Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image 9781501725692, 1501725696

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PAsT LooKING

ALSO BY MICHAEL ANN HOLLY

Panofsky and tbe Foundations ofArt History (1984) Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, co-editor with Norman Bryson and Keith Moxey (1990) Iconografia e Icon alogia ( 199 2) Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, co-editor with Norman Bryson and Keith Moxey (1994)

PAsT

LooKING

Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image

MICHAEL ANN HOLLY

Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright© 1996 by Cornell University .All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in '1 review, this hook, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage Tlouse, 512 K1st State Street, Ithaca, New York r4R5o. First published 1996 by Cornell Cniversity Press Library of'Crmgress Catalogiog-iu-Publication Data Holly, Michael .\nn. Past looking: historical imagination and the rhetoric of the image I Michael •\nn Holly. p.

em.

Inclmlcs hibliographic1l references and index. ISBJ',; 978-o-8or4-3209-5 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-o-8or4-83o2-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Visual communication in art. 2. Art-Philosophy. Historiography. I. Title. N7r.H63 1996 70r-dc2o

3· Art-

Printed in the United States of America Cornell L1niversity Press stri1 es to use em·ironmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website :lt www.corncllpress.cornell.eclu. Cloth printing 10 987654 21 Paperback printing 1098765432

To Alexander (I977-I99 2) In the past, in the present

ARcHAISCHER ToRso APoLLos Wir kannten nicht sein unerhortes Haupt, darin die Augenapfel reiften. Aber sein Torso gliiht noch wie ein Kandelaber, in dem sein Schauen, nur zuriickgeschraubt, sich halt und glanzt. Sonst konnte nicht der Bug der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen der Lenden konnte nicht ein Lacheln gehen zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug. Sonst stiinde dieser Stein enstellt und kurz unter der Schultern dursichtigem Sturz und flimmerte nich so wie Raubtierfelle; und brache nicht aus allen seinen Randern aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben andern. Rainer Maria Rilke, r9o8

ARcHAIC ToRso OF APoLLO We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise, this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

CoNTENTs

List of Illustrations Preface I

Telling a Picture

2

Picturing Cultural History

3 Looking into the Past 4 Imagining the Baroque

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I

29

64 91

5 Writing Leonardo Backwards

II2

6

1 49

Witnessing an Annunciation

7 Reading Critical Theory Index

170

209

ILLUSTRATIONS

Matteo de'Pasti, portrait medallion of Alberti, I446-5o 2. Design of Alberti's perspective diagram 17 I.

3· Jacques Lacan, diagram of the gaze, I973 4· Adaptation of Lacanian diagram 21

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5· Jan Vredeman de Vries, perspective diagram, I6o4 6. Adaptation of Lacanian diagram 23

22

7· Carpaccio, Arrival of Saint Ursula, I495 33 8. Masaccio, Adoration of the N!agi, I426 37 9· Leonardo da Vinci, study for Adoration of the Magi, begun I48I

39

Raphael, Betmthal of the Virgin, I 504 40 I r. Raphael, School of Athens, I 5 ro 44 I2. Fra Angelico, Saint Lawrence Distributing Alms to the Poor, I447-50 IO.

51

I 3· Master of Catherine of Cleves, "Saint Lawrence," Hours of Catherine of Cleves, ca. I440-45 52 I4. "The Hunt of the Unicorn (The Unicorn Defends Himself)," Unicorn Tapestries, late fifteenth century 54 I5. Leonardo da Vinci, "Storm over Valley in Foothills of Alps," ca. I5oo

55

I6. "Animals Boarding Noah's Ark," stained glass window, Chartres Cathedral, thirteenth century 6o I 7. "La Belle Verriere," stained glass window, Chartres Cathedral, ca. I I 50 61

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ILLUSTRATIONS

I 8. Giorgione, Sleeping Venus,

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506-8

70

I9. Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas, r656 20. Edouard Manet, Olympia, I863 72

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2 r. J can-Baptiste Simeon Chardin, The Young Schoolmistress, I 740 22. Gustave Courbet, The Corn Sifters, I855

73

74

23· Piero della Francesca, The Flagellation of Christ, ca. I450 77 24. Gustave Courbet, The Encounter ("Bonjour, iW. Courbet''), I854

84

25. Peter Blake, The A1eeting; or Have a Nice Day, Mr. Hackney, I98I-83 26. Rene Magritte, The False Min01; I928

85

88

7. Titian, Venus of Urbina, I 53 8 89 z8. Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, I495-97/98

2

29. Jacopo Tintoretto, The Last Supper, I594

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94

30. Giambattista Tiepolo, The Last Supper, I745-50 95 3 r. Peter Paul Rubens, The Raising of the Cross, I6 10 105 3 2. Giovanni Battista Gaulli (Baciccio), Triumph of the Saered Name of Jesus, I676-79 106 3 3. Raphael, The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple, I 5 I 2 I 07 34· Leonardo, "Study of Stairs and Horses," ca. r48r I I4 35· Leonardo, "Sketch of Armenian Mountains," ca. 1497 36. 3 7. 38. 39· 40· 41.

Leonardo, Leonardo, Leonardo, Leonardo, Leonardo, Leonardo,

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5

"Deluge Study," ca. r5r5 u6 "Study for a Sleeve," ca. I 510- 13 II7 "Studies of \Vater Impeded by an Obstacle," ca. I 507-9 "Star of Bethlehem and Other Plants," ca. I 508 1 I 9 "Studies of Emblems," ca. I 508 12I "Foetus in \Vomb," ca. I5IO-I2 Izz

42. Leonardo, "Foetal Calf in Utero," ca. I5o6-8 4 3· Book of the Dead, Egyptian

I I

8

I24

I 25

44· Freud's desk, London rz7 45· Isis Suckling Infant Horus, Egyptian 128 46. Vulture, Egyptian, ca. 7I6-332 B.C.E. I29 47· The Rosetta stone I3o 48. Leonardo, ]'vfona Lisa, ca. I505-14 rp 49· Leonardo, Virgin, Child, and Saint Anne, ca. I 508

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32

50. Leonardo, "Cartoon of Virgin, Saint Anne, and Children," ca. I 50 I 51. Egyptian goddess Mut I35 52. "Vulture" in drapery I36

I

33

ILLUSTRATIONS

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53· Leonardo, "Drawing of Male Head Illustrating the Practice of Painting," 1488-90 140 54· Leonardo, detail of landscape background from Mona Lisa, ca. 150514 I45 55· Leonardo, "Deluge over a Rocky Landscape," ca. 1513-r5 147 56. Leonardo, "Studies of Images Passing through Apertures; Coloured Lights; Human Figure in Motion and Light and Shade," I 508 I48 57. Robert Cam pin, Merode Triptych of the Annunciation, ca. 142 5 I so 58. Detail of Merode Triptych, Donors in Garden I 53 59· Detail of Merode Triptych, The Annunciation r 54 6o. Detail of Merode Triptych, Joseph in His Workshop

155

To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return .... "The things I see, see me just as much as I see them."

Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (quoting Valery)

PREFACE

Past Looking explores-sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally-the ways in which past works of art actually work at prefiguring the shape of their subsequent histories. It has become a commonplace in poststructuralist theory to argue that the interpretation always betrays the presence of the interpreter. While disputing neither the intellectual efficacy nor the ideological power of that perspective, this book uses poststructuralist revisions to return to the other side of the equation. My focus is on early modern works of visual art and their rhetorical roles in seductively legislating the kinds of tales told about them by a few classic cultural histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Burckhardt's synchronic history of the Italian Renaissance, Wi:ilfflin's exemplification of the baroque, Panofsky's exegesis of disguised symbolism in northern Renaissance painting, Schapiro's and Freud's disagreement over the meaning of Leonardo's art, among others. The primary issue is one of a productive correspondence of rhetorical ideologies between image and text. I argue by way of specific historical examples that representational practices encoded in works of art continue to be encoded in their commentaries. Holding fast to the conviction that we can consider this question of reciprocity between work of art and historian only in the wake of poststructuralist reconsiderations of the relationship between objecthood and subjectivity, I explore in the first and last chapters a range of contemporary theoretical perspec-

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PREFACE

tives, from current debates in the philosophy of history and reception theory to the phenomenological and deconstructive impulses of literary criticism. Why do I do this? Because some stories about the past seem to "match" their artifacts and periods better than others, even if the time is clearly past for believing that either visual imagery or empirical historiographic practices can yield up an unmediated access to a world of objective phenomena. In this book I propose to explore the ways in which the narrative coherency of late medieval, Renaissance, and baroque art history has been constructed and the routes through which those explanations have come to carry conviction. How do works become intelligible to those who write about them? \Vhere does the process of historiographic invention begin? If indeed it is the case that a dynamic understanding of interpretation demands that we as art historians come to terms with what we do to the work, it is equally useful to ask what the work of art does to us: how it sets us (its scholars) up as spectator-historians to see things in certain rhetorically specific ways according to its own logic of figuration. In writing about the past, we may be striving to look at its visual traces without realizing that those works of art are also forever looking back at us.

A John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship enabled me to do much of the reading and writing for this book during 1991-92. I am grateful not only for its support but also to the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities in Los Angeles, which provided my research home during that period, as well as to the University of Rochester, which periodically offered sabbatical leave. I am not sure if a book based on principles of reception theory confronts either an easier or a more difficult task than most intellectual labors in acknowledging the influence of its chapters' various audiences over a period of five or six years: in journal essays, in conference presentations, in formal lectures, in the classroom, and in discussions with friends. But I certainly recognize the challenging role a variety of listeners and readers played in the refining of its arguments and visual examples and, consequently, cannot help but feel indebted enough to mention many in print. Some parts of these chapters have appeared in different guises elsewhere, and I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to reprint. Chapter 2 combines aspects of two different essays, "Burck-

PREFACE

XV

hardt and the Ideology of the Past," History of Human Sciences I (Summer I988): 47-73, and "Cultural History as a Work of Art: Jacob Burckhardt and Henry Adams," Style 22 (Summer 1988): 209-I8. Chapter 3 appeared under the title "Past Looking" in Critical Inquiry I 6 (Winter I 990): 37 I -96 and was reworked in substantially different versions in Theory between the Disciplines: Authority, Vision, Politics, ed. Martin Kreiswirth and Mark Cheetham (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, I990), and Vision and Textuality, ed. William Readings and Stephen Melville (London: Macmillan, I995); aspects of the argument were also delivered as lectures at the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at Rochester in I989 and the conference on "Antiquity and Antiquity Transumed" held at the University of Toronto in the spring of I994· Chapter 4 had varying incarnations in both Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Maxey (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, I994), and Europdische Barock-Rezeption, ed. Klaus Garber (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, I99I). The major argument of chapter 5 was delivered as a lecture at the New York Institute of Fine Arts in December I990 and the "Word and Image" conference in Zurich in August of that year, and was published as an essay in New Literary History 23 (Winter I992): 173-211. Chapter 6 was published in several earlier versions in very different forms in Kunstlerischer Austausch: Akten des XXVIII Internationalen Kongresses for Kunstgeschichte, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, I992); in Iconografia e iconologia (Milan: J aca Books, I 993); and in The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis, ed. Mieke Bal and Inge Boer (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, I994). Its main argument was presented in lectures at the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz (spring I992), Hobart and William Smith Colleges (spring I994), and the Art Historical Research Institute at the University of Poznan in Poland (winter I995). Finally, chapter 7, like chapter I, owes its greatest intellectual debt to the graduate students in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, with whom I read and discussed a range of issues in two seminars, "The History of the History of Art" and "Critical Theory in Art History." Several independent studies with Natasha Goldman, Michael Maranda, Laura Quinn, and Charles Wright encouraged me both to read more and to be accountable for larger issues, and the expert research services of three teaching assistants, Mario A. Caro,

XVI

PREFACE

Lise Creuer, and E. ]. Hernandez helped me to push the project through to its completion. Had it not been for the challenges and perspicacity of all of the graduate students in Visual and Cultural Studies, this book would have had a much narrower theoretical focus. In addition, I want to thank Random House, Inc., for permission to reprint the Rilke poem that prefaces the book (from Selected Poet1y of Rainer }lfaria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell, 1982), as well as Daisy Hu of Art Resource and Nicole Tetzner of the Royal Library at Windsor for persisting with me in locating the most apt images for illustrating its arguments. And if it were not for the good and wise editorial services of Bernhard Kendler and Carol Betsch of Cornell University Press, the book would be far more ragged than I hope that it has turned out to be. In the end, it is the encouragement and interest of a circle of colleagues who are also friends that matters most to the vitality of a sustained intellectual commitment, as well as the project's-and its author's-ability to endure. In this respect I express my appreciation to Elena Ciletti, Dan Ewing, Toni Flores, Peter Burke, Douglas Crimp, Grace Seiberling, Norman Bryson, Stephen Melville, Stephen Bann, Frank ()'Laughlin, Ernst van Alphen, David Rodowick, Wolfgang Kemp, Richard Turner, James Crenner, Svetlana Alpers, Kaja Silverman, Griselda Pollock, David Carrier, UJny Vidler, Emily Apter, Mark Cheetham, Ken Gross, Howard Singerman, George Dimock, Alice Mansell, and Kim Kopatz. And then, especially, my profound indebtedness to three friends in particular: Mieke Bal, whose depth of understanding in all things scholarly and private has been a constant; Janet Wolff, whose wit, sensibility, and lively companionship continue to animate my daily activities; and most of all Keith Moxey, whose solace and strength have kept me secure and intellectually engaged throughout the most unsettling of times. Finally, my acknowledgment to the unending support of my parents, Peggy and George Mueller. And to my children, Lauren and Nicholas, who have endured the past four years with me, full of mourning, full of remembering. This book is dedicated in sweet and loving memory to their brother, my son Alexander. MrcHAEL ANN HoLLY

Rochester, New York

PAsT LooKING

I TELLING A PICTURE

Painting possesses a truly divine power in that not only does it make the absent present (as they say of friendship), but it also represents the dead to the living many centuries later. LEON-BATTISTA ALBERTI,

On Painting

It is not guilty pride but the ceaselessly reawoken instinct of the game which calls forth new worlds. HERACLITUS

Images that can no longer be seen, only imagined, have been part of the history of art for a very long time. Indeed, one of the founding myths of mimesis in art history, Pliny's ancient parable of the grapes of Zeuxis-so naturalistically painted that actual birds flew down to peck at the apparently succulent fruit-achieved its mythic status precisely because its realist claims could not be corroborated by the existence of any such work of art. 1 As the central genre of art historical writing from which all other narratives must historiographically radiate, ekphrasis derives its poetic power from more than this apparent paradox. Even if the work is present, translation from paint to prose, no matter how dexterous, is never "without remainder." 2 Inevitably, the sheen on a grape or the twist of a vine will go without telling. Loss is that which gets found through the act of writing. Like photographyinvented in the same century, as Roland Barthes has so poignantly I. Pliny, Natural History 35.64-66. On the role of this anecdote, see Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 1; and Stephen Bann, The True Vine: On Visual Representation and Western Tradition (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 32· 2. Bann, True Vine, p. 28.

