Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women. Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind, New York, 2016, p. 118.

2 Ibid., p. 375. 3 Ibid., p. 133.

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Empathy In his study Hepatische Empathie. Die Affinität des Inkommensurablen nach Aby Warburg, Georges Didi-Huberman connects the role of the → Mnemosyne Atlas with the concept of empathos, empathy.1 In 1892, after correcting the second proof of his doctorate on Sandro Botticelli, Warburg decides to add a short prelude.2 Within this text, still at the start of his exceptional biography and career, Aby Warburg connects the renewal of his method to three concepts: Nachleben, → Pathosformel, and Einfühlung.3 The last concept he defines as follows: dass dieser Nachweis für die psychologische Aesthetik deshalb bemerkenswerth ist, weil man hier in den Kreisen der schaffenden Künstler den Sinn für den ästhetischen Akt der ‘Einfühlung’ in seinem Werden als stilbildende Macht beobachten kann.4 Georges Didi-Huberman considers Warburg’s methodical parameters of Einfühlung as the ultimate key in reading and understanding the → Mnemosyne Atlas. The cognitive affect of empathy – seemingly ‘ambivalent’ or ‘paradoxically’ situated between the ‘emotional feeling’ and the ‘cerebral thinking’ – is reflected in the heart of the dialectic of the entheos we discussed. Ist das nicht im Grunde ein elementares Paradigma aller Erkenntnis, die versucht, ausgehend vom Sinnlichen zu Intelligiblem zu gelangen? Und besteht darin, nebenbei bemerkt, nicht die hauptsächliche Arbeit eines jeden Archäologen oder Kunsthistorikers?5

Yes!

Georges Didi-Huberman, Hepatische Empathie. Die Affinität des Inkommensurablen nach Aby Warburg, in Trivium, 2, 2010, p. 2-17. 2 Warburg Institute Archive (WIA), III.39.6, 1. 3 Didi-Huberman, Hepatische Empathie, p. 3. 1

4 Aby M. Warburg, Werke in einem Band, auf der Grundlage der Manuskripte und Handexemplare, eds. Perdita Ladwig, Martin Treml & Sigrid Weigel, Berlin, 2010. 5 Didi-Huberman, Hepatische Empathie, p. 6.

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Engramm The disturbance by the → nymph as Engramm:1 – the conviction that each visual prototype possesses a root or ‘essence’ that is responsible for the reproduction and procreation of the ‘species’ of the visual prototype, – who is at once inside and out, is also suggestive of a breach in time, a strange → interruption, a → pause in the whirlpool of history that the → nymph causes to implode in a stormy energy that channels desire.

1

The term refers to Richard Wolfgang Semon, Die Mnème, Leipzig, 1908; See Giorgio Agamben, Image et mémoire, transl. Gilles A. Tiberghien, Paris, 1988, p. 20-21: Chaque événement agissant sur la matière vivante y laisse une trace, que Semon appelle engramme. L’énergie potentielle

conservée dans cet engramme peut être réactivée et déchargée dans certaines conditions. On peut dire alors que l’organisme agit d’une certaine manière parce qu’il se souvient de l’événement précédent; (also after Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography, London, 1986, p. 242).

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Enthusiasm The word enthusiasm is derived from the Greek ἐνθουσιασμός/enthousiasmos and has a meaning of being possessed by a god (ἔνθεος/entheos) referring to θειασμός/theiasmos, ‘inspiration’.1 The person who is possessed by a god surpasses their normal state of being and ascends to a higher plane or ἔκστασις/ekstasis. This state of being is caused by → breathing in vapors, drinking elixirs, or by frantic dancing, through which the gods enter the → body. During the Homeric Age in Greece, enthousiasmos was connected to ecstatic prophecies and rituals, such as the Pythia, the Dionysian bacchanals, the → dances of the Maenads. In the post-Homeric Age, Plato and Aristotle shifted the meaning of enthousiasmos towards the artistic inspiration of poets. Even today, we use ‘enthusiasm’ to describe a special energy that can suddenly overwhelm us: an affect of rapture that radiates out towards the audience. Yet, through the ages, the concept has not always carried with it the positive connotations of the ancient Greeks. Along the way, enthusiasm and rapture became contaminated with (religious) fanaticism and even with manipulative deceit.2 In his book Philosophie und Enthusiasmus, Bernd Bösel asks why we so often view enthusiasm as a suspicious affect in the modern-day intellectual context.3 He thinks the reason is found in the Zweikampf between enthusiasm and → melancholy on the one hand, and enthusiasm and reason on the other.4 According to the author, the first conflict is situated on the vertical scheme of the mood, which holds the extremes of highs and lows, as with the pathological diagnoses of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and even psychosis.5 The second conflict polarizes enthusiasm with reason, making enthusiasm an → emotion that hinders rational thought.6 In both positions, enthusiasm is not seen as part of a reliable epistemology. These splits gradually started to develop from the seventeenth century on, although enthousiasmos was revalued during the Age of Enlightenment and the Romantic Era as a positive stimulant of creativity and Ideenflucht.7 Despite a few flickers on the cultural historical time line, enthusiasm has mostly been marginalized in modern Western philosophy: as an excessive urge, or as a harmful exaggeration of → emotions that leads to madness. Bösel calls for rehabilitation of enthousiasmos as a knowledge paradigm that shouldn’t be seen as the opposite of → melancholy genius, nor as → Besonnenheit, but as

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something which deserves an intrinsic place in the cultural sciences: in the Zwischenreich des Begehrens und Fühlens.8 Enthusiasm is more than just an affect or an ecstatic state of being that muddles the senses according to some, and causes genius insights according to others. Enthusiasm is the flash of openness. The → ruach bursts forth and descends. The artist sees the light and the artwork → blushes when it realizes its own existence. And an intellectual at the start of the twentieth century – “Hamburger by heart, Jewish by blood with a Florentine soul”9 – rejoices at the image’s capacity to immortalize itself in lasting visual memory trails (→ Erinnerungsspuren).

1

Hubert Cancik & Helmuth Schneider (eds.), New Pauly Online, Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World, Leiden, 1996: lemma enthousiasmos. 2 Franz-Joseph Meissner, Wortgeschichtliche Untersuchungen im Umkreis von französisch Enthousiasme und Genie, Genoa, 1979, p. 313-314; Kristin Wömmel, Enthusiasmus. Untersuchung eines mehrdimensionalen Konstrukts im Umfeld musikalischer Bildung, Berlin, 2016, p. 17-26. 3 Bernd Bösel, Philosophie und Enthusiasmus, Studien zu einem umstrittenen Verhältnis, (Passagen Philosophie, 1), Vienna, 2008, p. 13.

Ibid., p. 78-84. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 99-102. Ibid., p. 188: after Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). 9 Christopher Johnson, Metaphors, Memory and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images, Ithaca NY, 2012, p. 23; The epigraph Amburghese di cuore, Ebreo di sangue, d’anima Fiorentino occurs in Gertrud Bing’s essay Aby M. Warburg, in Rivista storica italiana, 72, 1, 1960, p. 100-113, p. 113. 4 5 6 7 8

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Erinnerungsspuren In Aby Warburg’s Denkraum, the Nachleben der Antike plays a crucial role. This means that the concept of → enthousiasmos can be found in his oeuvre, in both a theoretical and an iconographical way. One can connect the entheos principle to Warburg’s concept of → Pathosformel or internal transfer (transport) of antiquating formal energies that navigate between bacchanalian exuberance and classical soberness, between the realm of Dionysus and that of Apollo. According to Warburg, this polarity is part of a universal dynamic in the anthropology of imagery, a dynamic that keeps refreshing itself over the eras. Thus, visual thinking keeps developing based on conscious and subconscious artistic memories (Erinnerungsspuren).

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Fireflies Let us simply admit that images are often the vehicles of non-knowledge. But non-knowledge is not to knowledge what total darkness would be to full light. Non knowledge is imagined, thought, and written. (...) Like fireflies when they make a summer night flicker, for example. (...) We can thus hypothesize that non-knowledge is to knowledge what the firefly is to the light or what a small image is to the wide horizon. We see entirely different things in effect, depending on whether we expand our vision to take in the horizon that stretches, immense and immobile, beyond us; or direct our attention towards the image that passes, tiny and mobile, close by us in the night. The image is indeed like a firefly, a little glimmer, the lucciola of transient sporadic events. Somewhere Dante’s Beatrice and Baudelaire’s fleeting beauty: the paradigmatic passer-by.1

1

Georges Didi-Huberman, Glimpses. Between Appearance and Disappearance, in Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, 7, 1, 2016, p. 109-124, p. 112.

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folds

Fig. 30. Stefano Maderno (1576-1636), Saint Cecilia, 1600. Rome, Santa Cecilia chapel

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Folds The → marble sculpture of Saint Cecilia (1600) by Stefano Maderno (1576-1636) in the Church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere in Rome shows a special version of the topos of the → sleeping → nymph, the locus amoenus and → genius loci of → silence (fig.  30). Her → body is turned away from the viewer and fully ‘wrapped’ in a veil. The viewer cannot see her → face. According to Georges Didi-Huberman, she is the anti-nymph: the chaste martyr.1 The sculpture should be seen in the context of the seventeenth-century obsession for the catacombs during the Counter Reformation. These subterranean passageways were (re)discovered during this period. The ‘opening’ of a new world beneath Rome, the doubling of her → genius loci in the dark and chthonic substructure versus an abundant urban top structure, was the subject of great fascination around 1600. The fascination was fueled by a series of interventiones: human remains from the early Christian macabre world were literally pulled up into the light and the luxury of the Baroque churches. This also happened to Cecilia, who was dug up in 1599 with a → body intero and intatto, as the topoi of martyrology would have it.2 Just one year after the inventio, Maderno makes the → marble emulatio of her ‘anti-nymphean’ → death. In true Warburgian style, Cecilia is an inversion dynamique: her → head turned towards the ground (chthonic position), the opposite of the extrovert position of the Baroque mysticae, such as the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647-1652) by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) (fig.  31). Once again, the bipolarity concerns the always shifting → melancholy versus the ecstasy: the eternal dual undercurrent of the cultural memory. “In other words, Warburg’s aptitude for the astra (concepts) always brought him in proximity to the monstra (→ chaos).”3 If Cecilia is the anti-nymph, it is in a completely ambivalent manner. First of all: although her garments are that of a martyr and she is completely covered, even her → head, the draping of the cloth is done in a manner bordering on erotic paragone. The anti-nymph disappears behind the sensuality of textile and thus, as a second ambivalence, carries a motif which is archetypical in Christianity: the → body reduced to – or even better, the → body ‘as’ – a shroud (the shroud of Turin, → vera icon) like Giuseppe Sammartino’s (1720-1793) sculpture of a dead Christ (1753) in the Sansevero chapel in Naples (fig. 32).

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Fig. 31. Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1647-1652. Rome, Santa Maria della Vittoria

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Fig. 32. Giuseppe Sammartino (1720-1793), Dead Christ, 1753. Naples, Sansevero chapel

The → Pathosformel of Cecilia’s → body and shroud intensify her martyrdom as an inflection of the anti-nymph, as an inherent access to the underworld of Rome (and by extension, the cultural undercurrent as such). Cecilia is an ambivalent → nymph overrun – absorbed, → camouflaged – by her ambiguous champs dynamophores: she rolls away from our sight in the tumbling drapery between eros and thanatos, between → sleep and → death, between ecstasy and the underworld. She opens an unheimliche locus amoenus: a secret that tolerates no speech, no look. The suggestive chthonic opening to the underworld finds its counterpart in the early Christian strigil (or stria) sarcophaguses (fig.  33). The front of these → marble tombs were decorated with wavy grooves that seemed to curve towards each other from the center point, but at the same time, seemed to move away from each other. The center can be an empty mandorla, as in figurative

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Fig. 33. Early Christian sarcophagus with strigil motif. Marseille, Saint-Victoire

iconography. These symmetrically formed ‘wave fields’ are in no way an empty decorative motif. The visual effect is extremely dynamic and hypnotic, as if one were dealing with fluid material. Striae are mentioned in Vitruvius (80 bc15 ad), De architectura, IV, 1, as an imitation of drapery.4 Anthropologist and art historian Emma Sidgwick interprets the strigil motif as a spatial expression of the Ancient Greek notion of dynamis and energeia: the vital life force that is stored within humans.5 Richard Broxton Onians (1899-1986) relates this paradigm to the Homeric substance of the elixir of life: → nepesh.6 → Nepesh is the substance that humans need in order to live. It is their principle of life. → Nepesh uses → blood as its medium (which is why → blood is a taboo), but has also been connected to → breathing in and out. → Nepesh is not only present in → blood, but also in one’s heart. And in ancient texts, such as the Assyrian ones, → nepesh is located in the → throat. → Nepesh survives after people die: it remains in the corpses under the ground. The → nepesh (→ blood) of the

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dead ‘weeps’. According to Onians, the translation for → nepesh is most similar to that of the Greek thumos and the Latin animus. The folds/strigil motif relates to a spectrum where fluidity, gateway (life after → death), elixir of life, and drapery come together. The folds/strigil motif pays homage to the continuous waves between the upper and underworld, uses an abstract motif to picture the potential of imagery being created and → tears open time and space hierophanically (mandorla). Georges DidiHuberman writes of the striae: Le motif des strigiles fait respirer et vibrer lumineusement notre propre distance au mort. Il nous tient en respect entre son leurre et sa lueur. Un seuil par excellence: un seuil mouvant. Comme le seuil d’une jouissance et d’une lamentation.7 Those who visit the Church of Santa Cecilia in Rome today can still see the different cultural layers of Rome in situ, and by extension, determine the undercurrent of the earlier mentioned spectrum. The crypt of the original fourthcentury church shows an impressive collection of early Christian sarcophaguses with strigils. The building aboveground has an apse mosaic saved from the ninth-century Roman church. This apse is covered with large green slabs of → marble, referencing the Byzantine ekphrasis tradition. In 563, Paul the Silentiary describes the Hagia Sophia as follows: “The masonry is covered with wondrous decorations. These are made from → marble from the Proconnesus. The way the cut slabs of → marble have been combined is almost like a painting: one can see the (natural) veins/motifs, that have been combined in such a way that they became structures. Connected like that, they imitate the beauty of the painterly art.”8 The ‘draped’ anti-nymph, finally, lies at the front of the altar and immediately catches the eye. The strigils, the slabs of → marble and the sculpture by Stefano Maderno resonate both visually as well as psycho-historically. The strigils – the undercurrent and at the same time the deepest past of this place – visually evoke the idea of the life elixir and life after → death. The slabs of → marble that decorate the sacred and timeless space in the upper church evoke the fluid solidifying of the → sea; marmairein means to glisten, to shine like the surface of the water.9 According to Byzantine tradition, the → marble slabs offer a higher visual sight (the recognition of imagery), but also offer a visual version of the idea of prefiguration: the image in process. → Marble vacillates between abstraction and figuration, between liquid and solidification.10 And finally Cecilia, who occupies the so-called ‘present’ and who wondrously

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came to the surface from the deepest of undercurrents, evokes the nymphean paragone and the ‘hysteria’ of textile as both a closed and open seconde peau. As martyr, she mediates between the chthonic substrates and the heavenly substrates of Christianity. From a psycho-historical perspective these three cultural layers have different → archetypes within the visual-anthropological spectrum in common: the idea of fluidity and fluxus, of potentiality and being in progress, the idea of prefigurative thinking with strigils, spots and drapery as important visual expressions of it, and finally the idea of the → acheiropoieton : the image that without any human intervention from above (strigils), from nature (→ marble) or from the visual genius (paragone and ekphrasis of Maderno’s anti-nymph) ‘came into’ the artistic space of humankind.11 The → sleeping → nymph is not innocent. She belongs to the underworld, just like the → silence and the midday hour as mysterium tremendum are chthonic motifs. She sleeps the → sleep of demons, those that overcome the nympholeptic in the → shadows of the sycamores, on the banks of the river, near the city fountains. She sleeps the → sleep that drives people mad, or the → sleep that leads to prophecies. The → nymph sleeps the gate to the underworld. She sleeps the → silence of the humanists in their Roman → gardens, but also the → silence of Angerona.12

Georges Didi-Huberman, Ninfa moderna. Essai sur le drapé-désir, Paris, 2002, p. 25-39. 2 See also on the subject of martyrdom and physicality: Barbara Baert, More Than an Image. Agnes of Rome: Virginity and Visual Memory, in More than a Memory. The Discourse of Martyrdom and the Construction of Religious Identity in the History of Christianity, ed. Johan Leemans, Louvain, 2005, p. 139-168. 3 Georges Didi-Huberman, Warburg’s Haunted House, in Common Knowledge, 18, 1, 2012, p. 50; Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, transl. Graham Burchell & Hugh Tomlinson, New York, 1991, p. 20: “It is as if one were casting a → net, but the fisherman always

1

risks being swept away and finding himself in the open → sea.” 4 Georges Didi-Huberman, Phasmes. Essais sur l’apparition, 1, Paris, 1998, p. 215-216. 5 Emma Sidgwick, Radiant Remnants. Late Antique Strigillation and Productive Dynamis/Energeia, in Ikon, 5, 2014, p. 109130; Emma Sidgwick, From Flow to Face. The Haemorrhoïssa Motif (Mark 5:24-35) between Anthropological Origin and Image Paradigm, (Art&Religion, 3), Louvain – Walpole MA, 2015, p. 179-192. 6 Richard B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought. About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate, Cambridge, 1988, p. 480-505. 7 Didi-Huberman, Phasmes, p. 215-216.

folds 8 Maria L. Fobelli, Descrizione e percezione delle immagini acheropite sui marmi bizantini, in Immagine e Ideologia. Studi in onore di Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, eds. Arturo Calzona, Roberto Campari & Massimo Mussini, Milan, 2007, p. 27-32; John Mitchell, Believing Is Seeing. The Natural Image in Late Antiquity, in Architecture and Interpretation. Essays for Eric Fernie, eds. Jill A. Franklin, T.A. Heslop & Christine Stevenson, Suffolk, 2012, p. 16-41. 9 Fabio Barry, Walking on Water. Cosmic Floors in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, in The Art Bulletin, 89, 4, 2007, p. 627-656. 10 John Onians, Abstraction and Imagination in Late Antiquity, in Art History, 3, 1980, p. 1-23, p. 8; Paul Vandenbroeck, Matrix Marmorea. De subsymbolische iconografie van de scheppende energieën in Europa en Noord-Afrika, in Materie & Beeld, eds. Lut Pil & Trees De Mits, Ghent, 2010, p. 51-78, p. 60. 11 Also see: Joshua O’Driscoll, Visual Vortex. An Epigraphic Image from an Ottonian

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Gospel Book, in Word & Image, 27, 3, 2012, p. 309-321. There is one last element that mysteriously connects the cultural layers and → archetypes within the visualanthropological spectrum: the spatial resonance or the role of the acoustics in the visual experience. For more information, see: Bissera V. Pentcheva, Hagia Sophia and Multisensory Aesthetics, in Gesta, 50, 2, 2011, p. 93-111. 12 Hendrik Wagenvoort, Diva Angerona, in Pietas. Selected Studies in Roman Religion, Leiden, 1980, p. 21-24, p. 23, particularly the → solstice of December. “Therefore I ask, what is to prevent us believing that Angerona presided over those Angera, or Angustiae, or ‘narrows’, ‘through which → death is reached’? In my opinion it all agrees very well together” (p. 24). However, the author rejects an earlier identification of Angerona with the goddess of the new year, possibly of Etruscan origin (p. 21).

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Fragment frangō, -ere1, ‘to break’ [v. III; pf. frēgī, ppp. frāctum] (Lex XII+) Derivatives: fragēscere ‘to become subdued’ (Acc.), fragilis ‘fragile, crackling’ (Lucr.+), fragmen ‘a piece broken off ’ (Sis.+), fragmentum ‘fragment’ (Lucil.+), fragor ‘the breaking, crash, roar’ (Lucr.+), fragōsus ‘brittle, rugged’ (Lucr.+); cōnfringere ‘to destroy, ruin’ (Andr.+), cōnfragōsus ‘uneven, difficult’ (Pl.+), dēfringere ‘to break off ’ (Cato+), diffringere ‘to break up’ (Pl.+), effringere ‘to break open’ (Pl.+), īnfringere ‘to break, crush, deprive of ’ (Pl.+), interfringere ‘to break (here and there’) (Cato), offringere ‘to break up by cross-ploughing’ (Varro+), perfringere ‘to break, fracture’ (Lucr.+), praefringere ‘to break at the end’ (Pl.+), refringere ‘to break back, force open’ (Pl.+), suffringere ‘to break the lower part of ’ (Pl.+); compounds in -fragium ‘the breaking’, -fragus ‘who breaks’. PIt. *frang- [pr.], *fragto- [ppp.]. PIE *bhr-n-ǵ- [pr.] ‘to break’, *bhrǵ-to- [ppp.]. IE cognates Go. brikan, OHG brehhan ‘to break’ < *bhreg/ǵ-. The long vowel of frāctus is due to Lachmann’s Law. Schrijver 1991 argues that Latin and Irish have continued a PIE root present *bhreǵ-/*bhrǵ- in different ways, whereas LIV opts for an old athematic aorist. The latter seems more likely in view of the meaning. Since the Irish forms which Schrijver connected in 1991 are now connected with fragrāre, it may be that Gm. continues the old root aorist, and Latin the nasal present. bhreĝ-12 English meaning: “to break”; Deutsche Übersetzung: “brechen, krachen”; Material: O.Ind. giri-bhráj- “bursting out from the mountains”; Lat. frangō, -ere, frēgi (: got. *brēkum), frāctum “break in pieces, dash to pieces, shiver, shatter, fracture”, fragilis “frail, breakable, easily broken, brittle, fragile” etc. (*bhre g-), fragor m. “a breaking; a crashing, a noise of breaking, crack, crash, noise, din”; with ā (after frāctus etc.): suffrāgium “a voting tablet, a vote, noisy applause, approval; the right to vote, franchise; in gen. judgment; approval, support”; suffrāginēs f. “the hollows of the knee (suffragines, are so called because they are broken underneath = subtus franguntur, that is, they bend downwards and not upwards like the arm)” lit. “bend, kink”;

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M.Ir. braigid “farts”, Verbaln. braimm, Welsh Corn. bram m. “breaking → wind, fart”, M.Ir. t-air-brech “crash, blast”; but Gaul. brāca “breeches”) (compare βράκκαι αἴγειαι διφθέραι παρὰ Κελτοῖς Hes.) is Gmc. Lw., O.Ir. brōc “trouser” is O.E. Lw. Goth. brikan, O.S. brekan, O.E. brecan, O.H.D. brehhan “break, rupture” (lat. frēgimus = Goth. *brēkum, Ger. brachen), ablaut. Goth. brakja “wrestling match”; lengthened grade M.H.G. brache f. “breaking in the ground, unbroken recumbent unsowed land after the harvest”, O.E. ā-brācian “press in”, O.H.G. prahhen, brahhen, M.H.G. braechen, Ger. prägen (*brēkjan), Causative to brechen; zero grade Goth. gabruka f. “piece, fragment, gobbet” (*bhre g-) = O.E. bryce m. “the break, lump”, O.H.G. bruh “break, cracked”; O.E. brocian “press”, broc “woefulness”; with gemination O.H.G. brocco “broken”, Ger. Brocken; here perhaps Nor. brake m. “juniper” (as brisk ds. to bhres- “break, crack, cracking”), M.H.G. brake m. f. “twig, branch”, Engl. brake “brushwood, thorn bushes, fern”, ablaut. Nor. burkne m. “fern”, compare also Nor. bruk n. “shrubbery, bush”; a nasal. form in Nor. dial. brank n. “affliction, defect”, branka “injure, break, rupture”; with the meaning “din, fuss, noise” here O.Ice. braka “crack, creak”, brak n. “row, din, fuss, noise”, M.H.G. O.E. brach m. ds., O.H.G. M.H.G. O.S. braht “din, fuss, noise, clamor”, with changed meaning Ger. Pracht; O.E. breahtm m. “argument, quarrel”, O.S. brahtum “din, fuss, noise, clamorous mass”; Gmc. *brōk- “rump”, newer “trouser” in O.E. brēc pl. “buttocks”, Eng. breech ds., O.Ice. brōk, pl. brøkr “thigh, trouser”, O.E. brōc, O.H.G. bruoh, Ger. Bruch ds., Swiss bruech “pubic region”; geminated O.E. etc. braccas “britches”; here (rather to bhres-) belong Lith. braškù, braškéti “crack, creak” (*bhre ĝ-sk̂ō), Ltv. brakšk̂ēt, brakstēt ds.

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A parallel root *bhre(n)gh- seeks Wood (KZ. 45, 61) in O.Ind. brháti “wrenches, → tears from”, O.Ice. branga “damage”. O.Ind. brgala-m “piece, gobbet, lump” is not IE (Kuiper Proto-Munda 49).

1

Michiel de Vaan (ed.), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages, (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series, 7), Leiden, 2008, p. 239.

2 Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary. A Revised Edition of Julius Pokorny’s Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2007. https://marciorenato.files.wordpress. com/2012/01/pokorny-julius-proto-indoeuropean-etymological-dictionary.pdf.

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Fig. 34. Lutwin, Eva und Adam, 15th century: Seth Meets the Guardian of Paradise and Receives a Twig. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindob. 2980, fol. 73v

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Fragrance/scent In the Greek-Western paradigm, → smell and taste come fourth and fifth in the hierarchy of the senses.1 Nevertheless, Judaeo-Christian thought shows a particular fascination with these lower senses. In late-ancient and medieval epistemologies, rites and models were developed in which scent (incense, oils, flowers) occupied a prominent place.2 The unseen God manifests himself through his voice and through scent, and is worshipped with the scents of sacrifice, incense, herbs, perfumed oils.3 Perfume is a medium that allows people to move between the now and the transcendent: “Incense traveling through the air, was believed to attract and unite humans and gods, while the absence of → odor, or unpleasant → odors, had the opposite effect.”4 The relationship between the divine and these scents is a deep → archetype and was developed by the earliest Fathers of the Church for didactic purposes. Fragrance worked especially well in this role (the human-divine relation) because it could carry sacrificial sense – the offering of good works, of prayer, of good teaching – while at the same time evoking the notion of identity, the perfumed scent of sanctity, divine presence, and grace. The ‘sweet → smell’ of virtuous conduct pervaded accounts of monastic life, with both religious meanings clearly intended.5

Ephrem the Syrian echoed the call to the whole congregation: “Our prayer is become like a hidden taste within our → body,/ but let it richly give forth the fragrance of our faith:/ fragrance acts as a herald for the taste/ in the case of that person who has acquired the furnace that tests all scents.”6 Or: “they wove blossoms that did not fade./ Instead of flowers they wove an ascetic life./ Prayers they wove like lilies/ That flourished in the flowing of tears. Fasts they mingled with humiliation/ And prayers by means of just deeds. In ashes and sackcloth that made beauty fade/ The crown of the saints rejoiced.”7 John Chrysostom (ca. 347-407) treats the sweet → smell of herbs, flowers and the → garden in a pedagogical way:8 This gate too admits much that is harmful if it be not kept barred – I mean fragrant scents of herbs. Nothing weakens, nothing relaxes the right tension of

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the soul as a pleasure in sweet → odors. “How then,” says some one, “Must one take pleasure in filth?” That is not my meaning, but that one should not take pleasure either in the one or in the other. Let no one bring (the child) perfume, for, as soon as it penetrates to the brain, the whole → body is relaxed. Thereby pleasures are fanned into flame and greater schemes for their attainment. So bar this gate, for its function is to → breathe the air, not to receive sweet → odors.

Gregory the Great refers to the combination of senses in the context of the marriage with the soul: Visus quippe, auditus, gustus, odoratus, et tactus, quasi quaedam viae mentis sunt, quibus foras veniat (…). Per nos etenim corporis sensus quasi per fenestras quasdam exterior quaeque anima respicit, respiciens concuspicit.9 “For seeing, → hearing, tasting, → smelling, and touching, are a kind of ways of the mind, by which it should come forth without, (…). For by these senses of the → body as by a kind of windows the soul takes a view of the several exterior objects, and on viewing longs after them.”10 Gregory the Great links the sensorium and the co-operation of the senses with the desire of the soul. → Odor is also the pre-eminent binding agent of synesthetic apprehension.11 Finally, besides the conviction that fragrances make us travel through the air and bring us into contact with the divine in our environment, → odor is believed to be the source of an exceptional form of ‘knowledge’: knowledge through anamnesis (scent evokes memory) and knowledge through instinct (scent evokes primary and fundamental feelings such as fear, sexuality, and alerts us to → death, illness, danger). In his Constructive Citizenship Lawrence P. Jacks (1860-1955) writes:12 → Smell especially perhaps the most atrophied of all senses of man, shows signs of having once been in the main a time-dealing sense; everybody is familiar with its power in reviving the memory of the past; and I have → heard a rumour of certain speculations in Germany to the effect that the human mind has missed a vast amount of interesting knowledge by trusting to sight rather than to → smell as a means of finding its way through the universe.

I give an example from a legend that was widespread in the Middle Ages. In his prologue to the Liber Floridus, Lambert of Saint-Omer (twelfth century) refers to → smell and taste as metaphors of a certain type of knowledge.13 The

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author wants to offer the reader the honey that the → bees collect from flowers in the → garden. He also refers to the etymology of sapere as sapor, which consequently inserts the notion of taste and → smell into the heart of wisdom, or sapientia. The notion of the → bees and the → garden is of course topical: it refers to paradise. However, this reference to the locus amoenus defines → smell and taste as primordial senses of a lost world. We can see how Lambert is interested specifically in the prototype of scent as a ‘knowledge-generating sense’. This is why he refers to the Legend of the Rood, a story that was profoundly embedded and widely disseminated in medieval culture. It mirrors precisely the importance that → odor gains in the more intuitive and cosmological realms of deeper insight. In the legend, Seth returns to paradise to collect healing oil from the Tree of Life in order to cure the dying Adam.14 However, the angel Michael gives him instead a branch of the Tree of Knowledge. Seth – like the aforementioned dove – becomes the carrier of a twig from which a new covenant will grow (fig. 34). Indeed, Jerome (347-420) recognizes in Seth the concept of semen, and hence a fructifier, a future stem for the patriarchal generations until the coming of Christ.15 As Adam smells the branch, he feels contented and falls into the deep → sleep of → death. In the Gnostic sources for this motif, the scent of the branch does even more: it offers him universal knowledge, the gnosis Adam desired and transmitted to Seth.16 Seth would write the gnosis on two columns, one made of stone so as to be able to endure the test of water and one made of clay so that it could stand the test of fire. In the Judeo-Christian tradition it lays bare traces of a belief in the exceptional power of → smell as a way of acquiring access to privileged knowledge that was usually reserved for God alone. Like touching the Tree of Good and Evil, scent could apparently provide access to the ultimate knowledge, to gnosis. Scent creates an opening toward knowledge; a knowledge, moreover, that was regarded as a deep yearning for what had been lost. The → Annunciation in particular exposes two major ‘scent trails’. On the one hand, we have seen from the ‘interior allegory’ that devotional instructions and the Modern Devotion lavished a great deal of mental and literary attention on the → smell of blossoms, flowers and the like. The act of scattering, covering and decorating with scented herbs, grasses and flowers – on the floor, on the walls of the house – was considered a metaphor for virtue, for the perfect

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receiving room. Scented rooms extend a welcome, like the angel of the → Annunciation, and they also reflect the unblemished character of the (startled) hostess, Mary. In the second place it is typical of → odor that it must make use of material in order to translate itself into the medium of intuition, memory and the mystical. In the → Annunciation this ‘material’ is the attribute of Mary herself: the lily (branch). In the collection of fifteenth-century sermons mentioned above, based on Bernard of Clairvaux, the author says that he himself has the habit of freshening his house with the goodness of flowers, such as the lily. The lily is the flower of purity par excellence, and hence of bodily virtue.17 The lily is prized for its elegance and slenderness. And the gold of the stamens symbolizes the magnificence of the divine.18 But beneath the symbol of purity pulsates the scented connotation of the flower. The lily’s position in iconography is therefore also indicative. Lilies commonly appeared at the center of compositions (fig. 35), as if to separate the realm of heaven (the angel, that from beyond time and beyond space) from the receptive universe of the lived-in room. If the lily is indeed the compositional marker between the two worlds, or even a materialization of that imaginary threshold, then its scent in the → Annunciation may be regarded as the medium of ‘transgression’ or ‘connection’ between those worlds. But which worlds do we mean? In other words, what is it that needs scent? What deeper intuition, unspeakable and invisible, is pulsating here, in need of the subtlest of all senses: → smell? Because → odor is a magical, adjuring element, and at the same time one of the most ephemeral substrates of the intuition, of the repressed past, → odor in the → Annunciation emanates the → Incarnation: the life that emerged from invisibility and subsequently ‘collapsed’ into visibility. What better way to guide this transgression of invisibility to visibility than through → odor, which embraces the continual transformation of substance and immateriality? What better way to follow this path than to start the sublimation of → wind, passing through pneuma, spiritus and gold until we reach the essence of this semantic field: the precipitation of something that can only be perceived by the nose? Is not the vegetative that gives off an overwhelming scent – tree, flower, cross/crotch, seed/semen – a mirror of visible invisibility? Annick de Souzenelle clarifies this from a deeper symbolism.

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Fig. 35. Simone Martini (1284-1344), Annunciation, 1333. Florence, Uffizi

According to de Souzenelle the nose is l’épanouissement de la totalité des énergies sublimées and therefore also of Eros and love.19 Canticle 1:3 sings: “your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is perfume poured out; therefore the maidens love you.” Canticle 7:4 compares the nose to the tower of Lebanon looking towards Damascus (“Your nose is like a tower of Lebanon, overlooking Damascus”). The tower (and the nose) is an axis mundi like the ladder and like the Tree of Life. The nose symbolizes potency and fertility as a process, as a

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sexual ascent in various stages.20 Here the nose and the axis also unite with the fragrant lily, which already in Sumerian tradition was regarded as derived from the Tree of Life, or twig of life.21 The lily, by its shape and its color, symbolizes the heart’s joy. But as symbolic mirror of the → face the nose, like the lily, blossoms from its roots to the openings where the perfume that can pierce the soul (or the home of → ruach: the → head) is secreted.22 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.23

1

On the hierarchy of the senses, see: Hans Jonas, The Nobility of Sight. A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses, in The Phenomenology of Life. Towards a Philosophical Biology, ed. Hans Jonas, Chicago IL, 1982, p. 135-156; Carl Nordenfalk, The Five Senses in Flemish Art before 1600, in Netherlandish Mannerism, ed. Görel Cavalli-Björkman, Stockholm, 1985, p. 135-154; Eric Palazzo, Les cinq sens au Moyen Âge. État de la question et perspectives de recherche, in Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 55, 2012, p. 339-366. 2 Susan A. Harvey, St Ephrem on the Scent of Salvation, in Journal of Theological Studies, 49, 1, 1998, p. 109-128, p. 113; Susan A. Harvey, Scenting Salvation. Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination, Berkeley CA, 2006, passim; Martin Roch, L’intelligence d’un sens. Odeurs miraculeuses et odorat dans l’Occident du haut Moyen Âge (Ve-VIIIe siècles), Turnhout, 2009; David Parkin, Wafting on the Wind. Smell and the Cycle of Spirit and Matter, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13, 1, 2007, p. 39-53. 3 Henry J. Cadbury, The Odor of the Spirit at Pentecost, in Journal of Biblical Literature, 47, 3-4, 1928, p. 237-257. 4 Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past. Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History, Berkeley CA, 2007, p. 62: “Scent is

5

6

7

8

9

10

to reveal truth, incense is to enjoy devotion”; p. 63: “when it came to expressions and practices of religious faith especially, → smell operated in tandem and enjoyed a rough equality with → hearing and seeing, and at times, it trumped both.” Harvey, Scenting Salvation, p. 164-165; Augustine, Confessions, 8.6.15; Paulinus of Nola (ca. 345-431), Poems 25 and 27. Ephrem, Hymns on Faith 20.11, transl. Sebastian P. Brock, The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life, Kalamazoo, 1987, p. 34-35 Jonah, 3: Ephrem, Hymns on Virginity 50.2-6, transl. Kathleen McVey, Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns, 259-468, New York, 1989, p. 458. John Chrysostom, Address on Vainglory and the Right Way for Parents to Bring up Their Children, 27, (Pagan Culture in the Later Roman Empire, 75-122, 129-140), Ithaca NY, 1951, p. 110. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, XX, II, ed. Patrologia Latina 76, col. 189; Palazzo, Les cinq sens au Moyen Âge, p. 350. Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church Anterior to the Division of East and West, 21-23, transl. James Bliss & Charles Marriott, 3 vols., Oxford, 1844-1850, II, p. 515-516.

fragrance/scent 11 Palazzo, Les cinq sens au Moyen Âge, p. 347351, refers to the tenth book of Augustine’s Confessions, chapters 9 and 11, where the author interprets synaesthesia as the door towards the soul and the inner self; Laura K. Skinnebach, Practices of Perception. Devotion and the Senses in Late Medieval Northern Europe (unpublished doctoral thesis), Bergen, 2013, p. 233-257, p. 259: “These [devotional] practices effected an overstepping of perception, not by extending the abilities of the individual senses, but by transforming → materiality.” 12 Lawrence P. Jacks, Constructive Citizenship, New York, 1928, p. 13. 13 Karen De Coene, Navelnacht. Regeneratie en kosmologie in de middeleeuwen, (unpublished PhD diss.), Louvain, 2006, p. 68. 14 For details see: 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), Florence, 2012, p. 69-99. 15 Jerome, Liber interpretationis hebraicorum nominum, 20, 17, (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 72), Turnhout, 1959, p. 71: Seth positio sive positus aut poculum vel gramen aut semen seu resurrectio. The Indo-European semantic stems for ‘seed’ encompass the semantics of sacerdos, priest, but also, grass and vegetation. Moreover, in the Celtic and Russian languages there is

16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23

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a common root shared by semen and to impregnate, to jump upon. This brings Seth’s seed and his important mission back to the → wind: also a fructifier and impregnator for new life and new generations (Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary. A Revised Edition of Julius Pokorny’s Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2007). Baert, Adam, Seth and Jerusalem, p. 69-71; Annick de Souzenelle, Le symbolisme du corps humain, Paris, 1991, p. 380-381, refers to Jewish legends in which Adam before the Expulsion had the same → odor as the animals. The animals recognize Adam by his → odor. The → smell is a condition paradisiaque. This animal → smell was lost at the Fall and the animals no longer recognize him as their kin. Reynicheyt des herten ende reynicheyt des lichaems; Leiden, University Library, Ltk 2189, fol. 199. Jozef Van Vlierberg, Het symbolisme der bloemen, Dendermonde, 1930, p. 31. de Souzenelle, Le symbolisme du corps humain, p. 377-378. Ibid., p. 379. Israel Regardie, The Tree of Life. A Study in Magic, York, 1994, p. 74, passim. de Souzenelle, Le symbolisme du corps humain, p. 380. Ibid., p. 382.

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Gallop! “What counts, faced with an image, is not ‘what we are talking about’. What counts is the → dance itself – of my → gaze and my sentences – with the image. It is a question of rhythm. Like a galloping horse uses stretches of ground; it is not the ground, it is the gallop that counts.”1

1

I made this association with galloping based on the relationship between the → sieve and the horse skin from Chapter 4 The sieve dances. See Barbara Baert, About Sieves and Sieving. Motif, Symbol, Technique, Paradigm, Berlin, 2018 (at press De Gruyter). I also remember an association that Georges Didi-Huberman discussed during his introductory lecture on May 27 2015 during the IKKM Weimar congress Dis/Appearing: L’image est

en galoppe. Later he published this paper as Georges Didi-Huberman, Glimpses. Between Appearance and Disappearance, in Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, 7, 1, 2016, p. 109-124, p. 113 (quote). Didi-Huberman borrows this idea from a psychoanalyst friend and from Cornelius Coastoriadis, L’institution imaginaire de la société, Paris, 1975, p. 404-407.

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Fig. 36. Gerard Leeu (ca. 1445/50-1492), The Souls in the Garden, Thoofkijn van devotien, 1487, Antwerp. Ghent, University Library, Res. 169, fol. 16

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Garden Reindert Falkenburg has shown in his Fruit of Devotion that early modernity was a hinge moment in the mystical tradition of ‘love in the garden’:1 The first tractates to employ allegorical references to the spiritual garden as a central theme date from the beginning of the thirteenth century. However, the genre only became widely popular in the fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. In this period spiritual garden allegories appear as separate texts, but also as elements within other, mainly devotional literary forms.

