Saint Marks: Words, Images, and What Persists 2018024885, 9780823282081, 9780823282074

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Saint Marks

Saint Marks Words, Images, and What Persists

Jonathan Goldberg

fordham university press New York 2019

Copyright © 2019 Fordham University Press 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— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Goldberg, Jonathan, author. Title: Saint Marks : words, images, and what persists / Jonathan Goldberg. Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018024885 | ISBN 9780823282081 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780823282074 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Mark, Saint—Art. | Art—Psychology. Classification: LCC N8080.M28 G65 2019 | DDC 701/.15—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024885 Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

contents

Preface List of Figures and Plates

vii xv

Part I painting marks 1. 2.

Atmospherics (Bellini) Gravity (Tintoretto)

3 40

Part II writing marks 3. 4.

Stones (of Venice) Secrets

75 112

Acknowledgments Notes Index

143 145 165

Color plates follow pages 46 and 78

p r e fa c e

The title of this book could look like a mistake; however, by naming St. Mark in the plural, I mean to gesture to a range of associations that attach to the name, and to detach the name “St. Mark” from the singularity of referentiality. The first half of this book is concerned mainly with one of these associations, Mark as the patron saint of Venice, and with a group of paintings produced in the sixteenth century that represent the supposed life and hagiography of the saint. Venetians claimed Mark because of his status as an evangelist; these images of him do not represent him as the author of a gospel, perhaps the first association someone might have with the name “Mark.” That book also is usually referred to simply as Mark (I turn to it in the final chapter of this book), but as C. Clifton Black points out in Mark: Images of an Apostolic Interpreter, nothing in the gospel named Mark connects it to anyone named Mark in Acts or in New Testament epistles. Moreover, as Black argues, the Marks (or sometimes John Marks) mentioned in those texts (texts of varying authority in terms of their supposed authors—Luke or Paul or Peter) never say that any of them wrote a life of Jesus. Moreover, as Black insists, while biblical scholars, starting with the fathers of the church, have tried to assemble a consistent biographical subject from these various Marks, it is impossible to do so, let alone provide a biography for the author of the gospel called Mark.1 These dispersed Marks do not produce a biographical subject. “The various ‘Marks’ . . . could be, and sometimes were, blended into one legendary figure” (148), Black writes, but this was done with little historical warrant. Mark was connected to the gospel that goes under that name by church fathers in the first few centuries A.D.; as Black notes, these patristic texts make almost no mention of the Mark of Acts or epistles in their creation of a figure of the author. This authorial personage is exceedingly sketchy; what the early fathers chose to claim about Mark tells us more about how a church was being founded than about a person named Mark or even about the book that was said to be his. None of the texts Black surveys through the first four centuries of Christianity ever mentions Mark in vii

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connection with Venice, of course (there was no such city then). That connection is not part of the early legends. For those who later sought to connect the evangelizing Mark with Venice, an occasional vagueness in some early reports of his activity—usually in Rome, but sometimes elsewhere in Italy—provided a minimal warrant for a connection to Venice. Most accounts find him in the company of St.  Peter in Rome. In the third and fourth centuries there are, however, a number of brief references that place Mark in Alexandria; these follow on reports that date from the second century that locate him there. Eusebius’s fourth-century Ecclesiastical History consolidates this story, although the several accounts of Mark told in separate places in that book do not entirely tally one with the other. An Alexandrian locale is important for Venetian claims to Mark made centuries later, when his body was supposedly stolen from Alexandria and brought to Venice, its proper resting place for those who believed Mark had been evangelizing in the Veneto early in the first century; this “recovery” of Mark’s corpse is dated to the ninth century, some eight hundred years after his death. Thanks to his supposed martyrdom in Alexandria, narratives of which cannot be found before the fifth century, Mark is taken to be the founder of the Coptic Church.2 In a 2011 book, Thomas Oden argues for that as a fitting end, claiming that Mark was north African by origin; Oden provides just the kind of biography for the apostle that Black suggests is impossible, a singularity that must ignore the incommensurate multiples that attach to “Mark” in New Testament texts and early patristic writings.3 Oden’s sources all date from years— centuries— after those that Black considers; they include numerous apocryphal lives of Mark as well as texts that form part of the Coptic canon. Accounts of Mark in Egypt like these must lie behind the thirteenth-century compendium of lives of the saints compiled by Jacobus de Voragine. His Legenda aurea supports the Venetian claims to Mark while adding many tales of posthumous Italian miracles that provide the subject matter for later biographies and paintings. These stories are completely separate from the texts more proximate to the time in which a gospel called Mark became canonical. There is virtually nothing in the New Testament to support the texts that relate Mark to Alexandria. These texts, the ones upon which Oden depends, omit any connection between Mark and Venice, although Oden countenances the Venetian “comic postscript” (African Memory of Mark, 169) to his story about Mark insofar as it provides evidence that the Venetians believed the story he tells about Mark’s martyrdom in Alexandria after he founded a church there.

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This sketch of Marks means to serve as the background for the Marks this book contemplates. I have narrowed my focus in the initial section of this book, “Painting Marks,” to the images of Mark produced in the sixteenth century for the Venetian Scuola Grande di San Marco.4 These paintings draw upon narratives of Mark written to elaborate the life of the saint summarized by Jacobus de Voragine. Most commentary on them is concerned with elucidating the narratives, identifying figures in the paintings, and pointing out how the stories and images served Venetian ideology. Although the early theorization of the goals of painting as articulated by Leon Battista Alberti in Della pittura—its emphasis on istoria as the crucial component of painting that links its formal features to narrative effects that are the basis for a viewer’s identifications— could justify such an approach to painting, the subordination of image to story, and of story to history, belies Alberti’s formulation that “the istoria will move the soul of the beholder when each man painted there clearly shows the movement of his own soul.” This proposition could have inspired an art history more like Aby Warburg’s than most inquiries are; these pursue the questionable supposition that paintings tell stories, illustrate texts, and that such narratives can be translated into history as if it too were simply a linear narrative.5 In her recent book on Venetian modernism, Jennifer Scappettone argues persuasively for anachronism as the historical milieu of Venice, and for the laguna as a place of lacunae that cannot be added up to produce some coherent and singular grand historical narrative. Scappettone exemplifies this early in her book by pointing to the two columns erected in the twelfth century in the Piazetta, the ceremonial landing place at the entrance to the Piazza San Marco. On one was placed a statue of the Byzantine St. Theodore, the first patron saint of the city, standing astride a dragon; on the other column, one finds a lion, the emblem of St. Mark: the patron saint who replaced Theodore is himself replaced by the lion. As Scappettone remarks, “these massive shafts of Egyptian granite, hauled from Constantinople and installed in the Piazetta around 1172, and the apotropaic statues later installed upon them exemplify the hybrid nature of a city poised between the Romes of Italy and the East.” Moreover, she continues, the statue of St. Theodore actually sports a Hellenistic head on its Roman body over which medieval armor has been added; the supposed dragon is part crocodile, part dog. “The so-called lion of St. Mark crowning the Eastern shaft, a symbol of Venice’s adoption of a second patron and consequent departure from Byzantium, is thought to be an archaic Anatolian bronze chimera whose tail, wings, and Bible were tacked on at a later date.”6 These anachronistic composites bring together disparate

x

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times and places in a manner that invites endless unraveling, rather than some straightforward notion of history or its ideological translation into the magical forces of powerful apotropaic consolidation. The analyses of the paintings for the Scuola Grande di San Marco that I offer in the first section of this book aim at finding ways to talk about what painting does as painting. In “Writing Marks,” this question comes to the forefront as I follow T. J. Clark in exploring painting’s invitation “to seeing a set of marks as something.”7 I have titled the first two chapters in the section on “Painting Marks” “Atmospherics” and “Gravity” to suggest that the “something” in these paintings by the Bellini brothers, by their followers, and by Tintoretto, is a condition of materiality, earth and air, matter and space. To ask how marks become images, how images become words, is to ponder that however incommensurable words and things, words and images are, there is nonetheless a material connection between them. To address these matters, I take my prompt from John Ruskin (as Clark himself has done in an essay about Veronese that I consider) and from two art historians before Clark—Paul Hills and Adrian Stokes—both also inspired by Ruskin’s Stones of Venice. That text is situated at the center of my chapter on stones. Ruskin himself has little to say about the paintings for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, although its facade is one of only two Renaissance buildings he singles out for praise in The Stones of Venice. Giovanni Bellini was an artist Ruskin admired greatly.8 It was Ruskin’s discovery of Tintoretto that totally reoriented his approach to Venice. “I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before any human intellect as I was today, before Tintoret,” he wrote to his father.9 That crushing weight lent the work of art the force of gravity, producing an annihilation of self in a meeting of minds—his and Tintoretto’s—tantamount to an identification with matter. It is on such transactions that I focus. When Ruskin reports himself “crushed to the earth,” he becomes pulverized, becomes in effect the very stones that title his volumes on Venice. In the third chapter of this book, I explore how the marks that are the matter of painting—pigments, color—make for the material connection of painting to writing and of reader and viewer to artistic works. These glimpse material existence, a meeting of mind and matter, as Ruskin couches it. In its final chapter, when this book turns to what might have been assumed to be its singular subject (if Mark and the gospel Mark are that), it is to conclude an inquiry that is about marks (written as well as painted) that mean beyond what they are precisely by being what they are, material marks that exceed the life of any biographical subject. So doing they become saint marks, if we take that phrase not to name some individual

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person but rather to refer to the ways in which marks surpass the immediacy of any singular referential function. Mark and the gospel Mark are not synonymous. Nor is the gospel according to Mark a singular text; it exists in numerous manuscripts and versions; there were likely two at one time, a fragment of one of which has been called Secret Mark. The secret of this secret of incommensurate multiples is not what might be supposed by the sainted designation, that it entails a redefinition of life that locates it in a time that is not one, eternity, and a place that is not here. In the Christian terms first propounded by St. Paul, this is the life believers live in Christ: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live: yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God” (Gal. 2:20). The ultimate quarry of this book is for terms to understand that other life coincident with the one “I now live in the flesh,” and to seek it in objects whose manner of existence involves surviving, living on longer than any of us do, persistent material connections between stone and pigment, pen and paper, light, air and water, and especially as these are recorded in marks on a page or a canvas. Christianity has no special relationship to this definition of life, although inevitably, given the subject matter of this book—paintings of St. Mark, the gospel that bears his name—the Christian religion must be a significant matrix for a vocabulary to grasp the life that lives in us that Paul describes. When I first began work on this project, it was the meeting in Mark of East and West, Alexandria and Venice as versions of what Scappettone calls the two Romes (of Constantinople and Rome) that promised a route to think beyond binaries. That aim is still legible as it extends from the Mark thought to be the mouthpiece of St. Peter to the multiple marks that I name Saint Marks to mark that meeting in a form of life that joins and overrides the distinction that inheres in any mark. When Jacobus de Voragine opens his life of “Saint Mark, Evangelist,” he begins by interpreting his name as a word, “Marcus, the Latin form of Mark, is interpreted: sublime by mandate, or certain, or bent over, or bitter,” continuing to apply each meaning of the word to the man. Having situated him in this verbal matrix, further possibilities in the word are allowed to proliferate: “Or Marcus may simply be marcus, a heavy hammer,” a meaning of Mark as a word that he applies to the words in his gospel “which strikes down the perfidy of heretics, rings out the praise of God, and strengthens the Church.” Before Jacobus de Voragine gives Mark a biography, a life that includes posthumous miracles, which he proceeds to recount, he first generates him from and as a word to which he returns him in the words he wrote that are not simply his own but belong to God and to his church. In the course of his opening

xii

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paragraph, moreover, the only detail offered about Mark’s life comes in the allusion to “Saint Peter his master.”10 The biographical Mark is a scribe. At the core of this book, in exploring the relationship of word and image, of painting and of writing “Marks,” is the question of life. I have sought a vocabulary for the phenomenon that Paul describes but in the terms offered by art historians and philosophers. T. J. Clark, Jean-Luc Nancy, Aby Warburg, to name a representative few, are not invoked to suggest that they, any more than Mark, can be amalgamated into a singular identity or an identical program (my discussion of the gospel called Mark points to its unorthodox version of Christianity, and indeed it is worth pondering why there are four canonical gospels and how they do not add up to one). The theorists upon whom I depend at various points in this book are by no means saying the same thing except insofar as they are concerned to find terms for acts of writing and painting (of writing about painting) that are adequate to describe the persistence of life we find in these works and that do not require recourse to the translation of that life into an otherworldly afterlife that entails a concept like spirit or soul in order to overcome what are supposed to be the limits of matter. I am not interested in finding a singular word or a term for this persistence of singularities, resisting, for instance, Georges Didi-Huberman’s translation of it into the Freudian unconscious even as I embrace his brilliant insights into the marks Fra Angelico made whose figuration persists beyond any illustrative aim, or his reading of Warburg’s Pathosformeln, about which Giorgio Agamben also has written stunningly, as a term for this ongoing life (my recourse to Paul depends on Agamben, but also on Alain Badiou, despite disagreements between them that could be parsed).11 There is no term for the coincidence of sameness and difference. Toward the conclusion of the second chapter of this book, I spend a few pages on what is likely the last painting Tintoretto made for the Sala Capitolare of the Scuola Grande di San Marco. It is usually titled Il ritrovamento del corpo di San Marco (The Discovery of the Body of St. Mark) and now hangs in the Brera, not far from the Bellini painting of St. Mark preaching in Alexandria that initiated the sixteenth-century cycles of paintings for the meeting rooms of the Venetian confraternity of St. Mark. Most of my discussion involves the disparate narratives that have been attached to Tintoretto’s painting—is it about the finding of Mark’s body in Alexandria, centuries after his supposed martyrdom, by Venetian merchants who came to reclaim it for Venice, or is it about the discovery of Mark’s body when, some two hundred years after being transported to the basil-

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ica built in his honor, it was misplaced and then found in its walls? In suggesting that both narratives could be involved, my discussion aims at getting past some definitive decision about the subject matter of the painting to ask what might make it possible for two separate moments in time and space to coincide. Recently, some art historians have come to refer to the painting as one in which Mark is performing disparate miracles; they see the painting as an amalgam of moments in the life of the saint brought together at once. Yet what brings them together is not said, or, rather, it is assumed that the biographical entity called Mark or that the theology that persists into posthumous acts is the answer. Without proposing an alternative identity, I am rather struck by the fact that the Marks in this painting—that there are several, no one really disputes—also are performing acts akin to those highlighted in the account of Jesus offered by the gospel of Mark; it is short on scenes of teaching and sermonizing, and intent on miracles. A corpse lies at the feet of the figure on the left side of this painting that undoubtedly represents Mark overseeing what unfolds before us. That corpse also could be Mark’s—the one being “discovered”—although it looks like the dead Christ Andrea Mantegna painted; it could be taken as a recurrence of a Pathosformel in more than one meaning of that phrase since this slightly twisted corpse seems possibly alive the way Warburg thought “dead” images were since they were stored with a vitality that could be revived, and were brought to life in the connections images made with viewers. Other figures in Tintoretto’s painting seem to be demonically possessed, or so Giorgio Vasari thought, while the figure identified as Mark on the left is remarkably like figures identified as Christ in other paintings by Tintoretto. Saints, of course, often earn that title by acts of imitatio Christi, miracles of exorcism or raisings of the dead that seem to be involved in this painting. Another possible Mark emerges from stone, the marble walls of the room depicted. Although I argue in the book that follows that the various Marks recorded in texts and images do not add up to a singular Mark, it is possible that Tintoretto’s painting, which has baffled art historians ever since Vasari first saw it and attempted to describe it, is trying to capture that life I call “Saint Marks” in an image in which St. Mark may be seen multiplied in the figures in which the Jesus of the gospel called Mark invited us to discover the life that lives in us beyond us, a life (as I will be arguing in the concluding chapter of this book) that even he did not call his own.

f i g u r e s a n d p l at e s

Figures 1 Andrea Zucchi, Miracle of the Transposition of the Body of Saint Mark 2 John Ruskin, “Byzantine Capitals: Concave Group” 3 John Ruskin, “Dripstones, Northern and Southern” 4 John Ruskin, “Abstract Lines”

Plates 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Titian, St. Mark altarpiece Giorgione, Castelfranco Madonna Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria Gentile Bellini, Procession in the Piazza San Marco Fra Angelico, St. Peter Preaching in the Presence of St. Mark Vittore Belliniano, The Martyrdom of St. Mark Giovanni Mansueti, Episodes from the Life of St. Mark Giovanni Mansueti, The Arrest and Trial of St. Mark Giovanni Mansueti, Baptism of Anianus Giovanni Mansueti, St. Mark Healing St. Anianus in Alexandria Palma Vecchio and Paris Bordone, Tempest at Sea Paris Bordone, Presentation of the Ring Jacopo Tintoretto, The Miracle of the Slave Jacopo Tintoretto, The Discovery of the Body of St. Mark Jacopo Tintoretto, The Carrying Off of the Body of St. Mark Jacopo Tintoretto, St. Mark Rescuing a Saracen from a Shipwreck Paolo Veronese, Infidelity Paolo Veronese, Respect Paolo Veronese, Happy Union Paolo Veronese, Scorn Jacopo Tintoretto, St. Mark and St. John xv

68 82 84 100

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Figures and Plates

22 Jacopo Tintoretto, St. Luke and St. Matthew 23 Palma Giovane, St.  Peter Dispatches St.  Mark to Preach the Gospel in Aquileia 24 Fra Angelico, Noli me tangere

Saint Marks

pa rt i

Painting Marks

chapter 1

Atmospherics (Bellini)

The two chapters in “Painting Marks” focus on paintings made in the sixteenth century for the Scuola Grande di San Marco in Venice; these paintings reflect textual traditions of the Middle Ages, narratives about St. Mark of the sort gathered in the Legenda aurea. I begin this discussion of representations of Mark, however, with an altarpiece by Titian made early in his career (in the first decade or so of the sixteenth century); chronologically contemporaneous with the first paintings supplied for the Scuola, Titian’s altarpiece anticipates and embodies stylistic features found in those produced for the Scuola years later. Occupying this divided historicity, Titian’s painting serves stylistically to counter some prevailing ways of reading paintings that imagine them as if determined by a singular historicity. Titian’s St. Mark altarpiece (now in Santa Maria della Salute) has been viewed as such a typical Venetian image of the saint (plate 1). In examining it, I am most concerned to explore what that typicality means. I take David Rosand’s acclaimed and authoritative work to index it. Titian’s painting is a recognizable instance of a sacra conversazione: its saint sits aloft on a throne, four saints stand below, two on either side of it, paired. Rosand discusses it in Myths of Venice, a study of artistic 3

4

Painting Marks

representations of what the subtitle of his book calls “the figurations of a state.”1 It is treating that figuration as the entirety of artistic meaning that I want to call into question. In his chapter on St. Mark, the figure who came to be the patron saint of Venice, Rosand sums up the meaning of Titian’s painting this way: “Mark here personifies Venice, suffering the calamity and, at the same time, represents its prayers for salvation from that pestilence” (Rosand, Myths of Venice, 66). The “calamity” Rosand has in mind is the plague conventionally associated with the other saints in the painting, the wounded St. Roch and St. Sebastian on the right, the paired physician saints Cosmas and Damian on the left. The shadow that crosses Mark’s face conveys the “suffering” of Venice; it “bespeaks the darkness of the moment,” Rosand contends. Mark’s assumption of the throne aloft figures the hoped-for, all-but-certain salvation of Venice. Rosand’s summary of the import of the painting quickly becomes a narrative; it opens with an equation, Mark = Venice. My use of an equation mark follows his, as when he offers the gist of the entire book as a study of “the figural equations of Justice = Venice or Virgin = Venice or lion = St. Mark = Venice” (5). These equations ignore manifest differences in the meanings of words and images to produce something like the biographical reduction that C. Clifton Black resists in his study of the image of Mark in canonical biblical texts and the church fathers of the first four centuries. Black is skeptical that a singular biographical Mark can be assembled from such various evidence, regarding the creation of that singular figure as part of the work of church foundation. Mark’s association with Alexandria is a puzzle, unmotivated by anything in the earliest textual traditions, that can be explained that way: “Once Mark’s derivative apostolicity becomes established in the tradition,” Black writes, alluding to how Mark became associated with Peter and Rome, the connection to Alexandria can be understood as a reiteration of that association, “a way of providing an apostolic foundation for a major church,” the new one in Alexandria.2 Mutatis mutandis, the same can be said of Mark’s much later connection to Venice. Because Mark is a figure of association, rather than a singularity, his name has this kind of mobility. It is anything but an identity. Titian’s painting belies a straightforward equation of Mark with Venice precisely by placing him where one might expect Mary to be found. Such a substitution does not easily identify Mary and Mark, even if there is a tradition that the foundation of Venice coincided with the date on which Mary conceived, upon which Rosand depends for his equation of the two figures.3 If all figuration means “Venice,” figuration gives way to dis-figuration, referentiality. In “Venice” all figuration ends.

Atmospherics (Bellini)

5

Reading this way produces what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick memorably terms a “Christmas effect.” 4 She has in mind “the depressing thing about the Christmas season” when every institution proclaims a message of sameness, usually centered on the family, in which all citizens are presumed to be interchangeable with one another, everyone identical in their desires and aspirations. Anyone against Christmas has to be the enemy. The Christmas effect is an instance of ideology at work to enforce group experience as something invisible and inevitable. Does the work of art only function as apparatuses for such shared meaning? Sedgwick counters this assumption with a question that guides me throughout this book: “What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing?” (Tendencies, 6). In his own way, Black’s reading of Mark poses a similar vantage point, a way to see things in their complex skewedness rather than homogenized into an official meaning that supports the wish of those in power of being everywhere at once. “It would outrun the evidence to suggest that the church fathers deliberately or even consciously queered their developing portrayal of the Second Evangelist,” Black writes (Mark: Images, 214). It outruns the evidence, I want to suggest, both that Titian deliberately sought to do no more than reiterate Venetian ideology, just as it is questionable that he deliberately sought to queer it. The meanings of a work of art outrun the intentions of the artist or the programs they may have been given by their patrons. If the entire meaning of Titian’s St. Mark rests on the figure of Mark, it is an odd fact about it that the painting is full of fingers pointing, none of them directed at St. Mark. Whatever hope may be housed in him that Venice always will remain La serenissima, those gestures invite the viewer to look elsewhere. There is a congruence in this dispersal of the gaze with the history of Mark’s attachment to Venice. That story was a late invention added to the multiple Marks who bear versions of that name in the New Testament. Mark was not the original patron saint of Venice: the state’s eternal sameness was invented over the course of the several centuries in which a retrospective narrative was developed to produce the Mark who came to be the saint who had always claimed and been claimed by Venice in his missionary work. This history of the making of Mark as Venice’s patron saint, with its gaps, discontinuities, contentions, and inventions, certainly is not the referent in Titian’s painting; nonetheless, Mark’s assumption of the place where we might expect to find Mary signals (or could remind us of) that history of replacement and invites us to view the equation of Mark and Mary with a critical eye. Mark’s displacement of Theodore, the original patron saint that linked Venice to the East, was,

6

Painting Marks

over several centuries, joined to the story of the city “miraculously born” (as Rosand puts it) on March 25, 421, the date but not the year of the Annunciation. The two events didn’t occur at the same time. The story of Mark as patron saint of Venice got started only in the ninth century, with the account of the theft of Mark’s body from Alexandria in 828–29; it did not cohere until the thirteenth century, at which time the relationship between Mark and Venice was shifted back to the city’s beginnings. By the sixteenth century, it was certainly possible to put one foundational story (in which Venice has its origins on the day the Virgin conceived) in the place of the other (in which Mark was called to be the patron saint of the city). The way to punctuate this coincidence might be a question mark rather than an equation mark. In The Altarpiece in Venice, Peter Humfrey offers an account of the occasion and meaning of Titian’s painting that bears comparison with Rosand’s. Humfrey is skeptical about a plague connection; he questions the idea that the painting functioned as part of the state apparatus, responding to some art historians who had argued that Titian had been commissioned by the state. He points out that the painting, now located in the Salute, close to the heart of Venetian power, originally hung in “the Augustinian church of S. Spirito in Isola in the Venetian lagoon.” Humfrey further doubts whether the painting should be understood to be determined by the verticality of its sacra conversazione format with Mark at the top, where Rosand focuses the point of the painting. Humfrey attends to its lower register where he sees Titian working to produce a more modern image, one like Sebastiano del Piombo’s horizontal S. Giovanni Crisostomo altarpiece. He admires Titian’s “classically proportioned figures, some of which exude a Giorgionesque yearning (St. Roch) or introspection (St. Sebastian), while the others are already more vigorous, decisive and rhetorical in their gestures” (242); his remarks ignore the figure of Mark who, as Humfrey notes, is difficult to locate in the incoherent space he occupies in the painting (the various architectural elements of the painting do not add up to produce a consistent sense of depth). Do the upper and lower registers of this painting add up to a unity? The space that Mark occupies does not read convincingly; there is, moreover, no way of telling how he got where he is—indeed no throne is visible to explain his seated stance. While Humfrey’s reading opens possibilities foreclosed by Rosand, it fi nally is not so far from his, for he too looks for references outside the painting, supposing, for instance, that the figures of Damian and Cosmas may be portraits (their “assertive realism” suggests this to him); this leads

Atmospherics (Bellini)

7

him to speculate that the occasion of the painting may have been to commemorate a recently dead physician, in which case the plague saints are there for their general appropriateness, if not because of the specific outbreak that Rosand supposes. Humfrey explains the odd space of the painting by speculating that in its original setting it would not have seemed odd. Humfrey’s version of history—of the modernity of Titian’s altarpiece— leads him to ignore its verticality and to suppose that the horizontality of Sebastiano del Piombo’s altarpiece equals modernity, a questionable assumption given the feat performed by Giorgione in the Castelfranco Madonna (plate 2) where the Virgin is at an all but insuperable distance from the figures below her throne. Giorgione’s extremity of placement, coupled with the kinds of atmospheric effects Titian learned from him, suggests that modernity is more complex than Humfrey’s model of temporal supersession can capture. Humfrey does not treat the painting as one more iteration of the myth of Venice. Indeed, he has nothing to say about the figure of St. Mark in the painting except to identify him, noting that since the painting was made for a chapel dedicated to Mark, he must be its presiding figure. Mark is not, in his reading, the culminating point of the meaning of the painting. He does not mention what is surely one of the oddest things about that representation, the shadow that obscures Mark’s face and shrouds one of his shoulders (perhaps this visual evidence explains why he fails to notice the figure in his discussion of the painting). In an earlier consideration of Titian’s altarpiece in Painting in Sixteenth- Century Venice, Rosand did take up that feature of the painting, noting as well asymmetries in its composition (for him, this made Titian’s painting more revolutionary than Sebastiano del Piombo’s contemporaneous altarpiece). Although in his earlier study he assumes that the plague was the immediate cause of the painting, he does not confine his analysis to an ideological explanation; the shadow across Mark’s face is understood more fundamentally in terms of “the expressive function of the deliberate absence of light.” Rosand takes this to be an early instance of something that Titian learned from Giorgione and made his own: “the shadow cast across the face became a sign of tragedy in his art,” meant to engage an affective response; it is a “fundamental expressive theme” (Painting in Sixteenth- Century Venice, 52). Rosand opens the way to further discussion when he points to the expressive function of the shadow in Titian’s painting. In turning conditions of visibility into a “theme,” “a sign of tragedy,” Rosand immediately poses questions that I will be asking throughout this book: What happens to paintings when we turn them into words in order to give them meaning?

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How does a literary form (tragedy) relate to how painting deploys light and shadow? Can painterly concerns be rendered immediately into something else, metaphorized into a verbal translation? What is the painting letting us see? What is it obscuring? Readings like Rosand’s and Humfrey’s are often most persuasive when they tell us things we can’t know simply by looking, for instance when they provide identifications of figures that often depend upon conventions—arrows for St. Sebastian, a thigh wound for St. Roch; we know who these figures are thanks to their attributes, indeed to their pairing in numerous other paintings.5 Knowing who figures are can lead us to think we have said every thing there is to say when we identify them; commentary often stops when such identifications are provided. This is perhaps even more the case in identifying the far less obvious figures of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Titian’s altarpiece. Presumably the vial that one of them holds contains medicine, thereby providing a clue to who they are; the fact that we don’t know which one is Damian and which Cosmas reminds us that the two are conventionally paired (sometimes twinned, although not here). Mark is not signaled by his usual attribute, the lion, in this painting; the book he carries could be the gospel he is supposed to have written, but other saints—Jerome for instance— are often figured with a book; beard and male balding pattern are not unusual for the figure of Mark, although not absolutely inevitable. Knowing that the painting was made for a chapel dedicated to Mark is the surest way to know who the figure is. But what does it mean to name these figures? Certainly there are paintings where identification seems to be what is being asked of the viewer— paintings with inscriptions on them invite the supposition that when viewers know who someone is, they know what they need to know. However, it could be argued just as readily that words on a painting relieve the viewer of the puzzle of identification and thus enable a looking that isn’t merely searching for a clue to name the figure. So often art historians (to whom one remains grateful) puzzle out who or what is being represented as if that is all one needs to know. (When that can’t be discerned an entire industry of interpretation is born: Giorgione’s Tempesta provides a perfect example.) What would happen if we attempted to look at Titian’s altarpiece alongside of but also beyond or aside from the names we can supply for the figures? What happens, that is, if we see the figures in the painting as images before we turn them into words? In posing this question I am not assuming we can do without words to describe what we see. The play of light and dark, crucial to what we see, and line and color, fundamental to the painting, are used toward figurative ends. We see hands, faces, bodies;

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at the same time, we see paint. We can attempt to follow pointing fingers or the direction of the gazes of figures in the painting as invitations to see visual connections that are not there simply to further the identifications that names provide or connections to the stories we may be supposed to know once we say “St. Roch” or “St. Mark.” Ultimately such looking might provoke questions rather than equations. Robert Kiely has followed the pointing fingers and the gazes in this painting. Although I have some questions about the interpretation he offers, what is important about these visual itineraries is the number of possibly irreconcilable paths they open. The two figures on the left point to the two on the right; the one on the left who looks in our direction looks at the figure beside him, depicted in profile, swathed in red. He gestures to the right, but looks up in the direction of Mark impossibly located at the top of the column on which he seems both to be leaning backward and thrusting forward. Mark looks vaguely in the direction of the figure looking up; he certainly does not look to the right where the figures on the left are pointing. The shadow across his face only adds to the uncertainty of the object of St. Mark’s gaze, if indeed he is looking anywhere in particular. He seems really to be staring into space. On the right side of the painting, St. Roch looks left, gazing upward, but indeterminately; his one visible hand gestures to the right, to the wound by which we know him. We can scan the image from right to left by way of the circuit of gazes from Roch to the younger man on the left to Mark; or we can scan the image from left to right by following the hand gestures that seem to lead to Roch’s wound and perhaps onward to the other figure identifiable as St.  Sebastian thanks to the arrow piercing his chest; he seems outside these movements of hands and eyes. He looks down and away to the right, his eyes hooded; his gaze corresponds to Mark’s only insofar as both figures look away from the play of gazes and fingers that constitute the sacred conversation. “If this is a sacra conversazione,” Kiely remarks, “some of the characters seem not to be listening” (Blessed and Beautiful, 141). The viewer who follows the gestures of hands from left to right is led to St. Roch’s thigh, to pierced flesh and the intimation of the penetrability of the male body that Kiely takes to be at the heart of the questions the painting explores: can there be a masculinity that is a site of vulnerability? Does Christianity’s embrace of suffering also entail an erotics? The right side of the painting is dominated by male flesh, St. Roch’s bared thigh, the body of St. Sebastian, fully naked except for the part of him that is ostentatiously draped. I use the word “ostentatiously” deliberately, recalling Leo Steinberg’s claims about the matching in Renaissance paintings of Jesus

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of an “ostentatio genitalium comparable to the canonic ostentatio vulnerum, the showing forth of the wounds.”6 These two forms of showing are divided between the wounded St. Roch and the ferocious knot below St. Sebastian’s waist that suggests a massive erection. It functions in counterpoint to the imperturbability or self-regard of the vulnerable naked youth who is somehow undisturbed by the arrow piercing his chest. Christ’s genitality, Steinberg argues, is often displayed in the same kind of knots and swirls of drapery as cover Titian’s St. Sebastian. (St. Roch’s thigh wound is conventionally a displacement of the plague buboes he had on his groin.) Such figuration, for Christ, shows that he is uncannily at once divine and human, vulnerable. The member that might convict him of fallen humanity is raised to mean the opposite, the resurrection of the flesh. In a conventional sacra conversazione a thematic of the flesh would settle on the figure of Mary with the infant Jesus on her lap, combining paradoxes of virginal sexuality and divine incarnation in the figure of the vulnerable child (often sporting, as Steinberg shows, an erect, if tiny penis). Can Mark occupy Mary’s place? Kiely claims that he does, assuring his readers that “the great patron and protector of Venice” countenances Sebastian’s display of the beauty of a less aggressive masculinity beneath him (the figure of Mark is no pinup). Kiely’s reading offers an ideological assurance comparable to Rosand’s. His Mark also is an embodiment of Venice, here, it seems, proffering a quasi-liberal assurance of the toleration of “difference” even as he remains a “great patron and protector,” presumably seated securely above the figures below him. Yet the figure of Mark functions mainly as swirling drapery, pink folds receding into shadow and thrusting blue. His drapery connects Mark to the splendidly robed Saints Cosmas and Damian, but also to St. Sebastian; it is his billowing drapery that suggests erect male genitals. The eye of the viewer is led, guided by the tiled floor, to the low angled view from below of the vanishing point of the painting, the column upon which St. Mark is perched. The column is covered, draped in a green unique in the painting’s palette. While the eye is led by the hands in the painting to wounded flesh and from there to drapery whose covering alludes to what is hidden beneath, the vanishing point of the painting leads to a column atop which folds of drapery seem to cascade. Mark’s lap does not suggest male genitalia beneath. Nor does the column seem particularly phallic. The column is not an unusual motif in altarpieces like this (indeed, Giorgione’s Castelfranco Madonna sits above a green cloth). Rather than a piece of rich tapestry, one whose painting might suggest opulence and texture, Titian’s rather flat fabric with its vertical linear design does not suggest folds but is more like the geometric

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tiles of the floor except that the lines, interrupted by the horizontal of the stairs, are not continuous with it. This emphasis on noncontinuous line frustrates what we might expect: the clarity and rationality of disegno which, along with his abilities at colorito, helped make Titian an instant classic.7 Titian’s painting, I am suggesting, is composed of crossed visual demands— of fingers and gazes— and of a crossed thematic of the flesh that would more readily resolve, however paradoxically, if Virgin and Child were at its apex. So, perhaps it can be said that the shadow that crosses Mark’s face and arm and visually divides the figure is close to the enigma of meaning in the painting; he is not there simply to be ignored, nor does he resolve the meaning of the image. If this painting is about the play between what is seen and what is covered, it sustains an opacity that any equation sign necessarily obscures. The shadow across Mark remains impenetrable. Can one thing be another? How does a canvas, which is a field of color, get us to the words “St. Mark”? Because this painting is (or is called) “the St. Mark altarpiece,” it especially provokes the concerns in this chapter about how St. Mark, and the stories that attach him to Venice, are represented. It is understandable why Humfrey more or less ignores the figure of Mark in the painting, why Rosand translates him immediately into a figure for Venice. His covered, shadowed, veiled face withholds. How did Mark ever come to be where he sits so uncomfortably in this painting? Some answers to this question are offered in an immensely learned essay by Thomas E. A. Dale on the politics of some of the earliest images of St. Mark; Dale shows how “the Adriatic versions of Mark’s legend . . . found primarily in the monumental art” of the regions contended for ownership of the figure, a contest that Venice won.8 The shadowy figure of Mark in Titian’s painting is at once in a triumphal position above the other figures and also somewhat out of place. Mark’s story is not one story; the bible offers no narrative linking him to Alexandria. Mark’s is a stolen body, smuggled out of Alexandria covered in pork; an offense to Islamic nostrils, it is insistently connected to and hidden by forbidden flesh. In the paintings for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, to which I turn below, Mark is an insistently Eastern saint before he becomes Western (if his installation in the Byzantine Basilica of San Marco does that). Once the body gets to Venice, and is deposited in San Marco, it gets lost; hundreds of years later, it miraculously reappears. Are these stories of the body of Mark—now you see it, now you don’t—part of the play of light and dark in Titian’s painting? Is its version of the flesh one with the Christology I have supposed, or in contention with it? Titian is not a painter one associates with male

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beauty as readily as one does Michelangelo, Leonardo, or Caravaggio; nonetheless, one can imagine the painting’s entrancement with male flesh apart from the Christian translation of flesh into a sacrament or modern questions of sexual identity, for that matter. All paintings must be about something more than whatever allegiances they may have to their subject matter. Titian’s ability to conjure Mark in a scene where we might not expect to find him, to make him almost there (but somewhat hard to see), could be a kind of equivalent to his dodgy story, but would not be in the ser vice of a state ideology that would not want us to consider it as dodgy; nor would Titian be performing an act of ideology critique. If we had to ask how this correspondence of subject matter and painterly ambition came about, the answer would lie, I think, in a shared fictiveness, which is not to suggest that the fictions of the patron saint are to be equated with the ability of the painter, through paint, to conjure up forms that we call by name as if they were people and objects. Titian’s red-robed, blue-mantled St. Mark was not his invention. If the colors in the much restored Zen Chapel in St. Mark’s Basilica are true to the original thirteenth-century mosaics, these were Mark’s colors almost from the start of the ideological program that attached him to Venice. Closer in time to Titian, Giovanni Bellini had included a similarly garbed St. Mark in his 1488 painting of Doge Agostino Barbarigo before the Virgin and Child (Murano, San Pietro Martire). The Madonna at the center of this sacra conversazione is dressed almost identically to Mark; where he has some goldflecked trim on his blue mantle, she has white; his red tunic also is fringed like hers with gold tracery. The St. Mark in Gentile and Giovanni Bellini’s St.  Mark Preaching in Alexandria (Brera) is likewise clad in rosy red trimmed in gold and mantled in blue (plate 3). This was the first painting completed for the decoration of the albergo, the room where the governing board of the Scuola Grande di San Marco met.9 Although Gentile Bellini had offered his ser vices to the Scuola as early as 1492, work on the painting commenced more than a decade later, only one year before his death in 1507; his will left its completion to his brother Giovanni. Art historians generally assume that the design of the painting was Gentile’s, and that he had all but completed it before his death. Giovanni is usually said to have been responsible for some of the portrait heads, certainly for the imposing portrait of his brother, the foremost figure in red on the left side of the painting, perhaps for the sundrenched bit of background on the right, and for other occasional details. Most critics assign the figure of St. Mark to him. Rona Goffen makes a compelling case for “Giovanni’s

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hand” in the “luminous atmosphere” of the painting, going on to describe it as offering “an Alexandria that evokes both the Piazza di San Marco and the saint’s Scuola Grande, thus anticipating Mark’s ultimate triumph.”10 That atmosphere, I agree, is crucial to the painting, but I would stop short of Goffen’s ideological conclusion. Literature on St. Mark Preaching frequently rehearses the documentary evidence about the activity of the Scuola in commissioning and supervising the decoration of the albergo; as Peter Humfrey notes in an essay on the arrangement of the seven paintings that ultimately covered its walls, the documentation, “although inevitably full of tantalizing lacunae, [is] . . . nevertheless considerably more detailed than that of any other Venetian cycle of the time.”11 The topic that most engages art historians is the historical relationship between the painting and the real Alexandria it conjures into existence. Isabella Botti is almost alone in venturing a thesis relating the history of its production to its content; she connects the economic interests of members of the Scuola in the spice trade with the choice of an Alexandrian locale for the initial group of paintings begun by the Bellinis and continued in paintings by their followers Giovanni Mansueti and Vittore Belliniano.12 The choice of subject is in question precisely because the albergo cycle omits any depictions of the episodes surrounding the transportation of Mark’s body from Alexandria to Venice so crucial to the state my thology. However, even without these scenes, the ideological meaning of those events— Mark’s attachment to Venice as the sign of the inevitability of Venetian ascendancy over the East and the cornerstone for the Venetian empire—underlines the interpretive work on the painting, as is evident in Goffen’s pairing of Mark and “triumph” echoed by Rosand and most other art historians; Botti, too, treats the trade relations of the Scuola Grande di San Marco as an arm of the state’s ongoing assault (ideological, religious, and financial) on the East. Identifying topography and Eastern costumes are topics in virtually every thing written about this painting.13 The Pharos, the light house in Alexandria, was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world (no longer extant when the painting was made, it is depicted in San Marco mosaics); commentators identify it with one or the other of the two towers in the background of St.  Mark Preaching that culminate in a small rounded dome and diminutive spire. Alexandria had an obelisk and there is one in the painting, but before it can be said to clinch the accuracy of the topography, discussion of whether it might represent the obelisk in Istanbul, where Gentile had spent a year in the employ of Sultan Mehmed II, is regularly considered, without a definitive answer being reached, since

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the hieroglyphs don’t match either column (some art historians think the obelisk depicted is the so-called Cleopatra’s Needle now found in Central Park in New York; others think it’s the one in London). Most art historians see Alexandria’s Diocletian’s Column (sometimes called Pompey’s Pillar) represented by the column on the extreme right side of the background of the painting. A couple of art historians are sure that the minaret with the curving outdoor staircase is based on Cairo’s Ibn Tulun mosque. The assessment of the historical accuracy of the buildings in the painting contributes to a historicizing effort whose search for a real referent lends support to an ideological program. St. Mark Preaching frustrates these attempts to say definitively what the painting represents; producing lists of possibilities often is about as far as art historians go in interpreting the painting. At stake in these attempts to identify monuments is the notion that Venetian appropriation of the East depended upon such knowledge. Julian Raby, for instance, details what he calls the “Oriental mode” in early Renaissance art, cataloguing items of costume (mainly headgear) as an “objective record of the East.”14 Patricia Fortuni Brown attaches the notion of “eyewitness style” to narrative paintings of the kind that decorated the Scuola Grande di San Marco; she sees such accounting as a form of domination (knowledge is power). However, Brown does not confine these paintings to what she calls their inventorial quality. She allows them to register a baffled wonder at the exotic East that lends them what she terms their “lyrical” quality (Venetian Narrative Painting, 4). Unlike most art historians who have written about the paintings in the albergo, Brown recognizes that there could be more to say about these works of art than deciding how authentic the costumes and settings are. The truth of painting lies in more than its ability to replicate the world. This is where Goffen’s recourse to “atmosphere” proves useful, especially when put beside the stunning work of Paul Hills’s Venetian Colour. “Too often art historians write of pictorial space as though it replicated physical space, whereas Renaissance painting at its most refined is a process whereby thought becomes incarnate in design: in doing so, space becomes luminous, self-evident, revelatory,” Hills writes.15 To bring this observation closer to the painting at hand, we might wonder what kind of eyewitness its perspective establishes. One reason art historians fixate on the buildings in the background of St. Mark Preaching might be because the aerial perspective of the painting brings the buildings closer to the surface than a lower vantage point would offer. The imagined viewer is not on the ground, certainly not in the position of the fixed eye upon which Florentine painting and one-point perspective depend.16 The viewer might

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be supposed to hover in midair before the painting, perhaps is imagined standing on a balcony like the ones in the painting; on some of them, viewers seem engaged by what is happening below them, although none can be said to be drawn to, or drawing our attention to what is ostensibly the subject of the painting, the preaching saint. If the viewer is like one of these figures, our eye is not led anywhere in particular, or, rather, is free to stop and pause at many points of interest in the painting. This is not surprising; as Hills suggests, Venetian painting, unlike Florentine art, is “at ease with representations that allow for a moving eye” (Venetian Colour, 11). The envelope of air that characterizes Venetian painting from Bellini on— and to which Goffen’s “atmosphere” can be attached—is one aspect of this kind of visual space. At 3.47 × 7.70 meters, the size of the canvas guarantees it can’t be seen all at once. Size and perspective, in short, ensure multiple, dispersed viewings that might start or stop here or there. It may have been the convention in Venetian narrative painting, as Rosand contends in Painting in Sixteenth- Century Venice, to read them from left to right, and it is possible to approach the painting this way, coming upon St. Mark from behind, as the members of the Scuola depicted on the left side of the painting do. For the Scuola members viewing the painting, this might well have been their entry point, drawn in through their own portraits. However, virtually all the Venetian figures scattered throughout the foreground are portrait figures; if they furthered such identificatory points of entry, they do not guarantee left-right scansion. Moreover, there is no narrative impetus in the painting. Phyllis Lehmann opens her brief monograph on the painting (it winds up being mesmerized by its giraffe and palm tree and the question of the source of these images) by venturing a detailed description of the contents of the painting; she begins with the figure of St. Mark since he’s the subject of the painting, not necessarily because he’s what a viewer first sees.17 Most viewers, I would venture, then and now, find their eyes drawn elsewhere initially. Like other art historians, Lehmann does not describe what it’s like to look at St. Mark Preaching; she inventories what’s there. This endeavor is most vexed when it comes to naming the building that dominates the background of the painting. The attempt to name it has a long history. In 1648, the building was identified by Carlo Ridolfi as “il tempio di Santa Eufemia” (Botti, “Tra Venezia e Alessandria,” 33); others claim it is the church that Mark supposedly built in Alexandria for its fledgling Christian community; others assume it is where Serapis was venerated in the pre-Islamic Alexandria of Mark’s time.18 Crucially, each commentator in his or her own way grapples with the resemblance of the building to the

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Basilica of St. Mark in Venice, since it is on that resemblance that they pin their historical/ideological arguments. For Caroline Campbell, San Marco is the “model” for what she regards as the temple of Serapis; for Lehmann, the building constitutes a “variation” on San Marco.19 Although the building looks like San Marco to the critics, at the same time it recalls various buildings to them, including the Scuola Grande di San Marco, but mainly ones in Istanbul, among them Hagia Sofia and the Church of the Holy Apostles. Attempts to draw the building into the orbit of St. Mark’s are, as usual, in the ser vice of arguments about Venetian domination of the East. This plot forgets that the building itself is not exactly or entirely a Western building. “Saracenic, oriental and Western sources are interwoven in a visual bricolage . . . an amalgam of precious materials,” Hills remarks about the basilica (Venetian Colour, 23). “Amalgam” is also a useful term to describe the orientalizing effects of the painting, a piecemeal gathering of Eastern allusions that may suggest modes of relationality that don’t simply collapse into domination. In trying to sort out how the building in the background of the painting conjures up San Marco when, in fact, it does not really look very much like it in many of its architectural specifications (e.g., number of doors, number of stories), it is perhaps more useful to notice how much the painting recalls one Gentile Bellini made several years before for the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista, his Procession in the Piazza San Marco (plate 4). Although scarcely any discussion of St. Mark Preaching fails to mention this precedent, Humfrey is almost alone in stressing that rather than aiming at a documentary vision of the east, Bellini might be recalling his own earlier painting as a model for this one. In his survey of Painting in Renaissance Venice, Humfrey notes of St.  Mark Preaching that “the large building in the background, while irresistibly recalling the church of San Marco, has assumed an appropriately exotic disguise”; in his catalogue of Venetian paintings of the Renaissance in the Brera, he explains further why this recall is so irresistible: one painting summons up the other.20 Humfrey terms the analogy between the two compositions “stupefacente,” astounding: Certo l’analogia tra le due composizione è stupefacente; anche la scene della Predica è ambientata in una vasta piazza, con un fregio di figure collocate sul davanti della scena, parallele al piano; mentre il tempio di Serapide sullo sfondo, nonostante le strane construzione annesse, somiglia da vicino alla basilica S. Marco che occupa lo sfondo della Processione. (92)

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[Certainly the analogy between the two compositions is astounding: the setting of St. Mark Preaching is also oriented towards a vast square, with a frieze of figures arranged in the foreground, parallel to the picture plane; while the Temple of Serapis in the background, not withstanding the strange constructions annexed to it, nearly resembles the setting of the Basilica of San Marco that occupies the background of the Procession.]