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PAST LOOKING

noted-historical scholarship confirms death "while trying to preserve life." 3 Melancholy, though often unacknowledged, is the constant companion of the historian. When I was a small child, a long-lost grandmother presented me with a picture book of Greek myths. One illustration-I recollect it now as the Garden of the Hesperides-was especially captivating because of the way in which its enchantment was visibly encircled by its terror. Three lovely young maidens in gauzy ivory-colored dresses linked hands and danced around an apple tree heavy with its autumnal bounty. Yet all was not as idyllic as it first appeared in that paradisiacal garden. Winding around the trunk of the majestic tree was an even more imposing, though immobile, serpent, whose shiny emerald scales reflected the golden light of the late afternoon. Especially unsettling was the fact that the pretty girls seemed so unaware of the serpent's menacing presence, dancing as they were on dainty feet dangerously close to its treacherous coils. Of course, had I read the myth rather than just looked at it, I would have learned that the serpent, Ladon, had been sent by the gods to watch over both the Tree of Hera and the dancing Hesperides, whose presence in the garden was choreographed to deny mortals access to the golden apples and ambrosia springs of immortality. Never mind; Heracles would shortly arrive on the scene to perform his most arduous eleventh labor, and unrest would soon enough disturb the pleasures of the pastoral. 4 The fragility of the past, and the perilousness of paradise I once upon a time equated with it, has been matched a thousand times over by the impulse to recollection animating the work of the great idealist philosophers of history. Hegel, for example, invokes similar mythopoeic imagery to illustrate both the loss of time and the potential for historical recovery in an allegory from The Phenomenology of Mind: [The works of the Muses] are themselves now just what they are for us-beautiful fruit broken off the tree; a kindly fate has passed on those works to us, as a maiden might offer such fruit off a tree. Their 3. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: :'-Joonday Press, 198r), p. 92. For a poetic analysis of the alliance of a number of cultural artifacts designed to defY time in the nineteenth century, see Stephen Bann, The

Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation ofHistm:v in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Hunce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 4· The myth is related in Yves Bonnefoy, A1ytbologies, trans. Wendy Doniger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1:490.

TELLING A PICTURE

3

actual life as they exist is no longer there, not the tree that bore them, not the earth, and the elements, which constituted their substance, nor the climate that determined their constitutive character, nor the change of seasons which controlled the process of their growth. So too it is not their living world that Fate preserves and gives us with those works of ancient art, not the spring and summer of that ethical life in which they bloomed and ripened, but the veiled remembrance alone of all this reality. Our action, therefore, when we enjoy them is not that of worship, through which our conscious life might attain its complete truth and be satisfied to the full: our action is external; it consists in wiping off some drop of rain or speck of dust from these fruits, and in place of the inner elements composing the reality of the ethical life, a reality that environed, created and inspired these works, we erect in prolix detail the scaffolding of the dead elements of their outward existence,-language, historical circumstances, etc. All this we do, not in order to enter into their very life, but only to represent them ideally or pictorially (vorstellen) within ourselves. But just as the maiden who hands us the plucked fruits is more than the nature which presented them in the first instancethe nature which provided all their detailed conditions and elements, tree, air, light, and so on-since in a higher way she gathers all this together into the light of her self-conscious eye, and her gesture in offering the gifts; so too the spirit of the fate, which presents us with those works of art, is more than the ethical life realized in that nation. For it is the inwardizing in us, in the form of conscious memory (Er-Innerung), of the spirit which in them was manifested in a still external way.s Hegel clearly thought that historical memory could cmpathetically labor to counteract the distancing powers of time. Not that it could recall the historical mind, the work of art, the event in all the plenitude of its own contemporary significance; but he believed that in the act of recollection itself something of the past would survive and connect itself meaningfully with the present. And in this faith nineteenthcentury historiography shares something else with the ideology of early photography: the conviction that, as Barthes puts it, "the photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was 5. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, zd rev. ed., trans.]. B. Baillie (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967), pp. 753-54·

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PAST LOOKING

there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; ... the photograph of the missing being ... will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze." 6 Seeing well becomes the prelude to historical understanding. Ekphrasis, as it struggles to describe that which can no longer be seen in a variety of ways, can itself serve as an allegory for the larger project of history writing. The vanished past cannot be reclaimed, but the desire to speak images, tell pictures about it, persists: acts of recollection motivated by a spectrum of literal and metaphorical unseen rays of light which it will be my mission here to register. Like the light emanating from a distant star, what is present has come from a place and time that still resonates, and what is past is not necessarily forgotten. Such phenomenological sentiments, however, can take us only so far-as far as the point in the story where the serpent languorously coiled around the tree of golden apples raises its bright head and reminds us of the dangers entailed in the suggestion of too easy a mediation between past and present. Perhaps there are other sinister creatures lurking in the garden; the maiden may have had another recipient for her fruit in mind; the apples are not ours for the taking. And even if they are, as Zeuxis' birds soon found out, their taste may well be bitter. "An appreciation of the transience of things, and the concern to rescue them for eternity," as Walter Benjamin perceived it, "is one of the strongest impulses in allegory."7 Making strange the ancient myths and the past they allegorize is quite likely the only meaningful course of intellectual action open to the contemplative historian at the end of the twentieth century.B Yet might it not also be possible that the perva6. Barthes, Camera Lucida, pp. 8o-81. 7· \Valtcr Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 22 3· In "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism," Craig Owens points out that this impulse is also what animates photography: "As an allegorical art, then, photography would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image" (Beyond Recognition: Representation, Pou•n: and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson et al. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 56). 8. See Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures ~ew Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), P· 115: "A first task in the historical perception of a picture is therefore often that of working through to a realization of quite how alien it and the mind that made it are .... 1o make the familiar strange and the strange familiar [isj ... a fair critical programme."

TELLING A PICTURE

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sive poststructuralist activity of defamiliarizing the past could also serve as a prelude to renewing contact in unforeseen ways? Unsettlement, though often unwelcome, rarely arrives without excitement. Once it visits itself upon us, even intellectually, it is difficult to return securely to who we were or the certainties of what we once thought about. The recent rethinking of the discipline of art history has generated a palpably electric charge throughout the field. The shapes of critical theory that have arisen in the metamorphosing guises of Marxism, feminism, semiotics, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis-more appropriate than images from Greek mythology would be those visually transforming creatures unleashed by the technological wizardry of today's science fiction films-have caught us up and transported us into territories which we only half recognize, lunar lands crisscrossed by paths on which only a few adventurers have left their traces. Being of sound scholarly mind, most of us who think and write about art consequently find ourselves in the grip of a predicament. Those objects art historians have written about since the nineteenth century, those material works of art that have emerged from the shadowy past, have come along on the odyssey. But the strange extraterrestrial light that illuminates them compels us now to speak of them in ways that seem little connected to what we once thought they were or even to who we once thought we were in writing about them. At the end of the twentieth century, it seems that there are two radically different courses of professional action open to us. Either we dig our heels into the unfamiliar terrain and resolutely refuse to acknowledge that we have genuinely been expelled from the garden where the timeless work of art reigns supreme, or we take those objects as they appear before us in the shimmering atmosphere of the new world and use their visible deconstruction as the occasion to remap our own disciplinary universe. The first choice is the easier one, for it lets us deal with concepts that have the air of familiarity about them: the archive, the artist, the masterpiece, the monograph, the medium-indeed all of the categories that have been expertly intertwined over the past century to constitute the very idea of art historical information and the scholarly "work" that must be done with it. The professional security that comes from knowing that there are fixed objects and tested methodologies for making sense of them was, in fact, flourishing on the floor above the room in which I first mused over this dilemma. The Getty Art History Infor-

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mation Program in Santa Monica is only the most glamorous technological example of traditional art historical confidence at work. Well funded as it is, scores of computers (in the quiet of the library I was certain I could hear them whirring) go to work daily on the problems of "how obstacles to access and barriers between realms of knowledge can be removed, and of how research practices can be made more efficient,"9 thereby facilitating the exchange of digitized facts and automated resources about the past and its art. An updated version of the archive, the computerized documents offer the scholar the reassurance that "research" is something one can actually "work" at, if only he or she accepts the categories (i.e., the inclusions, the exclusions) through which information has been processed, either in its origins or in its recollections. No doubt about it, there is historical "stuff" still to be put in order; there are actual "facts" about artists, workshops, themes, genres, sites, materials, and subjects still to be discovered. Business as usual is still business. The lure of the archive is strong and its challenges to the scholar unrelenting. Yet the arrangement and rearrangement of information is not the only route to understanding, as the other choice has made stridently clear. To what use can we put the conviction that art history, in the wake of poststructuralism, can no longer be confidently construed as a study of monuments, styles, artists, periods, and so on? The new critical art history explicitly championed theory at the expense of empirical research when it fi~st began to focus on the history, context, and politics of artistic production. On the shelves of the Getty Library proper (the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities), a scholar can find essays and books aplenty to reflect on the role of visual representation in the general deconstmctionist and ideological debates which are engaging thinkers across disciplinary boundaries into more far-ranging discussions of cultural and social significance. The issue has become less one of how history can serve art than how art can serve theory and history as a basis of cultural criticism and revisionist social practice. 10 The connections between the arts, the process of figuring forth material images, the interaction between theory and critical practice, the investigation of the gendered embedding and social historicity 9· Elizabeth Bakewell et a!., Object, Image, Inquiry: The Art Historian at Work (Santa ,\1onica: Getty Art 1 fistory Information Program, r 988), p. ix. ro. Cf. Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), pp. 4o, 49·