These tracts were also read by the laity and were stimulated by the Devotia moderna. I mention Die geestlicke boomgaert der vruchten printed around 1500, but also Gerard Leeu’s (1445/50-1492) earlier Thoofkijn van devotien, where the soul and its spiritual relationship with God is expressed in the drinking (hence tasting) of the water of life in the Garden of Paradise (fig. 36).2 With regard to the material culture of this period in the Low Countries, I refer to the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ‘Enclosed Gardens’ (fig.  37).3 This phenomenon of Enclosed Gardens in the North, particularly in modern-day Flanders and Mechelen (Malines), touches a deep undercurrent.4 Enclosed Gardens are in fact little trays or cases in which floral and vegetable motifs are mimicked with beads and paper. Often these cases also included relics or little tableaux of biblical → fragments. Enclosed Gardens evoke the Garden of Paradise, but more than that they evoke nostalgia and desire for the lost garden. A sort of ‘remnant art’, Enclosed Gardens gave material expression to the swarming, eddying, piling up of this unconscious discourse.5 Paradise is here an image for knowledge that escapes the cerebral, the knowledge, partly lost, that energetically mounts up in the cosmos, but in the human descends in the form of instinct, fertility, the urge to create, in brief through the whole sensorium. Enclosed Gardens not only appeal to the → gaze, but also invite → smelling, touching. For this reason Enclosed Gardens might be seen as the → matrixial field, the overgrowth in which feminine sensitivity is active. Luce Irigaray links it to the haptic. “The tangible represented a divine happiness, an ‘earthly paradise’, until the moment it entered into the perspective of the knowledge of good and evil. Prohibition might lead to a kind of knowledge that

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Fig. 37. Enclosed Garden with medallion of the Mystical Hunt for the Unicorn (St. Augustine, the Virgin and Child with St. Anne, and St. Elizabeth), ca. 1530, various media: wooden sculptures, textile, wax, oil on wood (medallion). Mechelen (Malines), Gasthuiszusters

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belongs to God alone.” In Irigaray’s interpretation, this is knowledge detached from touch.6 These little paradises became very popular in the sixteenth century, and soon they would be sold on the market for a wider public with private aspirations, losing their original feminine significations and interpretations of the senses. They became part of a more general fascination for garden allegory and prayer. By the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modernity, treatises, vernacular texts, and devotional objects teach us that the garden allegory grew from a selective female love mysticism into a more general ‘spirituality of love’ to be practiced in metaphors such as → fragrance and savor as the unique portals to the divine. It is again Falkenburg who has shown the deep Wirkungsgeschichte of garden allegory in the pictorial Marian Andachtsbilder of the Low Countries. For if texts and prayers use → scents and savors as conduits of devotional experience and spiritual insight, why would looking at these motifs in the form of flowers and fruits in paintings not fulfil exactly the same spiritual function? Gerard David (1460-1523) expresses prayer in his Virgin and Child by suggesting the divine → scent of a rose that Mary presents to the child (fig. 38);7 and such examples could be multiplied beyond counting. We can conclude with Falkenburg: “In the perspective of ‘mirrored piety’ it is possible to look to the garden tracts for greater insight into the nature of devotional attitudes associated with the consumption of fruit and flowers in the Andachtsbilder.”8

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Fig. 38. Gerard David (ca. 1460-1523), Virgin and Child, 1510-1523. Granada, Iglesia del Sacro Monte

garden

Reindert Falkenburg, The Fruit of Devotion. Mysticism and the Imagery of Love in Flemish Paintings of the Virgin and Child, 1450-1550, (Oculi, 5), Amsterdam, 1994, p. 20. 2 Antwerp, 1487; Ghent University Library, Res. 169, fol. 16. This is a Middle Dutch translation of Pierre d’Ailly’s Le jardin amoureux de l’âme; Falkenburg, The Fruit of Devotion, p. 36-37, fig. 47-48. 3 Paul Vandenbroeck (ed.), Hooglied. De beeldwereld van religieuze vrouwen in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden, vanaf de 13de eeuw, Brussels, 1994, p. 91-104; Barbara Baert, The Glorified Body. Relics, Materiality and the Internalized Image, in Backlit Heaven, eds. Paul Vandenbroeck & Gerard Rooijakkers, Mechelen, 2009, p. 130-153. 4 Barbara Baert, Late Medieval ‘Enclosed Gardens’ of the Low Countries. An Iconological Contribution to Gender Artistic Expression, (Studies in Iconology, 2), Louvain – Walpole MA, 2015. 1

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Brigette Pelzer, Relicten, in Hooglied. De beeldwereld van religieuze vrouwen in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden, vanaf de 13de eeuw, ed. Paul Vandenbroeck, Brussels, 1994, p. 179-204, p. 181-182. 6 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, London – New York, 2004, p. 137. According to Irigaray, the sense of touch stands for unity. The unborn child in the womb is surrounded by fluidity. Thought detached from touch, argues Irigaray, leads to the banishment of human beings from paradise; Karlijn Demasure, Noli me tangere. A Contribution to the Reading of Jn 20:17 Based on a Number of Philosophical Reflections on Touch, in Louvain Studies, 32, 2007, p. 304-329, esp. p. 327. 7 Granada, Iglesia del Sacro Monte; Falkenburg, The Fruit of Devotion, p. 85-86, fig. 31. 8 Ibid., p. 83. 5

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Fig. 39. Girolamo Savoldo (1480-1540), Noli me tangere, ca. 1524. London, National Gallery

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Gaze The Noli me tangere has brought out a process of transformation that diverts the prohibition on touch into a gaze (the ‘iconic turn’), both in the parent text and in the iconography. The gaze leads to an interiorized insight (horaô), a comprehensive and understanding seeing that is independent of understanding by touch (although in the arts this touch remains an implicit presence; seeing includes touching). Noli me tangere therefore seems to defend a model of knowledge against haptocentrism. This hegemony is characteristic of Western European modernity. According to Jay, “it must (…) be acknowledged that Hellenic thought did on the whole privilege the visual over any other sense.”1 Contemporary philosophy, especially the French school, contests the primacy of sight and has reinstated the importance of touch.2 Luce Irigaray characterizes scopophilia as typically masculine and diametrically opposite to touch as feminine.3 This division is also expressed in the Noli me tangere itself. But the phallocentric modernist model that the Noli me tangere might at first sight embody will be nuanced in what follows. To begin with, the prohibition of touch is sandwiched between two other senses: → hearing and sight. I would like to develop this further on the basis of Girolamo Savoldo’s Mary Magdalene (ca. 1524) in the National Gallery in London (fig. 39).4 Mary Magdalene looks out of the painting, at us. The composition refers in an ambiguous way to two new genres in the Mary Magdalene iconography of the sixteenth century: the genre of the Magdalene portrait on the one hand, and the half-sized penitent, often weeping or praying Mary Magdalene in the → grotto, on the other.5 Still, this Mary Magdalene refers to the Noli me tangere tradition. Striking in the painting by Savoldo is the ambivalent reaching out/not yet reaching out of the → hands. The meaningful deixis of the Noli is inexistent as yet, considering the veiled right → hand. The veiling of → hand and → body in this painting is no innocent motif, but is essentially directed at the particular moment in John 20:16. Unveiled, the Master is indeed recognized, but still veiled is the Resurrected whom she will see about one verse further, beyond the frame of this painting. When Savoldo touched Mary Magdalene with his paintbrush and thus brought her to life visually, yes called her by her name, he was the first person she saw: her artistic Rabbouni, master, and creator. This Noli me tangere is about the relationship between model and artist. Consequently, it is also about

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the genesis of the image. But different to the awakening of the girl who was later given the name of Galatea in the Ovidian myth of Pygmalion, who sees and is touched by her creator, the sculptor, this Noli me tangere is about painting. In painting, the relationship between image and viewer is not a tactile one. It functions in the energetic field of the gaze. Or to say it differently: the impossibility for Mary Magdalene to touch a → body in transformation shifts towards the impossibility for the beholder to touch the painting. In the Renaissance mind of Savoldo, Noli me tangere touches on the mystery of visuality itself. But there is more. Mary Magdalene’s posture betrays that she has turned about.6 As we know, this turn of the conversa, is described in the Gospel at the moment when she is addressed as “Mary!” Savoldo paints the look of recognition in John 20:16: “Rabbouni!” just before the Noli me tangere will be uttered. He calls, she turns. The speech echoes still in the gaze of this painting. What Savoldo has understood is that Noli me tangere is also an iconography of direct speech, of calling and exclamation: “Mary!”; “Rabbouni!” The first call (“Mary!”) is epistemologically interesting, since it is the voice that leads to recognizing the master. “Human persons find it difficult to close themselves off from sound. (…) → Hearing leaves the impression that it takes place within the person. In order to discover the origins of a sound we must first confirm it using another sense, namely the sense of touch or sight. (…) The sound is alienated from its origins.”7 In fact, the learning by voice refers to an → archetype in pedagogy: ‘acousmatic’ listening.8 Pythagoras, for instance, delivered his lectures from behind a black curtain to prevent his physical presence from hindering his audience’s concentration. The invisibility of master and pupil, for example by dividing the room with a curtain or veil, was held to increase mental concentration. → Hearing is an extremely primitive sense: it is the first and the last sense, and in principle precedes speech.9 → Hearing is the sense that the foetus already possesses in the womb: the foetus → hears the mother’s voice. It is also said to be the last sense that is lost in the process of dying and the only sense to remain latent in the comatose. Speech and → hearing work together in a knowledge-generating system that certainly precedes the visual-literary epistemology of Plato. Da der Hörsinn rückbezüglich ist, hört sich der Sprechende selbst. Sein Hören folgt seinem Sprechen (…) also nach-denklich zu sein.10 Communication by speaking and → hearing typifies oral culture, in which acoustic mimesis – transmitting values and insights – is more important than written, and

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Fig. 40. Noli me tangere, Codex Egberti, Reichenau, ca. 977-993. Trier, Stadtbibliothek, codex 24, fol. 91

therefore visible, laws.11 Oral culture is a culture of ‘intercession’, in which prophets play an important part. In such cultures, therefore, the tension between speaking and keeping silent is dual and fundamental: it is a tension that is ruled by the bounds of taboo or the deepest possible mystery.12 In this sense, we might compare the ‘auditive’ aspect of Noli me tangere also with the aural fascination in the → Annunciation: the spoken word ‘Ave Maria’ enters the → ear of Mary and induces conception.13 The secret of the → Incarnation is hidden in the spoken and aural received word (conceptio per aurem).14

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As soon as Mary recognizes her master (“Rabbouni!”), she reaches out to ‘touch’. The Noli me tangere paradigm – in other words – would suggest indeed a chronology of the senses: → hearing, (not) touching and finally seeing in the apex of insight.15 The iconography of Noli me tangere is scopophiliac in nature, but a phonocentric aspect resonates behind it: the archetypical function of → hearing in prophetic knowledge and in the secret of → Incarnation. The Mary Magdalene of Savoldo is besides its iconic turn a ‘sonoric’ image indeed. And couldn’t we interpret the same subtle interplay of the sense of → hearing in the Ottonian miniature, the Codex Egberti (fig. 40)? The miniaturist painted the → hand of Christ touching the epigraphy mary above her → head. Christ, the vox, who is calling Mary, ‘touches’ her in her very name. Thus the miniaturist expresses touch as speech and enriches the image with its ‘sonoric’ potential.

Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley CA – Los Angeles CA, 1993, p. 28. 2 For these anti-ocular thoughts see Jacques Derrida, Le toucher, Touch/to touch him, in Paragraph, 16, 2, 1993, p. 122-157. 3 Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light. Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau Ponty, (Warwick Studies in European Philosophy), London – New York, 1998, p. 7. Vision, according to Irigaray is priviliged by men. Vision objectifies, creates distance and dominates, placing women in a passive position. Women thereby become the object of contemplation. In Irigaray’s opinion, however, women prefer touch to vision. Touch is thus related to women, giving rise to a feminization thereof. 4 Mary Pardo, The Subject of Savoldo’s Magdalene, in The Art Bulletin, 71, 1, 1989, p. 67-91. 5 Yves Giraud, L’image de la Madeleine du XVe au XIXe siècle, Freiburg, 1996; Marilena Mosco, La Maddalena tra sacro 1

e profano. Da Giotto a De Chirico, Florence, 1986; Jean-Pierre Vanden Branden, ‘La Mélancolie’ ou ‘Marie-Madeleine pénitente’, in Bulletin van de Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, 38-40, 19891991, p. 283-294; Barbara Baert, Mary Magdalen, Ghent, 2002. 6 See on the pictorial concept of the bustum as Unheimlichkeit due to the combination of the static and dynamic pose: Jeanette Kohl & Rebecca Müller (eds.), Kopf/Bild. Die Büste in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, Munich – Berlin, 2007, p. 9-30. 7 Edith Wyschogrod, Doing before Hearing. On the Primacy of Touch, in Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, ed. François Laruelle, Paris, 1980, p. 179-203, p. 193; Karlijn Demasure, Noli me tangere. A Contribution to the Reading of Jn 20:17 Based on a Number of Philosophical Reflections on Touch, in Louvain Studies, 32, 2007, p. 304-329, p. 313. 8 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision. Sound on Screen, New York, 1994. With my gratitude to Wim Lambrechts.

gaze 9 Christoph Wulf, Das mimetische Ohr, in Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie, 2, 1-2, 1993, p. 9-15. 10 Ibid., p. 9-10. 11 It is, furthermore, an epistemology that is rooted in magic, such as the ‘pronouncing’ of spells to control nature. Wulf, Das mimetische Ohr, p. 12: Die Mimesis der Natur vollzieht sich über das ‚Hören‘ der menschlichen Stimme durch das ‚Ohr‘ der Natur. 12 Alois Hahn, Reden und Schweigen, in Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie, 8, 1, 1999, p. 204-231. 13 Leo Steinberg, ‘How Shall This Be’? Reflections on Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation in London, in Artibus and Historiae, 8, 16, 1987, p. 25-44. 14 Wolfgang Kaempfer, Die Zeit der Malerei und der Raum der Musik. Zur Frage des

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Funktionentauschs von Auge und Ohr, in Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie, 2, 1-2, 1993, p. 40-44. 15 The difference between recognition through the voice and recognition by sight, in parallel with insight through intangibility and insight through tangibility, is nowadays also seen as a hermeneutic key to the (apparent) opposition between Noli me tangere and the story of Thomas ( John 20:24-31). This is used by Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere. Essai sur la levée de corps, Paris, 2003, p. 50 and Daniel Arasse, L’excès des images, in L’apparition à Marie-Madeleine, Paris, 2001, p. 79-126, p. 97. This interpretation has valuable implications for the history of the appreciation of the auditory and visual senses in religious faith.

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Gender (moderator [male] walks on stage) …Many thanks for this… (hesitation)… enthusiastic lecture… (smile)… In a seemingly innocent manner (seemingly, because wasn’t she truly inspired and an inspiration, and isn’t the → enthusiasm in her words and gestures indeed so contagious?), the cerebral ‘scholarly’ qualities that women possess are ascribed to → enthusiasm, and almost as if the Enlightenment had gender-specifically ‘contaminated’ it, then depreciated. The result is ambivalent, bizarre, and unheimlich. Ambivalent because within this → enthusiasm – as the etymological core shows – there is indeed genius. Bizarrely, there is no resistance against this restrictive ‘compliment’ (anyone would answer “thank you”). Or, in other words: this ‘compliment’ shouldn’t even ‘warrant’ an unheimlich feeling.

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genius loci

Fig. 41. Vicino Orsini (1523-1584), Sacro Bosco with sleeping nymph, ca. 1552-1580. Bomarzo, Italy

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Genius loci In Bomarzo, near Rome, Vicino Orsini (1523-1584) founded the so-called Sacro Bosco or Parco dei Mostri between 1552-1580.1 It is a mysterious place where nature becomes one with sculptures of monsters, gods, and fantasy creatures from other realities.2 The park naturally does not lack a → sleeping → nymph (fig. 41).3 Visitors find themselves in a dream world and are confronted with mysterious artworks. Strolling around and discovering these spirited creatures is similar to Poliphilo’s experience. It is a locus amoenus that seeks contact with the chthonic underworld. The → nymph here is a meraviglia. For centuries she has been allowed to rest here, becoming one with nature. She lies buried under her protective layer of moss, just like → Echo’s → body slowly and sclerotically merged with the rocks. She → sleeps, but do not be mistaken: she → hears the chirping of the birds, the rustling of the trees, the murmur of a spring. And she → hears your footsteps. Do not wake her. The hour of the → démon de midi has arrived. Just listen, the earth is already humming.4 The rocks, springs, caves and woods venerated from the earliest historic times are still, in different forms, held as sacred. But what the continuity of the sacred places in fact indicates is the autonomy of hierophanies. The sacred expresses itself according to the laws of its own dialectic and this expression comes to man from without. If the ‘choice’ of his sacred places were left to man, then there could be no explanation for this continuity.5

Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) suggests that the sacredness of the places escapes men, is paradoxically handed down to him from above, given to him through a hierophany, through a flash of the divine that breaks through in a certain place. The → nymph, as a being somewhere between gods and humans, is also tasked with the special continuity of the sacred place. The → nymph rests on banks and in → grottoes, in an unspoilt nature that brims with mystery and desire. She has her own genius loci.6 According to Richard Broxton Onians, in his The Origins of European Thought, the Latin lympha, lymphatus refers to the element of water, but also to panic, fear, stupefaction and even insanity. “The current explanation of lymphatus,

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lymphaticus is that persons who ‘saw’ a → nymph or water spirit went mad.” The → nymph is related to hydrophobia and lymphatus refers primarily to a ‘crazy fear’. This stupefaction is caused by something liquid.7 In his work Atmospheres. Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces, Tonino Griffero defines the genius loci as a mysterium tremendum, as a “faint shiver,” a power that surprises, space that becomes place.8 Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) writes about this ambivalent sensation, that at once gives a sense of something sacred, but also untouchable and unreachable: “The feeling of it may pervade the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away.”9 The genius loci is like a “mystery forming an atmospheric tissue.”10 It is a Gefühlsraum and thus often the sensing of aura and Stimmung of a certain place as apparently ‘charged’ with a power that makes hierophany impossible. The genius loci is a riddle that opens or closes: it requires reverence; it tempts, it is a mysterium, but also a mysterium tremendum. Just like the → nymph on the banks of the Danube.

Pietro Roccasecca, Ricerca sul lessico di parchi e giardini. Istituto Centrale per il catalogo e la Documentazione, Rome, 1990, with bibliography p. 213-215, terminology p. 219, index p. 223-228; Pietro Roccasecca, Nota metodologica sul lessico di parchi e giardini di interesse storico, in Tutela dei Giardino storici. Bilanci e prospettive, ed. Vincenzo Cazzato, Rome, 1989, p. 256-262. 2 http://www.demorgen.be/buitenland/ elfjes-overspoelen-brits-sprookjesbos-autoriteiten-grijpen-in-a2243301/. See also the Wayford Woods, a thirty-acre natural heritage site, where doors and figurines started popping up between the trees as if summoned by fairies. 3 Horst Bredekamp, Vicino Orsini und der Heilige Wald von Bomarzo. Ein Fürst als Künstler und Anarchist, 2 vols., Worms, 1985, p. 177. 1

4 http://www.demorgen.be/wetenschap/ de-aarde-bromt-en-we-weten-eindelijkwaarom-a2293806/: Researchers of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique claim to have found the source of the humming. “The pressure of the waves on the bottom of the ocean cause seismic waves that make the earth oscillate.” “According to a 2003 study, barely 2 per cent of people can → hear the sound, they are mostly between 55 and 70 years of age. The researchers were able to determine that the waves could last between 13 and 300 seconds, and those who can → hear them describe it as torturous.” 5 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, New York, 1958, p. 369. 6 Barry Patterson, The Art of Conversation with the Genius Loci, Somerset, 2005.

genius loci 7

Richard B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought. About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate, Cambridge, 1988, p. 34-35, p. 67, p. 219-220 and p. 35; see: Plinius, Historia Naturalis, XXIV, 17, 164: hac pota lymphari homines. In fact, ingested liquids, water, wine, → blood were believed to go to the lungs (the substance of life-generating pneuma). “Lymphati are people who are in a frantic state of mind: commota mente. And νυμφόληπτος to which some refer (if νύμφη meant a spirit of water or plant sap) would describe the inspiring effects of drinking, of the perfundere” (p. 35, note 5, p. 66, note 6). “The muses, Camienae and Carmentis were indeed water → nymphs” (p. 35). “Lymphari could thus mean ‘to be frenzied’, to be possessed by such power” (p. 66). “A poem was water, honey or nectar of the muses, which are spring-spirits from which poets drank at Parnassus” (p. 67). “A ‘→ nymph’ appears to have been the ψυχή, the reproductive life, in a tree etc. In the earliest evidence, the Iliad, νύμφαι are usually clearly identified with water, springs etc. Lympha

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seems akin. The water-goddesses, are givers of fertility among the Celts. νύμφη also described a bride or marriageable girl (cf. νυμφεύω, to marry) (…) For the Persians, the tutelary spirit of the female sex was the spirit of water, Anahira” (p. 219). You also have the Saint Dymphna of Geel (degeneration of Nympha, Lympha), a recluse with a Vita from the 7th century, who wandered near water and in woods and was declared the patron saint of the ‘mad’; Anneke MulderBakker, Woudvrouwen. Ierse prinsessen als kluizenaressen in de Nederlanden, in Tijdschrift voor sociale geschiedenis, 20, 1994, p. 1-23. 8 Tonino Griffero, Atmospheres. Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces, Burlington VT, 2014, p. 73. See also: Dörte Kuhlmann, Der Geist des (W)ortes, in Wolkenkuckucksheim, 2, (e-journal), 1998. 9 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy. An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, Oxford, 1926, p. 12. 10 Hermann Schmitz, System der Philosophie, 3, 2: Der Gefühlsraum, Bonn, 1981, p. 133.

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Glimpses On 27 May 2015, Georges Didi-Huberman presented a keynote lecture at Charles University in Prague, during the Dis/Appearing conference organized by the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM, Bauhaus Universität Weimar).1 As an observer and former fellow of the IKKM, I was profoundly touched by the personal depth Didi-Huberman had instilled on his paper Glimpses. Between Appearance and Disappearance.2 It consisted of about ten reflections concerning the meaning of the image as a flaring and fading. During his talk, Didi-Huberman used evocative images – recollections – which he had collected during the years; impressions while walking streets, melancholic musings about love, and thoughts gathered from literature en route. I vividly remember the moment a PhD student inquired about expanding the associative approach of the theme. The reply of the master was, that the particular beauty of the discipline of art history can be seen through the embracing of multiple genres. “He (or she) who glimpses desires, is wounded.”3

1

Georges Didi-Huberman, Que ce qui apparaît seulement s’aperçoit, at Dis/Appearing, IKKM Conference, May 27-29, 2015, Charles University, Prague: https:// vimeo.com/163985507.

2 Georges Didi-Huberman, Glimpses. Between Appearance and Disappearance, in Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, 7, 1, 2016, p. 109-124, passim. 3 Ibid., p. 111.

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grid

Fig. 42. Drawing from a loom weight with grid/ net/lozenge, Starcevo-culture (Bulgaria), 5800-5600 bc

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Grid Rosalind Krauss writes the following in her iconic article Grids:1 Now it is in this ambivalence about the import of the grid, an indecision about its connection to matter on the one hand or spirit on the other, that its earliest employers can be seen to be participating in a drama that extended well beyond the domain of art. That drama, which took many forms, was staged in many places. (…) Therefore, although the grid is certainly not a story, it ‘is’ a structure, and one, moreover, that allows a contradiction between the values of science and those of spiritualism to maintain themselves within the consciousness of modernism, or rather its unconscious as something repressed. In order to continue its analysis – to assess the very success of the grid’s capacities to repress.2 (…) In this → matrix ambi- or multivalence, the grid helps us to see, to focus on. Regarding the → lozenge in particular she uses the following words.3 (…) Diamond shaped as if we were looking at a landscape through a window, the frame of the window arbitrarily truncating our view but never shaking our certainty that the landscape continues beyond the limits of what we can, at that moment, see.4

Sebastian Egenhofer, on the other hand, describes the material and metaphorical spectrum of the grid, → lozenge, and → trellis, essentially related to the weaving technique (fig. 42). To an extent unparalleled in any other cultural technique, the material infrastructure deployed in textile production [and hence sieve-making] is crucially linked to the straight line in the form of the taut thread, regular sequencing to form a surface, and lines crossing orthogonally. When textiles are produced, the grid is not imposed upon a pre-existing space or material surface but is instead the element that actually generates the material surface.5

Rosalind Krauss, Grids, in October, 9, 1979, p. 50-64. 2 Ibid., p. 54-55. 3 Ibid., p. 61. 4 Ibid., p. 59.

1

5

Sebastian Egenhofer, art. Grid, in Textile Terms. A Glossary, (Textile Studies, 0), eds. Mateusz Kapustka, et al., Berlin, 2017, p. 133-135, p. 133.

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grisaille

Fig. 43. Giotto di Bondone (1266/67-1337), Allegory of Inconstancy, grisaille, 1306. Padua, Cappella degli Scrovegni

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Grisaille Grisaille is a technique that was developed in the world of the Parisian miniatures of the fourteenth century as an aesthetic counterpart and paragone for sculpture. The shades of grey and minimization of the use of color also enabled the painterly arts to place the focus on plasticity. Grisailles, with their illusion of sculptures in alcoves, started to take over representational spaces, as seen in the Scrovegni chapel (1306) by Giotto (1266/67-1337) in Padua (fig. 43). Moreover, the grisaille technique is a visual state that has not yet been reached by color. Still, grisaille is not an incomplete image. Quite the opposite: grisaille specifically wishes to evoke an optical in-between mode, as a metaphor for the eschatology of the visual medium. The image is expectant. It is still enclosed within the medium, ready to burst out in color. Aby Warburg places Tuccia of Mantegna on Tafel 49 of the → Bilderatlas, with the inscriptions: Gebändigtes Siegerpathos (Mantegna). Grisaille als ‘Wie der Metapher’. Distanzierung. Pathos del vincitore imbrigliato (Mantegna). Grisaille quale ‘come della metafora’. Distanziamento (fig. 44). Grisaille is the paragone of the sculpted interspace, the optical → Zwischenraum, the technique that describes the potential and → transition of the painterly arts and thus its power of creation. In the affresco of → Kairos/Occasio in Mantua (ca. 1490-1510) attributed to the school of Mantegna (fig. 45), assimilation of the visual (time) dimension that is called grisaille transpires to be fundamental and necessary. It provides Occasio both with the sandwich position that enables her to become independent of → Kairos, and with the comfort of a waiting position. The shades of grey cling to Occasio and Occasio in turn absorbs the grey as an elixir for the visual soul. According to Georges Didi-Huberman, grisaille is in fact the medium that best approaches the nymphean ‘being of the in-between’. He connects both in their most radical shape: Mais on comprend aussi que ces incarnations [of the nymphs] demeurent toujours à mi-distance de la chair et de l’air, du souffle et de la pierre. (…) c’est dans la teinte des cendres et des sarcophages que l’énergie, que la vie dionysiaques s’expriment le mieux (c’est dans les coloris du deuil que le désir passe le mieux: paradoxe, en effet); c’est dans la distanciation – donc la dénaturalisation – des couleurs que la peinture humaniste accède aux nouvelles formes du naturalisme.1

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Fig. 44. Tafel 49 (Gebändigtes Siegerpathos (Mantegna). Grisaille als ‘Wie der Metapher’ Distanzierung) from the Bilderatlas. From: Claudia Brink & Martin Warnke, Aby Warburg. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, (Gesammelte Schriften. Aby Warburg, 2, II.1), eds. Horst Bredekamp, et al., Berlin, 2008, p. 90-91

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Fig. 45. Milieu of Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), Occasio e Poenitentia, ca. 1490-1510, grisaille. Mantua, Museo della Città nel Palazzo di San Sebastiano

The narcotic waiting mode of grisaille is similar to the → chrysalis or cocoon, in which the → butterfly waits to emerge. Similarly, grisaille is an optic interspace, where the kinetic energies of the → Zwischenraum, of before and after, can meet.

1

Georges Didi-Huberman, Phalènes. Essais sur l’apparition, 2, Paris, 2013, p. 280-305, p. 291-292.

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grotto

Fig. 46. Anapat grotto in Armenia, matriarchal reliefs

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Grotto To this day, the subterranean caves and grottoes with their stalactites and stalagmites fascinate us scientifically (speleologists), archaeologically and recreationally (fig. 46). The caves, with their complex underground chambers, tunnels and unexpected turns (rooms as big as houses that suddenly rise up out of nowhere), with springs that well up from the deepest parts of the earth and the strange echoes that reverberate through their spaces, stimulate all sorts of mysterious religions and gave rise to shrines and votive rooms, such as the ancient nympheia.1 Additionally, the natural gloss, the cave walls with their ornamentation and the colors of the minerals, inspired the artistic interventions in the subterranean cultures. The cave, as Gesammtkunstwerk, could be interpreted as the source of plastic dialogues with her pronounced textures and tectonics. The cave can be considered the pure and natural beginning of art (history). Ellen E. Rice researched the complex water structures and → nymph caves on Rhodes.2 The natural structures with their hidden and hard to reach chambers were part of the nymphean ritual. The searching, the climbing, was part of the ‘visual surprise’. In many of the chambers, archaeologists found old votive sacrifices: statues, reliefs, painted boards. On the island of Rhodes, they also found artificial water supplies and fountain sculptures. The locations also played a societal role. People could hold meetings there, but also festivities or they could relax in the springs. The Nymphaea kept getting bigger and more luxurious. They became palaces of pleasantries on the cool evenings, like the grottoes with countless of statues of Emperor Tiberius (14-37) in his summer home Sperlonga, south of Rome. The cave is logically a reference to the female sex.3 Together with the role of the water, the hidden dark and black life force from within, the cave indisputably has uterine connotations.4 The Babylonian mother-goddess Nintu lives in the mountain and embodies fertility and regeneration.5 Her → face is represented with the abstract sign of the female sex: an arch ending at the bottom with a curl similar to the Greek letter Omega (fig. 47).6 Subterranean springs and rivers function as the amniotic waterways of the earth and in the Christian period continued to trigger all kinds of uses, rituals and beliefs between on the one hand black magic and on the other the acculturalization and appropriation of springs dedicated to saints.

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Fig. 47. Symbols for Nintu and Hathor, Egypt. From: Alphons A. Barb, Diva Matrix, in The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 16, 1953, p. 193-238, no. 28c

Gaston Bachelard reflects on this archetypical chthonic function of the cave:7 La grotte ne quittera jamais son rang d’image fondamentale. C’est le coin du monde dit Loti, auquel je reste le plus fidèlement attaché, après en avoir aimé tant d’autres; comme nulle part ailleurs, je m’y sens en paix, je m’y sens rafraîchi, retrempé de prime jeunesse et de vie neuve.8 The cave is an escape destination where one dreams without end.9 The cave, with its mysterious hidden access, materializes the threshold, it monitors the → transition. The person at the entrance of the cave witnesses the passageway of the → ear, the darkness of the pupil. The → ear and the eye of the cave fascinate and attract, yet make one hesitate.10 The cave remains a mystery: cult of a forbidden love, a room harboring secrets, a birthplace, the realm of ghosts.11 Toutes les grottes parlent. La voix rocailleuse, la voix caverneuse, la voix grondante sont des voix de la terre. C’est la parole difficile, dit Michelet, qui fait les prophètes. (...) C’est parce que les voix sortant de l’abîme sont confuses qu’elles sont prophétiques. Devant l’antre profond, au seuil de la caverne; le rêveur hésite. D’abord il regarde le trou noir. La caverne, à son tour, regard pour regard, fixe le rêveur avec son œil noir. L’antre est l’œil du cyclope. Cette transposition, on doit la vivre sur les plus fragiles

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images, sur les plus fugitives images, sur les images les moins descriptives qui soient. Telle est l’image du regard de la grotte. Comment ce simple trou noir peut-il donner une image valable pour un regard profond? Toute la volonté de voir s’affirme dans le regard fixe des cavernes. Dans la grotte, il semble que le noir brille.12

See also: Horst Bredekamp, Wasserangst und Wasserfreude in der Renaissance und Manierismus, in Kulturgeschichte des Wassers, ed. Hartmut Böhme, Frankfurt am Main, 1988, p. 145-188. 2 Ellen E. Rice, Grottoes on the Acropolis of Hellenistic Rhodes, in The Annual of the British School at Athens, 90, 1995, p. 383-404. 3 Ewa Kuryluk, Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex, Evanston IL, 1987, p. 189-258. 4 This is also apparent from certain caverns with a serratedness that evokes association with the uterus, such as the Saint-Baume cave, where Mary Magdalene is honored to this day. The jagged shape has traditionally been a symbol for the uterus. “The jaggedness is an ancient motif associated with the womb, that has been retained in the Mary cult in sites such as Virgen de la Peña (= ‘Virgin of the jagged rock’) or Montserrat (= ‘serrated mountain’)”; Paul Vandenbroeck, Capturing Nameless Energies, Experiencing Matrixial Paradoxes. Syncretist Sacred Sites on the 1

5 6

7 8 9 10

11 12

Canary Islands, in Loci Sacri. Understanding Sacred Sites, (KADOC Studies on Religion, Culture and Society, 9), Louvain, 2012, p. 93-123; Paul Vandenbroeck, The ‘Nameless Motif ’. On the Cross-Cultural Iconography of an Energetic Form, in Annual of the Antwerp Museum, 2010 (2012), p. 113-180, p. 160. Bruno Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien, 1, Heidelberg, 1925, p. 11. Alphons A. Barb, Diva matrix. A Faked Gnostic Intaglio in the Possession of P.P. Rubens and the Iconology of the Symbol, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 16, 1953, p. 193-238, p. 199. Gaston Bachelard, La terre et les rêveries du repos, Paris, 1948, p. 205-234. Ibid., p. 213. Ibid., p. 208. Paul Masson Oursel, Le symbolisme eurasiatique de la porte, in La Nouvelle Revue Française, 239, 1933, p. 207-212. Bachelard, La terre et les rêveries, p. 209. Ibid., p. 216-223, passim.

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hair

Fig. 48. Diagram of a warp-weighted loom by Ellen Harlizius-Klück

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Hair In many languages, ‘seizing’ an opportunity has remained connected with catching or grasping locks of hair. In his linguistic study To Take Time by the Forelock, John E. Matzke (1862-1910) explored the Italian idiom tener la fortuna per ciuffo or per ciuffetto, comparable to the English “to take time by the forelock,” or less commonly (but also found in other languages) “to take fortune by the forelock.”1 The expression capere crines occurs in the context of Roman marriage ceremonies and later in Arthurian romance (Tristan and fata morgana).2 The grasping of → Kairos’ hair also shows similarities to the tassel (also sometimes called tuft or bunch) that children riding a merry-go-round attempt to grab to win a free ride. To this day, in both language and folk customs, there is a relationship between the tuft/tassel/lock of hair (or strands of textile) and being lucky. The texture of hair relates it to thread. Hair possesses mobility that closely resembles the ‘fluidity’ of soft silk fabrics and both are played with by breeze and → wind. Hair is the most intimate extension of the → body.3 ‘Something’ is growing out of you and thus becomes graspable, tangible. Hair is a dry and aesthetic version of liquid and abject bodily fluids like → blood and semen. Hair can be worn down or bound up. This approaches the fringes of textiles on the one hand and the idea of tassels on the other. The following symbolic spectra can be distinguished: → Kairos and textile; the idea of the → head as tempus and hornedness, of elixir and psyche; and finally the motif of tassels and fringes as apotropaic bundlings of fertility. Firstly, → Kairos was related to keirein (κείρειν), to cut in two, or the Latin cernere, to divide. → Kairos makes an opening, an opening that symbolizes ‘opportunity’, like the loophole or the flight forwards. Richard Broxton Onians also sees a link to the phonetically related → Kairos.4 The latter is specifically weaving jargon and is the name of the lower wooden bobbin that weights the warp threads (fig. 48). The action of the god → Kairos is analogous to the action of the weft on the warp, with the ‘shooting’ of the shuttle through the warp making a passage through a series of ‘openings’.5 Onians takes it as read that the phonetic relationship implies a semantic relationship: the singular opening, the ‘shot’ through the warp, reminiscent of the victim’s most vulnerable point to the impact of an arrow.6 The action of weaving through the warp threads anciently reflects the human person’s fate, the length of the threads representing

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Fig. 49. Mona Hatoum (born 1952), Recollection or installation with loom and hair, 1995. Ghent, S.M.A.K.

the duration of time. In English it is still possible to speak of a ‘nick’ (a notch, a cut) in time. In 1995, the Lebanese artist Mona Hatoum (born 1952) created an installation for the Kortrijk (Belgium) Beguinage entitled Recollection. The installation formed part of the conceptual exhibition Inside the Visible. Upon entering the space, the visitor saw a white table in the distance. Strewn upon the ground lay tufts of something resembling dust bunnies. From close up, the viewer could realize that the loom on the table contained not wool but weft made from the artist’s own hair (fig. 49).7 Hair is, secondly, a very specific sacrificial topos in the ancient Greek world. Again, in the Homeric worldview hair could be regarded as a post mortem sacrifice. It was a substitute for the soul that resides in the → head and lives on through the hair. Luxuriantly growing hair is also related to a naturally regenerative principle; it is a genialis. This was also true of beards and bearded → heads.8 In the Homeric rites bearded → heads were sacrificed at the mouths of rivers to propitiate the powers of the stream. Hair growth is also known to

hair

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have symbolized sexual potency; by analogy, hair loss was regarded as loss of seed. Hairs on the → head contain an elixir, an oily substance that ‘anoints’ the → head and makes it a powerful medium for speech, fate and prophecy.9 Thirdly, we come to the tassels. In the fifth century bc, Herodotus (484425 bc) recounts how two teams of young women would annually engage in a potentially lethal battle with sticks and stones in honor of Athena.10 Still according to Herodotus (IV, 189), the women would be dressed in a garment of red goatskin, known as the aegis, with fringes.11 The aegis had been interpreted as an animal skin or a shield worn by Athena, bearing the → head of a Gorgon (fig. 50). In Homer, we read that the skin or textile had many tassels (Iliad, XXI, 400): “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.”12 Both the game between man and woman, as well as the shield that also introduces the Gorgon spectrum in this case, points to a connection with powers of repelling evil on the one hand and fertility symbolism on the other. In Herodotus (Histories 4.188) there is another reference to the tassels of Athena: “but the dwellers by the Tritonian lake sacrifice to Athena chiefly, and next to Triton and Poseidon.” It would seem that the robe and aegis of the images of Athena were copied by the Greeks from the Libyan women; for except that Libyan women dress in leather, and that the tassels (θύσανοι) of their goatskin cloaks are not snakes but thongs of hide, in everything else their equipment is the same. And in fact, the very name betrays that the attire of the statues of Pallas has come from Libya; for Libyan women wear the hairless tasselled ‘aegea’ over their dress, colored with madder, and the Greeks have changed the name of these aegeae into their ‘aegides’. The quote from Herodotus suggests that the tassels are significant in diameter if they are to represent snakes. And Homer says there are one hundred in all. This might make a string skirt that shimmered when the wearer moved. (…) In another relevant passus, Homer, Iliad 14.177 says: “Then she clothed her about in a robe (ἑανός) ambrosial, which Athena had wrought for her with cunning skill, and had set thereon broideries full many; and she pinned it upon her breast with brooches of gold, and she girt about her a girdle set with an hundred tassels

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hair

Fig. 50. Vase with Athena and aegis, detail, Attica, ca. 480 bc

hair

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(θύσανος).” It seems significant that the word used for robe in this passage is ‘ἑανός’ and not ‘πέπλος’. ‘ἑανός’ – robe from Indo-European ‘2. eu-’ ‘to dress, put on’ and ‘2. nei-, neiə-, nī-’, ‘to be moved, excited; to shine’. From this possible derivation the question is whether string would be exciting or shining. In the context of the above quote the tassels may be adding the excitement. Note that both words ‘ἑανός’ and ‘πέπλος’ seem to be of Indo-European origin. It is the garment of men ‘χιτών’ which may relate to the Minoan culture. Now the question turns to the tassels to consider whether they might in fact be long strings. θύσανος – tassel from Indo-European ‘dheues-, dhuēs-, dheus-, dhūs-’, ‘to blow, dissipate, fly about like dust’.13

It is therefore interesting and by no means a coincidence that there is a semantic connection between blowing, movement, → wind and the Kairotic element (locks of hair). For Berber women, the act of weaving is an act of cosmogony and procreation (fig. 51). Weaving itself reflects the potentiality and power of genesis from the liquid darkness of nothingness. The warp threads are the axes mundi, and cutting them is compared to birth, with the cutting of the umbilical cord. The ‘→ hems’ or fringes that this makes, remind one of the separation between mother and child.14 → Hems and fringes are not at all neutral loci: they embody transit and the most magical of powers – dynamis (δύναμις) – that is accumulated in the edges, the residue concentrated like the deep red lees of wine at the bottom of the → pitcher. In short, the → hem’s → materiality and technique – be it the tying of the fabric or the twisting of the yarns – embodies the vital principle.15 Childbirth and the tying off of the umbilical cord are in all cultures associated closely with the symbolism of textile itself. The → hem delimits and constitutes a → transition. It is a liminal zone. Its fringes vibrate and come to life, so that an association is established with vegetation and growth. For that matter, brom, brum (‘young twig’), Dutch braam (‘bramble’, ‘knife edge’), brem (‘broom’) and berm (‘edge’), and English bramble and brim all share the same Indo-European root (i.e. bherem, ‘to stick out’, ‘edge’, ‘→ hem’).16 Tassels demonstrate their semantic relevance to → Kairos in the senses of psyche, blowing, movement and moment. The apotropaic aspect, as well as fertility, is not explicated in → Kairos as such, but with regard to luck, opportunity and the right moment in time, both → archetypes are of vital importance.

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Fig. 51. Knotted Berber Textile, Ait Bou Irshaouen, Morocco, ca. 1930. Provenance unknown

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Fig. 52. Terracotta Medusa, Etruscan, Santa Maria Capua Vetere, ca. 500 bc. Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale

After all, evil happens unexpectedly and fertility is supremely directed towards the ‘right moment’. In conclusion, as soon as → Kairos is spotted, he should be seized firmly, from the front, because he will disappear in an instant. If we see his → back, then it is too late, the opportunity has been ‘plucked bald’. But the → head has deeper meanings yet: both the side as well as the front are charged with extra energy. The Greek word → Kairos as used to mean ‘mark’ was important to archers and was the weakest point on the → head.17 The Romans translated this target as tempora (see the Greek kairia/kairion), relating to the side of the → head (in English the ‘temple’, still visibly related to tempus) and so a homonym of the Latin word for time.18 Jael murdered Sisera with a tent peg through the temple ( Judges 4:21). And so the forehead is related to ‘hornedness’ in the ancient Greek world.19 The forehead is the symbol of the genius and of the procreative (phallic) locus. Just like hair, horns grow as an extension, like “outcrops of the lifesubstance.”20 There is also an association with horned insects (the crickets

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– Grillen, in German, where the root -gril also means whim, → caprice, suddennes – the praying mantis (μάντις),21 and also the → butterfly).22 The horns reflect foolishness, wild impulses, but a positive meaning could be that they are a reference to the wonder of creation, to genius. The energetic → head once again brings us to the Gorgon or Medusa motif. In its archaic form, the Gorgon motif on the aegis was not yet anthropomorphic (fig. 52). Originally, it had a round shape with protuberances. In Berber culture, we recognize that motif on ceramics and textiles as the Dar grouna motif. In the literal sense, dar grouna means ‘house with extensions/branches’; figuratively, it denotes a ‘house’ from which came forth subsequent generations. The dar is also a ‘→ head’. At its centre, there is a diamond with four recurring hooks: the birth symbol, vertically and horizontally integrated. These hooks are sernina, jewellery that is attached to the plaits at young girls’ temples. Dar grouna is a stylised representation of the ‘spontaneous’ sphere-with-hooks/extrusions motif. On the one hand, it is a → head with extrusions – horns, – while on the other it evokes certain uterine aspects.23

John E. Matzke, On the Source of the Italian and English Idioms Meaning ‘to Take Time by the Forelock’, with Special Reference to Bojardo’s Orlando Innamorato, Book II, Cantos VII-IX, in Publications of the Modern Language Association, 8, 3, 1893, p. 303-334, p. 317-319. 2 Ibid., p. 319. 3 In the martyrologies of Agnes and Mary Magdalene, hairs miraculously cover the → bodies of the saints, as a second pelt or seconde peau; Barbara Baert, More Than an Image. Agnes of Rome: Virginity and Visual Memory, in More than a Memory. The Discourse of Martyrdom and the Construction of Christian Identity in the History of Christianity, ed. Johan Leemans, Louvain, 2005, p. 139-168. 4 Richard B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought. About the Body, the Mind,

1

the Soul, the World, Time and Fate, Cambridge, 1988, p. 102-122, p. 345. 5 Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Weberei als episteme und die Genese der deduktiven Mathematik, Berlin, 2004, p. 103. See above, p. 156, fig. 48. 6 Onians, The Origins of European Thought, p. 346. 7 Marina Schneede, Mit Haut und Haaren. Der Körper in der Zeitgenössischen Kunst, Cologne, 2002, p. 97-100; Barbara Baert, Thread. On the Origin of Creation, Ghent, 2012. 8 Onians, The Origins of European Thought, p. 232. 9 An example of a prophet filled with much elixir is John the Baptist, whose → head was kept as a relic and became subject to veneration in the cultic artefacts known as Johannesschüsseln; see Barbara Baert, Caput

hair

10

11

12 13

14

15 16

Johannis in Disco. {Essay on a Man’s Head}, Leiden, 2012, passim. Paul Vandenbroeck, The ‘Nameless Motif ’. On the Cross-Cultural Iconography of an Energetic Form, in Annual of the Antwerp Museum, 2010 (2012), p. 113-180, p. 120. Herodotus, Histories IV, 189. In the Arab world the fringes are called hawfi; Mourad Yelles-Chaouche, Le Hawfi. Poésie féminine et tradition orale au Maghreb, Algiers, 1990. Full text available at: http://www.perseus. tufts.edu/hopper/. Both paragraphs quoted from the important web index of The Role of Women in the Art of Ancient Greece; http://www.rwaag. org/ Paul Vandenbroeck, Azetta. Berbervrouwen en hun kunst, (exh. cat), Ghent – Amsterdam, 2000, passim. Ibid., p. 141. For further research on the symbolism of the → hem, and more specifically on the motif of the woman with an issue of → blood from Mark 5, see Barbara Baert, Touching the Hem. The Thread between Garment and Blood in the Story of the Woman with the Haemorrhage (Mark 5:24b-34parr), in Textile. Journal of Cloth and Culture, 9, 3, 2011, p. 308-359. See also: Archibald T. Robertson, Word Pictures in the New Testament – Matthew, s.l., 19301933: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/robertson_ at/wp_matt.txt; Matthew 9:20: “The border of his garment [tou kraspedou tou himatiou]. The → hem or fringe of a garment, a tassel or tuft hanging from the edge of the outer garment according to Numbers 15:38. It was made of twisted

17 18 19 20 21

22

23

165 wool. Jesus wore the dress of other people with these fringes at the four → corners of the outer garment. The Jews actually counted the words Jehovah One from the numbers of the twisted white threads, a refinement that Jesus had no concern for.” Onians, The Origins of European Thought, p. 343. Ibid., p. 344, note 1. Ibid., p. 238. Ibid., p. 246: just like nails and hooves. The French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre describes the mantis in his Souvenirs entomologiques, 10 vols., Paris, 1914-1925, vol. 5, chapters 18-21, as Satan disguised as the pious; Roger Caillois (1913-1978), sociologist, philosopher, literary critic and surrealist writes in his essay La mante religieuse, in Minotaure, 5, 1934, p. 23-26 about the sexual cruelty of the insect: during coitus, the female rips off the male’s → head and eats it. In Provence, the mantis is still associated with teeth. The relationship between sexuality, → death and oral consummation (vagina dentata) in combination with the vaguely humanoid shape have made the mantis one of the most fascinating bugs. See also: William L. Pressly, The Praying Mantis in Surrealist Art, in The Art Bulletin, 55, 4, 1973, p. 600-615. Paul Vandenbroeck, Zur Herkunft und Verwurzelung der ‚Grillen‘. Vom Volksmythos zum kunst- und literaturtheoretischen Begriff, 15.-17. Jahrhundert, in De zeventiende eeuw, 3, 1987, p. 52-84. Vandenbroeck, The ‘Nameless Motif ’, p. 120.

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hands

Fig. 53. Handprints in the Chauvet Cave, Dordogne, Magdalenian period (17 000-12 000 bc)

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Hands In the Magdalenian period (17 000-12 000 bc) someone – many someones, in fact – made imprints of their hands on the wall of the Chauvet Cave in the Dordogne. By blowing pigment through a bone tube they left the outline of their splayed fingers on the wall (fig. 53). This is one of the first images produced by man. It’s a trace-image. The hand points to the person’s existence. The hand is the word ‘I’ that is also indexical. The relationship between → body, skin and → stain can no longer be formulated in the same way as these Palaeolithic images, as a thing of integrity in itself. In the twentieth century that integrity was reprised – not just with the hand but the whole → body – in the Anthropometries of Yves Klein (1928-1962). In that installation-performance in the Galerie d’Art Contemporain in Paris (9 March 1960) naked women coated in International Klein Blue were used as human paintbrushes to make imprints on paper, so that the paper articulates the literal relationship with the skin’s boundary and again questions and establishes that primal relationship.1 The result is now a prefiguration: the relationship with the primal source has separated itself and has thus articulated the genesis of the image. At the same time, the anthropometry has become a haptic relic of our own → body. Elsewhere, Yves Klein writes: Un jour le Ciel Bleu est tombé sur la terre/ et de sa Blessure le sang a jailli/ c’était du Rouge éclatant brillant et pétillant (27 February 1951) (fig. 54).2

Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts, Berlin, 2010, p. 258. 2 Sidra Stich, et al. (eds.), Tagebuch vom 27 Februar 1951, in Yves Klein, Stuttgart, 1994, p. 26. 1

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hands

Fig. 54. Sam Francis (1923-1994), Red Over Blue, Watercolor, 1952. Bern, Sammlung E.W.K.

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Head/face The early seventeenth-century drawing by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (il Guercino) (1591-1666) (fig.  55),1 depicts angels worshipping → Veronica’s sudarium. The starting point for this drawing is San Silvestro in Capite in Rome, where not only the → skull relic of John was present, but also where the Byzantine → mandylion was traditionally preserved from the fifteenth century onward.2 Below the → vera icon, shrouded in → shadow on a wooden table, lies the head of the Baptist on a platter. The head is like a black ink → stain, formless, erased and melting into its own medium of → shadow, in order that the true face could appear, made visible in the medium of the sharp line, of circumscription. The drawing magisterially reproduces the most important bias in Christian visual culture: Im Antlitz Christi und des Täufers begegnen sich in kontrafaktischer Weise Bild und Körper, Figur und Defiguration, forma und deformitas, Tranzparenz und Opazität, Bild und Urbild.3 As Gerhard Wolf also remarks, only one part of the Johannesschüssel remains lit: his mouth. The black → stain, deformitas, opaque primal image, appears to be an open mouth. The → tongue of the prophet, his vox like the gaping wound of a lost voice, but also an opening for food. In relation to the → vera icon, the deep tension of anthropophagy rises once more to the surface. The suggestion of the dish as manducatio, as food, had already come to the surface in the sacrificial character and function of the Johannesschüssel. But in the medium of drawing it appeals to the manducatio per visum: the visual nourishment that can lead to heights of ecstasy during the ostensio.4 Guercino’s Johannesschüssel extends the ecstasy of the visage to what was previously called the abyss: the black → stain of the quivering “mouth wound.”5 The bond between the Johannesschüssel and the → Veronica has culminated in the waxing and waning of visuality itself. The word made flesh, the face, must increase, but the voice, the → skull, must dec(r)ease. The platter with the head turns out to be a fading object, an image that appeals to the sense of → hearing. The platter with the head is an ephemeral echo that will soon transform itself, in the persistence of sight, into the veil with the face. There, in that transforming moment, the medium of the speaking textile will become the covering and hushing shroud of a crying stone. Once again, in the cultural history of Christianity, there may be no object so lonesome as the Johannesschüssel. No man so solitary as the Other Man.