In this context, as Humfrey recalls, it’s useful to remember that Gentile had promised (in one of the many documents that survive) that the painting he would provide the Scuola Grande di San Marco would be of greater perfection and quality (“più perfection e bontà” [92]) than the one he had done for San Giovanni Evangelista. Bellini’s earlier painting lends visual authenticity to his later work; it provides a template for seeing. The desire of art historians to provide the painting with referential, documentary value—to cinch exactly what buildings are represented—is matched by the desire to make the painting proclaim the ideological assurance of Venetian ascendency, collapsing whatever historical vision might be on offer into a kind of eternal present. To do that, critics grapple with the multitemporality of the painting evident as much in the buildings assembled as in the combination of portraits of contemporary Venetians side by side with more generic Easterners. How does the figure of St. Mark fit into these anachronistic schemas? Charles Dempsey claims that he sports an “impeccable antique toga”; Lehmann, on the other hand, ventures that his garb, especially in its rather acid colors, seems more quattrocento than the up-to-date attire of the other figures.21 Dempsey reads the “obvious enough analogies” between the central building in the painting and San Marco (and the facade of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, too, he adds) as an invitation to make comparisons furthered by the “fusion of historical narrative with contemporary reference” (“Renaissance Hieroglyphic Studies,” 358). His historicizing leads to a familiar ideological presentism; he ups the ante by declarations that try to turn the thesis of Western domination into incontrovertible fact. Although the painting has been called St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria for centuries, “properly speaking its subject is the establishment of the Church of Alexandria by Saint Mark,” he writes (358). The point in having an impeccably proper ancient Mark in the painting preaching “not to the ancient Alexandrians, but to a crowd of Turkish men and women” amounts to this: “Explicitly stated thereby is the hope of reconverting Alexandria . . . , and this hope of turning back the

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new paganism of Islam by Venetian Christians appears in the assembly of Venetian citizens . . . attending the sermon of Saint Mark” (358). “Properly speaking”; “Explicitly stated”: these declarations express Dempsey’s thesis, but there is nothing in the painting that supports them (this painting doesn’t sport a title, nor does it state anything explicitly). Mark is preaching to a crowd that includes not only Eastern figures (Raby insists that they are not for the most part Turks, but Mamluk Egyptians), but Venetians as well. It is difficult to assert that many of these can be said to be listening to or visibly engaged by Mark—they are “attending” merely in the sense that they are present before him, or along with him (a whiteturbaned man in a brocaded robe standing before the platform from which Mark preaches is the sole figure visibly engaged by him). Moreover, nothing in the relationship of the various groups of figures supports the fierce opposition between East and West assumed by Dempsey; the fascination with costume or architecture, moreover, hardly seems captured in an entirely negative relationship to Islam as a “new paganism.” I think it’s more to the point that the painting presents the anachronistic coexistence of figures from various places, bringing together various temporalities and geographies that cannot be stabilized into the dualism of East versus West, or the assurance of Western ascendency. The painting brings multiple times and spaces together in its fictive pictorial space. Bringing them together sustains difference. This is not the “Translatio Alexandriae et Aegypti” with which Brian Curran titles the subsection of his The Egyptian Renaissance devoted to Bellini’s painting, which concludes with this claim: “Past and present, sacred and profane, Venice and Alexandria: all of these are brought together in the anachronistic space of Bellini’s painting.”22 Curran’s “anachronistic space” serves the ideology of Venetian triumphalism, the translatio from East to West instanced as well in Botti’s account of mercantile relationships as a war between Venetians and what she characterizes as a malicious and capricious sultanate: “la ‘conquista’ della città egiziana da parte di Marco” (58) (the “conquest” of the Egyptian city by Mark). There is another way to think about what is brought together in this painting if we follow Hills and think about the effects of the color and light that suffuse the painting. If paintings like St.  Mark Preaching manage to suggest “the persistence of the timeless within the present moment,” Hills argues (Venetian Colour, 156), it is not simply the timeless ideology of the Venetian ruling class being conveyed. The canvas certainly features the Venetian elite, clothed in black or red, often sporting the obligatory black beret, but it puts them in a context they do not visibly dominate. As Hills insists, the work of painting is not

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to serve as a “mere reflection of what Venetian society already believed” (156). Commentators on St. Mark Preaching who want the painting to add up to Venetian ideology encounter many obstacles, and it’s on these I would fasten rather than repeating the usual magisterial declarations of Venetian ascendancy. I would follow Campbell, who remarks about Gentile’s Procession that “architecture and people are interrelated rather than integrated” (“Bellini, Bessarion,” 56), opening possibilities, rather than the conclusion she reaches that St. Mark Preaching offers “the hope that Mark’s Venetians would re-convert the Alexandrians to Christianity” (55). Such interpretations of the painting seem to enshrine a kind of crusader ideology, assuming a war of West against East, and seem far from the strange simultaneous unanim ity and difference that the painting captures. It’s not merely that Westerners and Easterners mingle, or that details conjure up a variety of sources without settling on a definitive origin. This is true of the large building that dominates the background. But it’s also true about the human figures in the painting who lack self-sameness and are curiously detached from the groups that lend them identity. This is especially the case with the Venetians. On the one hand, almost all are clothed in the patrician gowns of black or red; however, there are exceptions, like the imposing figure on the right side of the painting standing on one of the lines that establishes perspective; although he is black capped like almost all the Venetians, he is clothed in a luxurious goldencolored gown, whose texture and weight are conveyed by highlights of a blue-gray like that of the sky, by yellows that turn golden in the chain around his neck, and that deepen into brown tones like those that suffuse the entire painting. Moreover, however much group identity is proclaimed, almost every Venetian head seems to be an individualizing portrait. Pointing up the discrepancy of individualizing and corporate identity is the fact that these portrait heads seem to have been put on askew. They don’t fit their bodies. It is a rare instance to find one Venetian face relating to another; while all of the Scuola members depicted on the left (with a few exceptions) face in the same direction, notionally toward Mark, but of course toward the back of his head, elsewhere the dispersed Venetians look every which way across one another, often even when face to face. Here and there a face seems to be looking directly out at the viewer, perhaps offering a mirror to the person who sat for his portrait who now sees himself painted—but the heads are too small to focalize anyone’s attention for very long. The size of the Venetians, moreover, is not kept in strict perspective scale, and the occasional diminutive figures, and not just the child

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behind the golden robed figure (his page?), seem curiously diminished next to larger Eastern figures. Densely packed in the painting, the Venetians are nonetheless dispersed among others, and scarcely unified themselves, either as individual figures (with body and head as loosely assembled parts), or as a group whose similar garb but whose lack of interpersonal relationality seems at odds with the solidifying of a group identity. Among the Eastern figures, there is a greater sense of interpersonal relationality; small clusters of two or three or more of these figures seem to be interacting; hand gestures convey a sense of conversation between them (fairly deep in the background on the left, one man even has his arm on the shoulders of another). Yet their faces lack the specificity of the Italian faces; this generic anonymity works against the intimacy of touch and grouping that other wise creates a sense of greater personal relationship. Variations in costume further individualize these figures; the Easterners are not as uniform as the Venetians are in their attire. The groups of Easterners and Westerners, in sum, are represented differently, to be sure, but the differences within these differences— differences in faces, in clothing, in grouping, in interrelations—do not create an absolute dualism of East and West so much as a continual play of difference. Absolute difference is further baffled if we can trust the label that Cesare Vecellio provided for a figure in striped garb with a tall hat that he derived from one of the two tall figures behind and in the midst of the women in the center of the painting—“Christiano Indiano” is the label he applies to them (Vecellio mined this painting for an authenticity much like that desired by art historians); the label suggests that the figure is from the East—“Indiano”— but is also a Christian.23 The relationships among the various groups and subgroups support generic difference and individualization without necessarily favoring one or the other mode of characterization (you could say of either group “they are all like that” and mean two quite different things). The figures play out a set of variations without one mode being valued above another. The spacing of the painting allows for coexistence, not St. Mark’s forceful conversion of anyone. The painting holds together in one space figures whose various dispositions are allowed to be just that— various, unrelated, or differentially related. Red and black may be the colors that “belong” to the Venetian patriciate, as Hills demonstrates, but these colors are not theirs alone in the painting. On the left side, their black dominates, and black caps and robes dot the other Venetians in the painting, but also, occasionally, it is the color worn by an Eastern figure, notably an outsized man to the right of the figure in gold, white-turbaned but clothed in black. Red skips across the canvas

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from the red-robed figures on the left (Gentile foremost among them) to the three figures with the tall red turbans grouped on the right. But even this group’s color solidarity is interrupted by the odd (in shape and color) green-shaded hat of a fourth figure who seems in and yet apart from the group of three; and, of course, these same tall red hats appear again in the background of the group on the right; they are about all that can be seen of those in the rear. But just as prominent as the figure of Gentile on the left is an Eastern figure on the right who similarly violates the bottom line of the painting to intrude into the viewer’s space; he, too, wears a red robe. Red, in short, is dispersed across the painting. The eye is drawn to this play and spacing of color—the black on the left answered, perhaps, by the white of the turbans and scarves on the right; but even here this is not a question of absolute differentiation; one Venetian on the left wears a white scarf, while bits of white gleam on the necks and sleeves of other Venetian figures. White, of course, is the mesmerizing color of the drapery of the women in the front and center of the painting; they are perhaps the most eyecatching human figures in the painting and do not easily fit into prevailing historicizing/ideological readings, which largely ignore them. But, again, white is not theirs alone; on the right side of the painting, an Eastern figure with his back to us wears a white cap and tunic over a rosy red gown. We could take the elaborate shading that creates the feel and sheen of a white garment, its bunching around the waist, its puffed sleeves, as a warrant for noticing what can be seen the more one looks—that any costume that seems at first glance a single color is, rather, multicolored within its singularity, creating, in the application of paint, differences of light that convey texture, weight, sheen. This is not the only variegation that lends difference to sameness; figures wear striped garments, damasked robes; gold buttons gleam. Color is never just in one place or doing one thing to establish difference. Interspersings of red across the painting, occasional echoes of the blue sky in gowns or a deepening of the basic creamy browns and pinks of the painting in deeper, more opulent versions in a gown here or there, or across the gray facade of the large building in the background glimmering with gold, pink around its strange side appendages, and further varied subtly provide the unity in a painting that other wise treats its objects and its figures as occasions to reflect the light that suffuses the painting, glowing especially on the walls to the left, but also in the background on the right. These are all features of color that Hills teaches his readers to see and appreciate. As he suggests, color calls into question absolute binarisms;

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no color in this painting is “pure” or flat; none is self-identical. Moreover, color, so dispersed, refuses to stay within the lines, to serve merely to depict and to separate; its function is to suffuse the painting, to create a surface that overrides even as it serves to support and make possible our ability to say such words as “hat,” “robe,” “Venetian,” or “Easterner.” Color, that is, tells another version of identity and difference that is as mobile as the play of light. Hills, as we have seen, claims that pictorial space arises from a painterly conception. As the examples we have been considering might suggest, it inheres especially in color: “colouring— colorito—in all its variety and its blending is source of animation, of the pulse of life and likeness, in Venetian eyes” (Venetian Colour, 216). The light captured by paint on the canvas could be taken to demonstrate a philosophical point insofar as the materiality of the painting points to what joins art to life when it is understood as matter in motion.24 This materialist definition of life does not attach itself to the unique difference of any person to the exclusion of the relationship of individual difference to shared participation in the material conditions of life. Life, so understood, extends beyond the person to a matter that does not only involve human existence but it also cannot be attached to any particular group of people or their religious beliefs. In the painting, Mark has no privileged spot, and the fact that an obelisk rises above him and points upward is no guarantee of Christian ascendancy. It could as easily suggest a continuity. “The energy of colouring is a metaphor for life, its quickenings and extinctions,” Hills writes (Venetian Colour, 224). Even more than that could be claimed; the material ground of the painting participates in a “life” that extends beyond it. Paintings of this kind (by which I mean paintings in the wake of Bellini’s discoveries around color) allow us to see something other wise invisible to our eyes, “luminous film” (171) that extends everywhere. The philosophical position imagined most certainly recalls Lucretian atomism, but it might also attach to the life that Aby Warburg thought animated images, a Nachleben, survival, a living on across time and cultures. In the painting the veiled women are the most palpable figures for these implications. Once the viewer decides to attend to them, if they don’t happen to be the first figures that catch the gaze, they are a mesmerizing visual focus of the painting located front and center, unlike the preaching Mark off to the left. If this painting is about “attending,” it is these women, through whose veils the suggestion of faces can be seen, beneath whose white robes flecks of brilliant color appear, who, more than the oratorical gesturing of the saint, demand attention precisely because they are so hard

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to see as themselves. Or, rather, they are at once veiled, hidden, and visibility itself, a white glow reflecting light. Thirty or more of them sit on a rug, barely distinguished from the floor; another three, in various postures, are located on a smaller rug, perhaps a prayer carpet beneath their feet. They appear utterly serene in their similarity of form and posture, utterly mysterious in their groupings and covered gestures: it is impossible to say that the group seated on the floor displays much in the way of interaction, although some hands might touch, some heads incline together; they are established as a social grouping by a veiling that makes it difficult simply to say what the basis for the grouping is beyond a difference in gender that seems, at the same time, to be a condition for visibility—for light— and for form. These figures might be said to invite decipherment the way the hieroglyphs on the obelisk do. There, commentators, Lehman and Dempsey in particular, take the various signs inscribed to lead to the inevitable reading of Venetian domination.25 These women might be read in a parallel orientalizing way, as figures for a mysterious East reduced to femininity (there are no other women in this painting except for them). What is shown in these figures is at the same time veiling, hiddenness, and the blazing revelation of white. More than any other figure decipherable as human in the painting thanks to portrait face, recognizable gesture, or identifiable costume, these women are very close to being geometrical shapes (although their basic conic form is disrupted by the play of shading that joins various white robes into a field of oscillating light and texture). These figures are very close, that is, to being paint, or to revealing what white paint can suggest as the final coat put over a darker underpainting, which here peeks out as colors that suggest flesh—hands, the face beneath, and fabric behind a veil. The veil, that is, serves the function of Hills’s “luminous film” (Venetian Colour, 171). In looking at a painting suffused with Bellini’s atmospheric effects, we are seeing where life and art meet in a real ity that includes but is nonetheless diminished if reduced to being an eyewitness solely to the realities that go under the proper name. These female figures are unexpected (there is no precedent for them in The Procession). Indeed, the subject matter of St. Mark preaching in Alexandria is virtually unprecedented as an image. It’s not the subject in any mosaic cycle in San Marco devoted to its patron, for example.26 It is easy enough to suppose that Mark preached in Alexandria. In the life of St. Mark in the Legenda aurea, Jacobus de Voragine quotes Peter Damian on the number of people who “flocked together to receive the rudiments of faith” and mentions “the eloquence of his preaching”;27 no particular narrative

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is offered as an example, nor in various apocryphal accounts that casually mention preaching among Mark’s activities in Alexandria. There is, however, a telling detail in this scene of preaching that seems significant to how Mark is represented because it ramifies to early texts about him as the author of the gospel that goes under his name. I have in mind the figure of the scribe seated behind the saint who seems to be taking down the words he is speaking. Several commentators assume that the scribe, whose garb locates him as non-Western, if not exactly an Islamic Easterner, must be Anianus, the cobbler Mark met upon arriving in Alexandria. (Mark converted him, and Anianus succeeded Mark as bishop of Alexandria. Their meeting and the baptism of Anianus are the subject of two of the three paintings that Giovanni Mansueti provided for the St. Mark cycle in the Scuola Grande di San Marco; they flanked St. Mark Preaching on either side.) There is no textual support for Anianus as Mark’s scribe, however, and no image of him in that role; there is, however, precedent for thinking of Mark as St. Peter’s scribe. Clement of Alexandria, in remarks preserved by Eusebius, says that Peter’s audience “resorted to appeals of every kind to induce Mark (whose gospel we have), as he was a follower of Peter, to leave them in writing a summary of the instruction they had received by word of mouth.”28 Although there are no mosaics in San Marco showing Mark as Peter’s scribe, Peter is shown in one approving/authenticating Mark’s gospel; that is, he approves it as an authentic transcription of his, that is, of Peter’s words. The scribe taking down Mark’s sermon in the St. Mark Preaching might well reflect Mark himself as a scribe of Peter. There is, in fact, a representation of the scene of Mark as Peter’s scribe in the left-hand predella panel of Fra Angelico’s 1433 Linaioli tabernacle (plate 5). No one, so far as I know, has claimed this image as a precedent for Bellini’s painting. Obviously, there are enormous disparities in scale, and Fra Angelico is not usually thought of as an influence on Venetian painters of the generation following him. Yet, in this panel, Peter is at the center, on a podium, arms raised as he speaks. In profile to his left, Mark sits, looking up at Peter as he inscribes his words. Peter is garbed in blue; Mark wears a pink mantle over a dark gown. Further paralleling St. Mark Preaching, a group of women sit, attending to Peter’s sermon in Fra Angelico’s painting. Men are standing in the foreground of the image and gather around Mark. The displacement of Mark as the focal point in St. Mark Preaching (and, as we will see, in all the paintings in the albergo) is congruent with the portrait of the figure that Black has traced as St. Mark emerged in the writings of early church fathers as the derivative mouthpiece for Peter’s apos-

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tolic authority. Rather than the figure who stands for Venice and domination of the East, Mark is depicted in St. Mark Preaching in a manner that reminds one visually of his subordination. The Golden Legend follows Eusebius, making Mark Peter’s disciple. “When the apostle preached the Gospel . . . , the faithful . . . asked blessed Mark to put it in writing. . . . He did indeed write down the Gospel just as he had heard it from the lips of his master blessed Peter” (Voragine, Golden Legend, 243). My ellipses omit the one significant difference in this story from the painting: the Golden Legend locates Mark in Rome, not Alexandria. The representation of Mark in this painting calls into question what has been claimed so often, that it is an iteration of the myth of Venice. It might be possible to argue that the painting deploys the ruse of dominant power to seek to disperse itself, but it also might be the case that Venice secured its place in a less than absolute way, indeed, that it sought for coexistence. Scholars have recently suggested, for instance, that after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, the Venetian community in Istanbul flourished even more than it had before.29 In her study of the diplomatic relations of Venice and the East, Lucette Valensi suggests that visions of Oriental despotism familiar from the Enlightenment, or from the Crusades (and assumed as the Venetian mentality by so many art historians), is not really what is found in the dispatches of Venetian ambassadors to the East before the late sixteenth century.30 If we look to the place in the painting that most forthrightly declares a relationship between East and West, I’d venture it is in the figure of Gentile Bellini, who commands attention—he is recognizable— and as a representative member of the Venetian ruling class. He wears around his neck the medal commemorating his ser vice to the sultan who conquered Constantinople and who employed him in 1479–80. Bellini’s painting may be a vision of the East that only a Westerner might have, but it is not simply one aimed at appropriation or the obliteration of difference. This painting is more about invention than documentation, more about multiples coexisting than the determination of hierarchies of difference and value. There is, one could say, a certain indifference in this painting to such differences as East and West, Christian and pagan, the past and the present, the individualizing face and the generic, that is reconciled by what Goffen called “atmosphere,” and by the light that bathes the canvas in the way that Hills finds so crucial to Venetian color. The light that plays in this painting is not oblivious to the actual location of the painting in the albergo on the east wall facing the entrance, at right angles to the two large windows that face south, and which are therefore

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filled with light at various angles throughout much of the day. So, in the painting, light certainly seems to stream in from the right, illuminating the figures in the open space toward the right rear of the painting, cast brilliantly on the balcony on the most remote wall in the right rear, punctured with the suggestion of darkness within, decorated with carpets over the railing and screening (dazzling bits of color throughout the painting are found in such locations), and, on it, the tiniest figure, a dot of paint suggesting he too is clad in red and sports a white turban as do numerous other small figure on balconies and roofs and in the streets in the background of the painting. But the painting is not true to a singular source of light coming from the window to its right; the play of light and shadow is more dispersed, perhaps truer to the quality of Venetian light, as it reflects off the water; bits of the painting shine unaccountably if we insist on a “natu ral” source of light to explain it. Indeed, the entire setting of the painting is a study in a monotone, a brown in a number of shadings, patches of illumination, bits of color that we can read as a rug, a mosaic, marble inlay, gold, not to mention the occasional camel or giraffe, made of the same colors and yet distinct as themselves. The painting captures the atmospheric unity of Venice, which points beyond itself to a vision of unstoppable life as a matrix of sameness and difference. If the painting captures a fictive East for the West, it does so through a light that no one owns. Much that we observed in St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria obtains as well in the next Bellini painting commissioned by the Scuola, The Martyrdom of St. Mark (plate 6). The two paintings faced each other in the albergo, The Martyrdom straddling the doorway. In this painting, light appears to stream in from the windows on its left, connecting fictive and real space. Once again, such naturalistic effects are not strictly maintained. The background of the right side of the painting is suffused with a light that exceeds an external source, while the foreground too is filled with light catching especially the whites of turbans and scarves. Here, as in St. Mark Preaching, Venetians are portrait figures, and here, too, heads do not face in any consistent way in relationship to the bodies on which they are placed; bodies in proximity to other Venetians seem, once again, curiously detached; once again, few figures seem to be in relation to or aware of the supposed central event of the painting, the martyrdom of St. Mark. It is represented in the lower right part of the painting; his body is being dragged, as in the account in the Legenda aurea and apocrypha and as depicted in mosaics in San Marco. On the right side of the painting, a group,

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composed mainly but not solely of Venetians, gazes intently on Mark’s martyrdom. They are shown in profile, cut off at the waist, almost as if they were in the room, rather than in the painting. To an observer in the albergo, standing right below the entranceway, they would have been just above eye level. However, the perspective of the painting, as with St. Mark Preaching, imagines a more elevated viewer able to take in the large canvas (3.62 × 7.71 meters, just about the same size as St. Mark Preaching, but with the central third of its lower half interrupted by a gap of 1.58 × 2.72 meters to allow for the top of the doorway). Easterners are less individualized in physiognomy, and, as in St. Mark Preaching, are arranged in small groupings that suggest social interaction (in fact, those in the front row on the left seem more caught up in the scene of martyrdom on the lower right than do most of the Venetian figures on the left side of the painting who gaze in almost any other direction; that interest is not sustained on the right side either). Once again, splendid Eastern robes are the occasion for wonderful effects of variegated color and texture, while the Venetians for the most part are garbed in the black gowns of the patrician class (but occasionally in red), usually sporting the black beret that contrasts with the white turbans of the Easterners. The play of light and shadow across the painting is again a remarkable study in shades of brown and cream, ending in a blue of sky and blue-shadowed distant mountains on the right that seem unmistakably the work of Giovanni Bellini. Like St. Mark Preaching, The Martyrdom may have been the subject for a painting by Gentile Bellini, who had proposed to supply a canvas over the doorway of the albergo in 1505 (the documents are silent on its subject matter). Once again, his death interrupted the project, although this time he is not supposed even to have begun it. It was only in 1515 that Giovanni was commissioned to paint the martyrdom over the doorway; once again, death intervened: the artist died in 1516. Completion of the painting was left to Vittore Belliniano, a disciple who renamed himself after his master; he signed and dated the painting 1526 on the pier base beside the doorway to the building on the left side of the painting. Most critics see Giovanni’s hand in the landscape on the right, while Goffen again voices a minority opinion, “convinced . . . that Giovanni painted much of the Martyrdom himself.”31 She moves from the distinctive landscape to “the sunlight that bathes the buildings,” invoking here too an “atmosphere” that bears his stamp; indeed Goffen argues that the energy and imagination shown in the painting of the figures produces “the rhythmic unification of the crowd” with its “visual and psychological vigor and specificity”; she concludes

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that “this important painting deserves recognition as one of Bellini’s most significant late works, for all that he did not live to complete it” (Giovanni Bellini, 273). Goffen doesn’t explain why, if so much of the painting was Bellini’s doing, ten years passed between his death and Belliniano’s signature (William Rearick thinks he was employed to provide the portrait heads of members of the Scuola). Nonetheless, Goffen’s observation about the “unification of the crowd” does point to something true here and in the earlier canvas of St. Mark Preaching as well: that for all the differences between Venetians and Easterners, the painting does not seem intent, even in this most extreme subject of Mark’s martyrdom, on pitting West against East. Indeed, over the doorway of the albergo, a very strange genre scene takes place: a small group of veiled women, with a maid behind them, have ventured from the residence on the left (a structure whose walls and carpeted balconies suggest Eastern architecture, but whose windows and columnflanked doorway look more classically Western); they greet the arrival of men in black; to their right, still over the doorway, on horseback, blackhatted men (who might be Italians) seem engaged with more visibly identifiable Easterners, judging by their headgear, astride their mounts. This sense of pacific relations extends into the pastoral landscape, dotted here and there with elephants and camels, and crowned with a building that looks like an Italian church save for the crescent above the high steeple atop the dome; it is located in a landscape that, despite the Eastern animals, could be Italian (this was also the case with the mountains on the horizon in St. Mark Preaching). Botti identifies the church in the painting as that of San Ciriaco in Ancona. Claiming that trade relations with Alexandria were no longer fraught, and that this painting only offers a “generic aversion to infidels” (una generica avversione contro gli infideli [“Tra Venezia e Alessandri,” 64]), she fastens on this building to find, again, a polemical and historical explanation for its presence in the painting: Venetian claims to Ancona, situated at the limits of the Venetian maritime empire, are being supported. Religious subject matter, she concludes, takes on a political/economic coloring, the painting’s devotional object turned into an expression of Venetian civic pride (“la rappresentazione religiosa si colorava di una nota di attualità politico-economico; e l’intento devozionale . . . si tramutavano nella temporalissima espressione di un soddisfatto orgoglio cittadino” [66]). Once again, Venetian painting is presented as little more than an ideological statement. Contention is manufactured for a canvas where it is hard to find, remarkably so, as I noted, given its divisive subject matter.

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However, that subject, Mark’s martyrdom, is easy to miss (the ElectaLEM postcard that has been on sale at the Accademia crops it!). This is the case with miraculous events in other Venetian narrative paintings. In Gentile’s Procession, for example, its miracle is conveyed by a single figure, toward its center, on his knees. Once you see him, and if you know the story, you can find its supposed subject. But it’s difficult even to find him, and certainly impossible to sustain the event to which he is attached as the center of interest in the painting. In The Martyrdom, Mark, once found, is unmistakable; the prostrate figure is based on a prototype found in mosaics in the Basilica of San Marco; the cords dragging his body, standard in representations of his martyrdom, further the identification. Brown has explained the subordination of the main event in Venetian narrative painting as part of their “eyewitness” aim to give, as it were, a snapshot of a moment when something miraculous occurs alongside everyday events in a way that those coming upon the scene well might miss. The notion of a snapshot in time is difficult to sustain for paintings that are so resolutely anachronistic, multitemporal, ones where contemporary Venetians witness the moment of Mark’s martyrdom in a setting that refuses to settle into a singular topography. The notion that the ordinary and the miraculous can be seen simultaneously is appealing; the miracle is not a privileged instance in Gentile’s Procession, nor is Mark’s martyrdom in this painting of it. Even that event is not subsumed into a message about Venice triumphant against its enemies (Eastern but also Italian, in Botti’s account). We could draw a parallel to the deeply enigmatic painting of The Flagellation of Christ by Piero della Francesco (Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino), where the flagellation of Christ is relegated to the left background of a painting whose right foreground is dominated by three contemporary figures who are engaged with one another and not at all aware of the momentous scene beside and behind them. As Robert Kiely, following Carlo Ginsberg, observes, the composition implies that these two scenes may be put beside each other, and, at the same time, that the flagellation can be “ ‘put to one side’ ” (Blessed and Beautiful, 125). The simultaneous, noncommensurable realities of The Martyrdom may suggest a “unification,” as Goffen argues, an atmospheric unity in paint that does not focalize narrative attention or promote ideological closure. The very awkward shape of the canvas does this too; its large gap in the middle is not there to insist on an unbridgeable dualism. Goffen’s attachment of the initial two paintings for the albergo to Giovanni Bellini is not a widely shared opinion among art historians. Her insistence

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on “atmospheric” unity, achieved mainly in the use of color to create a pictorial space, effects of texture and reflected light, seems to me entirely persuasive, whether or not to be ascribed solely to Giovanni Bellini’s hand. In drawing attention to these features, Bellini’s achievement is being claimed for the incipient modernity realized by Giorgione and Titian. In that context, it’s somewhat startling (to understate the case) to find in Vasari quite a dif ferent attribution for St. Mark Preaching. Reviewing the career and work of Carpaccio and other Venetian painters of his time, Vasari has this to say: “Giovanni Mansueti . . . imitating the works of Gentile Bellini not a little, made many pictures in Venice. At the upper end of the Audience Chamber of the Scuola of S. Marco he painted a S. Mark preaching on the Piazza. . . . In the same place, . . . he painted S. Mark healing a sick man. . . . In another picture, he made a S. Mark converting an infinite multitude to the faith of Christ.”32 Mansueti certainly considered himself a Bellini disciple and proclaimed himself as such, signing one of his contributions to the true cross cycle for the Scuola di San Giovanni (for which Gentile Bellini provided two paintings, including the Procession) “Opus Joannis de Mansuetis Veneti recte sentientium Bellini discipli” (the work of Giovanni Mansueti, rightly understood as a disciple of Bellini); another work specifies Giovanni as his claimed master: “Opus Joannis de Mansuetis Discipuli Johanis Bellinus.”33 Vasari correctly assigns to Mansueti the paintings of St. Mark healing the cobbler Anianus and the one (variously titled) that depicts scenes from the life of St. Mark (these are two of the three paintings that Mansueti provided for the albergo in the years following the two paintings begun by the Bellinis; the third is the baptism of Anianus); he has no trouble attributing St. Mark Preaching to him as well. In 1912, J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle were still following Vasari’s attribution, declaring that St. Mark Preaching is “for Mansueti a masterpiece.”34 Their grudging admiration tacitly acknowledges the low esteem in which the painter has long been held; Carlo Ridolfi’s complaint about his tedium in the brief notice he gives him in Le maraviglie dell’arte provides the constant refrain in the critical literature.35 (Noioso, “tedious,” Miller notes, is the charge regularly made [“Giovanni Mansueti,” 93].) Philip Sohm barely can contain himself in deploring the conservatism of the taste of the Scuola Grande di San Marco when it came to choosing painters for the albergo: “For example, the three paintings in the albergo by Giovanni Mansueti are cluttered with lifeless figures which reveal a dessicated imagination. Although they were painted in the 1520s, they are a mindless repetition of formulae which he had copied from Carpaccio in

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the late fifteenth century.” He caps this dismissal with a footnote referring the reader to a brief German essay on Mansueti’s late work as an instance of the “appropriately limited” scholarship on him (Scuola Grande di San Marco, 43).36 I don’t want to attempt here some revaluation of Mansueti that would exonerate Vasari’s attribution of St. Mark Preaching to his hand; nonetheless it is salutary to contemplate that a near contemporary was not able to see much difference between him and Bellini. I don’t think this is just another instance of Vasari’s general antipathy to Venetian art: Mansueti’s contemporaries praised him for what later critics regularly deplored as tedious clutter: the variety and beauty of his images, as instanced by his “noble” architecture and deployment and costuming of figures (“copiose e belle con nobili architetture, e con figure variamente, e graziosamente vestite,” one comment reads [Miller, “Giovanni Mansueti,” 85]). Vasari offers similar approval, concluding his description of Episodes from the Life of St. Mark (plate 7) with this evaluation: “throughout the whole work there are diverse persons with a beautiful variety of expression, dress, and features” (Lives, 1:605). Mansueti has in recent years gotten some attention because of his representations of the East in these paintings (and one other of The Arrest and Trial of St. Mark [plate 8] painted originally for the Crociferi St. Mark cycle). Here, as with the Bellini paintings, critics want authenticity and accuracy and complain when it is not to be had. Raby, for example, draws upon Mansueti for his lists of types of headgear but deplores as merely decorative the use of Mamluk emblems in the arches in the Baptism of Anianus (plate 9) or above the presiding figure at the center of St. Mark Healing St. Anianus in Alexandria (plate 10) and in the arches on the pavilion on the right side of the Episodes as well (Raby, Venice, 45).37 Catarina Schmidt Arcangeli is delighted that a bowl that sits on the lowest stair on the left side of the painting of St. Mark Healing St. Anianus is an authentic Islamic object (“ ‘Orientalist’ Painting in Venice,” 129); Deborah Howard, on the other hand, insists that the “lobed roofline” in that painting locates it in Alexandria.38 Sanda Miller, in the longest published essay devoted to Mansueti, goes back and forth evaluating him, valuing authenticity but despairing of the faulty perspective of his paintings and their “uniform employment of gesture and facial type” (“Giovanni Mansueti,” 82). Brown once again finds in them “the look of documentary authority” (Venetian Narrative Painting, 125), allowing that it could mix with imagination ( fantasia). Among the few critics of his work, she comes closest to granting Mansueti’s paintings some pictorial reality.

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One could locate it in the feature Sohm dismisses as mindless repetition. It could be rethought, rather, as a desire to imitate other artists, precisely as a means to acquire artistic authority. Miller notes, for example, the unmistakable debt to St. Mark Preaching for the veiled women in these paintings (grouped on the right side of the central pavilion in Episodes and at the top center balcony of St. Mark Healing); their presence might well have led Vasari to his attribution. Sohm mentions motifs familiar from Carpaccio; Brown further notes that Mansueti borrows from himself, “adding or subtracting elements to suit the format and needs of the narrative” (Venetian Narrative Painting, 203). The phrase “the needs of the narrative” begins to ascribe an aesthetic motive to be put beside questions of authenticity, indeed, perhaps, to allow them to be put aside, although it too easily translates images into a literary form. Brown does observe how compositional demands dictate choices; she understands the upper tier in St. Mark Healing, for example, as “specially constructed” precisely to allow even more figures onto the already crowded canvas (125). Crowding is undoubtedly a feature of Mansueti’s paintings. In his Miracle at the Bridge in San Lio (Accademia) for the True Cross cycle, for example, one of its most remarkable features surely is the presence of figures, almost always women, looking out of virtually each of the numerous windows in the painting. This impulse to fill, and therefore to flatten space, can be seen in the paintings in the Scuola Grande di San Marco as well; wherever there is an aperture, one sees through it, almost never as an opening into space, rather just about always leading to another set of arches; in virtually every window and archway, a figure or a face fills the space. This can be deplored as clutter or admired as copiousness; it is clearly an aesthetic aim of Mansueti, and it’s part of the reason Vasari named him as the painter of St.  Mark Preaching. Its deployment of figures answers to much the same requirements, “the multitude of men and women who are listening to the Saint, Turks, Greeks, and the faces of diverse nations, with bizarre costumes,” as Vasari puts it (Lives, 1:605). Mutatis mutandis, these words might apply to all of the paintings for the albergo we have been contemplating. The words describe an aesthetic that justifies Mansueti’s claim to have been a Bellini disciple. Such copiousness, so much self-citation and imitation of others, suggests that this aesthetic was not grounded on the authenticity of representation but in the ability to look like other authoritative paintings. If these paintings achieve “the look of documentary authority” that Brown claims for them, it’s not because they accurately represent the East but because they share a pictorial vocabulary that came to serve that function. These paint-

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ings don’t look like the East so much as they look like paintings of the East as conventions for such representations developed in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice. Mansueti seems to believe that his paintings accrue more authority (greater ability to deliver an image that will be taken as authentic) the more he fills them with the formulae that signify “the East,” but that signify “Bellini disciple” just as readily. He affixes these claims to his paintings, just as, sometimes, he affixes labels telling the viewer their subject. While it certainly is the case that Mansueti paintings lack the kind of “atmosphere” we have been identifying as the hallmark of the pictorial space in the albergo’s Bellinis, their copiousness also offers a powerful, shared aesthetic. It defeats any sense of space (of depth, of room around figures), and eschews the blurring of outlines that creates a sense of a shared atmosphere in which everyone moves, in which buildings shine or are shaded. Mansueti’s is an aesthetic that pulls backgrounds into the foreground (this is also the case in the aerial viewpoints in Bellini); it makes palpable that the canvas is two-dimensional. This is perhaps a dif ferent form of modernity on offer, one tending in its own way toward the geometric abstraction of the veiled women in St. Mark Preaching. Mansueti seems unable to stop painting until every possible space is filled; hence, we have horizontal tiers, or have, as in the painting of the three episodes, three spaces that resemble each other that divide the painting into vertical thirds as well (the composition of the scene of Mark healing Anianus is similarly geometrically organized). As Humfrey notes, the paintings for the albergo were not framed to produce the notion of a window through which to look at an imagined space beyond; rather, the picture plane continued as decoration attached to the wall (“Belliniesque Life,” 231), offering an almost continuous frieze of Scuola members along their lower border. Raby’s complaint sees correctly that Mansueti aims at decorative effects. In this respect Mansueti’s labels announcing his subject matter are important; these are needed because his decorative aims can obscure the sacred narrative that might other wise control representation. At the center of the Episodes, Mark is seized as he performs Easter Mass, but so far in the background as to be easy to miss. Once seen, the fact that Mark stands before a painting of the Crucifixion might well suggest that however much Mansueti identifies the saint with his savior’s suffering, his primary loyalty may be to painting (it is something of a tour de force that the vanishing point in this central pavilion should be a painting within the painting). Adding to the confusion of narrative aim in this painting is the fact that two depictions of Mark occur in it. Thematically linked, in that the scene

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on the left has Jesus appearing to Mark in prison, there is nonetheless a violation of the spatial unity created by the clash between the architecture that repeats across the canvas and the multitemporality of the narrative. Left–right reading for narrative painting, if it was a norm, as Rosand claims, also is violated, since the imprisonment on the left must occur after the arrest in the church at the center: a correlation between depth and pastness is not established either. Moreover, the episode on the right is often considered the initial event. Since the painting originally was located between the windows of the albergo, a viewer entering the room would have come upon it first, moving from right to left. The subject of this right hand scene is, in any case, obscure, and narratives of Mark’s martyrdom don’t help to identify what might be going on in it. Even in the more centrally orga nized Baptism, where the naked and modeled torso of Anianus, located right of center in the middle ground of the painting, might draw the eye, the filling of the foreground with larger figures who do not register awareness of the baptism, along with the addition of balconies above with turbaned figures looking down (figures at whom we are more likely to look than to be led to see what they see), guarantees that the eye is in motion, and not likely to focus on the main subject. It’s worth adding, too, that the scene of baptism is witnessed by more turbaned Easterners than it is by black-capped Venetians who attend the event. With the exception of the figure behind Mark, those few spectators who look at the baptism are all Easterners. Once again, there seems no visible contention of East and West, no mass conversion either. Perhaps this matches Mansueti’s anachronic indifference to temporality and spatiality. Signs that might establish perspectival depth work even more forcefully to establish the horizontality and verticality of the picture plane. Mansueti’s art aims to fill space; spatial categories like in and out exist only to be violated; the two turbaned figures who look down on the baptism are doubled by two almost identical figures below them, but further in the background, who also look down, as if the baptism scene were below them as well. To understand this aesthetic further in relation to Venetian color, it helps to glance at the earlier painting of The Arrest and Trial of St. Mark that Mansueti painted for the Crociferi. It offers the same crowdedness, but on a much more richly colored canvas, where marbles of many colors, often rippled with veins of deeper hues, cover the field, from the pavement in the foreground where a dappled leopard moves, through arches and pavilions of shades of orange and cream-colored marble. The colors of costumes continue this color field. Mansueti’s later paintings for the albergo

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are, arguably, abstracted from this earlier model. The Baptism, for instance, seems to cue its coloristic ambitions in the tile floor of the foreground— its salmon and black are related to the red and black robes worn by virtually every figure in the painting; the marble here is mainly white, shading to gray, veined in black; old-fashioned gold leaf glows on capitals and roofs and Mamluk emblems. The two larger canvases for the albergo seem further abstracted in their gray and white architectural frames, dotted with the colors of robes, but also with inlaid marbles that serve as templates for the filling of space with their colors. In the Three Episodes, orange marble contrasts with white and seems to rise from the sand-colored floor, which might as easily be a representation of the material, the stones from which paint is ground. It is not mistaken, I think, to associate Mansueti’s aesthetic with the style of “encrustration and perforation” that Hills identifies as crucially Venetian (Venetian Colour, 12). Mansueti’s indifference to the in/out distinction allows every thing to touch every thing else. In the scene of Mark healing Anianus, their hands touch; a turbaned figure strokes the cobbler’s cheek while his left hand echoes Mark’s blessing gesture. (East and West are not in opposition.) If Bellini works for an atmospheric unity that opens space, Mansueti works to fill space. However, the effect is not to increase the weight and density of objects and figures. His buildings are just so many frames, and like the edges of the paintings, they do not function to create the illusion of depth but to define a space filled with light and color that does not render anything very substantial. There is less play of light and shadow in Mansueti than there is in Bellini; the uniformity of light adds to the dazzle of the surface. Mansueti does not turn matter into something that glows beyond itself, as Bellini does, allowing matter to achieve the effect of something for which one is tempted to use the word “spirit” insofar as it exceeds the material limit of the object; rather, his paintings shine with the glow of what Hills characterizes as “impersonal materials” (198); in this way, they too achieve an effect that also goes beyond a limit (in this case, the limit that separates the human from the material). His persons become thereby impersonal, dabs of color like the colored stones set in the gray and white marble. Color is not, for him, a film that fills the air and unites every thing thereby. But it is nonetheless, like the ground in his Episodes, that from which all things arise and from which all things are made. Commentary on the last two paintings for the albergo—Palma Vecchio and Paris Bordone’s Tempest at Sea (plate 11) and Bordone’s Presentation of the Ring (plate 12)—focus, quite understandably, on their stylistic departures

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from the earlier ones. Brown sees them abandoning the “eyewitness” approach in which the miraculous event is scarcely to be seen in the midst of dailiness for a “a new taste for excitement and high drama” (Venetian Narrative Painting, 238) that she associates with the influence of Rome; Rosand, commenting on the Tempest in his study of sixteenth- century Venetian painting, finds the picture plane abandoned for “the depths of a strange world”: “Reading is not a process of lateral scansion across the plane, of following an unfolding narrative line; instead, we are compelled to cross the threshold, to enter and immerse ourselves in a literally more profound fiction” (Painting in Sixteenth- Century Venice, 34). These remarks about style may overstate the differences in how narrative is conveyed. Where, for instance, is the miraculous event in the Tempest? Is “lateral scansion” easily performed and decipherment of narrative what the earlier paintings offer? These stylistically later paintings were painted only a few years after Mansueti’s three canvases (Mansueti died in the late 1520s, Palma Vecchio in 1528; documentation dates Bordone’s work to around 1534); however, unlike Mansueti’s, these paintings look like works produced after Titian and Giorgione. Yet, for all their palpable difference from the earlier paintings for the albergo, there are continuities (some a bit uncanny) between these paintings and the earlier ones. Mark is a diminutive figure in the middle ground of the Tempest, hard to discern, in that respect a reminder of “the traditional sensibility,” as Brown notes (Venetian Narrative Painting, 238). The story being told in these final paintings is not readily apparent. Just as St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria was the all but unique subject that initiated the decoration of the albergo, the Tempest and Presentation of the Ring present equally unusual subject matter. (Giovanna Nepi Sciré, noting their obscurity, opines that the depiction of this Venetian legend about Mark might not be entirely unique were lost paintings to be found; she does not specify why she supposes such paintings ever existed.)39 The subject matter for this pair of paintings cannot be found in the usual sources for stories about Mark, the Legenda aurea or apocrypha; it is a “local legend” about an event supposed to have taken place on February 25, 1341: Mark summoned a fisherman to ferry him across the lagoon in a storm; stopping along the way, they picked up St.  George and St.  Nicholas; through their prayers, the three saints then effected the destruction of a ship filled with demons aimed at destroying Venice. Mark rewarded the fisherman with a ring, and he, in turn presented it to the doge. This story is palpably part of the myth of Venice, an ideological tale that links the survival of Venice to its patron saint.

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It is an undeniably odd conclusion to the cycle in the albergo. Rather than continuing Mark’s Alexandrian story—the subject of the previous paintings—with the transportation of his body to Venice, the cycle skips from the martyrdom to this obscure local tale. However, when we recall that the cycle also began with unfamiliar subject matter, Mark Preaching, a canvas where a vision of the East claims attention rather than a focus on the saint, perhaps this final choice of subject is not entirely surprising. In his essay on the paintings for the albergo, Humfrey explains it by noting that the Scuola Grande di San Marco had in its possession a ring that supposedly belonged to their patron saint. Their ring was not the one represented in the final painting, however.40 The indifferent substitution of one ring for another does not jibe with the usual claim for a singular ideological program, the myth of Venice supposedly underpinning all representations of St. Mark. But, as our initial consideration of the altarpiece by Titian suggested (and as Black’s work on Mark does as well), substitution is, arguably, even more the story of Mark. In the cycle of paintings for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, Mark is often difficult to locate, and when found is not tied to some notion of singularity and authenticity either. Even when we find Mark in Tempest at Sea, he is in a boat with three other figures, themselves not immediately decipherable as the two saints and fisherman from the story. The message of the story may be straightforward enough, but the story is not so readily apparent in the painting. Would a viewer immediately grasp that it is about a miracle performed by Mark that saved Venice? We see four little men in prayer, and we see them only belatedly, since our eye is drawn elsewhere, more likely to the heroic male nudes in the foreground, or to the atmospheric effects of the storm that suffuse the canvas, or to the buffeted ship. Mark and his companions may eventually catch the viewer’s eye, but only as one of the many disjointed elements of the painting; the recognizable Venetian skyline in the upper right would be another of these. Such is the case as well with the final painting of The Presentation of the Ring. An elderly man is presenting something to the doge (with some scanning back and forth, we can make out his resemblance to the figure of the fisherman in the previous painting, while the young man seated in the stairwell, twisted looking left, may further the connection between the two paintings by the direction of his gaze). Mark is “in” this painting insofar as he is represented by “his” ring, a fleck of paint barely visible in a painting in which the narrative subject is subordinated to the elaborate setting. Marks’s ring—at once the one owned by the Scuola and the one from the local tale—is not one; it does not have referential or documentary value.

