the poetics of the image- art history and the rhetoric of interpretation.pdf
TRANSCRIPT
The Poetics of the Image: Art History and the Rhetoric of InterpretationAuthor(s): Matthew RampleySource: Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 35. Bd. (2008), pp. 7-30Published by: Verlag des Kunstgeschichtlichen Seminars der Philipps-Universität MarburgStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27823060 .
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The Poetics of the Image: Art History and the Rhetoric
of Interpretation
Matthew Rampley
"Art historical writing is for the most part clotted
with jargon and larded with cliche, impenetrable in its density, analytic and contentious to a fault
and, worst of all, utterly predictable."1 "[...] modern professional art historical
interpretation is far more deeply imaginative than most art historians recognize or are willing
to admit [...] art history, despite its efforts to
reject the poetical, belongs, if unwittingly, to the
imaginative tradition of writing about art that
descends from Homer and Vasari."2
Introduction: Taming the Image
The greater part of critical attention devoted to the contours of art history has focused on the Austro
German tradition and its legacy.3 Tracing the de
velopment of institutionalised art history in Ger
many, Switzerland and Austria-Hungary from
the late nineteenth century onwards, historians of
the discipline have seen how it staked its claim to
scholarly recognition through its ability to dem onstrate its use of 'scientific' methods. As one
commentator has stated: "art history endeavoured to demonstrate that its practice was as disciplined and rigorous as any other [...] by mounting a dis course that was tough-minded, logical, detached,
objective."4 Hence the period between the 1870s
and the 1930s in particular witnessed an explo sion of publications devoted to outlining system atic 'principles' of art historical investigation in
the name of a ,strenge Kunstwissenschaft'. These
ranged from the identification of concepts and
structures of formal analysis through to the elab
oration of systematic hermeneutic procedures.5
Linking all was the determination to provide an
'objective' value-free form of scientific inquiry.
To quote one well-known assertion, that of Moriz
Thausing in Vienna: ?Ich kann mir die beste Kun
stgeschichte denken, in der das Wort ,sch?n gar nicht vorkommt."6
The limitations of such an ambition have long been pointed out and highlighted. The desire to
find some Archimedean point from which the his
tory of art could be surveyed is epistemologically flawed, relying on the assumption that the art his
torian could somehow set aside their own socio
historical location.7 It has been argued such uni
versal principles' were most often formulated in
response to one particular artistic phenomenon -
the Italian Renaissance - and were then employed as a means of assessing its difference from others, such as the Baroque or the art of the Netherlands.8
Their applicability to other artistic cultures and
periods, both within Europe and in the wider do
main of global art production, was highly limited. More politically-informed critique has also high
lighted the extent to which such 'scientific' art his
tory served an Enlightenment project of "the fab rication of a past that could be effectively placed under systematic observation for use in staging and politically transforming the present."9 That
political aim was, accordingly, the reinforcement of the modern state and the legitimation of the
colonial belief in the supreme position of Europe as the brain of the earth's body.10 Furthermore, a
recurrent complaint has been that such 'scientific'
procedures bury the artwork in a formidable ap
paratus of dry scholarly analysis that robs it of its
specificity to such an extent that its cultural and
aesthetic value become lost.
I do not wish to rehearse these issues in any fur
ther detail, partly because others have done so in
considerable depth, but mainly because I wish to
contest the idea that such an account represents the
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whole story. Specifically, it would be possible to write another description of art history that gave a divergent picture. Rather than treating art works as the objects of a detached interest, it would be an art history motivated by an explicit erotic, moral or aesthetic immersion in them. Accordingly, if, instead of focusing on the late nineteenth century,
we consider Johann Winckelmann's writings on
classical art as a point of departure for art history, a rather different image emerges. Winckelmann, of
course, has been identified by many as the founder of modern art history, based on his identification of a principle of historical analysis
- style
- cou
pled with recognition of the historical distance be tween his own time and the classical era. However, as Alex Potts and Whitney Davis have argued, his
writing was also marked by a homoerotic absorp tion in and idealisation of the male Greek nude.11
Further, it was through its homoeroticism that the study of ancient art and its history gained its
moral purpose, modelled on the paederastic ethics of classical Greece: "paederastically determined
judgements [...] relayed an approved notion of a
rational-moral identity [...] Winckelmann insist ed that the ancient images of beautiful masculin
ity socially served only to steer individual culti vations of sensuous and erotic experience towards such a morality."12 Winckelmann thereby opened up the historical study of art to the domain of
aesthetic, moral and sexual engagement. Indeed, in his work it is possible to see a tension that has
marked the subsequent development of art histo
ry. On the one hand, his identification of stylistic categories and periods provided the template for a
'systematic5 art history. On the other, he created the tradition of the art-loving connoisseur such as
Giovanni Cavalcaseli, Bernard Berenson, Julius von Schlosser, Adolfo Venturi, Pietro Toesca or
Max Friedl?nder. An important aim for many was
the formulation of a historical poetics of the image, in other words, articulating a form of historical
analysis that was open to the aesthetic qualities of the individual work of art. In the remainder of this
article, therefore, I explore the work of authors, Roberto Longhi, Adrian Stokes, Georges Didi Huberman and Mieke Bal, who aim at precisely what 'wissenschaftlich' art history has often ex
cluded. In different ways they each raise impor
tant questions about the nature of art historical
interpretation. Motivating my analysis of each is
also the fundamental question: to what extent do
they manage to resist the temptation to contain the image within the deadening grid of systematic analysis that has been such a central force within so much art historical discourse?