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head/face

Fig. 55. Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (il Guercino) (1591-1666), Vera icon and John’s head. Princeton University, Art Museum Guercino

head/face

1

Princeton University, Art Museum; Isabel Combs Stuebe, The Johannesschüssel, From Narrative to Reliquary to Andachtsbild, in Marsyas. Studies in the History of Art, 14, 1968-1969, p. 1-16, p. 11, fig. 10; Gerhard Wolf, Teller und Tuch, Haupt und Gesicht, in Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe, Tod, eds. Christoph Geissmar-Brandi & Eleonora Louis, Vienna, 1995, p. 397-398; Klaus Krüger, Gesichter ohne Leib. Dispositive der gewesenen Präsenz, in Verklärte Körper. Ästhetiken der Transfiguration, eds. Erika Fischer-Lichte & Nicola Suthor, Munich, 2002, p. 183-222. 2 Giovanni Giacchetti, Iconologia Salvatoris et Karilogia Praecursoris, Rome, 1628. 3 Gerhard Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel. Traditionen des Christusbildes und die Bildkonzepte der Renaissance, Munich, 2002, p. 216. 4 Women’s cloisters in particular were the site of the host’s power to induce ecstatic experiences and visions; Caroline W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast.

5

171

The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, Berkeley CA, 1987, p. 15: “Intellect, soul, and sensory faculties were not divided, with a separate vocabulary to refer to each other. Rather, God was known with senses that were a fusion of all the human being’s capacities to experience. When medieval writers spoke of eating or tasting or savoring God, they meant not merely to draw an analogy to a particular bodily pleasure but, rather, to denote directly an experiencing, a feeling/ knowing of God into which the entire person was caught up… Thus almost all medieval mystics sometimes speak of ‘tasting God’, and the verb itself is a kind of bridge between the physical act of eating the host and the inner experience of resting in sweetness (fruition) of mystical union”; Barbara Baert, ‘The Gendered Visage. Facets of the vera icon,’ in Antwerp Royal Museum Annual, 2000, p. 11-43. Sigmund Freud, Totem et tabou, transl. Serge Jankélévitch, Paris, 1966, p. 171.

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hem

Fig. 56. The Meeting between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Hours of Catherine of Cleves, Utrecht, 1442-1445. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 917, fol. 216

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Hem The Indo-European root for ‘hem’ is siuyô, meaning ‘sewing’. ‘Hemming’ is the process of folding and then sewing the borders of a piece of cloth. The process of hemming thus completely encloses the cut edges of cloth, so that it cannot ravel. The term is also extended to other treatments of textiles that prevent unraveling.1 There are many different techniques and hem stitches. Hems can be serged, rolled, and then sewn down with tiny stitches, pinked, piped, or covered with binding, which is known as the Hong Kong finish.2 However, in archaic times, such as in the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Jewish cultures, the hem was not a simple → fold sewed down to prevent the edge of the cloth from fraying. Often the hems of cloths and garments were fringed and had tassels, with important decorative purposes. The ornate was an indication of the social status of its wearer, but hems and fringes had also apotropaic powers. Assyrians believed in the protective sacred power, and magicians used the hem of a sick person in healing ceremonies. In Babylonia, a husband could divorce his wife by cutting off the hem of her robe. In Mari, now Syria, the diviner would enclose a lock of his → hair and a piece of his hem, hidden in a clay tablet, as a kind of signature under his report. Also, fringes were sometimes pressed in clay as a personal and official ‘seal’.3 In any vestimentary culture, borders – such as hems and tassels and also → lace – → fragment and defragment the sensitive symbolic markers of the → body: the feet, the waist, the neck.4 The hem of the garment is a border between one’s own → body and the → body of the other. The hem is, moreover, the entrance and the exit of power par excellence, loaded, as it were, with the idea of the transfer zone between the textile and the world. This defines the hem as a liminal zone, where transfers and transpositions become potent between the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’, between me and you.5 Finally, the lower hem is also a thriving contact made with the earth. The hem, therefore, shares the symbolic meaning of the foot, evoking sand, earth, even filth – in short: the expressions of humility and contact with the Sacred.6 That humble contact at the Lord’s service leads to the textualization of the textile. Border texts are added precisely at these symbolic edges, transforming them into transit zones of plea, praise, liturgy, glory, tears, joy, and submission.7

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In relation to the narrative and the iconic space, the hem is the symbol of demarcation and discontinuity.8 The syntax of → interruption is translated into the medium of the hem. However, the hem, as ‘discontinuity’, is not solely a rupture, but also a locus of exchange: the locus of the transit of power (dynamis) from one person to another. Concerning this locus of exchange, a particular antique prototype is important:9 Plutarch writes of the emperor Sulla: “As she (Valeria Mesalla, B.B.) passed on along behind Sulla, she rested her → hand upon him, plucked off a bit of nap from his mantle hem, and then proceeded to her own place. When Sulla looked at her in astonishment, she said: ‘It’s nothing of importance, Dictator, but I too wish to partake a little in thy felicity’.”10 So she did and became his fourth wife. The emperor actually believes that the hem will transfer, will share with her the power of the → body that wore it. Besides the locus of the transit of power, the hem is also a pars pro toto of both the anthropology of the sacred space and the energies of procreation. This is apparent from its many linguistic prototypes and offshoots. Ellen Harlizius-Klück traces the Hebrew denotations that connect the hem to the bosom and, more importantly, to the womb. Heik is the Hebrew word for both ‘hem’ and ‘bosom’.11 The bosom is understood as the marked opening in the cloak, just above the belt (Isaiah 40:11; Psalm 74:11). Kanap means ‘wing’, ‘cloak’s hem’, ‘hem’, and ‘edge’, but also ‘lap’ and ‘womb’. It is related to the cloth that covers the genitals (Deuteronomy 23:1; 27:20). In Ruth 3:9, the taking of the father’s wife is compared to the taking of the father’s blanket or cloth. It is, indeed, this root that led to the typical Hebrew cloak – in fact a draped blanket – with the tassels (tzitzit). This cloak or cloth brings to mind Yahweh’s commandments, and the tassels relate to the laws of the Old Covenant (Numbers 15:38; Deuteronomy 22:12). Sul is the hem of Yahweh’s royal garb. Isaiah 6:1 says that the hem filled the Temple. The word also refers to the edge and circumference of the → pitcher, in its turn an image of a woman’s lap. In combination with the verb galahn, sul means ‘to uncover’ ( Jeremiah 13:22.25-26). To uncover the hem implies revealing a vulnerable part of the → body (Nahum 3:5). This explains why the hem is also related to erotic feelings and feelings of shame. Traces of the hem as eros and shame we still encounter in the Legend of the True Cross (fig. 56). A rhymed German version by Heinrich von Freiburg, dated 1275, describes the meeting between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba:12

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7

Claude Gandelman, Le regard dans le texte. Image et écriture du Quattrocento au XXe siècle, Paris, 1986, p. 107-112. Barbara Baert, Touching the Hem. The Thread between Garment and Blood in the Story of the Woman with the Haemorrhage (Mark 5:24b-34parr), in Textile. Journal of Cloth and Culture, 9, 3, 2011, p. 308-359, p. 331. Pieter J. Lalleman, Healing by a Mere Touch as a Christian Concept, in Tyndale Bulletin, 48, 2, 1997, p. 335-361, p. 358. Sulla, 35; cf. Gerd Theissen, The Miracle Stories of the Early Christian Tradition, Philadelphia PA, 1983, p. 134. Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Saum und Zeit. Ein Wörter-und Sachen-Buch in 496 lexikalischen Abschnitte angezettelt, Berlin, 2005. Barbara Baert, The Wood, the Water, and the Foot, or How the Queen of Sheba Met up with the True Cross. With Emphasis on the Northern European Iconography, in Mitteilungen für Anthropologie und Religionsgeschichte, 16, 2004, p. 217-278.

Then the queen bowed, on her knees she fell and lifted the hem of her dress and a naked foot she unveiled. Then she said, filled by the Ghost, Her head so humbly, and she spoke to herself: the sign of the Judgment has appeared before my → gaze.

1

Frederic P. Miller, Agnes F. Vandome & John McBrewster (eds.), Loom: Warp (Weaving), Saarbrücken, 2010, passim. 2 Claire B. Shaeffer, Couture Sewing Techniques, Newton CT, 2011, p. 69-70. 3 Jacob Milgrom, Of Hems and Tassels, in Biblical Archaeology Review, 9, 3, 1983, p. 61-65. 4 Paul Vandenbroeck, The Energetics of an Unknowable Body, in Backlit Heaven, eds. Paul Vandenbroeck & Gerard Rooijakkers, Mechelen, 2009, p. 174-205; Dani Cavallaro & Alexandra Warwick, Fashioning the Frame. Boundaries, Dress and the Body, Oxford, 2001, p. 72-88. 5 Giorgio Agamben, On Potentiality, in Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford CA, 1999, p. 177-184. 6 Cornelius Verhoeven, Symboliek van de voet, PhD dissertation, Assen, 1956, p. 166; Dr Aigremont (pseudonym of Siegmar Schultze-Gallera), Fuss- und SchuhSymbolik und -Erotik. Folkloristische und sexualwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen, Darmstadt, 1909, p. 21.

8

9

10

11

12

176

honeycomb/bees

Fig. 57. Knotted Berber Textile as honeycomb, Rehamna, Morocco, 19th century. Provenance unknown

177

Honeycomb/bees Berber women see the → sieve in connection to the honeycomb (fig.  57). The honeycomb refers to the checker motif and thus to the beehive. The Berber word for ‘life’ d-r is connected to the word for beehive: edder (live), taddart (beehive, home) en taddurt (life). This root is also the base for idir, base, ground, cavemen, furrow, like we saw in connection to the ‘→ net’. Azetta, the basic root for loom, is also applied to honeycomb, spider → web or wasp → nest.1 For Plato, the honeycomb containing bee larvae was the symbol for the human → body.2 Also the comb, like the → sieve, has a purifying function: it removes dirt and lice. And the comb is also an image of the womb given its ‘teeth’ referring to the vagina dentata.

1

Paul Vandenbroeck, Azetta. Berbervrouwen en hun kunst, (exh. cat), Ghent – Amsterdam, 2000, p. 199-201.

2 Otto Immisch, Sprachliches zum Seelenschmetterling, in Glotta, 6, 3, 1915, p. 193206, p. 200.

178

iconogenesis/incarnation

Fig. 58. Iconoclast and Crucifixion, Chludov psalter, 8th century. Moscow, Historical Museum, fol. 67

179

Iconogenesis/Incarnation I define iconogenesis as the creation of something plastic from ‘nothing’ – the incarnation as descent into a tangible form, matter, and content.1 This incarnation utilizes the possibilities and limits of the artistic medium itself: the Metabild. This elliptically makes → enthousiasmos part of our starting point: the descent of the divine into the physical. Like a → ruach, a whispered suggestion, glossolalia. In connection, I quote iconophile John of Damascus: “If we should attempt to portray the invisible God, that would be a great sin indeed. It is impossible to portray one who is without → body: invisible, uncircumscribed, and without form (...). But we are not mistaken if we make the image of God incarnate, who was seen on earth in the flesh, associated with men, and in His unspeakable goodness assumed the nature, feeling, form, and color of our flesh.”2 The words of John of Damascus show that the Incarnation is the key argument when it comes to a theological defense for depicting Christ. The Christian God has humiliated himself in the flesh for the sake of mankind and thus offered visibility as salvation. This principle is called oikonomia.3 If God had shown himself in physical → materiality, then any depiction – also physical, material ones – would be allowed in this analogy (fig. 58). This argument was supposed to invalidate the main argument of the iconoclasts, namely Exodus 20 – “You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the lord your God, am a jealous God.”4 Because the Christian God was no longer the jealous God. He was the humbled God that did not shun the paint, just as he had not shunned the flesh. He is the God who descends (entheos) into matter. The manuscript is the place where word, image, and scholar meet. There are many factors at play when it comes to the manuscript. The manuscript vibrates with the intimate synergy of words and imagery and the → hands that touch the parchment. The image as such, would have no existence without the enunciatory power of the word, of → ruach, pneuma, spiritus… This interweaving of text and miniature relates to what is known as paragone, the competition for precedence between the medium of the word – scriptura – and the medium of the image – pictura. This tension nestles in the Creation narrative itself, with on the one side the image – the Creator – but on the other side the spoken words

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iconogenesis/incarnation

that “God said” (echoed in John 1: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God”). Does the word emerge from the image or vice versa? Was a word needed before anything could be seen? This again raises the question of a notion that Christianity embraces so fundamentally: the fusion of word and image in the Incarnation. The ‘word made flesh’ described at the beginning of the Gospel according to John is already contained in the first words of the Old Testament: In principio. As scribe and illuminator are joined to one another on the page of the Manuscript, so too are we to understand the adhesion of Father and Son, of Old Covenant and New Covenant, of narrativity and medium. Or further: between the content of the narrative – creation – and the origins of art – iconogenesis. “Headless servants of the image, that is what we – so it is said – have become due to the image. I answer loud and clear: the image is nowhere; the image is blameless.”  This is what byzantinologist and philosopher Marie-José Mondzain-Baudinet writes in her book L’image naturelle.5 The seeming contradiction between the absence and the innocence of the image is the only imaginable outcome of the selfless love for the figurative image. That the image does not show what it seems to be, is the ‘nowhere’ of the image. And precisely in that ‘nowhere’ the image deculpabilizes itself from the idolatrical danger. That is the iconophile paradox of the image.

Barbara Baert, Pneuma and the Visual Arts in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity, (Art&Religion, 5), Louvain – Walpole MA, 2016, passim. 2 Patrologia Graeca 94, col. 1288, cited in Herbert L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing. Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art, Philadelphia PA, 2000, p. 35. 3 The key term oikonomia – the image as service and salvation –, was developed in the iconophile manifesto of the patriarch 1

Nikephoros (758-787, antirrheticus adversus Constantii). See: Marie-José Mondzain-Baudinet (ed.), Nicéphore. Discours contre les iconoclastes, Paris, 1989. 4 Here, I quote the New American Standard Bible. 5 Marie-José Mondzain-Baudinet, L’image naturelle, Paris, 1995, p. 1. L’image naturelle was translated into Dutch by Helen Saelman in De Witte Raaf, 89, 2001, p. 21-23.

181

Interruptions & Transitions Interruptions are affects, like the loaded → silence in a → pause between two people, the flare of a → blush, a hesitation, a blink of the eyes. Every time there is a tilt between something old and something new, every time there is a diachrony being disrupted, there is an ‘incident’: a surface wrinkling, water rippling, paper ripping. An interruption is an interposition, an intervention, a disruption, a shift that can be felt by the senses based on a difficult to describe atmospherical feeling: a quasi-cosa, writes Tonino Griffero.1 The cause, outcome, and impact of an interruption can be very diverse: an interruption can have a huge impact, or be incredibly subtle. However, traditionally, the interruption is a ritually and cosmically charged moment. Interruptions are openings, and that which opens can receive and give. It’s the pregnant moments in an ontology that brings forth both hierophanies – the → hand of God interrupting Abraham’s sacrifice – (fig.  59), as well as demonic powers – Pan appears when the sun is frozen in its → zenith. Interruptions are dynamic moments of opportunity that last the blink of an eye, but they are also moments also of crisis: of in-sight. In the blink of an eye is literally the time that the eyelid moves down and back up, a very short amount of time: blinking.2 As if to protect them from what suddenly comes storming up to them from the outside, and what can penetrate our core like a lightning bolt. In ictu trepidantis aspectus, in the words of Augustine (345-430), “in the blow of a trembling glance” (Confessiones VII, 24) this penetration is perceived and repelled at the same time. The blink of an eye is not a random stretch of time. The Latin momentum is a moment of time, that functions as a reference, a preamble for an action or experience, a transition. Time is not homogeneous; there are moments that are more important and ones that are less important, or maybe: time isn’t usually there, it’s only there in the blink of an eye, during the occasion, in the moment. It’s not the flight, but the moment of paralyzing indecisiveness before the flight or evasion. That which happens in this moment, what comes to a halt, is so profound and total that it is indescribable. An abyss, which defines the totality of life, becomes visible.

182

interruptions & transitions

Fig. 59. Sedelius, The Sacrifice of Isaac, Carmen Paschale, ca. 814. Antwerp, Plantin-Moretus Museum, M 17.4, fol. 8r

interruptions & transitions

183

That is why an interruption is always a transition: a shift towards something else. Interruptions have the power to transform something fundamentally. Because Interruption & Transition are so connected, they show a connection to the paradigm of the threshold. The threshold interrupts the time and space and defines as it were the potential of the transition, of chance. In her book Die Schwelle im Mittelalter. Bildmotiv und Bildort, Tina Bawden assigns five coordinates to this intertwined energy of stillness and movement, of past and future, of the in-between:3 ambivalence, hiddenness, invitation, transformation, and mediation, to which I would like to add a sixth parameter – synesthesia. The transition always has two poles: before and after, from the outside and from the inside. Interruptions & Transitions have the Janus → face of ‘ambivalence’. At the same time, the interruptions remain part of the ‘hidden’; they operate within the riddle, the secret. This secret, this integration process, asks for the → silence of the taboo: the ‘voicelessness’ of that which both conceals and reveals. That is why the threshold is an ‘invitation’ to step into the secret of that which is hidden and to embrace the insight that is being generated that – of the swift potential of it. This embrace is the hesitation, the short → pause, the suspension within the pair of concepts that induces ‘transformation’ and ‘mediation’. The Interruption & Transition paradigm finds its catharsis in the rite de passage. We wriggle through the tunnel; we descend downwards through the chthonic gate. Now our sensorium is on edge and the sensual relationship with the higher powers becomes synestetic, according to Augustine. The ultimate exaltation operates from the ‘in-between’, the → interval, and reaches a permeability, a pars pro toto for the Dahinter. And what remains is the everlasting dynamic of open and closed, like how the wings of the → butterfly also embody the flaring and fading of the psyche. With their threshold figures and objects, Interruptions & Transitions contain the secret of these endlessly forthcoming meanings.

Tonino Griffero, Atmospheres. Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces, Burlington VT, 2014, p. 74. 2 Cornelis Verhoeven, Inleiding tot de verwondering, Utrecht, 1967, p. 62-64. 1

3

Tina Bawden, Die Schwelle im Mittelalter. Bildmotiv und Bildort, (Sensus. Studies zur Mittelalterlichen Kunst, 4), Cologne – Weimar – Vienna, 2014, p. 24-32.

184

interval

Fig. 60. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Virgin of the Rocks, 1483-1486. Paris, Musée du Louvre

185

Interval The affect of the break, the interval, can be found in painting as a medium. This section will consider this idea from the perspective of the visual theory of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Leonardo praises the art of painting as a medium between science, religion and philosophy: O meravigliosa scientia [della pittura], tu riservi in vita le caduche bellezze de’ mortali, le quali hanno più permanenta, che le opere di natura, le quali al continuo sono variate dal tempo, che le conduce alla debita vecchiezza.1 In The Angel’s → Gaze, Frank Fehrenbach delves into Leonardo’s artistic theory about the relationship of time to the epistemological viewing of the image.2 According to Leonardo this was, in contrast to literature’s diachronic epistemology, ‘immediate’ (medesimo tempo), in the now (nunc stans).3 The nunc stans is not a snapshot, frozen and mummified like a photograph, but a simultaneous, all-encompassing understanding that steps out of natural time into an apparently eternal gelling of a frozen point. Leonardo derives these ideas from a consideration of the harmonic principle in music, la sorella della pittura.4 The tempo armonico in music is the length of a → breath: that is the time between two pulses, which according to Leonardo is between 1.2 and 3.3 seconds. It is a punctual time: punctum. The punctum brings the painting to life. If it is absent from a painting, the painting is dead twice over (due volte morta): Double dead is a work when it does not express physical and ‘mental movement’. The artist attains his goal only when the represented figures are solely missing a real soul. Only then, the spectator stands spellbound in front of the canvas ‘half dead’; only then is it that effective aesthetical exchange is set in motion, which achieved topical rank as the stony magic of the terrifyingly beautiful Medusa. Artwork has attained its goal when optical distancing and isolation vanish, when synaesthesia materializes, and when the lively active power of the image transcends the spectator’s capacity for desire.5

This is also apparent from the painterly technique of sfumato. Representing movement in Leonardo: floods, fixed objects like rocks seemed to stretch out amorphously in the direction of their trajectory. Here, graphemes run

186

interval

through the image field. These graphemes directly (simultaneously) create the impression of the strongest movement, as they immediately shift, or allow succession of the → gaze to incomplete movement.6

If we apply these ideas of Leonardo to time and to internal perception – the exchange of → gazes within the painting – a number of pertinent results come to the surface, as in the Louvre’s version of the Virgin of the Rocks (1483-1486) (fig.  60). An imaginary line runs from the angel’s index finger to John the Baptist’s mouth, right under his → ears, which, as it were, rebounds from the edge of the painting to his eyes. A second remarkable line runs from Jesus’ eyes over John’s right → hand raised in blessing to the infant prophet’s eye, rebounding from the edge of the painting to the Virgin’s eyes.7 In other words, a notable tension is at work between the higher senses. The angel’s finger links the mouth, the → ear and the eyes of the infant John. The second line that runs from Jesus’ eyes links them to John’s → gaze, with both vectors crossing Mary’s eyes. It is clear that sight, speech and → hearing are all thematized, with all of them intersecting the figure of the infant prophet. This is no coincidence: in John the Baptist sight coincides with the prophetic enunciation Ecce, behold the Lamb of God. John the Baptist embodies → hearing, for he → heard and recognized the voice of the Messiah ex utero.8 It is possible that this internal structure was Leonardo’s way of going beyond the painting’s descriptive-narrative (and thus temporal) level to reach the medesimo tempo, the nunc stans, the interval of a few seconds. Augustine had already pointed out a paradox in our ability to know the moment of Creation (De genesi ad litteram): although speech – dixit – induced the creative act of → ruach (God as → wind or → breath in Genesis 1:1-5: while a → wind from God swept over the → face of the waters),9 the momentum of Creation is undivided and simultaneous, while speech is in fact discursive. “In terms of content, language must successively divide what God has created.”10 With regard to the sense of sight he distinguishes God’s sight and human sight.11 The first operates in an implosive time, a hyper-time from a house of sight that is unchanging and not successive: domus luminosa et speciosa, caelum caeli. This is at the same time the house of the angels (which in the patristic interpretation of Creation coincides with the moment of the creation of light): the visio angelorum is seeing ex toto, which Leonardo approached with his medesimo tempo.12

interval

187

It is a ‘nothing’ that stands in contradistinction to our deficient sequential understanding of God’s timelessness. The angel in the → grotto may be Leonardo’s embodiment of the visio angelorum, and thereby translates a vision of the creative act of the painter himself: mirroring the divine creation in an ‘at-onceness’, a momentum thrown beyond natural time, perhaps illumined in 3.3 seconds in two intersecting vectors: a → breath, just as the angel in Mary’s chamber with a single → breath split time in two so that the mystery of the → Incarnation and something-from-nothing could take place. The use of the imaginary external source of light in the Virgin of the Rocks (in contrast to the atmospheric sfumato light in the background) is the creative light of the origins of the → gaze, which illuminates the dark → grotto in a single glance, bringing to life in a mystery that makes use of → incarnation and prophecy. Non è né il tempo né lo spazio, ma la possibilità di un tempo concreto e la possibilità di uno spazio concreto (...). Nel concetto di Nulla viene in primo piano il problema della creazione.13

1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8

Frank Fehrenbach, Der oszillierende Blick. Sfumato und die Optik des späten Leonardo, in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 65, 4, 2002, p. 522-544, p. 544. Frank Fehrenbach, Angels’ Gaze, and Lively Force. Image Time, Language Time and Natural Time in Leonardo, s.l., s.d. p. 169-206. Ibid., p. 172. Ibid., p. 173. Ibid., p. 174-175. Ibid., p. 178. Ibid., p. 188. For a fuller development, see: Barbara Baert, Wild Is the Wind. Pathosformel and Iconology of a Quintessence, in Annual of the Antwerp Museum, 2010 (published 2013), p. 9-47. The foetus is like an ‘→ ear’ in the mother’s womb (one that in fact → ‘hears’). The foetus is the bearer of a → breath that ‘calls’ him in his name, and by that name the foetus lives; Annick de Souzenelle, Le symbolisme du corps humain, Paris, 1991, p. 356.

9 Paul Volz, Der Geist Gottes und die verwandten Erscheinungen im Alten Testament und im anschliessenden Judentum, Tübingen, 1910; Harry M. Orlinsky, The Plain Meaning of Rûah in Gen 1, 2, in Jewish Quarterly Review, 48, 1957-1958, p. 174-182; Gerhard Kittel, Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, 6, Stuttgart, 1959, cols. 330-453; John P. Peters, The Wind of God, in Journal of Biblical Literature, 30, 1911, p. 44-54; Jacobus C.M. Van Winden, In the Beginning. Some Observations on the Patristic Interpretation of Genesis 1:1, in Vigiliae Christianae, 17, 1963, p. 105-121; Robert Luyster, Wind and Water. Cosmogonic Symbolism in the Old Testament, in Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, 93, 1, 1981, p. 1-10. 10 Fehrenbach, Angels’ Gaze, p. 194. 11 Ibid., p. 195. 12 Ibid., p. 196. 13 Leonid Batkin, Leonardo da Vinci, Rome – Bari, 1988, p. 180.

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kairos

Fig. 61. Kairos, relief following the Lysippos model, 2nd century bc.Turin, Museo di Arte Greco-Romana

189

Kairos Kairos is the image of potential (fig.  61). This potential can be found in ‘→ transition’, in disruption and → interruption. The tear in the fabric of time is the genetrix of renewal: it is four times the → intervallum. Firstly, the → interruption is an interference, an intervention, a disturbance, a shift that one senses through an often indescribable atmospheric feeling.1 This atmospheric feeling or Gefühlsraum2 is something I have discussed in other texts, describing it as “the sensing of aura and Stimmung of a certain place as apparently ‘charged’ with a power that makes hierophany possible. The → genius loci is a riddle that opens or closes: it requires reverence; it tempts, it is a mysterium, but also a mysterium tremendum.”3 Kairos also manifests himself as a sigh. He is related to the world of air and → wind. In the etymology of the Indo-European languages, the root of the word for → wind carries the principle of life itself. The semantic meanings are always related to movement and express the dynamic interaction of humankind and nature. Thus the → wind root derbhhas meanings going from → dancing, turning, interweaving, connecting and → knotting, to bundling grass.4 The → wind root kelg- links → wind to going around → corners, twisting, bending, spiraling, turning, convolution, and by transference the idea of (literary and dramatic) plotting.5 The → wind root lek-, finally, points to squirming, but also jumping up and down, the ‘hopping’ that occurs in so many rituals.6 Furthermore, the term tassel in Indo-European etymology derives from: ‘dheues-, dhuēs-, dheus-, dhūs-’: ‘to blow, dissipate, fly about like dust’. Consequently, the → interruption has always been a cosmological and thus ritually charged moment. → Interruptions are openings, and that which opens itself can receive and give. There are pregnant moments in ontology, that both allow for hierophanies – the → hand of God interrupting Abraham’s sacrifice – as well as negative powers: → le démon de midi appears when the sun pauses at its → zenith.7 → Interruptions are thus affects, like the loaded → silence in a → pause between two people, the sudden appearance of a → blush. Callistratus wrote: “(...) though it was bronze, it blushed; and though it was hard by nature, it melted into softness.” The → blush is a Greek expression of psyche.8 The statue of Kairos lives – it blushes (an important topos for the ‘spirited’ ancient statue)9 – and it lets his powers gently glow to the surface for

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kairos

Fig. 62. Adriena Simotová, Was vom Engel geblieben ist, 1979/80

those who recognize him.10 But for those who miss him, a sharp and bitter trail remains (Poenitentia). This contrast between the two pans of the weighing scale not only bring forth the idea of inner and cosmic disunity – as in the hermeneutics of Aby Warburg’s → psychomachia – but also the idea of consciously dealing with a ‘missed opportunity’. The anti-Kairos – the moment that was not seized – is also epiphanic: it shows what will not happen again (fig. 62). Those who concentrate on their own Kairotic consciousness and accept it can achieve Aristotelian evidentia (truth as insight).

kairos

1

2

3

4

5 6 7

8

Tonino Griffero, Atmospheres. Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces, Burlington VT, 2014; Tim Ingold, Earth, Sky, Wind, and Weather, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13, 1, 2007, p. 19-38; Tim Ingold, The Eye of the Storm. Visual Perception and the Weather, in Visual Studies, 20, 2, 2005, p. 97-104; James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston MA, 1979. With this ‘feelings space’, Hermann Schmitz means the philosophical locus of → emotions, as they stretch between the subject and the world; Hermann Schmitz, System der Philosophie, 3, 2: Der Gefühlsraum, Bonn, 1981, p. 264-276. Barbara Baert, ‘Locus Amoenus’ and the Sleeping Nymph Revisited. ‘Ekphrasis’, Silence and ‘Genius Loci’, (Studies in Iconology, 3), Louvain – Walpole MA, 2016. Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary. A Revised Edition of Julius Pokorny’s Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2007: Root / lemma: derbh-. Ibid., Root / lemma: kelg-. Ibid., Root / lemma: lek-2 (: lek-) and lēk-: lǝk- (*leĝh-). Pierre de Labriolle, Le démon de midi, in Bulletin du Cange. Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi, 9, 1934, p. 46-54; Jean de Fraine, Le démon du midi (Ps. 91 (6)), in Biblica, 40, 1959, p. 372-383; Jean Daniélou, Les démons de l’air dans la Vie d’Antoine, in Studia Anselmiana, 38, 1956, p. 136-147. Richard B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought. About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate, Cambridge, 1988, p. 112, note 2.

191

9 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; Deborah Tarn Steiner, Images in Mind. Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature and Thought, Princeton NJ, 2001, p. 3-26. 10 The topos of the → blush bring us to the myth of Pygmalion, as told in the 10th book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (43 bc17 ad). In response to his prayer to Venus on the yearly festival in Cyprus, the sculptor Pygmalion sees his own beloved and idealized artistic creation – the ivory girl – come to life. The moment the girl wakes from her artistic covering, she blushes; Donald E. Hill (ed.), Ovid. Metamorphoses IX-XII, Warminster, 1999, vs. 293-296, vs. 244-297; see: Heinrich Dörrie, Pygmalion. Ein Impuls Ovids und seine Wirkungen bis in die Gegenwart, (Rheinisch-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Vorträge, 195), Düsseldorf, 1974, p. 12-13; Annegret Dinter, Der Pygmalion-Stoff in der europäischen Literatur. Rezeptionsgeschichte einer OvidFabel, Heidelberg, 1979, p. 14-15; Barbara Baert, Een huid van ivoor. Het Nachleben van Pygmalion’s geliefde in Ovidius’ Metamorfozen, in Bijdragen. International Journal in Philosophy and Theology, 2, 2002, p. 171199; Victor Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect. From Ovid to Hitchcock, Chicago IL – London, 2008.

193

Khōra Aby Warburg writes about the schizophrenic oscillation in cultural phenomena: Urprägewerk in der Ausdruckswelt tragischer Ergriffenheit; → Pathosformeln sind ‘Dynamogramme’.1 When a memory arises from these depths, it must work in a ‘polarizing’ way, as ‘explosive’, as a formula of liberation and activation. Only then, will the memory be allowed penetration and can it trickle through the cultural membrane of the → skin-ego. At that point, the image is born. The child is innocent, it → dances and skips.2 How to define this image in its childlike incomprehensiveness, in its limitless → enthusiasm? Didi-Huberman states: “What counts, faced with an image, is not ‘what we are talking about’. What counts is the → dance itself – of my → gaze and my sentences – with the image. It is a question of rhythm. (...) Like a → galloping horse uses stretches of ground; it is not the ground, it is the → gallop that counts.”3 If it is the → gallop that counts, the → dance itself, we must emancipate the image of its flat and static condition humaine. It is energetic, and it lives. By descending into the depths of our own words we dive into the undercurrent of our consciousness and reach the as yet unarticulated breeding ground of our own ideas and dealings with the world, the khōra.4 Anthropologists and psychoanalysts examine this seedbed and teach us the way we must follow to get to it. The image also draws its energy from a sub-terrain situated in the khōra. From that ‘subversive’ position the image associates itself with affect-laden patterns and intuition, with the pyscho-energetics of morphological language as opposed to the classical canon and stylistic convention. This is why the properties of images are often indescribable. Images escape, they are transient, but they decidedly have a ‘presence’ that is literally expressed in an aura, an edge. The image possesses three keys to the khōra: → body and textile, performative expression and ritual action, and finally aesthetics as formal subconsciousness.5 The first key is connected with doubling: → body and textile are parallels. One speaks of the → moi-peau, the ‘I-skin’. The I-skin is a buffer, a two-dimensional membrane. We recognize it in → lace, darning, woven fabrics. Here, in the medium of textile, the image finds its preferred membrane. The second key relates to the ‘shifted’ → body: the energy of the → body moves elsewhere, to a place where it can flourish undisturbed, like the → dance,

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but also in a new plastic refuge, like the image. The shifted → body does not express itself allegorically but ‘allo-deictically’, which is to say in a ‘different-showing’ way, and is therefore unconventional in its signifiers and symbols. With the third key the expression of the energetic → body shifts to areas where the connection with the → body is no longer literally articulated or has faded considerably.6 These areas involve non-figurative forms of expression. That last borderland is psychosomatic, intuitive; ultimately it’s even therapeutic. The creative process coming from the borderland with the psycho-corporeal, the psychosomatic and the kinetic, restores a pre-aesthetic and pre-conscious manifestation of the body-in-the-world. It takes place in a humus: “The deeper one plunges into the seething cauldron of processing the psycho-corporeal experience of existence and its paradoxes, the further one departs from its aesthetic elaboration and the closer one gets to its source.”7 As a means of access to the khōra all three keys share a common characteristic – the creation of forms of expression that ‘bypass’ language. A sub-symbolic transfer is at work (related to the prefiguration and pre-vocality).8 Meaning is conveyed as an → emotion, an affect-laden quantum that nonetheless leaves a stylistic and aesthetic imprint. Examples of this can be seen in the aesthetics of → marble. So there is indeed a transference of content, but it is rather based on an ‘energetic experience’, an ‘active participation in the → gaze’ in the borderland between psyche and → body – hence the term psycho-energetics. As will have appeared by now, the image is unique in possessing all three types of access to the khōra, for it is strongly linked to textile as its intimate support, to the performative expression of a dynamic prototype and to a willful urge towards form, namely to be image-in-potential, to evade the realms of denominatable figuration. In short, the image attaches itself to the membrane, to the textile that shields and protects. And thus it undulates with the fluctuations of a performative essence: veiling and unveiling, flaring up and dying down, soiling and washing away. The image is a metaphor for both the cradle and the grave and everything in-between; for the early emergence of a → shadow and the etiolation of a trace. It is surging forms that manifest themselves but may also vanish in a trice, emblematizing the creative urge and the → death urge. As a result of the paradigms of the psycho-energetic symptom (I repeat: “Meaning is conveyed as an → emotion, an affect-laden quantum that nonetheless leaves a stylistic and aesthetic imprint”), a hitherto hard-to-reach site of the

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image is approached: the creative process itself or the irrepresentable zone ‘between’ image and primal source. Therefore, images have their own hermeneutics of understanding the image. These hermeneutics come close to the ‘→ chthonic’ aspects of artistic expression (Trauerarbeit).

Marianne Koos, et al. (eds.), Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne. Begleitmaterial zur Ausstellung im Hamburger Kunsthaus. 63 Bild- und Texttafeln, Hamburg – Munich, 1994, Tafel 32/32b. 2 This is a reference to Marie-José Mondzain-Baudinet, L’image naturelle, Paris, 1995. In her manifesto Mondzain-Baudinet defends the iconophile image: the figurative image embraced by mankind. I have treated her essay in Barbara Baert, Iconogenesis or Reflections on the Byzantine Theory of Imagery, in A-Prior, 7, 2002, p. 128-141. 3 Georges Didi-Huberman, Glimpses. Between Appearance and Disappearance, 1

in Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, 7, 1, 2016, p. 109-124, p. 113. 4 According to Plato’s Timaeus, Chora (khōra) is a place, an → interval. Jacques Derrida, Khôra, in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, Stanford CA, 1995, p. 87-127. 5 Paul Vandenbroeck, The Energetics of an Unknowable Body, in Backlit Heaven, eds. Paul Vandenbroeck & Gerard Rooijakkers, Mechelen, 2009, p. 174-205, p. 178. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., p. 186. 8 Ibid.

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knot

Fig. 63. Tapestry Miniature with plaiting and spiral work, Book of Durrow, 675. Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS A. I. (58)

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Knot The works by Tim Ingold are fundamental regarding knots, and more particularly the deeper meaning of “binding-something-together” with threads, resulting in knots or more complex patterns and decorative schemes, in short: resulting in tectonics. Tectonics have to do with einerseits der Fähigkeit, Knoten zu formen in Verbindung zu bringen und andererseits mit derjenigen, durch sie hindurchzuschneiden – das heißt, in der Komplementarität von Weben und Zimmerhandwerk, Textilien und Holzwerk – und etymologische Unterstützung für seine Überzeugung in dem vom Griechischen Tekton abstammenden Wortcluster zu suchen.1 In this context, Ingold’s publications use the term ‘dissolution of surface’ (fig. 63). Horror vacui allows the surface to disappear: we see not so much the knot as whatever it is that the knot seals, conceals, covers, opens and shuts. The mesh, the labyrinth and the knot all arise at the threshold where the maelstrom and the magical abyss beckon, where horror vacui arises to take unawares and to shelter: at the same time both absorbent (implosive) and restrictive (sticky, captive).2

Tim Ingold, Bauen Knoten Verbinden, in Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, 6, 1, 2015, p. 81-100, p. 85. 2 In his fascinating work Lines. A Brief History, anthropologist Tim Ingold sets out in search of the origin and the effects of lines in our interaction with the world. In relation to the knot and, by extension, the notion of connecting, tying or 1

braiding a cord or a thread, the author refers to an association with meshes, with → lacework and with the labyrinth, all of which used to be considered to possess apotropaic qualities; Tim Ingold, Lines. A Brief History, London – New York, 2007, p. 53; based upon a study by Alfred Gell, Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory, London – Oxford, 1998, p. 83-90.

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La scienza senza nome Giorgio Agamben defines Warburg’s Denkraum or la scienza senza nome as una diagnosi dell’uomo occidentale attraverso i suoi fantasmi: il circolo in cui si rivelava il buon dio nascosto nei dettagli.1

1

Giorgio Agamben, Aby Warburg e la scienza senza nome, in Aut aut, 199-200, 1984, p. 51-66, p. 62.

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lace

Fig. 64. Lace, produced in Burano

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Lace In Burano, Veneto, a fisherman resists the temptation of the sirens, because his love for his fiancé was too strong. In response, one of the sirens hits her tail on the surface of the water, creating an enormous wave. From the foam of the wave a → net-like veil forms, which clings to the surface of the water. On their wedding day, his love wears this veil, and still women try to replicate the finest quality of lace from the foam of the → sea with their needles and threads (fig. 64).1 The → iconogenesis of lace connects the foam of the ocean and its remarkable ‘openwork’ structure that froze on top of the waves for a fraction of a second, with humans’ universal fascination for networks that seem chaotic at first glance – such as the → web, the → nest – which they try to match in their own handicrafts: the ultimate paragone between nature and the arts.2

Barbara G. Harrison, Italian Days, New York, 1989, passim, and see the AarneThompson-Uther Classification of Folk Tales: http://www.mftd.org/index.php?action=atu. 2 I expand further on the idea of the → web and the → nest in Barbara Baert, Late Medieval Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries. Contributions to Gender and Artistic Expression, (Studies in Iconology, 2), Louvain – Walpole MA, 2016. In Chapter 7 Manuductus. A (very) brief epistemology of the → web, I write: “Spider and → web form a fascinating prototype for handicraft, the arts and capturing the moment. Through their association with the notion of a ‘thread’, the cultic umbilical cord of the earth and the seal inscribed in the skin, as well as the skin’s outgrowth 1

that is → hair, are related to the symbolism of the → knot”; Ulrike Zischka, Zur sakralen und profanen Anwendung des Knotenmotivs als magisches Mittel, Symbol oder Dekor. Eine vergleichende volkskundliche Untersuchung, (Tuduv-Studien, Reihe Kulturwissenschaften, 7), Munich, 1977, passim. See also: Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Weberei als episteme und die Genese der deduktiven Mathematik, Berlin, 2004, a challenging study that starts from Greek semantic roots in analyzing the linguistic idiom surrounding weaving. The author finds traces of the origins of mathematics as a cosmological model; see also Ellen Harlizius-Klück’s epilogue on Digital sieves in Barbara Baert, About Sieves and Sieving. Motif, Symbol, Technique, Paradigm, Berlin, 2018 (at press De Gruyter).

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laocoön

Fig. 65. Laocoön group, 40-20 bc. Vatican City, Vatican Museums

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Laocoön On 14 January 1506, a sculpture featuring the horrible → death by strangulation of the priest Laocoön was dug up in a vineyard near the Colosseum in Rome (fig.  65). The discovery is the beginning of an iconic impact on art history. The aesthetic discourse will never be the same again. The harmonious calm that people were used to when it came to ancient sculptures shockingly changed into horror, pain, and pathos. In the eighteenth century, the sculpture was once again the topic of discussion between Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) (Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, 1764) and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) (Über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie, 1766). Winckelmann says that the statues project edle Einfalt und stille Grösse. He considers the sculpture to be stoic, despite its horrors, because Laocoön is suppressing his scream. Lessing, however, sees the nearly impossible moment in time of the fruchtbaren Augenblick captured in the Laocoön.1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also sees the aesthetics of ‘the moment as unity’ realized in the Laocoön. The Laocoön expertly connects → symmetry with variety, calm with movement, all of which simultaneously offer themselves up for the audience.2 Herder describes Laocoön from a purely physical standpoint. Laokoon, der Mann, der Priester, der Köningssohn, bei einem Opfer, vor dem versammelten Volke, war er nackt? Stand er unbekleidet da, als ihn die Schlangen umfielen? Wer denkt daran, wenn er jetzt den Laokoon der Kunst siehete? Wer soll daran denken? 3 “Isn’t this a denial of the Pygmalion myth?” Simon Richter wonders about this point of view. “The eroticism of sculpture and sensual touch is denied and transferred to painting and vision, the medium and sense that were originally supposed to be cold and uninterested in the → body.”4 “He orders the → body away, and asks, rhetorically, what Greek artist could have made such a statue. The answer, by no means rhetorical, is Apollo.”5

1

Moniker Schrader, Laokoon – ‚eine vollkommene Regel der Kunst‘. Ästhetische Theorien der Heuristik in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts. Winckelmann,

Mendelssohn, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Hildesheim, 2005. 2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Über Laokoon, in Laokoon. Lessing, Herder,

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Goethe. Selections, ed. William Guild Howard, New York, 1910, p. 1-15; Tzvetan Todorov (intro.) & Jean-Marie Schaeffer (transl.), Goethe. Écrits sur l’art, Paris, 1997, p. 168. Wolfgang Pross, Johann Gottfried Herder. Part 2. Herder und die Anthropologie der Aufklärung, Darmstadt, 1987, p. 480.

4 Simon Richter, Laocoön’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain. Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz, and Goethe, Detroit MI, 1992, p. 126-127. 5 Ibid., p. 130.