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of vision all serve to question the art object's traditional status as a "still" image. Yet the crucial quandary will not go away. If images refuse fixity, how are we going to identify and catalogue them and, by extension, write their history and tell their pictures? To put it reductively, the choice seems to be between the objectivity of the objects of art or the subjectivity and subjecthood of their interpreters.11 While being far more sympathetic intellectually to the political commitments that animate the second position, I regard it as an act of misguided hubris to dismiss the "abjectness" of the first. It is on that side of the equation that my attention first falls. Lest that attentiveness have the potential to propel me back into the middle of the nineteenth century or cast me as a "moderate" at the end of the twentieth, I want to consider the ways in which the binary opposition between subject and object can be regarded as perpetually unfixed, as historically "on the move." In short, I want to explore something of what it is we might be doing when we talk about pictures. What are the ligatures or the "rays" that hold our later interpretations in contact with original works of art? Why have there been times, asks Francis Haskell, "when seeing has appeared to provide a more useful way of understanding the past than reading"? 12 Such an inquiry need not necessarily route us through linguistic theory or confine us to an exercise in reception aesthetics, although we will also traverse that ground. In contributing to the shifting of art historical focus from an attentiveness to the intrinsic workings of objects of art to their later historical reception, I want to chip away at the walls that separate the domains of verbal and visual signification, the distinctions between past and present. I hope that my concentration on the rhetoric of argumentation in historical narratives might offer a way of addressing a crucial problem in late twentieth-century historiography: the question of "adequacy," or at the very least "suitability," in historical representation. We all recognize the challenges that postmodernist thinkers have levI r. Cf. Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, I985), pp. I 37-38. "The objectivist historian places the past in the 'logocentric' position of what Jacques Derrida calls the 'transcendental signified.' It is simply there in its sheer reality, and the task of the historian is to use sources as documents to reconstruct past reality as objectively as he or she can .... The relativist simply turns objectivist 'logocentrism' upsidedown. The historian places himself or herself in the position of 'transcendental signifier' that 'produces' or 'makes' the meaning of the past. And in the semiotic variant of relativism, the past does indeed seem submerged in all-pervasive semiosis." 12. Francis Haskell, Histo·ry and Its Images: An and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 3·

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eled at the modernist faith in historical reconstruction. Yet their critiques have very often taken aim at the psychological and political inadequacies of historical interpretations rather than at what might be the actualizing "legitimacy" of their accounts. The question is left unsettled why some stories of the past seemingly "match" their artifacts and periods better than others, even if the time is certainly past for believing that both visual imagery and philosophical language ever offer unmediated access to the world of phenomena. In his 1969 essay "Is Painting a Language?" Barthes asks two haunting questions to which I hope this book responds: "What is the connection between the picture and the language inevitably used in order to read it-i.e., in order (implicitly) to write it?" and "Is not this connection the picture itself?" I3 I aim to return the discussion provoked by paintings (especially of the Renaissance) to the paintings themselves to see how they have legislated what we can say about them; how they have seductively "set us up" as spectator-historians to say certain things in certain rhetorically persistent ways ..My project is not inconsistent with the phenomenological project of eidetic reduction, whose "special cognitive procedure," according to the work of Edmund Husserl, is to concentrate essentially on an intellectual observation of the object and its workings. But it also opens onto questions that defy the underlying motive of phenomenology: "to see the given object and nothing else at all." 14 My agenda is both more ecumenical and more circumscribed. In showing how a few of the classic cultural histories of our art historical heritage have been iconically prefigured by the works of art they set out to describe, I call into question the possibility of ever keeping separate the discursive and the visual. Our treks through the various theoretical terrains of reception theory, historiography, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, and the philosophy of history, among others, should reinforce the perception that we can think about the issue of rhetorical exchange between painting and historian only in the wake of compelling poststructuralist reconsiderations of the chiasmic crossings of subjectivity and objecthood. r 3. Roland Barthes, "Is Paintin!{ a Language?" in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on ,'v!u.>ic, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and \Vang, r985), p. ISO. '4· J. M. Bochenski, The Methods of Contemporary Thought (New York: Harper and Row, I g68), p. I 6. See Edmund Husser!, Logische Untersuchungen, 2 vols. (Halle an der Saale: M. Niemeyer, rgzz).

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The historiographic imagination, the way we see and shape the world of the past, has a history that is not simply forged by the demands of the present. To acknowledge the hold that the past itself exerts on us, we need to focus on the way historical works of art position us as their ideal spectators, expect certain responses from us, and confirm in the exchange what they anticipated all along. In this respect the historian as spectator is no different from the straightforward beholder of paintings. Both roles are legislated and predicted by the spatial and temporal organization of the pictorial field: we stand where the works tell us to and we see what they choose to reveal. A casual observer can walk away. The historian of art, however, is compelled to repeat, or at least react to, the conceits of positioning in his or her historical account. Writing mirrors picturing. The rhetoric of the painting engenders the rhetorical strategies of its interpreter.15 Hermogenes of Tarsus, in his second-century definition of ekphrasis, anticipated something of this claim: Ekphrasis is an account with detail; it is visible, so to speak, and brings before the eyes that which is to be shown. Ekphrases are of people, actions, times, places, seasons, and many other things .... The special virtues of ekphrasis are clarity and visibility; the style must contrive to bring about seeing through hearing. However, it is equally important that expression should fit the subject: if the subject is florid, let the style be florid too, and if the subject is dry, let the style be the same.I6 A cautious reliance on the concept of style as that which connects depiction and description in classical ekphrasis, however, would elide too many historiographic issues. "Style" implies something that-if not added on-can nonetheless be extracted from the utterance if need be. What I argue in this volume is something so fundamental to history writing that it lies at the origin of historical insight itself: that there are 15. See Culler, Framing the Sign, who characterizes this procedure "as a new, expanded rhetoric: a study of textual structures and strategies, in their relations to systems of signification and to human subjects .... a surprising number of thinkers have called for criticism to become a generalized rhetoric, studying the production, structure and reception of texts of all sorts" (pp. 17, 2 3). r6. Hermogenes, from Progymnasmata, quoted by Michael Baxandal! in Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Obseroers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, IJSOI450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, [corrected paperback] 1988), p. 85.