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Its truth lies in painting. So, too, the setting bears almost no resemblance to the doge’s palace it supposedly represents. Real portrait figures of members of the Scuola (on the left side) are once again joined to fanciful architecture. Archways exist mainly to open vistas filled with more architecture, arcades that seem to echo the endless filled apertures in Mansueti. Indeed, Humfrey fastens on this aspect of Bordone’s painting to note how the more modern artist seeks to make his painting fit with his earlier contemporary located on the wall to the right. Bordone’s architecture may have been inspired by the courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale, but it looks even more like the architecture imagined by Sebastiano Serlio. In this painting, Venice is represented in much the way that Alexandria figures in the paintings in the earlier canvases: at the end of the central axis the recently erected campanile of the Madonna del Orto serves to attach the name “Venice” to an other wise imaginary place. Rather than ending the cycle by securing an ideological message, Bordone seems intent on making his painting fit within a history of painting as gathered in the albergo. Rather than marking a break with the past, this later painting affiliates itself with what came before. The multitemporality of earlier canvases can be found in its mingling of contemporaries in a scene supposedly set a couple of hundred years in the past; even more, such connections are sought by recalling the Bellinis and especially the architecture in the paintings in the albergo by Mansueti. (St. Mark Healing St. Anianus would have been just to the right of Bordone’s painting; the final painting, that is, hung next to the one that begins the cycle.) Although Rosand calls Bordone’s Presentation “the most thoroughly contemporary in the cycle” (Myth of Venice, 81–82), in his earlier survey volume on Venetian painting, he had more accurately described its “attempt to reconcile the traditional pageantry of the narrative procession with the newer forms of deep perspective space” (Painting in Sixteenth- Century Venice, 71). The last painting for the cycle may not be subsumed into its ideological purpose, or into a singular modernity either. One turbaned figure in the crowd of contemporaries on the left side of Bordone’s painting provides the only allusion to the East in these final canvases. It could seem as if the thematic of another world has been decisively abandoned, but perhaps not. Rosand, we’ve seen, looks to the Tempest for a new kind of effect, a depth and profundity that allows him to indulge an old association between the painting and Giorgione that most art historians now reject (even without the question of Giorgione’s contribution, this painting, interrupted by the death of Palma Vecchio, presents the problem of discerning hands that also haunts the initial paintings for the

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albergo).41 The little bit of Bellini blue sky on the upper left— cleared, presumably, by the breath of God that opens a flickering path of light that crosses the canvas, illuminating what would other wise be dark—also might be read as a way the painting affiliates its vision with the earlier ones in the albergo, that uncanny light and color that suggests an order of painting as the reality sought. The light in the painting, diffused to illuminate the billowing waves, spotlights the naked male figures in the foreground. While nothing about them says “the East,” these figures come from another world. It could be called “pagan” or “classical” or “Roman” or “Michelangelesque.” The sea god on the right, riding a fish, beating the waves, might be Neptune or some lesser deity; he is the answering force to the figure blowing in the upper left corner. We may be supposed to know who will be the victor in this narrative contention, but visually the evidence is not clear; the fact that the four diminutive men are visually parallel to the sea god does not clarify which way to scan the energy in the painting. Moreover, those four are answered—really, are overwhelmed visually—by the four nudes up front, who are posed in pairs that allow views of straining muscles of arms, of legs, back and buttocks, even the suggestion of genitalia for the figure in the center of the group. The story tells us we are to call these figures “demons,” but nothing about them mandates their opposition to Christianity (and we know from Michelangelo, but also from the Titian altarpiece with which we began, that the Christian problematic of the flesh did not rule out the representation of ravishing male bodies). The bodies in this painting are related, in their modeling and in the use of paint, to the waves, and to the play of light and shadow in the painting. The energy in this painting cannot easily be allied to state ideology or a Christian iconography hostile to the flesh. This way of painting comes to whoever painted these figures as an inheritance from Bellini.

chapter 2

Gravity (Tintoretto)

When Paris Bordone included the campanile of the Madonna dell’Orto in the other wise imaginary cityscape in the final painting for the St. Mark cycle in the albergo of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, it is doubtful he meant to summon up Tintoretto by way of his parish church, or signal the major role Tintoretto would come to play in providing paintings for the Sala Capitolare. In 1534, the date by which the Presentation of the Ring was completed, Tintoretto was an adolescent whose career had barely begun. Exactly how, a little more than a decade later, the twenty-something Tintoretto won the commission for the main hall of the Scuola is a matter of speculation; unlike the albergo commissions, for which remarkably full documentation survives about its employment of well-known painters, information about the commission for the larger hall is scanty. The 1542 records mention plans for paintings about St.  Mark for the room; an April 1548 letter to Tintoretto from Pietro Aretino, mainly full of praise for The Miracle of the Slave (plate 13), is the first document that responds to the painting of his that had been installed by that date on the south wall between the two windows facing the Campo dei SS. Giovanni e Paolo.1 We do not know details of the commission, whether, for instance, its sub40

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ject matter— a posthumous miracle recorded in the Legenda aurea— had been chosen by the board members of the Scuola. The selection of Tintoretto, it has been supposed, reflects the influence of Marco Episcopo, Tintoretto’s future father-in-law; in 1547, he held an official post in the Scuola (Tintoretto married his daughter Faustina around 1550). In Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity, Tom Nichols compares Tintoretto’s “performative picture-making” (98) to the style of the playwright and poet Andrea Calmo, another member of the Scuola board; Nichols considers him a likely instigator in securing him the commission. Calmo’s polyglot and spontaneous-seeming writing, in its mixtures of tone and vocabulary, embraces a wide range of associations. For Nichols, similar qualities in Tintoretto reflect his social status; as he came to assume a part in a significant Venetian social institution, he kept his independence, not hiding his own less-than-patrician origins. The Miracle of the Slave is signed “Jacomo Tentor.” As Nichols notes (18), “Tentor,” of course, was not Tintoretto’s family name (it was Robusti); he names himself through his father’s profession, a dyer. Nichols speculates that Aretino may have suggested this name for him (his 1548 letter to Tintoretto is addressed to Jacopo Tintore). If so, Nichols argues, Tintoretto accepted the sobriquet offered him by a humanist who often allied with patrician interests and the modes of literary and artistic production the ruling classes favored, yet simultaneously identified himself with his working-class origins. Aretino’s letter praises the young artist; however, he ends by cautioning him about practices associated with Calmo and his fellow poligrafi; if Tintoretto hoped to be a major artistic player, Aretino insisted, he must strive for a “higher peak of perfection” (maggior grado di perfezione) by working more slowly and patiently, not by letting wild bursts of imagination lead to carelessness in finish and execution (trascuratezza).2 Aretino’s warning about the young artist’s lack of polish and apparent speed of composition became the most frequent complaint about Tintoretto after Vasari voiced it in the brief account of the painter he included in his Lives.3 The analysis of The Miracle of the Slave that Nichols offers compellingly places Tintoretto at a complex crossroad of influences that points in more than one direction at once. Rather than occupying a fixed position, he carves the space of his artistic independence as a pathway between and negotiation of oppositions. In this way Tintoretto manages the question of “tradition and identity,” the pair of terms that subtitles Nichols’s book (terms that can’t help but recall T. S. Eliot’s modernist manifesto, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” [1919]). Nichols is squarely on the side of a social determinism, albeit a quite sophisticated form of it; as a conceptual

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space, what Nichols proposes is compelling precisely in not being predictive and monological; it is dynamic. Eliot suggested in his essay that the future reshapes the past; tradition for him is less predictive of what will count as art and more a retrospective remaking. This could imply that tradition holds a transcendent place outside of time, precisely the kind of idealism that Nichols resists; however, the formulation could suggest that the temporality of artworks baffles ordinary temporal distinctions of past and present and notions of causation that follow from them; tradition maintains itself even as it appears to change course. Questions about temporality are raised by Tintoretto’s painting, as they had been by the anachronistic paintings in the albergo. Eliot’s preposterous history may mark a limit to historical explanations, even to the multivalent and nondeterminative kind that Nichols offers, while it opens on to another one, the kind variously explored by Georges Didi-Huberman or Jennifer Scappettone, to name two examples. Anachronism is key for Didi-Huberman to explain how it is that works of art continue to live beyond their time (Aby Warburg is an inspiration). For Scappettone, Venice itself is a place of anachronism and “provides routes through which to recover a vitally nonlinear form of history.” 4 Nichols is interested, as I am, in the place of Tintoretto’s painting in the history of painting. This history does not necessarily tally with sociohistorical positioning. Scholarly and critical consensus also stresses Tintoretto’s relationship to previous art in his Miracle of the Slave. As with most commentators who follow Carlo Ridolfi’s mid-seventeenth-century biography in Le maraviglie dell’arte in this respect, Tintoretto’s emulative rivalry with Titian is impor tant, as is the ambition that Ridolfi claimed provided the motto for Tintoretto’s studio (this is undoubtedly a fiction, but nonetheless a telling one), “Il disegno di Michelangelo, e il colorito di Tiziano.”5 Michelangelo is demonstrably a source for figures in Tintoretto’s painting, among them the soldier in red with his back to us on its right side and the deeply shadowed pink-turbaned figure immediately to his left, based on the Medici tomb figure of “Dusk” (Roland Krischel notes [ Jacopo Tintoretto, 25] the aptness of this borrowing for this crepuscular figure). Pordenone’s paintings are another source, as well as Sansovino’s sculpture for figures in the painting and his architectural designs for the Piazza San Marco that model the architecture in Tintoretto’s painting. Other critics have added other works of art to Tintoretto’s repertoire, Raphael among them. Krischel makes the intriguing suggestion (26) that the mother and child on the left side of the painting may allude to the statue of Caritas (a woman holding babies at her breast) by Bartolomeo Buon

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affixed to the facade of the Scuola on the other side of the wall on which the painting hung. Krischel supposes that the painting “knows” its location and suggests it through its lighting. After noon light floods the Sala Capitolare from the row of windows on its west-facing wall; the painting would be illuminated on its right side, the direction from which light is cast on the frieze of figures in the foreground of the painting. As Krischel emphasizes, natural light is not the only (fictive) source of light in the painting—it does not explain the brightly lit background. The light in the painting that appears to have a source outside it is doubled by the light in the background of the painting that cannot be explained by any source of light in the Sala Capitolare; this light would have had a natural source if the painting were not on the south-facing wall, but hung in the space where the wall is, its background the sun-drenched Campo dei SS. Giovanni e Paolo. Nichols notes (Tintoretto, 58–59) that the back-turned soldier in red inspired by Michelangelo is more accurately described as derived from a statuette that Tintoretto owned that was based on Michelangelo’s statue of Samson and the Philistines. In considering the contextualization of the painting by way of other works of art it is noteworthy that it is more often sculpture than painting that Tintoretto conjures—architecture, too.6 Even more important about Tintoretto’s use of a statuette as a model is something Ridolfi mentions more than once: Tintoretto worked from small models, made of wax and plaster, posed in extreme positions impossible for a human model to sustain; these sculpted models were reused, as Krischel argues—including for the painting’s figure of St. Mark ( Jacopo Tintoretto, 55). If Tintoretto thought of his painting as arising from other works of art, it was not in a relationship of copy and original, but in an order of replication across differences of scale and medium. Ridolfi writes that the use of such models furthered his “bizzarre invenzioni” (Maraviglie dell’arte, 2:176); criticism for the next couple of centuries did not tire in repeating the strangeness of Tintoretto’s vision. “Le reliquie di questi modelli si conservano ancora nella stanza in cui egli concepiva i peregrini suoi pensieri,” Ridolfi continues, in a sentence difficult to translate.7 “He kept the relics (the remains, the reminders) of these models in the room in which he conceived his wandering thoughts.” Ridolfi’s sentence may mean that Tintoretto returned again and again to these models for inspiration, or that they remained in mind as inspiration, or that they are what we see in his paintings as the realization of his wandering thoughts. Ridolfi insists that Tintoretto avoided the imitation of nature in order to become in effect the “eterno Facitore” (2:172), another God, the eternal maker. Early

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modern theorists often speak of artistic accomplishment this way: it provided Ridolfi with the title of his book. Among the paintings that Tintoretto had in mind for his Miracle of the Slave for the Sala Capitolare, I would suggest, are those that hung in the albergo. Other commentators have not made this suggestion, although Nichols comes close when he mentions the “exotic and quotidian detail reminiscent more of Gentile Bellini or Carpaccio than Michelangelo” (Tintoretto, 60) in Tintoretto’s painting.8 Tintoretto would not have had to look past St. Mark Preaching for models for some of the “exotic” figures in his crowded canvas, while the two Africans on a balcony in the background could easily be related to similar figures in more than one of the paintings Giovanni Mansueti contributed to the albergo cycle; they often are posed on balconies looking downwards. The Michelangelesque slave figure also could remind one of the nudes in the foreground of the Tempest. Through such echoes, Tintoretto might be located in an order of painting whose use of color, as I suggested in the previous chapter, stresses the materiality of paint (Tintoretto’s name carries this suggestion too; dyes for fabrics can share the same material sources as the pigments of paint). Seeing painting through that kind of material lens involves looking at them to see something that precedes the possibility of subject matter. Emphasis on the materiality of paint, as Didi-Huberman has argued in his monograph on Fra Angelico, suggests limits to regarding painting as a form of illusionism; it also poses problems to historicist readings of a work of art as the mouthpiece (however ambivalent) for an ideological commitment to subject matter and narrative that a painting of a miracle of Mark’s might be supposed to convey. In Painting in Sixteenth- Century Venice, David Rosand devotes several full and closely observed pages to what Tintoretto achieved in The Miracle of the Slave; he recognizes its significance for Tintoretto’s career, treating it as “a moment of arrival” that virtually ensures future success (135). Although Rosand attends to the formal features of the painting, he ultimately hands it over to its narrative function. He notes Tintoretto’s indebtedness to Michelangelo and Sansovino, among others, glances at Aretino’s letter; brushing aside his worry that the painting may show hastiness and incompleteness, he insists that The Miracle of the Slave is “deliberately constructed,” and not in any way marred by “the evident rapidity of . . . execution” (135). This he demonstrates first by way of such features as the distribution of color in the painting, taking Mark’s “crimson-mauve” garment and his golden cloak as the ground for imitation, variation, and distribution across the canvas, finding a similar deployment of olive green

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extending from the brilliantly lit hammer-wielding executioner’s costume to the branches that frame the top of the painting and extending into the shadows as well; he looks at the similar dispersal of the blue of the sky as it reappears in cloaks or as a soldier’s cap. Noting the “clarity and intelligence of chromatic construction,” he proceeds to “the great contrapuntal relationship between the two sharply angled figures” of saint and slave (136). Settling in to concentrate on the narrative construction of the painting, Rosand summarizes the Italian accounts that expand the paragraph in the Legenda aurea that tells the story of Mark’s rescue of a slave who had disobeyed his lord by traveling to visit a shrine dedicated to St.  Mark; upon his return, the slave was subject to a series of attempts on his life— blinding, amputation, beating by a hammer— each of which failed thanks to his patron saint; recognizing the futility of his efforts to martyr the slave, the ruling lord and the would-be executioners all converted and traveled to the shrine of St. Mark to pay homage to him. Rosand sees this narrative played out across the painting from left to right. “The full sequence of acts, upon which the story builds to its climax of repentance, unfolds in a manner complex in its anecdotal richness but absolutely clear in its discourse,” he concludes (Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice, 137), comparing this “clarity” to the obscurity of a Sansovino bronze relief on the same subject. Each detail adds to the unity of the painting, so much so that Mark’s “healing hand,” juxtaposed to the broken hammer, constitutes the vanishing point that holds the painting together, “for in times of need saints do not fail in the protection of their devotees” (138), Rosand concludes, quoting Ridolfi, ending its narrative course in a “climax of repentance” represented, I suppose, by the presiding lord’s gesture as he seems perhaps to be rising up off his throne, his arms flapping as he steadies himself. For Rosand, the diagonals that trace “the miraculous core” and “pious devotion” of the painting (138) form a satisfying counterpoint to the more “mundane” horizontals that convey the narrative; perspective holds the painting together. The curving path from slave to would-be executioner (leading back to a garden door) separates contrasting groups of witnesses, he suggests, onlookers on the left, more active participants to the right. (Although there are more soldiers here than elsewhere, I’m hard-pressed to find these seated figures, straining to see, as more active than those closer to the supine slave who also bend over to see better what is going on.) In the variety of figures, noted by all commentators from Ridolfi on, Rosand sees a “range of temporal and geographic reference” and takes this to suggest the “universal” message of the miracle. (Krischel echoes this

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reading; after wondering for a moment whether the presence of Turks and Moors might signal some East-West contention, he rules that out since Venice was no longer threatened by the East at this time [ Jacopo Tintoretto, 40–42].) As Rosand aptly notes, Tintoretto does not invite viewers to identify with any figures in the painting (“individualizing pathos” [Painting in Sixteenth- Century Venice, 139] is not on offer). “We are . . . struck,” Rosand concludes, “by the efficiency of Tintoretto’s choreography: Each figure participates with a certain functional precision in the dramatic structure; each response is exact on its own particular level. The tale is told with great energy, but always with a clarity requisite to public communication on this grand scale” (139). Rosand’s reading of the painting as a tale, as if it were the Legenda aurea, dispels the bafflement a viewer might well have. For him, narration answers all questions we might bring to its composition, theme, intent. Tintoretto’s story offers a choreography in which every thing fits, everything is in its place. If so, why does almost every figure in the painting strain to see and fail to register what is to be seen? Moreover, if the painting so fully satisfied public demands, why did the Scuola order Tintoretto to remove the painting, as Ridolfi reports (Tintoretto did, although eventually it was returned). Details are lacking, but Rosand is sure that nothing in the painting could have provoked its negative reception; some political squabble unrelated to the painting must explain this turn of events. However, throughout his career, Tintoretto was not immediately embraced. This point is crucial for Nichols, but not for Rosand. Rosand makes the same point when he considers Tintoretto’s painting in Myths of Venice, although in that later account he is willing to venture that the painter’s ambitions may not have quite squared with what the Scuola had wanted in commissioning him.9 Nonetheless, by the time he has finished discussing Tintoretto’s paintings for the Sala Capitolare, Rosand is satisfied that his patrons were satisfied: “they knew how to read the allusions to their San Marco in the pictorial representations of the orient, how to locate themselves . . . in the great events of the past, how to claim the eternal vigilance of their patron St. Mark on behalf of his favored city. To this religious language Tintoretto added a new kind of grammar and syntax of figural inflection, a new corporeal eloquence” (Myths of Venice, 88). Tintoretto, that is, only could tell the old story over again; his way of doing it may have seemed dubious at first, but ultimately it is not: those who know what paintings like this mean know to find in them the one story they have to tell. As Nichols worries, Rosand domesticates Tintoretto, making him too simply the voice of Venetian ideology.10

Plate 1. Titian, St. Mark altarpiece. Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, Italy. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 2. Giorgione, Castelfranco Madonna. Duomo, Castelfranco Veneto, Italy. Scala / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 3. Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy. Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 4. Gentile Bellini, Procession in the Piazza San Marco (1496). Photograph: Mauro Magliani. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, Italy. Alinari / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 5. Fra Angelico, St. Peter Preaching in the Presence of St. Mark. Predella from the Linaioli altarpiece. Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 6. Vittore Belliniano, The Martyrdom of St. Mark. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, Italy. Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 7. Giovanni Mansueti, Episodes from the Life of St. Mark. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, Italy. Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 8. Giovanni Mansueti, The Arrest and Trial of St. Mark. © Liechtenstein, The Princely Collections, Vaduz-Vienna. Scala / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 9. Giovanni Mansueti, Baptism of Anianus. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy. Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 10. Giovanni Mansueti, St. Mark Healing St. Anianus in Alexandria. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, Italy. Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 11. Palma Vecchio and Paris Bordone, Tempest at Sea. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, Italy. Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 12. Paris Bordone, Presentation of the Ring. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, Italy. Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 13. Jacopo Tintoretto, The Miracle of the Slave. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, Italy. Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 14. Jacopo Tintoretto, The Discovery of the Body of St. Mark. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 15. Jacopo Tintoretto, The Carrying Off of the Body of St. Mark. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, Italy. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 16. Jacopo Tintoretto, St. Mark Rescuing a Saracen from a Shipwreck. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, Italy. Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, New York.

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Rosand is correct to insist that elements of the Legenda aurea story explain details in the painting; the pike above the slave’s eye, for example, alludes to attempted blinding, the hammer held aloft to the threat to crush him when all else failed. But do these details tell a story? A viewer might not be sure that the figure in blue holding the broken pike above the naked man’s eye might not yet strike, or whether the pike broke after he blinded the slave. One could have the same questions about the broken hammer. In a footnote in Painting in Sixteenth- Century Venice (235n18), Rosand mentions that his student John Markowitz connected the painting to the etymology of Mark’s name, and, indeed, Jacobus de Voragine prefaces his life of Mark with possible etymologies of his name. One possibility: “Marcus may simply be marcus, a heavy hammer.”11 How would this doubling of the slave’s rescuer with his would-be executioner further narrative clarity? How would perspective hold the painting together in this coincidence? Is the hammer held aloft at a highly illuminated spot in the painting the focal point for the presiding lord? Is it perhaps what first catches the viewer’s eye, too? What is its relation to the flying figure of Mark? Visually, there is a connection we can see: the hammer, like the saint, seems located in front of the picture plane; it flies at the viewer while Mark flies into the canvas. Is the broken hammer perhaps the mark of Mark? The pictorial and etymological relationship between Mark and the hammer wittily caught by Markowitz is not resolved as a narrative connection. They do not relate sequentially but rather as, at the same time, an identification and a doubling substitution, one hammer for another, both simultaneously before us, one a driving force from the outside flying in, the other flying out. These energies are subject to the forces of gravity and of matter in motion. Their swirling forms, falling and twisting, are replicated over and again in the painting. The viewer is not, I think, invited to read a story so much as pulled into and assaulted by these disorienting vortices. “The saint’s miraculous intervention,” Peter Humfrey writes, cannot be seen by anyone in the painting; they nonetheless “register their profound amazement” at what is happening.12 What are they seeing? What do we see? Humfrey notes “the bold repetitions of a limited range of colors” that Rosand sees; while for him it holds the painting together, unifying it as some kind of organic whole, Humfrey sees “planes . . . constantly broken by linear slashes of contrasting white highlight and black shadow,” concluding that the effect “is not restful and decorative but agitated and dissonant” (Painting, 226). That agitation contributes to the life of the painting.

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Paraphrasing the gist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s response to Miracle of the Slave, Timothy Raser writes, “The scene is one of confusion, explicable only by the miracle that is to be inferred from the title: one might think, for example, that it shows Mark bringing some tools and is entitled ‘The Miracle of the Hammer.’ ”13 Indeed, one needs the title (not affixed to the painting by Tintoretto) even to divine that the figure flying into the picture is St. Mark. Nothing in all the texts that Rosand gathers to read the painting mentions that Mark could fly. Nothing in the painting tells us that the ruler was converted when Mark saved the slave unless the fact that the colors of his costume are akin to Mark’s means that. Indeed, nothing tells us why a ruler from Provence has Turks and Moors among his subjects. Or Roman soldiers. Or contemporary Venetians (some of whom may be portrait figures; the figure on the extreme left is positioned like the contemporary witnesses in the extreme right of the albergo’s Martyrdom). If this painting offers a narrative, it needs to be remarked that what is going on can be explained by a figure in the painting that no one sees or even looks at. They all strain to see the slave as if he were invisible. The slave’s faith may have summoned the saint in the story; in the painting they are face to face, but the figure on the ground has his eyes shut, and the one in the sky is too shadowed and foreshortened for us even to see whether he has eyes. (He is almost headless; other figures in the painting have heads, but little else.) Although it is true, in a way, that we can see saint and slave, both are so foreshortened as to make that difficult. As Krischel notes, we would see them much better if we were standing on our heads ( Jacopo Tintoretto, 29); “It has been pointed out,” Clive Hart writes, without telling us who has done this, “that if the picture were inverted Saint Mark would look like a model lying quietly on the floor of the studio and gesturing with one arm.”14 Rosand’s satisfying calm composition is perhaps most readily available from that impossible vantage point. Is this topsy-turvyness, rather than sequential narrative, closer to the truth of the painting? There is not a single erect figure in this painting; they are all bending, twisting— even when seated they are contorted, bent by the effort to see, by the weight of bodies wedged together, so much so that sorting out which body part belongs to which figure is a formidable task. Bodily discomfort is conveyed to us. The figures in the painting can barely see or stand. We feel the insupportable weight of Tintoretto’s painting. What do the figures in the painting strain to see? Could the painting be encouraging a kind of Heideggerian realization about the difference between Vorhanden and Zuhanden when the instruments of torture that seem present to hand unaccountably fail, the insight of object-oriented ontolo-

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gists avant la lettre that the tools we might think we have to hand are not made for us?15 If the painting suggests something about the limits of tools, of equipment, perhaps it also says something about what Veronico Franco called the “divine hand” of Tintoretto.16 In the story, the saint saves the slave, but is that what the painting shows? Is that naked man alive? Does he still have his limbs intact? (Krischel notes that the foreshortening might lead us to wonder whether he still has his lower legs or both his arms.) The disposal of bodies in this painting, their submission to forces beyond their control, is at the heart of Tintoretto’s accomplishment. This is what Sartre saw in writing published posthumously as “Saint Marc et son double.”17 I take it as my guide to analysis of the painting. Sartre opens this essay with a reading of The Miracle of the Slave. He supposes that Tintoretto was handed his subject matter, told the size of the canvas required (some thirteen and a half feet high by almost eighteen feet long), the number of figures to be in it stipulated (twenty-five to thirty, Sartre imagines the board demanded), and the like, that Tintoretto complied fully— and produced a scandal. This is the essential point for Sartre. He takes seriously the initial rejection of the painting; in giving his patrons what they wanted, Tintoretto gave them something they couldn’t have wanted. Although Nichols insists that Sartre has too simple a notion of Tintoretto’s antagonistic class position in “The Venetian Pariah,” an essay he published on his career, Sartre’s probing reading of his paintings in this essay seems to me offer a complex social positioning compatible with Nichols’s analysis. Sartre wonders whether any of us, looking at The Miracle of the Slave now, can see what made it monstrous, scandalous; he proceeds for several dense pages to offer a formalist description, one in which Tintoretto’s accomplishment is secure, his handling of figures, their variety, the deployment of color, his use of perspective— every thing that one might want. And yet, he insists, it is a scandal. Sartre locates it by stressing the size and weight of the figure of Mark as a kind of disturbance, a permanent aggression (“agression permanente” [“Saint Marc et son double,” 172]) in the picture directed at its supposed equanimity and selfcontainment. The miracle figured in the painting is the burden of bodies that have the massive solidity of sculpture, and by a saint who flies like a rocket heading in for a crash landing. In a word, the spiritual is conveyed by matter in motion. Sartre recalls the statuettes that Tintoretto disposed in space, and in his mind, before he turned them into images. Tintoretto’s figures began as solid objects, and as other artworks. This is something his paintings do not let us forget. Materiality is absolute; his painting has no other object (“Le peinture n’a d’autre objet que la matière” [176]).

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In analyzing the scandal of the painting, Sartre is intent upon the relation of saint to slave, the material relation of their shared corporeality. The saint has descended to save a slave, not to serve the ruling power in the painting; the disturbance in the painting thus reflects Tintoretto’s relations to his patrons: he serves them; he defies them. Writing about Tintoretto, Sartre recalls Jean Genet, the “Saint Genet,” about whom he tells a very similar story about artistic defiance, a pariah who should be sainted for his revelations about how the world works. Sartre appreciates Tintoretto’s St. Mark in the company of his gigantic often all but nude, muscled flying forms of the sort that can be found in numerous other paintings of his. They remind him of Genet’s men. “Ces malabars m’évoque les Macs tant aimés de Jean Genet. . . . L’exhibitionnisme de la place Pigalle se retrouve, à vue, chez les Macs du Tintoret” (“Saint Marc et son double,” 183; “These musclemen evoke for me Jean Genet’s beloved hustlers. . . . The Place Pigalle meat market is visibly relocated in Tintoretto’s male prostitutes”). He sees these muscular bodies flaunting themselves even as they offer themselves to be had. In this reading, Mark and his double are the saint and the slave lying beneath him joined in an erotic street scene. Both figure Tintoretto— one the awful power he brings, defiant, outrageous, the other the passivity with which he seems to do what his patrons desire. The slave, in fact, may be a self-portrait; his face resembles that of the young Tintoretto in self-portraits made around the same time. Moreover, as Krischel, among others, suggests, the foreshortened figure is a kind of visual translation of the name “Tentor” into its more familiar form, “Tintoretto,” the little dyer ( Jacopo Tintoretto, 32); subordinating himself and alluding to his own diminutive stature; he is reduced in scale like one of those wax models he used and then made gigantic on his canvas. The brief evocation of male same-sex desire by Sartre is not in the service of any claim about Tintoretto’s sexuality (for a time that lacked modern notions of sexual identity no possibility need be precluded either); it furthers the material connection between saint and slave and between the spiritual and the material. Is Mark descending to ravage the naked man beneath him? Nichols notes how the “radical foreshortening” of the slave “directly echoes that of the saint above” (Tintoretto, 60), an identification that could invite the conflation, the doubling of saint and slave that underlies Sartre’s scenario. They mirror each other. There is an uncanny likeness between them, and it is played out, as Nichols notes, in how light is deployed, the chiaroscuro in which the saint’s face is in the dark, while the slave’s is illuminated. Moreover, as Sartre insists, there is the indecorum

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in that we see the saint upside down; we come at him feet first; unnaturally, his tunic clings to his body while his cape billows. The bottom of his feet are illuminated, just as the light falls on the sunburned face of the slave; this marks him—unlike every other figure in the painting—as someone who works outdoors. The two together might form one body. This kind of indecorum in what Nichols terms their “intimate relation” is more familiar in Caravaggio’s saints whose class and sexual status are palpable. Krischel notes how the shadow on the lower body of the slave functions as what he terms a Schamtuch ( Jacopo Tintoretto, 29), using a less familiar word than the more usual German for loincloth (Lendentuch); but, as a “shamecloth,” Krischel signals and, by avoiding saying “loin,” all but says that the painting might be teasing us with the possibility of seeing the genitals of the slave; his nudity promises what the shadow withholds. By naming this covering the covering of shame—the making shamed of the genitals—Krischel glances at the scandalous intimacy of the doubling of the two figures. (Krischel follows Sartre in his analysis of displacements in the field of the visual, and in the deployment of light and shade in The Miracle of the Slave; he does not mention Sartre’s sexualization of the scene between the slave and his savior.) Mark has a halo, but his head is so dark as almost not to be visible; this foreshortening mirrors the occlusion of the genitals that the slave may or may not have—by “have,” I mean, have to be seen. The slave has been denied the member that his nakedness promises, as if to make the genitals visible would clinch the sexuality that is drawing one to the other.18 It is usually said that Mark is coming because the slave has called him. But the slave in this painting seems possibly dead or perhaps unconscious, not visibly calling anyone, dreaming perhaps of the rescue that the painting depicts. In a brief piece entitled “Tintoretto’s Sixteenth-Century Superman,” an essay that does not acknowledge Sartre, who does in fact compare Mark to Superman (Sartre notes how his mysterious yet physical power allows him to exploit weight without being constrained by it [“Saint Marc et son double,” 177]), Burton B. Fredericksen seeks to explain “why children who love comic books and dream of flying may grow up to love Tintoretto,” or so the subtitle of his essay ventures.19 Fredericksen’s answer skirts the sexuality he hints. Little boys may dream of flying as a form of phallic endowment that gets realized in the hard bodies of superheroes. Nichols perhaps moves in a similar orbit when he describes the painting as opening a “dynamic pocket of space . . . pregnant with symbolic possibility” (Tintoretto, 60); the choice of “pregnant” suggests a physicality that Nichols

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skirts. For him, the “intimate relation” of slave and saint is only a “spiritual intimacy” (61).20 Nonetheless, when Nichols observes the connection between heaven and earth manifest in the relationship of slave and saint, he points to something crucial for Sartre; for him, the dynamic pocket of space between them reveals nothing more than the law of dynamics, of mass in motion. The extraordinary accomplishment of Tintoretto’s painting renders a miracle that also obeys the laws of physics. “Il vient de suspendre les lois naturelles . . . mais en plein accord avec la Physique” (“Saint Marc et son double,” 176; He has suspended the laws of nature . . . but in clear compliance with physics). The spiritual missionary obeys the laws of gravity. Tintoretto’s canvas is material; it records a material event. Matter is what there is. If heaven and earth are more like each other than one might think, it has to do with shared physicality, mass, and motion, if not with an easily grasped temporality. In the suspended time of this painting, a series of events that would follow each other in a narrative like that in the Legenda aurea appear all to happen at once, to have happened, to be about to happen, to have been averted from happening. All at once, however, is an impossibility in a painting so large that the eye cannot take it in a single glance. At the same time, no left-right scansion can accommodate the descending figure of Mark, plummeting in a freefall that suggests that whatever we call divinity is subject to the laws of nature. He rockets to land on top of the naked slave, head to foot, feet to head. If Mark is responsible for the miracle of suspension in the painting, that would seem to require him to have been there all the while, not in flight toward a goal he has yet to reach, stopped in midair. Moreover, insofar as he appears to be falling, his flight might not be entirely in his control; the miracle of broken instruments could be a series of accidents, of failures of matter to last that might have nothing to do with Mark except insofar as both the plummeting saint and the broken instruments on the floor testify to natural forces: nothing lasts forever. In that respect, the figure of Mark could be compared to the anamorphic blur in Hans Holbein’s Ambassadors, an unreadable skull that disturbs a composition that seems at first simply to offer us a mirror of the real— still life objects and the men who use them. You can see that or see the skull in focus, not both at once; the painting is not controlled by onepoint perspective. Is Tintoretto’s? Aretino’s letter, as Sartre recalls, only describes the figure of the slave in detail, commending its realism, its lifelikeness. What is the life in painting? The death’s head in Holbein’s painting reminds us of our mortality. We can’t keep it and the human

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accomplishment on display in mind—in view—at once. Mark flies into this image in a way that also introduces another order of reality that is, at the same time, the law of gravity. The underlying law of nature is not a spiritual reality although it is likewise invisible: we can’t see the laws of nature, just their effects. In the painting, Mark has all the qualities of a physical object, as Sartre notes, except visibility (“tous les caractères d’un objet sensible sauf la visibilité” [“Saint Marc et son double,” 175]). The Miracle of the Slave challenges the visibility that one-point perspective claims to offer. It could be understood by way of the inquiry that Hubert Damisch launches in A Theory of /Cloud/ (a history of painting inflected by Derridean theory and semiotics).21 For Damisch, one-point perspective reaches a limit when it comes to the sky, whether to represent the gods usually placed above looking down, or to register the moving transient phenomena exemplified by clouds. Its vision is no wider than a window frame. Tintoretto’s Mark, as Sartre memorably writes, is a missionary turned into a missile (“Ce missionnaire est un missile” [176]). Unseen by all, he is at once an unstoppable force we might call divine, and, at the same time, subject to the laws of gravity, both supernatural and natural at once. If his flight were to continue, he would land head first with the force of an explosion; even suspended, he offers a hammering realization that effaces categorical distinctions and puts into question what humans think of as real and what is in our power to command. Yet this Markan missive is a force in the world, not out of it. The viewer who sees Mark and imagines the course of his flight, must think—as Clive Hart more or less remarks—that a moment before he flew into the painting where we apprehend him, he must have flown over our heads. He seems to come from where we are. Tintoretto’s paintings, the force of their gravity, have this effect. Marco Boschini registered such a response in the mid-seventeenth century: “The movement of these painted figures is simply astounding,” he writes in one place; “a miracle of the world of Art . . . making his figures leap forwards out of the canvas,” he puts it in another (Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 46). As Sartre insists, Tintoretto’s paintings crush us. The Miracle of the Slave has the floor grid familiar in Renaissance paintings, at least the beginning of a line on the pavement in front of the slave drawing us back into its imaginary space; bits of horizontal cross-lines appear between the figures in the foreground, and the tiny bit of illumination behind the figures in the foreground is striated with several of them. But the vertical line at the bottom of the painting also is a line on its surface, and it leads up to Mark’s outstretched arm (itself perhaps an echo of Michelangelo’s Sistine deity), lending a third arm to the hammer-bearer.

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The depth of the painting is purely notional; the garden wall blocks any further view; the space in the background is compressed. What are the two Moors looking down upon? An empty courtyard behind the wall of interlaced figures? Or are they somehow looking over these figures at the naked man in the foreground that mesmerized Aretino? The picture plane is pulled forward, not back. Tintoretto has reversed Albertian geometry and the function of the picture plane in Renaissance art as a window through which we look. The pull forward and the gravitational thrust of the flying figure are at odds with the narrative. What story could we plausibly tell about how all these figures came to be in the same space? Are they in relation to one another? Or are they each drawn, almost separate from each other, from various models, and then densely packed so that body parts are less determinative than is the distribution of paint, the colors of a limited palette (as Rosand suggests) played out across the canvas. Paint brings these figures together; paint makes us think we see persons, stories, whatever. In truth we barely see any figure fully. Some are buried in shade; light illuminates parts but never an entire body; those most whole are among those most foreshortened. The central would-be executioner is a corkscrew. An abbreviated history of painting is on offer. As Sartre stresses, these bodies mainly are derived from sculpture; Michelangelesque bodies, they never breathed. Or, better, the difference between living matter—humans— and tools is not what painting shows. Damisch argues finally that what painting tries and fails to organize by way of perspective is something that exceeds it and explains it: he invokes Lucretius— and Marx—to explain what he means. Painting is a materialist practice. Paintings may offer representations, but they are made of paint. The limited palette of Tintoretto’s painting is like the atomic units from which the world is made in De rerum natura. By way of paint a world is represented, but paint itself is part of the world, supposedly lifeless matter that produces lifelike images. Sartre insists that the figure of Mark has the effect that Tintoretto always produces: a sense of our being overwhelmed by his paintings. It is an effect of the density of their materiality. Tintoretto never painted anything he had not before grasped and touched, Sartre contends (“il ne peint rien qu’il n’ ait d’abord touché” [174]); his painting invokes a tactile response, kinetic sensations: “Si nous devons connaître le poids des messagers célestes, il faut que nous les recevions sur nos épaules” (186; We have to feel the weight of celestial messengers on our shoulders in order to understand them). This feeling may come from the activity of the eye as we try to make out figures who are realized almost always in apparent motion, never in repose; fig-

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ures who are twisted, falling, turning, precarious. Figures we cannot exactly see. For Sartre, Tintoretto’s Mark epitomizes the sense that our own materiality is insupportable; standing is a remarkable accomplishment for bodies subject to gravity and meant to fall. The weight of matter is only furthered by stifling human conventions and the limitations of social arrangements with their oppressive, insidious distinctions. Against these one struggles, not to leave the world—there is no other world for us—but to exist within its limits. Tintoretto’s painting has trees growing across its top; even the sky is bound within earth. There is no place to see beyond the wall in the back. The painting feels compressed, crowded, dense with figures, and dense with the thought and effort to conceptualize itself within the constraints of a materiality in which the miracle of realization may occur: that the supernatural and the natural are indistinguishable from each other. The flying saint was once a tiny model in Tintoretto’s hands. What we are to see we cannot: the matter from which every thing is made: this is what is on offer in Tintoretto’s Miracle of the Slave. For Damisch, painting starts telling this truth with Paul Cézanne, who let us see the canvas on which can also be seen dabs of paint— material space and material substances and the traces of motion that brought them together for us to see and to see more than that. Cézanne, Damisch notes, was “an assiduous reader of De rerum natura” (Theory of /Cloud/, 229). Cézanne, Sartre reminds us, called Tintoretto “the Painter” (“Saint Marc et son double,” 174; “Cézanne l’appelait ‘le Peintre’; voilà ce qu’il est” [Cézanne called him “The Painter”: that’s what he was]).22 One regular complaint about Tintoretto’s speed was that you could see his brushstrokes and the canvas beneath. Boschini, writing at about the same time as Ridolfi (and in the Venetian dialect favored by the poligrafi a century earlier), admired this. Philip Sohm comments that although the justification for painting in this manner may have been that brushstrokes are not visible at the distance at which a painting of the size of Tintoretto’s has to be seen to be seen at all, he wonders whether “Tintoretto did not intend his viewer to see them and love them as much as Boschini did.”23 For one thing, Sohm continues, letting us see brushstrokes allows us to realize where the animating life of the painting comes from. What Boschini admired reverses the judgment of Vasari, deploring Tintoretto’s supposed carelessness. This reversal could lead one to claim Tintoretto as the first modern painter— and not just for Cézanne; Édouard Manet admired him, too, copying Tintoretto’s late self-portrait for its “implication of ultimate freedom from outward cultural determination,” as Nichols recalls (Tintoretto,

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24), a notion from which Nichols demurs, refusing to countenance a connection between Manet’s proto-modernism and Tintoretto’s.24 In a lecture on Manet, Michel Foucault remarks on the qualities that make Manet modern: canvases on which the perspectival grid has been flattened, and where the lateral and vertical strokes on the canvas are likely to remind us of the weave of the flat surface on which the painting occurs.25 Figures in Manet tend to look past each other; relationship, the notion of being together in a single human world, is broken by the insistence that a “picture was a piece of space in front of which the viewer could be displaced” (Manet, 30), “the picture as materiality” (31); space collapses into flatness, indifferent to human presence or representation. The flattening force in Tintoretto has this effect too. Light in Manet’s painting, Foucault argues, lets us see what is invisible. Foucault’s lecture was delivered in Tunis in 1971; Damisch’s book first appeared in France the year after. Both Foucault and Damisch are sure that the conventions of Renaissance art, which they equate with the principles of Alberti’s De pictura, and with the accomplishments of Florentine perspective, are what modernity—which starts with Cézanne or with Manet—finally shatters, revealed as incapable of representing the real. However, what brings the figures together in Tintoretto is both beyond them and within them. Tintoretto lets us see that the painting took time to make when he leaves brushstrokes exposed, when his composition is palpably drawn not from life but from art. Denying the fiction of one-point perspective, he depends upon our eyes not to be taken in by illusion but to do the work of approaching the limits of what we can see. Painting, insofar as it derives from painting, offers us the lifelike—it shows what life is like beyond individuality. In Ninfe, Giorgio Agamben, continuing his exploration of what he earlier termed Aby Warburg’s nameless science, contemplates the “energies stored in images,” suspended there, inanimate, yet living in in the afterlife art awakens in them.26 That life might remind us of the temporality of Eliot’s modernism; it suggests, as Walter Benjamin insisted, that history does not move forward on a single line. The image, Agamben writes, “delineates a space in which we are not yet thinking, in which thought becomes possible only through an impossibility to think” (“Nymphs,” 78). Warburg’s Pathosformeln move thought by way of images that are ungraspable and reiterative, persistent, and elusive. As Agamben writes, in the hybrid mix that Pathosformel named—formula and feeling, form and matter—is housed a time that is not one. Pathosformeln are made of the time when their kinetic potential is realized in the artwork and in us. Agamben thinks of this union in sexual terms at the same time as he describes it as the potential to think beyond

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difference. “In order to be totally alive, images . . . need a subject to unite with them” (78). “I let the signs I receive come out of me,” Warburg wrote.27 The active passivity that Agamben posits by way of Warburg and attaches to the life of images—of the imagination— Jean-Luc Nancy has also claimed as the work of religion, insofar as it draws us to the recognition of the limits of thought and the expanses of sense. Warburg’s thinking about images recognized their ability to make a visceral connection to us, indeed to parts of ourselves that may not be reached in other ways because these parts may not belong to ourselves in some restricted, identitarian fashion. We are connected by way of a shared materiality, a shared life. Warburg’s lecture on Native American culture and imagery in relation to classical and Renaissance art is one indication of the cultural range of connections he posits by way of the revival of images. As Agamben writes in “Warburg and the Nameless Science,” his “unitary approach to culture” (99) overcomes the distinction between history and anthropology, conscious and unconscious, offering a unity that opens “a new way of writing art history . . . that . . . directs . . . research toward the overcoming of the borders of art history” (90). Georges Didi-Huberman, who has written about how Fra Angelico’s figuration exceeds its mimetic function, and about Aby Warburg’s Pathosformeln in ways akin to Agamben, stresses how any image calls upon the viewer’s resources of memory (including unconscious recollection). “Before an image, finally, we have to humbly recognize this fact: that it will probably outlive us, that before it we are the fragile element, the transient element, and that before us it is the element of the future, the element of permanence.”28 Didi-Huberman writes this against the practice of most art historians who consign the image to a past and imagine our task involves historical decipherment so that we can place it back where it belongs, forgetting all the while that it is before us, awakening thought. Sometime in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, Tintoretto, who before then had been hailed as an artist of the extreme, someone for whom making art was every thing and who was possibly antireligious in the way in which he represented divinity so physically, became a painter whom it became commonplace to describe as deeply spiritual. If he is, it is not because of the kind of conventional piety that art historians now tend to find in his work. It is rather in the embodiment of a seeing and thinking that surpasses thought that one can credit Tintoretto as religious, if we also hear in that word the notion of tradition, and thereby what it is that makes for connection. Tradition cannot be separated from materialism. Even Eliot tried to explain the relation between the individual talent

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and tradition by way of the example of a chemical reaction. Sartre looks at Tintoretto and sees Galileo and Newton, a physics yet to be articulated already realized in Tintoretto’s imagination. To these moderns we might add Spinoza, equating God and Nature, the Spinoza who tells us that we do not know yet what a body can do. When we look at Miracle of the Slave, we can begin to know that. In the anachronisms of the gravity of Tintoretto’s visual field we may glimpse its version of a theory of general relativity. What remains of a Rembrandt torn to bits and flushed down the toilet, Genet asked, a question raised for him by the fact that such a dissolution would give the painting the same fate as awaits our bodies.29 So dissolved, the flushed painting would show what it did when it was intact, a material existence that enables us to glimpse what we all are. “He depersonalizes his models . . . he removes all identifiable characteristics from objects that he gives the most weight. . . . He presents [them] as distinct substance” (98). For Genet, this accompanies the “revelation ‘that every man is every other man’ ” (101), an antihumanistic homo-life that exceeds and is our own. When Sartre looked at Tintoretto and thought of Genet he might have been inviting our thought in that direction. In 1562, twenty years after the first commissions for the Sala Capitolare, the Scuola Grande di San Marco proceeded to commission more paintings of the legend of St. Mark; Tommaso Rangone, a learned doctor originally from Ravenna, and Guardian Grande of the Scuola that year, undertook to cover the expenses.30 He chose Tintoretto for three new works, completed at least by 1566 when Vasari saw them installed on the east wall of the Sala Capitolare. Commentary on the three paintings has tended to focus on Rangone, almost to the exclusion of anything else; this is not entirely surprising since he is portrayed, quite prominently and unmistakably, in each of the paintings. In Il ritrovamento del corpo di San Marco (The Discovery of the Body of St. Mark [plate 14]), he is just to the left of center in the lower half of the canvas, his arms extended, garbed in the golden robe of the office of “Cavalier aurato” granted him by the doge in 1562. He is central, too, in Il trafugamento del corpo di San Marco (The Carrying Off of the Body of St. Mark [plate 15]), again clothed in a gold-tinged robe (this time it is fur-lined), standing just behind the corpse. In the painting of St. Mark Rescuing a Saracen from a Shipwreck (San Marco salva un Saraceno durante un naufragio [plate 16]), he is in the lower left of the painting; once again wearing a golden robe, he appears to be extending one hand to a turbaned figure in the water while he points with his other

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hand to the flying Mark on the right side; the saint likewise reaches down toward another figure, presumably the Saracen. (Commentators have speculated that Rangone also may be represented in The Miracle of the Slave in the figure of the bearded contemporary Venetian spectator in the extreme lower left; Sergio Marinelli, quite convinced that this figure is meant to be Rangone, juxtaposes it to a portrait statue of him by Alessandro Vittoria that is certainly similar in physiognomy and especially close in the cut of the hair and beard.31) This drive to identify Rangone in Tintoretto’s paintings reflects Rangone’s desire for self-representation: he had wanted his statue to be placed on the facade of the Scuola Grande di San Marco (his application was at first approved and then annulled). He made the same request, once again refused, at San Geminiano, the church that once faced the basilica across the Piazza San Marco, where he served as procurator. He succeeded at San Guiliano, a church located on a small square nearby, where his portrait statue by Jacopo Sansovino remains above the doorway. Commentators have tended to denigrate Rangone’s desire for self-representation even as they make it their focus and note Tintoretto’s willingness to satisfy it: In the Trafugamento, he stands before a building that may be meant to recall the church of San Geminiano where he had hoped to have his statue placed. Rosand traces Rangone’s story over the several pages in his Myths of Venice devoted to the three post-1562 paintings by Tintoretto (discussed mainly in relation to Rangone). “This donor’s campaign of self-portrayal is actually of direct relevance to our theme” (86), the theme outlined in a passage we have quoted before, where paintings of events from the life of Mark that display “the collapsing of far and near, of past and present” demonstrate that Venetians knew “how to locate themselves—through the portraits of their contemporaries—in the great events of the past” (88); they knew, that is, how to subsume themselves in the ideology of the state and its saintly representative. Such corporate identification, however, is just what Rangone’s desire for self-representation challenges as Nichols, as mesmerized by Rangone as others are, points out; his analysis plays out the dialectical force of this contradiction since Nichols takes it also to illustrate Tintoretto’s own position. The painter identifies with his patron as a fellow self-promoter, much as Rangone’s choice of Tintoretto to be the painter for the Sala Capitolare highlights Rangone’s “identification with the painter’s more maverick tendencies” (Nichols, Tintoretto, 144), yet another instance of Tintoretto and his double. Nichols directly opposes Rosand’s vision of Tintoretto as a company man. Just as The Miracle of the Slave had (for whatever reasons) been rejected initially by the Scuola twenty

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years earlier, so were the three paintings from the 1560s. They too were the source of controversy, and this time the reason is known: the Scuola demanded that the figure of Rangone be removed. Tintoretto failed to do this, yet again, for reasons unknown, the paintings were returned to the Scuola intact; they remained there until the Scuola was closed after the Napoleonic invasions of 1797, when the paintings were dispersed. The extravagant singularity of Rangone’s behavior is manifest in his desire for representation, as if his identity was located in or could best be confirmed by repeated artistic mimesis. Indeed, his presence in the three paintings by Tintoretto is their most identifiable feature, one strong unifying thread. Rangone is unmistakably there, however mistaken it may be for him to be so singularly there. (It would not have been at all amiss if the entire body of the Scuola were depicted, as Bellini had done in St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria.) The exact subject matter of each of the paintings, miracles of St. Mark, is far less clear. What do these paintings represent? The Ritrovamento is “a canvas generally interpreted as the discovery of the body of the saint but including a composite of acts of his miraculous healing,” Rosand notes (Myths of Venice, 84); by “discovery,” he alludes to a supposed event of June 25, 1094, when the body of St. Mark, somehow misplaced after its abduction from Alexandria a couple of hundred years earlier, was found again in its walls. The discovery of the body is its recovery as the word ritrovamento succinctly suggests. Between the “general” interpretation and Rosand’s “but” stands a challenge voiced by Erasmus Weddigen in a footnote to a 1991 essay on some Sansovino bas-reliefs of miracles of St. Mark in which Weddigen promised “in altra occasione” (another occasion yet to occur) to show that Tintoretto, inspired by Sansovino, represents a number of dif ferent miracles of Mark in his painting and not the 1094 rediscovery of his body usually supposed to be its subject.32 Rosand does not go that far in conceding that some miracles seem to have been added to the scene of discovery; he insists that the “general” understanding of the painting’s subject matter has been settled ever since Ridolfi first identified it. However, Ridolfi did not identify the painting as the miraculous recovery of the saint’s lost corpse; he says its subject matter is the “levare” (Maraviglie dell’arte, 2:188), the raising and carry ing off of the body of Mark from Alexandria by Buono da Malamocco and Rustico da Torcello, the two merchants credited with bringing his body to Venice in 828. Ridolfi identifies the foreshortened corpse on the lower left as Mark’s and reads the agitated figure on the right as someone demonically possessed (or being exorcised), an indication of how tormented the devil was by the transportation of the saint.