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Lozenge Ernst Gombrich focuses on the archetypical pattern of the lozenge in his The Sense of Order.1 He includes it in his chapter on harmony as a basic pattern that can have endless variations and can achieve very complex opaque structures by being ornamentally ‘filled’ in, or ‘wrapped’ in floral motifs. Moreover, Gombrich sees the lozenge pattern (and by extension, every schematic ornament) in its basic mathematical form as a direct offshoot of the stem/stalk principle, therefore of nature itself. According to the author, element and structure share a truncus communis. Indeed, from the point of view of visual anthropology, the lozenge is one of the oldest ideograms in the world. The longue durée of the → net symbol stretches from recurring patterns on objects from the Magdalenian period (Dordogne, 17 000-12 000 bc) up until the patterns of embroidery and sewing with its cross-stitching. It is also a core motif in Berber weaving (fig. 66). The lozenge pattern is in fact the endless repetition of the diamond, and shares the notion of ‘becoming’ with this vulvatic pictogram. The → net and the lozenge symbolize creation and the power of reproduction: the → net motif is a ‘cloth’ that is ‘placed’ on the subject, on the → body, on the textile, to articulate it as a duplicating membrane and the pattern is in se infinite; the membrane can expand and ‘grow’ endlessly… No other form can be so pregnant of continuum as the lozenge and the → grid. No other formula has the unavoidable écriture of expanding in repetition giving humankind the comfort of stability and the consolation of potential future creation processes. This notion of potentiality and endless reproduction also becomes attached to the fertility cult and the countless associations of a birth-giving amniotic agency. Since early Byzantine art, the iconography of the lozenge pattern has been attached to cloth, veils, clothing, and curtains (often highlighted in gold) to either depict the cosmos and firmament, or secondly as a carrier of the true form of Christ.2 Herbert Kessler collected examples from early medieval Byzantine manuscripts where gold work textiles with a → net pattern were used to show the Second Coming of Christ (fig. 67).3 In an eleventh-century codex from Saint Catherine’s Monastery, the concealing temple curtain consisted of a lozenge pattern filled with lilies (fig. 68).4 Herbert Kessler defends the pattern as being

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lozenge

Fig. 66. Knotted Berber Textile, Bouja’d, Morocco, 19th century. Basel, Hersberger Collection

lozenge

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Fig. 67. Christ of the Parousia with lozenge motif on curtain behind, 9th century. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Gr. 699, fol. 89r

a formal support of the iconography of the cosmos, the firmament, and, as a temple curtain, even an eschatological reference to the Heavenly Jerusalem and thus the return of Christ and the restoring of paradise. In some cases, the lozenge pattern is seen in connection with the brick wall, and thus with the structure of the masonry of the Heavenly Jerusalem (fig. 69).5

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lozenge

Fig. 68. Temple curtain with lozenge motif, miniature in Topographia Christiana, 11th century. Sinai, Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Cod. 1186, fol. 82v

Fig. 69. Curtains of the holy land with lozenge motif, miniature in Topographia Christiana, 11th century. Sinai, Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Cod. 1186, fol. 79r

lozenge

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Fig. 70. John Climacus (579-649), Holy Ladder, Mandylion with lozenge motif, Constantinople, ca. 1100. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Ross. Gr. 251, fol. 12v

This brings me to the second important branch of the lozenge pattern as an energetically charged carrier of textile: the → acheiropoieton, or the → face of Christ as an epiphany of God. Both the → vera icon of the West as well as the prototypical Byzantine → mandylion had textile as a carrier (fig. 70).6 Textile charged with a sacral veiling to show that which is invisible shifts to the bestowed → face of Christ. The figure of the Son, the New Covenant, has become visible; the → face now floats in front of the woven curtain that conceals the Tabernacle of the Old Covenant. There is now a ‘duality’ of cloth and → face, of old and new, of invisibility and visibility, both a Janus → head on the threshold of a shared ‘visible invisibility’. In the Byzantine iconography, the → mandylion often shows the lozenge pattern on damask, directly referencing the above mentioned triple layer of power of the Biblical curtains on the one hand, and by extension the anthropo-

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logical creation and fertility schemata (sublimated in Mary) on the other. The figurative visibility of the Son is thus literally able to attach itself in front of or on top of the cloth as an apparition and as a definition of a new pact between the invisible God of Moses and his visualization in the Son. The → face becomes a new organic manifestation of the primal secret of the Old Testament. The textile with → net pattern is meant to incorporate the past, with its energy to continue the secret, but at the same time functions as the perfect ‘safety → net’ for showing-that-which-must-be-shown.

Ernst Gombrich in his The Sense of Order. A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, London, 1994 (reprint), p. 53-54. 2 Many thanks to Roland Krischel, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, who alerted me to this fact during the workshop at IKKM Weimar, entitled: Excessive Spaces. Considering Media Genealogies of Trompe-l’œil in Netherlandish Book Illumination and Early Still Lifes, which took place on 21-22 January 2016; Roland Krischel, Ein ‘vergiftetes’ Meisterwerk? Theologie und Ideologie im Altar der Stadtpatrone, in Kölner Domblatt, 80, 2015, p. 1-100, notes 250-253. 1

Herbert L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing. Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art, Philadelphia PA, 2000, p. 53-54. 4 Ibid., p. 53-54, p. 57-59, figs. 3.3, 3.4. See also: Herbert L. Kessler, Medieval Art as Argument, in Iconography at the Crossroads. Papers from the Colloquium sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 23-24 March 1990, (Index of Christian Art, Occasional Papers, 2), ed. Brendan Cassidy, Princeton NJ, 1993, p. 63-64. 5 Herbert L. Kessler, Il mandylion, in Il volto di Cristo, eds. Giovanni Morello & Gerhard Wolf, Milan, 2000, p. 67-76, p. 74. 6 See also: Kessler, Spiritual Seeing, color image IVb.

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Magnet The effect of poetry is a divine power (theia dynamis) that the poet experiences, but which also touches others. Socrates compares this to a magnet that not only moves iron, but can magnetize other objects, which then in turn attract other objects.1 Socrates introduces the → enthousiasmos affect as a rhetorical concept that can ‘infect’ the audience. When the poet is entheos, gifted by the gods with inspiration and communication, he will be able to transfer the rhetorical capacities of → enthousiasmos to the audience, without necessarily needing to use technè (craft) to do so.2

1

Wesley D. Smith, So-called Possession in pre-Christian Greece, in Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 96, 1965, p. 403-426, p. 423.

2 Peter Fenves, The Scale of Enthusiasm, in Huntington Library Quarterly, 60, 1/2 (Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850), 1997, p. 117-152, p. 118.

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making/materiality

Fig. 71. Paul Klee (1879-1940), Bei der bewegten Form…, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 1921-1922. From: Paul Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, Orginalmanuscript von Paul Klees erstem Vortragszyklus am staatlichen Bauhaus Weimar 1921/1922, ed. Jürgen Glaesemer, Basel, s.l. vol. Facsimile, p. 114, vol. Transcription, p. 62-63.

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Making/materiality Tim Ingold writes: To create anything, Aristotle reasoned, you have to bring together form (morphè) and matter (hylè). In the subsequent history of Western thought, this hylomorphic model of creation became ever more deeply embedded. But it also became increasingly unbalanced. Form came to be seen as imposed by an agent with a particular design in mind, while matter, thus rendered passive and inert, became that which was imposed upon. My ultimate aim, however, is (...) to overthrow the model itself and to replace it with an ontology that assigns primacy to the processes of formation as against their final products, and to the flows and transformations of materials as against states of matter.1 Namely that it is a question not of imposing preconceived forms on inert matter but of intervening in the fields of force and currents of material wherein forms are generated. Practitioners, I contend, are wanderers, wayfarers, whose skill lies in their ability to find the grain of the world’s becoming and to follow its course while bending it to their evolving purpose.2 (...) My aim is to restore things to life and, in so doing, to celebrate the creativity of what Paul Klee (1879-1940) called ‘form-giving’ (fig. 71).3 This means putting the hylomorphic model into reverse. More specifically, it means reversing a tendency, evident in much of the literature on art and material culture, to read creativity ‘backwards’, starting from an outcome in the form of a novel object and tracing it, through a sequence of antecedent conditions, to an unprecedented idea in the mind of an agent.4

Hence, when we see the world not as a collection of dead objects that an actor puts to some use, but as a mixed world, we no longer need the polar separation between subject and object and reconciliation between thing and maker/user becomes a given. “The world we inhabit is not made up of subjects and objects, or even of quasi-subjects and quasi-objects. The problem lies not so much in the sub- or the ob-, or in the dichotomy between them, as in the -ject. For the constituents of this world are not already thrown or cast before they can act or be acted upon. They are in the throwing, in the casting.”5 Suzanne B. Butters adds to this: “From the maker’s point of view the physical act of making new things is predicated on empirical knowledge, but the very act

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of fabrication forces him to respond to unforeseen material anomalies, to unpredictable mental imaginings and to a continuing feedback between the two. Acquiring new knowledge of this kind is delightfully rich, even when the objects made seem modest or banal.”6 As a result, Tim Ingold and Elisabeth Hallam distinguished two forms of ‘creating’ in their book Making and Growing. ‘The Action of Make’ (production, creation, construction, preparation; conversion into or causing to become something), versus ‘The Action of Grow’ (to arise or come into existence, to manifest vigorous life, to flourish, to increase gradually in size by natural development, to increase in quantity or degree, to advance towards maturity).7 Makers know better, however. They know that the simple answer, designed perhaps to fend off your unwanted attentions as a meddling onlooker, leaves almost everything about their craft unsaid, and implies a certainty about ends and means that, in practice, is largely an illusion. Making things, for them, often feels like telling stories, and as with all stories, though you may pick up the thread and eventually cast it off, the thread itself has no discernible beginning or end.8

Following the analogy of a revaluation of the study of materiality as ‘making’, James Elkins has a recommendation for the Art Sciences. It takes time to experience and articulate the materiality of artworks, but academic discourse prefers its insights to come quickly. Real materiality – paying attention to the matter and the substance experienced by artists, does not yield many ideas per page or per day. Like other disciplines, Art History and Art Theory prefer continuous streams of insights and ideas, and so they consider only general aspects of materiality.9

Virtually in reply to Elkins’ critical note, Tim Ingold succeeds in opening up the history of art to the history of life, where improvisation and freedom can be integrated:10

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Rather, every work encapsulates the movement that brought it forth and is in turn encapsulated in the maturation of what follows. Likewise, the life of the organism is not simply expended in the translation of an initial, genetically encoded design into a material end-product. If we ask what organisms and persons create, the answer must be that they create one another and themselves, playing their part in the never-ending and non-specific project of keeping life going.

Tim Ingold, The Textility of Making, in Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34, 2010, p. 91-102, p. 91-92. 2 Ibid., p. 92. 3 Ibid. p. 97. See Paul Klee, Notebooks, Volume 2: The Nature of Nature, transl. Heinz Norden, ed. Jürg Spiller, London, 1973, p. 269. 4 Ingold, The Textility of Making, p. 97. 5 Ibid., p. 95. 6 Suzanne B. Butters, From Skills to Wisdom. Making, Knowing, and the Arts, in Ways of Making and Knowing. The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge, eds. Harold Cook, Amy Meyers & Pamela H. Smith, Ann Arbor MI, 2014, p. 47-85, p. 48. 1

Elizabeth Hallam & Tim Ingold, Making and Growing. An Introduction, in Making and Growing. Anthropological Studies of Organisms and Artefacts, (Anthropological Studies of Creativity and Perception), eds. Elizabeth Hallam & Tim Ingold, Farnham, 2014, p. 1-24, p. 1. 8 Ibid., p. 1. 9 James Elkins, On Some Limits of Materiality in Art History, in 31. Das Magazin des Instituts für Theorie (Taktilität. Sinneserfahrung als Grenzerfahrung), 12-13, 2008, p. 25-30, p. 30. 10 Elisabeth Hallam & Tim Ingold (eds.), Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, Oxford – New York, 2007, p. 48. 7

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mandylion

Fig. 72. Mandylion, 14th century. Genoa, Armenian Church of Saint Bartholomew

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Mandylion From the sixth century onwards, the Syrian Legend of Abgar was spread, recounting how the king of Edessa was, in a similar fashion, cured of leprosy thanks to a cloth bearing the imprint of Christ’s features: the mandylion (fig. 72).1 These tributaries feed into the Roman Legend of St → Veronica, and in the twelfth century the first Western testimonies of a sudarium occur, later also the first true images.2 In the legend of Abgar, the artist, blinded by the light, could not paint a portrait of Christ for the king the legend is named after. But miraculously, → shadows and later colors appeared on/in the canvas: the first image is born. It floats between → materiality and texture. If floats because it is located neither in front of nor behind the → grid, constantly resonating, pulsing, in process, intangible. The membrane of the true image is loosely woven. It’s see-through. It filters the light that comes from God’s streaming countenance when he decided to effuse himself into tangible material.3 It means the light can be carried in the → grid, where it is partially gulped up. And later, when → Veronica came and the mandylion became the sudarium, and she in turn received this image on a surface of white textile, the light wasn’t enough any more, so the image flowed further in → blood, tears, and sweat (fig. 73).4 And the image became a leaking → sieve left behind on a woman who knows what it is like to give birth, and thus knew to embrace this first image in the permeation of her own sex. Fear not, said the angel. However, it was not the fear of his coming that overwhelmed Mary, but the stupefactio of the moment: the cosmic shift, the → shadow of the firmament that descended upon her and that also reached her through her → ear and nestled inside her, smaller than ever, like a piece of wool that would thread the world. Yes, a world, as one would like, that turned digital the moment an invisible God decided to show themselves as a → stain on the membrane.5

1

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; Kurt Weitzmann, The Mandylion and Constantine Porphyrogenetos, in Cahiers

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mandylion

Fig. 73. Hans Memling (1430-1494), Veronica, ca. 1480. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art

archéologiques, 11, 1960, p. 163-184; Gerhard Wolf, Colette D. Bozzo & Anna Rosa Calderoni Masetto (eds.), Mandylion. Intorno al Sacro Volto, da Bisanzio a Genova, Genoa, 2004; Herbert L. Kessler, Configuring the Invisible by Copying the Holy Face, in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, Bologna, 1998, p. 130-151. 2 Giraldus Cambrensis, Speculum Ecclesiae, lib. IV, 6: Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores, 21, 4, p. 274; Ernst von Dobschütz, Christusbilder. Untersuchungen zur christlichen Legenden, Leipzig, 1899, p. 210; Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth. History, Symbolism, and Structure of a ‘True’ Image, Oxford, 1991, p. 107-111. 3 Roland Betancourt, The Icon’s Gold. A Medium of Light, Air, and Space, in West 86th. A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design

History, and Material Culture, 23, 2, 2016, p. 252-280, p. 267: “In the icon, the gold ground literally circumscribes the bodily figure as space, giving the figure a ground not only from which to present itself as sensible form, but also placing it within a space that confines and delimits the bounds of its outline. (…) Thus, place here is a form of activated or practiced space, whereby it is in the deed or act of receiving that bodiless form in matter that the → body becomes present itself. Topos suggests place precisely as that event of giving plasticity to the immaterial, of giving → materiality to that which is absent.” 4 Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth, passim. 5 Birgit Schneider, art. Digitality, in Textile Terms. A Glossary, (Textile Studies, 0), eds. Mateusz Kapustka, et al., Berlin, 2017, p. 72-76.

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Marble The Hebrew word for → silence is at the same time the ‘voice of God’: dmamah. Dmamah links the stem ma, water with dam = → blood. But dmamah also contains the word damah, which means ‘to be similar to’.1 The semantic core that connects water with → silence and the Divine has been kept in this instance. In the Indo-European languages there is also a verifiable etymological connection between → silence and fluidity, between → silence and something that overflows, fluxus, water sources, rivers. And the Latin murmur, talking quietly, whispering, is also used for the soft rushing and babbling of water. It is indeed peculiar to establish a linguistic (and so perhaps symbolically sensed) relationship between → silence and the spring, a relation that is also implicated in the → nymph’s epigram.2 Looking even deeper into the etymology, we can recognize the Sanskrit root mar, for movement (of waves) and mar-ma for a more wild movement of the → sea, which we can still → hear when we use the word to describe the murmuring → sea.3 The word ‘marble’ has an interesting etymology acquainted with the Sanskrit root as ‘frozen liquid’. According to a eulogy written between 435 and 446 by the fifth-century poet Flavius Merobaudes on a marble font in a now-vanished baptistery, ‘the jewel, once liquid itself, still carries the liquid’.4 Where does the idea that marble is a (solidified) liquid come from? Theorizing on mineralogy, the Arab scholar and physician Avicenna (980-1037) conjectured that conglutination (as seen in alluvial formations) and congelation (as in the growth of stalactites) have a lapidifying effect on water; in short that water ‘stiffens’, ‘freezes’ and ‘petrifies’ through the action of a ‘mineral force’.5 The derivation of the word itself – mar/marmor/marmora – may also have contributed to the idea that marble is water metamorphosed into stone. ‘Marble’ derives from the Latin noun marmor. Marmor stems from the Greek marmairein (μαρμαίρειν), which means to shimmer, to shine like the surface of the water. In the Iliad, Homer (ca. 840 bc) speaks of the shimmering → sea: ἅλα μαρμαρέην (hala marmareên, 14.273). Virgil (70-19 bc), when he writes of the marble smoothness of the → sea, turns marmor and mar into synonyms. In short, this brings the setting of the → sleeping → nymph in the → grotto into an almost tautological layered space of meanings: (...) murmur = marble = water = → silence = petrification (...).6

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marble

Fig. 74. Agnolo Gaddi (ca. 1350-ca. 1396), Faux marbre in the Annunciation, 1394-1395. Prato, Cathedral, Capello di Sacro Cingolo

marble

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In recent anthropological image analyses, the striking presence of stones and flaming marble in → Annunciations is interpreted as a visual enterprise meant to explain the hidden, mysterious ground of creation itself. Independently of each other, Georges Didi-Huberman, Victor Stoichita and Paul Vandenbroeck described this marbre faux in depictions of the → Annunciation and the → Incarnation as an expression of a pictorial phase that precedes figuration (fig.  74).7 In other words, artists symbolically embed amorphous, marbled mineral drawings in iconographies that are fostered by the symbolism of ‘preceding’ or of ‘descent into matter in order to take on form’. They will also resort to the phenomenon as a reflection on their own artistic being, which follows the process of an abstract idea descending into the world of form and matter. The integration of abstract, painted materials in the iconography of the → Annunciation imposes a relationship between the pre-figurative and the figurative. The integration of the two consists in the fact that between both worlds, or visual fields, an energy is unleashed that continually jumps from one to the other, as if between the promise of the figure that will be created out of nothing and the figure/figuration itself. Both are experienced in the world of the plattomenos (forming) and the world of mimesis (depicting), respectively, as virtuosity. At the same time this forms, according to the Neoplatonist Pseudo-Dionysius (fifth-sixth century), the binome upon which all visual/plastic creation rests. In other words there is a constant shifting, a dissemblance: “to figure without substance to take on and is thus oriented toward the associative, the mystery, the processual.”8 The energetic abstraction that the plattomenos, the dizzying flaming of marble panels embeds in the → Annunciation bears witness to a deeper anthropological division between sub-symbolic gradations (a-figurative, abstract) and symbolic linguicity (figurative, legibility, mimetic).

Annick de Souzenelle, Le symbolisme du corps humain, Paris, 1991, p. 362. 2 Paul Vandenbroeck, Matrix Marmorea. De subsymbolische iconografie van de scheppende energieën in Europa en Noord-Afrika, in Materie & Beeld, eds. Lut Pil & Trees

1

De Mits, Ghent, 2010, p. 51-78; Paul Vandenbroeck, The ‘Nameless Motif ’. On the Cross-Cultural Iconography of an Energetic Form, in Annual of the Antwerp Museum, 2010 (2012), p. 113-180.

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Erkinger Schwarzenberg, Colour, Light and Transparency in the Greek World, in Medieval Mosaics. Light, Color, Materials, eds. Eve Borsook, et al., Florence, 2000, p. 15-34, p. 22. 4 Fabio Barry, Walking on Water. Cosmic Floors in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, in The Art Bulletin, 89, 4, 2007, p. 627-656, p. 631; Flavius Merobaudes, Carmina, II, 8, in Flavius Merobaudes. A Translation and Historical Commentary, ed. & transl. Frank M. Clover, Philadelphia PA, 1971, p. 11 and p. 60: gemma vehit laticem, quae fuit ante latex. Perhaps Merobaudes visited the Santa Croce Baptistery in Ravenna. 5 Avicenna, De Congelatione et conglutinatione Lapidum, eds. Eric J. Holmyard & Desmond C. Mandeville, Paris, 1927, p. 46. 6 On the subject of these layers, see: Barbara Baert, New Iconological Perspectives on Marble as Divinus Spiritus. Hermeneutical Change and Iconogenesis, in Louvain Studies, 40, 1, 2017, p. 14-35. 7 Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico. Dissemblance et figuration, Paris, 1990; 3

Georges Didi-Huberman, Anhaltspunkt für eine abwesende Wunde. Monographie eines Flecks, in Stigmata. Poetiken der Körperinschrift, eds. Bettine Menke & Barbara Vinken, Munich, 2004, p. 319-340; Victor I. Stoichita, Inkarnatfarbe. Ein Kunstbegriff im Spannungsfeld zwischen deutschen Idealismus und französischer Phänomenologie, in ‘Trinkt, o Augen, was die Wimper hält, …’. Farbe und Farben in Wissenschaft und Kunst, eds. Hanspeter Bieri & Sara M. Zwahlen, (Berner Universitätsschriften), Bern, 2008, p. 215-239; Paul Vandenbroeck, Matrix Marmorea. The Sub-Symbolic Iconography of the Creative Energies in Europe and North Africa, in New Perspectives in Iconology. Visual Studies and Anthropology, Brussels, 2012, p. 180-210; Vandenbroeck, The ‘Nameless Motif ’, p. 113-180. 8 Vandenbroeck, Matrix Marmorea. The Sub-Symbolic Iconography of the Creative Energies, p. 192.

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Matrix/matrixial The ‘matrixial space’ is a term coined by the French psychoanalyst Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. It is a space that may be characterized first and foremost as containing an energy or potentiality that has ‘not yet’ manifested itself at the phallic level, only at the feminine, internal, uterine level.1 Here, a prefigurative knowledge model unfolds that is not geared towards distinction (krinein, symbolon), but precedes it and thus taps into a different kind of spontaneous intuitive energy in terms of ‘borderlinking’, ‘borderspace’. She refers to it as “a minimal sense of differentiation-in-togetherness,” as might be encountered in an unborn child inside its mother’s womb.2 Borderlinking is, in essence, a “matrixial” concept, comparable to the melding of two entities, as occurs uniquely in the maternal womb. Here Lichtenberg Ettinger introduces the notion of ‘metramorphosis’. “The matrixial affect, which creates the metramorphosis and is created by it, is the affect of the Thing that Marks together: an I with a non-I in co-emergence and co-fading.”3 In short, Lichtenberg Ettinger sees room for another type of episteme – “It is a chief silenced hole in the phallic paradigm”4 – that makes use of the process instead of the static, that is ‘metramorphosis’ rather than metamorphosis, that is ‘fluid’, foamy, ungraspable rather than stable, and that goes beyond the krinein that divides yet embraces the → chaos as an alternative knowing/feeling in a forgotten and suppressed world (fig. 75).

Giorgio Agamben, On Potentiality, in Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford CA, 1999, p. 177-184. 2 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Art as a Transport-Station of Trauma, in Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. Artworking 1985-1999, (exh. cat.), Ghent, 2000, p. 97. 1

3 Ibid., p. 97. 4 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, The With-In-Visible Screen. Images of Absence in the Inner Space of Painting, in Inside the Visible. An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art, ed. Catherine de Zegher, Cambridge, 1996, p. 89-113, p. 101.

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Fig. 75. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (°1948), Eurydice series nr. 5, Oil and photocopy on paper mounted on canvas, 1992-1994. Courtesy of the artist

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Melancholy/acedia Francesco Petrarca (1303-1374) wrote the Secretum or De secreto conflictu curarum mearum in 1347 after his decision to stop living as a religious. The Secretum (surely meant as a secret that thus does not hold with indiscrete readers) is written in Platonic mode as a fictive dialogue between himself and Augustine.1 A third figure is also included, Veritas, but she stays shrouded in → silence.2 The dissertation describes acedia as an incurable sadness, certainly not laziness. Augustine says to Petrarch: Habet te funesta quaedam pestis animi quam accidiam moderni, veteres aegritudinem doxerunt (The ancients called it aegritudio and nowadays we call it accidia).3 Petrarch lets acedia take on the role of his mistress. She torments, but also opens the genius of his artistry. In short, there is a shift in significance at the start of the Italian Renaissance.4 Acedia becomes a form of melancholy, which is necessary to inspire an artist from sorrow (from love) and to attract the muse/→ nymph of writing. Of course, since the days of the Ancients, the melancholic have been charged with one of the most negative of temperaments. Acedia/melancholy is hard and sorrowful – a black sun5 – but not a sin of the soul, more a condition that is necessary to gain access to inspired creativity. Acedia gave Petrarch the power to write. The fusion with melancholy means that acedia as a concept also becomes subject to the therapeutic tradition of the four temperaments. We receive a new ‘idea’ about genius and → sleep that semantically oscillates between the theological and therapeutic, between technical and monastic, between profane and sacred, between psychological and magical, between Saturn and Satan.6 The melancholic is ‘acediast’, because both paralysis and inactivity as well as genius and inspiration fall to him.7 Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) says that the melancholic had an open wound that could not be healed, just as the Fall could not be repaired.8 The fusion of acedia and melancholy also had an impact on the iconography of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (fig. 76).9 Le droit d’ouvrir, en tant que chrétien, des livres païens ne s’affirme qu’à partir de Pétrarque. Nantis de ce passé restauré, les hommes de la Renaissance forgent alors l’idée d’une mélancolie inspirée, intellectuelle, contre ceux qui méditent sur un crâne et font leurs exercices spirituels. Sur les gravures, la Mélancolie ne craint plus Dieu. Elle médite intellectuellement, un compas ou un livre à la main.10

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Fig. 76. Sloth (Acedia), from The Seven Vices, engraving by Hieronymus Wierix (ca. 1553-1619) after Philips Galle (1537-1612), before 1612. New York, Metropolitan Museum

melancholy/acedia

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Agamben writes: Il n’est guère facile de préciser à quel moment la doctrine morale du → démon de midi est sortie des cloîtres pour se greffer sur l’antique syndrome médical du tempérament atrabilaire (…) le type iconographique de l’acidiosus et celui du mélancolique apparaissent confondus dans les illustrations des calendriers et des almanachs populaires de la fin du Moyen Âge.11

1 2

3 4

5

6 7 8

Petrarca, Secretum, ed. Ugo Dotti, Rome, 1993, p. 90. Jerrold E. Seigel, Ideals of Eloquence and Silence in Petrarch, in Journal of the History of Ideas, 26, 1965, p. 147-174. → Silence is truth and recommended to the seekers of that truth. Petrarca, Secretum, p. 90. Anne Larue, Les chambres de l’esprit. Acedia, ou l’autre mélancolie, Paris, 2001, p. 39. Julia Kristeva, Soleil noir. Dépression et mélancolie, Paris, 1987; See also: Michel Stanesco, Du démon de midi à l’Éros mélancolique, in Poétique, April, 1996, p. 131-159. Yves Hersant, art. Acedia, in Le débat, 29, 1984, p. 45-46. Julien Gracq, En lisant, en écrivant, Paris, 1981, p. 203. Sigmund Freud, Deuil et mélancolie, in Métapsychologie, Paris, 1968. In his L’image ouverte Georges Didi-Huberman describes the image as a dynamic → emotion, which opens up to the viewer like a gate, an image ouverte. According to Didi-Huberman, this ‘opening’ of the

imagery lies in the paradigm that man was created in God’s image. That unity, the ressemblance, is something man lost during the fall of man. The ressemblance became a dissemblance. The history of imagery became a history of wanting to become one with the origins from that point on. Artistry defines itself as the continuous striving for this reunion and the artwork is the only hope of that tried recovery. In short, each artistic expression to this day makes a pact with what was once lost; Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image ouverte. Motifs de l’incarnation dans les arts visuels, Paris, 2007. 9 Larue, Les chambres de l’esprit, p. 26. In the fifteenth century, The Temptation of St. Anthony makes a comeback in the iconography of the melancholic; André Chastel, La tentation de saint Antoine ou le songe du mélancolique, in Fables, formes, figures, Paris, 1978, p. 138. 10 Larue, Les chambres de l’esprit, p. 15. 11 Giorgio Agamben, Stanze. Parole et fantasme dans la culture occidentale, transl. Yves Hersant, Paris, 1994, p. 37.

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mithras

Fig. 77. Mithraeum of Capua, Santa Maria Capua Vetere, built at the beginning of the 2nd century ad

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Mithras On 17 May 1929, Aby Warburg and Gertrud Bing descended into the Mithras → grotto of Capua. At that point, the mithraeum had only been discovered five years earlier (fig. 77).1 “Because both he and Bing were short enough to climb down into the opening afforded by a manhole cover, and because ‘a woman from the neighborhood… brings [them] an acetylene torch’,”2 so it is written in the diary, “they are able to discover the cult’s colorful, sanguinary origins.”3 The god Mithras can be traced back to the Indo-Iranian culture (second millennium bc). The cult lived on in the Persian mysticism of Zoroaster. His name is etymologically connected to ‘mediator’ between good and evil, ‘conveyor’ of light; he who has a ‘contract’ with the sun.4 The Mithras cult became popular in the Hellenistic culture of the Mediterranean. For the Romans, Mithras became a secretive mysterious rite exclusively for men (especially soldiers). The initiation and worship were performed in underground caves, or mithraea. The slaughtering of a bull, or the tauroctonia, played a key role in the Mithras cult and iconography. Mithras was born from a rock and is sometimes depicted at a banquet with the Sol Invictus: the unconquered sun. Although many archaeological sites and sculptures have been preserved – such as the one in Capua – barely any texts that could tell us about this closedoff mystery cult have survived. Franz Cumont (1868-1947), Reinhold Merkelbach (1918-2006) and Manfred Claus managed to compile some of the symbolic spectrum of the cult through Christian writings denouncing it – the cult remained active until the fourth century and was a competitor of early Christianity –, and archaeological remains.5 Mithraic rituals may have been performative reenactments of the Mithras myth: the birth from the rock, which had to be accompanied by absolute sacred → silence,6 the striking water from stone with an arrow shot, the killing of the bull, Sol’s submission to Mithras, Mithras and Sol feasting on the bull, and Mithras’ ascent to heaven in a chariot.7 Whatever they may be, these rituals were meant to stimulate the receiving of the unconquered sun: the entheos that would bring forth salvation and resurrection. Warburg revels at the chance in Capua die Ausdruckswerte des imaginären Auf- und Abstieges in den Tiefen ihres kultischen Praegewerkes kennen zu lernen.8 (“To become familiar with the expressive values of the imaginary ascent and descent into the depths of their cultic, minted works”). The personal descent

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(Abstieg) into Mithras’ chthonic underworld was reflected in Warburg’s mental studies of Giordano Bruno’s (1548-1600) → shadow realm, which was bursting with the desire for insight and enlightenment (Aufstieg). This oscillating dynamic was already part of Warburg’s psychological past and personal Denkraum. Between 1921 and 1924, Aby Warburg is admitted to Bellevue Sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, presumably after a psychotic episode. He is treated by a psychiatrist named Dr. Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966).9 His bipolar Denkraum was uniquely developed in the earlier mentioned → Mnemosyne project, which was set up during his hospitalization by Gertrud Bing, Fritz Saxl (1890-1948), and Ernst Cassirer, and which was continued with Warburg afterwards. “What Warburg learns in that underground, in that chthonic legacy, close to his own obsessions, is that space speaks directly to the agonistic struggle with polarities shaping his own psychology.”10 Wir haben es jetzt erfahren, wie tief im opferblut-durchtränkten Boden die Erlösungsreligiösität der römischen Legionäre wurzelte… Die qualvollen und gefährlichen Einweihungsriten… sind in farbigen Figuren (was bisher an keinem Monument zu erkennen war) dargestellt. Der Grundgedanke ist bei all diesen Mysterien derselbe: Du warst getötet und erstandest wieder zum Leben.11 We have now experienced how deeply the redemptive religiosity of the Roman legion took root in the thoroughly-soaked-in-sacrificial-blood earth. The painful and perilous initiation rites… are depicted in colorful figures (which earlier were not recognizable on any monument). The basic idea is the same in all these mysteries: you were killed and brought back to life again.

Aby M. Warburg, Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg, (Gesammelte Schriften, VII), eds. Karen Michels & Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Berlin, 2001, p. 456. 2 Ibid. Quoted by Christopher Johnson, Metaphors, Memory and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images, Ithaca NY, 2012, p. 209.

1

3 Ibid. 4 Reinhold Merkelbach, Mithras. Ein persisch-römischer Mysterienkult, Wiesbaden, 1998; Franz Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra, transl. Thomas J. McCormack, Chicago IL, 1903. 5 Manfred Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras. The God and His Mysteries, transl.

mithras Richard Gordon, New York, 2000, p. 62-101. 6 Renate Pillinger, Parola e silenzio nell’arte paleocristiano, in Silenzio e parola nella patristica, (Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum, 127), Rome, 2012, p. 685-689, fig. 9: Dublin, Trinity college, a believer holds their → hand in front of their mouth with the epigraph nama (= veneration); Merkelbach, Mithras. Ein persischrömischer Mysterienkult, fig. 68, p. 98, note 16. 7 Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras, p. 33. 8 Warburg, Tagebuch, p. 456. 9 Barbara Baert, Nymph. Motif, Phantom, Affect. Part II. Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) Butterflies as Art Historical Paradigms, (Studies in Iconology, 4), Louvain – Walpole MA, 2016, passim. Together with Fritz Saxl and Ernst Cassirer, Warburg will continue to work on the → Bilderatlas. I cannot expand on his stay at the sanatorium and his healing process. For more information on that subject, see: Ludwig Binswanger, Krankengeschichte Aby Warburg 1921-1924, LudwigBinswanger-Archiv, Universitätsarchive Tübingen, I: the archival materials from Tübingen (UAT) are published in: Ludwig Binswanger & Aby M. Warburg, Aby Warburg. Die unendliche Heilung. Aby Warburgs Krankengeschichte, eds. Chantal Marazia & Davide Stimilli,

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Zürich – Berlin, 2007; Karl Königseder, Aby Warburg im Bellevue, in Aby M. Warburg. Ekstatische Nymphe ... trauernder Flussgot – Potrait eines Gelehrten, eds. Robert Galitz & Brita Reimers, Hamburg, 1995, p. 74-98; Ludwig Binswanger, Le problème de l’espace en psychopathologie, transl. Caroline Gros-Azorin, Toulouse, (1933) 1988; Ron Chernow, The Warburgs. The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family, New York, 1993; Pierre Fédida, Binswanger et l’impossibilité de conclure, préface à Ludwig Binswanger, Analyse existentielle, psychiatrie clinique et psychanalyse. Discours, parcours, et Freud, Paris, 1970, p. 7-37; Bettina Gockel, KriegKrankheit-Kulturwissenschaft. Warburgs Schizophrenie als Forschungsinstrument und das Ideal moderner Primitivität, in Kasten 117. Aby Warburg und der Aberglaube im Ersten Weltkrieg, (Tübinger Vereinigung für Volksunde), ed. Gottfried Korff, Tübingen, 2008, p. 117-134; Carlo Severi, Warburg anthropologue, ou le déchiffrement d’une utopie. De la biologie des images à l’anthropologie de la mémoire, in L’Homme, 165, 2003, p. 77-138; Carlo Severi, Il percorso e la voce. Un’ antropologia della memoria, Turin, 2004. 10 Johnson, Metaphors, Memory and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images, p. 209. 11 Warburg Institute Archive (WIA), GC 25005, fols. 2-3.

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Fig. 78.

mnemosyne

ΜΝΗΜΟΣΥΝΗ-inscription

above the entrance of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg at Heilwigstraße 116, Hamburg, 1925-1926

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Mnemosyne In her article from 1965, Getrud Bing describes Warburg’s dream: “he planned a pictorial atlas setting out the history of visual expression in the Mediterranean area, with the title Mnemosyne, the name which he had also chosen as a motto for his library,” as Mnemosyne would later be inscribed above the entrance of the library in Hamburg in Greek letters (fig. 78).1 In addition to being the mother of muses and the goddess of memory, for Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne was also the great sphinx of whom he hopes “to unlock, if not her secret, at least the formulation of her riddle:”2 der grossen Sphynx Mnemosyne, wenn auch nicht ihr Geheimnis, so doch die Formulierung ihrer Rätselfrage zu entlocken.3 La Mnémosyne invoquée ici n’est certainement pas le gardien bienveillant d’un trésor de délicatesses bibliophiles (Schatzhaus für bibliophile Kostbarkeiten), mais plutôt “le grand sphynx” dont Warburg souhaitait “soutirer, sinon le secret, au moins la formulation de son énigme.4

Gertrud Bing, A. M. Warburg, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 28, 1965, p. 299-313, p. 304. 2 Davide Stimilli, Aby Warburgs’ Impresa, in Images Re-vues (online), 4, 2013, p. 1-23, p. 12. 1

3

Warburg Institute Archive (WIA), III.133.3.3, p. 5 (annual report on the Library for 1925, December 1925). 4 Davide Stimilli, L’énigme de Warburg, in Revue française de psychanalyse, 79, 4, 2015, p. 1100-1114, p. 1110.

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monstrum

Fig. 79. Rudolf Larisch (1856-1934), Per monstra ad sphaeram ex libris of Franz Boll (1867-1924), 1924

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Monstrum Within Warburg’s Denkraum, the monstrum stayed mostly hidden, interspersed with moments of frightening visibility.1 Aby Warburg developed one of the most famous mottos about the monstrum in honor of his friend, philologist and astrologist Franz Boll, who died suddenly on 3 July 1924. The first motto reads: per monstra ad astra (after Johannes Kepler’s (1571-1630) motto per aspera ad astra).2 A week after Boll’s death, Warburg adds a final note: per monstra ad sphaeram (fig. 79).3 Warburg changed the meaning of these sayings to mean “the gods have placed the monster [das Ungeheuer] before the idea.”4 In 1928 Aby Warburg and Getrud Bing start to read the work of the impenetrable cosmographer Giordano Bruno – he unmistakably has the background knowledge, the erudite, and also the detailed methodology on ancient → astrology that lived on in a distorted fashion during the Quattrocento, which he characterized as the pendulum that swung between monstra and astra. Thus, monstrum became more than a motto: it became a hermeneutic paradigm for the oscillating forms of expression between esotericism and reason in Humanism, and by extension, art history. In other words, Warburg had his own personal Dialektik des Monstrums (“dialectic of the monster”), “wherein chthonic and cosmographical forces are ideally mediated by the claims of reason and the contours of form.”5 The “dialectic of the monster” was also a highly personal struggle for him. In a letter to his family from during his stay as a psychiatric patient at the Bellevue Sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, dated 26 December 1923, he writes: “One could say (it occurred to me last night): Per monstra ad superos inferosve, namely, fate has placed ‘the struggle with the dragon’ before the liberation from fear.”6 Aby Warburg often saw that ‘monster’; he managed to tame it by not seeing the frightening aspects of the psychè as the enemy, but as that which comes ‘before’ the idea: a knowledge model, in short, which only ‘through’ divinistic practices and the presence of the monstrous aura can reach abstract thinking. In his lecture in honor of Franz Boll, for example, Aby Warburg talks about hepatoscopy, an archaic means of fortune telling through the liver. Tafel 1 of the → Bilderatlas features Etruscan tablets with hepatoscopic notes (fig. 80).7 Warburg was convinced that the astrological system as an abstract science was

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Fig. 80. Tafel 1 of the Bilderatlas. From: Martin Warnke & Claudia Brink, Aby Warburg. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, (Gesammelte Schriften. Aby Warburg, 2, II, 1 ed. Horst Bredekamp, et al.), Berlin, 2008, p. 15

monstrum

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Fig. 81. Aby Warburg (1866-1929) wearing a Hemis kachina mask, Oraibi Arizona, May 1896

determined by these types of practices. He followed a hypothesis of the previously mentioned → Mithras specialist Franz Cumont.8 In the same lecture in memory of his friend Boll, Aby Warburg says: Die kosmische, bildhafte Orientierung des europäischen Menschen im 15. Jahrhundert: ein kulturwissenschaftliches Kapitel aus der Epoche der Wiedergeburt der Antike, so dürfte man die Skizze bezeichnen, die heute Abend im schnellsten Umriss vorüberzog. Das Bild stellte sich dabei heraus als Erzeugnis einer Ausdruckswertprägung nach bisher unbekannten Kreislaufgesetzen. In dem Wahlspruch ‘per monstra ad sphaeram’ mag ein solches Gesetz angedeutet sein. Es galt die polare Spannung zwischen bildhafter und zahlenmässiger Ursachensetzung als denknotwendige, humane, psychologische Funktion beim Geschäfte der geistigen Orientierung zu erfassen und im Laufe der historischen Entwicklung zu verfolgen.9

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Fig. 82. Serpent as lightning, reproduction of an altar floor, kiva ornamentation. From: Aby M. Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, transl. Michael P. Steinberg, Ithaca, NY – London, 1995, p. 3

The different facets of the monstrum – humans’ fascination with the astrological, using it as a dialectic to understand imagery, and also his own personal battle with the psychè – grow stronger in Warburg’s thinking after his time in Kreuzlingen and being declared healed in 1923/1924.10 It is well documented that Warburg held a successful lecture on the Hopi Pueblo tribe (that he visited in 1896) at the sanatorium itself on 21 April 1923, as ‘proof ’ he had been cured (fig. 81).11 Here, the snake sheds its skin as the archetypical monstrum par excellence (fig.  82) into the tamed demon that was formerly part of Warburg’s psychosis and presumed bipolarity,12 into abstract thought, into purification, into a knowledge model, and yes, into a purification and thus what was said to be a miraculous self-healing.13

Davide Stimilli, Aby Warburgs’ Impresa, in Images Re-vues (online), 4, 2013, p. 1-23. 2 Carl Bezold, Die Astrologie der Babylonier, in Sternglaube und Sterndeutung, eds. Franz

1

3

Boll & Carl Bezold, Berlin, 1931, p. 1-15, p. 15. Warburg Institute Archive (WIA), III.12.3, fol. 12.

monstrum 4 Maurizio Ghelardi, Aby Warburg e Franz Boll. Un’amicizia stellare, in Aby Warburg e le metamorfosi degli antichi dèi, ed. Marco Bertozzi, Modena, 2002, p. 141-151. 5 Christopher Johnson, Metaphors, Memory and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images, Ithaca NY, 2012, p. 19. 6 Warburg Institute Archive (WIA), GC, Warburg to his family, 26 December 1923. 7 Georges Didi-Huberman, Hepatische Empathie. Die Affinität des Inkommensurablen nach Aby Warburg, in Trivium, 2, 2010, p. 2-17. 8 Franz Cumont, Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain, Paris, 1906, p. 239; Davide Stimilli, Warburg’s Pentimento, in The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, 56, 2010, p. 140-175, p. 173. 9 Thomas Hensel, Kupferschlangen, unendliche Wellen und telegraphierte Bilder. Aby Warburg und das technische Bild, in Schlangenritual, (Wissenskultur und Gesellschaftlicher Wandel, 16), eds. Cora Bender, Thomas Hensel & Erhard Schüttpelz, Berlin, 2007, p. 297-360, note 45; quoted from Peter van Huisstede, De Mnemosyne Beeldatlas van Aby M. Warburg. Een laboratorium voor beeldgeschiedenis, (unpublished Diss.), Leiden, 1992, p. 115. 10 The time after his stay at Kreuzlingen marked an intensification and rejuvenation of his work; Alexandre Métraux, Aporien der Bewegungsdarstellungen. Zur Genealogie der Bildprogramme von Aby Warburg und Étienne-Jules Marey im Vergleich, in Der Bilderatlas im Wechsel der Künste und Medien, eds. Sabine Flach, Inge Münz-Koenen & Marianne Streisand, Munich, 2005, p. 21-44, p. 35; Katia Mazzucco, Genesi di un’opera ‘non finibile’, in Metalinguaggi visivi. Disergno, Pittura, Fotografia, Cinema, ed. Lucia Corrain, (unpublished), s.l., 2004-2005, p. 1-15, p. 11: Ad aprire la stagione della seconda fioritura. 11 Aby M. Warburg, Schlangenritual. Ein Reisebericht, ed. Ulrich Raulff, Berlin, 1988; Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of

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the Pueblo Indians of North America, transl. Michael P. Steinberg, New York, 1995. 12 Kyung-Ho Cha, Mimesis und schizophrenes Wissen. Die Geschichte des wissenschaftlichen Denkens in Aby Warburgs Kreuzlinger Vortrag über das Schlangenritual der Hopi, in Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie, 23, 2, 2014, p. 63-74. On 8 November 1921, Ludwig Binswanger writes a letter in answer to Sigmund Freud’s request to be informed about the condition of his friend Aby Warburg. Binswanger writes that Warburg indeed suffered a severe psychotic episode in 1918. He had suffered from anxiety and compulsions since he was a child. At this time, he is also suffering from anxiety and delirium, the psychiatrist writes. However, his interest in culture remains, and he asks critical questions, though he has trouble focussing on any particular topic for long periods of time. Binswanger is pessimistic and thinks that while the patient will be able to conquer the psychosis, he will never regain his former intellectual level, and he references his publication on Luther with much esteem. (Binswanger’s official diagnoses in the archives were: Schizophrenie. Manisch-depressiver Mischzustand). The psychiatrist was correct about the first diagnosis, but mistaken about the latter. Aby Warburg helps himself recover from his mania within his Denkraum; Ludwig Binswanger & Aby Warburg, La guérison infinie. Histoire Clinique d’Aby Warburg, 1921-1924, ed. Davide Stimilli, transl. Maël Renbouard & Martin Rueff, Paris, 2011, p. 206, p. 214; Anamnesis and Pathology: Tübingen UAT 441/3782, II.3; Barbara Baert, Nymph. Motif, Phantom, Affect. Part II. Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) Butterflies as Art Historical Paradigms, (Studies in Iconology, 4), Louvain – Walpole MA, 2016, p. 34. 13 Davide Stimilli, L’énigme de Warburg, in Revue française de psychanalyse, 79, 4, 2015, p. 1100-1114.

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Fig. 83. Anonymous, 15th century panel from a bridal chest. Formerly Dayton Art Institute, location now unknown

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Narcissus Ovid (43 bc-17 ad) tells the story of → Echo and Narcissus in the third book of his Metamorphoses (fig. 83).1 → Echo’s unreciprocated love for Narcissus led her to a cruel fate. Besides the punishment the talkative → nymph received – the echoing voice – → Echo slowly wastes away until her bones became one with the rocks. Just as Narcissus ignored → Echo, so art historical literature also seemed to have little interest in the → nymph. For a long time, art history was mainly interested in Narcissus’ reflected phantasm, which Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) brought to the foreground as imagery for the painterly arts.2 → Echo did not stand a chance against Narcissus, a seemingly indestructible paradigm of masculine-scopic art history. The → nymph remained the ‘blind spot’ of art history. Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pittura (1435) Book 2 reads: “For this reason, I say among my friends that Narcissus who was changed into a flower, according to the poets, was the inventor of painting. Since painting is already the flower of every art, the story of Narcissus is most to the point.”3 Cristelle Baskins has pointed out that Alberti’s reference to the Narcissus, as the art of painting, is an idiosyncratic invention. It is certainly more than an antiquating mode that looks back at the old texts; it is also a reference to Alberti himself as ‘inventor’ and by extension a statement of his own self-consciousness as the author of De Pittura.4 Focusing on the masculine self-love of the metaphor, Baskins recognizes a parthenogenetic vision on the painterly arts in Alberti’s vision. “→ Echo is erased. Renaissance readers associated → Echo not only with commemorative speech, as glossed by Boccaccio, but also with the written word: Ovid’s → nymph vanished into voice; the natural fact of disembodied voice vanishes… into text.”5

1

Louise Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early 19th Century (unpublished doctoral thesis), University of Lund, 1967; Véronique Gély-Ghedira, La nostalgie du moi. Écho dans la littérature européenne, Paris, 2000.