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both temporal and spatial ways in which the figural patterns of meaning or syntactical ideology of a work of art "sneak into" the structure of argumentation of the art historian, who is presumably analyzing the object or constellation of objects from the other side of time. As a consequence, the genre of ekphrasis might be regarded in a different light. 17 Since Homer first encyclopedized the universe on Achilles' shield-the oxen straining in their furrows at the end of the day's ploughing, the waxing moon, the silvery waters of the sea at night, the lovers' secret vows, the constellations festooning the sky-writers have fantasized that language actually is capable of making us see. W. J. 1: Mitchell has characterized that kind of conviction as "ekphrastic hope." Elevated from a "minor poetic genre" to "a universal principle of poetics," ekphrasis calls attention to the primal connection between words and images. Citing Murray Krieger, Mitchell reminds us that the visual arts are a metaphor, not just for verbal representation of visual experience, but for the shaping of language into formal patterns that "still" the movement of linguistic temporality into a spatial, formal array. Not just Yision, but stasis, shape, closure, and silent presence ("still" in the other sense) is the aim of this more general form of ekphrasis. Once the desire to overcome the "impossibility" of ekphrasis is put into play, the possibilities and the hopes for verbal representation of visual representation become practically endless. 18 But ekphrastic hope, Mitchell goes on to argue, is inevitably accompanied by ekphrastic fear, the awareness that the differences between verbal and visual images on which ekphrasis is founded might be suspended, and, at that moment, the "figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually." 19 The dangers lurking in that realization, of course, are abundant. Not only do we elide 17. See David Carrier's interesting chapter "Ekphrasis and Interpretation: The Creation of Modern Art History," in Principles ofA1-t History Writing (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, '99I), p. 104; and Svetlam Alpers, "Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari's Lives," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (r96o): r9o-2r5. r8. W.]. T. Mitchell, "Ekphrasis and the Other," South Atlantic Quarterly 91 (Summer I!)!)Z): 697. See also the chapter by the same title in Mitchell's Picture Theory• (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, r 994); Murray Krieger, "The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Moment of Poetry: Or Laokoon Revisited," in The Play and Place of Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Ilopkins University Press, 1967). '9· Mitchell, "Ekphrasis," p. 697.

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distinctions from both a materialist and a semantic point of view, but we also lose our ekphrastic justification for voyeurism and, by extension-ifNietzsche was right in characterizing all of us as voyeurs of the past-our legitimacy as historians.20 For above all, the genre indulges the pleasures of voyeurism, whether those occurrences actually happened or are merely remembered. If there were no passive Other on which we could festishize desire, by Mitchell's account, there would be no ekphrasis. 21 As astute as it may be, by my reckoning Mitchell's analysis of the dynamics of ekphrasis leaves something out: what David Freedberg calls in another context the power of images, a power that insistently refutes the propensity of images to be characterized as passive and "still." 22 As often as language teaches us to see, art instructs us in telling. The exchange works actively in both directions. The subject of one side is the object of the other. The object of art also possesses a subjecthood, in the sense of an agency distinct from the artist who made it-an agency that compels viewers to respond in certain ways. If that is so, then the alleged subjecthood of interpreters is not as autonomous as the relativizing inclinations of many poststructuralist historians would make it seem. In other words, what is questionable is not that works of art are objects and viewers subjects, but instead that these statuses are frequently regarded as absolute and exclusive, permanent and fixed. The work of art may be the product of a subject, as the traditional intentionalist view would have it. "Behind" the work stands a sender, in relation to whom the historical interpreter, like the spectator, is merely a "receiver." But then the equation reverses itself. The next step in the methodological protocol of sound art history has the interpreter taking subject status over the work as object, only to relinquish it again-and often without irony-when appealing to intention. From that moment on, it seems to me, the relation between the two poles begins to shift, to be more mobile than the subject/object binary distinction would suggest. Perhaps our primary clue to the existence of this mobility is our professional semantic slipperiness in 20. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, 2d ed., trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957). 21. Mitchell, "Ekphrasis," pp. 715-17. 22. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

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the use of "subject" and "object" when we talk about what is transpiring inside a framed work of art.23 The act of interpretation, of course, always will be an appropriation, a forcing of the work to fit the interpreter.24 Yet the interpreter, in that very act of appropriation, as I will argue by way of example, can be seen as altered by the encounter. 25 This visual dialectic can, of course, lead to a replication of problems, particularly with respect to point of view: on the past, on the autonomy of artistic creation, on the relationship between the sexes, on the organization of knowledge. As Mieke Bal so perceptively phrases it: "Nothing about art is innocent: It is neither inevitable, nor without consequences."26 Yet the awareness of the shaping process at work and our capacity as individualized spectators to accept or resist its mandates can also be empowering. "The ultimate justice to the past," claims Nancy Struever, "is to assume its creativity, to see the relation of investigator and investigatee as in some way reciprocal, as in the hermeneuticists' model of a dialogue or conversation with the past." 2 7 The difficult chore, according to Dominick LaCapra, "is to develop an exchange with the 'other' that is both sensitive to transferential displacement and open to the challenge of the other's 'voice.' In this sense, it is a useful critical fiction to believe that the texts or phenomena to be interpreted may answer one back and even be convincing enough to lead one to change one's mind." 28 Dialectic has always been the source of philosophical insight. If the exchange between object and historian indeed 23. Similar ambiguities surround the word "image," as Martin Jay has pointed out: it can "signifY graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, or verbal phenomena" (Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century Thought [Berkeley: University of California Press, I993L p. g). 24. Compare I Tans Belting, The End of the Histmy of Art? trans. Christopher \Vood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 59: "The problem hegins with what I would like to call the 'analogy of mimesis': where what the critic does is linked to what the work of art does. The work was supposed to reproduce either something which was considered real, such as nature, or a truth, such as beauty. The critic, in turn, was supposed to reproduce the work by describing its relation to the content or model it reproduced. Thus he duplicated, or reversed, the work's act of representation by transferring its visual statement to the verbal system of the text. In doing this he would maintain a frontal position with respect to the object of his interpretation, much as the work itself preserved a clear detachment &om what it referred to." 2 5· Altered, but not Jisappeared; see Carrier, "Ekphrasis and Interpretation." z6. Mieke Bal, Reading "Rembrandt'': Beyond the U/ord-lmage Oppoiition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199r), p. 5· 27. Nancy S. Struever, "Historical Discourse," in Handbook of Discourse Analysis, val. r, ed. 'lhm A. VanDijk (London: Academic Press, I985), p. 268. 28. LaCapra, Hil'tory and Criticism, pp. 72-73.

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works in both directions, then the activity of history writing might actually have something to do with both the past and the present which goes beyond the vitiated laments of contemporary historiography, just as Hegel once hoped it might. Time can still be challenged, praised, or condemned, even as it persists in trying to delineate the figural conditions of its contemporary interrogation. 2 9 If these sound like phenomenological claims, I intend to extend the discussion by reference to the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer at the end of this chapter. But before we arrive at his discussion of art as performance and the observer's role in completing it, I want to summon two other theorists of spectatorship-not an unnatural companionship-Leon-Battista Alberti and Jacques Lacan. Together these three thinkers will, I trust, provoke an interest, more poetic than analytic, in the issue of the historical "look." In a final defense of this visual dialectic, the concluding chaptermore analytic and summarizing in nature-will engage contemporary critical theory, especially reception aesthetics and a certain kind of deconstruction, as well as some debates in the philosophy of history proper, in order to reflect on the dialectic's exemplification in several paradigmatic case histories presented in the previous chapters. Despite my focus on individual authors, I would prefer to construe the task at hand as one of working through the theorization of the historical look as it has manifested itself in art historical and ekphrastic narratives in a variety of times and places. We should think of these texts in critical theory, in other words, not as records of individual thinkers but as written traces of an age-old struggle to come to terms with the power of the visual image. Veracity of interpretation, as far as I am concerned, must yield its place in the philosophy of art history to the surveying and mapping of 29. The notion of the past "interrogating" the present is a critical theme in Dominick LaCapra's intellectual history. See his Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, l.anguage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 29-30, as well as History and Criticism, passim. The wonderful epigraph from Niccolo Machiavelli that opens the first chapter of the latter work, in fact, deserves repeating in this context: "On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my smdy; and at the door T take off my every-day clothes, covered with mud and dust, and I put on garments regal and courtly; and, thus reclothcd appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, being lovingly received by them, I feed on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason of their actions; and they, out of their humanity, answer me; and for four hours of time I feel no boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not fear poverty, death does not terrify me; I am completely transferred into them."