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In his monograph on the Ritrovamento, Marinelli notes obvious problems in Ridolfi’s account: if it represents the 828 carry ing off of Mark’s corpse, which figures in the painting are supposed to be Buono and Rustico? If the corpse on the floor is Mark’s, whose body is being removed from the tomb on the wall? Further questions arise about the identification of figures in the painting. Is the figure standing on the left (another figure of St. Mark) an apparition pointing out where to find his corpse in the wall of the mausoleum, or does his raised hand signal that he is calling a halt to the search because the corpse has been found and is lying at his feet? Krischel, presumably convinced by Weddigen’s footnote (and perhaps in response to questions like these), renames the painting St. Mark Working Many Miracles in his monograph on Tintoretto.33 He proffers this title rather than one that reflects the general understanding of its subject matter: “It has recently been shown that this picture does not, as was long assumed, show the rediscovery of the body of St. Mark on June 25, 1094, but various miracles of healing worked by the patron saint” (Tintoretto, 72). Marinelli fi nally opts for the possibility that Tintoretto is not representing any particular event. In support of this position, he quotes Ruskin from the opening pages of The Stones of Venice: “The mind of Tintoret, incomparably more deep and serious than that of Titian, casts the solemnity of its own tone over the sacred subjects which it approaches, and sometimes forgets itself into devotion; but the principle of treatment is altogether the same as Titian’s: absolute subordination of the religious subject to purposes of decoration or portraiture.”34 Ruskin is Marinelli’s warrant to think of Tintoretto as a modern, individualistic artist not much obligated to subject matter or narration. Rather than being a painting committed to illustrating a story, Il ritrovamento del corpo di San Marco may suggest and conflate two legends about Mark’s body— its removal from Alexandria or its miraculous rediscovery hundreds of years later in the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice; alluding to both, it may represent neither. Weddigen’s suggestion that the Ritrovamento does not represent either discovery but rather a series of miracles performed by Mark footnotes an essay intent on identifying the subject matter of three of the six bas-relief sculptures Sansovino made for the Basilica of St. Mark that usually have been assumed to be moments in the story of the miracle of the slave: Weddigen argues that they represent three dif ferent miracles and are unified not by narrative but by an overarching theological paradigm. Having dismantled narrative unity as the ideological support for the images (it is precisely on these grounds that Rosand disputes Weddigen’s analysis),35 Weddigen arrives by way of theology at an identical ideological thesis. Each

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story demonstrates the same thing, Mark’s miraculous powers, their “qualità taumaturgiche,” his wonder-working ability, no matter where or when (Weddigen, “Il secondo Pergola,” 113). Marinelli’s argument moves in the same direction: his analysis of perspective in the Ritrovamento arrives at the hand of the standing St. Mark as the place where all lines in the painting converge. The hand of the saint becomes the hand of the artist. The unity of the painting is clinched for Marinelli by way of the golden triangle he sees in this convergence (51); a mystical mathematical unity resolves for him the other wise anomalous assemblage of figures in the undecideable locale of Tintoretto’s painting (Marks everywhere, lying dead, standing seemingly alive, falling from the walls). He then ties this arcane Pythagorean mathematics to the learned Rangone. Artist and patron thereby double each other. Weddigen also connects Tintoretto to Rangone, this time by way of Sansovino, the artist who placed a statue of Rangone on the facade of San Giuliano and redesigned the architecture of the Piazza San Marco along the modernizing, classicizing lines Tintoretto’s Trafugamento recalls. Through such equations (of Tintoretto and Rangone, of one artist with another, of all of them with Venetian state ideology), Marinelli arrives at the serene equilibrium (“un sereno equilibro” [51]) of Tintoretto’s accomplishment. His “terribilità,” the incalculable force of an uncontrolled imagination, is lost. Vasari saw the paintings in the Scuola Grande di San Marco in 1566 and praised the artistic finish of the earlier Miracle of the Slave; he found the 1560s paintings lacking in just the way for which he criticized Tintoretto throughout the brief notice he gave him in his Lives—for a rapidity of execution that left them, as far as Vasari was concerned, unfinished, indeed, looking to him as if they had scarcely been begun. Vasari, who presumably was walked around the Sala Capitolare by some local guide, briefly identifies the subject matter of each of the 1560s paintings. The Ritrovamento is described as a scene of exorcism; what other wise catches Vasari’s eye is the perspectival effect of the loggia and the effects of illumination shed by the torches in the very back of the painting. No further mention is made of subject matter. Even more surprising is his description of the Trafugamento: “a storm of rain, with the dead body of another of S. Mark’s votaries, and his soul ascending into Heaven.”36 Vasari had identified the slave in The Miracle of the Slave as Mark’s votary, then noted the rescued Saracen as another votary, and thus saw the body in the Trafugamento that is usually identified as the corpse of Mark as yet another of the saint’s rescued votaries. This identification is quite anomalous, but it does remind one that none of these paintings came with the labels affixed to them that

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they now display in museum settings.37 Vasari’s readings make clear that it was quite possible not to have known their subject matter at the time they were first painted. This flies in the face of usual suppositions, as when Nichols writes of the three Tintorettos produced under Rangone’s patronage: “The paintings he commissioned were certainly traditional enough in subject matter. Drawing primarily on Jacopo Voragine’s popular Legenda aurea (1255–66, printed in Venice in 1475), Tintoretto’s paintings illustrated three miraculous interventions from the afterlife of St. Mark. These scenes would have been well known to his contemporaries” (Tintoretto, 142). Nichols thinks that it was only by inserting Rangone into these other wise familiar scenes that Tintoretto defamiliarized them and thereby asserted himself. Vasari, however, mistook the subject matter of the paintings and disliked the way they were painted. Rangone does not get a mention. Vasari’s mistaking of the corpse of St. Mark for a votary in the Trafugamento can remind us that the subject matter of that scene is no more settled than is the case with the Ritrovamento. Ridolfi had identified the Ritrovamento as the first of the paintings—Buono and Rustico discover the body of Mark— and read the Trafugamento as what follows, their carry ing it off to be transported to Venice. He sees the two paintings as a pair, joined by the narrative. This interpretation of the two paintings can be found in the 1949 catalogue of the Accademia; it is reiterated in a 1981 volume on the Venetian scuole edited by Terisio Pignatti. Boschini, the note mentions, also reiterated Ridolfi’s identification of subject matter, but later proposed that the subject of the Trafugamento was a depiction of the moment directly after the martyrdom of Mark, not the transportation of his corpse hundreds of years later. After his martyrdom, the legend goes, Mark’s body was about to be burned, but then was saved thanks to a storm that doused the flames and dispersed all but the Christians loyal to him, who carried off his body for burial.38 This is the “general” understanding of the subject matter of the Trafugamento, as Rodolfo Pallucchini and Paola Rossi note in the standard catalogue of Tintoretto’s works; it has prevailed since around 1960 when a cleaning of the painting restored more clearly the wood pyre in the background of the painting. Vasari mistook the subject of the painting, depending on the visual evidence that linked the body being carried to the bodies of Mark’s votaries in the other paintings, a series of muscled, all but nude men. Is this “erroneous” visual evidence simply to be dismissed when the “general” understanding of the narrative subject of the paintings has either been indebted to other early mistaken accounts— Ridolfi’s, most notably—or continues

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to remain in dispute? Rather than seeking to identify a definitive narrative as the subject of the painting maybe we should follow Boschini, who by getting it right once and wrong once, perhaps got it right both times. These paintings could as easily conjure up one scene of the carry ing off of Mark’s body as another. Even Rosand has it both ways; he looks at the Trafugamento and sees Alexandria turned into Venice: “Within this thoroughly Venetianized Alexandria, the body of St. Mark is being carried toward its final resting place, the reliquary church of San Marco itself” (Myths of Venice, 88). Since all stories are always the same story, a scene that may show the rescue of Mark’s postmartyrdom body from the flames and not his body being carried to Venice eight hundred years later, must nonetheless point to that later story since the only reason Alexandrian Christians would have saved the body from being burned was so that it could be stolen and brought to Venice.39 Either way, these paintings must insist on Mark’s Venetian future. The scene of the Trafugamento must be the Piazza San Marco or (for Elaine Banks) the Campo SS. Giovanni e Paolo, the site of the of the doge’s palace or of the Scuola Grande di San Marco: they are all made the same to fit the ideological translation of these narratives and despite the fact that the Venetian state and the Venetian scuole were anything but identical to each other as sites of power, different necessarily precisely because the exclusions upon which state power rested precipitated the rise of alternative sites of power and influence. The collapse of the visual into the ideological in the name of historicizing analysis ignores the contentions of history. When viewers saw Tintoretto’s painting of the rescue of the Saracen, how much of the story of that miracle as told in the Legenda aurea might they have had in mind? In Voragine, the shipwrecked Saracen pledges himself to Mark and Mark obligingly flies in to save his newfound convert from drowning. When the Saracen is back on dry land, he forgets any obligation to Mark and fails to visit his church or to become a Christian. Mark appears to him again, this time to reproach him; the intervention works: “realizing the wrong he had done, he went to Venice, was reborn at the sacred font of baptism, took the name of Mark, professed faith in Christ, and lived out his life in good works.” 40 Tintoretto’s painting shows two scenes of rescue, Rangone extending a hand to a drowning figure on the left, Mark similarly engaged on the right. Is the double story in the painting related to the double story in Voragine? In that story the votary reborn as a Christian in his second rescue by Mark is also reborn and renamed Mark. This story of Mark and his double is, in Voragine’s telling, very much

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the story of Mark himself; before Voragine tells legends, he starts with Mark’s name. It can mean many things— sublime, bitter, bent over, or “simply” hammer (1:242–43), the meaning we have noted in relation to Miracle of the Slave. When Voragine begins narrating, he offers other forms of doubling. Mark became an evangelist by taking down Peter’s words and putting them into writing; he does it again when, dispatched by Peter to the Veneto, he copies his Roman gospel; that copy is supposedly still preserved in Aquileia, a challenge to Venice’s right to Mark: “evangelium suum similiter ibi conscripsisse dicitur” (it is said that the evangelist himself copied himself).41 Mark is the site of copies. Vasari saw and conflated the various votaries of Mark, the conflations that are Marks: “that scene is by no means executed with the same diligence” as the first of the rescues, he complains, comparing the rescue of the Saracen to the rescue of the slave (Lives of the Painters, 2:513). Vasari seems to miss much, but has he in fact seen something? That savior and saved could change places? That Tintoretto is indifferent to the diligence of supposed exactness of execution, in painterly technique, indifferent in his adherence to familiar subject matter? Is he perhaps adhering to something less familiar than the stories commentators like to tell, the ones that then reduce these stories to one story? Vasari came to identify Mark as his votary in the Trafugamento in his itinerary around the Sala Capitolare. He began with The Miracle of the Slave, perhaps because it was pointed out to him as Tintoretto’s first painting for the room, perhaps because it caught his eye as he looked to the south wall at the far end of the room and saw at a distance the kind of finished work he was prepared to admire. In any event, his itinerary then took him along the east wall, back toward the entranceway into the room at the top of the grand Mauro Codussi staircase. He describes the paintings in the order in which they hung, presumably the order Tintoretto had in mind as he executed them in the 1560s. First came the Miracle of the Saracen, at right angles to The Miracle of the Slave, hanging close to the doorway into the albergo. Behind the wall where Tintoretto’s painting of the sea rescue of the Saracen hung and at a right angle to it Paris Bordone and Palma Vecchio’s Tempest was located. Tintoretto’s painting recalls its storm, shares with it a ship sinking in the background, and a small skiff thrust forward. As we noted earlier, Tintoretto’s The Miracle of the Slave resonates with paintings in the albergo; the Alexandria of the Trafugamento recalling the elaborate architectural settings of these paintings. Most immediately the 1562–65 paintings in the Sala Capitolare summon Tintoretto’s own previous work for the room, The Miracle of the Slave. In the rescue of the Saracen,

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we see another flying Mark, wrapped again in a swirling pink robe. The figure he lifts may be the Saracen from the Legenda aurea, although nothing about the all-but-nude figure (his genitals covered in a white cloth) identifies him as a Saracen. He looks rather like the slave in The Miracle of the Slave; they share skin tone, both are curly haired. Mostly he looks like Mark, whose bared and flexed biceps the hunky slave echoes in his impressive musculature. These are the only figures who touch, or, at least, Mark is close to touching him (it is not clear whether he has quite taken hold of him or let go). The scene perhaps represents Mark as having saved this figure from the sinking ship in the background, but given the usual instability in Tintoretto’s representations, he might as easily be removing him from the sinking skiff; the oarsman in the boat just beneath Mark seems about to fall into the ocean; is this because of the churning sea or because of the upsetting sight of someone remarkably human in aspect, but flying? In The Miracle of the Slave, no one sees the flying figure, and whatever is to be made of what is seen is itself not seen. Here, however, Mark may be seen; his effect, however, doubles the storm that seems to be in no one’s control; nor is it in Mark’s power either; the waves are not calmed by his presence. So, too, the oarsman in the center may be seeing Mark; he also appears to be falling from the boat. Rangone’s arm is extended, pointing to Mark and presumably pointing there for the sake of a figure in the painting more likely to be identified as a “Saracen”—the figure in the water that is nothing more than an almost indistinct black face topped with a turban. Is Rangone rescuing this figure from the water, or suggesting to him that salvation lies not in the skiff but with Mark? The other bearded figure, the one behind Rangone and who therefore can’t be him because he is not wearing gold, but who other wise looks like his dead ringer, has his eye on another muscled figure holding onto the skiff. No lending hand is offered to him. The ghostly sinking ship in the background plays out more scenes of sinking and rescue, of extended hands that do not touch, while the painting itself in its swirling and churning shows matter in motion, making indifferent where the sea starts and the sky begins, which white swirls are waves and which are clouds. Every thing in the painting has been thrust forward, every thing is toppling. Curls of white paint unify the painting, conveying an energy that may, indifferently, represent the gleam of light on bodies or flashing in the air, natural or miraculous light or foam on the sea that spills over everywhere. Matter in motion, atomized figures, each one like each other if only in their instability. The limited palette of color makes them all look alike—Rangone’s gold robe is no mark of distinction or singularity. He is doubled. So-called Saracen and

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saint are mirrors of each other. White paint that is visibly everywhere and yet not a mark of belonging is the ground for what things are. Proceeding along the wall from this painting to the Trafugamento beside it, how could Vasari not have seen Mark as his votary? Here we have another naked body even more like the slave’s in physiognomy and in being a dead weight in the arms of those who carry him. Elaine Banks is the only recent commentator who has noted the hunkiness of the figures in these paintings, although she stops short of any Sartrian estimation of their erotic appeal; nor does she venture the social equalization and contention among powers that might be suggested by their physicality. Surely this heavily muscled body invites the gaze. In this case he is entirely naked, his genitals blocked by the muscular forearm of the figure who straddles the body, an other wise fully clothed figure who touches, embraces the corpse, while his legs spread wide to bear its weight; this figure looks aside, perhaps unable to look at the corpse he bears, perhaps averting his gaze from the genitals his arm covers. This play of weight, of touch and averted eye, of bared and covered skin, establishes how opposing forces are being brought together, not toward some resolution, the serenity and harmony that most art historians seek, but in a felt tension that sustains difference and identity at once. (Tintoretto’s paintings are congruent with how Jennifer Scappettone sees Venetian anachronism, “allowing the contradictions to remain generative” [Killing the Moonlight, 42].) The other figure carrying the body— the one robed in pink— does look, and invites our gaze thereby; so too does Rangone, taking him from behind. This compacted group is surmounted by a vast camel—the animal body, straining against the figure who has fallen holding onto its lead, registers the push-pull of the forcefield that brings humans and animals together into a tightly packed group, a nonce-sociality that forms a large weighted mass on the right side of the painting tilted as if it might fall into the viewer’s space. The Trafugamento looks even more unbalanced and strange now than it once did. In the nineteenth century it was mutilated, several feet of the canvas removed from its left side. A circa 1720 engraving of the original by Andrea Zucchi (fig. 1) reveals that the figure in what is now the lower left of the painting—the one who seems to have fallen, and whose head looks as if it might at any moment fall off as well— actually was tightly bound to another standing figure, while above them, ghostly figures were to be seen painted in swirls of white like that used for the background fleeing figures as well as for atmospheric effects of storm and fire. Nichols sums up the composition this way: “The group are strongly lit and shown in bold diagonal foreshortening in a forward plane, giving the impression

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Figure 1. Andrea Zucchi, Miracle of the Transposition of the Body of Saint Mark. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

that they will progress directly out of the picture and into the world of the viewer. In contrast, pagan Alexandria is in a state of physical dissolution, its spatial unreality, like the ghostly forms of its fleeing inhabitants, aptly expressing its moral disintegration. The disjunction, supported by the widely varying degree of finish given to the Alexandrian context and Christian protagonists, thus clearly marks their difference in spiritual status” (Tintoretto, 142). Nichols offers this summary as a restatement of a normative account of the painting that he goes on to complicate. Those Alexandrian arcades do look a lot like the Piazza San Marco, after all, while the central building in the background could recall the facade of the Scuola Grande di San Marco. Having Rangone play the part of Nicodemus to a Mark who looks a lot like a Christ in a deposition, Nichols thinks he has located the Scuola’s objection to the two “outsiders” (Tintoretto, 144), Rangone and Tintoretto, allowed into their midst. Perhaps. I wonder how much Nichols may be inventing a normative view in his initial summary of the painting. It really does not much look the way he says it does. Rangone’s presence is not the

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only outrage in the painting. Because the figures seem to be toppling toward us, does that simply confirm the ideological narrative of the inevitability of the triumph of Venice that Nichols’s summary intimates? Suppose the movement is an erotic trajectory. What if the viewer doesn’t see the nude body as the saint but as a slave who needs to be rescued, touched, seen; or simply as a naked body, the dead weight of a corpse that might be anyone’s insofar as it is seen as body-qua-body (it is no flying saint, although even his was a falling body subject to gravity and mortality). This nude body is nonetheless heavily muscled, weighty, embraced; its face is the young bearded countenance of the slave in The Miracle of the Slave, a face that also recalls self-portraits of the youthful Tintoretto. If the background of the painting is “unreal,” if it is Alexandria, as Nichols contends, is it “real” when it is perceived as a version of the Piazza San Marco? Does Tintoretto apply paint to make moral and spiritual distinctions? The ghostly figures in the painting once included the spirit of the dead body leaving it and taking flight (this part of the painting only is available fully in the engraving). Spirit in this image is white paint; white paint is applied in just the same way for pagans as it is for Christians. Either way, whether it is the dead saint’s living spirit or the live Alexandrians fleeing the scene, it is materialized spirit. Yes, there are differences in this painting; nonetheless, all these equations—the body as Mark, or as a votary, or as Christ; the scene as Alexandria or Venice— are marks that refuse to stabilize themselves into an identity; they arise from the matter from which they are made, which is itself thematized and materialized in white paint. On to the Ritrovamento, which Vasari described as an exorcism; what fascinated him about the painting was its perspective and the play of uncanny light. The demonically possessed figure is most brilliantly lit. It is possible to see this painting paired with the Trafugamento (as Miracle of the Slave and Saracen arguably are too). Both feature exaggerated perspectival prospects. If, as Humfrey supposes, the two paintings hung side by side, separated by the entrance doorway on the east wall of the Sala Capitolare, that configuration recalls the facade of the Scuola Grande di San Marco.42 The figures, tightly knotted and falling on the right side of the Ritrovamento echo the figures that once were similarly configured on the left side of the Trafugamento. Tintoretto’s art strains to find what painting can do and, so doing, presses at its limits—hence his use of wax models rather than humans, hence his reiterations from one painting to another that establish the imaginative parameters of his aesthetic (in this respect, if in no other way, like Mansueti’s insistent repetitions).

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Perspective supposedly offers the illusion of space, of depth, of threedimensionality to a flat plane. But the final two paintings on Vasari’s itinerary exaggerate depth. In the Trafugamento, the figure on the left is falling headlong toward us, the body on the right is barely supported as it falls forward. Instead of being pulled into the enormous depth behind, we are assaulted visually by figures falling forward toward us with the uncanny force of gravity. In the Ritrovamento, every visual line leading back meets at the raised hand of the towering figure on the left, a Mark who seems a counterweight to the Marks in the two paintings that once hung to its right; in both the Trafugamento and St. Mark Rescuing a Saracen, the figure of the saint supported the right side of these paintings. All lines converge on Mark’s hand in the Ritrovamento, as had also been the case with the saint flying into The Miracle of the Slave. Marinelli claims that the convergence on Mark functions to stabilize the painting, but it also does what Banks says—it establishes a boomerang, an “alternating current” (“Tintoretto’s Religious Imagery,” 36): every time we are drawn back we are pulled forward. Architecture, so insistently framing the painting, refuses to give us the space it promises. One further boomerang: this figure on the left-hand side of the Ritrovamento, clad in pink, mantled in blue, recalls the attire of St. Mark in the scene of him preaching in Alexandria. The strange play of light that fascinated Vasari is of a piece with this. What place is this? A mausoleum? How did these figures ever come to be in the same room? Once again, as in the Trafugamento, we have a knot of bodies on the right, a woman looking and falling backward at whatever it is she sees, while a male figure holds onto her as he too falls away from another male figure, chest bared, pulling them and perhaps being pulled by them; all three fall and yet wind around each other, while they give off puffs of white threads that seem to materialize in the air as the face that seems to face the gigantic standing figure in pink at the left. In the foreground of the painting, Rangone’s golden robe is not his color alone. The palette is other wise limited, black and white perhaps used to manifest the bare beginning of life and death that the painting depicts. The standing Mark has the book he carried in The Miracle of the Slave (or, at any rate, he also carries a book), the outstretched hand that seemed to function as the wing on which he flew now vectors the force of the motion in the painting as we follow it with our eyes. At his feet, another dead body. Is it his own body? It lies on a carpet that might signal the “East,” and might also be a magic carpet. Ridolfi claimed that the corpse on the floor in the painting was the saint’s, and that his eyes follow the viewer. Perhaps, although the one open eye does not seem to have a pupil. The head of this lying figure

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is aslant, his mouth open: is he sleeping, drawing in air? Banks notes acutely how this body refuses the rigidity of a straight line; it curves, echoing the very curve of Mark’s body. It is as if Andrea Mantegna’s dead Christ had succumbed to the forces that Tintoretto always displays, bending, contorting its figures under its force. Even corpses are not immune. Are life and death distinct? Is this another dead or all but dead votary? Another identification across lines of supposedly determinate difference? This dead body curves with a life that may not correspond to a definition that ties life to human life or that depends on the difference between the organic and the inorganic. Behind the corpse, a figure so thinly painted as to be almost invisible falls backward, echoing Rangone; his clothing is made of the same colors as the checkered squares of the floor. Bodies are falling from walls that seem alive with death; living bodies in the depth of this painting—its illusory behind that may also be a before— seem to fall into or draw from a deep pit from which light emerges: the fires of hell? A crematorium? A buried source of light and life? Who knows? Another twenty years pass; Tintoretto’s name appears again in documents for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, but the final paintings for the Sala Capitolare (likely from 1585 to 1586) are the work of his son, Domenico.43 A pair of paintings, now hanging on either side of the altar, shows the body being removed and another its arrival in Venice; these are certainly paintings about the transfer in 828. Another painting, now in the Accademia, shows the saint asleep receiving the call to Venice, the founding myth of the saint. “Pax tibi Marce evangelista meus,” the call to rest, for the remains to remain in Venice. Others in the Sala Capitolare depict him founding a city in the rural huts of the lagoon. Yet another represents the saint’s hand appearing miraculously from a hiding place in the wall of the church; no doubt it is the 1094 story and this time members of the Scuola Grande di San Marco are present to witness it. There may have been more paintings than these. One can imagine that the members of the Scuola—who, as Philip Sohm deplores (in his book on the Scuola Grande di San Marco), always had conservative tastes in the painters it chose— fi nally had the paintings it must have wanted all along (as seen when it returned Tintorettos as fast as he produced them). It is difficult to know precisely where Domenico Tintoretto’s paintings hung in the Sala Capitolare, although very likely they had a place of honor at the far north end of the room at the altar on which a painting of Christ in glory with Mark, Peter, and Paul below, by Palma Giovane, remains.44

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Rosand ends his chapter in Myths of Venice on “The Peace of St. Mark,” claiming that Domenico’s paintings make “more explicit” what Jacopo Tintoretto was aiming to do and “complete the decoration” he had started (92). They offer up unambiguous illustrations of texts. They tell stories. In them, every thing is in place. There are no ambiguities in their subject matter. Giant forms stand foursquare in recognizable postures radiating stability and serenity; categorical distinctions and bodily discretion are affirmed. These paintings “complete” Tintoretto’s project only if to complete means to undo it and to conventionalize it fully.

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chapter 3

Stones (of Venice)

In the previous chapters, I have been exploring how the figure of Mark in painting exceeds singularity, representing Marks that do not serve simply to represent some consolidated biographical person bearing ideological import or some self-identical historical moment. The time in these paintings does not support narrative time, nor does Mark control or dominate the scenes in which he is placed. In these ways Marks in these paintings raise questions about the status of marks and the material means by which marks become Marks at the same time as they draw us to consider them as themselves, marks as marks. Pursuing these questions I follow a lead provided by Georges Didi-Huberman in Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain Art History.1 There Didi-Huberman pauses over a predella panel by Fra Angelico that also is central to the analysis offered in his book on that artist. At eye level beneath the Madonna of the Shadows (Florence, San Marco, 1440–50), these are four panels in which all that one sees is the splatter of drops of paint. Fra Angelico’s image reminds us of the colored slabs of marble it dissembles; it anticipates color field painting (indeed, it is that, above all): painting is allied with a material object, the stones I pursue in this chapter; their materiality does not keep them from 75

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signifying, from figuration that is also a dissemblance, to borrow DidiHuberman’s terms. The image reminds us “above all, what painting shows is its material cause, which is to say paint” (235). This emphasis on paint is part of the way that Didi-Huberman argues against the procedures of art history that would consign the art work historically to a past presumed to be past. Vasari in the Renaissance and Erwin Panosfky in modernity are charged as the instigators of this view of art history; against it, Didi-Huberman argues for the anachronism of the image, a project also in his book on Aby Warburg, The Surviving Image, whose title points to the ongoing afterlife of images to counter the notion that they are saturated with a historicity that is the same thing as a past that we cannot recover.2 The image is not something that once was transparent to a contemporary viewer (Vasari’s “errors” about the subject matter of paintings by Tintoretto for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, or his attribution of a Bellini painting to Mansueti, suggest that). Art historians intent on identifying stories as the subject of paintings, or determined to name real objects as what they represent, and sure that paintings are saturated by ideological meanings (the so-called myth of Venice) refuse the thesis that Paul Hills announces in the preface to his book Venetian Colour, which also has guided my approach: “Colour builds a world before it imitates one,” Hills writes.3 Didi-Huberman is someone to whom Hills refers; so, too, do Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood in Anachronic Renaissance, their wide-ranging study of “the plural temporality of the work of art,” and Amy Knight Powell in Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum.4 I name these art historians to gesture to those who have been questioning “a certain art history,” a project with which this book is allied.5 Art history of the variety under pressure, it could be argued, models its understanding of Renaissance art on its reading of principles laid down in Leon Battista Alberti’s Della pittura, an emphasis on disegno, the Florentine principle that begins with drawing and linear clarity that is supposed to be at odds with colorito, the aesthetic of Venetian painting that arises from the observation of light that produces atmospheric effects of connection and density. The stark dichotomy often assumed between these principles is belied by artistic practice and by critical theory. Aby Warburg’s development of his crucial concept of Pathosformeln, of form and feeling that conveys the survival, the afterlife, of the image, was first broached in work on Botticelli. It is not simply the case that Florentine art aims at illusionism. The world seen through its window depends on mathematical abstraction, one-point perspective that offers a kind of visual

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thinking. It is an attempt to see the world that rationalizes it. Venetian painting also is an exercise in thought; it is allied to what underlies a world that changes before one’s eyes, less mathematical abstraction than the enduring materials and material principles that painting might capture by the revelation that it is paint. In Venetian Colour, Hills attends to the materials from which paint of dif ferent colors was made and to the quarries that provided the marbles of various hues that sheathe a building like the Basilica of St. Mark. He attends to the par tic u lar qualities of Venetian light, of stone reflected in water, their mutual imbrication, describing color in Venetian painting alongside mosaics (these cover the interior of St. Mark’s from floor to ceiling). One episode in the “life” (the afterlife, the hagiography) of Mark illuminates these imbrications: the story of the discovery of his corpse encased in marble. It suggests the life in stone that also is Didi-Huberman’s subject: the predella panel that simulates marble underlies a representation of the enthroned Madonna because the God who became flesh can be imaged as stone, lifeless matter that exceeds the distinction between life and death that Christian paradoxes of the incarnation exfoliate, the paradoxical life of dead images. As Powell explores how images of the past can be brought into the present (a process of being put on deposit), she comments that “the promiscuity of the work of art—its return, reiteration, and perpetuation beyond its original moment—is the surest sign it never lived” (Depositions, 17). These images that never lived do something that living beings, who live and die, cannot do: “they will outlive us” (263). Their never living is a form of living that evades mortality. We will confront this form of living again in the final chapter of this book in the gospel that goes under the name of Mark. We could compare these projects in Renaissance art history to Jennifer Scappettone’s studies in Venetian modernism, their insistence on a historicity that is anything but the straightforward linearity of narrative.6 Venetian modernity begins for Scappettone with John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice. She studies it as part of a historical project he tries to build, as she puts it, “stone by stone” (16), aimed at narrating “the reciprocal interference of present and past” (43), to cite the subtitle of her chapter on Ruskin. In this chapter, I am intent on what Scappettone sees, but more as an aesthetic and philosophical project than as a work of history. The central question in this chapter is how to turn painted marks into written marks, how to model a writing practice that might attend to its materiality. Hills acknowledges a debt to Ruskin; the contemporary art historian of Venetian art whose work most inspires my own, I have cited him earlier and

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return now to Venetian Colour to launch this chapter; its focus will be on Ruskin. Ruskin inspired Hills to think about the relations of stone and water, the life that comes from stone; this also is the focus of Adrian Stokes’s work, which I will examine at the end of this chapter. Stokes, too, was influenced by Ruskin; he, in turn, influenced Hills (Scappettone devotes some pages to Stokes as well). One other contemporary art historian also will engage me in the chapter that follows—T. J. Clark, who is not usually associated with Venetian art of the Renaissance (I will be looking at an essay of his on Veronese). His acute materialist and aesthetic analyses are for me inspiring models for writing about art. Venetian Colour concludes with Titian; we could begin there (this book actually began there), with Hills’s comment on “Titian’s feel for colour as the luminous interface between surface and space” (209). “Surface” in this sentence could refer to the materials Titian represents, “space” an inbetween that exceeds the difference represented by particular objects; it is opened by way of color insofar as color refuses simply to define objects (although it does that) since it also relates them to each other. Color functions like metaphor, but also is a property of bodies. A quotation from Hills is the best way to see how his vision focuses on the connections color makes and how he puts these connections into words: “Metaphors reorder perception: velvet becomes grass, grass velvet, and as in Titian’s paintings, mountains may glow with coloured light like silk, or mantles fold like mountains. What is within touch is brought into play with the distant, the imaginary, the inaccessible. The flux of colaramento, chameleon as shotsilk . . . runs like a restless desire” (199). These connections in Titian are, for Hills, made by Venetian color, its manifestations in made objects capture the very qualities of light in Venice that reflect its extraordinary physical situation, a city on the lagoon, where light bounces off water onto surfaces of buildings. As Hills insists, in this ambiance, boundaries between water and air dissolve; the solidity of stone is tossed into question by the play of light and by the deep shadows of contrasting interiors. The elements that would distinguish a world in this period— earth, air, fire, water— are up for grabs. A couple of quick asides in which Hills glances at Tintoretto— the unmoored figures in the painting of Mark rescuing the Saracen, for example— connect to the painter’s engagement with weight and the forces of gravity; Hills links his refusal to anchor figures on the ground to the lack of balance in a place where one moves most often on water, not on land. “Travel by boat reawakens awareness of balance that on terra firma is readily taken for granted (here is one source of those figures in Tintoretto

Plate 17. Paolo Veronese, Infidelity. © National Gallery London / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 18. Paolo Veronese, Respect. © National Gallery London / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 19. Paolo Veronese, Happy Union. © National Gallery London / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 20. Paolo Veronese, Scorn. © National Gallery London / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 21. Jacopo Tintoretto, St. Mark and St. John. S. Maria del Giglio, Venice, Italy. Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 22. Jacopo Tintoretto, St. Luke and St. Matthew. S. Maria del Giglio, Venice, Italy. Scala / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 23. Palma Giovane, St. Peter Dispatches St. Mark to Preach the Gospel in Aquileia. S. Polo, Venice, Italy. Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 24. Fra Angelico, Noli me tangere. Museo di S. Marco, Florence, Italy. Scala / Art Resource, New York.

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that wheel and tip in balletic postures)” (9). “Wayward undulation” (46) can describe as easily the effects of being on the lagoon or what one sees looking at marble, mosaic, or glass. “The whole colouristic equation,” Hills writes, “was . . . at root founded upon the world’s absorption in the body and the body’s in the world” (216). These equations between nature and art are conveyed in analogies and metaphors rooted in materials that translate one into the other; they rest upon a shared materiality that defines bodies of all kinds, delineating and distinguishing them and, at the same time, connecting them to the life that lies in those connections (marbles are alive). Hills describes his version of Venetian serenity, not so much as an ideological program of domination (although Hills attends to Venetian social structures and distinctions) as one of connection. “Communal habits of attention” (18) may have at their economic base mercantile exchanges, but these open on exchanges that exceed the function of capital to turn use value into exchange value; even if aesthetic value arises from the socioeconomic, it does not remain there.7 I quoted Hills earlier on the ways artifacts exceed the social relations from which they arise. The marble columns of San Marco are spolia, signs of conquest, yet the basilica they adorn cannot be called Western or Eastern; it is both and neither. Atmospheric unity—atmospheric mobility— characterizes Venetian color as Hills sees it, a phenomenon of the place and the art made there. The “envelope of air” (12) that is Bellini’s distinctive contribution to painting is the “luminous film” (169) that brings things together, overcoming ordinary binaries like East and West and bringing them into “pictorial amity” (156). The Venetian aesthetic project is a worlding project, or a projection of the world that Venetian light intimates. “At its root, Titian’s colorito realizes changing apprehensions of the body and the world, matter and spirit” (224). Hills captures these connections in an extraordinary prose that seeks to find words for what objects and images share in the ambiance of the revelations of Venetian light. It is fair to say that Ruskin inspired this way of writing, as is suggested by a passage Hills quotes from the second volume of Stones of Venice in which Ruskin describes the light streaming into the basilica as throwing “a narrow phosphoric stream upon the waves of marble that heave and fall in a thousand colours.”8 Marble streams; Ruskin imagines it as water; it heaves in motion: the phosphoric “stream” of light that appears as color describes the walls of San Marco as readily as it names the vital properties of Ruskin’s prose with its crossings from solid to liquid. Vitality is conveyed by color and by a word stream (by the word “stream”) that does not stay within the lines any more than color does in its atmospheric effects. Commenting on

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Ruskin’s acute perceptions of minuscule variations that provide shifting possibilities in and out of visibility of materials whose colors and shapes are at the mercy of the changing light and the moving eye of someone passing before or through the Basilica of San Marco, Hills remarks: “Such regular alternation of a rectangle of splendid gold and recess of shadowy blue on a scale of little over a finger-tip’s width lent a special micro-rhythm to the architecture. It is the heart-beat—light/dark, light/dark, gold/blue, gold/blue—throbbing endlessly, its regularity contrasting with the veins of marble” (37–38). Hills’s stunning and observant prose catches a number of contrasting visual sensations and makes them as sensate as the life of a body that could be ours—or a world whose demarcations pulse with what Hills summons up as “living colour” (211), “the essential sign of life, of animation” (216). The heartbeat of color and light functions in tandem with the beat of the marble that pulses in its veins. As in Lucretius, this is a matter of matter in motion. “The energy of colouring is a metaphor for life, its quickenings and extinctions” (224). Or, I would suggest, metaphor in this final sentence of Hills is itself a metaphor, an indication that the language we have to describe the work of art— and in particular of Venetian color, which is not solely a property of art—attempts to grasp in words what painting grasps without them. Hills’s invocation of Ruskin in the context of his discussion of the Basilica of St. Mark is not the entirety of the relationship between these two theorists of Venetian color. I earlier endorsed Hills’s characterization of the “visual bricolage” of St. Mark’s: “Saracenic, oriental and Western sources . . . interwoven” (23), and I want now to further pursue the significance of such East-West relations in Ruskin. Hills describes this Venetian aesthetic as a matter of “encrustation” (12), the very word that Ruskin uses to define the Byzantine influence on Venetian architecture; for Ruskin, the basilica “is the purest example in Italy of the great school of architecture in which the ruling principle is the incrustation of brick with more precious materials” (Stones, 10:93). Encrustation refuses the dualisms and invidious comparisons that the East-West relationship often entails. In the conclusion to the chapter on “Grotesque Renaissance” in volume 3 of Stones of Venice, Ruskin argues against such prejudicial views, enjoining the recognition of “two great families of men, one of the East and South, the other of the West and North: the one including Egyptians, Jews, Arabians, Assyrians, and Persians; the other, I know not whence derived, but seeming to flow forth from Scandinavia, and filling the whole of Europe with its Norman and Gothic energy” (11:188). Bricolage and encrustation take on a historical dimension in an evenhanded account of human origins that

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fosters the anachronisms that Scappettone details.9 Ruskin can value the accomplishments of Tintoretto, Titian, and Veronese even as he vehemently deplores Renaissance aesthetics in general. We can see what anachronism looks like in Ruskin if we glance at plate 8, “Byzantine Capitals, Concave Group” (fig. 2), in the second volume of Stones of Venice, a typical illustration of how the principle of encrustation works. As is so often the aim in these illustrations, this plate arranges this group of capitals in what is supposed to be at once a chronological survey of developing forms and a revelation of a logic of increasing encrustation. However, what the illustration just as readily shows, in juxtaposing images out of their architectural context and putting them on the same page next to one another, is akin to what one sees looking at the rows of columns on the west facade of St. Mark’s, columns whose variegated marbles, derived from equally various sources, are each topped with an amazing range of capitals, no one identical to another. Dif ferent times and places stand side by side. As Ruskin is wont to admit, providing a chronology for the buildings he surveys, however much it may be his goal, defeats him when faced with this bricolage. It is that bricolage that plate 8 offers. So, when Ruskin looks at the central doorway of the Basilica of St. Mark, although he sees it as an instance of Gothic thanks to the surmounting arch that is a hallmark of that Northern/Western style, he also claims that Gothic arises from the Byzantine encrustation, the variegated marble sheathing that is the main feature of the building, in some “occult” fashion. The doorway may be “Gothic in feeling, selections, and vitality of execution” for Ruskin; it nonetheless shows “the occult entrance of the Gothic spirit before it had yet succeeded in effecting any modification of the Byzantine forms” (Stones, 10:315). “Occult” is as close as Ruskin can come to explain how what is to come after comes before, how Gothic somehow is implicit in Byzantine form without that being evident. This relationship of before and after restates the relationship of East and West. In the passage toward the end of Stones in which he urges the suspension of orientalist prejudice, the two streams seem independent of each other; however, the source more proximate to Ruskin as a Northerner is the one whose origins seem obscure to him. Indeed, as his description of the doorway of St.  Mark’s suggests, the “occult” relationship is from South and East to North and West, a movement that Ruskin describes in a metaphor (that, like Hills’s metaphorics, is more than that) as the “lava stream” of East to West: “The glacier stream of the Lombards, and the following one of the Normans, left their erratic blocks wherever they had flowed; but without influencing, I think, the Southern nations beyond the sphere of

Figure 2. John Ruskin, “Byzantine Capitals, Concave Group,” in Stones of Venice, vol. 2, plate 8.