2 Gerhard Wolf, ‘Arte superficiem illam fontis amplecti’: Alberti, Narziss und die Erfindung der Malerei, in Diletto e Maraviglia. Ausdruck und Wirkung in der Kunst von der Renaissance bis zum Barock, eds. Christine Göttler, et al., Emsdetten, 1998, p. 11-39;

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3

narcissus

Ulrich Pfisterer, Künstlerliebe. Der Narcissus-Mythos bei Leon Battista Alberti und die Aristoteles-Lektüre der Frührenaissance, in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 64, 3, 2001, p. 305-330. [5] Però usai di dire tra i miei amici secondo la sentenza de’ poeti, quel Narcisso convertito in fiore essere della pittura stato inventore: [6] ché, già ove sia la pittura fiore d’ogni arte, ivi tutta la storia di Narcìs viene

a proposito. [7]; Rocco Sinisgalli, The New De Pictura of Leon Battista Alberti, Rome, 2006, p. 161-162. 4 Christelle L. Baskins, Echoing Narcissus in Alberti’s Della Pittura, in Oxford Art Journal, 16, 1993, p. 25-31, p. 27. 5 John Hollander, The Figure of Echo. A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After, Berkeley CA, 1981, p. 22.

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Navel In her Song of Solomon (1977) writer Toni Morrison creates a female character without a navel.1 When she was born, and the umbilical cord was cut, the chord stump shriveled and was shed without leaving a trace of ever have been there at all. Her father had acquired the surname ‘Dead’, so that became her surname too. The girl grew up like a new Medea, surrounded by people who die. “Since → death held no terrors for her (she spoke often to the dead), she knew there was nothing to fear.”2 This familiarity with → death made her generous, loving, forthright, courageous and cunning, a woman of absolute integrity. Her most singular characteristic, though, was that people believed she had the power to step out of her skin. Navel-less beings, we feel, have no point of attachment and thus no connection between inside and out. The navel is like a → knot that secures the skin to the → body within. Since 1991 the French artist Marie-Ange Guilleminot has made over ninety plaster casts of other people’s navels, a performance she has called Point commun. Vues de l’intérieur (fig. 84).3 The navel forms a common punctum, a mysterious closed → glimpse of the innermost. Everyone has a navel, but every navel is different. That is why, in Antiquity, the navel was the subject of umbilicomantia, the reading and predicting of the future by means of the → folds in the umbilicus.4 The navel is the paradox of the ‘closed opening’. The navel is eternally ambivalent: it is a closed wound that yet recalls a stub of mortified matter. The navel can be thought of as imprint and protuberance, as the seal and its thumb. Hence, according to Elisabeth Bronfen in her publication Das verknotete Subjekt, navels are always Nabelinversionen.5 The inversion flips back and forth between track and loss, between inward and outward look, between relic and absence, between matter and image. “The navel is a residue inscribed in the → body,” says Bronfen.6 The navel is the memory of something that cannot be remembered – our own birth. It is just on this border between mark of connection and rupture that → archetypes open which root man in the universal vortex of birth and → death.7

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navel

Fig. 84. Marie-Ange Guilleminot (°1960), Point commun. Vues de l’intérieur, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, March 1995

Nancy Huston, Novels and Navels, in Critical Inquiry, 21, 4, 1995, p. 708-721, p. 718. 2 Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, New York, 1977, p. 149. 3 Elisabeth Bronfen, Das verknotete Subjekt. Hysterie in der Moderne, Berlin, 1998, p. 26-30. 4 Hanns Bächtold-Staubli & Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer, art. Umbilicomantia, in Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, Berlin, 1987, p. 1307. 1

5 Bronfen, Das verknotete Subjekt, p. 53. 6 Ibid.: Der ein auf den Körper geschriebenes Relikt oder Residuum ist. 7 Ibid.: Wie funktioniert dieser Omphalos als Symbol des Verlustes und der Erinnerung und auf welche Art und Weise bringt er zum Ausdruck, dass die mit der Muttergottheit verbunden Werte – die Erde, die Nacht, das Band zwischen Geburt und Tod – die Grundlage jedes väterlichen symbolischen Systems bilden?

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Nepesh Richard Broxton Onians discusses the concept of → ruach in relation to the Hebrew concept nepesh.1 To start with, nepesh occurs in the Old Testament with much greater frequency than → ruach.2 The hundreds of passages using nepesh draw on such meanings as ‘life’ or ‘soul’. Nepesh is that substance that is necessary to make a person live. It is the individual’s principle of life. Nepesh uses the medium of → blood (which is why the consumption of → blood is such a great taboo), but is also, like → ruach, linked to → breathing in and out. Nepesh resides not only in the → blood but also in the heart. And in the oldest texts, such as the Assyrian, nepesh is located in the → throat. Nepesh survives a person after → death: it remains in the dead under the earth. The nepesh (→ blood) of the dead can ‘cry out’. In the translations, according to Onians, nepesh is closest to the Greek thumos and the Latin animus.3 → Ruach is more closely related to anima. Anima in its turn corresponds to pneuma and spiritus. Nepesh and → ruach are closely related in that they each stand for a vital principle, a principle giving life to our → body. Nevertheless, there are differences between them. First of all, → ruach is never linked to → blood. Secondly, → ruach was also used for the power of God himself: it fills both the divine person and the human person with wisdom and power. Nepesh, on the contrary, is a vital principle that is not related to God and so cannot be shared with God.

Richard B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought. About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate, Cambridge, 1988, p. 481. 2 Daniel Lys, Rûach. Le souffle dans l’ancien testament. Enquête anthropologique à travers l’histoire théologique d’Israël, (Études d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses, 56), Paris, 1962, passim; Ellis R. Brotzman, Man and the Meaning of nefes, in Bibliotheca Sacra, 145, 580, 1988, p. 400-409.

1

3

Vanessa Rousseau, Le goût du sang. Croyances et polémiques dans la chrétienté occidentale, Paris, 2005, p. 23, contends that in ancient Judaism ‘soul’ was used interchangeably for ‘life’, but that in Christianity the soul is more specifically conceptualized as distinct from the → body, installing a dual human nature.

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nest

Fig. 85. Bird’s nest (owned by the author)

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Nest The word ‘nest’ is etymologically related to the notion of an Enclosed → Garden through ‘niche’. French niche is most likely derived from the verb nicher ‘to build a nest’, which in turn comes from Latin nidicare or nidificare, from nīdus (nest). Hence, the spatial connotation of niche emerged through formal similarities with the most intimate shell around something extraordinarily precious and fragile. Gaston Bachelard writes in his The Poetics of Space about the nest: The philosophical phenomenology of nests is being able to elucidate the interest with which we look through an album containing reproductions of nests or even more positively, in our capacity to recapture the naïve wonder we used to feel when we found a nest. This wonder is lasting, and today when we discover a nest it takes us back to our childhood or, rather, to a childhood; to the childhoods we should have had. For not many of us have been endowed by life with the full measure of its cosmic implications.1

The dialects between forest love and love in a city room is between wilderness and a nest, yes, between nature and the → garden. A nest is never young; we come back, it is the sign of return and of daydreams.2 It is past and present (fig. 85). In the nest and → garden, the shelter built by and for the → body is taking form from the inside, like a shell. It is a formal and performative intimacy that works physically. The → body is exactly the tool for making the nest. (This makes me point to the curious fact that the same technique for the flower stitching is used with women’s → hair. The making of the female → hair into a paradise-nest with a bird added is a mysterious metonymy for the bodily and performative → gardens.) Bachelard adds that “the female → gender, like a living tower, hollows out the house, while the male → gender brings back from the outside all kinds of materials, sturdy twigs and other bits. By exercising an active pressure, the female makes this into a felt-like padding.”3 I quote from Jules Michelet’s (1798-1874) observations on birds: “The house is a bird’s very person; it is its form and its most immediate effort, I shall even say, its suffering. The result is only obtained

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nest

by constantly repeated pressure of the breast. There is not one of these blades of grass that, in order to make it curve and hold the curve, has not been pressed on countless times by the bird’s breast, its heart, surely with difficulty in → breathing, perhaps even with palpitations.”4 “The form of the nest is commanded by the inside. On the inside the instrument that prescribes a circular form for the nest is nothing else but the → body of the bird. It is by constantly turning round and round and pressing back the walls on every side by the bird’s belly, that it succeeds in forming this circle.”5 The nest is a swelling fruit, pressing against it limits. It is an expression of praise of its felt-like fabric.6 Here Gaston Bachelard unexpectedly meets Rosalind Krauss. He, the bridegroom: intuitive, obsessed with the infant space and hence praising the curved inside-outside nest warmth of the → garden. She, the bride: modernistic, antidevelopmental, antinarrative, antihistorical, and hence praising the sticky ambivalent → grids of the → garden. Gaston Bachelard says to Rosalind Krauss: “The grace of a curve is an invitation to remain. (...). For the beloved curve has nest-like powers; it incites us to possession, it is a curved ‘→ corner’, inhabited geometry. Here we have attained a minimum of refuge, in the highly simplified pattern of a daydream of repose. But only the dreamer who curls up in contemplation of loops understands these simple joys of delineated repose.”7

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, transl. Maria Jolas, et al., New York, 2014, p. 114. 2 Ibid., p. 119. 3 Ibid., p. 121.

1

4 5 6 7

Jules Michelet, L’oiseau, Paris, 1858, p. 208. Ibid. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 122. Ibid., p. 165.

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Net In their Alles, was Netz ist, Michael Andritzky and Thomas Hauer describe how traditionally, humans’ relationship with nature and culture has been structured based on the net-principle.1 Das Netz war immer auch eine Metapher für den Versuch, Strukturprinzipien in unserer Welt, ja in unserem Kosmos zu entdecken. (…) Die Entwicklung von Schrift, Zahlen und Mathematik hängt unmittelbar zusammen mit dem Aufbau von ausgedehnten Bewässerungsnetzen im Zweistromland Mesopotamien und in Ägypten, die einen blühenden Garten Eden inmitten der lebensfeindlichen Wüste entstehen ließen.2

One of the earliest uses of the net was indeed for fishing.3 There are net → fragments left over from the Neolithic in Hornstaad-Hörle on Lake Constance.4 A prey in the net is the result of the supernatural and magical power of the woven or → knotted structure. That is why they also found → amulets in the nets. The net encloses, but also allows things to pass through: it is permeable like a → sieve. This makes the net, a membrane of life comparable to the amnion (ἀμνίον) or caul, the amniotic sac that surrounds a baby, in short, the physical ‘nets’ and ‘filters’ in the womb itself.5 In Egyptian hieroglyphs the → sieve stands for the consonant kh (fig. 86). The → sieve means here the placenta that filters the baby’s nutrition. In Egyptian alchemy this hieroglyph is also the pictogram for the combining of particular substances into a unity and a higher synthesis. Figuratively, the kh → sieve signifies the process of the soul’s self-perfection.6 The ambivalence between concealing and revealing strengthens and articulates what has been caught in the net: from → butterflies, to fish, to footballs.7 Because the net catches and shows, but also because it is made with → knots by → hand, it forms both a game of cruelty as well as refinement. Ethnologists Henry Evans Maude (1906-2006) and Honor Maude (1905-2001) have done important research into the so-called ‘stringfigures’,8 which live on in the modern-day commercial ‘dream catchers’. → Knotted abstract figures have always been part of the great myths of the creation of the world.9 Networks play a big role in cosmology or in the Dream Time of the Aboriginals, as well

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net

Fig. 86. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the sieve stands for the consonant kh or  ,  limestone relief from a tomb of the Old Kingdom of Egypt. Cairo, Egyptian Museum

net

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as in their visual work, and are derived from the furrows on the fields. And the Mesopotamian God Marduk fought the primordial Goddess of → chaos, Tiamat, with a net.10 In short, because the net catches, it also catches evil, and because it constitutes an artisan → knotted and wovenness, the net brings order to → chaos. In Ancient China, people considered the expanse of the heavens as one great permeable ‘net’.11

1

Michael Andritzky & Thomas Hauer, Alles, was Netz is, in Das Netz. Sinn und Sinnlichkeit vernetzter Systeme, (Kataloge der Museumsstiftung Post und Telekommunikation, 12), eds. Michael Andritzky & Klaus Beyrer, Heidelberg, 2012, p. 11-18. 2 Ibid., p. 11, p. 13. 3 Franziska Roller, Fangen-Halten-ZeigenSpielen. Zur Geschichte des Netzes als Alltagsgegenstand, in Das Netz, p. 19-43, p. 23: Die Art und Weise einiger Stick- und Knüpftechniken ähnelt grundsätzlich der des Fischernetzes; der Netzgrund für die Filetstickerei verwendet zum Teil identische Knoten sowie einige Formen des Makramée. Und es gibt noch eine weitere Überschneidung: die Seefahrer im Mittelalter brachten nicht nur die Makramée-Tradition aus dem arabischen Raum nach Europa mit, sondern sie entwickelten die Knüpfkunst auch selber weiter.

4 Ibid., p. 19-20. 5 Helen King, Sacrificial Blood. The Role of Amnion in Ancient Gynecology, in Helios, 13, 2, 1986, p. 117-126. 6 Juan Eduardo Cirlot, art. Sieve/Cribble, in A Dictionary of Symbols, London, 2001, p. 296. 7 Roller, Fangen-Halten-Zeigen-Spielen, p. 24. 8 The Maude Papers are being steadily digitized and are available through the H.E. Maude Digital Archive: https:// digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/ handle/2440/79833. 9 Roller, Fangen-Halten-Zeigen-Spielen, p. 28. 10 Ibid., p. 29. 11 Ibid.

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neurosis

Fig. 87. Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) photographed by Bertram Park (1888-1972), 1921

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Neurosis It is known that Warburg attended the early → dance performances of Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), a true exponent of the fin-de-siècle new woman and certainly a bodily paradigm of the → nymph (fig.  87).1 “It was via theatrical routes that he was able to conceptualize his pathos formula, which he then manifested in his vast and ambitious gestural knowledge-montage, → Mnemosyne.”2 Or in the words of Philippe-Alain Michaud: “Warburg replaced the model of sculpture with that of → dance, accentuating the dramatic, temporal aspects of the works.”3 This is also the period of photographic interest in the architecture of fabrics, veils and draping, as exemplified by the musicologist and composer Maurice Emmanuel (1862-1938), who was particularly preoccupied with Greek → dance,4 by the Catalan entrepreneur and photographer José Ortiz Echagüe (1886-1980) (fig.  88)5 and by Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872-1934). The latter, a famous psychiatrist, exhibited a ‘fetishist’ interest in the veiled women of Morocco (fig. 89). His series may be regarded as erotic Stoffleidenschaft, on which he actually wrote a scientific treatise in 1908. He was interested in a supposed pathology in women that he called cri de soie (Seide ruft), i.e. silk mania as a form of hysteria.6 Last but not least, the image of a prototypical → nymph adorned the treatment room of avid art collector Sigmund Freud: a rendering of the goddess Gradiva in keeping with the interest and the taste of his time (fig.  90).7 In Delusion and Dream, Freud actually comments on the novel Gradiva (1907) by the Austrian author Wilhelm Jensen (1837-1911), which tells the story of a young archaeologist whose mental condition is cured by his love for a young girl.8 We can now see how Warburg’s encounter with his → ninfa was filtered by the historical cultural contexts of → gender, new media, a fascination with exotic textiles and the neurosis of → folds, the new subject matters of photography, and contemporary psychoanalytical therapies. He had an ability for capturing the Zeitgeist and hence instantly recognized the → dancing girl in the Santa Maria Novella as a contemporary female ‘friend’, as it were, with whom he could easily fall in love. It is appropriate to quote here in full length Gabriele Brandstetter’s reflections on → folds in relation to Aby Warburg’s Denkraum.9

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neurosis

Fig. 88. José Ortiz Echagüe (1886-1980), Woman of Fez, ca. 1910. Navarra, Fundación Universitaria de Navarra

Falten sind bewegliche Flächen, die ein unentscheidbares Zeigespiel von Innen und Außen inszenieren. Der Prozess der Faltung (des ‘implicare’) zeigt ein Inneres als Äußeres und ein Äußeres als Inneres. In dieser Grundstruktur der Falte, in die immer schon Bewegung eingelassen ist, besteht ihr Verwandlungspotential. Die Falte selbst entsteht durch einen Umbildungsprozess, nämlich durch regelmäßige Verformung einer Fläche, die dadurch nicht mehr als reine Stoff-Fläche erscheint, sondern in eine dreidimensionale Form gebracht ist. Der Prozess dieser Transformation, das heißt vor allem: die Energie und die Bewegung dieses Übertragungsaktes, bleibt dem gefalteten buchstäblich ‘impliziert’. Die Falte bildet also per se keine statische Struktur aus, sondern sie transportiert die in sie eingeprägte Energie – als Verwandlungspotential – in die Kontexte ihrer Verwendung und ihrer Darstellung. Mehr noch, sie verkörpert und

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Fig. 89. Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872-1934), photographic studies of veiled women, 1914-1918. Paris, Musée de l’homme

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neurosis

Fig. 90. Studiolo of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) with goddess Gradiva, photographed by Edmund Engelmann, 1938

inszeniert Verwandlung als doppelte Bewegungsrichtung von Ein- und Ausfaltung, als zwiefaltig von Innen als Außen, und Außen als Innen. Dieses Bewegungspotential der Falte teilt sich der Drapierung mit. 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. In der Naturwissenschaft nennt man die komplexe architektonische und energetische Formation von Faltung ‘Tensegrity-Struktur’. (…) In diesem Sinn sind Falten Membranen energetischen Austausches, oder, mit einem Begriff von Aby Warburg, ‘Energie-Konserven’. Die Drapierung für Aby Warburg als ‘bewegtes Beiwerk’ zum eigentlichen Ausdrucksmedium leidenschaftlicher Affekt-→ Engramme

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werden. Für Herder wie auch für Winckelmann ist es die antike Plastik, die die ‘schöne Form des Körpers’ repräsentiert. (…) Körper- und Affekt-Bewegung sind gleichermaßen in der Bauschung des Stoffes inkorporiert; die stilisierte Faltung impliziert jenes ‘Energiepotential’, seinen erotischen Zauber (wie Ernst Gombrich wiederum Warburgs Deutung auslegt), der nicht zuletzt aus dem Ambivalenz der Figur (ihrer apollinischdionysischen Doppelgesichtigkeit) entspringt: Victoria-Salome, oder wie Warburg notiert: “Von der Kopfjägerei: Judith, Salome, Mänade, über die Nymphe – Fruchtspenderin, Rachel am Brunnen, die Feuerlöschern beim Brand des Borgo.”

In sum: “Warburg surrendered himself to the pathos of movement he invented…”10

1

Aby Warburg had a friendship with the playwright Georges Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), but Warburg himself also wrote a play on social reform in Hamburg; See: Mark A. Russel, Aby Warburg’s Hamburg Comedy. Wilkehlmine Culture from the Perspective of a Pioneering Cultural Historian, in German History, 24, 2, 2006, p. 153-182. 2 Kathleen M. Gough, Between the Image and Anthropology. Theatrical Lessons from Aby Warburg’s Nympha, in The Drama Review, 56, 3, 2012, p. 114-130, p. 125; see also: Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia PA, 1985, p. 36. 3 Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg et l’image, Paris, 1998, p. 28. 4 Sylvie Douche (ed.), Maurice Emmanuel, compositeur français, Prague – Paris, 2007; Christophe Corbier, Maurice Emmanuel, Paris, 2007. 5 Asubción Domeño, José Ortiz Echaguë. Un notario de la tradición, (Bibliotheca Photobolsillo), Madrid, 2009. 6 Walter Seitter, Sieben Sätze zu Clérambault, in Tumult. Zeitschrift für Verkehrswissenschaft, Munich, 1988, p. 87; Gaëtan

Gatian de Clérambault, Erotische Stoffleidenschaft bei der Frau, in Tumult. Zeitschrift für Verkehrswissenschaft, 1908, p. 5-20, p. 11: see [Seide]schreit; Eugénie LemoineLuccioni, Vom Seher zu Voyeur, in Tumult. Zeitschrift für Verkehrswissenschaft, Munich, 1988, p. 64-76; Catharina Zakravsky, Heilige, Gewänder. Analysen in Kunstwerken, Vienna, 1994, p. 98-100: about female fetisjism as Haptophilie in the works of Clérambault. 7 Gabriele Huber, Warburgs Ninfa, Freuds Gradiva und ihre Metamorphosen bei Masson, in Denkräume. Zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft, eds. Silvia vom Baumgart et al., Berlin, 1993, p. 443-460. 8 Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, London, 1946, p. 108, p. 548. 9 Gabriele Brandstetter, ‚Ein Stück in Tüchern‘. Rhetorik der Drapierung bei A. Warburg, M. Emmanuel, G. Clérambault, in Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus, 4, Hamburg, 2000, p. 107-139, p. 112-117. 10 Georges Didi-Huberman, Savoir-Mouvement. L’Homme qui parlait aux papillons, in Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg et l’image, Paris, 1998, p. 7-20, p. 13.

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ninfa fiorentina/nymph

Fig. 91. Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494), Nymph at the Birth of John, John the Baptist Cycle, 1485-1490. Florence, Santa Maria Novella

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N infa Fiorentina/Nymph In his correspondence with his Dutch friend André Jolles between 1898 and 1902 (when he lived in Florence), Aby Warburg describes his ‘encounter’ with the nymph in the John the Baptist Cycle (1485-1490) by Ghirlandaio (1449-1494) in the choir of the Santa Maria Novella (fig. 91). Behind them, close to the open door, there runs – no, that is not the word, there flies, or rather there hovers – the object of my dreams, which slowly assumes the proportion of a harming nightmare. A fantastic figure – should I call her a servant girl, or rather a classical nymph? (...) This lively, light-footed and rapid gait, this striding step, which contrasts with the aloof distance of all other figures, what is the meaning of it all? (...) My condition varied between a bad dream and a fairy tale (...). Sometimes she was Salome → dancing with her death-dealing charm in front of the licentious tetrarch; sometimes she was Judith carrying proudly and triumphantly with a gay step the → head of the murdered commander; then again she appeared to hide in the boy-like grace of little Tobias (...). Sometimes I saw her in a seraph flying towards God in adoration and then in Gabriel announcing good tidings. I saw her as a bridesmaid expressing innocent joy at the Sposalizio and again as a fleeing mother, the terror of → death in her → face, at the Massacre of the Innocents. I lost my reason. It was always she who brought life and movement into an otherwise calm scene. Indeed, she appeared to be the embodiment of movement (...) but is it very unpleasant to be her lover? (...) Who is she? Where does she come from? Have I encountered her before? I mean one and a half millennia earlier? Does she come from a noble Greek lineage, and did her great-grandmother have an affair with people from Asia Minor, Egypt or Mesopotamia?1

Although Aby Warburg’s surviving work on nymphs consists of, on the one hand, this letter,2 which was extrapolated by Gombrich as the paradigm par excellence of his → Pathosformeln,3 and, on the other, of → fragments in the famous Ninfa Fiorentina file (ca. 1900) (fig.  92), we may safely assume that Aby Warburg was fascinated with this girl and her ‘avatars’. This is very apparent in the numerous tables, stemmata, notes and even taxonomical classifications of movements of the nymph’s feet, → hems, draping and → folding (fig. 93).4

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Fig. 92. Cover of Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) Ninfa Fiorentina file, ca. 1900. London, Warburg Institute Archive, III.55.1

April Oettinger demonstrates in her article Aby Warburg’s Nymph and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (fig. 94) how deeply Aby Warburg was engaged in trying to decipher the many forms of → folds of the female antique → Pathosformeln.5 He seemed to desire a satisfactory vocabulary to pinpoint the formats of → folds and drapes from the perspective of ‘visual linguistics’.6 Warburg discerns in his descriptions of the clothes three types of pathos: Doppelgürtung, Gürtung and Rundbausch. Sometimes he notes: “fl. G.” for flatternde Gewänder. Or: “fl. H.” for fliegendes Haar. The notes and abbreviations in his research on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and on Botticelli constitute the very basis of the later Ninfa Fiorentina file.

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Fig. 93. Chart regarding nymphs and their Nachleben from the Ninfa Fiorentina file compiled by Aby Warburg (1866-1929), ca. 1900. London, Warburg Institute Archive, III.55.1, fol. 118

On his sketch of Spring in the Hypnerotomachia, he underlines volante trecce (fig. 95). There is also a note and a sketch on the dynamic → hems and moving feet of → dancing youth. Here he uses words like Endung and aufflatterende Gewänder. He also describes the → folds: krackelige (crackly) and zackelig (spiky). The complete note says: und e.[ine] weibl.[iche] Fig.[ur] ruhig stehend im Bild m.[it] bew.[egter] Gwdg. [Gewandung] ruhig stehend aussen geg.[gürtet?][Kleidung?] Uebersschlag frei endend krackelige Endung zackelig aufflatternde Gewänder.7 “There is a dream-like quality even in the manner with which Warburg stored his notes on the Nympha,” says Oettinger.8 “Indeed, Warburg’s own enthusiastic response to the dynamic quality of the nymph’s drapery is echoed not only in

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Fig. 94. Allegorical figure of Spring from Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) copy of J.W. Appell, The Dream of Poliphilio (Hypnerotomachia Poliphili), facsimile with 168 woodcuts, London, 1888. London, Warburg Institute Library

the zig-zag lines in his sketch, but also in the energetic manner with which he jotted down his description.”9 All these notes culminated in a detailed chart on the very last page of his Ninfa Fiorentina file with the following six captions (fig. 96): “a. Kw” = antike Kunstwerk Mythol. Wesen (mythological subject matter) “fl. H”. (flatternde Haare, wind-swept → hair) Gürtung (girded robes) “Gw. Bwg” (Gewand Bewegung, garments in motion) Motivierung (reason for motivation)

ninfa fiorentina/nymph

Fig. 95. Frühling, notes by Aby Warburg (1866-1929) from the Ninfa Fiorentina file, ca. 1900. London, Warburg Institute Archive, III.55.1

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Fig. 96. Chart from the Hypnerotomachia, nymphs, notes by Aby Warburg (1866-1929) from the Ninfa Fiorentina file, ca. 1900. London, Warburg Institute Archive, III.55.1

ninfa fiorentina/nymph

Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography, London, 1986, p. 143. Full edition in Walter Thys (ed.), André Jolles (1874-1946), ‚Gebildeter Vagant‘, Amsterdam – Leipzig, 2000. 2 For the nymph as a paradoxical ‘nonexisting’ research topic and the extrapolating responsibility of Ernst Gombrich, see Sigrid Weigel, Aby Warburgs ‚Göttin im Exil‘, in Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus, 4, 2000, p. 68-103, p. 72: … eine wissenschaftsgeschichtliche und -theoretische Fallstudie untersucht werden (…) die an der Schwelle von Religion und Kunst operiert, die sich also mit religions- und geschichtstheoretischen Implikationen in der Geschichte der Künste und Medien beschäftigt – oder aber, um es mit Heinrich Heine zu sagen, mit den Göttern in Exil. The author puts in evidence the contrast between the small and experimental file of Warburg and the massive impact of it on the humanities. 3 For these → fragments, see: Gombrich, Aby Warburg, An Intellectual Biography, p. 65, p. 106-127. Warburg reduced the nymph to her pagan origins: the maenads of the ancient mystery cults, the snakebearer of Dionysus, mobile and erotic, a clash in the harmony. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, An Intellectual Biography, p. 71: “The deeper power in contradictions and in the subtle challenge that images could pose to the viewer’s own detachment. You live yet you do me no harm.” 1

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4 The Ninfa Fiorentina file started with his study of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499, Venice). Aby Warburg first describes her in Sandro Botticellis “Geburt der Venus” und “Frühling”. Eine Untersuchung über die Vorstellungen von der Antike in der italienischen Frührenaissance, Hamburg, 1893, p. 13-16. See also Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg et l’image, Paris, 1998, p. 65-79, p. 168-223. 5 For the content and growth of this file, see: April Oettinger, Aby Warburg’s Nymph and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. An Episode in the Afterlife of a Romance, in Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 32, 2, 2006, p. 225-247, p. 229: “Its Venetian author was another who considered that a sense of surface mobility (Beweglichkeit) in the figures was essential to any successful revival of the most telling achievements of antique art.” 6 Giorgio Agamben, Image et mémoire, transl. Gilles A. Tiberghien, Paris, 1988, p. 16. This lexicographical method is related to Leo Spitzer, Essays in Historical Semantics, New York, 1948. 7 Oettinger, Aby Warburg’s Nymph and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, p. 237-238: Warburg Archive, III.55.1. 8 Ibid., p. 236. 9 Ibid., p. 238.

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Odor/smell David Parkin has conducted research into the connection between → wind and East African rituals relating to → scent.1 In these there is an idea at work that the → wind harbors a plenum of spirits, which can be conjured by means of odors. Odor is both the essence of a → wind spirit and the medium by which it can be manipulated. Odors are sensory mappings, the threads of the → wind: they tie the invisible to the material world. Odors can be ‘captured’; they are preserved and summoned in pomades, liquids and burning herbs. Mastery of the → wind overlaps with control of → scents. The odor traces the identity of a → wind spirit and leads the human to this invisible higher power, in much the same way that sound, likewise invisible, is a means of communication from and with such powers. Music and song support the odors of the → wind spirits and surround these with the right atmosphere and ceremony. Odors are a symbolic bridge to the ineffable and a manifestation of the ephemeral. These functions are connected to the way in which odors are generated (and in which they ‘manifest’ spirits): through burning, through steam or through smoking out.2 Each of these techniques gives the odor a different density and gradation of (im)→ materiality, and consequently differentiates the spirits being summoned or the demons being driven out. “But unlike sight, touch and → hearing, odor or → fragrance is always incomplete, reaching back and bringing forth social and sensory trails which never settle. (…) And once passed: a smell cannot be re-imagined to that degree, it depends also on a particular context to be remembered.”3 Odor has the strange quality of always just escaping. Being ephemeral, its paradoxical hermeneutic is its lack of articulation. Odor is incomplete. “I suggest however that one way in which a smell becomes completed is when it is so concentrated as to be a substance, an element of physical matter, such as a pine resin, a rotting carcass, or cooked food.”4 This means that odor has to use matter as a medium: it is by this process that the → wind demon can be ‘known’ and ‘tamed’. Such knowledge is cyclical: odor is the point of encounter between the density of the odor’s origins (for example a corpse) and the spirit/demon.5 Odor teaches us about the continuous transformation of substance and

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immateriality. This cycle mirrors how the → wind is the essential entity in binding together nature/cosmos and humankind. For → wind too is preeminently transitional, fleeting and mediatory.

1

David Parkin, Wafting on the Wind. Smell and the Cycle of Spirit and Matter, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13, 1, 2007, p. 39-53.

2 3 4 5

Ibid., p. 45. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 47.

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Owl Homer describes in the Odyssey how the → nymphs in the cave, utilizing long stone looms, weave purple cloths. The cave is mixed with stone mixing → bowls and stone → jars/where the → bees store their honey, and large stone looms on which/ the → nymphs weave marvelous purple fabrics, and springs/ that flow on forever (Book 13, vs. 107-110). The old looms made the textile grow from top to bottom, emulating the walls of glittering dung caves. Caves, with their glow and architectural ornamentation are the principal spots of artistic inspiration and enchantment. It is apt that the cave constitutes the place where man recognizes this ekphrasis and further articulates this sense visually by leaving imagery of bizons and handprints as seen in caves like the one in Chauvet, Dordogne. In the 2014 documentary (Christian Tran) for Arte, Les Génies de la Grotte Chauvet, which examines the ambitious project which aims to copy these spaces and their murals, the Catalan painter Miguel Barceló talks about both the artistic qualities and techniques of the murals. The owl of Chauvet is here a remarkable paradigm: she was drawn in a few seconds by moving ten fingers from top to bottom (fig. 97). The → genius loci of this → hand as well as its tender iconography may constitute the deepest and most moving ekphrasis of both wisdom and plastic beauty that man has ever realized. Or as Barceló says: tout est déjà là.

Fig. 97. The Owl in the Chauvet Cave, Dordogne, Magdalenian period (17 000-12 000 bc)

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Pathosformel Pathosformel is an internal transfer (transport) of antiquizing formal energies that navigate between bacchanalian exuberance and classical soberness, between the realm of Dionysus and that of Apollo. According to Aby Warburg, this polarity is part of a universal dynamic in the anthropology of imagery, a dynamic that keeps refreshing itself over the eras.1

1

Aby M. Warburg, Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Geschichte der europäischen Renaissance, ed. Gertrud Bing, Leipzig,

1932: Dürer und die italienische Antike (1905); Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography, London, 1970, p. 244-245.

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Pause Thomas Macho speaks of the rhythm of the ontologically relevant pause:1 Die ontologisch relevanten Pausen (die rätselhaften Zeropunkten) liegen vor dem Lebensbeginn und nach dem Lebensende (…). Das Wunder der Oktave besteht eben nicht darin, dass sie den Bauplan des Universums verrät, sondern vielmehr in der Epiphanie der Pause: dass im monotonen und sinnlose, Weltgeräusch ein Wesen auftaucht das sich selbst irgendwann als die Unterbrechung der Schöpfung hörbar zu werden vermag – als jene existentiale Pause, die – mit Martin Heidegger gesprochen – die Zeit als Horizont des Seins erschließt.

1

Thomas H. Macho, Die Kunst der Pause. Eine musikontologische Meditation, in Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für

Historische Anthropologie, 2, 1-2, 1993, p. 104-115, p. 105, p. 113.

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Psychomachia Basically, Aby Warburg is describing a history of polarities that results in an anthropology of the history of western civilization in which philology, ethnology, history and biology converge into the → Zwischenraum where the turbulences of the magical and symbolic thinking of cultural memory are at work. Only within this interspace will it be possible to find any basis for understanding and curing the schizophrenia of human culture. Imagery is precisely where the polarité pérenne of history – this psychomachia of the Warburgian method1 – and energy are unearthed and left behind.2

Georges Didi-Huberman, Science avec patience, in Images Re-vues (online), 4, 1, 2013, p. 1-29, p. 8. 2 Barbara Baert, Nymph. Motif, Phantom, Affect. Part II. Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) 1

Butterflies as Art Historical Paradigms, (Studies in Iconology, 4), Louvain – Walpole MA, 2016, p. 25.

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Ruach (rwh) Genesis 1:1-5 reads: In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless → void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a → wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light;” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

The very first verses of the Bible refer to the concept of → wind: ruach.1 “The spirit [ruach] of God moved over the waters.”2 Even before Creation, in, as it were, a pre-cosmogonic state, the earth was covered with a ‘primal flood’ and there was → chaos and darkness. The primal flood is here negative: it is a threatening force that stands in opposition to the power – the ruach – of God.3 And God sweeps over the waters. He is the principle of air that must obtain power over the principle of water. The Hebrew story of Creation is thus not one of creation ex nihilo. There is a cosmic pre-existence, albeit a chaotic one, and God is shown as the sovereign power that drives out the → chaos of the waters.4 In Genesis 8:1 it is the → wind sent by God that makes the waters of the Flood subside. In Exodus 15:8 and 10 there is a comparable allusion: “At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up, (…) You blew with your → wind, the → sea covered them” (in furore spiritus tui congregatae sunt aquae (…) flavit spiritus tuus et operuit eos mare). In the Psalms we find configurations of God and the threatening waters in which it is always His sovereign power – ruach – that calms the → seas. God must first intimidate the waters with his ‘windvoice’. → Wind and voice are parallel, although → wind slightly precedes voice: it is this primordial form of God exercising all-powerful influence over → chaos, before the creative action of the voice is initiated. The action by which the immanent voice emerges from the → wind is reinforced by the phrase in which the → wind of God – ruach elohim – ‘sweeps’ over the waters. According to some philologers this ‘sweeping’ (floating, hovering, moving over or upon) means ‘impregnating’: a fertilization with light as its fruit.5 According to others, the verb should be

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taken as a ‘floating above’, as an image of power and leadership.6 However this may be, “The → wind of Yahweh is the ultimate expression of his power and supreme cosmic authority.”7 Besides ruach probably being the monotheistic variation upon the primal principle of the powerful, roaring and creating → wind god(s) found among the Indo-Europeans, Daniel Lys sees in ruach a typically Semitic interaction between humanity and environment, between individuals in relationship to God.8 He indicates that the word for → wind, in the Old Arabic root (raha: to → breathe), carries the idea of enlarging and shrinking, incorporating spatial extension and diminution, just as we fill our lungs with air and then let it escape.9 Ruach should therefore be seen from the perspective of rhythm, of a principle of life that is not static but always dynamic. Donner de l’air, c’est à dire de l’espace (d’où intervalle) pour pouvoir respirer (d’où “soulagement”) dans une situation critique.10 As ruach is fundamentally related to the movement of air in a space, Lys also indicates that ruach in the Bible goes hand in hand with → odors, with perfumes, with sacrificial offerings, and with showing honor to God.11 Ruach is an elixir of life belonging both to God and to mankind. Through ruach humanity can come to know God and can reach him; he can be human.12 This is why ruach is very close to Theophany.13 But through their own ruach humans also possess self-knowledge, for ruach reflects the movements of their souls. When the Queen of Sheba met Solomon, she was said to be so exalted that it took her → breath, ruach, away.14 With regard to ruach David Abram adds a third approach. In his The Spell of the Sensuous, he analyses the complex of air, → breath, → wind and ruach in terms of the → transition from oral culture to literacy. In principle air is invisible and for an oral cultural system air/→ wind is the → archetype of the secret, of what is unknown but nonetheless ‘there’:15 Is it possible that a volatile power once propitiated as a local storm god came to be generalized, by one tribe of nomadic herders, into the → capricious power of the encompassing atmosphere itself? That it was experienced not as an abstract power entirely outside of sensuous nature, but as the unseen medium, the ruach, the ubiquitous → wind or spirit that enlivens the visible world.16

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Air/→ wind links to → breath/speech. Abram shows that the word enunciated (and a fortiori sung) is conceived as ‘structured → breath’, giving air and → wind a linguistic-semantic potential. The principle of air/→ wind communicates, it ‘thinks’, and → breath structures this in speech in the communication between humans, between humanity and nature, between humanity and God.17 The author gives the example of Aboriginals who, in their famous Dreamtime recognize the invisible powers of the air as a medium that moves back and forth between the human and its environment.18 Hence → wind – which sometimes seems to come from every direction at once – turns time into a spatial datum. The Woniya people of North America see the air in their group as something ‘dense’ that can be touched like matter.19 Audrey J. Butt dedicated a case study to another Indian people, the Akawaio.20 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 Indians see the individual → breath or respiration as the bearer of spirit or spirits.21 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.22 It is at that moment that the surrounding → winds ‘fill’ the child.23 To the Navajo, → wind is a pluralist principle that accompanies the human person at various stages of life, just as changes in life relate to the changing → winds.24 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). To return to Abram’s approach to ruach: speech and song are what influence the ‘windhood’ within our being in a model of knowledge in which → breath, speech and thought have remained interwoven with the dynamism of internal

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and external air in relation to our → body.25 And even though the ancient Jews were on their guard against any animist relationship towards the world, Abram sees traces of these anthropological roots in their ruach.26 Ruach is the medium that enables the person to participate, to enter into relationship with the world and consequently to understand the world in a culture that was transitioning from oral culture to literacy, from polytheism to monotheism. The Hebrew aleph-beth comprises twenty-two consonants. As is widely known, the vowels have to be added by the reader, and the meanings of words can shift depending on the vowels added. What is a vowel but the opening of the mouth to let a sound, a → breath, escape? The vowel is therefore the counterpart of the → breath of life, a synecdoche of ruach. The vowel sound as → breath of life or ruach is a sacral taboo that may not be shown in the symbol of the letter. It must remain invisible in order to be the bearer of higher laws that link the individual human to their own life force and to God. The vowels that is to say, are nothing other than sounded → breath. And the → breath, for the ancient Semites, was the very mystery of life and awareness, a mystery inseparable from the invisible ruach – the holy → wind or spirit. (…) To make a visible likeness of the divine, it would have been to make a visible representation of a mystery whose very essence was to be invisible and hence unknowable – the sacred → breath, the holy → wind. And thus it was not done.27

A uniquely ‘blind’ alphabet could arise from the monotheistic iconoclasm that in its core still regarded the → wind as a divinely creative principle, placing the vowel under taboo as though in relation to the visibility of God it was both a step too far and a step too close. A Hebrew text is not a mirror or doubling of the world of knowledge; it is an actively dynamic secret that the reader has to impregnate with → breath, with speech. Reading and gaining knowledge mean adding vowels, creating with → breath in the same way that Adam was given life by God’s → breathing into his nostrils (Genesis 2:7). The position of the Hebrew alphabet at the threshold between orality and literacy is articulated by the absence of written vowels: the reader is required to in-spire, to → breathe life into the words, for without the reader’s ruach the secret cannot be revealed. This “ensured that Hebrew language and tradition remained open to the power of that which exceeds the

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strictly human community – it ensured that the Hebraic sensibility would remain rooted, however tenuously, in the animate earth.”28 The reader, as it were, actively and consciously takes part in God’s living word, which invites him to interpret Him.29 This active participation is given magical dimensions in Kabbalah, the letters themselves carrying a charge of divine power.30 Meditation on the letters reveals hidden secrets; the letters are alive; they go away and reappear and interact with the human person and with the environment. A variation on this magic is the relationship between letters and their numerical values, especially with the famous Tetragrammaton ‘yhwh’.31 The magical taboo around the Tetragrammaton is that its exact pronunciation has been ‘forgotten’. Kabbalah says that the y-h has a whispering intake of → breath and the w-h a whispering exhalation, like the rising and the falling of the tides.32 This shows just how much the most sacred word (and thus God himself ) was, in the Semitic world, still intertwined with the cycles of → breathing or the ‘inter-windedness’ of the relationship between humanity and God. y-h-w-h is a sound so closely tied to → breath itself that it seems as though the very → wind entrusts it to humanity. In the human action of one inhalation and one exhalation God is ‘pronounced’. Pronouncing God is a human sigh that reflects the cosmic → wind, but also continually replenishes it. And taking the consonants rwh of ruach in one’s mouth, one finds that they result in a similar emission of → breath. Looking at the Greek alphabet with its abstract symbols and its vowels we immediately see the contrast: “The Hebraic writing had preserved this mystery by refraining from representing the air itself upon the parchment or the page – by refusing to image, or objectify, this unseen flux that sustains both the word and the visible world. By breaking this taboo, by transposing the invisible into the register of the visible, the Greek scribes effectively dissolved the primordial power of the air.”33 Abram draws an interesting thought from this. Might it be that when the written word is given vowels, the words become self-activating within the written sphere and ‘speak’ without dependence on the → breathed impregnation, so that we then lose our dynamic participation in nature and environment (which is → wind)? Will we still ‘→ hear’ and understand how the forests and the trees speak to us? And is it not the case that with the unilateral signification of the vowel, both human speech and the voice of nature lose their invisible, multi-semantic and secretive character? Might the spirit (pneuma,

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psychè, spiritus) not distance itself further and further from its primordial principle – the air – thereby emptying the air, alienating it from its capacity to communicate and to give expression to humanity?34 Does the → body become a trap for the air?35 For now the spirit has been made immaterially internal and the → body materially external. Both are decoupled from their intimate interaction with the environment, with a God who once, on the threshold between oral and literate culture, had his devotees whisper and sigh. Or as Abram concludes: The absence of the vowels provided the pores, the openings in the linguistic membrane through which the invisible → wind – the living → breath – could still flow between the human and the more-than-human worlds. It was only with the plugging of these last pores – with the insertion of visible letters for the vowels themselves – that the perceptual boundary established by the common language was effectively sealed, and what had once been a porous membrane became an impenetrable barrier, a hall of mirrors?36

Paul Volz, Der Geist Gottes und die verwandten Erscheinungen im Alten Testament und im anschliessenden Judentum, Tübingen, 1910; Harry M. Orlinsky, The Plain Meaning of Rûah in Gen 1, 2, in Jewish Quarterly Review, 48, 1957-1958, p. 174-182; Gerhard Kittel, Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, 6, Stuttgart, 1959, cols. 330-453; John P. Peters, The Wind of God, in Journal of Biblical Literature, 30, 1911, p. 44-54; Jacobus C.M. Van Winden, In the Beginning. Some Observations on the Patristic Interpretation of Genesis 1:1, in Vigiliae Christianae, 17, 1963, p. 105-121; Robert Luyster, Wind and Water. Cosmogonic Symbolism in the Old Testament, in Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, 93, 1, 1981, p. 1-10. 2 In the Vulgate that was the prime influence on Western artists: In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram (1). Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae

1

super faciem abyssi, et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas (2). 3 This negative power may seem curious, given that we in the West spontaneously associate water with fertility and regeneration. Nevertheless, in the Babylonian mythography that influenced the Book of Genesis, the pre-cosmogonic state was a watery → chaos, a primordial ocean. Only after this state, in the creation and order brought about by God, could water be considered a positive and regenerative principle; Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, New York, 1958, p. 191. 4 Luyster, Wind and Water, p. 7. 5 Hermann Gunkel, Genesis, Göttingen, 1922, p. 102; On the relationship between ruach and light in the Creation narrative see also: Sverre Aalen, Die Begriffe ‘Licht und Finternis’ im Alten Testament im Spätjudentum und im Rabbinismus, (Skrifter det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi

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6

7 8

9

10 11 12

13 14 15

Oslo, 2. Historisk-filosofisk Klasse, 1, 2), Oslo, 1951, p. 9-31. William H. McClellan, The Meaning of Rûah Elohim in Genesis 1, 2, in Biblica, 15, 1934, p. 517-527, p. 526. Luyster, Wind and Water, p. 8. Daniel Lys, Rûach. Le souffle dans l’ancien testament. Enquête anthropologique à travers l’histoire théologique d’Israël, (Études d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses, 56), Paris, 1962. On the philosophical impact of ruach on Jewish thought in modern philosophy and anthropology, see James Arthur, Diamond, Maimonides, Spinoza, and Buber Read the Hebrew Bible. The Hermeneutical Keys of Divine ‘Fire’ and ‘Spirit’ (Ruach), in The Journal of Religion, 91, 3, 2011, p. 320-343. Old Arabic distinguishes rih (→ wind) and ruh (spirit). Hebrew does not make this distinction; Lys, Rûach, p. 24. In Jewish culture the notion that God had to make himself as small (concise) as he could to make the universe possible is still held; with thanks to Prof. Dr. Dror Ze’evi, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 23. Alexandre Leupin, The Impossible Copula (Humanities and Judaeo-Christianity), in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 29, 3, 1999, p. 11-20, esp. p. 24, develops a psychoanalytic and sexualized reading of ruach: “The Hebrew Bible, the Torah, posits that the very copula of Being is outside language. For me, for Freud, for Lacan, what this means is that this copula is unconscious. It is replaced by a linguistic fiction. The verb ‘to be’, in other words, is the first and most important metaphor. What creates meaning is in fact God’s ruach, literally His → breath, and thus His speech (Nietszche says: esse is to → breath).” Lys, Rûach, p. 31. Ibid., p. 33. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a More-thanHuman World, New York, 2007, p. 225-260,

16 17 18

19 20

21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

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esp. p. 226: “the air for oral people is the → archetype of all that is ineffable, unknowable, yet undeniably real and efficacious.” Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 249. Ibid., p. 227. Ibid., p. 228: “for the rainbow is perceived as the very edge of the Dreaming, as that place where the invisible, unconscious potentials begin to become visible.” Ibid., p. 229. Audrey J. Butt, Ritual Blowing. ‘Taling’, a Causation and Cure of Illness among the Akawaio, in Man, 56, 1956, p. 49-55. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 49. Franc J. Newcomb, A Study of Navajo Symbolism, (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology Papers, 32), Cambridge MA, 1956, passim. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 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.” Ibid., p. 233. Ibid., p. 236. Ibid., p. 239-240. Ibid., p. 241-242. Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., p. 243. Ibid., p. 245. Ibid., p. 246. Ibid., p. 250. Ibid., p. 252. Ibid., p. 254. Ibid., p. 255. Ibid., p. 257.