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iconicity, the ground of common meaning generated by the interaction between visual and verbal discourse. I want to know what makes the words we write about art, especially early modern art, compelling. I take it as axiomatic that our words and those pictures from the past meet in some in-between realm, and that spatial locus, so conceived, should be the place for contemplating our sense of the fittingness between what we write abaut those images and what we see as we say it. To this end I appropriate the graphic illustrations of Alberti and Jacques Lacan, who both employ triangular axes to suggest the crossdirectionality involved in the act of looking. Yet in the end it is not a matter of which side, subject or object, holds sway over the other. Poststructuralism has given much attention to the "constructedncss" of criticism and history; this study in the poetics of interpretation aims to redress the balance by taking a look at the past's role in the act of construction. While not claiming that the work of art possesses unchanging ontological status, I do go so far as to claim that a viewer's (in this case a historian's) relation to a work of art is prescribed, assigned in advance by a system of representation which I call rhetorical. Of course, the subsequent viewer (i.e., historian) is not compelled simply to repeat something that has always been there, in the terms in which it was preordained by the object. Any later commentator, it should go without saying, brings with her or him a host of contemporary preoccupations which interact with the rhetorical mandates of what she or he is looking at. Reciprocity is critical. And yet, historians cannot help but react to the interrogation the past puts us through, the proposition a work of art sets before us. The mechanics of this process are my focus here. To quote Edward Said, this study literally looks at "some of the ways by which texts impose constraints upon their interpretation or, to put it metaphorically, the way the closeness of the world's body to the text's body forces readers to take both into consideration."3° A work of art has traditionally been regarded, as Mieke Bal notes, as entertaining three systematic relationships: "one with the cotext or the literary and artistic environment, one with the historical context that frames it, and one with the preceding artistic tradition, the pre-text."3 1 1o this list I am confident that she would be sympathetic to my adding a fourth relationship: the post-text, the afterlife of the object as it 30. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, I983), p. 39· 3 r. Bal, Reading ''Rembrandt," p. 189.

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continues to work at organizing its remembrance in the cultural histories that emplot it. Critical receptivity, not objectivity, is what is at stake here. The continuum between the production of the work and its historical processing negates the distinctness of either pole. To borrow the oft-cited analogy ofLacan's sardine can, when we look at a work of art, we find the work looking back at us, having anticipated our gaze.32 The vertiginous predicament of the spectator, incapable of having any language still its pace, is dizzingly characterized by Leo Steinberg: "And as any living encounter, any vital exchange, the work of art becomes the alternate pole in a situation of reciprocal self-recognition. If the picture were speaking instead of flashing, it would be saying: I see you seeing me-l in you see myself seen-see you seeing yourself being seen-and so beyond the reaches of grammar."33 Surely any recognition of the power of this encounter requires that we substitute a new metaphor of interpretation for the old one of "seeing through," of getting it "right." Perhaps no one in the history of art is associated more readily with the "real" metaphor of per-spective, literally "seeing through," than Leon-Battista Alberti, a fact Lacan repeatedly acknowledged. TheRenaissance theorist's On Painting of 1435 articulaccd one of the fundamental myths of mimesis, namely, that a canvas should function as a window onto the world.34 Over half a millenium later we can hardly escape this manifesto's theoretical pull when it comes to discussing the relationship between objectivity and subjecthood.35 Alberti defined a picture as that pane of glass or framed surface situated between the one who sees and the scene seen. Each pole of the equation, it logically follows, is dependent on the perspective presented by the other. In laying down the technical ground rules for both paint32· See my account of the anecdote of the sardine can in chapter 3· 33· Leo Steinberg, "Velazquez' Las Meninas," October 19 (Winter 1981): 54· 34· Lcon-Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson, intro. Martin Kemp (London: Penguin Books, 1991). The text exists in both Latin and Italian versions, although Kemp points out that while "very occasionally the Italian helps clarifY the meaning of the Latin, ... it is generally the case that the original text conveys Alberti's sense with more precision" (p. 20). 35· For a lengthy discussion of the metaphorical implications of perspective (pcrspectivism, perspectivalism, etc.), see Claudio Guillen, "On the Concept and Metaphor of Perspective," in his Literature as System: &says toward the Theory of Litemry History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ry7r); Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Keith Moxey, "Perspective, Panofsky, and the Philosophy of History," New Literary History 26 (Autumn 1995): 775-86.

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ing in perspective and perspectival observation, he validated the scheme's status "as a practical means for securing a rigorous two-way, or reciprocal, metrical relationship between the shapes of objects as definitely located in space and their pictorial representation."36 The reciprocal relationship of his painterly scheme is reflected in the hi-directionality of its written account. Not only did Alberti manifestly write to extract underlying perceptual schemes from the most advanced pictorial experiments of his day (an after-the-fact assessment),37 but in doing so he also articulated a conceptualization through which these intellectual principles could be applied to other kinds of perception in the future. William Ivins even goes so far as to claim that Alberti's systematization of seeing was the most important event of the Renaissance (more important than the fall of Constantinople, the invention of the printing press, even the "discovery" of America). In setting down the principles by which beholders observe the Figure r. Matteo de'Pasti, portrait meworld of phenomena in which they find dallion of Alberti (obverse and reverse), themselves, Ivins speculates, Alberti could r446-5o. Copyright© British Museum. be credited with initiating the scientific revolution precisely because he established sight as the principal route through which all subsequent "systematic thought about nature is based." 38 Alberti's own emblem was a radiant winged eye encircled by an honorific laurel wreath and accompanied by the ever-inquisitive motto "Quid tum?" (What next?) (figure 1). Excessive in his adulation for the faculty of sight, he praised the "eye [as] more powerful than anything, swifter, more worthy; what more can I say? It is such as to be the first, 36. William M. Ivins, Jr., On the Rotionalization of Sight: With an Examination of Three Renaissance Texts on Perspective (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), p. 9· 37. Kemp, intra. to Alberti, On Painting, p. z 1. 38. Ivins, Rotionalization of Sight, p. IJ·

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Design of Alberti's perspective diagram. Mario A. Caro.

chief, king, like a god of human parts. Why else did the ancients consider God as something akin to an eye, seeing all things and distinguishing each separate one?"3 9 His rationalization of sight, though complex mathematically, can be simply summarized with reference to a graphic model of human spectatorship. Picture an observer, or at least his or her synecdochic eye looking at the world, or simply a single object in it (figure 2).4° Any material object has two properties of surface. The "horizon" (or "brim" or "fringe," as it is translated from the Latin) is the outer edge that encloses the inner surface, over which is stretched the "skin."4 1 "Certain rays, ministers of vision as it were," emanate from the eye, "move rapidly with great power and remarkable subtlety," and penetrate the air "until they encounter something dense or opaque where their 39· Renee Watkins, "L. B. Alberti's Emblem, the Winged Eye, and His Name, Leo," Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 9 (1960): 257. Watkins takes this explication from Alberti's dialogue "Anuli." 40. Alberti's original treatise, of course, was not illustrated. 41. Alberti, On Painting, pp. 38-39. This metaphorical vocabulary was omitted from the Italian edition. According to Kemp, "Alberti uses a number of terms to indicate 'boundary,' 'borderline,' 'contour,' 'edge,' 'outline,' etc.: ambitum, discrimen, extremitas, horizontem, fimbria, ora, rimula, terminus" (p. 97).