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their own presence. But the lava stream of the Arab, even after it had ceased to flow, warmed the whole of the Northern air; and the history of Gothic architecture is the history of the refinement and spirtualisation of Northern work under its influence” (9:40). Lava streams: there is a history of stones that in its streaming also describes the effects of color and light. Ruskin’s Byzantine emphasis has been studied by Robert S. Nelson, while Thomas F. A. Dale, in an erudite essay on Venetian reinvention as dazzling as the one cited earlier on the role of art in Italian contentions over St. Mark, has endorsed and furthered Ruskin’s claims about the Eastern nature of the architecture of San Marco.10 For Ruskin, the apogee of the relationship of East and West is the Palazzo Ducale, especially the arm of the building that faces the lagoon. “The Ducal palace of Venice contains . . . three elements in exactly equal proportions—the Roman, Lombard, and Arab. It is the central building of the world” (9:38). This “center” is not exactly a geographic locale if only because Venice itself occupies the same position at the opening of the second volume of Stones; it is described there as the “golden clasp on the girdle of the earth” that gathers and gives forth “in world-wide pulsation, the glory of the West and of the East” (10:15). The centrality of this position is underscored in a letter from Ruskin to his father dated October 12, 1851, in which Ruskin describes Venice as the “centre of Europe, . . . at the point where the influence of the East and West, of the old and new world, were to meet,” a passage cited as a gloss on the “golden clasp” passage in the Library Edition (9:15n1). This double center—of Venice and its Ducal Palace—is a place of meeting, of historical simultaneity, not of succession. The origin of Venice for Ruskin is an anticipatory coming together of what more usually might be thought of as a succession from East to West or as the confrontation of opposites that art historians often insist upon in their discussion of these relationships. This double origin can be glimpsed in an illustration from the first volume of Stones (Ruskin’s fig. 7) that appears in a chapter on wall cornices, and in the prose that accompanies Ruskin’s drawing (fig. 3). The figure shows a molding with two possible curves; it is not a sketch of any molding that actually exists as such, but a drawing of two dif ferent possibilities brought together. It offers a shared architectural form, a curve that manifests differently in Western and Eastern buildings. Ostensibly offering a typology that also is a history of development, the image amalgamates typical Northern and Southern cornices, one designed to handle rain, the other sunlight; so doing, the image unveils the (occult?) possibility inherent in the curves that make cornices. Describing this confluence, Ruskin finds himself transported across the world, across time and space, arriving

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Figure 3. John Ruskin, “Dripstones, Northern and Southern,” in Stones of Venice, vol. 1, fig. 7.

at just the kind of anachronistic center he locates by way of Venice and its central building. “Take the outer line, and the moulding is one constant in Venice, in architecture traceable to Arabian types, and chiefly to the early mosques of Cairo. But take the inner line; it is a dripstone at Salisbury. In the narrow interval between the curves there is, when we read it rightly, an expression of another and mightier curve,—the orbed sweep of the earth and sea, between the desert of the Pyramids, and the green and level fields through which the clear streams of Sarum wind so slowly” (9:97). The movement between two lines in this imagined confluence now traces the curve of the world, at least as it stretches from east to west if not quite all the way around the globe. These translations in image and word, between image and word, light on a “narrow interval” which “read . . . rightly” is a wide expanse. These figures of time and space also figure the “occult” metaphoricity that keeps them apart and together at once. Minute particulars that occasion globalizing gestures are writ large in the aims of Stones of Venice from its very opening sentence, which promises to trace the relationship between “three thrones, of mark beyond all others . . . Tyre, Venice, and England” (9:17). The relationship between these marks is complex: Tyre no longer exists, Venice is said to be in ruins, and England in need of a resuscitation of which Ruskin despairs. Are these marks or blanks? Are these three cities meant to sum up moments in a successive history or are they three instances of the same thing, the same history over time? The three are named in the chapter called “The Quarry,” but rather than offering a literal account of the materials used to build Venice (Hills quarries kinds of marble in just that way), the chapter title serves as one of those metaphors that are more than that. Like the stones named in the title of Ruskin’s book, the materials through

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which Venice was built, and which Ruskin’s words are recreating, is a relationality—historical, geographic, and aesthetic. To better understand origins (the quarry) as Ruskin does, we might linger over Tyre. Ruskin footnotes the initial naming of the city by citing a prophecy in Isaiah 23 that foretells the disastrous fall of this city in Lebanon as, presumably, a warning against disbelief. (This theme resounds throughout Ruskin.) Tyre was first a Phoenician city, an island city like Venice; it was conquered by Alexander who dismantled it stone by stone in order to reuse the spolia to build anew a city on the mainland. This history echoes and anticipates the story of Venice that Ruskin will proceed to tell many pages later at the opening of volume 2 of Stones of Venice. It is a story especially pertinent to the building of St. Mark’s Basilica, about which Hills writes so inspiringly. As Nelson points out—and he is not alone in doing so—Ruskin thinks of Venice as a kind of new Byzantium; however, the Eastern city named as the book opens is Tyre. Just as Ruskin is perfectly capable of making moral/religious judgments about architectural failure in ways that deploy adjectives (like “primitive” or “monstrous”) that could and often were applied to the East, he conjures up Tyre as the name of a cursed place, which at the same time stands for the Eastern origin of Venice and for the fall of Venice from some pristine origin. “Tyre” points east to a place that has a typological relation to Christianity (the warnings in Isaiah get recycled in Mark and Matthew); but it also has a pre–JudaeoChristian existence. The movement from Tyre to Venice, the juxtaposition of Tyre and Venice, conjures up the movement of stones as spolia—the movement of remains to become building stones; in that reuse something occurs that is neither absolute distinction nor supersession. Ostensibly, Ruskin’s history from Byzantine to Gothic is a story of Christian triumphalism, the westward progress of the Church Militant that George Herbert, a favorite poet of Ruskin’s, charts in the final book of The Temple, itself a poem offered as a building. But the origin intimated by Tyre and summoned up in invocations of Byzantine precedents, engages—indeed endorses—the possibility of a non-Christian source for this Christian trajectory. In the preface to the third edition of Stones, Ruskin worries that he had not distinguished between the Christian Byzantine and Arab influences in Gothic (9:14–15), a belated concern that obliquely registers the indifference to Islamic/Christian distinctions in the book, as when, early, he praises the towers and terraces of Venice: “her roof terraces were wreathed with Arabian imagery of golden globes suspended on the leaves of lilies” (9:30). A few pages later, the history of shafts that begins in Greece and proceeds to Roman arches culminates in Arab foliation

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and the pointing of the arch (Ruskin’s beloved ogee form), Ruskin locating thereby “the spirituality and sanctity of it from Ismael, Abraham, and Shem” (9:34). The three sons of Noah— and the races they were taken to father— are allied with the origins of the shaft: it begins with Ham, the first slave, the serving shaft, is followed by arching Japheth, and ends with “Shem the spiritualisation of both” (9:34). Quarrying, seeking origins, Ruskin arrives, where the “lava stream of the Arab” (9:40) disgorges. The towers Ruskin commends are those “which are to be watched from or cried from, as in a mosque” (9:74); the moldings found in Venice are “an architecture traceable to Arabian types, and chiefly to the early mosques of Cairo” (9:97). Capitals in St. Mark’s Basilica are rooted in “Byzantine Arab capitals” (9:139) and are “the most beautiful capitals in the world” (9:140). “The most beautiful base I ever saw, on the whole, is a Byzantine one in the Baptistery of St. Mark’s” (9:343). Retrospectively, Ruskin worries the enthusiasm for the East found in Stones from the start, for the pre- Christian and non- Christian origins brought together at the center of the world. At the close of the chapter on “Material of Ornament,” for example, he decries the inconsistency and evanescence of the beauty that Arabian architecture lends Venice. Gorgeous sentences belie the caution he expresses about the Arab command of construction, color, and proportion: The imitation of radiance by the variegated voussoir, the expression of the sweep of the desert by the barred red lines upon the wall, the starred inshedding of light through his vaulted roof, and all the endless fantasy of abstract line, were still in the power of his ardent and fantastic spirit. Much he achieved; and yet, in the effort of his overtaxed invention, restrained from its proper food, he made his architecture a glittering vacillation of undisciplined enchantment, and left the lustre of its edifices to wither like a startling dream, whose beauty we may indeed feel, and whose instruction we may receive, but must smile at its inconsistency, and mourn over its evanescence. (9:282)

Ruskin may try to summon up the voice of the prophet, but the enchantment is too strong, condemnation turns to a smile, and what is to be regretted is that it didn’t last and yet somehow did—in Venice—where, again, it didn’t last— except in Ruskin’s prose. What is Ruskin describing if not Venice as if it were the fulfillment of Arabic architecture? What world is he seeing when he looks at the various wedges that form arches and sees a light that might sweep from the desert to the stars, a geography that is then internalized in the imaginary buildings being imagined? The smile that

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this occasions is as much a glance at his own words as a reading of what the stones of Venice themselves tell. It is a history that moves in two directions at once. East and West meet. The “veined or variously coloured marble” (10:170) that sheathes St. Mark’s or the “circular disks of green serpentine and porphyry” on Byzantine palaces in Venice reflect the “Eastern mind” behind them. Ruskin makes this connection by pointing again to Tyre as source at this later point in his text. This time he cites Ezekiel 28:11 for a description of the “beauty perfect” of its walls. A page later, Ruskin’s closing peroration of Byzantine palaces as the “first and fairest” in Venice now claims that the “Eastern mind” revealed in these stones is at the same time “the mind of early Christianity” (10:171). The “Eastern mind” is also located in the Old Testament, but also earlier, in beliefs that are pre-Christian, Arab, and yet Christian, a historical confluence like that of Hagia Sophia, once a church, then a mosque, or of San Marco: according to Dale, the basilica was designed to allow worshippers to retrace a path across the Holy Land, indifferent to Christian/Islamic difference. Ruskin may seek to locate his history inside a Christian narrative of arrival and origin, but it opens on aesthetic claims that lead to the bricolage that Hills sees through Ruskin’s eyes. For Ruskin, too, Venetian color names this place of meeting. The “seriousness of the early Venetian mind,” he concludes, is found in “that love of bright and pure colour” (10:172). The chain of thought from Eastern mind to Christian mind arrives at color to connect the two. “Of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest” (10:173), Ruskin writes, knowing he is offending evangelical sensibilities in making the Eastern gift of color central to Christian belief. Late in his career, in St.  Mark’s Rest (1884), demurring from the evangelical attitudes he had expressed in Stones, and refusing any sectarian Christian point of view, Ruskin declared, “I am a mere wandering Arab” (24:277). That late avowal might be understood as an affirmation of the writing position throughout Stones of Venice, however much Ruskin attempts to shape that project in a more orthodox way. God may be supposed the ultimate origin of color, but Ruskin affirms the vital “connexion of pure colour with profound and noble thought” (10:174). Another version of the history he told in the first volume unfurls in this passage from volume 2, this time by way of “Shem, or Splendour” (10:174). In Genesis, Shem is the son of Noah from whom the Israelite patriarchs descend, but Ruskin’s paragraph ends with the “Asiatic races” (10:175) that descend from Shem, the Eastern splendor of Medes and

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Persians that extends to the West; this is the source of the “peculiar seriousness” of “the Oriental mind” (10:176) that was conferred upon the West when Venice “first rose a vestal from the sea” (10:177); she “rose . . . like the Iris, painted upon the Cloud” (10:179). The rainbow of the deluge figures the Eastern origin of Venice. Hence it follows that the Venetians “thoroughly sympathized with Arabs” in “their intense love of colour”; it led them “to that perfection of the colour-instinct in them” (10:110). What is in them Ruskin registers in the city built from ruins, encrusted, its “pillars of variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles, that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, ‘their bluest veins to kiss’” (10:83). Ruskin insists that one must have the ability to value color: it is “the very first requisite for true judgment of St. Mark’s” (10:97). For Ruskin as for Hills, Venice is Venetian colorito. No Bellini or Giorgione, no Titian, Veronese, or Tintoretto without the stones of Venice, its encrusted palaces and churches clothed in a film of porphyry and gold. This end point points to a beginning located variously, in the East, in God, in the mind, in buildings and landscapes, and in the eye that beholds and the words that convey what is seen or thought. Ruskin summons up “the sacred element of colour” in the concluding volume of Stones (11:107). “Sacred element” is something of an oxymoron insofar as “element” names a physical principle, a basic substance, while “sacred” points to a more “occult” unity. By means of this double locution, he offers the thesis that Hills translates in similar terms as “that mighty spirit of Venetian colour, which was to be consummated in Titian” (10:64). Consummatum est. This “spirit” comes to take the place of a divine, providential story. It works like the story of Marks (a saint and the marks that mark), an “occult” relation that refuses ordinary chronology and distinctions. As crucial for Ruskin as for Hills is color’s ability to create a world, the point Hills made prefacing Venetian Colour. Ruskin makes it in the conclusion to the final volume of Stones when he draws the distinction between inferior and superior deployment of color in painting, contrasting the difference between painters who use “colour for the sake of realization” (color as representational of something supposed to preexist depiction) and those who “realize for the sake of colour” (11:218; Ruskin’s italics). “Good colouring does not necessarily convey the image of anything but itself” (10:216). That “itself” is an aesthetic realization that is also the matter that art conveys. In Venetian Colour (24), Hills quotes Ruskin to this point, a passage from an appendix to the second volume of Stones on the shafts of St. Mark’s: “I do not know anything whatsoever in the whole compass of

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the European architecture I have seen, which can for a moment be compared with the quaint shade and delicate colour, like that of Rembrandt and Paul Veronese united, which the sun brings out as his rays move from porch to porch along the St. Mark’s facade” (10:449). Ruskin declares incomparable something he sees in the architecture of the basilica that in fact provokes a comparison to Veronese and Rembrandt, itself an impossible combination of artists. This is how Ruskin summons up the artistic effect of the sun’s rays on the encrusted facade of San Marco, a place where the spirit of color seems to reside in an effect made by nature that is anything but simply that, depending as it does on the assemblage of the building and the city itself: “A city of marble, did I say? Nay, rather a golden city, paved with emeralds. . . . A wonderful piece of world. Rather, itself a world” (11:244). Ruskin’s rephrasings here could suggest an aestheticism that turns away from the world, but it seems to me that these two sentences can also be read to maintain a double position, one in which Venice, and Venetian art, being itself a world, does not preclude its being part of the world. Indeed, these relations are writ large in Stones of Venice when its apparent empirical aims—as Scappettone repeatedly observes—to delineate the elements of building, to instantiate them in Venetian Byzantine and Gothic examples— come up against all the ways such straightforward narration is impossible. The very naming of parts and their relations in the first volume is neither a history of architecture nor an actual survey of existing solutions to architectural problems; when Ruskin actually gets to Venice in the second volume, scarcely a building can be offered to exemplify his ideal types. Time has not let them stand still. Thus, when Ruskin opens the chapter on “The Nature of Gothic,” he begins by declaring that it has no singular nature; no Gothic building looks identical to another (Ruskin complains that Renaissance architecture is precisely the opposite case; it is building by prescription). Being itself a world, in short, is a principle about buildings but also about every thing in the world.11 This does not keep Ruskin from seeking connections— color is one central element that makes them. To the point about the worlding capacity of art is something that Ruskin mentions in the preface to the first edition of Stones—that his attempts to provide accurate data were frustrated by all the other projects he was engaged with at the same time as he was climbing over the stones of Venice: “I have not . . . written carelessly; nor should I in any wise have expressed doubt of the security of the following argument, but that it is physically impossible for me, being engaged quite as much with mountains, and

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clouds, and trees, and criticism of painting, as with architecture, to verify, as I should desire, the expression of every sentence bearing upon empirical and technical matters” (9:7). At the very least, this sentence locates the writing of Stones in a context that extends into the world, just as the book he had written immediately before, Seven Lamps of Architecture, treats architecture as a guide to social and political relations, indeed to larger questions about the nature of existence. These connections, especially those between mountains and the stones of Venice, are matters to which I will be turning to clinch the central concerns of this chapter. To conclude this initial consideration of the relationship of painting to writing—how both (differentially) enable the kind of thinking that color makes possible; how both (differentially) are worlding projects, I turn now to an essay of T. J. Clark’s on Veronese that asks how the artwork can be part of and apart from the world. Clark, like Hills, finds inspiration in Ruskin, indeed by way of Ruskin’s own pronouncements about the relationship between writing and painting. His 2014 essay, “Veronese’s ‘Allegories of Love,’ ” on four paintings that are part of the permanent collection of London’s National Gallery, opens with an epigraph from Ruskin’s diary that provides Clark with the main line of his inquiry.12 Ruskin made this entry on Sept. 8, 1849, after he had visited the Louvre and seen Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana.13 The painting brought home to him “the entire superiority of Painting to Literature as a test, expression and record of human intellect.” Clark endorses the sentiment. Clark’s essay seeks to describe how painting thinks without words; however, the assertion of the superiority of painting to literature in this respect is immediately complicated by something that Clark notices when he begins his essay with a discussion of the first of the Veronese allegories of love, the one he calls Infidelity (plate 17): there is a scrap of writing in the hand of the female figure with her back to us. Through this, the painting contemplates and thematizes a relation to literature that is likely not the absolute statement that Ruskin’s “entire superiority” intimates. The words on the paper are almost indecipherable; from the ones that are legible, Clark reads them as “Petrarchan boilerplate” (7). Perhaps; nonetheless, this bit of writing signals Veronese’s participation in a debate about the relationship between the arts, the familiar paragone; it extends in the paintings to include not only this bit of writing but also the inclusion of architecture and statuary in the others as well as a putto in this painting playing music on a keyboard. The paintings stage a debate about art’s relation to nature and address the question of the relation between the world made in art and the world at large. Do paintings reflect a world or create

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one?14 The presence of trees and sky and clouds and stones in these four paintings (the fields of Ruskin’s investigations) further provoke these questions. Undoubtedly Veronese means painting to win the debate: it includes all the other arts in its pictorial space; nonetheless, once this inclusiveness invites comparisons, possibilities of relationality arise. Words can never simply translate images or provide exact equivalences for the thought that paintings convey. Ruskin and Clark, following his lead, declare—in words—the superiority of thinking in painting to the limits of writing. Indeed, Clark has sometimes been moved to literary production as his response to painting as a way to overcome the limits of prose; there are several poems in The Sight of Death, his book on the intense experience of looking at Poussin. A recent poem on a Giotto fresco for the Cappella Scrovegni, “A Lesson from Giotto,” includes a quotation from Ruskin as well as some lines in translation from Dante’s Paradiso. These lines echo Ruskin’s thesis and Clark’s as well: “our speech, / Not to say our imagination, has no colors / To match folds like these.”15 They declare in words that there are no words for the painter’s colors. A failure to “match” is not an absolute failure, however. There is a connection, and not merely a verbal one, between images and imagination after all. It is not possible to maintain the strict difference between language and image when one tries to convey the thought of painting. This can be seen in Clark’s essay when, “remembering Ruskin” and “stick[ing] to [his] guns” about the incomparable advantage of painting against literature, Clark commends Veronese for his “Shakespearean ability to use the sensuous and structural qualities of his medium” (“Veronese’s ‘Allegories,’” 7). Literary comparison seems inescapable. Indeed, when Clark arrives at his central claims about the ability of shadows in Veronese to convey bodily weight and, through it, something beyond it (these shadows are like those Ruskin commended when writing about the effect of the facade of San Marco pulsing with life), he cites Donne’s “A Lecture upon the Shadow,” a piece of writing that would not exist without Petrarchan boilerplate, to further his analy sis. Words will never be equivalent to colors; however, as Clark argues, non-equivalence is central to the thought of painting. Shadows serve to convey the particularity of bodies in Veronese’s paintings, their weight and solidity; at the same time, they remain strokes of paint on canvas. ( There is nothing simple about holding these two facts together.) Shadows effectively create the sense that these bodies are like ones we know, yet they are nothing but paint. The relationship is a material one.

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In his attention to bodies and the bodily inhabitation crucial to Veronese’s allegories, Clark pursues a point congruent with Jean-Paul Sartre’s argument about Tintoretto’s Miracle of the Slave— that it records a miracle that coincides with the unmiraculous natural force of gravity (not that scientific knowledge has exhausted an explanation of that phenomenon). Describing the sensuousness of Veronese’s art as “grave,” Clark explains his word choice: “Grave meaning subject to the force of gravity” (“Veronese’s ‘Allegories’” 8).16 Bodies are load-bearing, yet scarcely any figures in these four paintings by Veronese stand erect. That fact impinges crucially for Clark on the strange disorientation that conditions our viewing position for these paintings. No one knows where this set of allegorical paintings was hung originally although it is usually supposed that they were ceiling paintings (if so, how they were arranged remains in question).17 Clark is taken with their view from below but doesn’t believe they were meant for a ceiling but, rather, to be placed high on the walls of a room. The images glimpse a world that seems continuous with ours, not located so far away as to make us crane our necks; we can identify with the figures on view, yet we are far enough away to see that these are not our bodies and that the logic of the space they inhabit is not the logic of our world. These paintings do not conform to the Albertian prescriptions that Renaissance paintings pretend to open a window on a world that extends from the world we inhabit. They are meant, rather, to jolt us from an ordinary sense of the world to glimpse something more fundamental that reorganizes space and time in something of the way that Ruskin’s Venetian stones refuse certain historical and geographical categories to establish the lava flow of connection. Veronese’s paintings seem to share with and yet depart from the logics of the real world as we think we know it, suspending the oppositions and dualisms that usually structure thought and language. These paintings as paintings—in the thinking they do, through the space and solidity they create through colorito and shadow—move thought where the “familiar and tangible” has been “transfigured,” Clark writes (“Veronese’s ‘Allegories,’ ” 11). “Only a painter who had made it his life’s work to set up worlds that would register as fully and naturally equivalent to ours—worlds of mass and proximity— could have put things at a distance in just this way,” he continues; painting thinks its way through the seeming familiarity of bodies in space to a transformative vision that lets us see the world differently. Clark fetches a key to this transformation by drawing on yet another passage from Ruskin: it and the diary epigraph first cited are the touch-

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stones to which Clark returns continually in his analysis (Ruskin’s words remain inextricable from Clark’s argument about the thought that painting conveys). In this passage, too, Veronese is Ruskin’s subject, this time a painting of Solomon and Sheba he saw in Turin in 1858. As Tim Hilton recounts in the first volume of his biography of Ruskin, this climactic moment of viewing constituted a major turning point for Ruskin—it led him to reject the evangelical religion of his parents. Clark quotes from Ruskin’s letter to his father on the “stout, self-commanding, magnificent Animality” in Veronese’s painting. Hilton quotes further to contextualize the claim: Veronese’s “Animality” surpasses the message Ruskin had just heard in a sermon; he commends “mighty Paul Veronese, in whose soul there is a strength as of the snowy mountains, and within whose brain all the pomp and majesty of humanity floats in a marshaled glory, capacious and serene like clouds at sunset.”18 In his comment on this passage, Clark substitutes “humanity” for Ruskin’s “Animality,” a substitution actually found in the portion of the letter that Hilton cites. Strikingly, that humanity is a strength like that of mountains and clouds.19 These are favored terms for comparison in Ruskin as we have seen and will be seeing further. The soul of mountains is not just a metaphor for a “humanity” that extends beyond human bounds; indeed “Animality”—once we hear the “anima” in “animal”—works the same way to suggest a force of animation, a life beyond and yet within the human. That is perhaps what we feel as we contemplate Veronese’s “Animality” in his allegories of love and desire. The bottom-up viewing vantage point in these four paintings sets them within a ledge of stone at the lower edge of each painting; it usually is answered by sky above. The human is placed within a framework of elemental transformations that mark the continuum of life between the extremes of solidity and air. The singular and dif ferent forms that fill the canvases (bodies, trees, architecture) are all modeled from color and shadow, connected by way of formal patterning and color that does more than solidify objects. Clark notes how “the head of the knight in gold in Respect [plate 18] is rhymed with that of the poet in pink in Infidelity: yet there is just as good a comparison, in terms of uninterrupted silhouetting of head against sky, between the knight in gold and the femme fatale in Infidelity. But surely she calls out to her opposite at the centre in Happy Union [plate 19]— clothed to naked, embedded to isolated, sacred to profane” (“Veronese’s ‘Allegories,’ ” 9). As Clark goes on to say, binarisms become equivocal in these cross-identifications, “opposites lead on almost immediately to crossings, half-rhymes, borrowing of traits. Equivocation— balancing between possibilities— seems to be the key to his ethics.” Clark describes painterly

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relations as forms of rhyme; he imagines one figure in a painting to be a poet, calls another a femme fatale; literary comparison provides his vocabulary even as he captures the thinking of painting; the connections that color makes can perhaps also be made by rhyme or by literary typologies. “The knight in gold” does not singularize the figure. His mantle of green leaves echoes Happy Union, where the male figure wears that green, while his mantle is gold. Grass grows from stone, and as Clark notes, we can’t quite tell when plant life becomes damask. Nor can we easily distinguish skin tone from the marble support beneath or the gray sky above, itself capable of shadowed echoing in the vaults in architecture that frames or is framed by sky. This language of connection pushes on the language of distinction. Neither words nor images are confined to indexicality. This pressure on language extends to what to call these paintings. Clark refers to them in English translations of their usual names (titles provided in the eighteenth century, not by Veronese) except in the case of Disinganno, which he finds difficult to translate—Xavier Solomon calls it Scorn (plate 20). And no wonder, the various meanings of disinganno— disillusionment, disabuse, undeceiving—are akin to the untranslatable meaning of the thought these paintings convey, the illusion of proximity, of distance maintained yet overcome; something inheres in these images that connects us to and disconnects us from them. The world in these paintings, Clark remarks, is one in which neither gods nor humans are exactly “at home.” “Not even heroes are wholly at home. . . . Not even gods perched high on stone” (“Veronese’s ‘Allegories,’ ” 11). Stone is the “grounding” from which we look up; the bottom edge of each painting sometimes replicates the marble of architecture, sometimes is more proximate to the earth. From stone, we move to bodies, themselves often marbled with veins and blushes, white tinged in various hues. If we begin, following Clark, with the “femme fatale” of Infidelity seen from behind, a slight line in her buttocks draws our eye; Cupid’s buttocks match hers and invite comparison. In Disinganno, a whipped and all but nude heroic male falls toward us over the architectural ledge that divides his world from ours (he casts a shadow on it); two women arm in arm (a couple?) see him plunging. The knight in gold is pulled away from a nude sleeping woman by his male companion (another same-sex pair); she is placed in an architectural setting in which the ledge below stabilizes what other wise appears to be a structure ready to fall on the viewers, or to fall away behind the image. This knight is a figure with whom Clark identifies (perhaps overidentifies); he teeters on the edge of heterosexual desire and its restraint.20 As Clark almost says, sexual desire in these paintings refuses to

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stabilize along the conventional terms of gendered difference (it would be a mistake to suppose that desire is any more stable in Petrarchan poems); the pairing of women in Disinganno, of men in Respect, suggests other possibilities, while the Cupids in each painting, like the figures of love in poems by Petrarch or Sir Philip Sidney, represent a desire shared by all, but variously. Veronese’s Cupids echo human figures and distinguish themselves from them. They are forces of desire that do not seem bound to gender difference as the basis of desire, nor do they suggest that desire simply is a human property. Crucial to any view from below, whether we are talking about the “animality” of human bodies or the life that might be found in stone, are the connections across the divide between our world and the world in painting. Hills notes how Veronese “learned to increase brilliance and variety of colour by extensive deployment of intervening greys” (Venetian Colour, 38); his remark captures something crucial in the four allegories, where grays are floor and ceiling, stone and sky, architecture and body. Veronese learned this way of coloring, Hills suggests, from the marbles that clothe the walls and floors of San Marco. “Marble reveals its own narratives of veiling and unveiling . . . a visual enactment of the very process of igneous formation” (41). This connection between worlds—igneous formation is related to Ruskin’s lava stream—is instanced, Hills continues, in the discovery (ritrovamento) of the corpse of St. Mark: “When the Venetians forgot the hiding place of their most sacred relic, the body of Saint Mark, it miraculously reappeared from behind the marble veining of the column in which it lay concealed” (41). Hills’s account tallies with Ruskin’s marble heaving with life, its veins a veining that might be our own; or with Veronese’s allegories of desire where tree branches and human limbs echo and rhyme visually, as do stone and sky, thereby grasping a totality. Clark calls it “a whole vision of the human” (“Veronese’s ‘Allegories,’ ” 11), but what makes it “whole” exceeds the human that it includes. Clark’s essay is supported—perhaps was inspired by— a few sentences of Ruskin’s on the relation of words to painting and on the possibility that painting, through its animation, takes us somewhere that is not identical to yet not unrelated to the world we think we inhabit. This argument resonates with themes explored by Ruskin at length. It almost would be possible to retrace the arc of Clark’s analysis with a point-by-point comparison to Ruskin’s thinking about writing, its relationship to painting, and to move from those questions to the relationship of art to nature. That trajectory guides me in the pages ahead. In the rest of this chapter I further explore

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the more than metaphoric relationship between the “stones” of Venice and actual stones, inquiring thereby into the life that joins human veins to marble veining. This is Ruskin’s way to that “whole vision of the human” that Clark finds in Veronese, a wholeness, I want to insist, that exceeds the categorical distinction between the human and the nonhuman. Such wholeness, therefore, cannot be exclusively human property. If painting intimates these connections more immediately than words do, this may have more to do with the difficulty of registering the visual verbally than with any inherent limit within language, or it may just as soon have to do with the privilege that the visual has in much writing about thinking and theorizing. In the cases at hand, it has a great deal to do with the writing experiment of The Sight of Death, in which Clark records the experience of repeated looking over time, in dif ferent conditions of light, and with a lifetime of experience in mind. Such a project resonates with Ruskin. The thirty-nine massive volumes in the Library Edition of Ruskin’s writing that appeared under the editorship of E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn between 1903 and 1912 might seem to stand as an argument against Ruskin’s elevation of painting above literature. Nonetheless, the monumental volumes testify continually to their provisionality. However often Ruskin issues absolute and dogmatic utterances, all this writing suggests the difficulty of finding words for what is seen or thought. Ruskin continually revises. The Library Edition adds glosses that extend published texts to notebooks, diaries, letters, and the like. Ruskin’s own footnotes often rescind opinions he lets stand in the text. This continuous activity testifies to the inadequacy of writing as readily as to belief in the medium. All this writing was not the only way Ruskin responded to the visual—to art and to the world before his eyes; almost from childhood on, Ruskin drew daily.21 Often that activity was meant to serve as an aide-memoire for subjects on which he was writing; Ruskin usually claimed little more for his drawing. As Christopher Newall observes in an essay on Ruskin’s drawing that introduces a volume that reproduces a number of them, scarcely any of the drawings aspire to the status of finished works of art. Focus in many is sporadic: each element is not equally realized. Various media are used at various points.22 Blank edges are a common feature. These features of his mammoth output of drawings are comparable with Ruskin’s writing practice. As Newall persuasively argues, the drawings register Ruskin’s sense of the “relentless flux” of the physical world, the “unique and unrepeatable conjunction” of any cloud formation, for example (21). So doing, Ruskin’s drawing and writing practices can be drawn into the

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conversations of art and literary theorists. Comparisons of the arts have had to do precisely with the question of the adequacy of each as a representation of nature; however much Ruskin singles out painting for an ability to think that words cannot capture, his writing on the visual arts—painting, architecture, and sculpture—and his drawing are comparable in large measure because “capturing” nature is not all that they achieve. “Take Nature at her word,” Ruskin writes in the final volume of Stones of Venice (11:38); the phrase immediately imagines nature itself as a form of writing. Marbling is described a sentence later as if it were an effect of a painter’s palette. This connection of stone and paint, made by color, is immediately recast when Ruskin writes that in its veining, marbles “write various legends, never untrue, of the former political state of the mountain kingdom to which they belonged” (11:38). The connection from color to writing continues in that amazing predication: in it legends also can be truths and the natural developments of mountains are at the same time a story about politics and the state. These late remarks in Stones echo against the first chapter of its first volume when Ruskin invites his reader to enter Venice in order to “behold in the brightness of their accumulated marble, pages on which the sentences of her luxury were to be written” (9:59). In the next volume, San Marco is hailed as a “Book-Temple,” a “glorious Bible” (10:141); in order to explicate the sculptures on each of the columns and capitals of the Palazzo Ducale, Ruskin has continuous recourse to Dante and Edmund Spenser. Volume 3, in fact, includes an appendix on Spenser, using the Renaissance author to gloss the much earlier architecture; this anachronistic history-making tallies with Ruskin’s refusal to absolutize the difference between the sister arts. Ruskin wrote and drew. His drawings, whether of the natural world or of architecture, intimate connections between mountain stones and the buildings made from them as various testaments to a truth about nature. In drawing these connections, Ruskin is intent upon the paradox explored by Clark—how the nonequivalence of word and image nonetheless can intimate an equivalence. Clark expresses this when he argues that Veronese’s lifelong effort “to set up worlds that would register as fully and naturally equivalent to ours” (“Veronese’s ‘Allegories,’ ” 11) leads us beyond that equivalence to the world offered in painting. Ruskin writes in an equally dense and paradoxical way about the relationship of “the thing itself” (as he refers to one of the lily capitals of San Marco) to any attempt to capture it in words or in a drawing: “No amount of illustration or eulogium would be enough to make the reader understand the perfect beauty of the thing itself, as the sun steals from interstice to interstice of its

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marble veil, and touches with the white lustre of its rays at midday the pointed leaves of its thirsty lilies” (Stones, 10:165). Neither drawing nor writing can capture “the thing itself” because these lily capitals are not an “itself” but a relationality. The stones that Ruskin quarries and wishes to unveil are not simply there to be seen, nor is his point that present ruination belies an irrecoverable past. These stones are not texts with an immediately decipherable story to tell. Crucially, “the thing itself” is not simply itself because it depends upon the conditions of light that grant it visibility (similar conditions apply to painting). In this sentence about “the thing itself,” the “perfect” spot of aesthetic experience is an interstice, an in-between. As Scappettone emphasizes, this interstice is temporal as well as spatial. The sun that grants visibility also casts a veil of light on the capitals, lending sheen to the marble that sheathes (encrusts) the Byzantine building. This showing of the veil makes marble lustrous, as if its color were awakening in morning light. In this visual touch, a relationship (but not an identity) between the eye of the beholder and the sun’s cosmic eye is intimated. This relationship is organic and alive: the marble flowers are said to be thirsty, drinking up the light. These thirsty flowers reverse what happens when morning light evaporates the dew on petals; nonetheless, Ruskin claims that this (un)natural process is the natural that the artwork offers: after all, it takes place within the conditions of light that the sun provides. Ruskin’s image of the thirsty lilies drinking imagines a living cosmos perhaps akin to Milton’s (Ruskin was reading Paradise Lost at the same time he was writing Stones of Venice): “The sun that light imparts to all, receives / From all his alimental recompense / In humid exhalations,” Milton writes.23 The paradoxical, nondualistic points about the interstitial sets of relationship in this passage include a disavowal of the power of word or drawing to capture the being of the work of art that nonetheless is offered in writing whose literary quality is evidenced by metaphor and literary allusion; the ipseity of the thing is attached to conditions of atmosphere and light and to the position of the viewer; it is intrinsic to the artwork to be both part of and apart from nature; in itself, the object viewed is also veiled. What we see as the thing itself is the endless relationality of the conditions of its being: “this lily, of the delicate Venetian marble, has been wrought, by highest human art, into the same line which the clouds disclose, when they break upon the rough rocks of the flank of the Matterhorn” (Stones, 9:387).

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To use a phrase of Sir Philip Sidney, pondering the relationship of art and nature in his Defence of Poetry, art delivers “another nature,” which nonetheless, Sidney avers, is nature.24 “The eye is continually influenced by what it cannot detect” (Stones, 10:154), Ruskin writes just a few pages before the sentence we have been pondering. The artwork allows us to see what the eye cannot see. Such relations between art and nature are explicitly addressed at various moments in Stones. At the end of volume 1, Ruskin quotes a paraphrase of what are said to have been Raphael’s thoughts on the topic: that the artist does not make things as Nature made them but as she would make them (9:407), a sentiment that Sidney also offers in his Defence. (It is worth noting that when Sidney extends his definition of poetry beyond its mimetic abilities, he describes it metaphorically as a “speaking picture” [25].) Ruskin insists that the artist cannot better Nature (“I should have liked to have seen him mend a daisy!” [9:407]), but readily admits that art does not imitate it either. For one thing, the regularity of art does not correspond to the “mark of Nature” (9:409), its inexhaustible multiplicity and variety. Art makes nature comprehensible, offering us a way of seeing what we would not other wise see (9:411; buildings with lily capitals give city dwellers an access to nature they would not have other wise). Yet what art allows us to see is not a reduction of nature to some idealized regularity, but an invitation to “continual astonishment”: “This is the necessary condition of a finite creature with divinely rooted and divinely directed intelligence; this, therefore, its happy state,—but observe, a state, not of triumph or joy in what it knows, but of joy rather in the continual discovery, of new ignorance, continual self-abasement, continual astonishment” (11:65). Ruskin may appear to be de-intellectualizing nature as if it were some heap of things, matter too self-different to be comprehensible on its own, and to be relying solely on human comprehension, within its limits, to reveal its truth. He also could seem to be idealizing the work of art, abstracting it from natural phenomena. That is not all he is saying, however. The buildings that Ruskin loves best in Venice—Byzantine and Gothic— over which he pores, and which he assiduously measures, always reveal that their effects of proportion are never the result of the kind of absolute symmetry and formalization he deplores in Renaissance art and architecture; they are not the result of the patterning that the human mind imposes on things. The capitals he adores have different carvings on each of their faces, “no two sides alike,” he italicizes (10:160). “The spirit of triangle must be put into the hawthorn” (9:306), he writes about architectural ornamentation, but goes on to say in the next sentence, “It must suck in isoscelesism with

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Figure 4. John Ruskin, “Abstract Lines,” in Stones of Venice, vol. 1, plate 7.

its sap.” What is this “sap”? The life-giving moisture and food of the living flower? The formal principle that the artist supplies or something he reveals? In Ruskin’s stunning drawing of “Abstract Lines” (fig. 4, from Stones, plate 7, following 9:268), ridges of mountains provide the template for waves of water as well as for architectural details. Abstract lines, abstracted from nature, do not lead to art that simply imitates the appearance of nature—who looks at leaves or flowers and sees waves or mountains? “The line or curve of the edge of a leaf may be accurately given to the edge of a stone, without rendering the stone in the least like a leaf, or suggestive of a leaf; and this more fully, because the lines of nature are alike in all her works” (9:267). Ruskin posits likeness as the basis for difference. Stones are not leaves, and we will never be fooled to think other wise. Divine creation is one way that Ruskin can reconcile what is other wise a violation of categorical difference. God made stones as stones and leaves as leaves, but presumably God also made the connection that the artist or theorist sees and makes apparent. Clark’s Ruskinian encounter with Veronese entertains this theologism to insist that the formal and material connections in the paintings do not need it. In Stones, too, despite its avowed Christian belief, God seems mostly there as a way to think about creation and creativity. Ultimately, Ruskin affirms that the artwork reveals human “thoughts and affectations” (9:64). They extend from a relation to the created world to the world that humans make. Indeed, this belief underlies Ruskin’s affirmations of artisans’ instinctive grasp of the connection

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between their artisanal labor and the world that they see as compared to artists who simply follow rules and strive for the perfection that supposedly follows from doing so. “Foliation” is one of Ruskin’s terms for the nature of Gothic, but what foliates is not simply the imitation of nature. The “naturalism” of Gothic is imitative insofar as some inherent law of nature is being reenacted. Ruskin’s lists and drawings attempt to state and show these laws; he finds instead multiples that never reduce to singularity. This exhausts his empirical project and demonstrates that underlying form and ideas cannot be abstracted from the matter that prompts them. This is the “occult” principle that explains how Gothic can inhere in Byzantine ornamentation that does not look like it. In another phrasing of that relationship, take Ruskin’s example of Torcello’s Byzantine marble flower that Ruskin calls the acanthus. Not that the marble flower actually looks like an acanthus, Ruskin admits; “it is not very like the acanthus” (Stones, 10:24), but its “feeling of nature” is greater than some more exact copy might be. Lacking the perspective that Renaissance art would come to demand, this carving does not achieve a likeness based in mathematical regularity, but reveals something even more “delightful”: “organization and elasticity to the lovely group of spiral lines” (10:24). The spiral conveys motion; viewing is always something that happens in the course of pausing as we move, coming upon something that is the way it is at the moment we see it. Momentary preservation is true to nature as a principle of continuous self-difference. This truth, Ruskin insists, is what Gothic artisans discovered. The naturalism central to Gothic never means copying nature. The artisan looks to nature “for material” (10:215), but the material seen must pass through thought for it to be realized by the worker. Materials change in the process, or become what they are, since the materials are seen as color and form. “Good colouring does not necessarily convey the image of anything but itself” (10:216). Form— abstract line—is another instance of the same point. Ruskin vehemently denies what most people looking at Gothic sculpture assume—that it derives from the imitation of vegetative life. “The reverse of this theory is the fact, because the Gothic did not arise out of, but developed itself into, a resemblance of vegetation” (10:237). Lily capitals can be called “lily capitals,” but not because they really look like lilies. The point is illustrated in Stones: drawings of real lilies and lily capitals appear beside each other on the same page to convey at once likeness and difference. Gothic artisans exercised the human capacity to see “beauty in natural forms” (10:238) and transfer it into stone. Ruskin’s terms for this relationship outstrip my bland paraphrase. What is seen in flowers, he

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writes, is “more perfectly transferred into those of stone” (10:238); the “mountainous strength” of Gothic (10:238) lies in its ability to more perfectly represent what nature is than what nature does. The greater perfection of stone plants compared to real plants is in the life conveyed by form and color. In part, Ruskin imagines stone flowers as living longer than frail flowers do (Horace or Shakespeare can be cited as precedents for this belief however much it may borrow from some religious notion of eternal life). But it also seems to be the case that when flowers become stone they become again what they were at first, regaining the source of their being. In the first volume of Modern Painters, Ruskin writes: Mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent muscular action is to the body of men. . . . This, then, is the first grand principle of the truth of the earth. The spirit of the hills is action, that of the lowlands repose; and between these there is to be found every variety of motion and rest, from the inactive plain, sleeping like the firmament, with cities for stars, to the fiery peaks, which, with heaving bosom and exulting limbs, with the clouds drifting like hair from their bright foreheads, lift up their Titan hands to heaven, saying, “I live for ever!” (3:427)

Stone flowers are what living ones strive to be, or what the worker’s mind perceives to be the reason for being. The search to articulate and realize impossible perfection opens the hiatus, the interstice, in which Ruskin writes and which he sees artworks create. When the foliated Gothic forms are cut out in windows, they look like leaves from without, stars from within.25 The empty space opens these connections (Stones, 10:259). Ruskin sums up what he thinks the artist achieves in a succinct and stunning paragraph in the third volume of Stones when he remarks that “the labour of the whole Geological Society, for the last fifty years, has but now arrived at the ascertainment of those truths respecting mountain form which Turner saw and expressed with a few strokes of a camel’s hair fifty years ago, when he was a boy”; he concludes the paragraph by alluding to Tintoretto’s similar accomplishment: “all the members of Surgeons’ Hall helping each other could not at this moment see, or represent, the natural movement of a human body in vigorous action, as a poor dyer’s son did two hundred years ago” (11:50). Mountains and muscles come together in these examples; both Turner and Tintoretto know bodily truths, including the connection between stones and flesh that Ruskin’s examples suggest. By means of the strokes of his brush Turner captures the essence of mountains; it is “vigorous action” that Tintoretto reveals. Both are intent

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upon capturing life. “No science of perspective, or of anything else, will enable us to draw the simplest natural line accurately, unless we see and feel it” (11:57). Turner and Tintoretto break the rules, and in so doing capture something that is not of their time: Turner is fifty years ahead of the scientists; they have yet to catch up with Tintoretto. “What we want art to do for us is to stay what is fleeting, and to enlighten what is incomprehensible, to incorporate the things that have no measure, and immortalize the things that have no duration” (11:62). This statement is not just an eternizing and idealizing project. Ruskin also is claiming that art arrests the momentary and the fleeting; by being so fully in touch with what we barely see, art allows us to see what we other wise miss and yet experience; we see beyond the moment, but to something nonetheless in the moment and momentary, something that makes the moment itself and also makes for our connection to it. The artist must “see and feel,” and both capacities exceed the ordinary impercipience with which we think we grasp (or, more to the point, fail to grasp) the world. Ruskin’s vision of the human extends beyond the human. Our capacity to see and know the world is part of being in the world. This is phrased as our “mountain brotherhood” (10:188). At this moment in Stones, it describes the relationship “between the cathedral and the Alp,” natural stones and their architectural repurposing by humans who see and feel the connection that flows from one to the other. Like Clark, Ruskin will claim this knowledge as a sign of “Humanity” (10:178) revealed in “the majesty of thoughtful form” (10:179). Humanity extends to “mountain brotherhood.” Ruskin’s notion of humanity is close to Clark’s, which we can see when Ruskin uses “humanity” to describe how the artist as a “great Naturalist” takes “human being in its wholeness” (10:226) to make “one majestic harmony” out of the haste, anger, sensuality, pride, fortitude, and faith of humans (Ruskin might be describing Veronese). The artist at once unveils the body “and beholds the mysteries of its form” (226) as if he were an angel looking down at these beings from some great height: by the end of this paragraph, however, the artist is just where Veronese places the viewer of his allegories, below, but not so far below as to be unable to make a connection beyond oneself to these giant forms. Ruskin’s “Naturalist” “claims kindred” with these figures (10:227), yet also is described as “standing, in a sort, afar off, unmoved even in the deepness of his sympathy; for the spirit within him is too thoughtful to be grieved, too brave to be appalled, and too pure to be polluted” (227). “Brotherhood” also is invoked, in ways that anticipate Hills, as the principle of “giving and receiving” (11:24) that neighboring colors lend each

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other in the works of the Venetian painters that Ruskin most admires— Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto. An “everlasting brotherhood” (11:221) connects the “dark stones” and “silent rock” of the buildings of the past, Egyptian and Byzantine, with “the Northern cloister” and the stones of Venice. The “lava flow” from East to West is a figure that derives from geological formation. Venice itself was made in such upheavals: “torrents” (10:9) when Alpine snow silted below to form the rocks that made the stones of Venice from the “slime” that eventually debouched in the Adriatic. This is an instance of what Scappettone describes as the Venetian “ongoing dialectic between stone and water” (Killing the Moonlight, 198): “Is Venice made of stone or sea . . . Ruskin will never quite decide” (62). The making of Venice from stone and sea is the activity early workers repeated: Let us watch him with reverence as he sets side by side the burning gems, and smooths with soft sculpture the jasper pillars, that are to reflect a ceaseless sunshine, and rise into a cloudless sky: but not with less reverence let us stand by him, when, with rough strength and hurried stroke, he smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea; creatures of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that shade them. (Stones, 10:187–88)

This passage about the earliest workers is not just about their activity. In the 1881 epilogue to Stones, this stream of what Hills so aptly termed “igneous formation” is attached to Tintoretto’s “Venetian mysticism . . . which runs down from Egypt through the Byzantines to Venice in one unbroken and ever clearer stream” and thereby makes connections to “clouds, and seas, and mountains,” and to Ruskin’s “love for the Alps” (11:236–37). At the close of volume 2 of Stones, the editors of the Library Edition gloss a passage about Tintoretto to which I will turn (Veronese also is mentioned in it) with a March 13, 1852, letter from Ruskin to his father about the accomplishment of Tintoretto: “Nothing in the world gives me so great an idea of human power. No writing—neither Homer’s, nor Dante’s, nor Shakespeare’s— seems to be education of so colossal an intellect. Their work is only thought; Tintoret’s is actual creation. . . . None of the changes or phenomena of Nature herself appears to me more marvellous than the

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production of one of his pictures” (10:439n1). Ruskin venerates God as creator of the world (“the whole world, and all that is therein, be it low or high, great or small, is a continual Gospel” [11:184]); God makes the world a book. The artist creates another nature that allows us to comprehend the world. In the astonishing close to volume 2 of Stones, Ruskin recollects himself on the Lido gazing across the lagoon to the Palazzo Ducale and seeing the Alps “crested with silver clouds” above it (10:439). His thought: that “God had done a greater work in breathing into the narrowness of dust the mighty spirits by whom the haughty walls had been raised, and its burning legends written, than in lifting the rocks of granite higher than the clouds of heaven, and veiling them with their various mantle of purple flower and shadowy pine” (10:439). Orthodox belief, the creation of humans as the apex of divine creation, jostles with heterodoxy, an embrace of human creation that exceeds its creator. Even though the human is nothing but lowly dust, and mountains are towering, humans are filled with a spirit that builds rivals to the mountains and writes legends in them that perhaps go beyond the gospel that is the world. The exceeding of boundaries between the creator and creation, the created world and what is created by humans, makes a connection: from rocks to building, from one set of stones to another, from dust to dust. This is the vital connection in Ruskin’s thought, but, as we have also seen, it is also a thought—the thought—that Veronese’s allegories convey in their stone borders and the connections made between rocks and buildings, clouds and flesh. “The beauty of colour and form has been given so lavishly throughout the whole of creation, so that it may become the food of all, and with such intricacy and subtlety that it may deeply employ the thoughts of all” (11:222–23).26 What are the stones of The Stones of Venice? Robert Nelson notes multiple, opposing possibilities: stones are at once materials quarried (San Marco is not a mountain) and the rubble and remains of a crumbling city returning to dust. Materials in a flux of coexisting relationships, they also are, as Ruskin insists in the first volume of Stones and recalls in the final one, “touch-stones” (9:57), stones that bear messages (sermons in stones?), messages materialized, words and things. What unites these various and different meanings is “the perception of life in all things” (11:11), a perception that refuses the distinction of animate and inanimate. Responding to complaints about volume 1, its prolix examination of the elements of architecture, Ruskin wrote to his father, “You know I promised them stones. Not even bread. I did not feel any Romance in Venice. It is simply a heap of ruins” (February  8, 1852, quoted in 9:xxxvi). Seeming to be making a

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distinction between the activity of the imagination and the facts of physical existence, Ruskin can’t help associating bread with stones: he can’t dissociate the supposedly absolutely dead stones with food (itself not usually eaten live) that sustains human life. Nor, in detailing the elements of architecture, can he make the distinction; just about the first thing he says when he starts building imaginary buildings in volume 1 of Stones is to declare about the wall base with which he begins that “A wall has no business to be dead” (9:79; allusions to the workers bringing in Wall in A Midsummer Night’s Dream follow immediately). His discussion of relations between architectural parts always involves anatomizing them, treating their relations as moments in a life story that is also a rather miraculous one. Somehow, buildings stand (Clark and Sartre are taken with the precariousness of human standing). Gothic spires seem to rise forever into the sky, as if conjured up. There is romance in stones, and bread too: “I should like to draw all St. Mark’s, and all this Verona stone by stone,” Ruskin wrote to his father on June 2, 1852 (10:xxvi), “to eat it all up into my mind, touch by touch.” Late in life, Ruskin claimed to regret his work on Venetian stones, wishing that the geological studies he pursued throughout his life had been the center of his work. “What sort of human, pre-eminently human, feeling it is that loves a stone for a stone’s sake, and a cloud for a cloud’s,” he asks, and answers himself: “I took stones for bread, but not certainly at the Dev il’s bidding.”27 Jeffrey Nealon, in Plant Theory, provides a philosophical inquiry into the limits of animal studies that, in making the human part of relations that are not human-centered, neglect connections to plants and plant life.28 Yet, along with Aristotle or Heidegger, he, too, draws the line at stones. Ruskin does not.29 Many of Ruskin’s writings on geology were gathered together in 1879 in a volume called Deucalion. Its subtitle speaks to the point: Collected Studies of the Lapse of Waves, and Life of Stones.30 The title points to Deucalion and Pyrrha, recognizable cognates of Noah and his wife, the classical story of the world recreated after the flood. One crucial difference between the biblical account and this one, as Ovid tells it, is that this couple is childless and presumably past child-bearing age.31 Where is futurity? The goddess enjoins Pyrrha to cast the bones of her mother behind her, and Pyrrha is appalled at what she hears in the command, the desecration involved in digging up the dead, baffled at treating bones as seed. Deucalion understands, however, that by mother, the goddess means mother earth, and that the bones she has in mind are stones. So the couple cast stones behind them. From the ones the woman casts, women are born; from the man,