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Saturn-Vater Fritz Saxl (1890-1948), his collaborator and friend who, together with Gertrud Bing, helped lay the foundations of the → Bilderatlas, called Aby Warburg ein harter Saturn-Vater with kolossale Kräfte.1

1

Georges Didi-Huberman, Science avec patience, in Images Re-vues (online), 4, 1, 2013, p. 1-29, p. 10, after Ludwig Binswanger & Aby Warburg, La guérison

infinie. Histoire Clinique d’Aby Warburg, 1921-1924, ed. Davide Stimilli, transl. Maël Renbouard & Martin Rueff, Paris, 2011, p. 77.

287

Sea In his book Thalassa, Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi (1873-1933) considers the sex act – as in Ovid’s → Echo and → Narcissus Huc coeamus, let us copulate – as a return to the sea, to the boundlessness of the uterus from which all life has sprung forth. “The purpose of the sex act can be none other than an attempt on the part of the ego (…) to return to the mother’s womb, where there is no such painful disharmony between ego and environment as characterizes existence in the external world.”1 According to Luce Irigaray, the sense of touch stands for unity and aquatic surroundings. The unborn child in the womb is surrounded by fluidity. Thought detached from touch, argues Irigaray, leads to the banishment of human beings from paradise.2

1

Sandor Ferenczi, Thalassa. A Theory of Genitality, New York, 1968, p. 18: “The reestablishment of the aquatic mode of life in the form of an existence within the moist and nourishing interior of the mother’s → body” (ibid., p. 54). Alexis Wick, Narcissus. Woman, Water and the West, in Feminist Review, 103, 2013, p. 42-57, p. 50: “In other words, the aquatic is female, because the womb is the ocean: both are the motherly givers of life, the one ontogenetic, the other phylogenetic. This is evidenced at multiple levels of coitus: the soporific effect of ejaculation evokes oceanic tranquility, the penis

(the ego’s ‘narcissistic double’) is a symbolic fish, the secreted sperm (and potentially the foetus) lives in a little sea of amniotic fluid, the genital secretion of women has a fishy → smell.” 2 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, London – New York, 2004, p. 137; Karlijn Demasure, Noli me tangere. A Contribution to the Reading of Jn 20:17 Based on a Number of Philosophical Reflections on Touch, in Louvain Studies, 32, 2007, p. 304-329, p. 327; Jacques Derrida, Le toucher, Touch/to touch him, in Paragraph, 16, 2, 1993, p. 122-157.

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shadow

Fig. 98. Filippo Lippi (1406-1469), Annunciation with shadow, detail, ca. 1440. New York, Frick Collection

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Shadow In Semitic traditions, shadow is a symbol of fertility. It is also a feminine aspect, as opposed to the male aspect of light.1 In the Indo-European languages shadow – such as the shadow (of the Holy Spirit) in the biblical source that slides across Mary’s → body, impregnating her (fig.  98) – touches three semantic fields: (1) fine material, fine dust, such as pollen of flowers and trees; (2) vegetative growth in the forest; (3) and finally → wind itself.2 The first relates to the conviction that dark shadow consists of matter (in the way that light is also supposed to be matter). Shadow is thus a substance, something material and immaterial, like → odor. The relationship between dust and pollen connects shadow and flowers – in this case the lily – as ‘impregnators’. Vegetative growth in the forest evokes the dark place as a fertility symbol, as a feminine principle. → Wind is related to shadow thanks to its mobility; → wind brings forth shadows. Shadow and → wind were seen as equally phantom-like phenomena among indigenous peoples in the Americas, who cultivated a highly developed, animistic vision of countless → wind spirits.

Annick de Souzenelle, Le symbolisme du corps humain, Paris, 1991, p. 38. 2 Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary. A Revised Edition of Julius Pokorny’s

1

Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2007.

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sieve

Fig. 99. Drawing of a Palestine woman while sifting. From: James Neil, Peeps into Palestine. Strange Scenes in the Unchanging Land Illustrative of the Ever-Living Book, London, ca. 1915, p. 55

291

Sieve The prehistoric, proto-Indo-European word for sieve has been reconstructed as krēi-dhrom – from cribrum in Latin and κόσκινον (koskinon) in Ancient Greek – meaning sifting or sieving substances, but also by transference ‘to distinguish’, and to reach a decision (cernere in Latin, krinein (κρίνειν) in Greek).2 It is assumed that the stem relates to sifting dry materials, such as grain, rather than liquids, such as dairy products. It is suspected that the sieves of the Neolithic were mostly used for grain products (fig. 99). In any case, the idea of purity is closely related to this Indo-European etymology, as is apparent from the stem peu-1, meaning sieved, sifted, which gives the Latin purus: purified, fresh, spotless.3 The second Indo-European root for sieve is seip-, seib-, which can be seen in the Latin sinus and the Greek èthmos (ἠθμός), meaning globular, hollow. Seip- is related to sei sif-/sib and sē(i)-, sei-, meaning to drip, as in the Serbian sípiti: to drizzle. Also in Sumerian the stem sig underlies a semantic complex that touches on rain, pouring oneself out, and pouring through a sieve.4 The third Indo-European root for the sieve is er- 5, which primarily in Baltic languages is closely related to a ‘→ net’ for hunting and for fishing (rete in Latin).5 Here the sieve connects to the primordial techniques of weaving: a → grid or → lace pattern. The same can be found in Hebrew. Here, the two words for sieve are kevarah and naphah.6 Kevarah is mentioned in Amos 9:9: “For I will give the command, and I will shake the house of Israel among all the nations as grain is shaken in a sieve (kevarah), and not a pebble will reach the ground.” In Genesis 35:16 the term is also used during the → death of Rachel: “It was at the time of year when the ground is full of holes and riddled like a sieve (kevarah).” This means when there is plenty of ploughed ground, when winter has passed but the dry season has not yet come.7 Kevarah derives from the stem kabir: something woven, like a cloth or a → net, dropping something through something braided,8 as in the Arabic ghurbal. Naphah comes from nuph: to move back and forth like in the waves of the → sea or a well, as if to cradle, and to sprinkle. Naphah furthermore can also mean border, region, shoreline, as the sieve constitutes a flat thin ‘field’ with an articulated raised rim. For that matter, there is a semantic connection with brom, brum (‘young twig’), the Dutch braam (‘bramble’, ‘knife edge’), brem (‘broom’)

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and berm (‘edge’), and English bramble and brim all derived from the IndoEuropean root bherem: to stick out, edge, → hem, border plant, bank, and shoreline as in Naphah. Or as the Mother Goose rhyme says: A riddle, a riddle, as I suppose/ A hundred eyes and never a nose!

1

2

3 4

5

6 7 8

Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary. A Revised Edition of Julius Pokorny’s Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2007: Root / Lemma (s)Ker-4. Douglas Q. Adams, art. Sieve, in Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, eds. Douglas Q. Adams & James P. Mallory, London, 1997, p. 518. Douglas Q. Adams, art. Clean, in Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, p. 108-109. http://new-indology.blogspot.be/2015/05/ sumerian-and-indo-european-surprising. html. Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary. A Revised Edition of Julius Pokorny’s Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2007: Root / Lemma er-5. http://biblehub.com/hebrew/5130.htm. Benjamin Gelles, Peshat and Derash in the Exegesis of Rashi, Leiden, 1981, p. 66. In the Dutch language, the connection between the sieve and so-called rush – the

weaving and braiding with stems – has been preserved; Jan de Vries, Nederlands Etymologisch Woordenboek, Leiden, 1971, p. 857. “Where the rush was mostly used with braiding work, one can assume that the primitive sieve was braided with stems. This means one can go back to the Indo-Germanic root *sei ‘braiding’, see: zeel; which can also stem from the ancient Norse sāld (< *sēþla) ‘sieve’ cf. Welsh hidl, old Slavic sito ‘sieve’ (also sitŭ ‘reeds’!), Lithuanian sietas, Greek èthmos ‘sieve’. In itself, it’s not impossible to think of the Indo-Germanic root *sei ‘to drip, stream’, to which the words above could be accounted (see also: sijpelen, zijgen, and zeiken). IEW 889 wants to ascribe the meaning ‘to sift’ from ‘letting something fall through a braid work’, which is quite abstract. Should one need to use the term ‘braid work’ they are better off starting from sef.”

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Silence Oral culture is a culture of intercession, in which prophets play an important role.1 For this reason, in certain cultures the tension between speaking and remaining silent is extremely dual and fundamental: it is a tension controlled by the boundaries of taboo.2 Allerdings bedarf es einer Pause, einer ausgehaltenen Abwesenheit des Bildes, damit das menschliche Hören aufmerken kann.3 Or, in the words of Christoph Wulf: Le silence constitue l’horizon devant lequel se réalise tout acte de parole.4 Susan Sontag (1933-2004) writes: A genuine emptiness, a pure silence are not feasible – either conceptually or in fact. If only because the artwork exists in a world furnished with many other things, the artist who creates silence or emptiness must produce something dialectical: a full → void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or eloquent silence. Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech (in many instance, of complaint or indictment) and an element in a dialogue.5

The Algerian writer, translator, film director and art historian Assia Djebar (pseudonym of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen (1936-2015)) developed the status of aphonia in her autobiographical novel L’amour, la Fantasia.6 As a young Algerian woman, she saw herself as a graph, as a ‘self ’ that was being written into a strict oral culture. The stitched seam of arche-writing. Each gathering, weekly or monthly, carries over the → web [tissu] of an impossible revolt. Each speaker [parleuse] – the one who clamors too high or the one who whispers too fast-is freed. The ‘I’ of the first person will never be used: in stereotyped formulas the voice has deposited its burden of rancor and of rales rasping the → throat. Each woman, flayed inside, is eased in the collective listening. And the same for gaiety, or happiness-which you must guess at; litotes, proverb, to the point of riddles or transmitted stories, all the verbal stagings are unrolled for unpicking fate, or exorcizing it, but never to strip it bare.7

Aphonia is the middle ground between the oral culture of women and the patriarchal script. Assia Djebar fills the aphonic space with female notions surround-

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ing weaving. As an Algerian born in a Berber family, she has been deeply influenced by textile as an emotional, anthropological and epistemological medium within the female community.

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word, London, 1982, p. 31ff. 2 Alois Hahn, Reden und Schweigen, in Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie, 8, 1, 1999, p. 204-231. 3 Dietmar Kamper, Nach dem Schweigen. Hören. Das Ohr als Horizont der Bestimmung, in Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie, 2, 1-2, 1993, p. 116-119, p. 118. 4 Christoph Wulf, art. Silence, in Traité d’Anthropologie historique. Philosophies, Histoires, Cultures, ed. Christoph Wulf, Paris, 2002, p. 1165-1172, p. 1165. See also Alice Lagaay, Zwischen Klang und Stille. 1

Gedanken zur Philosophie der Stimme, in Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie, 17, 1, 2008, p. 168-181, with bibliography. 5 Susan Sontag, The Aesthetics of Silence, in Styles of Radical Will, London, 1969, p. 3-34, p. 11. 6 Assia Djebar, Fantasia. An Algerian Cavalcade, transl. Dorothy S. Blair, New York, 1985; Désirée Schyns, Tastend voortgaan in een donkere tunnel. Het autobiografische schrijven van Assia Djebar, in Armada. Tijdschrift voor wereldliteratuur, 16, 61, 2010, p. 83-95. 7 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Echo, in New Literary History, 24, 1, 1993, p. 17-43, p. 38.

295

Skin-Ego/Moi-Peau Sigmund Freud compared the skin-ego to a “mystic writing pad.”1 He asserts in The Ego and the Id that: “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.”2 The child conceives and describes its impressions of the world through its hide barrier.3 But the skin is a → sieve, it can open and contains pores that let through fluid. This makes the skin terrifying: its protection and enclosing is not complete. The skin constantly threatens to ‘leak’.4 This sifting function of the skin returns in Freud’s superego concept. Here the sieving through the skin is described as a filter for acceptable versus forbidden wishes. Didier Anzieu’s concept of the skin-ego is “the answer to questions he regards as crucial to contemporary psychoanalysis: questions of topography which were left incomplete by Freud; the analysis of fantasies of the container as of the contained; issues of touch between mothers and babies; extending the concept of prohibitions within an Oedipal framework to those derived from a prohibition on touching; and questions pertaining to the representation of the → body and to its psychoanalytic setting.”5 “He points out that a triple derivation is at play between the ego and the skin: metaphoric (the ego is a metaphor for the skin), metonymic (the ego and the skin contain each other mutually, both as a whole and as a part), and elliptic (the link between the ego and the skin represents an ellipsis, in other words, a bifocal figure incorporating mother and child).”6 Anzieu writes: “The skin ego is the original parchment which preserves, like a palimpsest, the erased, scratched-out, written-over, first outlines of an ‘original’ pre-verbal writing made up of traces upon the skin.”7 In his earliest work he sets out four functions of the skin ego:8 as a containing unifying envelope for the self (1), as a protective barrier for the psyche (2), as a filter of exchanges and surface of inscription for the first traces, a function which makes representation possible (3), and as a mirror of reality (4). Anzieu’s third moi-peau is the → sieve skin as a filter that is also a medium. The permeability of the psyche is a precondition of the → sieve skin’s capacity to be ‘inscribed’ with memories. The → sieve skin leaks out to the world and becomes an inscribed membrane and a screen upon that world. Anzieu goes on to define subcategories of the → sieve skin. The third moi-peau is also a fertile

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field: it produces → hair, fur and down, and it waters the field with sweat, pheromones, fluids. In just the same way the → sieve is made in function of dry and wet, from sifting grains to sieving dairy products, and so the → sieve skin is, as it were, also an image of fertile land.9 We recognized this connotation in Genesis 15:35: “It was at the time of year when the ground is full of holes and riddled like a → sieve (kevarah).” In short, the skin-ego or moi-peau filters the person towards the world: from their thoughts to their → body in the world and their physicality towards other → bodies. Gilles Deleuze sees the moi-peau as something quite radical: from the schizophrenic → body. “The first schizophrenic evidence is that the surface has split open. (…) → Bodies have no surface. The primary aspect of the schizophrenic → body is that it is a sort of body-sieve. (…) Other → bodies always penetrate our → body and coexist with its parts.”10 The moi-peau is also the percolating canvas of artistic expression: from fears to the buffer of the world, from a cultural subconsciousness to new → Pathosformeln. The creative moi-peau faces the world with a selective permeability: from dripping softly to violently pouring, from a subtle secretion to a brutal drop downwards, in short, like in the etymological traces we saw earlier in sehj, sei sif-/sib and sē(i)-, sei-, meaning to drip, and the Sumeric sig meaning rain, pouring oneself out (→ sieve).

1

Eran Dorfman, Foucault versus Freud on Sexuality and the Unconscious, in Sexuality and Psychoanalysis. Philosophical Criticisms, eds. Jens de Vleminck & Eran Dorfman, Louvain, 2010, p. 157-170, p. 160: Our sensorium is both screen (energy, quantity) and → sieve (qualitative characteristics or stimuli that Freud calls periods); Erika D. Galioto, Split-Skin. Adolescent Cutters and the Other, in Skin, Culture, and Psychoanalysis, eds. Sheila L. Cavanagh, Angela Failler & Rachel A.J. Hurst, London, 2013, p. 188-214, p. 198: The buffer between me and the other is the → sieve ( Jacques Lacan, 1901-1981).

2 Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology. The Theory of Psychoanalysis, transl. James Strachey, London, 1989, p. 364. See also: Jay Prosser, Skin Memories, in Thinking through the Skin, eds. Sarah Ahmed & Jackie Stacey, London – New York, 2001, p. 52-68. 3 Marc Lafrance, From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope. An Introduction to the Work of Didier Anzieu, in Skin, Culture, and Psychoanalysis, p. 16-44, p. 22. 4 Yves Hendrick, Facts and Theories about Psychoanalysis, London – New York, 2013, p. 56.

skin-ego/moi-peau From a review on Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego. A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Self, New Haven CT, 1989: http://us.karnacbooks.com/product/the-skin-ego/35044/ 6 Victor Stoichita, art. Skin, in Textile Terms. A Glossary, (Textile Studies, 0), eds. Mateusz Kapustka, et al., Berlin, 2017, p. 231-234, p. 231. 7 Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 105. 8 Didier Anzieu, Functions of the Skin Ego, in Reading French Psychoanalysis, eds. Dana Birksted-Breen, Sara Flanders & Alain Gibeault, London – New York, 2010, p. 477-495. 5

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9 Anzieu, Functions of the Skin Ego, p. 488489: Other functions of the skin-ego are storage of fats as an image of memory, the function of production (→ hair, nails), and emission, for example sweat and pheromones. These are the skin-ego’s defence mechanisms. 10 Leen De Bolle, Desire and Schizofrenia, in Deleuze and Psychoanalysis. Philosophical Essays on Deleuze’s Debate with Psychoanalysis, ed. Leen De Bolle, Louvain, 2010, p. 7-33, p. 24.

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skull

Fig. 100. Skull of John the Baptist, Wallon de Sarton gave it to Richard de Gerberoy on December 17, 1206. Amiens, Cathedral

299

Skull In contrast to the closed visibility of the speaking relic, the cranium nudum of the → head of St John the Baptist in the cathedral of Amiens makes an uninhibited appeal to the → gaze (fig. 100). Denuded of its golden mask and augmented with the mummified effect of the wax filling – signum facies – the relic of Amiens must be experienced as an exogenous being. When uncovered, the relic loses itself in the anti-secret: dismantling itself, unveiling its own self, coinciding with itself, nudum. The addition of wax plays a bizarre role. Georges Didi-Huberman refers to skulls in Jericho and Mykene that were covered with clay, so that an impression was formed.1 According to the author, these death’s heads, particularly those where the → face has been reconstructed with clay or wax (from within), served literally as a → matrix: in one and the same object the borrowed form, the form of the impression, and the modeled form crystalized in one and the same object. Le crâne, à ce moment, devient réceptable d’un jeu dialectique ouvert sur l’invention plastique: jeu de la contre-forme et de la forme, jeu de la dissemblance, de la défiguration et de la refiguration. Jeu de la forme disparaissante (la chair qui, en se putréfiant, anéantit le visage) et de la forme en formation (la glaise qui, en séchant, prend dans le crâne comme le plâtre dans un moule ou comme le lait dans une faisselle).2 The wax in the relic of Amiens is not used as one would expect, to reconstruct the outward appearance of the → face. The wax bears the imprint of the secret: the interior of the skull. The anti-secret also becomes an anti-mask. In his essay Être crâne, Georges Didi-Huberman expresses this otherwise: Ce qui fascine d’abord, dans le crâne humain, c’est son côté interne; c’est la ‘cavité des orbites’, avec sa ‘profondeur’ dissimulée; c’est, en général, tous les ‘trous visibles’.3 The facies of Amiens is the signum of an inversive visage, of an “interior visage.”

1

Georges Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance par contact. Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte, (Paradoxe), Paris, 2008, p. 57.

2 Ibid., p. 57. 3 Georges Didi-Huberman, Être crâne. Lieu, contact, pensée, sculpture, Paris, 2000, p. 15.

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sleep

Fig. 101. Michelangelo (1475-1564), sculpture of Night, ca. 1520-1536. Florence, San Lorenzo, Medici chapel. From: Leonard Barkan, The Beholder’s Tale. Ancient Sculpture, Renaissance Narratives, in Representations, 44, 1993, p. 133-166, p. 149, fig. 4

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Sleep By the end of the 15th century, Michael Fabricius Ferrarinus (died between 1488-1493), prior of the Carmelite cloister in Reggio Emilia, launched in his chronicle (ca. 1477-1484) the rumor that super ripam Danuvii a fountain had been found with the ancient sculpture of a sleeping → nymph. According to Ferrarinus, the ensemble wears a peculiar tetrastichon epigraphy. Hvivs nympha loci, sacri cvstodia fontis, Dormio, dvm blandae sentio mvrmvr aqvae. Parce mevm, qvisqvis tangis cava marmora, somnvm Rvmpere. Sive bibas sive lavere tace.

In ‘The Beholder’s Tale’, Leonard Barkan discusses the Hvivs Nympha Loci epigram and its impact upon paragone.1 According to the author, the contents of the inscription by Michael Fabricius Ferrarinus are paradoxical for three reasons. Firstly, the statue of the → nymph speaks to and addresses the audience. But at the same time, the statue says it must be left alone for the image to effectively unfold. There is a tension between the speech that animates, and the viewing, which de-animates. This tension brings to mind Leon Battista Alberti’s description of the effect of Istoria (or the painterly arts): “with ferocious expression and forbidding glance challenges (the viewers) not [to] come near, as if he wished their business to be secret.”2 The image is aware it is being watched, but it is because of it being watched that the image exists. Yet it still asks for → silence and thus suggests something mysterious – a secret – that needs to be preserved. The viewer-voyeur that wants to uncover the mystery is on sacred ground, the locus amoenus of the → nymph: the place of eternity as against the place of temporality. This is connected to the motif of → silence. The sculpture sleeps and the visitor is requested to be quiet (therefore she speaks from her resting state). The second paradox is that waking her would mean bringing her to life, but waking her would also destroy the eternal nature of the artistic place of leisure. The viewer (voyeur, traveler, (art) lover) meets the → nymph during their travels, and is possibly surprised by the place, perhaps even thrilled to find this woman so subdued, but is immediately alerted to the impossibility of getting to know her, because complete restraint is insisted upon. In essence, the visitor is

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an intruder. That is the third paradox, defining the place as a spot not for human viewing. The sacred place of the → nymph – her own habitat and Gefühlsraum3 – is an anti-locus, because it must remain unknown (and unseen) by humans, untainted by their footsteps. A related problematization of the relationship between art and its audience is found in the poetic epigrams that Giovan Battista Strozzi (1504-1571) composed for Michelangelo’s (1475-1564) Night (fig. 101).4 La Notte, che tu vedi in si dolci atti Dormire, fu da un Angelo scolpita In questo sasso: e, perchè dorme, ha vita: Destala, se no ’l credi, e parleratti. Night which you see sleeping in such a lovely attitude was sculpted by an Angel in this stone; and because she sleeps, she lives. Disturb her, if you don’t believe it, and she will speak to you.

Michelangelo promptly replied to Strozzi’s quatrain with the following verses: Grato mi è il sonno, e più l’esser di sasso: Mentre che il danno e la vergogna dura, Non veder, non sentir, m’è gran ventura; Però non mi destar; deh parla basso! Sleep is pleasing to me, and being made of stone is more so, while injury and shame endure. Not to see, not to feel are my good fortune; therefore don’t disturb me, please, speak softly.

The poem declares that watching a sleeping being demands a sacred respect and a ritualistic behavior. Furthermore, the sleep is a metaphor for the closed off nature of the artist; the elusiveness and intimacy (in this case expressed by sculpture in the medium of stone) which by definition constitutes unavailability. Or is that not the case?

sleep

Leonard Barkan, The Beholder’s Tale. Ancient Sculpture, Renaissance Narratives, in Representations, 44, 1993, p. 133-166. 2 Ibid., p. 146. 3 With this ‘feelings space’, Hermann Schmitz means the philosophical locus

1

303

of → emotions, as they stretch between the subject and the world; Hermann Schmitz, System der Philosophie, 3, 2: Der Gefühlsraum, Bonn, 1981, p. 264-276. 4 Everything is quoted in Barkan, The Beholder’s Tale, p. 148-149.

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snail

Fig. 102. Francesco del Cossa (1430-1477), Annunciation, detail of snail, 1470-1475. Dresden, Gemäldegalerie

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Snail In the → Annunciation by Francesco del Cossa (1430-1477), the kairotic moment is strengthened by a special → detail (fig. 102). In the foreground, against the frame and on the right-hand side of the composition, which also features Mary, a snail can be seen crawling along.1 In 1978, Helen S. Ettlinger already convincingly demonstrated that this motif was connected with Mary’s virginity. I will copy her notes here:2 The Defensorium inviolatae virginitatis beatae Mariae is a typological work of the late Middle Ages, enlarged by Franz von Retz (1343-1427) around 1400, citing not only Biblical prefigurations but also analogies from classical mythology and nature.3 Among the natural parallels is the following: If the dew of the clear air can make the sea snail pregnant, then God in virtue can make His mother pregnant. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) also used the snail for this purpose in illustrating an antiphonary in the Book of Hours for Maximilian I.4 Two hundred years later, Filippo Picinelli (1604-ca.1679) echoes this belief: Ad honore di Maria Vergine Annuntiata che concepi il Verbo divino nel suo seno con la sola virtu dello Spirito Santo, serve l’impresa della conchiglia col motto: RORE PVRO FOECVNDA. As the dove of the Holy Spirit flies down from heaven to impregnate the evervirgin Mary, her symbol, the ever-virgin snail, crawls quietly along the edge of the frame.5

On a second level, the snail with its spiral shell is a symbol for post-mortem resurrection. Votive snails have been found in Roman sarcophagi.6 On a third level, the snail is also a symbol of slowness. The snail steadily inching its way forward is the imagery of diachronic Chronos against the interruptive synchronic flash of → Kairos. Angels and snail, → Kairos and Chronos, form an intersection with the start of the New Covenant. “What has been given in time past as → Kairos becomes thereafter pregnant with future.”7 The chronos-snail leaves behind a faint trace of slime; the → Kairos-angel leaves behind a feather. Both → Erinnerungsspuren answer to their respective time dimensions: horizontal versus vertical, sticky versus piercing, slow versus swift, the element of earth versus the element of air.

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Lilian M.C. Randall, The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare, in Speculum, 37, 3, 1962, p. 358-367. 2 Helen S. Ettlinger, The Virgin Snail, in The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 41, 1978, p. 316. See also: Franziska Brons, ‘... Some Purpose Other Than Decorative’. Die Schnecke in der ‚Verkündigung‘ von Francesco del Cossa, in Jahrbuch der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 29, 2001 (2004), p. 31-37. 3 Franz von Retz, Defensorium inviolatae virginitatis Mariae, facsimile edition by Wilhelm L. Schreiber, Weimar, 1910 (unpaginated). 4 The text makes this absolutely clear. Postpartum virgo inviolata permansisti: dei genitrix intercede pro nobis.... Precibus et 1

meritis beatissime gloriosissimeque matris semper virginis Marie; Walter L. Strauss, The Complete Drawings of Albrecht Dürer, New York, 1974, iii: p. 1510-1519, p. 1550: 1515/38. 5 Filippo Picinelli, Mondo Simbolico formato d’imprese scelte, spiegate, Milan, 1669, p. 317ff. 6 Alphons A. Barb, Diva matrix. A Faked Gnostic Intaglio in the Possession of P.P. Rubens and the Iconology of the Symbol, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 16, 1953, p. 193-238, p. 205. 7 In reference to a comment by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939); Philip Rieff, The Meaning of History and Religion in Freud’s Thought, in The Journal of Religion, 31, 2, 1951, p. 114-131, p. 118.

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Solstice The → silence of the solstice is the “gorgonian” → silence, intangibly terrifying but absolutely necessary in order to allow the greatest and most dangerous mysteries: to tilt, to clear the way for the sun, the portal, the transit. The solstice goes through the cosmic “→ throat” which needs the mediation of → silence: the angoisse.1 This → silence is not so much a frightening Gefühlsraum; it is more of a → pause, an → interval. This → silence is the cosmic standstill.2

Claude Gaignebet, À plus hault sens. L’ésotérisme spirituel et charnel de Rabelais, Paris, vol. 1, 1986, p. 363. 2 Thomas H. Macho, Die Kunst der Pause. Eine musikontologische Meditation, 1

in Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie, 2, 1-2, 1993, p. 104-115.

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Sophrosyne Wolfgang Kemp associates Warburg’s paradigmatic sovereignty with his splitting of the concept of memory: → mnemosyne versus sophrosyne.1 In an analogous way, Aristotle put mneme/memoria opposite of anamnesis/reminiscentia: the ability to remember by chance something previously experienced, allowing it to resurface in the soul, versus the power to concentrate fully on something, recapturing from memory that which was forgotten. As a matter of fact, it is also about Gedächtnis versus Erinnerung. Or Marcel Proust’s (1871-1922) mémoire involontaire versus mémoire volontaire. Or Roland Barthes’ (1915-1980) punctum versus studium. Punctum is the → detail that resonates out of historical material by surprise. Studium is the historical material that, in accordance with knowledge, leads to our own purposes. According to Aby Warburg, memory must undergo a test in order to become → mnemosyne, and thus earn the role of punctum or mémoire involontaire.2 Or as Georges Didi-Huberman formulates it: “Each recollection must be stored in the collective memory, where it is rooted in the primal experiences of sorrow, ecstasy, and passion that have left their indestructible ‘→ Engrammes’ on the psyche of humankind.”3 When a memory arises from these depths, it must work in a ‘polarizing’ way, as ‘explosive’, as a formula of liberation and activation. Only then is the memory granted passage and can it drip through the cultural membrane of the → skin-ego. In short, these culturally sifted ‘recollections’ are always profound: terrifying or emancipating. The dripping of the memory from the depths – called the humus of the psycho-energetics – possesses the wondrous beauty of the Augenblick. It is the oculus to the chthonic gate that connects past and present, that connects humankind with that which was ‘forgotten’. These moments of (psychic) access can be frightening, because their powers of anamnesis are overwhelming.

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1

solstice

The following is borrowed from my Nymph. Motif, Phantom, Affect. A Contribution to the Study of Aby Warburg (18661929), (Studies in Iconology, 1), Louvain – Walpole MA, 2014, p. 24. Wolfgang Kemp, Visual Narratives, Memory, and the Medieval Esprit du System, in Images of Memory. On Remembering and Representation, eds. Susanne Küchler & Walter Melion,

Washington DC – London, 1991, p. 87-108, p. 87. 2 Kemp, Visual Narratives, p. 88. 3 Ibid.: The term → Engramm is borrowed from German zoologist Richard Wolfgang Semon (1859-1918), Die Mnème, Leipzig, 1908, p. 190, who used it to describe a biologically inherent memory trail of a species.

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Stain A stain is the evidence of something that was. It is a trace. A stain may be something quite ordinary: the ink stain on my index finger; the mark of your fingers on this book. A stain may also be embarrassing: lipstick on a cheek; sweat rings under the arms; a bloody discharge. A stain may be forensically incriminating. A stain may be kept for sentimental reasons (the president’s sperm). Moreover, every stain has its own particular texture. Texture denotes the consistency of a surface and the sensory, often tactile imprint that is left on it. The stain may be absorbed in the thing that supports it; then again, it may stay on the surface, something separate. Every stain is unique. The second the stain appears it asserts its autonomy as “a spot or patch of colour different from the ground” (OED). The stain makes its mark; it sets itself apart. Thus the stain is consubstantial, in keeping with its quality of being totally ‘plastic’. The stain makes no claim to be anything more than contour, form, matter and dimension. It exists in and of itself. It is guilt-free.1 The stain tells us what it means to be the medium of visibility. Hence, every stain is a Metabild (a particular image that explains something about the image as a phenomenon).2 The stain, that ineffable opening, will support neither words nor academic reflection. It wants no rift in its intuitive and intrinsic connection with the pulsing underlayer, nor to be soaked out of the textile by text. It prefers to stay locked in the → marble; it elects to keep its innocence: a taboo. Maybe we should not even look at it. → Gazing at the stain might cast it out to the → khōra, never to return. I am just a → shadow, a vestige, or not even that. An aphasic murmur, a dissipated → smell and a vanished fever, a scratch without a scab, the scab came off long ago. I am like the earth beneath the grass, or even deeper down, like the invisible earth beneath the still more sunken earth, a dead man for whom there was no mourning because he left no corpse, a ghost whose flesh is falling away and who is only a name for those who come afterwards and who will never know for sure if that name is invented. I will be the rim of a stain that vainly resists removal when someone scrubs and rubs at the wood and cleans it all up; or like the trail of → blood that is so hard to erase, but which does, in the end, disappear and is lost, so that there never was any trail or any → blood spilled. I am snow on

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someone’s shoulders, slippery and docile, and the snow always stops falling. Nothing more. Or rather this: “Let it be changed into nothing, and let it be as if what was had never been.” That is what I will be, what was and has never been. That is, I will be time, which has never been seen, and which no one ever can see.3

1

This is a reference to Marie-José Mondzain-Baudinet, L’image naturelle, Paris, 1995. In her manifesto Mondzain defends the iconophile image: the figurative image embraced by mankind. I have treated Marie-José Mondzain-Baudinet’s essay in Barbara Baert, Iconogenesis or Reflections on the Byzantine Theory of Imagery, in A-Prior, 7, 2002, p. 128-141. See also: Barbara Baert, About Stains or

the Image as Residue, (Studies in Iconology, 10), Louvain – Walpole MA, 2017. 2 Jenni Sorkin, Stain. On Cloth, Stigma, and Shame, in Third Text, 53, 2001, p. 77-80. 3 Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream, Vintage 2010, English translation by Margaret Jull Costa, 2009, p. 201 (First published in Spain as Tu rostro mañana, 2 Baile y sueño, 2004).

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Stumbling block Skandalon derives from stumbling block.1 Girard makes an idiosyncratic reflection. If you follow someone with a limp, he writes, you’ll see that it seems as if that person repeatedly appears to want to (or is going to) coincide with his → shadow without ever succeeding. Girard’s image strikingly evokes how limping – the scandal – comes closest to the grotesque drama of the image, namely to be unable (or not allowed) to coincide with the self. The scandal shows in all its deficiency, in all its imperfection and tristesse, the loss of the absolute reflection and the impossibility of eliminating the dichotomy. Chez tous les écrivains majeurs, je pense, la rhétorique des oxymores constitue une allusion significative aux vicissitudes de l’interaction mimétique et rejoue obscurément l’essentiel drame humain de la pierre d’achoppement mimétique, le skandalon des Évangiles que nulle interprétation linguistique ne pourra jamais appréhender.2 The meaning of stumbling block is highly ambivalent: it is the defect but also the opening to insight; the obstacle but also the possibility. As if, in the stumbling, everything is briefly lit up. The hope. The → void of almost.3 The almost-fall before the most extreme fall: the tumble on the verge of l’image ouverte. The almost-disappearing into the big black hole. The almost emptying of oneself into the other (Didi-Huberman’s liquefactio in stigmata: La tentative d’excéder l’image par l’image). The stumbling block says, “It’s going to happen!” Coincidence with the → matrix, the ultimate desire consummated, the emptying of the Neoplatonic binomial in the unity of nothingness. But it happens in the emptiness of ‘almost’. It ‘limps’.

René Girard, Scandal and the Dance. Salome in the Gospel of Mark, in New Literary History, 15, 2, 1984, p. 311-324. 2 René Girard, Géometries du désir, Paris, 2011, p. 46-47. 1

3

David Grossman, Be My Knife, transl. Vered Almog & Maya Gurantz, New York, 2001, p. 195.

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symmetry

Fig. 103. Rorschach Inkblot Method (RIM)

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Symmetry The Rorschach inkblot test (RIT) is a psychological test that was introduced by Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922) in 1921. The test is based on the human inclination to project interpretations and feelings, in this case onto inkblots that often take on the suggestive form of insects and → butterflies (fig.  103).1 In the pathological literature of the day, subsequent studies about the role of the symmetrical → butterfly were published.2 Ludwig Binswanger describes symmetry as follows: La symétrie engage un mouvement, celui de l’ être-emporté-vers (after Georges Didi-Huberman).3 Symmetry is a pulse, such as the opening and closing of wings: psyché animant notre corps. But symmetry is more than just something that is balanced, and pleasing to the eye. 4 Symmetry also misleads (as the → butterfly misleads), because even symmetry needs the tertium quid: that which mediates in-between and supports the interaction between two parts. That is why symmetry is more than just two identical parts, but instead imagery for transformation within two poles, such as between life and → death, just like the → butterfly undergoes a triple transformation process with the ‘→ nymph’: the ‘→ chrysalis’ as mediation and tertium quid.

1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Rorschach_test. 2 Myriam Orr, Quelques observations inédites sur le test de Rorschach, in Bulletin du Groupement français du Rorschach, 11, 1959, p. 15-19. 3 Ludwig Binswanger, À propos de deux pensées de Pascal trop peu connues sur la symétrie, in Introduction à l’analyse existentielle, transl. Jacqueline Verdeaux & Roland Kuhn, Paris, 1971, p. 227-236, p. 228. 4 Besides psychology, art historical pedagogy also focused on symmetry.

Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), who was familiar with the work of Rorschach and Binswanger, saw many didactic advantages in the double projecting of mirror images; Georges Didi-Huberman, Phalènes. Essais sur l’apparition, 2, Paris, 2013, p. 56. The figure by Franz Boas (1858-1942) L’art primitif, Oslo, 1927, p. 62 has applied the idea of symmetry to ethnic art. La symétrie constitue l’un des traits caractéristiques (qui) s’observent dans l’art de tous les temps et de tous les peuples.

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Tearing The meaning of tearing and splitting as a life-, love- and wisdom-generating event (like the tearing of the Temple curtain) is profoundly rooted in the visual and literary ‘→ body’ of ancient and Christian thought. The primordial cosmogonic split is always sudden, sharp (like a knife), like a flash (at-once and all-over) and is lived through the whole bodily sensorium (shivering, bliss, sigh, → wind, → breath). The split is the epiphany of the radical change, the revolution and the → transition beyond. There is a Greek deity who embodies this mystery: → Kairos.

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Teichoscopia Canticle 2:9-10 says: “Look, there he stands behind our wall,1 → 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 (185-254) interpreted this teichoscopic 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. He would enter like the lover, like an erotikos. 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.2 The word ‘window’ originates from the Old Norse vindauga, from vindr, ‘→ wind’, and auga, ‘eye’; that is in fact: ‘wind eye’. The text of the Song of Songs is a bliss. One cannot speak ‘on’ such a text; one can only speak ‘in’ such a text. This we can compare with Barthes’ “paradise of words:” “we are gorged with language.”3 The verbal pleasure “chokes and reels into bliss.” This emptying of the unspoken is experienced by the Bride as an ‘ingrafting’: insero as in Rufinus’ Latin translation. It means an erotic sowing in the mind: “Thy name is as ointment emptied out.”4 The kiss by the bridegroom is a kiss of insight, a little flash that lights up in the dark, in the speech of the text. Yet, words are not stripped naked by it, words are not bare. They are visible provocations towards the invisible – the unspoken – and they do not pass away. By analogy, this going into the paradise beyond the word by using teichoscopia, viewing from the walls, or this emptying one out into the pleasure of the → making text, yes, these visible provocations towards the invisible and the unspoken, is indeed an energy as well as a dynamic between the world and the weaver. It is a world seen through the → grid of organic → making, as we saw in the work by Tim Ingold: “We should understand → making as a modality of weaving.”5

1

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 Iliad, Book 3, verses 121-244. Teichoscopia makes it possible to

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teichoscopia

describe an event taking place in the distance while integrating it into the narrative frame. 2 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; Henri Crouzel, Origène et la connaissance mystique, Bruges, 1961. On biblical hermeneutics and lire au-delà du verset according to Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995), see:

Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Lire aux éclats. Éloge de la caresse, Paris, 1994, p. 37, p. 136, p. 283. 3 The same conceptual osmosis between novel and love, → body and the erotic readership, is analysed by Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, transl. Richard Miller, New York, 1975. 4 Ibid., p. 8. 5 Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, New York, 2000, p. 339.

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Throat Claude Gaignebet describes the phenomenon of angoisses solsticiales in Western Europe.1 He observes that periods of tension and elevated stress between man and nature focus on the throat. Il nous faut rechercher aux deux solstices des faits, des rites ou des croyances qui associeraient ces périodes à la gorge.2 In several cultures the sacral → silence bordering on taboo is attributed to the revolution itself, the “throat” of the → solstice. It is a → silence that goes au-delà, beyond the Pythagorean order of music and the heavenly bodies. Où est en effet dans notre monde cette musique inouïe? Là où les âmes ne sont pas encore ou ne sont plus, au-delà des sphères ou au centre de la terre.3 It is a ‘gorgonian’ → silence, intangibly terrifying but absolutely necessary in order to allow the greatest and most dangerous, the shortest night or day to tilt: to clear the way, the portal, the transit – even the dumbfounded throat. → Transition and → silence are one in the tension before the angoisse of the cosmic ‘throat’. The → interval that possesses the secret of allowing something to pass – the tube, the transit, the throat, the uterus – makes use of cosmic → silence in the fraction of a second just before the turn. I refer to the Roman goddess Angerona.4 This divine being, who as Dea Tacita lauds → silence as salvation at the → solstice, liberated the Romans from their fear of throat diseases like the croup, and is represented with a finger on the mouth and on the anus – the two corporal openings that bring forth sound (and air) (fig.  104).5 Angerona is supposedly a ramification of the Roman goddess of → silence, Laurentia, who was also a goddess of the underworld. She was venerated in the form of a mundus grave: a grave that could be opened and closed on sacrificial feast days for the gods of the underworld. It was believed that this narrow passage was a passage to the underworld itself.6 The slender opening of the transit evokes at the same time the “narrowness” of the throat.

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throat

Fig. 104. Angerona, Roman bronze cult statue, Syria. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des médailles, inv. nr. Bronze 662

throat

Claude Gaignebet, À plus hault sens. L’ésotérisme spirituel et charnel de Rabelais, Paris, vol. 1, 1986, p. 347-351. 2 Ibid., p. 347. 3 Ibid., p. 356. 4 Hendrik Wagenvoort, Diva Angerona, in Pietas. Selected Studies in Roman Religion, Leiden, 1980, p. 21-24, p. 23, particularly the → solstice of December. “Therefore I ask, what is to prevent us believing that 1

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Angerona presided over those Angera, or Angustiae, or ‘narrows’, ‘through which → death is reached’? In my opinion it all agrees very well together” (p. 24). However, the author rejects an earlier identification of Angerona with the goddess of the new year, possibly of Etruscan origin (p. 21). 5 Gaignebet, À plus hault sens, 1986, p. 347. 6 Wagenvoort, Diva Angerona, p. 23.

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tongue

Fig. 105. John’s head, on the south-facing outer wall of the west aisle, 13th century, Münster, Dom

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Tongue The mouth refers to the ingress and egress of our → breath. The open mouth evokes John’s final dying → breath, the border marked by the Johannesschüssel. The mouth is a portal into the dizzying depths of the → body. It introduces us to the interiority of the → body, which is taboo. Through the mouth, things – including food – disappear, so that it becomes the antechamber of the → throat. The mouth, together with the tongue, is one of the organs of speech. Some authors even associated the open mouth of the Johannesschüssel with John’s pronouncement Ego sum vox clamantis in deserto in John 1:22-23.1 In some cases the tongue protrudes from the mouth – one might think from a purely macabre sense of expressionism. But it can also be depicted this way without attempting macabre effects, as on the south-facing outer wall of the west aisle of the Dom of Münster (13th century) (fig.  105). The sculpture is composed of several pieces of sandstone. A → hand emerges from the wall, carrying a platter which in turn bears a → head with a neck. The whole is set against the background of a large rosette aureole. In the south wall of the east aisle, there was an altar dedicated to John the Baptist. This space is still called the St John’s choir. The tongue is considered as the equivalent of the → head.2 This equivalence is clear in the totem context.3 The tongue is often kept as a trophy of the killed enemy. It guarantees the transfer of the other’s power. The extended tongue is also an apotropaion. The forces that repel evil preferably attach themselves to the → head, in particular the → face. The eyes and mouth maintain the power of protection; Medusa often shows her tongue (fig. 106).4 The tongue is also a topos of the prophet. The tongue joins with the fire of God (Isaiah 30:27). The Holy Ghost descended on the apostles in ‘cloven tongues like as of fire’ (Acts 2:3). The tongue, just like the → hand, is the revelation of God.5 The tongue has the power of life and → death (Proverbs 18:21). The tongue is “cleft” – indeed, again, mediator.6 The tongue is the organ of taste; hence, it distinguishes good and evil.7 Because the tongue speaks, it also has a judicial connotation. Tongue is speech. Thus, the tongue is also connected to the glossolalia of the orator and the prophet.8 The legend that Herodias maliciously pierced the Baptist’s tongue with a needle is believed to date back to the 4th century. The motif became a favorite subject in religious drama.9 Jerome (347-420) says in his Apologia contra Rufinum:

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tongue

Fig. 106. Medusa with protruding tongue, mask of the collection of Humbert de Superville (1770-1849). The Hague, National Library of the Netherlands, ms. CCXVII, fol. 37

Herodias in Joannem: quia veritatem non poterant audire, linguam veriloquam discriminali acu confoderunt.10 “Because the one did not want to → hear the truth, the tongue (= the truth of the speech) was wronged.” John is the tongue, the voice in the wilderness that was not → heard. The tongue attaches itself in other words to the sense of → hearing. → Hearing is an extremely primal sense: it is the first and last sense; in principle, it precedes speech.11 After all, → hearing is the sense that the fetus first masters in the womb: the fetus → hears the mother’s voice. It is also said that → hearing is the last sense to fall away during the process of dying, and with comatose patients the only sense to remain latent.