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points strike and they instantly stick." 42 To paint the picture of the scene seen, we must imagine a surface-Alberti calls it a "veil," thus unintentionally underscoring its masking aspect-interposed halfway between object and eye: a "painting represents the intersection of the pyramid" of rays originating from a single point in the eye and striking the object at different angles. 43 Although there are many extrinsic rays loosed upon the world by a single observing eye which "hold on like teeth to the whole of the outline [and] form an enclosure around the entire surface like a cage," the "prince of rays," the centric ray, pierces right to the heart of vision. 4 4 By extension, on the far side of the object the lines of sight begin to converge once again, establishing the vanishing point of its perspectival representation. ~ile the centric ray is not precisely equated with the vanishing point, the alliance between the most distant point in the painting (distant to the point of oblivion) and the initial ray emanating from the eye at the origin of the "look" is an obvious one. Their linkage is both temporal and spatial in extremis. The power of vision is manifest above all in the formal composition, the ordering of surfaces, bodies, lines, planes, and so on. The artist possesses absolute omnipotence in his capacity to change the aspects of the world at will, so long as these features remain internally consistent: To all these remarks should be added the belief of philosophers that if the sky, the stars, the seas, the mountains and all living creatures, together with all other objects, were, the gods willing, reduced to half their size, everything that we see would in no respect appear to be diminished from what it is now. Large, small, long, short, high, low, wide, narrow, light, dark, bright, gloomy, and everything of the kind-which philosophers termed accidents, because they may or 42. Ibid., p. 40. 43· Ibid., pp. 65-66, 48. The "veil," in fact, was an instrument of transparency with practical application: "a veil loosely woven of fine thread, dyed whatever colour you please, divided up by thicker threads into as many parallel square sections as you like, and stretched on a frame. I set this up between the eye and the object to be represented, so that the visual pyramid passes through the loose weave of the veil" ( p. 65). The "important thing about the intersecting veto or ideal frame," according to Joan Gadol, "is that it can be regarded as a 'glass' which always 'presents the same appearance' of the actual scene upon its surface. In perspectival painting, this is the appearance which the painter 'imitates."' Joan Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man ofthe Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 38. 44· Alberti, On Painting, pp. 42, 44·

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may not be present in things-all these are such as to be known only by comparison.45 Still, the artistic act must exceed its capacity to create a convincing world in miniature. Like Quintilian, the first-century c.E. Roman author whose lnstitutio aratoria shaped the rhetorical ideas of many a Renaissance humanist (as Michael Baxandall has so persuasively demonstrated), Alberti believed that "the art of rhetoric is realised in action, not in the result obtained. "46 Accordingly, the compositio was a structure articulated to a higher end: to make manifest the narrative power of the istoria, the telling of the story by appropriate emotions expressed through harmonious action. Once composed, the labors of the pictorial tale were far from complete: "A 'historia' you can justifiably praise and admire will be one that reveals itself to be so charming and attractive as to hold the eye of the learned and unlearned spectator for a long while."47 On these grounds alone Alberti's manifesto would be rated an artistic success. If any one historical individual could be assigned responsibility for legislating the way successive generations throughout the centuries have regarded le regard, it would be Alberti, whom Adrian Stokes once perceptively dubbed that "constitutional monarch of the mind." 48 Achievement, however, comes at a price. In the twentieth century there has arisen a distinct "anti-ocularcentrism," along with a concomitant suspicion of mimesis-the faith that a visual image, if it adheres to the proper geometrical rules, can properly copy reality. What Martin Jay has called "the scopic regime of modernity" has come under attack, especially in poststructuralist French thought, for the "abstract coldness" of its "allegedly disincarnated, absolute eye," an eye that appears capable of turning "its targets into stone." At the heart of this unease is 45· Ibid., p. 53· 46. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovny of Pictorial Composition, IJSO-I4SO (Oxford: Clarendon Press, r97r); Quintilian, Institutio aratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, r98o), 1:337 (bk. 2, )). 25-26). 47· Alberti, On Painting, p. 75· See Alpers, "Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari's Lives," p. 199: "Alberti's istoria already states the central concern of Renaissance ekphrasisthat emotion can only be experienced by real action. It is the seminal formation of the relationship between the technique of depicting reality and the telling of a story in paint, and it supplies the rationale for the concern with representational technique that we find in Renaissance ekphrasis." 48. Adrian Stokes, Art and Science: A Study of Alberti, Piero della Francesca, and Giorgione (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), p. r 3·

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The Gaze

The Subject of Representation

Figure 3· Jacques Lacan, diagram of the gaze. From The Four Fundamental Concepts of Prycbo-Analysis, r 97 3. Reprinted by permission of \V. W. Norton & Co., Inc.

the fear of extremes: either that all subjects, in this case viewers, are displaced from time, gender, and cultural disposition, or that viewing is reduced to an act of total subjective relativism: "For the monocular eye at the apex of [the] beholder's pyramid could be construed as transcendental and universal-that is, exactly the same for any human viewer occupying the same point in time and space-or contingentsolely dependent on the particular, individual vision of distinct beholders, with their own concrete relations to the scene in front of them." 4 '~

The work of Jacques Lacan offers a metaphorical antidote to this ideological conundrum, although the terms in which he articulates his scheme about the crisscrossings of subjectivity and objecthood are clearly Albertian in design. In a chapter titled "What Is a Picture?" from The Four Fundamental Concepts ofP.~ycho-Analysis, two intersecting triangles map the function of what Lacan calls the "scopic register" (figure 3). On the right side is the subject of representation, I myself, the observer, the witness. On the other is the gaze that is outside, that "pulsatile, dazzling and spread out" thing which turns me into a picture-makes the subject into an object, in other words.so The gaze, 49· Martin] ay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in Force Fields: Benveen Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (;\;ew York: Routledge, I993), pp. I I7, I I9; an earlier version appears under the same title in Vision and Vimality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, r9Htl). See also Jay's essay "The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism" in Force Fields. All of these issues reach their most expansive treatment in Jay's Dmvncast Eyes. 50. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: \N. W Norton, r~'l•P>·· -.lh.r.r.'f ...,.1 •,luh.

•ofent im Bild, and Wolfgang Kemp, "Death at \\'ork: A Case Study of Constitutive Blanks in Nineteenth-Century Painting," Representations 10 (Spring I98s): 102-23; Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, I98o); Koerner, Moment of Self Portraiture; Jon athan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and A1odernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). r 10. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, I983); Micke Bal, Reading "Rembrandt": Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I99I); Lucien Dallenbach, The A1irror in the Text, trans. Jeremy Whitely and Emma Hughes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989); and Claude Gandel-

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It would take a return to a much earlier German scholar, Alois Riegl, whose work some critics have identified as an intellectual progenitor of reception theory, to begin to excavate the historiographic links between verbal and visual reception theory. 11 1 Especially germane, as a biographer of Riegl has noted, is his concept of the psychological disposition of "attentiveness" embodied in visual depiction. With the aid of this interpretive category, he attempted to explain the Dutch genius for coherence evident in the genre of group portraiture, and the ways in which the unification of the depicted figures is accomplished not only by their concerted attention within the painting hut also by their communal attention to the solicitation of the spectator. 112 Rereading Riegl, in fact, might provoke the question that Jauss asked in another context: "Whether the history of art, which is usually regarded as a dependent 'poor relative' of general history, might not once have been the head of the family, and might not once again become a paradigm of historical knowledge." Lest one misinterpret his eulogistic sentiments, however, Jauss's subsequent attack on the intellectual poverty of art history is scathingly unambiguous: "Under historicism ... art history handed over lock, stock, and barrel its legitimacy as a medium for aesthetic, philosophical, or hermeneutic reflection." 113 How fair is this indictment? Indeed, if reference to reception theory (not to mention deconstruction) is the measure, it is true that mainstream Anglo-American art history has remained largely impervious to certain European theoretical insights developed since the 196os. This is not necessarily a regrettable state of affairs, provided that the discipline has its reasons for closing ranks beyond the hackneyed claims of empiricist research. Even though reception theorists have written alman, "Master 1ht and Slave Text: A Hegelian Theory of Writing," in The Uses of Adversity: Failure and Accommodation in Readc1· Response, eel. Ellen Spolsky (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1990), pp. 90-98. r I I. In particular, see Alois Riegl, Das holldndische Gmppenportrdt (Vienna: Osterreichische Staatsdr., 1931), first published in]ahrbuch der kwzsthistorischen Smnmlungen des /lllerhiichsten !VJiserhauses 23 (I902): ji-278. I I 2. Margaret Iversen, A lois Ricgl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 96-97. The evidence for renewed interest in Riegl can also be seen in Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl's Theory of A1-t (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), as well as in a translation by Evelyn Kain of Riegl's 1 H9 .l Stilfmgen: Grundlegungen zu eine1· Geschichte der Ornamentik as Pl·oblems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornamem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). I 13. Jauss, TIYWard an A estbetic of Reception, pp. 48, 51.