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men (this scene could be compared to the aspect of Veronese’s allegories that Clark does not notice, when Cupid assumes the pose, indifferently, of male and female, while same-sex couples widen the cross-sex coupling that the allegories depict as they seek to unveil the principle of a desire not confined to human beings nor necessarily directed at heterosexual reproduction). The stones in Ovid arise out of the earth, softening as they do so; first they become statues, then they come to life. “That which was but now veins remained under the same name” (quae modo vena fuit, sub eodem nomine mansit” [Metamorphoses, 1.410]). The life in stones or in statues is said by the same word, vena; it is the same life: that stones and humans are veined testifies to that. In his Defence, Sidney imagines an ur-scene of creation in which the archetypal poet-ruler Amphion “was said to move stones with his poetry to build Thebes” while Orpheus moved his audience of “stony and beastly people” (19). Just as the Ovidian story recalls a familiar Old Testament narrative (itself, probably, a memory of geological history), Sidney’s acts of poetic creation from stone recall the Genesis stories of Creation, humans made from dust.32 Mutatis mutandis, this even could be the story of the re-creations of St. Mark, as Hills suggested: his body was (re)found encased in marble. For Ruskin, Mark is the weak evangelist (Stones, 10:69) who does not exalt human life beyond its limits as human; Ruskin wonders about the claim that Mark’s body rests in a sepulchre in San Marco: could “this pretended miracle” (10:75) possibly be true given how many times the church burned and had to be rebuilt?33 That re-creative process defines life for Ruskin, as these sentences from Seven Lamps of Architecture (which I assume are about San Marco) intimate: “I do not know any sensation more exquisite than the discovering of the evidence of this magnificent struggle into independent existence; the detection of the borrowed thoughts, nay, the finding of the actual blocks and stones carved by other hands and ages, wrought into the new walls, with a new expression and purpose given them, like blocks of unsubdued rocks . . . which we find in the heart of the lava current, great witnesses to the power which has fused all but these calcined fragments into the mass of the homogeneous fire.”34 This life in stones— substitutive and originative life— that is central to Ruskin’s thinking also is at the heart of Adrian Stokes’s thought. Their relationship is signaled by Stokes’s title, Stones of Rimini (1934); its opening sentence, “I write of stone,” echoes an identical sentence that appears only a few pages into Stokes’s previous book about Italian art of the Renaissance, The Quattro Cento (1932).35 Hills alludes only once to Stokes in a footnote

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in Venetian Colour but indicates thereby a larger debt: “My comments on architecture and the body, surface and depth, owe much to the writings of Adrian Stokes” (227n18). In the closing pages of this chapter, I want to consider Stokes beside Ruskin, how both, in writing about stone, suggest a way to write about the material connection between word and image.36 Hills’s footnote is attached to the comparison he draws between marble and the body prompted by his recollection of the aptness of the rediscovery of the body of St. Mark encased in a column in San Marco: “Like the human body, the veneers of marble unfolded on the walls demonstrate symmetry. The visual litany of answering patterns is a sign of the cleavage of two halves” (Venetian Colour, 41). Body and marble are the two halves of a whole. This connection is rephrased in a remarkable number of sometimes contradictory ways by Stokes, as he attempts to grasp a relationship between stone and body that may be primordial. If it is, it lies on the edge of what can be thought; that is the edge that artworks cultivate, to follow the line of thought advanced in their various ways—in writing, in painting, in building—by Hills and Clark and Ruskin. “Flesh-like glow” is a recurring phrase in Stones of Rimini to describe the relationship between the stones that Stokes loves and their reflection of light. These stones are the limestone and its derivatives that encrust Venice (Stokes picks up Ruskin’s adjective); their “roseate . . . radiance” (53) also characterizes the pink and white of the Palazzo Ducale or the relationship between brick and marble encasement of windows that open upon spaces that look like dark holes in the wall from without and radiate from within. In Stones of Rimini, Stokes extends these Venetian relations to the carving in the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini. Venice remains his “constant theme” (100) even if it not his immediate subject. Likewise in The Quattro Cento: although its focus is on Verona and Florence, a chapter on Venice toward its beginning (it follows his declaration that stone is his subject) serves as the ground for his arguments about stone as a particular aesthetic in a geographic locale. The pink blush of the marbles of San Marco or the Palazzo Ducale are enhanced by the reflective light that marble reflects, or by a Venetian sunset when stones echo “the pinky flesh of succulent fishes” (Quattro Cento, 13); this association, like Ruskin’s, of stone and food, is fed by the water origins of Venetian stone. In these two books, the stones of Venice ramify and extend. A decade later, Stokes wrote a book on Venice that traces a path from its stones to Giorgione’s Tempesta. Like Ruskin, like Hills, stones lead Stokes to painting. (Piero della Francesco is the artist favored in the earlier books for paintings that draw near to far. Stokes compares their surface flattening to the carving he

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admires in the Tempio.) Stokes moves from the particular glow of Venetian stone to the effects of colorito: “The undulating floor of St. Mark’s is water with all its colours eternally healed.” These effects of water, marble, and light, Stokes terms a couple of pages later “an identity in difference.”37 “Flesh-like” could seem to go no further than an analogy between the body and stone (most commentators on Stokes treat the connection as simply that), but in drawing together body and stone, near and far, surface and depth, these analogies venture a thinking that eschews sharp demarcation and dualistic opposition; this is precisely the place of thought in painting on which Ruskin insists and that Clark and Hills emphasize and describe as rhymes or metaphors. In his autobiographical Inside Out, perhaps as significant as the tale Stokes tells about a privileged English boy who discovers himself at home in Italy, in the Mediterranean light (“I had, in fact, incorporated this objective-seeming world and proved myself constructed by the general refulgence”), Stokes’s self-reflection concludes with a discussion of Cézanne.38 Subject becomes and finds its object and finds itself there. “The difference between art and life is one only of degree, if living is conceived as the multiform of expression” (69), Stokes writes close to the end of Inside Out (the book concludes by insisting that science be reconciled with this aesthetic viewpoint), while “To live is to substitute” is the penultimate sentence that closes the first chapter of the book on Venice: “Why this satisfaction, this value, in one thing expressed in terms of another? Because it characterizes all human process, all thought and action and emotion. To live is to substitute. Art is the symbol of human process” (Venice, 31). In The Quattro Cento, Stokes is entranced by “the limestone origin of marble” (11); in Stones of Rimini, the origin of that origin is traced: “Limestone is petrified organism” (42), stone made from the remains of animals and plants. Marble itself is metamorphosed limestone. So, when Agostino da Duccio carved columns inside the Tempio with “dolphins, sea-monsters, as well as the fruits of the earth and the children of men,” he imitated “the metamorphosed structure of marble” to an “extreme anthropomorphic interpretation of its original life” (42). Sometimes it seems that too is what Stokes does when he asserts, as he often does, that “unconscious fantasies” are found recorded in these carvings (41), fantasies that seem to belong to the artist (gendered male and specified further at times in disquieting racial or geographic terms as well).39 “Mediterranean fantasies” (20) seem especially to captivate Stokes (as he describes his own case in Inside Out). But just as often stones record and contain vitality that is multitemporal, a concretizing of life that seems to have no bounds. The carving method

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that Stokes prefers because it respects the material makes for these broad connections because it imitates the way stone itself is carved, by insects and plants and water; this is how stone comes to have the life it has. The sculptor who carves participates in that life; it goes beyond him; behaving like nature he makes another nature. Stokes objects to modeling, the reshaping of materials that treats them as entirely malleable in the hands of the artist; although he recognizes as inevitable that carved stone will bear the impress of the carver, he deplores modeling that has that as its sole aim. For, he affirms, “it is the stones, not the figure, that has come to life” (Stones of Rimini, 110) in the kind of carving he values. The sculptor may make stone look like something, but the success of carving is to reveal what was in the stone. “Come to life” nonetheless suggests that the carver realizes something in the stone that is not the stone: the revelation is made by the connection, the analogy; representational subject matter points beyond itself to connections lodged in the stone. The stone comes to the life it is or has. Its “original life” is embodied in limestone as the “medium between the organic and inorganic worlds” (43). The connection between life and death that stone carving or aesthetic objects offers is the end, too, of selffashioning if, as Stokes affirms, the aim of life is externalization, the becoming-other (becoming-object) of self that extends the boundaries of life in object relations. Contemplating the Chapel of the Planets at the end of Stones of Rimini, Stokes explores astrological thinking because it suggests how we might be made by Influence and Relation (Stokes capitalizes these terms). In his most telling analysis of sculpting as Agostino practiced it, Stokes notices the small gradations, the calm equalizations, that make the surfaces of stone the vehicle of depth brought to the surface; the life revealed is brought out of the stone in an activity that appears to be its own blossoming; what appears outside is inscribed in reflections that know no boundary, where distinctions inhere in minimal differentiations of a same—the stone. The Chapel of the Planets, like the Tempio in general, celebrates the love of Sigismondo Malatesta for Isotta degli Atti. She is represented as a flower, he as an elephant. This intensely gendered opposition is not the whole story, however: figured as both Diana and Venus, Stokes avers, she also appears as a bisexual Mercury (Stones of Rimini, 239). Their love is the love of stone and water; the figure that brings these together—Aquarius— also is Ganymede (245; Stokes raises and disputes the possibility that the figure also might represent Deucalion). The ideal couple, Sigismondo and Isotta, also are the Gemini, the twins (255; the enchained emblems of the first letters of their names spell SI, “yes” in Italian, IS in English). Their

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offspring are the stones that figure them or the putti who fly in these carvings to suggest forms of life and love like the Cupids in Veronese’s allegories of love that remake the world by letting us see connections there that we have not seen before. This power of seeing also has been hailed as the function of metaphor, at least from Aristotle on. These extended connections of relationality are insistently astral in the Chapel of the Planets. When Stokes reaches for the stars I am reminded of the argument that Leo Bersani makes in “Far Out,” the penultimate chapter of Thoughts and Things.40 Bersani draws on the work of Lawrence Krauss, a physicist who has claimed that our bodies are ultimately made of stardust—“every atom in your body was once inside a star that exploded,” Krauss affirms in a sentence that Bersani quotes (77). This is the basis for our “affinity with the nonhuman” (82), Bersani argues, for “the human contains the inorganic from which it has evolved” (83). Not just that, however; just as limestone origins in plant and animal waste is where Stokes begins his analysis, human creativity attests in Bersani to a “fundamental oneness” (83) instanced precisely by the exercise of metaphorical, virtual connection, a reaching out beyond limit toward a connectedness that reconciles without ever canceling individual difference and sameness. “To engage in this activity of positing uncertain alikeness is to expand the field of being,” Bersani writes (81). “Fluidity, influence, confluence, effluence. . . . liquid gradualness is laid out in stone,” Stokes writes (Stones of Rimini, 230–31). He makes a parallel point in his book on Venice about the juxtaposed figures of the nursing mother and the soldier in Giorgione’s Tempesta: “They do not belong to the landscape in the sense of shepherds, owners or husbandmen. They belong in the sense of human beings belonging to the world. That is not personal, but an almost universal, impression” (Venice, 52). If limestone is, as Stokes affirms, “the humanistic rock” (Stones of Rimini, 32) and marble “the prime instrument of Humanism” (158), “humanism” extends what human means, “a Whole made up of Ones each as single as the Whole,” as Stokes puts the relationship in The Quattro Cento (155). Stokes sounds here remarkably like T. J. Clark summarizing the accomplishment of Frank Auerbach’s paintings; in them, Clark writes, “unity and particularity” are achieved at once, “a totality laid hold of, for a moment, as a particular,” “connecting and analogising things.” 41

chapter 4

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The Mark who appears in the Venetian paintings examined in previous chapters has no relationship to the Mark whose name is attached to one of the gospels—no relation, that is, except that the Mark who was supposedly the first bishop of Alexandria, and whose body was stolen/returned to Venice to be its patron saint, was a Mark worth claiming precisely because of his supposed authorship of a gospel. Nonetheless, the writing of that gospel is not the subject in the paintings we have examined (mosaics in the Basilica of San Marco do show Mark writing); it is not among the many biographical episodes depicted. In an image of Mark writing by Tintoretto, one of a pair of paintings of the four evangelists in Santa Maria del Giglio, he is joined with St. John (plate 21) in a doubled scene of writing that bears on Mark’s equivocal status as an author. In this painting, the young John, in the background of the painting, is writing, but seems to be copying a printed text beside him on which his writing arm leans. (Perhaps this depiction is a way of acknowledging the belatedness of the gospel that goes under his name.) Mark, in the foreground of the painting, is seated in an uncomfortably twisted position. His writing hand is obscured in the shadow on the left side of the painting. Prominently 112

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illuminated is his bared leg, supported by a cloud that looks like a rock. This twisted, contorted figure might well have turned to write after scrutinizing the text that John also seems to be copying (John is not looking at it, but his bodily position would involve nothing more than a turn of his head to make the printed text easily visible). Is this painting proposing a harmony of the gospels by suggesting that their authorship lies elsewhere, in the book being copied rather than in the hands of the writers? Matthew and Luke, paired in the painting (plate 22) that pairs with the one of Mark and John, also are depicted as copyists—the one of them that is seen writing looks at his copytext while an angel supervises his activity. These scenes of copying echo with the case of Mark, as the various accounts of his writing gathered by Eusebius suggest: Mark wrote at the dictation of St. Peter.1 His ability to give access to an authoritative account of the life of Jesus is secondhand. In a 1625 painting by Palma Giovane, San Pietro invia San Marco a predicare il Vangelo ad Aquileia (St. Peter Dispatches St. Mark to Preach the Gospel in Aquileia [plate 23]), Mark carries a book that one might assume has Peter’s authorization. On the right side of this painting, someone is lecturing, while a figure seated before him, on the lower right edge of the painting, gazes on an open book. Is this reader a prompter, making sure that the lecturer follows the text? Is the scene of speaking on the right echoed by Peter’s dispatch of Mark on the left, sent to deliver a book that is not exactly his own, and doubly so? The relationship of the biographical Mark to the gospel called Mark is, in any case, a nonrelationship. As C. Clifton Black puts it succinctly in Mark: Image of an Apostolic Interpreter, “a profile of the Evangelist no more arises from the exegesis of Mark’s gospel than such exegesis ostensibly guided the fathers in their conclusions about the legendary figure behind the Second Gospel” (197). Or, as Black suggests, equally succinctly, in the introduction to his Abington New Testament commentary on Mark, what we cannot know about this book is its authorship or its provenance (the story of Mark writing at Peter’s dictation is set in Rome, but the gospel called Mark never gives us information about who is writing or where).2 In his book on images of Mark, Black speculates that his supposed relationship to Peter was a reason why the gospel came to be accepted as canonical at the same time that others were rejected, indeed, posing the reciprocal possibility too that Peter’s status as an apostle was fostered by the gospel called Mark: “one index of Mark’s value in consolidating an orthodox image of Peter may well have been that Gospel’s use by the authors of the First and Third Gospels” (Mark: Images, 209). The second gospel, in other words, may have influenced the first and third.

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This numerology is baffling only if the canonical order, to which Black refers, is taken also to be the chronological order in which the gospels were written, as was assumed when the canonical order was established. For most of its history, the gospel of Mark has been thought of not simply as second, but as secondary; it is “the least cited Gospel in the early Christian period,” as Garry Wills notes in What the Gospels Meant, going on to document this claim with some statistics, noting as well that the most-cited lines from Mark (favorites of Luther) are the ones now thought to be spurious late additions.3 For well over 1,500 years, Mark was the least valued gospel. As a prime instigator of this neglect, Wills cites St. Augustine’s judgment of Mark as “ ‘the drudge and condenser’ (pedisequus et breviator) of Matthew” (What the Gospels Meant, 11) to explain the gospel’s less than exalted status. Wills’s translation of this phrase from Harmony of the Gospels 1.2 is a good deal more forceful and negative than others; for example, in the introduction to a volume that anthologizes Ancient Christian Commentary, Augustine is quoted as saying that Mark “follow[s Matthew] closely . . . like his associate and epitomizer,” which rather softens the position of pedisequus, a footman who manages his master’s horse.4 This milder translation serves the purposes of that volume, however; it aims to present the earliest responses to Mark as the most valuable. It is not exactly a coincidence that the editor of this patristic compilation is Thomas C. Oden, the author of the book on Mark’s African memory mentioned in the opening pages of this book.5 Just as Oden there believes that every apocryphal text can be read as offering a coherent image of Mark, so in his anthology of ancient commentary on Mark does he assume that the account Eusebius offers by way of Papias, as well as early associations of Mark and Alexandria, illuminate the writing of “his” gospel. Wills, like Black, has a rather dif ferent story to tell, although he also distances himself from Black’s suppositions about the mutual support that Peter and Mark lend each other. Wills notes how thoroughly Jesus rebukes Peter in Mark: “Get thee behind me, Satan” (Mark 8:33 KJV). Like Black, however, he distrusts the biographical image that Eusebius claims first was voiced by Papias, a late first-century bishop, who described the evangelist as writing down Peter’s words, if not always as fully or as sequentially as they were delivered (even Papias notices something condensed and possibly incomplete in Mark). Dissociating Mark from his status as amanuensis in Papias is congruent for Wills with exonerating the second gospel from a degraded secondariness. The far less positive image of Peter in Mark than in Matthew (who nominates him the rock upon which the church stands [Matt. 16:18]), Wills opines, “works against the claim, supposedly based on

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Papias, that Mark was the interpreter of Peter” (What the Gospels Meant, 21). This independent authorial position is in line with the status Mark has come to hold, not without some dissent, since the nineteenth century and especially more recently: Mark is assumed to be the first gospel chronologically; its frequent echoes of Matthew now are taken as a sign of Matthew’s dependence on Mark. Mark no longer is a debased second but an exalted first. No longer an inept summarizer, he is now an author.6 In his 2004 brief review of scholarship on Mark in What Are They Saying about Mark that replaced a 1987 volume with the same title, Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., pooh-poohs a 2002 volume that attempted to revive the thesis that Mark was a redactor, insisting that the current view that Mark (along with a collection of sayings of Jesus called Q [for Quelle, source in German]), lies behind both Matthew and Luke, each working independently of the other, “if for no other reason than its simplicity and economy in explaining most of the evidence.”7 However, Harrington goes on to concede that the detailed comparisons offered in this 2002 study do suggest that the relationships among the Synoptic gospels are “reversible” (64). Nonetheless, he continues, it cannot be that Mark, having Matthew and Luke to summarize, condensed and anthologized those texts by choosing “to omit the infancy narratives, the Sermon on the Mount, . . . the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal son . . . and the resurrection” (64). Harrington does not pause over the implications of this remark. Why would Mark omit moments that are for Harrington absolutely central to the story and to Christian belief? What kind of first is the second gospel? A question like this does resonate with questions we have been asking about the picture of Mark the Venetians created in which a supposedly authorizing figure is subordinated to painterly designs. In the pages that follow, I turn first to these “omissions” in Mark. Mark opens with a statement that seems to claim the priority long denied to this book—“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1)— and then with a first event, the baptism of Jesus, that is its correlate (the book that publishes the good news begins with the public career of Jesus). It is to these firsts I want to attend to take up the first of the “omissions” that Harrington queries, the absence of any account of Jesus before his baptism—no Nativity, no precocity in the temple, and so on. As Wills remarks in What the Gospels Meant, the gospels that follow Mark do provide such backtracking. Matthew locates Jesus in a long genealogy before the text proceeds to its account of his birth. Luke adds much to that story (he alone recounts the Annunciation), prefacing it with a

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similar account of origins for John the Baptist in his miraculous birth. Finally John, although dispensing with the infancy narratives as much as Mark does, nonetheless locates Jesus at the beginning of all beginnings, as the Word. When John proceeds to the baptism it is located within this theological framework. How does Mark’s opening sentence, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (1:1) relate to the verse that introduces the Baptist, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord” (1:3)? What kind of beginning is this arche when it is followed by a preparation to begin? Sandwiched between these two verses is a connection, “it is written” (1:2) that does not exactly seem to be one since it is situated in neither of the nows that open Mark. “It is written” functions in a manner that has been identified as typical of the “intercalation or analeptic narrative construction” of Markan narrative, to quote Frank Kermode’s Genesis of Secrecy, an interruption in narrative flow that points to a non-narrative principle of coherence that is not apparent in the story.8 The gesture, in this case, governs Matthew’s account far more straightforwardly than it does Mark’s “As it is written in the prophets, Behold I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee” (Mark 1:2). Between the announced beginning, before which there would be no other, and the preparing to begin that begins the narration, there is an explanation that the beginning has already been written elsewhere (where is not specified). It announces the arrival, or perhaps foretells the arrival, of a messenger: is this messenger the evangelist as pedisequus or is it John the Baptist? Before whose face is he come? When are the two befores in this verse, in the before of “the beginning of the gospel” or the “before” of preparing to make a way forward? My edition of the King James text footnotes the citations, the first Malachi 3:1, “Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me,” the second Isaiah 40:3, “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”9 In his Abington commentary, Black adds Exodus 23:20 to the recalled texts, “Behold I send an angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee to the place which I have prepared.” Black attends to the different contexts for each of these utterances, assuming they give the reader work to do: “By selecting these texts to introduce his Gospel, Mark invites the reader to assemble and to tease out a number of important biblical themes” (Mark, 49). Kermode, too, is alert to potential incongruity in textual echoes of this kind, which he connects to the typological habits of reading found as early as the epistles of Paul, in which Old Testament lines are assumed to prophesy New Testament fulfillment.

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“By seeking out such occult structural organizations one might confer upon Mark, after centuries of complaint at his disorderly construction, the kind of depth and closure one would hope to find in what has come to be accepted as the earliest and, in many ways, the most authoritative of the gospels” (Genesis of Secrecy, 60–61). Mark opens with an unspecified allusion to the already written as a key to what we are reading; such is the hope Kermode proffers, a way of cracking open the text to find its secret principle of organization. How would Mark be establishing itself in recondite citations that, it seems, might as easily displace the text as authorize it? Providing a beginning before the beginning is one familiar way to attempt to explain away what other wise seems the intractability of a difficult text: it got to be the way it is because of something behind and before it, some context that it does not proffer, but which a reader must have to understand it; with such knowledge one can remove any obstacle to understanding.10 Perhaps the difficulty is historical, perhaps it is textual, an unreliable source, a corrupt text behind this one. Indeed, such is the case with the decisive opening words in the King James Mark naming Jesus the Son of God; it is not found in all the manuscripts, as Black reports in his commentary: the evidence for and against its inclusion, he claims, is “remarkably well balanced” and it leads him to a Harrington-like quandary: “If Mark had originally written the longer form, why would later scribes have truncated it?” (Black, Mark, 47).11 This beginning in citation, the additional possibility that some readers of Mark would have had a dif ferent text before them than the one we do—the ones we do, since my King James Version is simply that, a version—bears on the question raised by the opening of Mark. Why does it begin as it does, in words not Mark’s? Why does it begin with the baptism and not the Nativity, with Jesus recognized by someone unworthy of him, not even fit to tie his shoelaces (Mark 1:7; is John even lower than a pedisequus?), who nonetheless does recognize him? How might that recognition relate to the one that follows when “a voice” (the same as the one crying in the wilderness?) declares, “Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11)? My edition refers me to Isaiah 42:1, “Behold my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth” as a congruent recognition, as if servant and master had changed places when Jesus steps into the path that was opened for John. He goes to the wilderness from which John came, and “after that John was put in prison, Jesus came unto Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel” (1:14–15).

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Textual replacement has now been narrativized as the replacement of John by Jesus. The gospel that began with “the beginning of the gospel of Jesus” (Mark 1:1) now begins again with Jesus preaching that gospel in a time said to be that of the time fulfilled (1:14); this is the time Kermode thinks is delivered when figura issues in refiguration. But this time of fulfillment, like the opening of a way forward/backward, is not a fulfillment that ends figuration. For the kingdom preached is “at hand,” yet to come (1:15). “Believe the gospel.” Is the reiterated “gospel” at 1:14 the one announced at 1:1? Jesus called and recalled by a voice now calls: “Come ye after me” (1:17) to two fishermen, brothers Simon and Andrew, “I will make you to become fishers of men.” The reiteration of fishermen, fishers of men, echoes the baptism by water that becomes the baptism by spirit (but both are baptisms of repentance [1:4, 1:16]). It is reiterated when two other brothers are called, James and John; “they left their father Zebedee . . . and went after him” (1:20). This desertion of their father correlates with the absence of the Nativity in Mark. The “birth” of Jesus in this text, his birth into text, is akin to what happens when men who catch fish become men who catch men. Mark does not present the Nativity or narratives of the life of Jesus before his baptism, but he does uniquely offer a list of his family members, his mother Mary, his brothers James, Joses, Judas, and Simon, as well as unnamed sisters (Mark 6:3). “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary,” the verse begins. That question is raised by a member of his congregation: whoever Jesus is, for them, starts at home. This is precisely not where Mark starts, and Jesus underscores the point in the one moment in the text when he and his family are together—together after a fashion if the friends at 3:21, who declare that Jesus is “beside himself” (insane), include his family, as Black supposes, commenting that “they are implicitly identified with those who have judged Jesus mad” (Black, Mark, 113). “Who is my mother or my brethren,” Jesus asks and answers, “whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother” (Mark 3:33, 35). This redefinition of family is akin to the redefinition of fishermen as fishers of men, or to the renomination of his disciples that occurs earlier in the same chapter of Mark. Simon is renamed Peter (3:16); the two sons of Zebedee are now called Boanerges, “the sons of thunder” (3:17); while the remaining disciples, not named before, are now named, ending with “Judas Iscariot, which also betrayed him” (3:19), and who is perhaps to be identified with the brother of Jesus named Judas, perhaps not. This renaming began, of course, when a voice named his “beloved Son” (Mark 1:11), a nomination that is not unique, since it is a citation of Isaiah 42:1 as

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my KJV reminds the reader (and is itself cited again at Mark 9:7, much to the amazement of the apostles who only see Jesus, a man and not a god). Indeed “Son of God” has a wide range of meanings, as Black discusses at several points in his Abingdon commentary.12 What is a son? One of the “proofs” offered to show that Mark was transcribing Peter’s words was found in 1 Peter 5:13 (a text no longer believed to be written by Peter), which sends salutations to his disciples from “Mark my son.”13 Mark is as much Peter’s son as is the palsied man whom Jesus heals in Mark 2 with these words, “Son, thy sins be forgiven” (2:5). Remarkably, the Jesus who seems not to forgive, not even to acknowledge his mother and siblings, grants sonship to this diseased man. At this moment, like many others in Mark, the Pharisees and scribes who track Jesus question his doings. Jesus gives a long answer to these charges at 7:6, when he answers their textual authority by quoting Isaiah on the hy pocrisy of those who claim to be speaking authoritatively when their authority is merely self-interest. Jesus quotes Moses, the commandment to honor one’s parents, accusing the scribes of violating that sacred duty (7:10–13). This is an accusation that could as easily apply to Jesus. At another such moment, questioned about divorce, Jesus asks what Moses says only to refuse the divorce he allows: “what therefore God hath joined, let no man put asunder” (Mark 10:9). Yet, when he prophesies what the new life after resurrection will look like, he insists, “they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven” (12:25). Who has been joined, who is separate? Asked why his followers don’t fast— unlike the Pharisees and the disciples of John the Baptist (a startling conjunction), Jesus answers that no one would abstain when they have the bridegroom with them (2:18). Jesus is the bridegroom. We can leave all for his sake, including parents and siblings, and yet at the same time be one with him. The model for this form of joining and separating, marriage and divorce at once, lies in the voice in the burning bush that said “I am” and was himself alone (12:26). “Whom do men say I am,” Jesus asks his disciples (8:27). Elijah, John the Baptist, they say, and Peter says, “Thou art the Christ” (8:29). The one. The absence of any nativity—any family—is a way to make Jesus begin in another way. What kind of gospel can it be that omits the Sermon on the Mount, Harrington asked. In What the Gospels Meant Wills illuminates why this is a question in the chapter he devotes to Matthew 5–7 that contains the Sermon on the Mount in which one finds “not only the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer and the Golden Rule” but also numerous familiar images and

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sayings. “Some would be content,” Wills continues, “if every thing else in the New Testament had perished but these three chapters remained. They think it contains the essence not only of Matthew’s gospel but of Jesus’ entire teaching” (76). If so, what does Mark’s Jesus teach? A formula in Mark describes Jesus as preaching and teaching, yet his teachings barely coincide with the central tenets of these chapters in Matthew. Echoes of Mark can be found in Matthew only in half a dozen passages, none really coinciding with the comforting themes of Matthew 5–7. Whereas Jesus in Matthew enjoins the multitudes who hear his sermon to behave ethically, not to cast lustful gazes, for instance, but to pluck out the offending eye that would glance in the wrong direction or the hand that would reach for what is forbidden (Matt. 5:29–30), Jesus in Mark devotes a number of verses to the necessity of amputating hands, feet, or eyes if they “shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me” (Mark 9:27). Rather than being a gospel about others, Mark is about believers. This chapter has its version of the salt of the earth metaphor that appears in a corresponding place in Matthew (5:13), but the salt in Mark is in the ser vice of amputation. The final message: “Salt is good: but if the salt has lost his saltness, wherewith will ye season it? Have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with another” (Mark 9:50). The message of this teaching, if it has one, if it is one, is baffling. Some new form of sociality is glimpsed (peace with others) in the self-amputation recommended that seems also to produce a new form of inwardness (“Have salt in yourselves”), a new kind of relationality that marks those who believe. The Jesus of Mark withdraws from the multitudes that follow him and would touch him; he resists, wanting to escape from them with his disciples on a boat (3:7ff.). Or so it seems until the narrative makes a 180-degree turn: “And unclean spirits, when they saw him, fell down before him, and cried; saying, Thou art the Son of God. And he straitly charged them that they should not make him known” (3:11–12). By the time this happens in Mark, a pattern has been established. Chapter 1 is filled with scenes of Jesus exorcizing demons that acknowledge him, and with Jesus enjoining silence as he moves from one encounter to another. Claiming he has begun his public career in order to be known, “therefore came I forth” (1:38), he commands dev ils to “come forth” (1:26, 5.8) and acknowledge him; “say nothing,” he commands those who come into his orbit (1:44), repeatedly enjoining them to tell no one what has happened (5:43, 8:30, 9:9, 9:30); when his commands are not heeded, as usually happens, and his followers tell all, Jesus keeps on the move, fleeing: “But he went out, and began to publish it much, and to blaze abroad the matter, insomuch that Jesus could no

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more openly enter into the city, but was without in desert places” (1:45). Commentators take these scenes to be explained by a historical situation that they suppose but cannot document, that Mark’s gospel was meant for particularly threatened communities of believers. The pattern in these teachings and preachings involves exorcism. Jesus answers that charge: “How can Satan cast out Satan?” (3:23). What affinity does Jesus have with the demon-possessed? How is it that they can acknowledge him while his chosen, his disciples, seem baffled by him, so much so that the first chosen, Peter, is addressed as Satan (8:33) when he challenges what “he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” (8:31)? These are all questions raised by the teaching in Mark, strikingly dif ferent as it is from the consolatory message of the Sermon on the Mount, strikingly avoiding such scenes of massed gatherings. “Ye are the light of the world,” Jesus tells his followers from the mount; do good and you glorify God (Matt. 5:14–16). “Is a candle brought to be put under a bushel, or under a bed? And not to be set on a candlestick?” (Mark 4:21), Jesus asks in a seemingly parallel moment in Mark, continuing to explain, “For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was anything kept secret, but that it should come abroad” (4:22). Then why the flight from crowds, why the enjoinments to silence, why this coming forth only to withdraw? Is the secret being hidden or is it coming forth? Is it manifest as it goes “abroad,” or as it goes away and withdraws? The Sermon on the Mount concludes: “he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (Matt. 7:29). Mark introduces its first scene of instruction with the same words: “he taught them as one that had authority, and not as the scribes” (Mark 1:21). Yet his teaching, his words, come from the same authoritative source that the scribes cite against him. They object to his breaking of the Sabbath, but he insists he keeps it by breaking it, and not him alone: “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath” (Mark 2:27–28). Peter balks when Jesus insists that his way, their way, the essence of his teaching, involves the embrace of suffering and death. The last words Jesus speaks in Mark are “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? . . . My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34), a citation of Psalm 22:1. How can this authority be his own? Whose is the Son of God? Is he the Son of Man? Can one be both? How does one build a following upon abandonment?

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The gospel that began with baptism and the naming of Jesus by the voice circles back to that moment as the narrative moves closer to the Passion. The priests and the scribes ask Jesus where he gets his authority, and he answers by asking them a question that they find unanswerable: “The baptism of John, was it from heaven, or of men” (Mark 11:30). Both answers are right and both are wrong. “We cannot tell,” they reply, and Jesus echoes them back, “Neither do I tell you by what authority I do these things” (11:33). But what he tells those who hear him speak is that they must “be opened” (7:34), as he enjoins a man who is literally incapable of speaking or of hearing. Opened to hear what, to say what? Pilate asks: “Art thou King of the Jews? And he answering said unto him, Thou sayest it” (15:2). “And Pilate asked him again, saying, Answerest thou nothing?” (15:4). “But Jesus yet answered nothing” (15:5). How is nothing an answer? In the preceding chapter, when the high priest asks, “Answerest thou nothing?” (14:60), Jesus “answered nothing” (14:61). So, he asks again, “Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? And Jesus said, I am” (14:61–62). That affirmation is not the end of the sentence, however. It is followed by a characteristically paratactic “and” that continues “and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven” (14:62). Is “the Son of the Blessed” the same as “the Son of man”? Is “I am” identical to “ye shall see”? The words he speaks recall— cite— a vision of Daniel’s, “and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven” (Dan. 7:13). How is citation an answer to the question of identity? Is likeness identity? What is the teaching of Mark, saying nothing? This was Harrington’s question, provoked by the absence of the Sermon on the Mount. Harrington’s way of rebutting the notion that Mark is a derivative, lame version of Matthew and Luke leaves open what kind of unprecedented text Mark is. Congruent with this is his wondering about another supposed omission: how Mark could leave out the parables of the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, tales of forgiveness across seemingly impossible barriers. It is not that Mark lacks parables, of course—they are its mode of teaching; Harrington is not alone (Black concurs) in pointing out that a most difficult moment in the gospel concerns what Jesus says about his parables when he tells his first one, about the sower and the seeds (Mark 4). Parables are a form that his teaching takes in all the gospels, of course, but the theory of the practice in this chapter of Mark seems particularly relevant to the difficult question of what exactly Jesus teaches in this gospel. Harrington comments:

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The most enigmatic and (even notorious) verses in Mark’s Gospel appear in 4:11–12, between the parable of the sower and its explanation: “11. And he said to them, ‘To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, every thing comes in parables; 12. In order that “they may indeed look, but not perceive, / and may indeed listen, but not understand; / so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.” ’ ” (12)

As Harrington says, these verses seem to be making a distinction between insiders who have “the secret of the Kingdom of God,” and outsiders who don’t and from whom it is being withheld through the “deliberately obscure riddles” Jesus uses to confound those—the many—whom he wishes to keep from becoming believers. Kermode takes up this difficult moment, noting that the version of these lines in Matthew seems to soften them somewhat so that the distinction is not between insiders and outsiders but between those who have the capacity to hear and those who do not: in Matthew, unlike Mark, it appears that Jesus is not deliberately withholding but that some are incapable of being opened (Genesis of Secrecy, 31). However, even in Mark, the distinction that seems to be proferred between insiders and outsiders falters, since the disciples, who are being told that they are the insiders and in the know, repeatedly fail to comprehend the teachings: Peter’s denial is perhaps the most notorious instance of failure (and not least since he also affirms that Jesus is the Son of God, which is, presumably, what is essential to the teachings), while Judas’s kiss and betrayal crystallizes an insuperable contradiction that seems to replace the division of insiders and outsiders with the collapse of one into the other. How could such distinctions apply to a teacher whose way of answering questions is to say nothing, to enjoin silence, to flee from those who seek to tell what he withholds? When he does affirm, he places his answer in quotation marks. Is the point of speaking in parables to remove them? Just the opposite, Kermode suggests. Part of the softening of Mark’s version of parabolic teaching in Matthew, he notes, is that Matthew makes explicit the justification for teaching that way as “fulfilling the Psalmist’s prophecy: ‘I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world’ ” (Ps. 78:2; Kermode, Genesis of Secrecy, 31). For Kermode, this echo is consoling since it places parabolic utterance inside the relationship of prophecy to fulfillment that joins Old and New Testament into a single book with an overarching coherence. Kermode offers this relationship as key to the desire that motivates literary

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interpretation, the search for fulfillment that comes when disparate parts of the text illuminate each other and hidden meanings come to rest in interpretive closure that is tantamount to revelation and the end of secrecy. (For Kermode, such closure always is temporary, and interpretation seems like an ongoing activity of finding again and again the clues to a satisfactory ending; to his credit, Mark is the limit case for this belief in Kermode’s account.) Kermode’s secularism and humanism can be translated into theological belief of the kind to be found in Wills, who also thinks typology is key to reading Scripture. Wills cites 1 Corinthians 15:3–4, its reiterations of an “accord with the Sacred Writings” (What the Gospels Meant, 2) as pointing to promise and fulfillment as the tie that binds Old and New Testaments and that makes the Bible one. Paul is, however, an equivocal witness to this process, since abrogation of the law is a central theme. Perhaps even more central, and closer to the denials of Jesus in Mark, is Paul’s insistence on a mode of fulfillment that is indistinguishable from one of betrayal and refusal, a twinning of affirmation and negation. “The time is short,” Paul insists in 1 Corinthians 7:29. This is not the same as saying that the time is fulfilled; in Mark, when Jesus says, “The time is fulfilled,” he immediately adds an “and” that rescinds what he has just said, “and the kingdom of God is at hand” (1:15). If it is at hand it is yet to come. In the time that remains—the time that is opened—Paul says, “it remaineth, that both they that have wives be as though they had none; and they that weep, as though they wept not; and they that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not” (1 Cor. 7:29–30). Jesus in Mark tells his disciples that they must take the child whom he takes: “Whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name receiveth me; and whosoever shall receive me, receiveth not me, but him that sent me” (Mark 9:37). Paul’s “as though,” Jesus’s “in my name,” “not me, but him” offer displacements, chains of contrary assertions treated as equations; it is “as though” me and not me were identical, as if having and not having were identical. The Pharisees may want “to catch him in his words” (Mark 12:13), but words like these seem ungraspable. This linguistic transvaluation began when fishermen became fishers of men. What is a parable? In his commentary on Mark, Black cites with approval C. H. Dodd’s “now classic definition: ‘At its simplest the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought’ ” (Mark, 116). In his “or”s, Dodd catches how equivocal parables are (metaphor or simile, nature or common life, vivid or strange) when they make a connection (an “application”) that remains dubious; parables are an object of

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arrested or/and active thought rather than the kind of knowledge that seems implied, where one thing illuminates or explains another. Toward the end of his discussion of the parables offered in Mark 4, Black asks, “What do these parables teach about God’s kingdom,” immediately acknowledging that they do not “talk directly” but only “as if”: “So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground” (Mark 4:26) begins a parable unique to Mark. Black continues: “The medium is the message: a parable—literally (in Greek), something thrown beside another—is irreducibly mysterious” (Mark, 130). One thing is thrown beside another, and these two things do not seem to have anything to do with each other. Yet, a parable is also a parabolic loop like the figure that is composed when two parallel sides curve and meet at the bottom. It is perhaps only an analogy (a parable of parables) that this geometric form, which doubles the literary form, is congruent with (identical to?) the most characteristic device in Mark for putting one thing beside another, those loops that Kermode identified (Black diagrams them) in which the opening and closing of a bit of narrative encloses a seemingly unrelated bit of narrative that interrupts and yet somehow, simultaneously, serves to attach the beginning and ending of the story at the same time as it displaces it, placing it inside what nonetheless also seems to be outside it. The medium is the message, indeed. These parables/parabolas are related to Markan parataxis, the form of representation of reality that Erich Auerbach identified as characteristic of Scripture. Auerbach, too, wrote authoritatively about Scripture’s mode of figural connection.14 The connection between figure and fulfillment lies in both and in neither. Narrative is displaced for a connection that displaces both texts and puts them elsewhere: in a relation of nonrelation. Parable/parabola joined to figura produces paradox, the paradox that what is not there is what is there. Secrets remain. The etymological origin of parlare, to speak, is parabolare, to speak in parables. Jean-Luc Nancy takes up the question of the parable and parabolic teaching in Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body, a study of an episode unique to the gospel of John involving the post-Resurrection appearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalene and its frequent representation in Renaissance painting.15 His study begins, however, not in John but in Matthew’s version of the difficult question of the parable as a kind of teaching that may as easily be understood as a refusal of pedagogy. Indeed, it is precisely that, Nancy affirms: “Thus the objective of the parable is first to sustain the blindness of those who do not see. It does not proceed out of a pedagogy of figuration (of allegory or illustration) but, to the contrary, out of a refusal or a denial of pedagogy” (5). This is perhaps simply to put as strongly

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as possible Dodd’s “classic” definition that Black approved. Nancy’s phrasing suggests that this refusal of pedagogy is not absolute; it is a rejection of a kind of teaching that supposes equivalences, in which “figuration” means not the chain of figurations as displacements, but a process of identifications in which one thing substitutes for another, where the verbal finds a pictorial equivalent, or where one word supplies whatever was lacking in another (allegory as one word for another rather than a movement of language toward otherness). Nancy also supports Black’s sense of the medium as the message, that is, that there is something inescapable in the language itself. This is the reason an episode from John and paintings of it (each of which grasps the episode in a dif ferent way visually) is prefaced by a discussion of parables that does not come from John. For Nancy’s point is that every story about Jesus in the gospels is itself a parable; the life of Jesus is a series of loosely articulated narratives, scenes, each of which has the significance of a parable. These gospels are not attempts at capturing historical facts any more than they are intent on providing novelistic narrative coherence. Another form of the real is involved: “truth itself becomes parabolic” (Noli, 4), by which Nancy means that it is figurative. This truth must break with the religious truth (belief) that Black or Harrington holds as true. Nancy suggests that parabolic truth is deeper than religious truth when he adverts to the “deep, nonreligious, and nonbelieving structure” (4) of parabolic figuration. With Dodd, we might call this structure of “or”s the provocation of thought. Nancy attaches it to “sense,” a multivocal concept in French and, to a lesser extent in English, as when we say that something does not make sense, by which we don’t mean that it can’t be touched, smelled, or felt, exactly, nor that it is as senseless as someone who has lost consciousness either. “There are figures, silhouettes, names, and sonorities that endlessly revitalize the resources of sense that concepts cannot allow to burst forth” (Noli, 8). The refusal of the parable is the refusal to translate itself into other words it proffers as if that was what it did; in making these incomparable comparisons it questions conceptual categories that are presumed to be self-evident, definitionally enclosed, cordoned off from their opposites or from apparently irrelevant associations. That refusal of closure and singularity of meaning is an opening. “For he that hath, to him shall be given; and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath” (Mark 4:25), “that seeing they may see, and not perceive; / and hearing they may hear, and not understand” (Mark 4:12). This is the interiority to which Mark points by way of amputation, silence, and betrayal, of self-finding in self-abandonment. Nancy describes it as “responding to myself in the voice of the other, to the ear of the other as if to

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my own, more proper ear” (Noli, 9). Figural relationality offers the endless revitalization of a life beyond conceptual limits, a life of provoking thought. The first parable that Jesus tells in Mark is the one about the sower who plants his seed on various terrains; it thrives only on “good ground” (4:8). Alone with Jesus, the disciples ask for an explanation, which is what prompts Jesus to explain that those who know don’t need an explanation while those who don’t won’t get one. He then offers an exasperated explanation, “Know ye not this parable? And how then will ye know all parables?” (4:13). It is not immediately clear whether “this parable” refers to the utterance about those who see and fail to see, hear and fail to hear, which is certainly parabolic insofar as it is self-contradictory, or whether Jesus refers to the parable of the sower that the disciples have found baffling. At any rate, his question “Know ye not this parable” would seem to mean that not to know it is not to know anything, and that this parable is about parables as much as it is about anything. The explanation he offers, where the seed is the word, Kermode pronounces “odd” and “inept,” and Black agrees; both have in mind Dodd’s succinct objection to Jesus’s interpretation: “The seed is the Word: yet the crop which comes up is composed of various classes of people.”16 “The sower soweth the word. And these are they” (Mark 4:14–15). The singular seed/word is immediately pluralized in the various grounds now allegorized as kinds of people. Dodd assumes that word/seed is one thing, soil something else. In Mark 7:15–16, a kind of answer to this distinction is offered by Jesus, and in terms that echo the words to his disciples in Mark 4, although this time he is addressing the Pharisees: “there is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man. If any have ears to hear, let him hear.” The word that enters is like the word that Jesus speaks and that does not exactly come from him but comes to him, utterances whose opacity demands understanding, and whose opacity is usually translated by Jesus into parabolic terms. Dodd thinks that Mark has confused the parable by offering an interpretation that confuses seed and ground, that translates them into entirely separate categories, the Word (he capitalizes) and people. Yet, it is precisely that categorical relationship that parables call into question in the kind of circularity that Nancy describes as the hearing of the other within oneself, the calling out of what is within, a capacity endlessly renewable. It explains why nothing that comes from without can defile. (Is Mark recalling Titus 1:15, “To the pure all things are pure”?) In pondering the “odd” and “inept” allegorization on offer, in seeking to make one thing into another, what seems forgotten are precisely the

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terms of the parable, seed and soil, as if they must be translated into something else, seed into divine utterance, biblical text, the Logos that created all things; soil into humans of various moral stripes and constitutions; it is as if these two registers—the earth (and its capacities for production) and the divine— are entirely separable whereas the parable depends upon their inseparability. The parable that is unique to Mark recasts terms from the parable of the sower into another one that begins “So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground” (Mark 4:26). The “as if” makes clear that the analogy is not an identity, not an exact equivalence, not to be translated directly, even as it translates the first, paradigmatic parable of parables that opens “there went out a sower to sow” (4:3). In this parable unique to Mark, the sower knows nothing about the seed. It is as if he sleeps while the seed grows, “he knoweth not how” (4:27), “For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself” (28). And when it has done that, the sower reaps the harvest. The parable is about a cause and effect, the seed and the ground, but it separates one causal agent, the sower, from another, the receptive ground. If the parable asks that the kingdom of God be read as a human activity, that activity turns into a receptivity that is figured as that of the earth itself. The categories of God and human cross. The man/ God reaps what the earth delivers. The parable recasts categorical difference by means of a material analogy that suggests its figural “application” without denying its literality. “When the fruit is brought forth” (Mark 4:29), one becomes the other, and it happens in the time and through the word Mark uses insistently, “immediately” (euthys; ενθύς). These mysterious utterances about the kingdom of God, its location in time and space, in language, are the subject of Mark from its opening chapter onward: “Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:14–15). In Mark 11, Jesus hungers and comes upon a fig tree that has yet to bear fruit “for the time of the fig was not yet” (11:13). Jesus blasts the tree, goes on to cleanse the temple, and returns to find the tree forever incapable of bearing fruit. Jesus treats this event as a parable (the folded story of the temple is congruent): “What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them” (11:24). Two chapters later, foreseeing the end of his life, Jesus once again offers “a parable of the fig tree” (Mark 13:28). Is it the same fig tree? Or the same insofar as it is a parable of the fig tree? This time, one never knows when the fig tree will bear fruit; the point is to watch, to wait, to inhabit the time. The time to inhabit— the time of the fig tree— could be one in which its never bearing fruit is what one desires, where that fulfilled