1

Robert Suckale, Der Meister der Nördinger Hochaltarfiguren und Till Riemenschneider. Exemplarische Beiträge zum Verständnis ihrer Kunst, in Opus Tessellatum. Modi und

Grenzgänge der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Katharina Corsepius, Hildesheim – New York, 2004, p. 327-340, p. 328.

tongue 2 Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des symboles. Mythes, rêves, coutumes, gestes, formes, figures, couleurs, nombres, Paris, 1997, p. 561-562. 3 Henri Gastaut, Le crâne. Objet de culte, objet d’art, Marseille, 1972; Roland Penrose, Wonder and Horror of the Human Head. An Anthology, London, 1953, passim. 4 This is a phenomenon noticed at executions at well; for further development, see: Samuel Y. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment. Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance, London, 1985, p. 126ff. 5 Gregory Glazov, The Bridling of the Tongue and the Opening of the Mouth in Biblical Prophecy, (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. Supplement Series, 311), Sheffield, 2001. 6 Claudia Benthien, Zwiespältige Zungen. Der Kampf um Lust und Macht im oralen Raum, in Körperteile. Eine kulturelle Anatomie, Hamburg, 2001, p. 110-113. 7 Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste. Food and Philosophy, Ithaca NY, 2002, p. 19-22.

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8 1 Corinthians 14:2.13: “For those who speak in a tongue do not speak to other people but to God; for nobody understands them, since they are speaking the mysteries of the Spirit… Therefore, one who speaks in a tongue should pray for the power to interpret.” 9 Isabel Combs Stuebe, The Johannesschüssel. From Narrative to Reliquary to Andachtsbild, in Marsyas. Studies of the History of Art, 14, 1968-1969, p. 1-16, p. 5; Oskar Thulin, Johannes der Täufer im geistlichen Schauspiel des Mittelalters und der Reformationszeit, s.l., 1930; Hella Arndt & Renate Kroos, Zur Ikonographie der Johannesschüssel, in Aachener Kunstblätter, 38, 1969, p. 243-328, p. 301ff. 10 Jerome, Apologia contra Rufinum, PL 23, col. 510. 11 Christoph Wulf, Das mimetische Ohr, in Paragrana. Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie, 2, 1-2, 1993, p. 9-15.

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Trellis The trellis forms the inner structure that prevents the world from collapsing (the wall) and keeps the viewer’s eyes in place (the window). It gives the eye the possibility to ‘hook’ into the love space (lattice). In short, it prevents him from what William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) predicted in The Second Coming: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.”1

1

After William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) in his The Second Coming, 1919. See also: William Butler Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, Churchtown, 1920.

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Uncanny space Ernst Fischer introduces a paradigm for the ‘uncanny space’.1 He uses the → moi-peau in terms of the woman’s position in the domestic space. “Architecture introduces a necessary third term, namely ‘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.”2 When the → grid explicitly bursts out of the bounds of the surface that underpins it or negates the → materiality of this support through its strict geometry, it provides motivation for a reading that transcends the immanence of the material world – that domestic universe divided by walls and wall hangings and shot through with social borderlines.3

“The agency of the → grid dividing a space or a surface into regular repeating units that serve as modules to measure an area is indubitably such an elementary form of human orientation in the world that it does not have a clearly defined origin in any particular cultural technique.”4 “Unfolded into three dimensions and repeated in vertical and horizontal directions, the → grid does more than define the space of architecture – it turns into architecture.”5 The → trellis indeed permits a visual contact of external and internal elements. It allows one to observe both the inside and the outside of a construction. The semi-transparency of the plans permits a simultaneous reading of imbricated volumes.6

Ernst Fischer, Writing Home. Post-Modern Melancholia and the Uncanny Space of Living-Room Theatre, in Psychoanalysis and Performance, eds. Patrick Campbell & Adrian Kear, London – New York, 2001, p. 115-131. 2 Ibid., p. 123. 3 Sebastian Egenhofer, art. Grid, in Textile Terms. A Glossary, (Textile Studies, 0), eds. Mateusz Kapustka, et al., Berlin, 2017, p. 133-135, p. 134. 1

4 Ibid., p. 133. 5 Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques. Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, (Meaning Systems, 22), transl. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York, 2015, p. 116. 6 Jean-Max Albert, L’espace de profil, Paris, 1993.

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vera icon/veronica

Fig. 107. Master of Saint Veronica, St Veronica with the Sudarium, ca. 1420. London, National Gallery, inv. no. NG687

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Vera icon/Veronica Iconophile mediation (the → body as a septum of the image) is expressed not only paradigmatically but also literally in the character of Veronica, a woman who received the image of Christ with its miraculous imprint of → blood and sweat → stains as the support, protector and legitimation of the artistic (fig. 107). Veronica is the female → body that generates the image on the white sheet of her own garment. She is the female → body that devises and revises the complex boundaries of the → stain from the point of view of its generative potential.1 As a theme, Veronica connects all the aspects that use iconophile energy: relic, textile, imprint. On top of that, the theme of Veronica is the inexhaustible source of this energy. The vera icon has the immense task of absorbing the shock of the image – the → face that draws the image to itself and from there creatively pushes it outwards again. “And in the midst a round small hole must have, / That Species may pass, and repasse through, / Life the Prospective every thing to view” (Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673)). In the Cistercian convent of Wienhausen in Lower Saxony a number of late-medieval Veronicas have been found, small in size and painted on leather (fig. 108).2 They were made by and for the nuns and were easily portable.3 Christ’s greenish-black → face contrasts with the white cloth and the white of his eyes. Veronica herself is also painted in white though outlined in red, as Christ’s lips are also colored red. Only her little round → head peeps schematically above the black silhouette. The cloth blends into her white veil; indeed, it seems to be made from her attire. She is the vera icon. Christ’s → gaze is dark: a ‘black hole’ inside the outline of an abstract woman, of the feminine. There are visionary descriptions by female mystics from which an extraordinarily plastic interpretation of the vera icon emerges. In one of her ‘showings’, Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342-ca. 1416) describes the black appearance of the vera icon:4 “the revelation symbolized and resembled our foul, black mortality, in which our fair, bright, blessed Lord concealed his divinity.”5 At a basic level this explains the → Incarnation. The black is the image of confined corporeality, God’s humiliation in a human → body. Julian applies the ‘black → face’ to our own ontology. At a second level, the black → stain recalls a potentiality, an image in the making, in transformation from the dark black zone that precedes figuration.

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Fig. 108. Late-medieval St Veronica on leather. Lower Saxony, Cistercian convent of Wienhausen

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Fig. 109. Saint Veronica, Cloister Marienbaum, 1501. Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. Theol. Lat. Quart. 19, fol. 178v

At another time, Julian sees first one half of the black → face and then the other, suddenly caked with dried → blood. In the first instance, one might think of the conventional image of the suffering Christ: the ‘double red’ in the black could be an allusion to the irrefutability of the two natures. The black ‘foulness’ is representable in the red → blood.6 The red gives shape to the black → chaos and thus makes visible the divine concealment of which Julian spoke: redemption through sacrifice.7 This brings me to a second example.

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In 1501 a laywoman from Marienbaum in Germany painted her vision of the vera icon (fig.  109). The parchment is almost entirely occupied by Veronica’s miraculous cloth. Veronica herself has become almost insignificant behind Christ’s → face, which she displays on the huge piece of fabric. The vera icon is represented a tad luridly. The whole → face is spattered with drops of → blood. The decoration of the halo is carried out with similar sanguinary gusto in crinkly red strokes and splashes. The vera icon pays homage to a surrender to the → blood, the caking, as Julian also saw it. Every trace of narrativity has been drained from the Marienbaum image, and the bloody → face coincides with Veronica’s silhouette. The dynamic of veiling and unveiling, concealing and revealing, is also the dynamic in which the → stain is involved, pulsating and vibrating on the membrane. Here, however, there is no more limitation: the → stain goes beyond the female → body, beyond the contours of a composition. The Marienbaum Veronica ‘runs over’. The → stain is the image, is painting, is the phantasm of the primal source that flows – as stigmata do. This vera icon is excessive; it gushes in the ever ambivalent space the woman occupies, between pure and impure, between → death and redemption, between the black of capacity and the red of creation. Is it a coincidence that Veronica was also the patron saint of laundresses – those removers of → stains?8 And is it a coincidence that Veronica has been identified with the ailing haemorrhaging and therefore ‘stained’ woman who was healed by Christ (Mark 5:24-34)?9

Caroline Walker Bynum, Die Frau als Körper und Nahrung, in Stigmata. Poetiken der Körperinschrift, eds. Bettine Menke & Barbara Vinken, Munich, 2004, p. 114-144. 2 Horst Appuhn, Kloster Wienhausen, 4: Der Fund vom Nonnenchor, Wienhausen, 1973. 3 Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth. History, Symbolism, and Structure of a ‘True’ Image, Oxford, 1991; Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary. Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany, New York, 1998, p. 323. 1

4 Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary. Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany, New York, 1998, p. 366. 5 Edmund Colledge & James Walsh (eds.), Julian of Norwich. Showings, New York, 1978, p. 194-195. 6 Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) calls ‘color’ a precondition of Darstellbarkeit; Georges Didi-Huberman, Un sang d’images, in Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, 32, 1985, p. 123-154., p. 136.

vera icon/veronica Le sang christique démontre les vertus structurales au point même où l’informe coulée (le jet d’humeur) se relève en fantasme originaire (la plaie christique); DidiHuberman, Un sang d’images, p. 136. 8 Until well into the seventeenth century in Rouen it was customary for brides to make offerings of phallic symbols in the local St Veronica chapel; Paul Sartori, art. Veronika, hl., in Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, ed. Hanns 7

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Bächtold-Stäubli, 8, Berlin – Leipzig, 1937, cols. 1614-1615. 9 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, ed. Manfred Horstmanshoff, Leiden, 2012, p. 307-338.

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Void In his L’image ouverte Georges Didi-Huberman describes the image as a dynamic → emotion that opens up to the viewer like a gate, i.e. as an image ouverte. He argues that this ‘opening’ of the image lies in the paradigm that man was created after God’s image. However, this likeness was lost in the Fall. Ressemblance became dissemblance. From that point onwards, the history of images became a history of the desire to coincide with the origin: la promesse de retrouver l’image. Artistic expression defines itself as a continuous striving for this reunion, and the work of art holds the only hope of achieving that goal. In sum, to this day, every instance of artistic expression forges a pact with what has been lost, yet the image escapes; it eludes us, does not allow itself to be captured: l’image échappe. Ultimately, any artistic act is about a fear of emptiness or absence, as Ulrike Gehring argues in Semantik der Absenz: Der Wunsch, Unsichtbares sichtbar zu machen, ist der Kunst von Anbeginn an zu eigen. Bildende Künstler verleihen ihren Ideen und Vorstellungen eine materiale Gestalt, indem sie unsichtbare Prozesse oder Empfindungen in die Antlitze ihrer bildlichen Stellvertreter einschreiben.1 A love in the interstice, indeed in “the void of the almost” writes David Grossman in Be My Knife.2

Ulrike Gehring (ed.), Semantik der Absenz. The Making and Meaning of the Void, in Kritische Berichte, 39, 2, 2011, p. 3-6, p. 3. 2 David Grossman, Be My Knife, transl. Vered Almog & Maya Gurantz, New York, 2001, p. 195. On the text as → body, and the → body that ‘opens’ for its reader and hence lover, see the fascinating article by 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; Henri Crouzel,

1

Origène et la connaissance mystique, Bruges, 1961; the same conceptual osmosis between novel and love, → body and the erotic readership, is analyzed by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text, transl. Richard Miller, New York, 1975; Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, Paris, 2000, p. 12: 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; Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Lire aux éclats. Éloge de la caresse, Paris, 1994, p. 37, p.136, p. 283.

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Web Spider and web form a fascinating prototype for handicraft, the arts and capturing the moment. Through their association with the notion of a ‘thread’, the cultic umbilical cord of the earth and the seal inscribed in the skin, as well as the skin’s outgrowth that is → hair, are related to the symbolism of the → knot.1 The → knot is magical, because it captures the dynamics of contraction and unravelling. The notion of connecting and untying is a cosmogonic and generative principle. Hence → knots touch upon taboo. → Knots are the secrets that can only be whispered. They constitute the breeze that originates in a language when a → hand and a thread join in a mysterious choreography. The web is spun on the air/→ breath and it sways in the → wind. Even a gale cannot easily destroy it due to its exceptional elasticity. However fragile the web may seem, it is, in principle, an indestructible artefact. The web, with its tectonic morphology and indestructible structure, is made up of intersections where strength is concentrated. The concentrically constructed web is a primeval expression of the centrifugal, the spiral that absorbs to the zero point, the trance → dance.2 However, the web also has transversal connections, like a woven fabric. This branching is reminiscent of the lifeline or the ancestral lines.3 The transversal connections of the web intertwine the notion of trance (zero point, vanishing point, circle: → dance) with that of a life path (process, time, instant, linear: plastic arts). The cobweb captures cosmic time; time as a caesura; as if someone were reading and suddenly looked up to ask: ‘How will this be?’ (Luke 1:34). It encapsulates the moment so forcefully that time is split in two, between the diachronic time of Chronos, and the moment of the occasion of → Kairos. And when a breeze enters the room, the → nest shivers: Arachne’s web rocks, and all the flowers rustle and all the little leaves attached to them murmur like a sigh, like a shudder. We never eliminate all vestiges, though, we never manage, truly, once and for all, to → silence that past matter, and sometimes we → hear an almost imperceptible → breathing ( Javier Marías). ‘And I’, spider goes on, ‘must return to my web. For I have to say that what air is for the → butterfly and water is for the fish, my web is for me. I cannot fly or swim, but I can weave a web and exploit its properties of stickiness, tensile

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strength and so on to run around and catch flies. I may → dance the tarantella with the fly that alights on my web, but the web itself is not a → dancing partner. It is not an object that I interact with, but the ground upon which the possibility of interaction is based. The web, in short, is the very condition of my agency. But it is not, in itself, an agent’. ‘That, if I may say so’, interjects ant, ‘is a very arachnocentric viewpoint’.4

1

In his Symposium, Plato writes that man was originally androgynous. After an uprising against the gods, Apollo split man into two, as evidenced by the presence of a → navel. Apollo laid a → knot in the skin around the opening, but not quite tight enough, so as to leave a scar that would remind man of his arrogance. Ulrike Zischka, Zur sakralen und profanen Anwendung des Knotenmotivs als magisches Mittel, Symbol oder Dekor. Eine vergleichende volkskundliche Untersuchung, (Tuduv-Studien, Reihe Kulturwissenschaften, 7), Munich, 1977, passim.

2 Paul Vandenbroeck, Azetta. Berbervrouwen en hun kunst, (exh. cat), Ghent – Amsterdam, 2000, p. 164-165; among the tribes of the Atlas mountains, the trance → dance or ‘whirling’ is associated with the → wind. These ‘winds of → dance’ (laryah) create vortexes that spiral upward as an image of the creative process within the very cosmos. 3 Tim Ingold, Lines. A Brief History, London – New York, 2007, p. 98. 4 Tim Ingold, Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, London, 2011, p. 93.

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Wind It is generally accepted that storms and winds fascinated the great nature religions, such as those of the Indo-European peoples, and that this fascination provided a primordial image of the divine.1 This might be explained by the fact that a storm has such an immense impact on nature and on people, evoking ideas of honor, power and supremacy (fig. 110). Experiencing winds as supernatural led to a belief in demons embodied by the winds and revealing themselves in wind instruments. Hermann Genthe deploys the term Urriefen (primal call) from which the symbols and shapes of the wind arose, such as the wolf howling and the calls of other male animals.2 Ancient Germanic traditions also include the Wild Hunt: ghosts and the souls of the dead raging round, with suicides in particular roaring savagely in the storm.3 Winds are therefore animate, and their noises evoke communication with souls that have passed over, which like the wind sit loosely to → materiality and the → body. It therefore sometimes seems as though the wind can inspire; it possesses eine beseelende Kraft.4 Another recurrent → archetype of the wind is of a sexualized nature. A storm could be perceived as an aggressor capable of carrying off or even raping women. Conversely, there was also a feminine wind, which spinning on its own axis turned like an enchanting → dancer. The feminine whirlwind is seductive – she draws in her victim – while the male storm roars chaotically, rages, conquers. Some → dances are known to copy this → gender dynamic, as with the German Windebraut, in which the groom chases the spinning bride with stormlike leaps to surprise and conquer her.5 In the etymology of the Indo-European languages, the root of the word for wind carries the same connotations, such as blowing, → breath, and therefore the principle of life itself. Furthermore, the semantic meanings are always related to movement and express the dynamic interaction of humankind and nature. Thus the wind root derbh- has meanings going from → dancing, turning, interweaving, connecting and → knotting, to bundling grass.6 The wind root kelg- links wind to going around → corners, twisting, bending, spiraling, turning, convolution, and by transference the idea of (literary and dramatic) plotting.7 The wind root lek-, finally, points to squirming, but also jumping up and down, the ‘hopping’ that occurs in so many rituals.8

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Fig. 110. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Storm, chalk drawing, ca. 1513. London, The Royal Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

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In brief, the wind is not only the originatory principle of the divine and the supernatural, but also the inner life force of the human being (→ breathing in and out). As a consequence, the winds reflect the interactions that humans build up with nature, through rituals and through the production of artefacts. Wind and → breath stand for both the medium of connection and the marker of power and identity. While experienced as weaving a binding pattern through life, wind has an undeniably felt presence, and perhaps it is such a relationship between divine → breath and materialized → breath that holds wind, → breath and spirit in such a tight conceptual overlap. In this sense humans may stage themselves as participating in divine → breath, the same but less powerful. Wind and → breath provide both the triggering spark and the → materiality that makes possible this process.9

In their special issue on the anthropology of wind, Chris Low and Elisabeth Hsu introduce three broad areas of research: the experience of wind, the phenomenology of wind, and medical anthropology. Wind can be felt; it carries certain → odors. Winds make sounds or can be converted into sound by means of objects hung in trees. Winds influence our feelings and our moods. Winds activate naturally occurring → shadows. Some types of storms and winds were even believed to have a therapeutic (or damaging) influence. The warm Föhn in Switzerland can cause migraines and madness (known as Föhnf ieber). In Tyrol the east wind is believed to shrink penises, while the west wind, which is warm and damp, has a fecundating effect.10 In Friuli, Italy, the Bora rages over the country for several days, coming from Slovenia as a dry north-westerly storm. This storm, clearly derived from the Greek north wind Boreas, purifies the land. And the inhabitants of Trieste believe that this wind makes new loves possible.11 The wind is experienced as penetrating and impregnating: it enters and leaves our → body in both physical and mental ways. As a result, the wind is spontaneously regarded as a mediator between humans and nature – fascinating, shaping and influencing the human. A need was felt to conjure and ritually divert manifestations of wind to benefit the health of oneself and one’s community. Such ritual customs go back to animist beliefs and nomadic lifestyles, but many survive to the present day.

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Humans spontaneously see a relationship between a sort of wind, the surrounding landscape, and the (spiritual) meeting of the two. Interesting eco-anthropological studies of this environmentally sensitive approach to wind have been published by Tim Ingold.12 Inhabitants of a region can ‘read’ and interpret the effects of weather and wind on the landscape and on their surroundings as what he calls open sensibilities.13 “We need to attend to the fluxes of wind and weather. To feel the wind is not to make external, tactile contact with our surroundings but to mingle with them. In this mingling, as we live and → breathe, the wind, light and moisture of the sky bind with the substances of the earth in the continual forging of a way through the tangle of life-lines that comprise the land.”14 Ingold defends the cosmological and ontological orientation in landscape as a study of ‘weather-scape’, in which space and time are climatologically and atmospherically related to one another. In his The Eye of the Storm. Visual Perception and the Weather, the author makes a methodological distinction between landscape and weather: “Weather is going on in the medium. The landscape by contrast, consists in the first place of surfaces.”15 Landscape is related to surface, to all the characteristics concerned in the sensual experience of a surface. Human beings get to know landscape through seeing it, → hearing it, touching it. Landscape is made up of things. Weather, by contrast, holds the characteristics of medium rather than of surface. Human beings experience that medium by means of light and sound. Weather is much more of a feeling, a sensation.16 We can see and → hear a windy day, but while we can feel the wind we cannot really touch it. We touch in the wind. Wind is part of the world of sense experience, and thus of the sensorium as a whole. Bettina L. Knapp indicates that wind, and in particular the motif of the whirlwind, provides a literary topos closely connected to circling, spinning and turning, and from there moves into the sacred space of meditation: Winds, manifestations of both inner and exterior happenings, pave the way for a hierophany: the dialectical process that transforms profane objects or events into something sacred. Circling and circular images also come to the fore in the opening whirlwind image. Circular movement around a center not only focuses energy, but relates to the idea of ‘circulation’ thereby generating energy and activity and beginning of course of action. Let us recall that Yahweh directed Joshua,

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in his conquest of Jericho, to ‘compass the city (…) and go round about the city (…)’ ( Joshua 6:3). Circles and circling also suggest an absence of divisiveness and of distinction: something eternal and immutable, without beginning or end. (…) The circle, as it appears and disappears amid the swirling wind, the coiling eddies, and the particles of sand, also had a mandala effect. (…) Only when the turbulence dies down can energy be concentrated on a given area and fragmentation cease, thereby divesting the brain of extraneous matter, idle thoughts, and random feelings. Since a mandala actualizes cosmic energy, it may also be looked upon as a microcosm of divine power, thereby taking on the contours of a sacred space and interiorizing the energies within its sphere.17

1

2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9

10 11

Hermann Genthe, Die Windgottheiten bei den indogermanische Völkern, in Jahresbericht über das Gymnasium zu Memel, 1, 1861, p. 1-16. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid. Ibid., p. 15. Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary. A Revised Edition of Julius Pokorny’s Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2007: Root / lemma: derbh-. Ibid., Root / lemma: kelg-. Ibid., Root / lemma: lek-2 (: lek-) and lēk- : lǝk- (*leĝh-). Chris Low & Elizabeth Hsu, Introduction, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13, 1, 2007, p. 1-17, p. 5. Ernest Jones, Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis, 2, New York, 1964, p. 284. http://ildiscorso.it/2013/07/26/la-bora-ilvento-dellamore-tra-mito-e-leggenda/. With thanks to Paolo Marchetti, Udine, Italy.

12 Tim Ingold, Earth, Sky, Wind, and Weather, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13, 1, 2007, p. 19-38. 13 Ibid., p. 33. 14 Ibid., p. 19. 15 Tim Ingold, The Eye of the Storm. Visual Perception and the Weather, in Visual Studies, 20, 2, 2005, p. 97-104, p. 101. Also relevant is James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston MA, 1979, passim, in which the author treats environmental factors such as water, wind and the ‘texture’ of a landscape as ‘surface’ in the context of the relationships that people and animals build with their surroundings. 16 Ingold, The Eye of the Storm, p. 102. 17 Bettina L. Knapp, Yizhar’s ‘Midnight Convoy’. Wheels, Circles, Eyes: The Dynamics of the Feminine Principle as Eros/Logos, in Modern Language Studies, 20, 3, 1990, p. 58-66, esp. p. 60-61.

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woman with an issue of blood

Fig. 111. Christ and the Haemorrhoïssa, mosaic, 14th century. Istanbul, Chora church

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Woman with an issue of blood/Haemorrhoïssa A very important narrative and iconographic context of the → hem in the West is told in the New Testament. Mark 5:24b-34, Luke 8:42-48, and Matthew 9:19– 22 tell the story of the healing of the woman with an issue of → blood, or the so-called Haemorrhoïssa.1 The healing miracle pulsates with a delicate energy relating to textiles, cloth, and the magical impact of the → hem.2 And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had → heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her → body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” He looked all round to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease” (Mark 5:24b-34, New Revised Standard Version).

Christ’s healing miracles are carried out through the word, through touch, through word and touch, with the use of saliva, at a distance, or through incision.3 The Haemorrhoïssa clearly belongs to the category of touch: haptein, tenere.4 But the touch of the woman with the haemorrhage is peculiar for three reasons. To begin with, she initiates the touch, and the touch seems to have a strong effect on Jesus. Furthermore, the touch causes a fascinating breach between fluidity and petrifaction, between movement and fossilization, between process and → interruption. The text even speaks of a power (δύναμις), over which Christ has no control. Finally, we need to mention that this touch is a touch upon a textile. It is, in other words, no skin-to-skin contact, such as the typical laying on of → hands (συνανάχρωσις).5 The idea that power can be stored or tapped from a holy person is very old. In 2 Kings 13:20-21 a strong example of this is preserved: a corpse that touches the bones in Elisha’s tomb is revived. Textiles

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also have the explicit capacity to transfer essences of the owner’s → body. The clothing of a → body constitutes that → body. This is also clear in Jesus asking “Who touched my clothes?”, and the disciples’ reaction: “Why would you ask ‘Who touched me?’” In Acts 19:12, handkerchiefs that were in contact with Paul’s → body have the power to heal the people of Ephesus. According to the Acts of John, many brothers were healed in Ephesus by touching the garments of John; the word used here is haptomai. Luke 8:44 and Matthew 9:21 both specify that the woman desired to touch not simply the garment of Christ, but in particular the → hem of the garment of Christ: the kraspedon or fimbria.6 Exegetes agree that this → detail in Luke and Matthew is quoted from Mark 6:56, which says that, wherever Christ went, people tried to touch the → hem of his garment, and that those who did it, were healed.7 The same idea reappears in Matthew 14:36: “And they besought him that they might touch but the → hem of his garment. And as many as touched, were made whole.” Patristic sources, moreover, see a type of the healing → hem of Christ in Zechariah 8:23: “In those days ten men of all languages and nations will take firm hold of one Jew by the → hem of his robe, and say: Let us go with you, because we have → heard that God is with you.” The prophecy referred to the exaltation of Jerusalem, to the gentiles united in an eschatological pilgrimage. In short, to touch the → hem is to be embraced by God, His kingdom, and the coming of Christ.8 A remarkably emotive representation of the Haemorrhoïssa is found in the 14th-century mosaic in the Chora church of Istanbul (fig.  111). The bleeding woman is depicted as a contorted crawling outcast trying to reach out for the → hem of Christ’s garment. Her robe covers her entire → body, turning her into an amorphous organic shape that is not instantly recognizable and has no apparent identity. Her contours are echoed by the undulating land: as she crawls along, her → body echoes the ‘→ hem’ of the earth.

1

Mary R. D’Angelo, Gender and Power in the Gospel of Mark. The Daughter of Jairus and the Woman with the Flow of Blood, in Miracles in Jewish and Christian Antiquity.

Imagining Truth, (Notre Dame Studies in Theology, 3), ed. J.C. Cavadini, Notre Dame IN, 1999, p. 83-109; Barbara Baert, The Woman with the Blood Flow

woman with an issue of blood (Mark 5:24-34). Narrative, Iconic, and Anthropological Spaces, (Art&Religion, 2), Louvain – Walpole MA, 2014. 2 Emma Sidgwick, From Flow to Face. The Haemorrhoïssa Motif (Mark 5:24-35) between Anthropological Origin and Image Paradigm, (Art&Religion, 3), Louvain – Walpole MA, 2015, passim. 3 Hendrik van der Loos, The Miracles of Jesus, (Supplements to Novum Testamentum, 9), Leiden, 1965, p. 10. 4 David Rhoads, Jesus and the Syrophoenician Woman. A Narrative-Critical Study, in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 62, 2, 1994, p. 343-375. 5 Hendrik Wagenvoort, Contactus (Contagio), in Reallexicon für Antike und Christen-

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tum. Sachwörterbuch zur Auseinandersetzung des Christentums mit der Antiken Welt, III, ed. Theodor Klauser, Stuttgart, 1957, p. 404-421. 6 Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel according to Luke, (I-IX). Introduction, Translation, and Notes, (The Anchor Bible), Garden City NY, 1985, p. 742-747. 7 John T. Cummings, The Tassel of His Cloak. Mark, Luke, Matthew-and Zechariah, in Studia Biblica 1978. II. Papers on the Gospels, (Journal for the Study of the New Testament. Supplement Series, 2), ed. E.A. Livingstone, Sheffield, 1980, p. 47-61, p. 51-52. 8 Graham H. Twelftree, Jesus the Miracle Worker, Downers Grove IL, 1999, p. 133.

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Zwischenraum Warburg felt mentally and academically torn between these poles and could think of no other way to dress this gaping wound than through Aufklärungsversuche in his inner dualistic and cosmogonic struggle.1 Aby Warburg writes about this cultural-schizophrenic oscillation: Urprägewerk in der Ausdruckswelt tragischer Ergriffenheit; → Pathosformeln sind “Dynamogramme”. His desire to bring order to → chaos gave rise to an Ikonologie des Zwischenraums: the space where the energy shoots between the polarities of the → Pathosformeln (Aby Warburg: Das Problem liegt in der Mitte).2 This leads to a so-called Distanzierung: a motto written on a → Fragmente writing from 1901: Du lebst und thust mir nichts’ – Ahnung von der Entfernung – Distanzierung. (“You live and do me no harm” – Presentiment of distance – Distantiation as basic principle).” “This Grundprinzip prescribes that he remains both near and distant from the perilous phenomena.”3

Georges Didi-Huberman, Science avec patience, in Images Re-vues (online), 4, 1, 2013, p. 1-29, p. 8. 2 Marianne Koos, et al. (eds.), Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne. Begleitmaterial zur Ausstellung im Hamburger Kunsthaus. 63 Bild- und Texttafeln, Hamburg – Munich, 1994, Tafel 32/32b. 1

3

Christopher Johnson, Metaphors, Memory and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images, Ithaca NY, 2012, p. 28; Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography, London, 1986, p. 71: “The deeper power in contradictions and in the subtle challenge that images could pose to the viewer’s own detachment. You live yet you do me no harm.”

The story of clay does not begin with the potter, since the material he throws on the wheel has already had to be dug out from the ground and kneaded so that it is sufficiently pure and of the right consistency. Before that, it was sedimented through the deposition of water-borne particles, over eons of geological time. And when does the story end? On leaving the pottery, the life of a pot has scarcely begun: think of all the hands or heads that will carry it and the substances it will hold until, cracked and discarded, it is returned to the earth. Even this does not rule out the possibility that it might, one day, be unearthed by an archaeologist and pieced together from the fragments, only for its life to continue as a museum exhibit. ‘Finishing’, in short, is but a moment in the life of the pot: a rite of passage, perhaps, where it crosses a threshold from preparation to employment. Elizabeth Hallam & Tim Ingold, Making and Growing. An Introduction, in Making and Growing. Anthropological Studies of Organisms and Artefacts, (Anthropological Studies of Creativity and Perception), eds. Elizabeth Hallam & Tim Ingold, Farnham, 2014, p. 1-24, p. 1-2.

Illustrations Fig. 1.

The Black stone of Paphos in Cyprus venerated as Aphrodite, example of so-called Argoi lithoi or baitulia: meteorites considered as divine acheiropoieta

Fig. 2.

Bronze amulet from a private collection in Asia Minor, representing the Haemorrhoïssa (emoroyc) on one side and the Hysteria motif (i.e. a head with seven protruding snakes) on the other. From: Jeffrey Spier, Medieval Byzantine Magical Amulets and Their Tradition, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 56, 1993, p. 25-62, p. 44, pl. 3d, no. 38

Fig. 3.

Annunciation as acheiropoieton, 13th century. Florence, Santissima Annunziata

Fig. 4.

Berlinghiero Berlinghieri (1175-1235), Virgin Hodegetria, ca. 1230. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fig. 5.

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), Annunciation, 1489. Florence, Uffizi

Fig. 6.

Fra Angelico (1395-1455), Annunciation, 1437-1446. Florence, Convent of San Marco

Fig. 7.

Fra Angelico (1395-1455), Annunciation, detail with boustrophedon, ca. 1433-1434. Cortona, Museo Diocesano

Fig. 8.

Cosimo Tura (ca. 1430-1495), Allegory of June, detail from the Hall of the Months frescocycle for Duke of Ferrara Borso d’Este (1413-1471), 1469-1470. Ferrara, Palazzo Schifanoia

Fig. 9.

Puccio di Simone (active ca. 1340-1362), Noli me tangere, 1340. Florence, Santa Trinita

Fig. 10.

Tafel 74 from the Bilderatlas. From: Martin Warnke & Claudia Brink, Aby Warburg. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, (Gesammelte Schriften. Aby Warburg, 2, II, 1), eds. Horst Bredekamp, et al., Berlin, 2008, p. 123

Fig. 11.

Image of the Bilderatlas at display in the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (K.B.W.) in Hamburg

Fig. 12.

Healing of Haemorrhoïssa, fluxus habens, Codex Egberti, Reichenau, 977-993. Trier, Stadtbibliothek, ms. 24, fol. 90v

Fig. 13.

Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572), Pygmalion, 1529-1530. Florence, Uffizi

Fig. 14.

Haematite amulet with the Healing of the Haemorrhoïssa, Egypt, Late Antiquity. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fig. 15.

Tomb of Verena of Zurzach, 1613, presumable after a 14th-century prototype. Münster, Zurzach, crypt

Fig. 16.

Creation of Adam, 12th century, mosaic. Monreale, Cathedral

Fig. 17.

Andronicus of Cyrrhus, Horologium (the so-called tower of winds). 2nd century or 50 bc. Athens

Fig. 18.

Chrysalis (owned by author)

358

illustrations

Fig. 19.

Antonio Canova (1757-1822), Psyche Revived by the Kiss of Eros, 1787-1793. Paris, Musée du Louvre

Fig. 20.

Attributed to Baccio Baldini (1436-ca. 1487), Punizione di Amore, copper engraving. Collection unknown

Fig. 21.

Desirée Palmen, Police in Jerusalem, 2005

Fig. 22.

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), The Birth of Venus, ca. 1486. Florence, Uffizi

Fig. 23.

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), Primavera, ca. 1482-1485. Florence, Uffizi

Fig. 24.

Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), Couples, 2007, gouache. Collection unknown

Fig. 25.

Banquet and Salome’s Dance, festal missal for Johannes de Marchello, abbot of the Premonstratensian abbey of St. Jean-sur-la-Celle, Amiens, Garnerus de Morolio (scribe), Petrus de Raimbaucourt (illuminator), 1323. The Hague, National Library of the Netherlands, Ms 78 D 40

Fig. 26.

The monumental cemetry of the Hertz family in Hamburg (Friedhof Ohlsdorfer) where Aby Warburg (1866-1929) was buried in 1929

Fig. 27.

Dancing Maenade, drawing after attic frieze. Paris, Musée du Louvre

Fig. 28.

Filippo Lippi (1406-1469), Annunciation, detail, ca. 1440. New York, Frick Collection

Fig. 29.

Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Echo and Narcissus, 1628. Paris, Musée du Louvre

Fig. 30.

Stefano Maderno (1576-1636), Saint Cecilia, 1600. Rome, Santa Cecilia chapel

Fig. 31.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1647-1652. Rome, Santa Maria della Vittoria

Fig. 32.

Giuseppe Sammartino (1720-1793), Dead Christ, 1753. Naples, Sansevero chapel

Fig. 33.

Early Christian sarcophagus with strigil motif. Marseille, Saint-Victoire

Fig. 34.

Lutwin, Eva und Adam, 15th century: Seth Meets the Guardian of Paradise and Receives a Twig. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindob. 2980, fol. 73v

Fig. 35.

Simone Martini (1284-1344), Annunciation, 1333. Florence, Uffizi

Fig. 36.

Gerard Leeu (ca. 1445/50-1492), The Souls in the Garden, Thoofkijn van devotien, 1487, Antwerp. Ghent, University Library, Res. 169, fol. 16

Fig. 37.

Enclosed Garden with medallion of the Mystical Hunt for the Unicorn (St. Augustine, the Virgin and Child with St. Anne, and St. Elizabeth), ca.  1530, various media: wooden sculptures, textile, wax, oil on wood (medallion). Mechelen (Malines), Gasthuiszusters

Fig. 38.

Gerard David (ca. 1460-1523), Virgin and Child, 1510-1523. Granada, Iglesia del Sacro Monte

Fig. 39.

Girolamo Savoldo (1480-1540), Noli me tangere, ca. 1524. London, National Gallery

Fig. 40.

Noli me tangere, Codex Egberti, Reichenau, ca.  977-993. Trier, Stadtbibliothek, codex 24, fol. 91

Fig. 41.

Vicino Orsini (1523-1584), Sacro Bosco with sleeping nymph, ca.  1552-1580. Bomarzo, Italy

illustrations

359

Fig. 42.

Drawing from a loom weight with grid/net/lozenge, Starcevo-culture (Bulgaria), 5800-5600 bc

Fig. 43.

Giotto di Bondone (1266/67-1337), Allegory of Inconstancy, grisaille, 1306. Padua, Cappella degli Scrovegni

Fig. 44.

Tafel 49 (Gebändigtes Siegerpathos (Mantegna). Grisaille als ‘Wie der Metapher’ Distanzierung) from the Bilderatlas. From: Claudia Brink & Martin Warnke, Aby Warburg. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, (Gesammelte Schriften. Aby Warburg, 2, II.1), eds. Horst Bredekamp, et al., Berlin, 2008, p. 90-91

Fig. 45.

Milieu of Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), Occasio e Poenitentia, ca. 1490-1510, grisaille. Mantua, Museo della Città nel Palazzo di San Sebastiano

Fig. 46.

Anapat grotto in Armenia, matriarchal reliefs

Fig. 47.

Symbols for Nintu and Hathor, Egypt. From: Alphons A. Barb, Diva Matrix, in The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 16, 1953, p. 193-238, no. 28c

Fig. 48.

Diagram of a warp-weighted loom by Ellen Harlizius-Klück

Fig. 49.

Mona Hatoum (born 1952), Recollection or installation with loom and hair, 1995. Ghent, S.M.A.K.

Fig. 50.

Vase with Athena and aegis, detail, Attica, ca. 480 bc

Fig. 51.

Knotted Berber Textile, Ait Bou Irshaouen, Morocco, ca. 1930. Provenance unknown

Fig. 52.

Terracotta Medusa, Etruscan, Santa Maria Capua Vetere, ca. 500 bc. Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale

Fig. 53.

Handprints in the Chauvet Cave, Dordogne, Magdalenian period (17 000-12 000 bc)

Fig. 54.

Sam Francis (1923-1994), Red Over Blue, Watercolor, 1952. Bern, Sammlung E.W.K.

Fig. 55.

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (il Guercino) (1591-1666). Vera icon and John’s head. Princeton University, Art Museum Guercino

Fig. 56.

The Meeting between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Hours of Catherine of Cleves, Utrecht, 1442-1445. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 917, fol. 216

Fig. 57.

Knotted Berber Textile as honeycomb, Rehamna, Morocco, 19th century. Provenance unknown

Fig. 58.

Iconoclast and Crucifixion, Chludov psalter, 8th century. Moscow, Historical Museum, fol. 67

Fig. 59.

Sedelius, The Sacrifice of Isaac, Carmen Paschale, ca. 814. Antwerp, Plantin-Moretus Museum, M 17.4, fol. 8r

Fig. 60.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Virgin of the Rocks, 1483-1486. Paris, Musée du Louvre

Fig. 61.

Kairos, relief following the Lysippos model, 2nd century bc. Turin, Museo di Arte Greco-Romana

Fig. 62.

Adriena Simotová, Was vom Engel geblieben ist, 1979/80

Fig. 63.

Tapestry Miniature with plaiting and spiral work, Book of Durrow, 675. Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS A. I. (58)

360

illustrations

Fig. 64.

Lace, produced in Burano

Fig. 65.

Laocoön group, 40-20 bc. Vatican City, Vatican Museums

Fig. 66.

Knotted Berber Textile, Bouja’d, Morocco, 19th century. Basel, Hersberger Collection

Fig. 67.

Christ of the Parousia with lozenge motif on curtain behind, 9th century. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Gr. 699, fol. 89r

Fig. 68.

Temple curtain with lozenge motif, miniature in Topographia Christiana, 11th century. Sinai, Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Cod. 1186, fol. 82v

Fig. 69.

Curtains of the holy land with lozenge motif, miniature in Topographia Christiana, 11th century. Sinai, Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Cod. 1186, fol. 79r

Fig. 70.

John Climacus (579-649), Holy Ladder, Mandylion with lozenge motif, Constantinople, ca. 1100. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Ross. Gr. 251, fol. 12v

Fig. 71.

Paul Klee (1879-1940), Bei der bewegten Form…, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, 1921-1922. From: Paul Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, Orginalmanuscript von Paul Klees erstem Vortragszyklus am staatlichen Bauhaus Weimar 1921/1922, ed. Jürgen Glaesemer, Basel, s.l. vol. Facsimile, p. 114, vol. Transcription, p. 62-63.

Fig. 72.

Mandylion, 14th century. Genoa, Armenian Church of Saint Bartholomew

Fig. 73.

Hans Memling (1430-1494), Veronica, ca.  1480. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art

Fig. 74.

Agnolo Gaddi (ca. 1350-ca. 1396), Faux marbre in the Annunciation, 1394-1395. Prato, Cathedral, Capello di Sacro Cingolo

Fig. 75.

Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (°1948), Eurydice series nr. 5, Oil and photocopy on paper mounted on canvas, 1992-1994. Courtesy of the artist

Fig. 76.

Sloth (Acedia), from The Seven Vices, engraving by Hieronymus Wierix (ca. 1553-1619) after Philips Galle (1537-1612), before 1612. New York, Metropolitan Museum

Fig. 77.

Mithraeum of Capua, Santa Maria Capua Vetere, built at the beginning of the 2nd century ad

Fig. 78.

ΜΝΗΜΟΣΥΝΗ-inscription

Fig. 79.

Rudolf Larisch (1856-1934), Per monstra ad sphaeram ex libris of Franz Boll (1867-1924), 1924

Fig 80.

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

Fig. 81.

Aby Warburg (1866-1929) wearing a Hemis kachina mask, Oraibi Arizona, May 1896

Fig. 82.

Serpent as lightning, reproduction of an altar floor, kiva ornamentation. From: Aby M. Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, transl. Michael P. Steinberg, Ithaca, NY – London, 1995, p. 3

Fig. 83.

Anonymous, 15th century panel from a bridal chest. Formerly Dayton Art Institute, location now unknown

above the entrance of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg at Heilwigstraße 116, Hamburg, 1925-1926

illustrations

361

Fig. 84.

Marie-Ange Guilleminot (°1960), Point commun. Vues de l’intérieur, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, March 1995

Fig. 85.

Bird’s nest (owned by the author)

Fig. 86.

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the sieve stands for the consonant kh or  , limestone relief from a tomb of the Old Kingdom of Egypt. Cairo, Egyptian Museum

Fig. 87.

Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) photographed by Bertram Park (1888-1972), 1921

Fig. 88.

José Ortiz Echagüe (1886-1980), Woman of Fez, ca. 1910. Navarra, Fundación Universitaria de Navarra

Fig. 89.

Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872-1934), photographic studies of veiled women, 1914-1918. Paris, Musée de l’homme

Fig. 90.

Studiolo of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) with goddess Gradiva, photographed by Edmund Engelmann, 1938

Fig. 91.

Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494), Nymph at the Birth of John, John the Baptist Cycle, 1485-1490. Florence, Santa Maria Novella

Fig. 92.

Cover of Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) Ninfa Fiorentina file, ca. 1900. London, Warburg Institute Archive, III.55.1

Fig. 93.

Chart regarding nymphs and their Nachleben from the Ninfa Fiorentina file compiled by Aby Warburg (1866-1929), ca. 1900. London, Warburg Institute Archive, III.55.1, fol. 118

Fig. 94.

Allegorical figure of Spring from Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) copy of J.W. Appell, The Dream of Poliphilio (Hypnerotomachia Poliphili), facsimile with 168 woodcuts, London, 1888. London, Warburg Institute Library

Fig. 95.

Frühling, notes by Aby Warburg (1866-1929) from the Ninfa Fiorentina file, ca. 1900. London, Warburg Institute Archive, III.55.1

Fig. 96.

Chart from the Hypnerotomachia, nymphs, notes by Aby Warburg (1866-1929) from the Ninfa Fiorentina file, ca. 1900. London, Warburg Institute Archive, III.55.1

Fig. 97.

The Owl in the Chauvet Cave, Dordogne, Magdalenian period (17 000-12 000 bc)

Fig. 98.

Filippo Lippi (1406-1469), Annunciation with shadow, detail, ca. 1440. New York, Frick Collection

Fig. 99.

Drawing of a Palestine woman while sifting. From: James Neil, Peeps into Palestine. Strange Scenes in the Unchanging Land Illustrative of the Ever-Living Book, London, ca. 1915, p. 55

Fig. 100. Skull of John the Baptist, Wallon de Sarton gave it to Richard de Gerberoy on December 17, 1206. Amiens, Cathedral Fig. 101.