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most exclusively about literary works, their commitment to reading "imagistically" would seem to open up possibilities for a field of inquiry devoted to the history of images. For the most part, as we have seen, it has not. Unless it is a rejection born of ignorance, the justification for dismissing this approach has had to come from somewhere else, perhaps in response to the cogency of critiques within literary criticism itself. The gist of these reviews can be reduced to one paradoxical complaint: reception theory is both too flexible and too rigid. According to Stanley Fish, it is this kind of ambiguity which accounts for the fact that "no one's afraid of Wolfgang Iser": His theory is mounted on behalf of the reader, but it honors the intentions of the authors; the aesthetic object is constructed in time, but the blueprint for its construction is spatially embodied; each realization of the blueprint is historical and unique; but it itself is given once and for all; literature is freed from the tyranny of referential meaning, but nevertheless contains a meaning in the directions that trigger the reader's activities; those activities are determined by a reader's "stock of experience," but in the course of their unfolding, that stock is transformed. The theory, in short, has something for everyone, and denies legitimacy to no one.ll4 Determinacy and indeterminacy exist on either side of the equation. To Iser's critics, such as Norman Holland, that presents a problem: the text may construct a role for the reader that he or she is compelled to fulfill, but one must not forget that the reader fulfills this compulsion in tension with individual predispositions. Iser's model confines the reader to a place inside the frame, whereas Holland wants to put him or her "in the driver's seat." 115 Furthermore, feminist critics ask, just who is this ideal implied reader, and in what does this so-called naturalized category of experience and disposition consist? 116 If earlier reception theorists such as Roman Ingarden or even Michael Riffaterre had cast 114. Stanley Fish, "Why No One's Afraid of Wolfgang lser," in Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rheto1·ic, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), p. 74· 115. Norman Holland, in an interview with Rudolf E. Kuenzli on Iser, Diacritics 10 (Summer 1980): 59, 61. See also Wayne Booth's critique in the same interview, as well as Iser's published response. n6. On this situation of "reading as a woman," see (ironically) Jonathan Culler, in On Deconstruction, pp. 42ff., among, of course, many feminist literary critics and historians.

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the reader only in a "recuperative role," others who followed, such as Jauss and Fish and Tompkins, were quick to point out that any aesthetic object, verbal or visual, "refuses to stay still." 117 The question then becomes whether the dynamism of the situation generates an inhibiting or a creative paradox. For Iser the answer is simple. What happens between writer and reader, he has emphasized in responding to his critics, is a "seducing, tempting, exasperating, affirming and pleasing ... game." Some observers of the contest might concentrate on one player, others on another. The text is process, the reading is processing, and neither is independent of the other: There is, on the one hand, the relation between the text and the extratextual systems which form its context and to which it relates, and on the other the co-operation, occurring in the time-flow of reading, between what the reader is given on the page and his habitual orientations .... As everybody seems to acknowledge that texts are interpreted, why should we then resist seeing the distinction between a significance which is to be supplied and a significance which has been supplied. tiS By Iser's lights, reader-response criticism and reception history have fulfilled the requirements of the first significance. Reception aesthetics concentrates on the second. In other words, his mode of interpretation focuses on the strategies of one of the players, all the while recognizing that the game could not go on without something to play against. To the stock criticism that it descends into an obdurate determinism, reception aesthetics has at the ready a repertoire of carefully worded responses, all of which can be paraphrased for our purposes here. Semantic meaning will always remain far richer than rhetorical meaning. The meaning that a work accrues through time will always exceed its originating rhetoric. The text is timeless; having left the past, it is forevermore always destined to exist in the present. The work is stable (even though it may contain a variety of meanings within itself); its interpretations are always in flux. Different readers at different times I '7· Freund, Return of the Reader; p. 76. See Roman Ingarden, The Literary f,Vin·k ofA11: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and the Theory of Literature (r93r; rpt. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, '973); Tompkins. Reader-Rc.1ponse Criticism, p. xvii. I r8. Iser, interview in Diacritics, pp. 70, 73, 72.

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will experience different apprehensions. The text is not the ending of a process but the beginning of one.ll9 Yet in the end, as it was in the beginning, the process of reading, says Iser, is like looking into the darkened sky at night: Two people gazing at the night sky may both be looking at the same collection of stars, but one will see the image of a plough, and the other will make out a dipper. The "stars" in a literary text are fixed; the lines that join them are variable. The author of the text may, of course, exert plenty of influence on the reader's imagination-he has the whole panoply of narrative techniques at his disposal-but no author worth his salt will ever attempt to set the whole picture before his reader's eyes. If he does, he will very quickly lose his reader, for it is only by activating the reader's imagination that the author can hope to involve him and so realize the intentions of his text.l20 Intention of the text: reference to the author's intention (although one would not at first suspect so from Iser's wording) is subtly eclipsed by the passage of the broader cloud of textuality.

It is worth remembering, of course, that the illumination from old stars is the only light that enables us to look into the dark and distant. Visual intention is as good a term as any for the magnetic pull the stellar bodies of the artistic past still exert on the satellites of historical understanding which keep circling around them. Like the light emanating from a distant star, what is present has come from a place and time that still resonates, and what is past is not necessarily so. "Knowing the past," George Kubler once suggestively remarked, "is as astonishing a performance as knowing the stars. . .. Astronomers and historians have this in common: both are concerned with appearances noted in the present but occurring in the past." 121 The spectator, Hegel reminds us in the Aesthetics, is "in it from the beginning, is I I9· See, for example, Iser, "The Reading Process," p. 6o; !Vlichael Riffaterre, "Fear of Theory," New Literary History 2I (I99o): 929; Roman Ingarden, cited in Freund, Return of the Reader, p. I 39; lser, Prospecting, p. 5. uo. Iser, "The Reading Process," p. 57· I 2 r. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on tbe History of Things (!New Haven: Yale University Press, I962), p. I9.

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counted in with it, and the work exists only for this fixed point, i.e. for the individual apprehending it."122 The "I" who looks becomes the subject that does the visual text's thinking, maybe even its writing, who lives its life as it were: "In a certain sense, it thinks itself, and it even gives itself a mean~ng within me." 1 23 Mappers of the heavens or mappers of the historical universe, those of us who desire to look into the dark and distant recesses of the past often discover, in the end, that centuries-old light has been illuminating our gaze all along. 122. G. IV: F IIegel, Aestbetin·: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 2: 8o6. 123. Georges Poulct, "Phenomenology of Reading," New Literary Jli.l'tory r (1969): 59·

INDEX

Page references to illustrations are in italics. Ackerman, James, 49 Adams, Henry, 57-63 Adequacy, question of, 7-8, 29 Alberti, Leon-Battista, 13, 14, r64, 177, r78; emblem of, r6-r7; the istoria and, 3739, 41; On Painting, rs-w, rgn, 36-39, 77; perspectival order of, 15-20, I?, 2 I23, 37· 4 1• 45-4~ 56, 76-77, 78-7~ 88 Alpers, Svetlana, 1yn Althusser, Louis, 86 "Analogy of mimesis," I zn Andreas-Salome, Lou, I 20 Ankersmit, E R., 112-13, 159, I82-83 Anlehnungstypus, concept of, I29 Annunciation scenes: gynocentric views of, 166-69; iconology and, ISI-6I, I6s-66; i\1erode Altarpiece and, I so, I 5 r -6g, IJ], IJ4, IJ5

Art history: as art vs. science, 65-67; ekphrasis and, I-5, 9- I I, I 77; historiographic experimentation and, 65-67; iconology and, 159-61, 165-67; language in, 172-79, 188; reception theory and, 203-8; traditional vs. deconstructionist approaches to, s-8. See also Deconstruction; Interpretation; Reception theory; Revisionist art history; Subject/ object relation

"Artwriting," I73 "Attentiveness," concept of, 204 Baciccio. See Gaulli, Giovanni Bartista (Baciccio) Bal, Mieke, Il, 14, 167, 203 Bann, Stephen, 30, 63, 174 Baroque art: "baroque" as term and, gin, 102; character of, yr-y3, 104-5; Wolfflin and, y6, n-g8, TOT -2, 103-I I Barthes, Roland, 8, r67, IRo, I8y, I