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desire is what it means to inhabit the kingdom of God in a time that is at once fulfilled and at hand (to come) because it is here within, now. Nancy turns from parabolic structure to the appearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalene, to his beckoning withdrawal as what draws her forth to the apprehension that he is as he goes, the physical/ghostly manifestation that is played out by parabolic utterance that gives and takes away and leaves us where we are and with the possibility that it is where we want always to be, which is to be on the verge of grasping and harvesting what is within like the sower in the parable unique to Mark. In his book on Fra Angelico, Georges Didi-Huberman studies that painter’s version of Noli me tangere (plate 24), focusing on what lies between Mary, with her arms outstretched, and Jesus, who is withdrawing from her; his arm also is stretched toward her, but in a gesture that means the opposite of hers. A refusal to touch that yet means that refusal as the way to fulfill her desire. Fra Angelico has painted Jesus’s feet so that right and left foot have replaced each other, or so that one is crossing the other; it is as if Jesus walked two ways at once. Between Jesus and Mary Magdalene the field blossoms with what can be taken to be flowers. But as Didi-Huberman observes, these schematic dots of red paint are painted precisely the same way as the dots on Jesus’s hand and feet that are his stigmata. They turn the field that could be first apprehended merely as the ground between the figures, a field of flowers, into a ground that attaches both figures and ground to figuration; what grows between them connects them in these daubs of red paint. “Their way of signifying— between the flower and the stigmata, creating the notion of a relation above all—no longer has anything to do with the way the story delivers its very recognizable meaning.”17 Didi-Huberman calls this other way dissemblance and figuration. Its most extreme form, as we saw in the previous chapter, is the likening of supposedly absolutely dead stone to the incarnate God. Mark’s fig tree surrounds the temple. Between it and the parable of the fig tree, Jesus tells the parable of the wicked husbandmen who fi nally kills the son and loses the vineyard. Jesus ends his parable by recalling a psalm and citing it: “The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner” (Mark 12:10; Ps. 118:22). “Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulcher? And when they looked, they saw the stone was rolled away” (Mark 16:3–4). And the tomb was empty. And “they trembled and were amazed . . . they were afraid” (16:8). This is the end of Mark, so baffling in its refusal of the Resurrection (as Harrington concludes his brief that Mark could not possibly have had Matthew and Luke before him and chosen to end his gospel at

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16:8) that text was added to try to make acceptable the unacceptable conclusion. In his commentary, Black reviews the manuscript evidence, noting that the earliest ones, from the fourth century, which tend to be most authoritative, end at 16:8, with the frightened women stunned by the empty tomb. Early fathers like Clement of Alexandria and Origen appear to know Mark with this ending. However, the majority of manuscripts, from the fifth century on, have longer endings. Jerome’s Vulgate included the longer conclusion that is translated in the King James Version and many other versions, and Black makes a case for 16:9–20 as “a pastiche of elements drawn from the other gospels” (Mark, 347), preachable texts if not true to Mark, whose abrupt ending Black affirms. Black would like it to be true that one could infer from those eight verses that Jesus has risen (hence the empty tomb); that the missionary work that follows will have begun with his promised Resurrection appearance in Galilee. Nonetheless, the additional verses are there to say that. Harrington is sure Mark could not have had the full story before him and have left out all the good parts; Black seems to think he could have readers infer what virtually no one in Mark does—neither his apostles nor the women who go to the tomb. Black’s final word on that impercipience is that this gospel is “a peculiar proclamation of the hidden explosion of God’s kingdom into this world with Jesus, a strange messianic vanguard, and a befuddled band of followers who try riding the missile yet keep falling off” (Mark, 361). I am taken by the extraordinary metaphorics of this pithy sentence (it reminds me of Sartre on Tintoretto’s St. Mark in Miracle of the Slave) that explodes all kinds of consolatory versions of Christianity in a militaristic imaginary. As Black suggests, Jesus refuses to allow his followers an easy ride. Indeed, to ride on this mission is to ride with Jesus to the end of this world and to encounter God’s kingdom in an explosion that opens something strange, peculiar, something that is yet in this world, as the metaphorics of the parables, drawn from the earth, intimate. Messiah and missile are linked in a kind of sending that delivers an entirely new message into the world. This message is in the world, like a seed secretly growing, ready for harvest whenever one has eyes to see and ears to ear. The empty tomb is thus not so dif ferent from what Mary Magdalene sees at the end of John, that the risen Christ is untouchable, thus leading her to find a new ground opening before her. The new ground lies between herself and the kingdom toward which he gestures by going in two directions at once, as he is doing in Fra Angelico’s painting of the scene made for the monks in San Marco in Florence. Nancy calls this opening “faith,” in contradistinction to “belief” (Noli, 22). Resurrection is not about living an afterlife, it is about a

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way of living this life (perhaps the “as if” way that Paul delineates), although, as John’s gospel proclaims, “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live” (11:21), a sentence that suggests the resurrected life is one lived in the face of death, but also in the face of a life that does not end. The parables figure that life as the kingdom of God; they also figure it as plant life, the persistence of matter. The unanswerable question—was the baptism earthly or heavenly—is unanswerable because the either/or is not one. Such is the case as well with the names that Jesus has— Son of God, Son of Man: Jesus alone uses that second designation and in ways that make it seem sometimes to be only about him and sometimes to be about anyone, but “Son of God” also can denote anyone, as can be seen particularly in the way Jesus speaks of his children, who are his because they are not literally his but because they are all God’s. (This is why the gospel begins with the baptism, not with the Nativity.) “God” here is nothing more or less than a word for a common belonging that is at the same time a common dispossession. The chosen apostles who abandon and betray are experiencing that loss that comes when the last are first. Jesus in Mark is not a member of a mystical trinity (that concept is centuries ahead). “Ye shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of,” Jesus assures James and John (Mark 10:39), but more than that he cannot give, for it “is not mine to give; but it shall be given to them” (10:40). And is given in the text that enfolds and explodes the text we read. “The gospel must first be published among all nations” (13:10). The gospel is the life that is becoming a citeable, unowned, shared text. In it, the two potentially absolutely contradictory commands are one: to recognize God alone as one and to love one’s neighbor as oneself (12:28–34). Even the scribes get that right. “Heaven and earth” (that distinction) “shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away” (13: 31) because they are not mine: “Now learn a parable of the fig tree” (13:28) “wheresoever this gospel shall be preached” (14:9) is the Kingdom of God. “ ‘I am resurrected’ does not signify an action that I would have accomplished but rather a passivity to which I am subjected or that I receive,” Nancy writes (Noli, 19), as Jesus indicates when the woman anoints him for burial when he is yet alive (Mark 14:3–9). Such are the mysteries, the secrets, of Mark. In the introduction he wrote for the 1995 edition of The Interpretation of Mark, an anthology that represents developments in Markan interpretation through the twentieth century, William R. Telford draws a distinction between current work and what he terms the “pre-critical” (3) work that preceded it. That earlier work depended on the narrative Papias

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supplied, in which Mark was transcribing Peter and thus offering secondhand firsthand testimony about the life and teachings of Jesus. The precritical work was historical in the sense that it assumed that Mark was recording history. Telford marks the distance between precritical and critical approaches to Mark with the 1901 publication of William Wrede’s Das Messiasgeheimnes in den Evangelien, only translated into English in 1971 as The Messianic Secret.18 Wrede argues that Mark is not presenting history but dogma, the belief consolidated in the emerging church that Jesus was the Messiah. Wrede suggests these were not beliefs held by the historical Jesus or proclaimed about himself. Mark is a gospel filled with secrets: as we have seen, every miracle is to be kept hidden, every utterance of Jesus is equivocal. It is a parabolic text that refuses the straightforward declaration Jesus seems to say he makes available in private to his disciples. But, if he does that, the only sign of it is how thoroughly they fail to understand. For Wrede, Mark’s text is riven by the contradiction between the church’s desire to proclaim Christ and the historical Jesus’s reticence. The secret emerges as this place of contradiction. Wrede’s thesis opened the way to studies of Mark no longer bound to excavating the historical truth of Jesus and directed more to its textual construction. However, as Telford tells this story— about the Markan text’s relation to prior texts, about the emergence of an authorial figure who may be doing a great deal more than arranging preexisting oral and written materials—what does not disappear is the sense of the text as the carrier of a secret. Tallying the issues that remain for the current, more literary approaches to Mark, number 1 on Telford’s list is “the secrecy motif and the writer’s interest in the true but hidden identity of Jesus” (Interpretation, 26). Key to this is parsing the relationship between the designations “Son of God” and “Son of Man.” Telford’s account assumes that Jesus has a true identity, presumably the one that the church proclaims, but that it remains hidden in the gospel, or perhaps is announced, as it is in the first sentence in Mark, but only to remain opaque in the text that follows. Summarizing where Markan literary criticism stood in 1995, Telford concludes: “Despite intensive research, this Gospel, in scholarly terms, still withholds many secrets which have yet to be revealed” (39). Something like this seems to be the thesis of Telford’s own 1999 study, The Theology of the Gospel of Mark, just about the only book reviewed negatively in Harrington’s study of “what are they saying about Mark now”—Harrington faults its embrace of “the messianic secret” (What Are They Saying, 31) among his complaints, and regards such concerns as old-fashioned. The up-to-date work he values is literary analysis that supports Christian belief.

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The gospel that Telford describes is not a joyous text but, rather, one that puts a burden on the believer that may invite a distance from received belief and ideology but that also intimates through the figure of Jesus that the promised Kingdom of God is “already present.”19 Up-to-date work has put behind any theological questions to tackle purely literary matters of narrative disposal. Janice Capel Anderson and Stephen D. Moore’s edited volume, Mark and Method, is an anthology that exemplifies what such work looks like: it features eight essays that sum up the field of literary Mark: narrative criticism, reader-response criticism, deconstructive criticism, feminist criticism, social criticism, cultural studies, and postcolonial criticism. An introduction on “The Lives of Mark” describes the various personae that past scholarship has assumed to stand behind the text, from Peter’s scribe to author, from author to an object of critique on the basis of current progressive notions, Mark, in this introduction can weather the storm of identities conferred and withdrawn, for whatever readers may bring to the text may find in it reflected back. The multiplicity of literary approaches guarantees that the text is a theological reserve that anticipates and answers any question we might have. Like the announcement at the beginning of Mark, it assumes all questions are answered in advance. In the course of tracing the increasingly literary nature of Markan scholarship, Telford refers to Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy, perhaps the only book on Markan narrative not written by a biblical scholar that he mentions.20 Kermode shows up once in Mark and Method, in a footnote to the essay on deconstructive criticism by Stephen D. Moore, which basically works to dissolve the insider-outsider question posed by the parables (and the opacity of the disciples). “Right to the end of the Gospel, then, the insiders are on the inside looking in, as though they were in fact outside” (97), Moore writes, glossing this sentence with a note: “As the literary critic Frank Kermode recognized in a reading of the Markan parables that was itself influenced by deconstruction” (253n3). Kermode certainly is aware of deconstruction in his book, but it is scarcely the position he embraces, which is why his final acknowledgment that Mark frustrates his desire for closure is so hard won. But this is not to say that deconstruction would do what Moore’s essay on deconstructive criticism intimates— simply make inside and outside exchangeable and undecideable and therefore the same in a comfortable and comforting way. Kermode’s name is in a list in Telford, as someone who claims “that Mark was a genuine author and not a scissors-and-paste editor” (Interpretation, 25). For Kermode, this amounts to a text of “simultaneous proclamation and concealment” (47) that continually baffles in its mix of secrecy

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and revelation. At the end of the paragraph in which Kermode is named, Telford points to two particularly baffling and possibly connected episodes in Mark, “the flight of the naked young man in 14:51–2 and his reappearance (?) in the Marcan ending” (25), itself a site of bafflement, as we have observed. Telford’s note here (56n89) quickly surveys how the youth in 14:51–52 has been treated—from “a thinly disguised John Mark,” an authorial signature, to a figure “invest[ed]” with “christological or baptismal significance.” Kermode is mentioned again, without discussion of his analysis. Thinly disguised, or invested with meaning, transparent or not, these moments in Mark are related to a secret Mark that receives no explicit mention (it remains a secret) in Telford, Harrington, or by the contributors of Mark and Method. I turn now to that secret Mark (Kermode also attends to it). Mark 14 is the chapter in which Jesus institutes the Eucharist, “Take, eat; this is my body” (14:22); is betrayed by Judas—“And as soon as he was come, he goeth straightaway to him, and saith, Master, Master; and kissed him” (14:45); and is denied three times by Peter. A moment after Jesus is seized, fulfilling Scripture, as Jesus says (14:49), the incident of the “Boy in the Shirt,” as Kermode calls it, occurs: “And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body: and he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked” (14:51–52). This moment is unique to Mark. Kermode ultimately opts to read this anomalous episode in the typological manner he favors, against echoes of Old Testament episodes where a garment is dropped by someone who flees (Joseph, from the seduction of Potiphar’s wife [Gen. 39:12]) or where it is used as a figure for courageous behav ior (Amos 2:16). Ignoring that these two prior usages do not seem entirely congruent, Kermode is taken with patterning, and ultimately connects the young man who flees with the one who sits inside the empty tomb, “clothed in a long white garment” (16:5). Both of these young men are called neaniskos, a word that suggests postadolescent youth. The youth who flees and the youth who sits are connected for Kermode precisely to the patterning of occlusion and revelation that he attaches to secrecy in Mark, and more broadly to the hermeneutical pursuit that teases us with meaning by offering kinds of repetition that suggest coherence. Kermode’s reading follows Austin Farrer’s typological connections, which Kermode characterizes as Farrer’s literary method (in its formalism it is the model of the literariness of recent Markan criticism), as when he “suggests that the young man deserting is a figure representing the falling off of all the others” (Kermode, Genesis of Secrecy, 62). Kermode continues, “This seems to me a fine interpretation. We have, at this moment in the

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narrative, three principal themes: Betrayal, Flight, and Denial.” Presumably, the neaniskos embodies them. When he appears at the end again, in the tomb, and pointing a meaning for the absence of Jesus that is denied and found baffling and frightening by the women who have come looking for him, he answers his earlier appearance. So the ending, Kermode concludes, paraphrasing Farrer again, “is part of an articulate and suggestive system of senses” (70), without venturing what those senses might be. Are they the enhancement of sense toward which Nancy gestures? Do they beckon us to make sense, or to recognize that there is no sense of sense, to recall a title of an essay of Nancy’s in Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II?21 It is to this typological method of prefiguration and fulfillment that Kermode attaches work on a secret Mark—on another secret Mark than the one that Wrede identified and which critics of Mark have pursued or denied as central to its way of narrating the mystery of the identity of Jesus. This is The Secret Gospel, to give the title of one of two books Morton Smith wrote (the other one is Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark), both published in 1973, the former a more accessible and popular version of its scholarly twin.22 Both books concern a three-page manuscript Smith discovered attached to a mid-seventeenth-century book in the library of the Mar Saba Monastery in the course of the summer of 1958 as he toured sites in the Middle East on the lookout for uncatalogued ancient texts. The manuscript identified these pages as a letter from Clement of Alexandria to an other wise unknown recipient named Theodore. It is a fragment of a longer text and breaks off in mid-sentence just as it is about to come to its central point: “Now the true explanation and that which accords with the true philosophy . . .” (Secret Gospel, 16). This truth is the central concern of the letter, the existence of an alternative version of Mark, a secret text that Clement says Mark wrote in Alexandria after he had penned in Rome the one now deemed canonical; the letter concerns the relationship between this secret text and one that a gnostic group of libertines called Carpocratians espouse. “Clement wishes to distinguish his authentic secret Mark from the inauthentic and conceivably licentious secret Mark of the Carpocratians,” Kermode summarizes as the thrust of the document (Genesis of Secrecy, 57). To do so, Clement quotes a couple of verses from Secret Mark. Kermode takes up the longest of these. It is a set of lines not found in Mark that “must have come somewhere in the present tenth chapter of the gospel” (58), as also would have been the case for the brief second episode cited in Clement’s letter, which Smith locates as having been added to 10:46. It reads, “And they came to Jericho: and as he

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went out of Jericho . . .” (Secret Gospel, 16); the colon seems to point to something missing that the Secret Mark adds to smooth out the narrative, to separate coming and going rather than making them seem coincident. The episode to which Kermode attends, and which also occupies Smith for a chapter in The Secret Gospel, involves a miracle that parallels a unique episode in John, the raising of Lazarus. In Secret Mark, the dead youth is unnamed. Jesus rolls away the stone from his tomb (just as it has been rolled away from the tomb of Jesus in the final chapter of Mark) and raises the youth, another neaniskos. Secret Mark reads: “But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over [his] naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan” (Secret Gospel, 15–16). Kermode ultimately folds this episode into the patterning of Farrer, noting that “the relation [between 14:51 and the youth in the tomb in 16] might have been made still more elaborate had Farrer known of the passage in Clement” (61). He suggests that Smith offers a historical explanation for the narrative gaps that Farrer filled in through typological connectivity. Clement explains that Mark elaborated secrets omitted from the Roman gospel, secret rituals that Jesus performed with those who were initiated into higher mysteries, indeed the mystery of the kingdom. Smith notes that while Jesus’s ministry begins with his baptism in Mark, he himself is never shown performing the rite that makes Christians Christians. The secret rite in Secret Mark is a baptismal rite, he claims. The white linen cloth suggests it. The fact that it also may be a burial cloth clinches its relationship to the death of the Messiah, which is crucial to the mission for which his apostles betray him with a kiss and from which they flee in horror and amazement. Kermode folds Smith comfortably into his preferred closure of meaning. “Whatever may be said about the provenance of these Alexandrian secret texts,” Kermode writes, referring to Secret Mark and Carpocratian Secret Mark, “they do provide a reason why the text as we have it appears both to reveal and proclaim, and at the same time to obscure and conceal” (59). In linking the two secret texts which connect two puzzling moments in Mark—the youth who flees naked, and the youth at the empty tomb— and relating them to the two secret Marks that Clement wishes to disentangle, Kermode barely glances at how Smith’s discovery has been received—hardly invariably as contributing to an understanding of canon-

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ical Mark. From the first, controversy surrounded Smith’s discovery, and it continues. A 2013 volume, Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? subtitled The Secret Gospel of Mark in Debate gathers papers, mainly from a 2011 conference, and succinctly names the crux of the controversy—is the letter, and the gospel it quotes, a forgery?—but does not quite say what has fueled the debate.23 Kermode, too, sidesteps it, unless his noting that Taylor’s commentary on the Greek text of Mark proposed that a phrase from 14:51 is unnecessary, although its recurrence in Secret Mark seems to validate it. Epi gumnou lies behind “about his naked body,” as it appears in my KJV; “[over] his naked [body]” in Clement’s Secret Mark as Smith translates the passage. “But ‘naked [man] with naked [man]’ ” Clement adds, “are not found” (Secret Gospel, 16). Theodore had presumably seen those words, or had heard they were to be found, perhaps in this episode, in Secret Mark. The most recent full-scale attempts to discredit Smith’s 1958 discovery and 1973 publications are Stephen Carlson’s The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark (2005) and Peter Jeffery’s The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery (2007).24 Both authors are represented in Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery, while the subtitle of Jeffery’s book points at what is for both of them the secret that discredits Smith—sex, and specifically homosexual sex. “Homosexuality was the religion of Jesus himself,” Jeffery concludes; that is what Smith argues, manufacturing Clement’s letter to show he was a typical church bigot denying it, secreting it (235). “Secret Mark easily conjures up to the twentieth-century reader the image that Jesus was arrested for soliciting a homoerotic encounter in a public garden,” Carlson writes in his book (70). Both authors insinuate that Smith was pursuing his own gay agenda against the church, forging these documents in ways that reflected his tormented life in the 1950s. The prompt for these allegations (neither Carlson nor Jeffery knew Smith, who died in 1991) came from Jacob Neusner, who shortly after Smith’s death blasted him for forging a document about Jesus as a “homosexual magician.” Neusner offered no proof, as Tony Burke, who quotes the phrase, records his attacks in the introduction to Ancient Gospel (7); Neusner was soon echoed by a follower, Donald Harman Akenson, who described Smith’s work as a “nice ironic gay joke,” some kind of retaliation by Smith on a profession that had rejected him for tenure at Brown in 1955 (two years later, he was hired at Columbia to replace Elias J. Bickerman, to whose chair as Professor of Ancient History he was promoted in 1962; he remained as a tenured professor at Columbia until he retired in 1985).25

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As Burke remarks, these allegations of Smith’s secret homosexual agenda seem to rest on exactly one remark in Secret Gospel when Smith describes the secret ritual glimpsed in Secret Mark as an occasion for the baptized youth to be “possessed by Jesus’ spirit and so united with Jesus. One with him, he participated by hallucination in Jesus’ ascent into the heavens, he entered the kingdom of God, and was thereby free from the laws ordained for and in the lower world. Freedom from the law may have resulted in completion of the spiritual union by physical union” (Secret Gospel, 107). This “may have” becomes a matter of continuous insinuation in Jeffery and Carlson. In his book, Carlson retranslates the phrase that Smith rendered about the youth wanting to “be with” Jesus as “spend the night with” and then reads his translation as a 1950s euphemistic way of saying “have sex with.” Having insinuated gay sex into the text, he calls Smith out for the insinuation. Jeffery claims in his contribution to Ancient Gospel that Smith hints but does not say, depending on the reader’s prurience to fill in the blanks, which he obligingly does. His proof of this is Smith’s “most infamous joke,” one Jeffery finds buried in a footnote in a 1982 essay by Smith in which he reviewed the controversy surrounding his 1973 publications. Taking to task a learned article that read the presence of the youth who flees when Jesus is arrested as if his nakedness could simply be ignored or read as an allegory, Smith reduces the episode to the phrase “Holy man arrested . . . naked youth escapes” to point to its crucial narrative elements. This is the phrase that Jeffery cites as Smith’s “infamous joke”; he couples it with the “sniggering title,” “Under the Sheet,” of a reply that Smith penned in answer to Kermode’s negative review of Jesus the Magician (1978).26 Kermode was much disappointed by what he took to be a sequel to the 1973 books that he had found persuasive and on which, as we have seen, he sought to explain Markan secrecy as a matter of formal patterning. Smith refuses to see his new book as a sequel and suspects Kermode’s dismissal of it, presumably because of the attacks his findings had aroused: “The question ‘what was Jesus doing, alone at night, with a young man wearing only a sheet?’ is apt to elicit a snigger from the modern reader, but the answer implied by the snigger cannot be the one the evangelist intended to suggest,” Smith wrote in his letter. Jeffery thinks that Smith invites and denies the snigger he invites. These recent attacks on Smith follow upon an initial review of Secret Gospel to which Smith alludes in a postscript he wrote to accompany the 1982 republication of the book, commenting on the “absurd intimation that I forged the whole thing . . . generally received with the contempt it deserved” (Secret Gospel, 141n8). Charges of forgery were rife for quite a while

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since it appeared that the manuscript Smith had found was no longer to be seen at Mar Saba. In fact, the document had been seen by other scholars in 1976, indeed, had been photographed in color; these photos were published only in 2000. By that time, the document was no longer at Mar Saba, having been removed to the Patriarchal Library in Jerusalem, where— once again—it cannot be located. This time Smith cannot be presumed to have secreted it. It is rather supposed that the manuscript was “concealed by certain well-meaning persons . . . for reasons of piety,” who wanted to hide documents that suggest “that the mystery initiation may have involved a homosexual encounter between Jesus and a young man raised from the dead,” as Charles Hedrick and Nikolaos Olympion report in the essay in which they published the photos.27 The recent attacks on Smith thus follow upon attempts to repudiate his discovery and would relegate the manuscripts of Clement’s letter and the Secret Mark he quotes to the obscurity that Smith contends they suffered as Christianity took doctrinal form in the second century. Hedrick, in “Secret Mark: Moving on from Stalemate,” his contribution to Ancient Gospel, points to what is perhaps crucial in this nasty wrangling about Secret Mark for the argument I have been making about Marks in this book. How do we determine authenticity for any of the gospels, he asks. Canonical Mark “is a modern scholarly reconstruction of a presumed ‘original Mark,’ ” he continues (46); we do not have an original, only versions. Smith himself, in Secret Gospel, worried that the Markan document he found was so like canonical Mark that it “looked like the result of imitation” (41). Indeed, he had the same worry about the letter from Clement: “The similarities to Clement’s style are so close that they can be explained only in two ways: either this was written by Clement or it is a deliberate and careful imitation, not to say a forgery” (27). This is a point that Hedrick also stresses: the proof of forgery is as easily proof of authenticity. Smith seemed to believe that Secret Mark might well be an imitation of Mark and yet might also shed light on an original Mark that had been suppressed. In Clement of Alexandria, he comments that “canonical Mk. is the end product of editorial reworking, in the course of which it was sometimes expanded, sometimes cut down. . . . The origin of the longer text [i.e., of Secret Mark] must remain part of the larger problem of the origin of canonical Mk.” (Clement, 280). As he puts it in Secret Gospel, if Secret Mark is an expanded canonical Mark, we do know something about what that would look like: “The canonical Gospels of Matthew and Luke are generally thought by scholars to be such expansions” (Secret Gospel, 39), and contractions as well, Smith might have added, since the

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naked youth who flees when Jesus is arrested is not to be found in them. And the youth at whose death Jesus wept (“Behold how he loved him!” [John 11:36]) seems to be the one resurrected in Secret Mark, making for a connection not attested by the synoptic coincidences, its expansions, nor by its rescensions. Smith, in fact, is a follower of Wrede. “There were secrets behind the messianic secret, and they seem to have concerned the nature of ‘the kingdom of God’ ” (Secret Gospel, 80). The secret of that secret at which Smith arrived is like the one Telford saw, of “the kingdom as already, somehow, attainable. . . . It is already here, growing like a mustard seed, spreading like leaven through dough” (88).28 This is why “Betrayal, Flight, and Denial” coexist in a chapter of Mark that also is about the Eucharist, the youth who flees, naked, about a disciple who denies and one who betrays with a kiss. When, at the end, Jesus is not seen in the tomb but only another young man is there, the point is about the incorporation of Jesus— about Jesus himself as incarnate God—that coincides in any follower who might say with Paul, “I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God” (Gal. 2:20). As Smith insists, Paul, and Mark after him, preaches a gospel of the body in which we are all one. Smith was not at the time of writing Secret Gospel a Christian believer, but he claimed to know what the experience was like, having had it in Mar Saba, years before he returned to make his manuscript discovery. It was by attending ser vices there, “which gave me a new understanding of worship as a means of disorientation” in which “one ceased to be in time, one ceased also to be in a definite space” (5). Hypnotic, hallucinatory, “the inner purpose of the Orthodox liturgy: to make the worshipers on earth participants in the perpetual worship of Heaven” (6); this, Smith acknowledges up front, was the discovery he made and made again in the document he found.29 Clement’s letter, Secret Mark, whether early or late, original or imitations, real or forged, point beyond the categorical. They are antinomian texts that speak to the liberty Paul proclaimed about a life beyond life yet in this life. As Alain Badiou argues, Paul’s distinction of flesh and spirit does not refer to a difference between physical life and spiritual afterlife but to ways of living now. Romans 8:6, which reads in KJV, “to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace,” Badiou translates as “The thought of the flesh is death; the thought of the spirit is life,”30 glossing this when he writes, “The death about which Paul tells us, which is ours as much as Christ’s, has nothing biological about it, no more so for that matter than life” (68). If death and life are “thoughts,” they

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suggest two ways of being alive, of being in the world. Secret Mark and canonical Mark speak to the revelations and concealments, the coincidence of revelation and concealment that is the secret growing in the parabolic metaphorics of Mark or the “erotic magic” (Secret Gospel, 131) of incorporation offered in the Eucharist. So it is not, as Kermode contends, that the Carpocratians had their own secret Mark: rather, “the Carpocratian text of the secret Gospel and the text of it used by Clement’s church were basically the same,” Smith contends (Clement, 92). Hence, what Clement says was falsified by the Carpocratians may be his own falsification of this similarity.31 This is also the similarity that refuses to draw a line between the spiritual and the physical, indeed that insists on the here and nowness of another life in this one. Defenders of Smith do not ever acknowledge this possibility; they too refuse the sexuality that his detractors see as the secret that discredits the secret of what persists beyond dualisms of flesh and sprit, of now and then, of earth and heaven, the secrets of what Nancy calls “sense.”32 It is difficult not to ask whether the deniers of homoerotic possibility in the Bible have ever seen paintings inspired by it, the beloved disciple asleep on Jesus’s bosom, the lives of the saints, Titian’s Sebastian, Tintoretto’s Mark, for example, that we have looked at earlier in this book. It is hard, too, not to wonder whether the Venetian importation of an Alexandrian Mark did not convey in its life-as-paint the secret of secret Mark as well. To end: it is worth glancing at what Nancy calls the deconstruction of Christianity. For him, it happens the moment Christianity stopped being a monotheistic religion by introducing the incarnate god/man, which is to say, Christianity always was undoing God’s claim to be one. “With the figure of Christ comes the renunciation of divine power.”33 The messianic secret persists to call into question why divine providence requires the Incarnation and death of Jesus. Indeed, following Giorgio Agamben, it persists in the divine need for glory that lies behind the divine act of creation. “Why must God be continually praised,” Agamben asks, when he creates humans to fall and redeems them through the Crucifixion?34 New possibilities for humans—for the body—he argues are opened by divine failure in what Agamben calls the time that remains, a new time created precisely by the failure of the apocalyptic promise of the Crucifixion. For Slavoj Žižek, it signals a “New Beginning”: “a pure-empty sign, and we have to

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work to generate its meaning.”35 Nancy, Badiou, Agamben, and Žižek do not agree in all points about the deconstruction of Christianity, and this is not the place to parse their arguments, but they each point, in their own way, to what Žižek calls the perverse core of Christianity—its generative secret marks.

acknowledgments

The idea for this book was prompted by a 2008 visit to Cairo (on the way to Cyprus at the invitation of Maria Margaroni); it opened my eyes to the many axes that intersect with the multiple figures that go under the name of St. Mark. I am grateful for the occasions I have had to present versions of this book as I was writing it; to Tim (Trace) Peterson for an invitation to participate in the CUNY Graduate Center series called, after Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Tendencies: Poetics and Practice” in March 2012 when I talked about questions of word and image raised by Titian’s St. Mark altarpiece along with Michael Moon on Pasolini’s Arabian Nights and Byron Kim on his extraordinary inscribed Sunday Paintings of atmospheric effects in the sky. My thanks to Laura Kolb, who invited me to join the University of Chicago Renaissance Seminar in April 2012, when I engaged in lively conversation about St.  Mark Preaching in Alexandria with the many graduate student participants (launched by Caryn O’Connell’s thoughtful response to my work), and appreciated the enthusiasm of Richard Strier for my project, and the engagement of Joshua Scodel, Bradin Cormack, Maud Ellmann, and Jennifer Scappettone; Scappettone’s Killing the Moonlight has proved to be inspiring. My thanks to Joan Landes and Robert Caserio for their invitation to the Pennsylvania State University to be a principal speaker in the 2012–13 Committee for Early Modern Studies series on “Materialism, Modernity, and Enlightenment,” where I offered thoughts about Tintoretto’s Miracle of the Slave (and was delighted to meet Vincent Bruyère). My thanks to James Kearney, who invited me to be a keynote speaker at the 2017 Early Modern Center conference on “The Ephemeral” at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I spoke again about Tintoretto. I was pleased to participate in such a stimulating event, to meet Heidi Craig and Stacie Vos, and to see, after too many years, Aranye Fradenburg and to scheme with her and Eileen Joy on a future project we will do together. My thanks to Karen Newman for a 2017 invitation to talk 143

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at Brown, as I have been doing happily over the years since I taught there. I record the pleasure of having friends like Stephen and Mary Jo Foley and Susan Bernstein in the audience, as well as James Kuzner and Rick Rambuss, former Johns Hopkins dissertation students, now on the Brown faculty; additional thanks to James and Laurel Flinn for tea and the company of the enchanting Edith and Celia. Once again I thank Tom Brooks and Karen for hospitality and friendship that now extends over thirty years. I owe thanks for research assistance to Mary Car ter, David Ritchie, Brent Dawson, and Aaron Goldsman. Carole Hahn joined me in my most recent trip to Venice to see the paintings of Mark that have intrigued me for years; Colin Talley has been interested to hear my thoughts about the Markan scriptures. Hal Rogers helped me over and again to work through issues in the writing inseparable from my life. Sharon Cameron and Marcie Frank remain supportive and inspiring friends. Michael Moon has cheerfully read too many versions of this book over the years and has always kept me going (and, I trust, always will; I aim to reciprocate). I am happy once again to be publishing with Fordham University Press, to be working again with Richard Morrison and Tom Lay, and grateful to Tom for the interest and care he has taken (including enlisting Nate Svogun to sort out the images), not least in finding two responsive readers for the manuscript, Richard Rambuss and Amy Knight Powell; I am especially thankful to her for welcoming it as a contribution to art history, which she has so splendidly advanced in her extraordinary Depositions. Thanks too to Eric Newman and to Kathleen Meyer for much appreciated light copy editing. I was fortunate enough to have had lunch with Helen Tartar just a couple of weeks before she was killed in a car accident on March 3, 2014, and to tell her about this project, still in a fairly inchoate state then. Helen immediately grasped what I had to say, “got it” faster than I yet had. I wish she were alive to receive this book and hope it would have moved her to the chortle of pleasure she displayed then. After working with her for more than twenty-five years, I have found it almost unbearable not to be able to give her in person the book that I had promised her.

notes

preface 1. C. Clifton Black, Mark: Images of an Apostolic Interpreter (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994). 2. On the various apocryphal texts, see Birger A. Pearson, “Earliest Christian ity in Egypt: Some Observations,” in The Roots of Egyptian Christianity, ed. Pearson and James E. Goehring, 132–56 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), esp. 137–45 on “The Mark Legend.” 3. Thomas C. Oden, The African Memory of Mark (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2011). 4. The importance of these paintings is noted by Gabriele Matino in “Il ciclo narrativo per la sala dell’albergo della Scuola grande di San Marco: Contesto e contenuti,” in La Scuola grande di San Marco e le scuole in Venezia tra religiosità laici e funzione sociale, ed. Pierandrea Moro, Gherardo Ortalli, and Mario Po’ (Rome: Viella, 2015), 83–99, when he describes them as the first monumental cycle dedicated to Mark (“primo monumentale ciclo pittorico dedicato al santo patrono dell Serenissima”), a point he then partially rescinds at the bottom of p. 84, recalling an earlier cycle in the Crociferi. 5. I quote Alberti from On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), 77. Warburg cites Alberti in his first publication, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring” (1893); see Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Foundation, 1999), 95–96. Georges Didi-Huberman argues strenuously for Warburg as an alternative model for art historians in Confronting Images, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), and The Surviving Image, trans. Harvey L. Mendelsohn (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017). The points Warburg makes in the Botticelli essay about Alberti’s animation of the inanimate are crucial to his notion of life as instanced by the revival of ancient images in Renaissance art and its ability to connect with viewers by means of what he termed Pathosformeln.

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Notes to pages ix–4

6. Jennifer Scappettone, Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 37. 7. T. J. Clark, “Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage,” New Literary History 45.2 (Spring 2014): 246. 8. William R. Rearick, “La Scuola Grande di San Marco: La tradizione artistica del passato e le prospettive future,” in La Scuola Grande di San Marco: I saperi e l’arte, ed. Nelli-Elena Vanzan Marchini, 33–64 (Treviso: Canova, 2001), suggests that Bellini influenced the Lombardi brothers’ designs for the sculpture for the facade (36–38). 9. A letter dated Sept. 4, 1845, quoted in Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 94. 10. I have been citing from the introductory paragraph of “Saint Mark, Evangelist,” 242–43, in Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, 2 vols., trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:242–48. 11. Didi-Huberman’s exhaustive study of Warburg in The Surviving Image brilliantly contextualizes his thought but then seeks to make it an anticipation of Freud’s, which seems to me a reductive move. His Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), hints at the same proposition but also is intent on showing how the Christian terms contemporary with Fra Angelico’s painting also illuminate his practices of disfiguration. On Warburg, Didi-Huberman is strongly influenced by Giorgio Agemben’s 1975 essay, “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science,” trans. Daniel HellerRoazen, in Potentialities (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 89–103, which argues that in overcoming conscious/unconscious distinctions, Warburg’s method remains nameless. In Ninfe (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2007), Agamben pursues one of Warburg’s favored Pathosformeln as an image of the life-bearing function of the image: “Le Pathosformeln sono fatte di Tempo” (18; the emotive formulas are made of time). Agamben writes about Paul in The Time That Remains, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), Alain Badiou in Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003). I compare these texts in The Seeds of Things (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 20–22, 25. 1. atmospherics (bellini) 1. I’ll be quoting in my text from David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Rosand dates the altar to 1508–9 in Painting in Sixteenth- Century Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 37, while Peter Humfrey,

Notes to pages 4–13

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The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 242, dates it to 1511–12. 2. C. Clifton Black, Mark: Images of an Apostolic Interpreter (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), 188. 3. Titian’s painting could be compared to Bartolomeo Vivarini’s 1474 triptych (Frari) in which Mark enthroned occupies the central panel while John the Baptist, in the left panel, points to him as if he were Jesus. 4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 5. 5. Robert Kiely does a good job of documenting this in Blessed and Beautiful (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 133–41, a discussion that culminates with Titian’s St. Mark. 6. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3. Kiely also alludes to Steinberg in the chapter “Manliness and Saintliness,” in Blessed and Beautiful, 130. 7. On this, see Mark W. Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 185 ff., where Titian achieves the position of preeminent artist in Dolce’s account. 8. Thomas E. A. Dale, “Inventing a Sacred Past: Pictorial Narratives of St. Mark the Evangelist in Aquileia and Venice, ca. 1000–1300,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 48 (1994): 54. 9. The Scuola Grande di San Marco was one of six so distinguished in contrast to the many scuole piccoli, essentially trade union organizations rather than the scuole grande gatherings of wealthy citizens barred from direct government participation, who shared financial and cultural interests. 10. Rona Goffen, Giovanni Bellini (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 271. 11. Peter Humfrey, “The Bellinesque Life of St. Mark Cycle for the Scuola Grande di San Marco in Venice in Its Original Arrangement,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 48.2 (1985): 226. Selections from the documents can be found in Patricia Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 291–95; Philip L. Sohm, The Scuola Grande di San Marco, 1437–1550 (New York: Garland, 1982), 249–354; Pietro Paoletti, La Scuola Grande di San Marco (Venice: Commune di Venezia, 1929), 137–60. 12. See Isabella Botti, “Tra Venezia e Alessandria: I teleri belliniani per la Scuola Grande di San Marco,” Venezia Cinquecento 3 (1992): 33–73, from which I cite below. Gabriele Matino, “Il ciclo narrativo per la sala dell’albergo della Scuola grande di San Marco: contesto e contenuti,” in La Scuola grande di San Marco e le scuole in Venezia, ed. Pierandrea Moro,

148

Notes to pages 13–18

Gherardo Ortalli, and Mario Po’, 83–99 (Rome: Viella, 2015), faults Botti for her diffuse discussion (94) but essentially echoes her argument for the economic interests of members of the Scuola as the unifying factor in the albergo cycle, which he extends to the final pair of paintings by Paris Bordone and Palma Vecchio. 13. Examples of this include Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 165; Catarina Schmidt Arcangeli, “ ‘Orientalist’ Painting in Venice, 15th–17th Centuries,” in Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797, 121–39 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), esp. 128–29. 14. Julian Raby, Venice, Dürer and the Oriental Mode (London: Islamic Art Publications, 1982), 83; Jürg Meyer zur Capellen, Gentile Bellini (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1985), is likewise mesmerized by cataloguing headgear (92–93). 15. Paul Hills, Venetian Colour (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 171. 16. It is nonetheless from just such a position that the perspective coheres in Leonardo’s Last Supper, a common quattrocento practice as Leo Steinberg avers in Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 122. 17. See Phyllis Williams Lehmann, Cyriacus of Ancona’s Egyptian Visit and Its Reflection in Gentile Bellini and Hieronymus Bosch (Locust Valley, N.Y.: J. J. Augustin, 1977). 18. In the version of the Martyrdom of the Holy Apostle and Evangelist Mark of Alexandria edited and translated from PG 115, cols. 164–69, by Allen Dwight Callahan in his Harvard University 1992 dissertation, “The ‘Acts of Mark’: An Introduction and Commentary,” Mark is martyred on Passover on a date that “coincided with the festive procession of Serapis” (4). 19. Caroline Campbell, “The Bellini, Bessarion and Byzantium,” in Bellini and the East, ed. Caroline Campbell and Alan Chong, 36–59 (London: National Gallery, 1995), 55; Lehmann, Cyriacus, 7. 20. Peter Humfrey, Painting in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), quotation on 11, and from Humfrey, La pittura Veneta del Rinascimento a Brera (Florence: Cantini, 1990). 21. I cite from Charles Dempsey, “Renaissance Hieroglyphic Studies and Gentile Bellini’s Saint Mark Preaching in Alexandria,” in Hermeticism and the Renaissance, ed. Ingrid Merkel and Allen Debus, 342–65 (Washington, D.C.: Folger Books, Associated University Presses, 1988), 358; Lehmann, Cyriacus, 5. 22. Brian Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 164; the discussion is on 158–64.

Notes to pages 20–25

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23. The illustration from Cesare Vecellio’s 1590 De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diverse parti del mondo is reproduced as fig. 15 in Lehmann, Cyriacus; it is fig. 26 in Raby, Venice, 49. 24. Dolce in fact connects the liveness of painting to the inanimate life of the vegetative soul in ancient philosophy and early modern thought indebted to the notion of the tripartite or triple soul; see Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino, 116–19. 25. Dempsey attempts to decipher the hieroglyphs on the obelisk, using Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Polifili (1499) as his guide. He translates the hieroglyphic into this Latin utterance: “Serapis subjectis suis vovit libens: ex ignorantia invidiaque in spe futurae salvationis (or even in signo crucio) fortuna sua descrescet” (“Renaissance Hieroglyphic Studies,” 362). Lehmann (and Botti after her) takes the two Latinate letters V and L to point to the reign of Doge Loredano, and through him to the ultimate meaning of the painting, the triumph of Venice. That two dif ferent decipherments of the inscription arrive at this same point is a sign that it is not being read so much as being interpolated into a foregone conclusion. Everything adds up to one thing. Yet, as Dempsey well knows, the Renaissance fascination with Egyptian hieroglyphics lies in their sharing in a perennial wisdom, not in propounding some ideological message about Venice. 26. For the basic iconography, see George Kaftal, Iconography of the Saints in the Painting of North East Italy (Florence: Sansoni, 1978), col. 669–88. There was a painting on the subject of Mark preaching in Alexandria by Lattanzio da Rimini, no longer extant, among the four St. Mark paintings done for the Crociferi church located near the Scuola Grande di San Marco in the late 1490s, and it may therefore be cited as the lone precedent for Bellini. I refer below to Kaftal, fig. 848, St. Peter Approves the Gospel Written by St. Mark. 27. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, 2 vols., trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1: 243. 28. Eusebius, The History of the Church, trans. G. A. Williamson (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965), 88. Black, Mark, cites from a dif ferent translation of Eusebius 2.15.1–2, going on to note that Eusebius also cites Clement to the effect that Peter was at best neutral in his appreciation of Mark’s efforts (6.14.7, p. 254 in Williamson edition). 29. See Robert S. Nelson’s review of four books on the history of Istanbul, Art Bulletin 93.1 (March 2011): 101–4, for this point. Rather than furthering accounts in which Mehmed II destroyed Constantinople, the emphasis is on continuity: “Constantinople was not erased in 1453. . . . its vital mercantile Italian quarter was comparatively little affected” (101).

150

Notes to pages 25–39

30. See Lucette Valensi, Venise et la sublime porte (Paris: Hachette, 1987). 31. William R. Rearick, “La Scuola Grande di San Marco: La tradizione artistica del passato e la prospettive future,” in La Scuola Grande di San Marco, ed. Nelli-Elena Vanzia Marchini, 33–64 (Treviso: Canova, 2001), also finds Giovanni’s hand in the painting. 32. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 2 vols., trans. Gaston du C. De Vere (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1927), 1:605. 33. I cite this information from Sanda Miller, “Giovanni Mansueti: A Little Master of the Venetian Quattrocento,” Revue Roumaine d’Histoire de l’Art, Série Beaux-Arts 15 (1978): 78. 34. J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle, A History of Painting in North Italy, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1912), 1:224. 35. See Carlo Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell’arte, 2 vols. (Padua: Cartallier, 1835), 1:69. 36. In their essays on the paintings for the albergo, Matino (“Ciclo narrativo”) and Rearick (“Scuola Grande di San Marco”) barely mention Mansueti’s contribution although his are the largest number by a single painter—three out of seven. 37. For accounts that determine Mansueti’s accuracy, see the notes on The Arrest and Trial of St. Mark (the Crociferi painting now in the Lichtenstein Collection in Vienna) (plate 8) and Baptism of Anianus (Brera) (plate 9) by Trinita Kennedy in Venice and the Islamic World, 304–5. 38. Deborah Howard, Venice and the East (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 75. 39. “Il soggetto, così apparentemente inconsueto alla pittura veneziana (ma forse tale ci appare ora perché altre opere simili andarono perdute), è legato alla leggenda riportate nel Codice Marciano vii 2021.” Giovanna Nepi Sciré, Gallerie dell’Accademia; I teleri della Sala dell’Albergo nella Scuola di San Marco (Venice: Soprintendenza ai Beni Artistici e Storici di Venezia/Electa, 1995), 45. 40. Lionello Puppi, “La ‘Consega dell’anello al doge’: Anatomia di un dipinto,” in Paris Bordon e il suo tempo (Atti del Convegno Internazionale di studi) (Treviso: Canova, 1987), 95–108, details what he calls “un enigma dei due anelli” (100–102). 41. Philip Sohm, “Palma Vecchio’s Sea Storm: A Political Allegory,” RACAR: Revue d’Art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review 6.2 (1979–80): 85–96, details controversies over the attribution of the painting to Giorgione (87–88) and appreciates the aesthetic effect of the painting. He ends his consideration of the painting by reading it as a political allegory about the shipwreck of the state.