Michelangelo (1475-1564), sculpture of Night, ca.  1520-1536. Florence, San Lorenzo, Medici chapel. From: Leonard Barkan, The Beholder’s Tale. Ancient Sculpture, Renaissance Narratives, in Representations, 44, 1993, p. 133-166, p. 149, fig. 4

Fig. 102. Francesco del Cossa (1430-1477). Annunciation, detail of snail, 1470-1475. Dresden, Gemäldegalerie

362 Fig. 103.

illustrations Rorschach Inkblot Method (RIM)

Fig. 104. Angerona, Roman bronze cult statue, Syria. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des médailles, inv. nr. Bronze 662 Fig. 105.

John’s head, on the south-facing outer wall of the west aisle, 13th century, Münster, Dom

Fig. 106. Medusa with protruding tongue, mask of the collection of Humbert de Superville (1770-1849). The Hague, National Library of the Netherlands, ms. CCXVII, fol. 37 Fig. 107.

Master of Saint Veronica, St Veronica with the Sudarium, ca. 1420. London, National Gallery, inv. no. NG687

Fig. 108. Late-medieval St Veronica on leather. Lower Saxony, Cistercian convent of Wienhausen Fig. 109. Saint Veronica, Cloister Marienbaum, 1501. Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. Theol. Lat. Quart. 19, fol. 178v Fig. 110.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Storm, chalk drawing, ca. 1513. London, The Royal Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Fig. 111.

Christ and the Haemorrhoïssa, mosaic, 14th century. Istanbul, Chora church

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Index of Names A Aalen, Sverre, 282 Abel, Eugenius, 7 Abram, David, 278-283 Adams, Douglas Q., 81, 292 Agamben, Giorgio, 31, 74, 76, 97, 175, 199, 223, 227, 265 Agobardus, 86 Ahmed, Sarah , 296 Aigremont (Dr) (pseudonym of Siegmar Schultze-Gallera), 175 Albert, Jean-Max, 331 Alberti, Leon Battista, 241, 301 Albertus Magnus, 75, 77 Alloa, Emmanuel, 55 Andritzky, Michael, 249, 251 Andronicus of Cyrrhus , 44 Anzieu, Didier, 295, 297 Appell, J.W., 262 Appuhn, Horst, 336 Arasse, Daniel, 81, 137 Arbesmann, Rudolph, 77 Arendt, Hannah, 29 Aristotle, 6, 29, 43, 47, 55, 99, 213, 309 Arndt, Hella, 327 Arnobius, 1 Arthur, James, 283 Athanasius of Alexandria, 67 Aubert, Jean-Jacques, 6 Augustine of Canterbury, 39 Augustine of Hippo, 86, 122-123, 181, 183, 186, 225 Ausonius (Decimus Magnus), 89 Avicenna, 219, 222 B Bachelard, Gaston, 65-66, 154-155, 247-248 Backman, Eugène L. , 69 Bächtold-Staubli, Hanns, 66, 244, 337

Baert, Barbara, 15-16, 41, 59, 85-86, 110, 123, 125, 131, 136, 164-165, 171, 175, 180, 187, 191, 195, 201, 222, 231, 239, 275, 312, 337, 350 Bätschmann, Oskar, 91 Baldini, Baccio, 48-50 Baradel, Virginia, 91 Barb, Alphons A., 2, 5-7, 154-155, 306 Barbieri, Giovanni Francesco (il Guercino), 169 Bardy, Gustave, 76 Barkan, Leonard, 300-301, 303 Barry, Fabio, 2, 111, 222 Bartal, Renana, 86 Barthes, Roland, 309, 319-320, 339 Baskins, Christelle L., 241-242 Batkin, Leonid, 187 Baudelaire, Charles, 103 Baumgart, Silvia vom , 257 Bawden, Tina, 183 Belting, Hans, 16-17, 86 Bender, Cora , 239 Benthien, Claudia, 14, 16, 86, 327 Berger, Anne-Emmanuelle, 83, 85 Berlinghieri, Berlinghiero, 10 Bernard of Clairvaux, 120 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 105-106 Bertozzi, Marco, 20, 71, 239 Betancourt, Roland, 218 Beyrer, Klaus , 251 Bezold, Carl, 238 Biale, David, 34 Bieri, Hanspeter , 222 Bieringer, Reimund, 23-24 Bing, Gertrud, 31, 50, 93, 100, 229-230, 233, 235, 271, Binswanger, Ludwig, 230-231, 239, 285, 315 Birksted-Breen, Dana, 297 Blandau, Richard J. , 6 Boariu, Dominic-Alain, 55 Boas, Franz, 315

388

index of names

Bodemer, Charles W. , 6 Böhme, Hartmut , 155 Bösel, Bernd, 99-100 Boll, Franz, 19-20, 234-235, 237-238 Borchmeyer, Dieter , 61 Bordignon, Giulia, 50 Borsetto, Luciana, 91 Borsook, Eve , 222 Botticelli, Sandro, 11, 48, 50, 56-58, 95, 260 Bourgeois, Louise, 62-64 Bozzo, Colette D., 218 Brandstetter, Gabriele, 253, 257 Branham, Joan R. , 34, 39 Bredekamp, Horst, 28, 58, 142, 150, 155, 167, 236 Brink, Claudia, 21, 28-29, 150, 236 Brock, Sebastian P., 122 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 7, 243-244 Brons, Franziska, 306 Bronzino, Agnolo, 36 Brotzman, Ellis R. , 245 Brunklaus, Franciscus A. , 25 Bruno, Giordano, 230, 235 Buckley, Thomas, 34 Bunge, Gabriel, 77 Buti, Lucrezia, 81 Butt, Audrey J. , 50, 279, 283 Butters, Suzanne B., 213, 215 Bynum, Caroline W. , 34, 171, 336 Bynum, Terrell Ward, 55

Cavallaro, Dani, 175 Cavalli-Björkman, Görel, 122 Cavanagh, Sheila L., 296 Cavendish, Margaret, 333 Cayleff, Susan E. , 6 Cazzato, Vincenzo, 142 Cha, Kyung-Ho, 239 Chastel, André, 227 Chernow, Ron, 231 Chevalier, Jean, 327 Chion, Michel, 136 Chrétien, Jean-Louis, 77 Cirlot, Juan Eduardo, 251 Clauss, Manfred, 231 Clifton, James, 54 Clover, Frank M. , 222 Coastoriadis, Cornelius, 125 Cohen, Shaye, 33 Colledge, Edmund, 336 Combs Stuebe, Isabel, 171, 327 Cook, Harold , 215 Corbier, Christophe, 257 Corrain, Lucia, 239 Corsepius, Katharina, 326 Cousinié, Frédéric, 89, 91 Cross, Frank L., 25 Crouzel, Henri, 320, 339 Cummings, John T., 351 Cumont, Franz, 229-230, 237, 239

C Cadbury, Henry J., 122 Caillois, Roger, 49, 76, 165 Calderoni Masetto, Anna Rosa, 218 Callistratus, 35, 37, 187 Calzona, Arturo , 2, 111 Campari, Roberto, 2, 111 Campbell, Patrick, 331 Cancik, Hubert, 100 Canova, Antonio , 47 Cassidy, Brendan, 210 Cassirer, Ernst, 71, 230-231 Catherine of Cleves, 172 Cavadini, J.C. , 350

D Dan, Alice J. , 6 D’Angelo, Mary R., 350 Daniélou, Jean, 76, 191 Dante Aleghieri, 103 David, Gerard, 129-130 Debarge, Louis, 69 Deblieu, Jan, 44 De Bolle, Leen, 297 de Clérambault, Gaëtan Gatian, 253, 255, 257 De Coene, Karen, 123 de Fraine, Jean, 77, 191 De Kesel, Marc , 64 de Labriolle, Pierre, 191

index of names Delaney, Janice, 6 Delange, Yves, 61 Deleuze, Gilles, 59, 110, 296 Dell’Acqua Boyvadaoğlu, Francesca, 55 Demasure, Karlijn, 131, 136, 287 De Mits, Trees, 2, 55, 111, 221 Derrida, Jacques, 136, 195, 287 de Souzenelle, Annick, 76, 83, 85-86, 120-121, 123, 187, 221, 289 Desreumaux, Alain, 217 de Superville, Humbert, 326 de Vaan, Michiel, 115 de Vleminck, Jens, 296 de Vries, Jan, 292 de Zegher, Catherine, 7, 223 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 31, 49, 57-59, 61, 95, 103, 105, 109-110, 125, 145, 149, 151, 193, 195, 221-222, 227, 239, 257, 275, 285, 299, 309, 313, 315, 336, 337, 339, 353 Diers, Michael, 58 Dinter, Annegret, 191 Djebar, Assia (pseudonym of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen), 293-294 Dobschütz, Ernst von, 218 Dörrie, Heinrich, 191 Domeño, Asubción, 257 Dooley, Brendan, 20 Dorfman, Eran, 296 Dotti, Ugo , 227 Douche, Sylvie, 257 Driscoll, Kári, 91 Dürer, Albrecht, 305 Duncan, Isadora , 252-253 Dutoit, Thomas , 195 E Edgerton, Samuel Y., 327 Edwards, Calvin R., 91 Egenhofer, Sebastian, 147, 331 Eickhoff, Hajo, 16 Eliade, Mircea, 141-142, 282 Elkins, James, 214-215 Emmanuel, Maurice, 253 Endres, Johannes, 58

389

Engelmann, Edmund, 256 Ephrem the Syrian, 86, 117, 122 Erftemeijer, Jan, 69 Ettlinger, Helen S., 305-306 Eusebius, 7 Evagrius Ponticus, 75 Evans, Craig A. , 33 F Fabre, Jean-Henri, 61, 165 Failler, Angela , 296 Fairbanks, Arthur, 37 Falkenburg, Reindert, 127, 129, 131 Farrington, Oliver C., 2 Fédida, Pierre, 231 Fehrenbach, Frank, 185, 187 Fenichel, Otto, 257 Fenves, Peter, 211 Ferenczi, Sandor, 287 Ferrarinus, Michael Fabricius, 301 Fischer, Ernst, 331 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 171 Fischman, Susan, 54 Fitzmyer, Joseph A., 351 Flach, Sabine , 239 Flanders, Sara , 297 Flavius Merobaudes, 219, 222 Fobelli, Maria L., 1-2, 111 Fonrobert, Charlotte, 33-34 Formanek, Ruth, 6 Forster, Kurt W. , 20, 50 Fra Angelico, 13-14 Francesco del Cossa, 19, 304-305 Francis, Sam, 168 Frank, Thomas, 25 Franklin, Jill A. , 2, 111 Freedberg, David, 2 Freud, Sigmund, 63, 171, 225, 227, 239, 253, 256, 283, 295-296, 306, 336 Frömming, Urte U., 54-55 Fussel, Stephan, 71

390

index of names

G Gaddi, Agnolo, 220 Gaignebet, Claude, 307, 321, 323 Galioto, Erika D., 296 Galitz, Robert , 231 Galle, Philips, 226 Gandelman, Claude, 175 Garnerus de Morolio, 68 Gastaut, Henri, 327 Gauthier, Claudine, 69 Gehring, Ulrike, 339 Geissmar-Brandi, Christoph, 171 Gell, Alfred, 197 Gelles, Benjamin, 292 Gély-Ghedira, Véronique, 241 Geml, Georg, 86 Genthe, Hermann, 343, 347 Geoffrey of Vendôme, 25 Gerasimchuk, Ivetta, 44 Geyer, Paul, 7 Gheerbrant, Alain, 327 Ghelardi, Maurizio, 71, 239 Ghirlandaio, Domenico , 57, 258-259 Giacchetti, Giovanni, 171 Gibeault, Alain , 297 Gibson, James J., 191, 347 Gillet, Joseph E., 76 Giotto di Bondone, 148-149 Girard, René, 79, 313 Giraud, Yves, 136 Glaesemer, Jürgen , 212 Glazov, Gregory, 327 Gockel, Bettina, 231 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 61, 203 Göttler, Christine, 241 Goldhill, Simon, 37, 191 Gombrich, Ernst H. , 20-21, 48, 50, 60, 97, 205, 210, 257, 259, 265, 271, 353 Gottlieb, Alma, 34 Gough, Kathleen M., 257 Gracq, Julien, 76, 227 Green, Monica, 6 Greenblatt, Stephen, 76 Gregory of Nazianzus, 67

Gregory the Great, 39, 75, 118, 122-123 Griffero, Tonino, 142-143, 181, 183, 191 Griffin, Susan, 6 Grossman, David, 313, 339 Guattari, Félix, 59, 110 Guercino (see Barbieri, Giovanni Francesco) Guilleminot, Marie-Ange, 243-244 Gunkel, Hermann, 282 Gysembergs, Hubert, 69 H Haberland, Karl, 76 Hagman, George, 64 Hahn, Alois, 137, 294 Hallam, Elizabeth , 214-215 Hamburger, Jeffrey F., 336 Hanson, Ann E. , 6 Harlizius-Klück, Ellen, 156, 164, 174-175, 201 Harrison, Barbara G., 201 Hartnell, Jack , 66 Harvey, Susan A., 122 Hauer, Thomas, 249, 251 Hecker, Justus F.C. , 69 Hendrick, Yves, 296 Hensel, Thomas, 239 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 83, 85, 203, 257 Herodotus, 159, 165 Hersant, Yves, 227 Heslop, T.A. , 2, 111 Hesychius of Alexandria, 47 Hieronymus Wierix, 226 Hildegard of Bingen, 41, 75 Hill, Donald E., 191 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 100 Hoffmann, Annette, 15 Hoffmann-Krayer, Eduard, 244 Hollander, John, 242 Holmyard, Eric J., 222 Homer, 159, 219, 269, 319 Horowitz, Maryanne C. , 6 Horstmanshoff, Manfred, 337 Houppermans, Sjef , 64 Howard, William Guild, 204 Hsu, Elizabeth, 345, 347

index of names Huber, Gabriele, 257 Hübner, Wolfgang, 20 Hüe, Denis, 69 Hüppauf, Bernd, 51, 54 Hurst, Rachel A.J. , 296 Huston, Nancy, 244 Hustvedt, Siri, 93 Hutcheon, Linda, 85 I Iarocci, Bernice, 91 Immisch, Otto, 45, 50, 177 Ingold, Tim, 66, 191, 197, 213-215, 319-320, 342, 346-347 Iogna-Prat, Dominique, 25 Irigaray, Luce, 127, 129, 131, 133, 136, 287 J Jacamon, Sophia M., 77 Jacks, Lawrence P., 118, 123 Jacquart, Danielle, 6 James, Elizabeth , 69 Jay, Martin, 133, 136 Jensen, Wilhelm, 253 Jerome, 119, 123, 325, 327 Johannes de Marchello, 68 John Cassian, 75-76 John Chrysostom, 117, 122 John Climacus , 209 John Damascene, 9, 15, 179 Johnson, Christopher, 60, 100, 230-231, 239, 353 Jolles, André, 48, 259 Jonas of Orléans, 39 Jonas, Hans, 122 Jones, Ernest, 347 Jones, Lesley D. , 6 Josephus Blancanu (alias Giuseppe Biancani), 89, 91 Julian of Norwich, 333, 335-336 K Kaempfer, Wolfgang, 137 Kamper, Dietmar, 16, 86, 294 Kapustka, Mateusz , 16, 147, 218, 297, 331

Kear, Adrian, 331 Kemp, Wolfgang, 309-310 Kepler, Johannes , 235 Kessler, Herbert L. , 15, 180, 205, 210, 218 Kinet, Mark , 64 King, Helen, 251 Kircher, Athanasius, 91 Klauser, Theodor , 351 Klee, Paul, 212-213, 215 Klein, Yves, 167 Klibansky, Raymond, 77 Knapp, Bettina L., 346-347 Königseder, Karl, 231 Kohl, Jeanette, 136 Koos, Marianne, 59, 195, 353 Korff, Gottfried, 231 Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 327 Krauss, Rosalind, 147, 248 Krischel, Roland, 210 Kristeva, Julia, 227 Kroos, Renate, 327 Krüger, Klaus, 171 Kruse, Christiane, 15 Küchler, Susanne , 310 Kuhlmann, Dörte, 143 Kuhn, Reinhard, 76 Kunze, Donald, 54 Kuryluk, Ewa, 155, 218, 336 Kusters, Liesbet, 337 L Lacan, Jacques, 64, 283, 296 Ladwig, Perdita, 95 Lafrance, Marc, 296 Lagaay, Alice, 394 Lalleman, Pieter J., 175 Lambert of Saint-Omer, 119 Lambrechts, Wim , 136 Lamers, Han, 50 Landersdorfer, Simon, 77 Larisch, Rudolf, 234 Larsow, Ferdinand, 7 Larue, Anne, 74, 76-77, 227 Laruelle, François, 87, 136

391

392

index of names

Leach, Neil, 53, 55 Leemans, Johan, 110, 164 Leeu, Gerard, 126-127 Lemay, Helen, 6, 34 Lemoine-Luccioni, Eugénie, 257 Leonardo da Vinci, 184-185, 344 Leone, Massimo, 49 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim , 203 Leupin, Alexandre, 283 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 16, 320 Lewis, Linda L. , 6 Leyerle, Blake, 6 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha, 7, 64, 223-224 Lippi, Filippo, 57, 80-81, 288 Livingstone, E.A. , 351 Loewenstein, Joseph, 91 Louis, Eleonora, 171 Low, Chris, 345, 347 Lupton, Mary J. , 6 Lurker, Manfred, 41, 49 Lutwin, 116 Luyster, Robert, 187, 282-283 Lys, Daniel, 245, 278, 283 Lysippos, 35, 188 M Macchi, Giulio, 54 Macho, Thomas H., 273, 307 Maderno, Stefano, 104-105, 109-110 Maehler, Herwig, 50 Mallory, James P., 81, 292 Mandeville, Desmond C., 222 Mantegna, Andrea, 149-151 Marazia, Chantal, 231 Marchetti, Paolo, 347 Marías, Javier , vii 64, 312, 341 Marin, Louis, 11-13, 15-16, 90-91 Marino, Giambattista, 90-91 Martini, Simone, 121 Matzke, John E., 157, 164 Maude, Henry Evans , 249, 251 Maude, Honor, 249, 251 Mazzucco, Katia, 239 McBrewster, John, 175

McClellan, William H., 283 McCracken, Peggy, 34 Meier, Christel, 7 Meissner, Bruno, 155 Meissner, Franz-Joseph, 100 Melion, Walter , 310 Mellinkoff, Ruth, 25 Memling, Hans, 218 Ménard, Philippe, 76 Menke, Bettine, 222, 336 Merkelbach, Reinhold, 229-231 Mersenne, Marin, 90-91 Métraux, Alexandre, 239 Meyers, Amy , 215 Michaud, Philippe-Alain, 48, 50, 253, 257, 265 Michelangelo, 300, 302 Michelet, Jules, 61, 154, 247-248 Michels, Karen, 21, 230 Milgrom, Jacob, 175 Miller, Frederic P., 175 Miller, Joseph H., 37 Miller, Patricia Cox, 320, 339 Mitchell, John, 2, 111 Moghissi, Kamran, 6 Mondzain-Baudinet, Marie-José, 15, 180, 195, 312 Morello, Giovanni , 210 Mori, Gioia, 54 Morrison, Toni, 243-244 Morsink, Johannes, 6 Mosco, Marilena, 136 Müller, Rebecca, 136 Münz-Koenen, Inge , 239 Mulder-Bakker, Anneke, 143 Mussini, Massimo , 2, 111 N Nagy, Piroska, 25 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 137, 339 Neil, James, 290 Neimeyer, Robert A. , 64, 371 Neumann, Erich, 41 Neuser, Kora, 44 Newcomb, Franc J., 283

index of names Newton, David E. , 44 Nicephorus, 9 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 31 Nordenfalk, Carl, 122 Nürnberg, Rosemarie, 25 O O’Driscoll, Joshua, 2, 111 Oettinger, April, 260-261, 265 Ong, Walter J., 84, 87, 294 Onians, John, 2, 55, 111 Onians, Richard B., 37, 50, 108-110, 141, 143, 157, 164-165, 191, 245 Origen, 319 Orlinsky, Harry M., 187, 282 Orr, Myriam, 315 Orsini, Vicino, 140-141 Ortiz Echagüe, José, 253-254 Otto, Rudolf, 142-143 Ouaknin, Marc-Alain, 16, 320, 339 Oursel, Paul Masson, 155 Ovid, 35, 37, 85-86, 134, 191, 241, 287 P Palazzo, Eric, 85, 122-123 Palazzo-Bertholon, Bénédicte, 85 Palmen, Desirée , 51-53 Panofsky, Dora, 91 Panofsky, Erwin, 77 Pardo, Mary, 136 Park, Bertram, 252 Parkin, David, 122, 267-268 Parret, Herman, 15 Patterson, Barry, 142 Paul the Silentiary, 1, 109 Paulinus of Nola, 122 Pausanias, 1-2 Payer, Pierre J., 39 Pelzer, Brigitte, 131 Penrose, Roland, 327 Pentcheva, Bissera V. , 2, 85, 111 Perella, Nicolas J., 76 Peters, John P., 187, 282 Petrarca, Francesco, 225, 227

Petrus Berchorius, 7 Petrus de Raimbaucourt, 68 Pfisterer, Ulrich, 242 Phillips, G.L., 24 Picinelli, Filippo, 305-306 Pierre d’Ailly, 131 Pil, Lut, 2, 55, 111, 221 Pillinger, Renate, 231 Pindar, 46 Plato, 29, 45, 84, 99, 134, 177, 195, 342 Plutarch, 50, 174 Pointon, Marcia, 6 Pokorný, Julius, 115, 123, 191, 289, 292, 347 Pomeroy, Sarah B. , 33 Portmann, Maria, 55 Poussin, Nicolas, 88-90 Pressly, William L., 165 Prioux, Évelyne, 37 Pross, Wolfgang, 204 Prosser, Jay, 296 Pseudo-Dionysius, 221 Puccio di Simone, 22, 24 Pythagoras, 134 R Race, William H. , 50 Ramsey, Boniface, 76 Randall, Lilian M.C., 306 Rappl, Werner, 50 Raulff, Ulrich, 239 Rée, Jonathan, 83, 85 Regardie, Israel, 123 Regnault, Lucien, 76 Reil, Johann Christian , 29 Reimers, Brita , 231 Rembrandt, 21 Resnick, Irven M. , 7 Retz, Franz von , 305-306 Rhoads, David, 351 Rice, Ellen E., 153, 155 Richter, Simon, 203-204 Rieff, Philip, 306 Riegler, Richard, 49 Ritner, Robert K. , 6

393

394 Robertson, Archibald T., 165 Roccasecca, Pietro, 142 Roch, Martin, 122 Roller, Franziska, 251 Rooijakkers, Gerard, 69, 131, 175, 195 Rorschach, Hermann, 314-315 Rosenthal, Joel T., 6, 34 Rousseau, Vanessa, 245 Rufinus, 319 Russel, Mark A., 257 S Salimbeni, Ventura, 90 Sammartino, Giuseppe, 105, 107 Sanders, James A. , 33 Sartori, Paul, 337 Savoldo, Girolamo , 132-136 Saxl, Fritz, 77, 230-231, 285 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 204 Schechner, Richard, 257 Schmitz, Hermann, 143, 191, 303 Schneede, Marina, 164 Schneider, Birgit, 218 Schneider, Helmuth, 100 Schöllgen, Georg, 25 Schoell-Glass, Charlotte, 21, 230 Scholten, Clemens , 25 Schrader, Moniker, 203 Schüttpelz, Erhard , 239 Schulz, Martin, 16, 86 Schwarzenberg, Erkinger, 222 Schyns, Désirée, 294 Sedelius, 182 Seigel, Jerrold E., 227 Seitter, Walter, 257 Semon, Richard Wolfgang, 97, 310 Severi, Carlo, 231 Shaeffer, Claire B., 175 Shaw, Georges Bernard, 257 Sidgwick, Emma, 108, 110, 337, 351 Siegert, Bernhard, 331 Simotová, Adriena, 190 Sinisgalli, Rocco, 242 Skinnebach, Laura K., 123

index of names Smeyers, Maurits, 69 Smit Sibinga, Joost, 24 Smith, Mark M., 122 Smith, Pamela H. , 215 Smith, Wesley D., 211 Socrates, 74, 211 Sontag, Susan, 293-294 Sorkin, Jenni, 312 Spier, Jeffrey, 3-4, 6 Spiller, Jürg, 215 Spitzer, Leo, 265 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 294 Sprung, Joacim, 59 Stacey, Jackie , 296 Stanesco, Michel, 227 Steinberg, Leo, 86, 137, 239 Steiner, Deborah Tarn, 37, 191 Stevenson, Christine , 2, 111 Stich, Sidra, 167 Stimilli, Davide, 20-21, 29, 231, 233, 238-239, 285 Stoichita, Victor I., 55, 191, 221-222, 297 Strauss, Walter L., 306 Streisand, Marianne , 239 Strozzi, Giovan Battista , 302 Suckale, Robert, 326 Summers, David, 58 Suthor, Nicola , 171 T Tarnow, Ulrike, 24-25 Tellenbach, Hubertus, 77 Tertullian, 5, 7 Theissen, Gerd, 175 Theodore of Tarsus, 39 Thomas Aquinas, 75 Thomasset, Claude, 6 Thulin, Oskar, 327 Thys, Walter, 265 Todorov, Tzvetan, 204 Toth, Emily, 6 Treml, Martin, 95 Trilling, James, 2 Tura, Cosimo , 18 Twelftree, Graham H., 351

index of names V Valière, Jean-Christophe , 85 Van Belle, Gilbert, 24 Vanden Branden, Jean-Pierre, 136, Vandenbroeck, Paul, 2, 6-7, 55, 69, 111, 131, 155, 165, 175, 177, 195, 221-222, 342 van der Loos, Hendrik, 351 van der Vliet, Nicolaas, 7 Vandome, Agnes F., 175 van Huisstede, Peter, 239 van Liebergen, Léon, 69 van Loo, Sofie, 63-64 Van Segbroeck, Frans , 24 Van Vlierberg, Jozef, 123 Van Winden, Jacobus C.M., 187, 282 Vasiliu, Anca, 55 Vasseleu, Cathryn, 136 Veith, Ilza, 6 Verhaeghe, Paul, 63-64 Verhoeven, Cornelius, 175, 183 Viller, Marcel, 76 Vinge, Louise, 241 Vinken, Barbara , 222, 336 Virgil, 219 Vitale, Maria , 54 Vitruvius, 108 Volz, Paul, 187, 282 Vorholt, Hanna, 86 W Wagenvoort, Hendrik, 111, 323, 351 Walsh, James, 336 Warburg, Aby M., 19-21, 28-29, 31, 48, 50, 57-59, 61, 70-71, 93, 95, 101, 105, 149, 190, 193, 199, 229-231, 233, 235, 237-239, 253, 256-257, 259266, 271, 275, 285, 309, 353

395

Warnke, Martin , 21, 28-29, 150, 236 Warwick, Alexandra, 175 Webb, Ruth, 69 Wedepohl, Claudia, 20 Weigel, Sigrid, 95, 265 Weiser, A. , 66 Weitzmann, Kurt, 217 Wenzel, Horst, 16 Wenzel, Siegfried, 77 White, Hugh G. Evelyn, 91 Whitekettle, Richard W. , 34 Wick, Alexis, 287 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 203, 257 Wittmann, Barbara, 58 Wömmel, Kristin, 100 Wolf, Gerhard, 15, 58, 169, 171, 210, 218, 241 Wood, Charles T., 34, 39 Worell, William H., 76 Wulf, Christoph, 16, 86-87, 137, 293-294, 327 Wyschogrod, Edith, 84, 87, 136 Y Yeats, William Butler, 329 Yelles-Chaouche, Mourad, 165 Z Zakravsky, Catharina, 257 Zancan, Marina , 91 Ze’evi, Dror, 283 Zeuxis, 51 Zischka, Ulrike, 66, 81, 201, 342 Zwahlen, Sara M. , 222

Index of Subjects A Acedia (see Melancholy) Acheiropoieton (see also Hands), 1-2, 9, 110, 209 Amulet, 3-7, 38, 249 Angel, 5, 9-16, 23, 119-120, 169, 185-187, 217, 302, 305 Annunciation, 8-16, 80-81, 86, 119-121, 135, 221, 305 Archetype, 6, 17, 29, 31, 35, 41, 74, 83, 105, 110-111, 117, 134, 136, 161, 243, 278, 283, 343 Astrology, 18-20, 235, 238 Athempause, 21 B Back, 22-25, 39, 163 Bees (see Honeycomb) Beheading, 5, 27, 67 Besonnenheit, 28-29, 99 Bilderatlas, 28, 30-31, 50, 149-150, 231, 235-236, 285 Blood, 3, 5, 7, 32-34, 39, 50, 108, 143, 157, 165, 217, 219, 245, 311, 333, 335-336, 349-350 Blush, 35-37, 50, 100, 181, 189, 191 Body, 3, 5, 9, 24-25, 33, 38-39, 41, 43, 45, 50, 57, 67, 76, 84, 90, 99, 105, 107, 117-118, 133-134, 141, 157, 164, 167, 173-174, 177, 179, 193-194, 203, 205, 218, 243, 245, 247-248, 280, 282, 287, 289, 295-296, 317, 320, 325, 331, 333, 336, 339, 343, 345, 349-350 Boreas (see also Wind), 43, 345 Boustrophedon, 14 Bowl/jar/pitcher, 40-41, 161, 174, 269 Breath/breathe, 15, 21, 42-44, 46, 50, 83, 99, 108, 118, 185-187, 245, 248, 278-283, 317, 325, 341, 343, 345-346 Butterfly (see also Moth), 45-50, 61, 151, 164, 183, 249, 315, 341

C Camouflage, 51-55, 90, 107 Capricious, 56-58, 164, 278 Cecilia, 104-105, 107, 109 Chaos, 59-60, 105, 223, 251, 277, 282, 335, 353 Chrysalis, 45-46, 61, 151, 315 Chthonic art, 62-64, 195 Cocoon, 48, 53, 61, 151 Comb, 41, 177 Conversa, 23-25, 134 Corner, 27, 65-66, 165, 189, 248, 343 D Dance, 67-69, 72, 74, 99, 125, 189, 193, 253, 259, 261, 279, 341-343 Death (see also Life), 27, 35, 45, 50, 53-54, 59, 67, 70-71, 105, 107, 109, 111, 118-119, 165, 194, 203, 235, 243, 245, 259, 291, 315, 323, 325, 336 Demon, 3, 5, 65, 74, 75, 110, 181, 238, 267, 343 Démon de midi/zenith, 72-77, 141, 181, 189, 227 Désir mimétique, 79 Detail, 7, 50, 57, 80-81, 305, 309, 350 Diaphanos, 55 E Ear/hearing (see also Senses; Sound/speech), 9, 13-15, 43, 67, 83-87, 90, 118, 122, 133-136, 141142, 154, 169, 186-187, 217, 219, 267, 281, 326, 341, 346, 349 Echo (see also Narcissus), 53, 83-85, 88-91, 141, 241, 287 Ecstasy, 51, 53, 67, 99-100, 105-107, 169, 171, 309 Einfühlung (see Empathy) Ekphrasis, 57, 89-90, 109-110, 269 Emotion, 35, 93, 99, 191, 194, 227, 303, 339 Empathy/Einfühlung, 95 Enclosed Gardens, 127-128, 247

398

index of subjects

Engramm, 97, 256, 309-310 Entheos, 35, 95, 99, 101, 179, 211, 229 Enthusiasm, 99-101, 139, 179, 193, 211 Erinnerungsspuren, 100-101, 305 Euros (see also Wind) , 43 Eye (see also Senses; Sight), 23-25, 45, 67, 81, 83-84, 89, 109, 154, 181, 186, 292, 315, 319, 325, 329, 333

Head/face, 1-4, 9, 27, 35, 46, 67, 75, 85, 105, 122, 136, 153, 157-159, 163-165, 169-171, 183, 186, 209-210, 259, 279, 299, 319, 325, 333, 335-336 Hearing (see Ear) Hem, 39, 161, 165, 172-175, 259, 261, 292, 349, 350 Holy Spirit, 9, 69, 76, 84, 289, 305 Honeycomb/bees, 45, 47, 119, 176-177, 269 Hysteria, 3-4, 7, 110, 253

F Face (see Head) Fertility, 41, 43, 76, 81, 122, 127, 143, 153, 157, 159, 161, 163, 205, 210, 282, 289 Fireflies, 103 Flower, 76, 117, 119-121, 129, 241, 247, 289, 341 Folds, 57, 104-111, 173, 243, 253, 260-261 Fragment, 48, 113-115, 127, 173, 249, 259 Fragrance/scent (see also Odor/smell), 15, 43, 116-123, 129, 267

I Iconogenesis/Incarnation, 9, 11-12, 14, 120, 135136, 178-180, 187, 201, 221, 333 Impurity (see Purity) Incantation (see also Magic, Spell), 3, 5 Incarnation (see Iconogenesis) Interruptions & Transitions, 16, 24, 51, 74, 97, 149, 154, 161, 174, 181-183, 189, 278, 317, 321, 349 Interval, 12, 21, 183-187, 189, 195, 307, 321 I-skin (see Skin-Ego/Moi-Peau)

G Gallop!, 125, 193 Garden, 12, 24, 110, 117, 119, 126-131, 247-248 (Garden of ) Paradise, 119, 127, 129, 131, 207, 287 Gaze, 23-24, 35, 57, 125, 127, 132-137, 175, 185-187, 193-194, 299, 311, 319, 333 Gender, 17, 75, 139, 247, 253, 343 Genius loci, 105, 140-143, 189, 269 Glimpses, 145, 243 Gnosis (see also Knowledge), 119 Gorgon, 3, 5, 7, 159, 164, 307, 321 Grid, 146-147, 205, 217, 248, 291, 319, 331 Grisaille, 148-151 Grotto, 133, 141, 152-155, 187, 219, 229

J Jar (see Bowl) Johannesschüssel, 169, 325 John the Baptist, 5, 7, 27, 67, 69, 84, 164, 169, 186, 258-259, 298-299, 325

H Haematite, 5, 38 Haemorrhoïssa (see Woman with an issue of blood) Hair, 3, 7, 57, 156-165, 173, 201, 247, 262, 279, 296297, 341 Hands (see also Acheiropoieton/Non manufactum), 1, 9, 33, 83, 90, 133, 136, 166-168, 174, 179, 181, 186, 189, 231, 249, 269, 325, 341, 349

K Kairos, 21, 35, 149, 157, 161, 163-164, 188-191, 305, 317, 341 Khōra, 193-195, 311 Knot, 15, 65, 81, 162, 176, 189, 196-197, 201, 206, 243, 249, 251, 341-343 Knowledge (see also Gnosis), 45, 64, 83, 84, 99, 103, 118-119, 127, 129, 133-134, 136, 213-214, 223, 235, 238, 253, 267, 278-280, 309 L La scienza senza nome, 199 Lace, 173, 193, 197, 200-201, 291 Laocoön, 202-204 Life (see also Death), 43, 45, 47, 50, 53-54, 93, 108-109, 119-120, 122-123, 127, 133, 143, 153, 161, 177, 181, 189, 213-215, 230, 245, 247, 249, 278280, 287, 301, 315, 325, 333, 343, 345

index of subjects Lily, 12, 76, 117, 120, 122, 205, 289 Litholatry, 1 Lozenge, 146-147, 205-210 M Magic (see also Incantation, Spell), 3, 5, 46, 53, 65, 81, 87, 137, 153, 161, 173, 185, 225, 275, 281, 341, 349 Magnet, 211 Making/materiality, 9, 13, 63, 120, 123, 161, 179, 212-215, 217-218, 267, 319, 343, 345 Mandorla, 107, 109 Mandylion, 9, 169, 209, 216-218 Marble, 1-2, 5, 53, 85, 105, 107, 109-110, 194, 219222, 311 Marbre faux, 1, 220-221 Mary , 9-16, 41, 67, 76, 81, 84, 86, 120, 129, 135, 155, 186-187, 210, 217, 289, 305 Mary Magdalene, 23-25, 133-137, 155, 164 Materiality (see Making) Matrix/matrixial, 7, 64, 85, 127, 147, 223-224, 299, 313 Melancholy/acedia, 53, 69, 74-76, 99, 105, 225227 Mimesis, 7, 35, 51, 53, 84-85, 134, 221 Mithras, 228-231, 237 Mnemosyne, 21, 28, 31, 50, 95, 150, 230, 232-233, 236, 253, 309 Monstrum, 234-239 Moth (see also Butterfly), 47-48 Mouth (see also Senses; Taste/tasting), 13, 83-85, 169, 186, 231, 280, 281, 321, 325 N Narcissus (see also Echo), 53, 81, 83, 85, 88-91, 240-242, 287 Navel, 41, 73, 81, 243-244, 342 Nepesh, 108-109, 245 Nest, 65, 177, 201, 246-248, 341 Net, 59, 64, 110, 146, 177, 201, 205, 210, 249-251, 291 Neurosis, 252-257

399

Ninfa Fiorentina/Nymph, 45, 48, 57, 61, 73-74, 85, 97, 105, 107, 110, 140-143, 153, 219, 225, 241, 253, 258-265, 269, 301-302, 315 Noli me tangere, 22-25, 132-137 Non manufactum (see Acheiropoieton; see also Hands) Nose (see also Odor/smell; Senses), 5, 120-122, 292 Notos (see also Wind) , 43 Nymph (see Ninfa Fiorentina) O Odor/smell (see also Fragrance/scent; Nose; Senses), 15, 76, 117-120, 122-123, 127, 267-268, 278, 287, 289, 311, 345 Owl, 269 P Paragone, 105, 110, 149, 179, 201, 301 Pathosformel, 31, 48, 57, 59, 95, 101, 107, 193, 259260, 271, 296, 353 Pause, 97, 181, 183, 189, 273, 307 Pitcher (see Bowl) Pneuma (see also Spiritus), 1, 13, 43, 57, 85, 120, 143, 179, 245, 281 Psychomachia, 190, 275 Purity/impurity, 33, 39, 120, 291 Pygmalion, 35-36, 134, 191, 203 R Ruach (RWH), 1, 11, 13, 21, 83, 100, 122, 179, 186, 245, 277-283 S Sapientia (see Wisdom) Sarcophagus, 107-109, 305 Saturn-Vater, 285 Scent (see Fragrance) Sea, 59, 109-110, 201, 219, 277, 287, 291 Senses (see also Sight; Smell; Sound; Taste; Touch), 15, 43, 84, 100, 117-120, 122-123, 129, 131, 133-134, 136, 169, 186, 287, 326 Shadow, 35, 73, 76, 110, 169, 194, 217, 230, 288289, 311, 313, 345

400

index of subjects

Shroud (see Sudarium) Sieve, 41, 125, 177, 217, 249-250, 290-292, 295-296 Sight/Seeing (see also Eye; Senses), 2, 15, 23-24, 63, 83-84, 90, 107, 109, 118, 122, 133-134, 136137, 169, 180, 186, 195, 267, 346 Silence, 15, 74, 84, 86, 105, 110, 181, 183, 189, 219, 225, 227, 229, 293-294, 301, 307, 321, 341 Skin-Ego/Moi-Peau, 193, 295-297, 309, 331 Skull, 169, 298-299 Sleep, 46, 50, 74, 105, 107, 110, 119, 140-141, 219, 225, 300-303 Smell/smelling (see Odor/smell; see also Nose; Senses) Snail, 304-306 Solstice, 111, 307, 321, 323 Sophrosyne, 29, 309-310 Sound/speech (see also Ear/hearing; Senses), 11, 13-15, 69, 83-85, 90, 107, 117, 134, 136, 142, 159, 186, 241, 267, 279-281, 283, 293, 301, 319, 321, 325-326, 345-346 Spell (see also Incantation, Magic), 87, 137 Spirit (see also Pneuma), 1, 43, 46, 50-51, 65, 120, 141, 143, 147, 179, 245, 267, 277-283, 289, 327, 345 Stain, 5, 7, 167, 169, 217, 311-312, 333, 336 Stone, 1-2, 5, 35, 119, 159, 169, 219, 221, 229, 269, 302 Strigil, 107-110 Stumbling block, 313 Sudarium/shroud (see also vera icon), 105, 107, 169, 217, 332 Symmetry, 203, 314-315 T Taste/tasting (see also Mouth; Senses), 117-119, 127, 171, 325 Tearing, 16, 109, 115, 317 Teichoscopia, 319-320 Textile, 5, 45, 85, 105, 110, 128, 147, 157, 159, 161-162, 164, 169, 173, 176, 193-194, 197, 205-206, 209210, 217, 253, 269, 294, 311, 333, 349, 350

Threshold, 12-13, 24, 64, 120, 154, 183, 197, 209, 280, 282 Throat, 3, 6, 108, 245, 293, 307, 321-323, 325 Tongue, 13, 169, 324-327 Touch/touching (see also Senses), 15, 17, 24, 33, 35, 39, 43, 93, 118-119, 127, 129, 131, 133-134, 136137, 179, 203, 267, 279, 287, 295, 346, 349-350 Transitions (see Interruptions & Transitions) Tree of Life, 119, 121 Trellis, 147, 329, 331 U Uncanny space, 331 Uterus (see Womb) V Vagina, 5, 41, 165, 177 Vera icon/Veronica, 105, 169, 170, 209, 217-218, 332-337 Void, 277, 293, 313, 339 W Weaving, 85, 147, 157, 161, 201, 205, 291-292, 294, 319, 345 Web, 177, 201, 293, 341-342 Wind (see also Boreas; Euros; Notos; Zephyros), 1, 11-13, 43-44, 57, 76, 85, 114, 120, 123, 157, 161, 186, 189, 267-268, 277-283, 289, 317, 319, 341-342, 343-347 Wisdom/sapientia, 16, 119, 245, 269, 317 Woman with an issue of blood/Haemorrhoïssa, 3-5, 7, 32-33, 38-39, 165, 348-351 Womb/uterus, 3, 5-7, 41, 64, 67, 69, 83-84, 87, 131, 134, 135, 155, 174, 177, 187, 223, 249, 287, 321, 326 Z Zabâ, 33 Zenith (see Démon de midi) Zephyros (see also Wind) , 43, 57 Zhuangzi, 49 Zwischenraum, 21, 57, 59, 149, 151, 275, 353

Colophon Studies in Iconology accepts original and interdisciplinary contributions in the broader field of art theory and art history. The series addresses an audience that seeks to understand any aspect and any deeper meaning of the visual medium along the history of mankind in the fields of philosophy, art history, theology and cultural anthropology. Studies in Iconology is founded by Professor Dr. Barbara Baert, KU Leuven – Illuminare. Centre for the Study of Medieval Art: www.illuminare.be Editorial board: Iconology Research Group The lemmas are extracts from Barbara Baert’s contributions to Studies in Iconology and the following publications: Jar and Comb. Verena of Zurzach as an Example for the Limits and the Possibilities in Iconology, in Annual of the Antwerp Museum, 2006, p. 9-25. Navel. On the Origin of Things, Ghent, 2009. Caput Johannis in Disco. {Essay on a Man’s Head}, (Visualising the Middle Ages, 8), Leiden, 2012. 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 Göttler, Leiden, 2013, p. 111-151. The Woman with the Blood Flow (Mark 5:24-34). Narrative, Iconic, and Anthropological Spaces, (Art&Religion, 2), Louvain – Walpole MA, 2014. {Arm} {Head} {Cut}: Framing as Decapitation. The Casus of St. John in Early Modern Painting, in Framings, eds. Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Slavko Kacunko & Hans Körner, Berlin, 2015, p. 211-233. Pneuma and the Visual Arts in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity, (Art&Religion, 5), Louvain – Walpole MA, 2016.

Pentecost and the Senses. A Hermeneutical Contribution to the Visual Medium and the Sensorium in Early Medieval Manuscript Tradition, in Preaching after Easter. Mid-Pentecost, Ascension, and Pentecost in Late Antiquity, (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 136), eds. Richard W. Bishop, Johan Leemans & Hajnalka Tamas, Leiden, 2016, p. 346-370. (with the collaboration of Hannah Iterbeke), Revisiting the Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries (Fifteenth Century Onwards). Gender, Textile, and the Intimate Space as Horticulture, in Textile. Journal of Cloth and Culture, 15, 1, 2017, p. 2-33. Around the Sieve. Motif, Symbol, Hermeneutics, in Textile. Journal of Cloth and Culture, 2018 (online). Special thanks to Lizzy van Rijswijck for the translations and to Stephanie Heremans and Rita Corstjens for editing.

Studies in Iconology

 1. Barbara Baert, Nymph. Motif, Phantom, Affect. A Contribution to the Study of Aby Warburg (1866-1929), 2014, viii-134 p. 2. Barbara Baert, Late Medieval Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries. Contributions to Gender and Artistic Expression, 2015, viii-112 p. 3. Barbara Baert, Locus Amoenus and the Sleeping Nymph. Ekphrasis, Silence and Genius Loci, 2016, viii-118 p. 4. Barbara Baert, Nymph. Motif, Phantom, Affect. Part II. Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) Butterflies as Art Historical Paradigms, 2016, x-105 p. 5. Barbara Baert, Kairos or Occasion as Paradigm in the Visual Medium “Nachleben”, Iconography, Hermeneutics, 2016, viii-133 p. 6. Barbara Baert, In Response to Echo. Beyond Mimesis or Dissolution as Scopic Regime (With Special Attention to Camouflage), 2016, viii104 p. 7. Barbara Baert, Revisiting Salome’s Dance in Medieval and Early Modern Iconology, 2016, viii-92 p. 8. Joseph Imorde, Carlo Dolci. A Refreshment, 2016, viii- 108 p. 9. Adi Efal-Lautenschläger, Habitus as Method. Revisiting a Scholastic Theory of Art, 2017, vi-110 p. 10. Barbara Baert, About Stains or the Image as Residue, 2017, x-118 p. 11. Larry Silver, Rembrandt and the Divine, 2018, xiii-106 p. 12. Dominique Bauer, Place – Text – Trace. The Fragility of the Spatial Image, 2018, viii-109 p. 13. Barbara Baert, What about Enthousiasm? A Rehabilitation. Pentecost, Pygmalion, “Pathosformel”, forthcoming