Notes to pages 40–44

151

2. gr avity (tintoretto) 1. Standard sources that I have consulted and quote in my text include Pietro Paoletti, La Scuola Grande di San Marco (Venice: Comune di Venezia, 1929); Carlo Bernari, L’opera completa del Tintoretto (Milan: Rizzoli, 1970); Terisio Pignatti, ed., Le scuole di Venezia (Milan: Electa, 1981); Rodolfo Pallucchini and Paola Rossi, Tintoretto: Le opere sacre e profane, 2 vols. (Milan: Electa, 1982). Critical studies cited include David Rosand, Painting in Sixteenth- Century Venice (1982; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Tom Nichols, Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity (London: Reaktion, 1999); and Roland Krischel, Jacopo Tintoretto: Das Sklavenwunder (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994). 2. I cite the Italian text from Rosand, Painting, 234n3; I have consulted the English translation by Thomas Caldecott Chubb, The Letters of Pietro Aretino (N.p.: Archon, 1967), 251–52, as well as the one in the invaluable compendium of documents and commentary by Anna Laura Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed (Ravenna: Longo, 1983), 16–17. 3. Vasari’s account of Tintoretto is included in his life of Battista Franco in Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 2 vols., trans. Gaston du C. De Vere (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1927). 4. See Georges Didi-Huberman’s book on Aby Warburg, The Surviving Image, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017). The survival of the image has to do with its anachronism. I cite Jennifer Scappettone, Killing the Moonlight (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 30. 5. Carlo Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell’arte, 2 vols. (Padua: Cartallier, 1837), 2:174. English excerpts are available in Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 34–41; Catherine Enggass and Robert Enggass translate The Life of Tintoretto and His Children Domenico and Marietta (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984). 6. Even the Raphael cartoon that Robert Echols champions as a precedent in “ ‘Jacopo nel corso, presso al palio’: Dal soffitto per l’Aretino al Miracolo dello Schiavo,” in Jacopo Tintoretto Nel Quarto Centenario della morte, ed. Paolo Rossi and Lionello Puppi, 77–81 (Venice: Poligrafo, 1996), was for a tapestry, not a painting. 7. English versions vary significantly: “bizarre inventions; the relics of which are still contained within the secret room of his peculiar thoughts” (Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 36); “bizarre effect. On these foundations Tintoretto built the structure of his program” (Enggass and Enggass, Life of Tintoretto, 17). 8. Nichols adds this point in the revised and expanded edition of Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity (London: Reaktion, 2015), 76.

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Notes to pages 46–49

9. David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 10. Jodi Cranston, The Muddied Mirror: Materiality and Figuration in Titian’s Late Paintings (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), has allied late Titian to painterly features usually associated with Tintoretto; however, for her, the materiality of paint exposed in Titian provides a negative critique, an obstacle to the realization of humanistic and spiritual truths. One might say that Rosand makes Tintoretto too much like Titian (it is certainly an ambition of Miracle of the Slave that it look like a Titian) were that not too easy to subscribe to a rather reductive notion of Titian often invoked to contrast with Tintoretto’s idiosyncrasies. In Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance (London: Reaktion, 2013), Nichols offers a version of Titian that makes him seem much more like Tintoretto in the distance he took from Venetian patrician identification, attributing their difference to a conflict between Titian’s individualizing and Eu ropean ambitions and Tintoretto’s more communal, if not patrician, affiliations. 11. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, 2 vols., trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:243. This is also almost the first thing C. Clifton Black, Mark: Images of an Apostolic Interpreter (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), says as he begins to dismantle the biographical Mark, the person called John, but usually known as Mark: “a large hammer,” Black glosses this renomination (Mark: Images, 1). 12. Peter Humfrey, Painting in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 225. Haylie Swenson has pointed out to me that there may be an exception to what Humfrey claims: the babe in its mother’s arms may be the only figure in the painting who sees the flying figure. 13. Timothy Raser, The Simplest of Signs: Victor Hugo and the Language of Images in France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 173. Raser ultimately faults Jean-Paul Sartre’s aesthetics for their refusal of a linguistic model. Sartre’s analysis of Tintoretto is championed in the final chapter of Guillaume Cassegrain, Tintoret (Paris: Hazan, 2010), “Tintoret et ses doubles,” for making clear the ideological stakes among Tintoretto’s critics, apparent, for instance, in Thierry Lenain, “Le roman du Tintoret Sartrien et ses implications philosophiques,” Annales de l’Institut de Philosophie et Sciences Morales (1987): 107–30, who is sure that every thing Sartre sees can be contained within Renaissance humanist culture. 14. Clive Hart, Images of Flight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 74. 15. See, e.g., Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002).

Notes to pages 49–56

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16. I quote Veronica Franco, Poems and Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Ann Rosalind Jones and Margaret F. Rosenthal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 37, paying tribute to Tintoretto for a portrait of her that she felt was an uncanny double. 17. All citations in my text are from Jean-Paul Sartre, “Saint Marc et son double,” Obliques 24–25 (1981): 171–202. I briefly consider this essay in The Seeds of Things (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 28–30. Sartre’s essay was to have been part of a book on Tintoretto. Two other portions have been translated into English, but not this long unedited piece of writing. Humfrey, Rosand, and Nichols ignore it, although Nichols does cite Sartre’s biographical essay on Tintoretto, “The Venetian Pariah,” in Essays in Existentialism, ed. Wade Baskin, 335–87 (New York: Citadel, 1965, 1993). The other part of Sartre’s project is “Tintoretto: St. George and the Dragon,” trans. John Mathews, Antaeus 54 (Spring 1985): 76–93. 18. This confirms Sartre’s sense that muscular does not necessarily match sexual performance (in Genet); there is perhaps an echo in Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave,” October 43 (Winter 1987): 208, when the pickup turns out to be a queen. 19. Burton B. Fredericksen, “Tintoretto’s Sixteenth- Century Superman,” Art News (March 1981): 166–67. Krischel picks up on Sartre’s Superman comparison (55). 20. Cf. the way Rosand turns Tintoretto’s fleeting brushstrokes into spiritual marks in “Tintoretto e gli Spiriti nel Pennello,” in Rossi and Puppi, Tintoretto nel Quarto Centenario, 133–37. 21. Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002). 22. Sartre presumably has in mind a conversation of Cézanne’s with Joachim Gasquet recorded in his 1921 book, found in English in Conversations with Cezanne, ed. Michael Dorin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): “Yes, Tintoretto, Rubens, they are what it means to be a painter. As Beethoven is the musician or Plato the philosopher” (138). 23. Philip Sohm, Pittoresco: Marco Boschini, His Critics, and Their Critique of Painterly Brushwork in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 7. 24. Nichols will not allow the poligrafi with whom he affiliates Tintoretto the status of “modernists avant la lettre” (Tintoretto, 98), a historicizing that I am here wanting to counter with a position he might call antihistoricist, but which Madhavi Menon and I have defended as “unhistoricist” in “Queering History,” PMLA 120.5 (October 2005): 1608–17. 25. Michel Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, trans. Matthew Barr (London: Tate, 2009).

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Notes to pages 56–63

26. Giorgio Agamben, “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science,” Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 94. I will be citing Ninfe from “Nymphs,” trans. Amanda Minervini, in Releasing the Image, ed. Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010). 27. Quoted in Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone, 2004), 305. 28. Georges Didi-Huberman, “Before the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty of Anachronism,” trans. Peter Mason, in Compelling Visuality, ed. Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnberg, 31–44 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 33. 29. Jean Genet, Fragment of the Artwork, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003). 30. Documentation can be found in Paoletti, Scuola Grande, 166ff.; Pallucchini and Rossi, Tintoretto, 65–68, 183–85; and Pignatti, Scuole di Venezia, 137ff. 31. Sergio Marinelli, Il ritrovamento del corpo di San Marco di Jacobo Tintoretto (Milan: TEA, 1996), 18–19. 32. Erasmus Weddigen, “Il secondo Pergola di San Marco e la Loggetta del Sansovino: Preliminari al Miracolo dello schiavo di Jacopo Tintoretto,” Venezia Cinquecento 1.1 (1991): 101–29; the promise for future discussion appears on 126n25. 33. Roland Krischel, Jacobo Tintoretto, 1519–1594 (Cologne: Könemann, 2000), 72. 34. Marinelli cites Ruskin in Italian translation; I cite from John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (London: George Allen, 1903), The Works of Ruskin Library Edition, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 9:32. Marinelli’s invocation of Ruskin opens the subject at the center of the next chapter of this book. 35. See Rosand, Painting in Sixteenth- Century Venice, 137. 36. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 2 vols., trans. Gaston du C. De Vere (New York: Knopf, 1996), 2:513. 37. Not that labels affixed to these paintings necessarily clarify subject matter. The Trafugamento is identified in the Accademia as the 828 stealing of Mark’s body by Venetian merchants, a questionable reading (it is more likely a scene right after the martyrdom, when Mark’s body was saved from being burned). The Brera label for the Ritrovamento also claims that it represents the 828 event, Ridolfi’s interpretation, which has been convincingly questioned even if that has not led to some new consensus. 38. See Le Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia: Catalogo (Venice: Carlo Ferrari, 1949), 98–99.

Notes to pages 64–76

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39. Elaine M. A. Banks, “Tintoretto’s Religious Imagery of the 1560s,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1978, attempts a similar collapse, comparing the Trafugamento to a small oil sketch of the “same” scene in Brussels (Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts) that is usually assumed to have been done by Tintoretto in conjunction with his commission for the Scuola Grande di San Marco. There is no evidence for this; we do not know when it was made or its relation, if any, to the paintings produced for the Scuola. See Pallucchini and Rossi, Tintoretto, 154–55, for basic information. 40. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, 2 vols., trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:246. 41. Latin text cited from Jacobi a Voragine, Legenda aurea, ed. Theodor Grässe (Dresden: Arnold, 1846), 265. 42. Peter Humfrey, La Pittura veneta del Rinascimento a Brera (Florence: Cantini, 1990), 178. 43. On this, see Rosanna Tozzi Pedrazzi, “Le storie di Domenico Tintoretto per la Scuola di S. Marco,” Arte Veneta 18 (1984): 73–88. 44. Many of the Domenico Tintorettos still hang in the Sala Capitolare, though not all where they originally hung, while the decor of the former albergo has, since 2013, featured full-scale reproductions of the paintings that once were there, a welcome change from the dilapidated condition of the rooms when I first visited them in 2010. 3. stones (of venice) 1. Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), and refer to Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 2. Georges Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017). 3. Paul Hills, Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass, 1250–1550 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), ix. 4. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010). They offered a foretaste of the book in “Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism,” Art Bulletin 87.3 (September 2005): 403–15, in which Panofsky is engaged; it appears with a response by Charles Dempsey (416–21), which insists on historical difference; one by Michael Cole (421–24), which wants to ally the simultaneous moments argued by Nagel and Wood as rather a conflict of medieval versus early modern (a refusal of their project); only Claire Farago (424–29), in her Marxist response, grasps and endorses their project, inveighing against art

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Notes to pages 76–83

history as follows: “the legitimization of the ‘reality’ of history has often been cast in terms of legitimizing a single interpretive truth” (427). Amy Knight Powell, Depositions (New York: Zone, 2012), similarly takes paintings of the deposition as occasions to explore their depositioning. 5. Among them would be Leo Steinberg, Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper (New York: Zone, 2001), which demonstrates the multitemporality of representation. Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), addresses the crisis in art history occasioned by theory in order to suggest that the history of art history is far less univocal than its antitheoretical defenders suppose. 6. Jennifer Scappettone, Killing the Moonlight (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 7. In an admiring review of Venetian Colour, Andrew Morrall, Art Bulletin 74.1 (March 2002): 172–76, worries the metaphoricity of Hills’s method and wishes for a historical method more like that of Michael Baxandall. Hills has written about Baxandall’s 1972 Painting and Experience in Fifteenth- Century Italy in Burlington Magazine 153 (June 2011): 404–8, part of a series of retrospective reviews of classic works of art history, emphasizing that Baxandall’s concern is about the development of pictorial intelligence, and that the connections he makes to socioeconomic realities are themselves metaphors and analogies aimed at finding terms for looking. This is indeed a point Baxandall insists upon in later work, especially in Words for Pictures (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003). 8. Hills, Venetian Colour, 32, quoting John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 2, in the Library Edition of The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903–12): 10:88. I cite Ruskin from this edition unless other wise noted. 9. Scappettone, Killing the Moonlight, “The Entanglement of Memory: Reciprocal Interference of Present and Past in Ruskin’s Venetian Histories” (43–86), links anachronism to what Scappettone terms Ruskin’s empiricism as well as to his embrace of the momentary nature of attention and consciousness. 10. See Robert S. Nelson, Hagia Sophia, 1850–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), chap. 3, “Stones of Byzantium: John Ruskin and The Stones of Venice” (51–72); Thomas F. A. Dale, “Cultural Hybridity in Medieval Venice: Reinventing the East at San Marco after the Fourth Crusade,” in San Marco, Byzantium, and the Myths of Venice, ed. Henry Maguire and Robert S. Nelson, 151–91 (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010); Deborah Howard, Venice and the East (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), also credits Ruskin throughout her authoritative study.

Notes to pages 89–94

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11. Ruskin anticipates the argument in Markus Gabriel, Why the World Does Not Exist, trans. Gregory S. Moss (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), an argument against an all-encompassing world in favor of multiple worlds. For Gabriel, as for Ruskin, these allow a role for human creativity that exceeds some supposedly enclosed world that has no use for humans. 12. T. J. Clark, “Veronese’s ‘Allegories of Love,’ ” London Review of Books 36.7 (April 3, 2014): 7–12. 13. Robert Hewison, Ruskin on Venice (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), notes these circumstances on p. 150. 14. A standard survey of the trope is a 1940 essay by Rensselaer W. Lee, reissued as Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967). 15. T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), e.g., 40–41, 85–86, 120–21, 144–45, 148–49; these constitute part of the “Experiment in Art Writing” that subtitles this book on Poussin, acutely aware of the difficulty of the enterprise of turning paint into words. See also “A Lesson of Giotto,” Threepenny Review (Summer 2015), which quotes from Ruskin’s Giotto and His Works in Padua as well as from Paradiso 24.26–27. 16. Clark further considers questions of standing and gravity in “Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage: An Interpretation,” New Literary History 45 (2014): 221–52, esp. 230–35, in the context of the notion that “paintings . . . are not propositions” (230), and in relation to the question of the human (247–48). 17. See Xavier F. Salomon, Veronese (London: National Gallery, 2014), 181–91, a volume that accompanied the March 19 to June 15, 2014, National Gallery exhibit, “Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice,” which also occasioned Clark’s essay (“Veronese’s ‘Allegories of Love’ ”). 18. Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 256. 19. For some political implications of this thinking, see Daniel Williams, “Atmospheres of Liberty: Ruskin in the Clouds,” ELH 82.1 (Spring 2015): 141–82. 20. Allison Clark, in a letter responding to Clark’s essay, found in the online version of it (http://www.lrb.co.uk /v36/n07/tj-clark /veroneses -allegories-of-love), registers her discomfort with his calling Veronese a “realist” in his gendered depictions of male power. “I had thought that what I was reading was concerned with a view of the human that was larger than sexual politics.” Another letter, from David Wright, criticizes Clark for not being sufficiently historical, by which Wright means providing literary

158

Notes to pages 94–106

sources that explain away the visual to which Clark responds so acutely. Needless to say, Wright is an academic art historian. 21. See Kenneth Clark, Ruskin Today (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 353. 22. Christopher Newall, John Ruskin: Artist and Observer (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2014). 23. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 5.423–25, in Milton, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 24. Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. J. A. Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 23. 25. Hills offers an illustration of a similar phenomenon in Venetian Colour, figs. 22 and 23, where the openings in the windows on the Porta di Sant’Alipio of San Marco read as black designs when seen from outside, as blue sky when seen from within. 26. We could find another corollary to Ruskin in Milton, this time in his description of the third day of Creation when his materialism leads him to imagine the birth of mountains from “great mother” earth (Paradise Lost, 7.281), softened to conceive: “Immediately the mountains high appear / Emergent, and their broad bare backs upheave / Into the clouds, their tops ascend the sky” (7.285–87). 27. I cite book and paragraph numbers from John Ruskin, Praeterita (New York: Everyman, 2005), 1.245. 28. See Jeffrey Nealon, Plant Theory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016). 29. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), extends the impulses of ecocriticism. These are scrutinized in Tristram Wolff, “Romantic Stone Speech and the Appeal of the Inorganic,” ELH 84.3 (Fall 2017): 617–47. 30. Its title is, in fact, more pointed than the volume, a collection of random talks and not the summa of his thinking on mountains that Ruskin intended (Modern Painting is closer to that, although its thoughts about stones weave in and out of the five volumes ostensibly concerned with the subject named in its title). Still, Deucalion touches on numerous points that bear comparison with Stones, not least in its attention to the anachronistic presence of mountains, their formation by means of glaciers or lava flow, their overstepping boundaries of animate and inanimate, even the connection between stones and food (Ruskin often draws on culinary examples to explain the relationship between stones and the flows that they occasion in their “sculpting” [nature is an artist]).

Notes to pages 106–9

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31. All citations are from the Loeb edition of Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977). 32. For a meditation on the many boundaries that dust crosses, see Michael Marder, Dust (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). 33. As late as St. Mark’s Rest, Ruskin demurs from endorsing the notion that Mark’s remains are buried in San Marco, referring to them as “their imagined treasure” (24:278). 34. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 2nd ed. (1880; repr., New York: Dover, 1989), 152. 35. Adrian Stokes, Stones of Rimini (New York: Schocken, 1969); Stokes, The Quattro Cento (New York: Schocken, 1968). The shared sentence appears in Rimini, 15, and Quattro Cento, 8. 36. Connections between Hills and Stokes are offered in Stephen Kite, “ ‘A Deep and Necessary Commerce’: Venice and the ‘Architecture of Colour-Form,’ ” in The Coral Mind: Adrian Stokes’s Engagement with Architecture, Art History, Criticism, and Psychoanalysis, ed. Stephen Bann, 37–58 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). Taking off from a comment by Richard Wollheim in the introduction to the collection of Stokes’s writing he edited, The Image in Form (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 30, Stokes has been grouped regularly with Ruskin and Walter Pater as an aesthete, e.g., by David Carrier, England and Its Aesthetes: Biography and Taste (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers, 1997), which anthologizes autobiographical writings by the three, and throughout Richard Read, Art and Its Discontents: The Early Life of Adrian Stokes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 37. Adrian Stokes, Venice: An Aspect of Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1945), 4, 6. The book opens with some consideration of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, not mentioned in any of the 1930s books, and offers a correction of his Gothic emphasis and antipathy to the Renaissance. The stones Ruskin loves, Stokes insists, are later—they are identical to what he calls Quattro Cento, not so much a period designation as an effect of stone blossoming and encrustation. Indeed, Stokes is willing to call this a Gothic effect, and he deplores Florentine art for a hatred of stone in a polemic that resembles Ruskin’s against the Renaissance deadness of symmetry. As his reading of a Verrocchio lavabo in Quattro Cento shows, the life in stone for him, as for Ruskin, rests in asymmetries. 38. Adrian Stokes, Inside Out (London: Faber and Faber, 1947), 31. 39. The confluence of gendered and racialized fantasy is the central worry in “Stone Love: Adrian Stokes and the Inside Out,” chap. 4 of Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism (New York: Routledge, 1998).

160

Notes to pages 111–17

40. Leo Bersani, Thoughts and Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). It is worth noting here the importance of astrological thinking for Aby Warburg’s formulations of the afterlife of images, a point that also connects him to Stokes. 41. T. J. Clark, “On Frank Auerbach,” in Frank Auerbach, ed. Catherine Lampert (London: Tate, 2015), 13–14. This sameness and differentiation serve to emblematize an equalizing sociality. 4. secrets 1. An excellent guide to the role Eusebius played in creating an image of Mark is C. Clifton Black, Mark: Images of an Apostolic Interpreter (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994); hereafter cited as Mark: Images. 2. C. Clifton Black, Mark (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2011); hereafter cited as Mark. 3. Gary Wills, What the Gospels Meant (New York: Viking, 2008), 11. The spurious citations are from the twelve verses at the end of the final chapter of Mark that long have been regarded as not part of an original text. 4. Thomas C. Oden and Christopher A. Hall, eds., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament II. Mark (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998), xxvii. 5. Thomas C. Oden, The African Memory of Mark (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2011). 6. For versions of this narrative, see, inter alia, William Telford’s introduction to The Interpretation of Mark, ed. Telford (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), and “The Lives of Mark” by Janice Capel Anderson and Stephen D. Moore in their edited collection, Mark and Method (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 1–27. 7. Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., What Are They Saying about Mark? (New York: Paulist Press, 2004), 62. 8. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), 127. Black refers to this technique as “Markan interpolation, intercalation, interlamination, or sandwich” (Mark, 87). 9. The KJV I am citing is The Holy Bible (New York: American Bible Society, 1969). 10. These protocols of redaction criticism are examined in C. Clifton Black, The Disciples according to Mark (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989; 2nd ed., Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2012). Hugh M. Humphrey, From Q to “Secret” Mark (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), tries to explain the state of the text by tying it to Mark’s supposed biography, from

Notes to pages 117–33

161

amanuensis to Peter in Rome and redactor of Q to Bishop of Alexandria composing a longer text that survives in noncanonical fragments. 11. Black does not support the conclusions of two authoritative commentaries on the Greek text of Mark, both of which acknowledge the textual difficulty but are sure that the longer text, naming Jesus as Christ, the Son of God, must be what “Mark” wrote. See Vincent Taylor, The Gospel according to Mark (1952; repr., New York: St. Martin’s, 1966), 152; C. E. B. Cranfield, The Gospel according to Mark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 38. 12. Milton’s Satan reminds Jesus in Paradise Regained, “All men are sons of God” (4.520). I cite from John Milton, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 13. For a discussion of the authenticity of this text, see Black, Mark: Images, 60–66. 14. On biblical parataxis, see the first chapter of Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953); Auerbach’s essay “Figura,” trans. Ralph Mannheim, is included in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 11–76. The crucial point: “Figural prophecy implies the interpretation of one worldly event through another; the first signifies the second, the second fulfills the first. Both remain historical events; yet both, looked at in this way, have something provisional and incomplete about them; they point to one another and both point to something in the future, something still to come, which will be the actual, real, and definitive event” (58). In The Typological Imaginary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), Kathleen Biddick reads this as a less benign process, one in which fulfillment entails the violent erasure of the figura. 15. Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere, trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 16. Kermode, Genesis of Secrecy, 149n4, quoting C. H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom. 17. Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 21. 18. See William Wrede, The Messianic Secret, trans. J. C. G. Greig (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1971). 19. Harrington, What Are They Saying, 30, cites this claim from Telford’s The Theology of the Gospel of Mark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 86. 20. The avowedly deconstructive Barthesian book on Mark by George Aichele, Jesus Framed (London: Routledge, 1996), wrestles with Kermode to come to a solution in negative theology.

162

Notes to pages 135–40

21. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II, trans. John McKeane (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 10–22. The gist of the essay declares: “There is no sense of sense: this is not, ultimately a negative proposition. It is the affirmation of sense itself—of sensibility, sentiment, significance: the affirmation according to which the world’s existents, by referring to one another, open onto the inexhaustible play of their references. . . . Our true immortality—or eternity—is given precisely by the world as the place of mutual, infinite referral” (12–13). 22. Morton Smith, The Secret Gospel (Middletown, Calif.: Dawn Horse Press, 2005) (the book was initially published in 1973 and reissued in 1982), and Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973). 23. Tony Burke, ed., Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? (Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade Books, 2013). 24. See Stephen C. Carlson, The Gospel Hoax (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2005), and Peter Jeffery, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007). Their contributions to Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery are Carlson, “Can the Academy Protect Itself from One of Its Own? The Case of Secret Mark” (299–307), printed in an appendix since it preceded the 2011 conference, and Jeffery, “Clement’s Mysteries and Morton Smith’s Magic” (212–46). Although I will be examining the attacks on Smith, he has had defenders; the most recent book is Scott G. Brown, Mark’s Other Gospel (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005), whose contribution to Ancient Gospel is “Behind the Seven Veils, I: The Gnostic Life Setting of the Mystic Gospel of Mark” (247–83); also notable are the essays gathered in Marvin Meyer, Secret Gospels (Harrisburg: Trinity Press, 2003), one version of which appears as “The Young Streaker in Secret and Canonical Mark,” in Ancient Gospel (145–56). Black considers Clement’s letter to Theodore for the light it casts on the composition of Mark in Mark: Images (139–45), while Oden adds it to his argument for an Alexandrian Mark (African Memory of Mark, 198–208). 25. A useful brief biographical obituary of Morton Smith by William M. Calder can be found in Gnomon 64.4 (1992): 382–84. 26. Kermode reviewed Jesus the Magician in the New York Review of Books, October 26, 1978; he and Smith exchanged letters in the December 21, 1978, issue. “Under the Sheets” was Smith’s reply to Kermode on February 8, 1979. 27. Charles W. Hedrick with Nicolaos Olympion, “Secret Mark: New Photographs, New Witnesses,” Fourth R 13.5 (2000): 8. 28. In his chapter on Mark in How to Do Things with Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), Joshua Landy concludes his discussion of the metaphorical opacity of the parables of the kingdom by a reading apparently

Notes to pages 140–42

163

congruent with the one I have been offering (“the kingdom of God is now, is here, is spread out upon the earth, and all we have to do is enter it” [61]), except that its discovery of the here and now involves the requirement that we “look down upon sensory phenomena,” precisely not what the parable suggests despite Landy’s claim to value its figurative capacities. 29. Later, in Secret Gospel, Smith phrases this understanding in terms that could rile believers, as when he describes Jesus’s power over schizophrenics (109), or the disciples’ susceptibility to Jesus’s possession as a sign of their mental instability (110), and the effects of “psychological contagion” (111) among the early believers. These remarks echo Wrede, who dwells on how the demonically possessed best apprehend Jesus. 30. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 55. 31. So, as Smith contends in Secret Gospel, on the one hand Clement’s protests against “falsifications” may only show what he disliked, but may nonetheless be true of Secret Mark (39); on the other hand, Smith also suggests that one passage from Secret Mark quoted in Clement’s letter may actually be a forgery by Clement to make the Carpocratians more suspect (65). In Clement, Smith notes that the letter to Theodore omits saying “explicitly . . . that the additional material was sexually offensive” (185). 32. This can be seen in the Q and A that concludes Ancient Gospel, when Jeffery disingenuously claims that some proof that “Jesus was homosexual” would not be “that big a deal” (293; Jeffery’s entire work on Smith is a homophobic repudiation), and Mayer concurs that he “could care less if Jesus was straight or gay,” sure, at least, that there is no “hot sexuality in this text” (294), a point on which Brown quickly concurs. Giorgio Agamben comes close to Nancy’s position in “Parabole e Regno,” in Il fuoco e il raccanto (Rome: Nottotempo, 2014), 25–37; the parable of the kingdom, he argues, is a parable about parables, about the parabolic nature of language that exceeds referentiality and logic to show that the figurative is present; the “kingdom” lies in the proximity of what medieval exegesis called the literal and the spiritual. 33. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 36. 34. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011), 224. 35. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 136.

Index

abandonment, gospel of Mark and, 121, 126–27, 131 “Abstract Lines” (Ruskin), 100, 100f Africa: Mark and, viii. See also Alexandria Agamben, Giorgio, 56–57, 141, 163n32 Alberti, Leon Battista, ix, 56, 76 Alexandria, viii, 4; Rosand on, 64; St. Mark Preaching and, 13–14, 17–18 anachronism: Didi-Huberman on, 42, 76; Ruskin on, 81, 83–84; St. Mark Preaching and, 18; Scappettone on, 42, 67, 156n9 Angelico, Fra, 24, 57, 75 Anianus, 24, 31, 34–35 Arab influence. See East architecture: Martyrdom and, 28; Presentation of the Ring and, 38; Ruskin and, 75–111; St. Mark Preaching and, 13–16; Scappettone on, ix–x; Tintoretto and, 43, 68–70; and writing, 90 Aretino, Pietro, 40–41 The Arrest and Trial of St. Mark (Mansueti), 31 art: and life, 77; Ruskin on, 89; Stokes and, 109; and time, 42. See also nature and art art history, 75–78 atmosphere: Bellini and, 3–39; Goffen on, 27, 30; Mansueti and, 33; Titian and, 7 Auerbach, Erich, 125, 161n14 Auerbach, Frank, 111 Augustine, saint, 114 authority: gospel of Mark and, 119, 122; gospel of Matthew and, 121

baptism: gospel of Mark and, 131; Secret Mark and, 136 Baptism of Anianus (Mansueti), 31, 34–35 Baxandall, Michael, 156n7 Bellini, Gentile, 12–39; represented in painting, 25 Bellini, Giovanni, x, 12–39, 79 Belliniano, Vittore, 13, 27 Benjamin, Walter, 56 Bersani, Leo, 111 betrayal: gospel of Mark and, 126, 131, 135; Paul and, 124 binaries, surpassing, xi; color and, 21–22; encrustation and, 80; gospel of Mark and, 123; Veronese and, 93 biographical Mark, 5–6, 132; Black on, 4; carrying off of body, viii, 6, 11–12, 60–61; and gospel, 113 Black, C. Clifton, 4; on canonical Mark, vii, 113, 116, 118, 124–25; on end of Mark, 130; on parable of sower, 127 Bordone, Paris, 35–39, 65 Boschini, Marco, 53, 55, 63–64 Botti, Isabella, 13, 18, 28, 147n12 Botticelli, Sandro, 76 boundaries: Ruskin and, 105; Venice and, 78 bricolage, 80–81, 82f brotherhood, Ruskin and, 103–4 Brown, Patricia Fortuni, 14, 29, 31, 36 buildings. See architecture Buon, Bartolomeo, 42–43 Burke, Tony, 137 “Byzantine Capitals, Concave Group” (Ruskin), 81, 82f Byzantium, Ruskin on, 81, 83

Badiou, Alain, 140–41 Banks, Elaine, 67, 70–71

Calmo, Andrea, 41 Campbell, Caroline, 16, 19

165

166 canonical Mark (gospel), 112–42; and Alexandria, viii; beginning of, 115–19; Black on, vii; end of, 129–31; omissions in, 115–29; Ruskin and, 107; stages in interpretation of, 131–32; teachings in, 120, 122, 125 carelessness: Ruskin on, 89–90; Tintoretto and, 41, 62 Carlson, Stephen, 137–38 Carpaccio, Vittore, 31–32, 44 Carpocratian Secret Mark, 135, 141 The Carrying Off of the Body of St. Mark (Tintoretto), 58–64; reduction of, 67–68, 68f Castelfranco Madonna (Giorgione), 7 categories, gospel of Mark and, 127 Cavalcaselle, G. B., 30 Chapel of the Planets, 110–11 Christianity: deconstruction and, 141–42, 162n21; and life, xi; Ruskin and, 85 Christmas effect, Sedgwick on, 5 Clark, Allison, 157n20 Clark, T. J., x, 90–94, 96, 100, 111, 157n20 Clement of Alexandria, 24, 130, 135–36, 139, 163n31 Cole, Michael, 155n4 color: Arab, Ruskin on, 86; Hills on, 76–78, 80; Manseuti and, 34–35; Martyrdom and, 27; Miracle of the Slave and, 44–45; Ruskin and, 87–89, 105; St. Mark Preaching and, 18–22; Saracen and, 66, 70; Tintoretto and, 69; in Titian altarpiece, 10; Venetian, 34–35, 78, 87–89; Veronese and, 93, 95 composition. See reading of painting Constantinople, 25, 149n29 content of painting: Miracle of the Slave and, 47; Saracen and, 66; Tintoretto later paintings, 62–63; Titian altarpiece and, 8–11 Coptic Church, viii cornices, Ruskin on, 83–84, 84f Cosmas and Damian, saints, 4, 6–8 Cranston, Jodi, 152n10 Cupids, Veronese and, 95 Curran, Brian, 18 Dale, Thomas E. A., 11, 83, 87 Damian, Peter, 23 Damisch, Hubert, 53–55 Dante, 91, 97

Index deconstruction: and Christianity, 141–42, 162n21; and gospel of Mark, 133; Miracle of the Slave and, 53 degli Atti, Isotta, 110–11 della Francesco, Piero, 29, 108 Dempsey, Charles, 17, 23, 149n25, 155n4 denial, gospel of Mark and, 123, 135 Deucalion and Pyrrha, 106–7 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 42, 57, 75–78, 129, 146n11 difference. See same and other The Discovery of the Body of St. Mark (Tintoretto), 58–64 Dodd, C. H., 124 Doge Agostino Barbarigo before the Virgin and Child (Bellini), 12 Donne, John, 91 doubling: Mark and, 64–65; Miracle of the Slave and, 47, 50–51; Ruskin and, 89; Saracen and, 66–67; Tintoretto and, 112 drawing, Ruskin and, 96–97 “Dripstones, Northern and Southern” (Ruskin), 83–84, 84f East: Bordone and, 38; Mansueti and, 32–34; Martyrdom and, 27–28; Ruskin on, 80–83, 85–88; St. Mark Preaching and, 13–19, 25 Egypt: Mark and, viii. See also Alexandria Eliot, T. S., 41–42, 57–58 encrustation, 35, 80–81 Episcopo, Marco, 41 equivalence. See same and other equivocation: parables and, 124; Veronese and, 93–94 eroticism. See sexuality Eusebius, viii, 113, 149n28 exorcism, gospel of Mark and, 120–21 Farago, Claire, 155n4 Farrer, Austin, 134 fig tree, gospel of Mark and, 128–29 The Flagellation of Christ (della Francesco), 29 Foucault, Michel, 56 Franco, Veronica, 49, 153n16 Fredericksen, Burton B., 51 Gabriel, Markus, 157n11 garment, dropped, gospel of Mark and, 134–35

167

Index gaze: Manseuti and, 34; Saracen and, 67; Titian altarpiece and, 5, 9 Genet, Jean, 50, 58 genitalia: Saracen and, 66–67; Titian and, 9–10. See also male flesh; sexuality geology, Ruskin and, 106–7 George, saint, 36 Ginsberg, Carlo, 29 Giorgione, 7–8, 38 Goffen, Rona, 12–13, 27–29 gospels: chronological order of, 114–15; Mark, vii–viii, 107, 112–42 Gothic, Ruskin on, 81, 83, 89, 101–2 gravity: Miracle of the Slave and, 48; Sartre on, 54–55; Tintoretto and, 40–72; Veronese and, 91–92 growing seed, parable of, 128 hammer, Mark and, 47, 65 Happy Union (Veronese), 93 Harrington, Daniel J., 115, 122–23, 132 Hart, Clive, 48, 53 Hedrick, Charles, 139 Hills, Paul, x, 18, 35, 76–77, 88, 104; on color, 21–22; on space, 14–15, 22; on Stokes, 107–8; on Venice, 78–80; on Veronese, 95 Hilton, Tim, 93 historicity: Dempsey and, 17; DidiHuberman on, 57; Eliot and, 42; Titian and, 3–4 history, Benjamin on, 56 Holbein, Hans, 52 homosexuality: Renaissance painting and, 141; Secret Mark and, 137–38, 163n32; Titian and, 5, 9–10. See also male flesh; sexuality Howard, Deborah, 31 humanity: Ruskin and, 93, 103–4; Stokes and, 111 Humfrey, Peter, 6–7, 13, 16–17, 33, 47, 69 identification: Miracle of the Slave and, 47; Saracen and, 71 identity: gospel of Mark and, 132; Tintoretto and, 41–42 image: Didi-Huberman on, 76; life of, 56–57 Infidelity (Veronese), 93 interpretation: Kermode and, 124; of Mark, stages in, 131–32; typology and, 124, 134

Islam. See East Istanbul, 25, 149n29 istoria, Alberti on, ix Jeffery, Peter, 137–38, 163n32 John, gospel of, 131 Kermode, Frank, 116–18, 124–25, 133–34; on parable of sower, 127; on Secret Mark, 135–38; on secrets, 123–24 Kiely, Robert, 9, 29 Krauss, Lawrence, 111 Krischel, Roland, 42–43, 45, 48, 51, 61 labels, 154n37; Mansueti and, 33–34; versus meaning, 8; Miracle of the Slave and, 48; St. Mark Preaching and, 20; Tintoretto and, 62–63; Veronese and, 94 Landy, Joshua, 162n28 language, Nancy and, 126 Lattanzio da Rimini, 149n26 Legenda aurea (Voragine), viii, 23, 25, 63 Lehmann, Phyllis, 15, 17, 23 Leonardo, 148n16 Linaioli tabernacle (Angelico), 24 life, xi–xii; and art, 77; gospel of Mark and, 131; Hills on, 80; Miracle of the Slave and, 52–53; painting and, 56–57; Paul and, 140–41; Ruskin and, 93, 105–7; St. Mark Preaching and, 22; Saracen and, 71; Stokes and, 109–10 light: Discovery and, 62, 69; Hills on, 77; Martyrdom and, 26; Miracle of the Slave and, 43, 50–51; Ruskin on, 79, 98; St. Mark Preaching and, 18–19, 22, 25–26; Saracen and, 70; of Venice, 76–78 limestone, Stokes and, 109 literature. See writing Lucretius, 54–55, 80 Malamocco, Buono da, 60–61 Malatesta, Sigismondo, 110–11 male flesh, 39; Saracen and, 67–68; Stokes and, 109; Tintoretto and, 50, 63, 67–69; Titian and, 9–12 Manet, Édouard, 55–56 Mansueti, Giovanni, 13, 24, 30–35, 36 marble, 77; Ruskin on, 97; Stokes and, 108–9; Veronese and, 95

168 Marinelli, Sergio, 59, 61–62 Mark: biographical, viii, 4–6, 11–12, 60–61, 113, 132; name, xi–xii, 47, 65. See also canonical Mark Markowitz, John, 47 marks, x–xi, 75, 142; painting as, x The Martyrdom of St. Mark (Belliniano), 26–29; attribution of, 27 Marx, Karl, 54 Mary, saint, and Mark, 4, 10 material: Damisch on, 54; DidiHuberman on, 75–76; Hills on, 77, 80; Manet and, 56; Mansueti and, 35; of painting, 9; Ruskin on, 84–85, 101; Tintoretto and, 44, 49–50, 52, 55, 69; writing and, 75–111 Matino, Gabriele, 145n4, 147n12 Matthew, gospel of, 121, 123 meaning: versus labels, 8; Sedgwick on, 5 Michelangelo, 39, 42–43 Miller, Sanda, 30–32 Milton, John, 98, 158n26 The Miracle of the Slave (Tintoretto), 40–59, 65 modernism: Foucault on, 56; Mansueti and, 33; Tintoretto and, 55–56; Titian altarpiece and, 7; Venetian, 77 Moore, Stephen D., 133 Morrall, Andrew, 156n7 mountains, Ruskin and, 89–90, 93, 97, 102 multiplicity, St. Mark Preaching and, 18 Nagel, Alexander, 76 naked young man, gospel of Mark and, 134–35 naming, in gospel of Mark, 118–19 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 57, 125–27, 129–30, 135, 141–42, 162n21 narrative: canonical Mark and, 125; Kermode on, 116; Miracle of the Slave and, 44, 46–47; Rosand on, 72; Tintoretto and, 63–64; Titian altarpiece and, 4 nature and art, 79, 90–92, 95–96; Ruskin and, 97, 99, 101–3; Sidney and, 99 Nealon, Jeffrey, 106 Nelson, Robert S., 83, 105, 149n29 Neusner, Jacob, 137 Newall, Christopher, 96 Nicholas, saint, 36

Index Nichols, Tom: on Carrying Off, 67–68; on Rangone, 59; on Tintoretto, 41–44, 49–51, 55–56, 63; on Titian, 152n10 Noli me tangere (Angelico), 125, 129 nonequivalence. See same and other occult: Ruskin on, 81, 101. See also secrets Oden, Thomas, viii, 114 Olympion, Nikolaos, 139 Origen, 130 Ovid, 106–7 paint, 9; Damisch on, 54; DidiHuberman on, 75–76; Tintoretto and, 44 painting: Alberti on, ix; Clark on, x; history of, 38–39, 42–43, 54–55; Mansueti and, 33; Veronese on, 90–91; and writing, 75–111. See also content of paintings; reading of painting; Renaissance painting Palazzo Ducale, Ruskin on, 83 Palma Giovane, 71, 113 Palma Vecchio, 35–39, 65 Pallucchini, Rodolfo, 63 Panofsky, Erwin, 76 Papias, 114 parables, 122–23, 127–29; Nancy and, 125–26; nature of, 124–25 parabolic loops, 125–26 Pathosformeln, 56–57, 76 Paul, saint, xi–xii, 124, 140 perspective, 76–77; Discovery and, 62, 69; Manet and, 56; Martyrdom and, 27; Miracle of the Slave and, 48, 53–54; St. Mark Preaching and, 14–15; Tintoretto and, 70 Peter, saint, 24–25, 113–15, 121, 123 Piazetta columns, Scappettone on, ix–x Pignatti, Terisio, 63 Piombo, Sebastiano del, 6 plague, Titian altarpiece and, 4, 6–7 Pordenone, 42 portraits of Venetians: Martyrdom and, 26–27; Miracle of the Slave and, 48; Presentation of the Ring and, 38; Rangone, in Tintoretto paintings, 58–64; St. Mark Preaching and, 19–21 Powell, Amy Knight, 76–77 Presentation of the Ring (Bordone), 35–39

Index Procession in the Piazza San Marco (Bellini), 16–17 proportion, Arab, Ruskin on, 86 Q source, 115 Raby, Julian, 14, 31 Rangone, Tommaso, 58–64, 66, 68 Raphael, 42 Raser, Timothy, 48, 152n13 reading of painting: Mansueti and, 33–34; Miracle of the Slave and, 45–46, 52–54; Rosand on, 15, 36; Titian altarpiece and, 5–7, 9–11 Rearick, William, 28 refusal: gospel of Mark and, 125–26, 129–31; Noli me tangere and, 129 religion: Nancy on, 57; Ruskin and, 93, 100, 105 Renaissance architecture, Ruskin on, 89 Renaissance painting, 76–77; Nancy and, 125–26, 129; Steinberg on, 9–10, 148n16 Respect (Veronese), 93 Ridolfi, Carlo, 15, 30, 42–44, 63 Il ritrovamento del corpo di San Marco (Tintoretto), xii–xiii Roch, saint, 4, 6 Rosand, David: on Domenico Tintoretto, 72; on Miracle of the Slave, 44–46; on Presentation of the Ring, 38; on Rangone, 59; on reading paintings, 15; on Tempest, 36; on Tintoretto, 152n10; on Titian, 3–4, 7–8; on Trafugamento, 64 Rossi, Paola, 63 Ruskin, John, x, 61, 75–111; “Abstract Lines,” 100, 100f; “Byzantine Capitals, Concave Group,” 81, 82f; “Dripstones, Northern and Southern,” 83–84, 84f; Scappettone on, 77, 89; Stokes and, 108–11, 159n37; and writing, 79–80 sacra conversazione, Titan altarpiece as, 3–4, 6, 9 St. Luke and St Matthew (Tintoretto), 113 St. Mark altarpiece (Titian), 3–12 St. Mark and St. John (Tintoretto), 112 St. Mark Healing St. Anianus in Alexandria (Mansueti), 31, 38

169 St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria (Bellinis), 12–26; attribution of, 29–35; and Tintoretto, 44 St. Mark Rescuing a Saracen from a Shipwreck (Tintoretto), 58–71 St. Peter Dispatches St. Mark to Preach the Gospel in Aquileia (Palma Giovane), 113 same and other: Clark and, 111; gospel of Mark and, 123–24; Ruskin and, 97–101; Saracen and, 67, 71 Sansovino, Jacopo, 42, 45, 59, 61–62 Santa Maria della Salute, 3 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 48–55, 58, 92, 152n13 Scappettone, Jennifer, ix–x, 42, 67, 104, 156n9; on Ruskin, 77, 89, 98 Schmidt, Catarina, 31 Sciré, Giovanna Nepi, 36 Scorn (Veronese), 94 scribe, Mark as, 24, 113 sculpture, 90; Stokes and, 110; Tintoretto and, 43, 49–50 Scuola Grande di San Marco, 147n9; albergo paintings, 3–39, 44; main hall paintings, 40–72; order of paintings in, 65–66 Sebastian, saint, 4, 6 Secret Mark documents, 135–41; relation to gospel of Mark, 139–40 secrets: Gospel of Mark and, 112–42; Wrede on, 132 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 5 seen/unseen: Miracle of the Slave and, 53; Titian altarpiece and, 11 sense, Nancy and, 126, 135 Serlio, Sebastiano, 38 Sermon on the Mount, 115, 119–29 sexuality, 39; Miracle of the Slave and, 51–52; Saracen and, 67–68; Secret Mark and, 137–38, 163n32; Tintoretto and, 50, 63, 67–69; Titian and, 9–12; Veronese and, 94–95 shadows: Miracle of the Slave and, 51; Titian altarpiece and, 7–8, 11; Veronese and, 91 Sidney, Philip, 99, 107 silence, gospel of Mark and, 120–21, 126 Smith, Morton, 135–41, 163n31 sociality, gospel of Mark and, 120 Sohm, Philip, 30–32, 55, 71 Solomon, Xavier, 94 Solomon and Sheba (Veronese), 93

170 Son of God, 119, 132 Son of Man, 122, 132 sower, parable of, 127 space: Hills on, 14, 22; Mansueti and, 32, 35 Spenser, Edmund, 97 Spinoza, Baruch, 58 spirit: Ruskin and, 88, 93, 105; Tintoretto and, 69 state ideology: Presentation of the Ring and, 37; Rosand on, 59; St. Mark Preaching and, 23, 25; Tintoretto and, 46, 64; Titan altarpiece and, 4 Steinberg, Leo, 9–10, 148n16 Stokes, Adrian, x, 78, 107–11, 159n37 stone(s): gospel of Mark and, 129; nature of, 105–7; Ruskin and, 75–111; Stokes and, 107–11, 159n37; Veronese and, 94 substitution: Mark and, 37; Miracle of the Slave and, 47 Superman, 51 Taylor, Vincent, 137 Telford, William R., 131–34, 140 Tempesta (Giorgione), 8 Tempest at Sea (Palma Vecchio and Bordone), 35–39, 65 Theodore, saint, ix, 5–6 time: Agamben on, 141; and art, 42; Didi-Huberman on, 57; gospel of Mark and, 118, 128–29; Miracle of the Slave and, 52; Paul and, 124; Ruskin and, 98; St. Mark Preaching and, 17 Tintoretto, Domenico, 71–72 Tintoretto, Jacopo, xii–xiii, 40–72, 112–13; Hills on, 78–79; influences on, 42; later paintings, 71–72; name, 41; rejections of, 46, 49, 59–60; Rosand on, 152n10; Ruskin and, x, 102–4; selection of, 40–41; stages in criticism of, 57–58 Titian, 3–12, 78–79, 152n10 Torcello, Rustico da, 60–61

Index tradition, Tintoretto and, 41–42, 57–58 truth, Nancy and, 126 Turner, J. M. W., 102–3 typology, gospel interpretation and, 124, 134 Tyre, Ruskin on, 84–85 Valensi, Lucette, 25 Vasari, Giorgio, xiii, 65; and art history, 76; on Mansueti, 30–32; on Tintoretto, 41, 62–63, 69 Vecellio, Cesare, 20 Venice: aesthetic of, 35, 76–77; and anachronism, 42, 67; and color, 34–35, 78, 87–89; Kiely on, 10; and Mark, viii–x, 5–6; and modernism, 77; Ruskin and, 75–111; Stokes and, 108; Titian altarpiece and, 4–5. See also portraits of Venetians; state ideology Veronese, Paolo, 90–93, 157n120 Vittoria, Alessandro, 59 Voragine, Jacobus de, viii, xi–xii, 23, 25, 63–64 Warburg, Aby, 22, 42, 56–57, 76, 146n11 Weddigen, Erasmus, 60–62 weight. See gravity Wills, Garry, 114–15, 119, 124 women: Angelico and, 24; Martyrdom and, 28; St. Mark Preaching and, 22–23 Wood, Christopher, 76 worship, Smith and, 140 wounds, Titian and, 10 Wrede, William, 132, 140 Wright, David, 157n120 writing: and art, 7–8; Calmo and, 41; canonical Mark and, 112–42; and material, 75–111; Ruskin and, 79–80, 84, 95–105 Žižek, Slavoj, 141 Zucchi, Andrea, 67, 68f