Roberto Longhi
Roberto Longhi (1890-1970) is best known as a
scholar and connoisseur of Caravaggio and Piero della Francesca, and for his championing of the idea of a Ferraran School of art. Unusually for a
Renaissance art historian he wrote on contem
porary art and was on good personal terms with Futurists such as Ardengo Soffici, contributing to
the futurist journal La Voce and to other avant
garde journals such as Lacerba or La Ronda. He was critical of the fetishism of Florence in Italian art history, often attending instead to peripheral' art centres, and he was also the first to acknowl
edge the significance of the work of Artemisia Gentileschi.13 Because relatively little of his writ
ing has been translated into other languages, he remains hardly known except to specialists in the field of Italian art.14 With the exception of Ital ian scholars, few have explored the implications of his work for wider reflection on the nature of art
historical representation, in spite of his acknowl
edged importance (for one commentator he was
?der bedeutendste italienische Kunsthistoriker des 20. Jahrhunderts") for the discipline.15
A student of the medieval art historian Pietro Toesca (1877-1962), an admirer of Bernard
Berenson, and highly influenced by the aesthet ics of Benedetto Croce, Konrad Fiedler and Adolf von Hildebrand, Longhi became known above for his connoisseurial activity. This was the source
of his high reputation - in particular in relation
to Caravaggio - but it also gained him the most
notoriety, in terms of both his methodology and also his personal motivations. Although some of his attributions in regard to Caravaggio were sub
sequently vindicated, his reluctance to allow his connoisseurial intuitions to be informed by docu
mentary evidence was a source of constant criti
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cism, and also led to some major corrections of his
conclusions.16
To describe Longhi merely as a connoisseur
underrates the significance of his work, however,
despite the intellectual milieu he constructed for
himself. In the first issue of Paragone^ the journal he founded in 1950, he offered an outline of the
task of art criticism, which is the nearest to a state
ment of method to be found in his oeuvre.17 In a
well known and much cited passage he declares:
"L'opera d'arte, dal vaso delPartiggiano greco alla
Volta Sistina, ? sempre un capolavoro squisitamen te 'relativo.' L'opera non sta mai da sola, ? sempre un rapport. Per cominciare: almeno un rapoporto
con un'altra opera d'arte. Un'opera sola al mon
do, non sarebbe neppure intesa come produzione umana, ma
guardata con reverenza o con orrore,
come magia, come tab?, come opera di Dio o del
lo stregone, non dell'uomo [...] E dunque il senso
dell'apertura di rapport che d? necessit? alla ri
sposta critica. Risposta che non involge soltanto
il nesso tra opera e opera, ma tra opera e mondo,
socialit?, economia, religion, politica e quant'altro occorra."18
This seems distant from the concerns of the
connoisseur; the emphasis on the relational as
pect of the work, its place within a wider social
context, bears little comparison with the connois
seurial attachment to the masterpieces of the indi
vidual artist. It is also difficult to square with his
actual practice, which paid scant attention to the
social dimension of art. Where Longhi did see art
in relational terms was in viewing the place of the
individual artwork within a formal sequence; he
made this approach central to his work at an early
stage. In his Breve ma Veridica Storia della Pit
tura Italiana published in 1914 he stated: "Porre
la relazione fra [...] due opera ? anche porre il con
cetto della storia dell'arte, corno almeno l'intendo
io, e cio? nuli'altro che la storia dello svolgimento
degli stili figurative [.. .]"19 In a slightly later text he
sharpened the link between intra-artistic relations
and developmental sequence with the assertion
that the "rapporti tra opera e opera si dispongono inevitabilmente in serie di sviluppo storico [...]."20
Although 'style' was a central category of anal
ysis for Longhi, it was not used as an instru
ment of taxonomic ordering comparable to the
approach of W?lfflin or Riegl. Instead, his use
of style bears closer comparison with Julius von
Schlosser (1866-1938) who drew a sharp distinc
tion between epoch-making stylistic masterworks - the 'proper' subject of art history
- and the de
rivative works that disseminated a particular style, but which perhaps could not even be considered
fully as art.21 Longhi did not subscribe to Schloss
er's elitist views; the attention he devoted to minor
individual artists and schools is testimony to his
rather more open-minded views. Nevertheless, he
shared with Schlosser a resistance to the tendency within much art historical scholarship to inter
pret individual artworks by reference to abstract
general analytic categories. Indeed, Schlosser sin
gled out Longhi's early monograph on Piero della
Francesca as a ?Musterbeispiel" ("exemplary in
stance") of the history of style.22 The grounds for the similarity with Schlosser lay
in the fact that for both, the aesthetic theories of
Benedetto Croce provided a powerful conceptual
impetus.23 Croce, for whom ?die eigentliche und
wahre ,Geschichte' der Gesamtkunst [...] nichts
anderes denn den Fackellauf der sch?pferischen H?henmenschen bedeuten kann [...]" placed in
tuition at the heart of the aesthetic and critical en
counter with the artwork.24 The key considera
tion for Croce and, therefore, Longhi, was how to give voice to such intuition; for Longhi the so
lution lay not in the elaboration of any method
ological framework, but rather through the lan
guage of criticism. As Longhi noted in an early essay, "noi pensiamo che [...] sia possibile ed utile
stabilire e rendere la particolare orditura formale
dell'opera con parole conte ed acconce, con une
specie di trasferimento verbale che potr? avere
valore letterario, ma sempre e solo [...] in quan to mantegna un rapporto costante con
l'opera che
tende a rappresentare."25
Central to the understanding of Longhi is rec
ognition of the performative dimension of his
writing.26 It has long been recognised that he har
boured literary ambitions, the "baroque" and
intensely personal nature of his style was com
mented on and commended early on by other art
historians, including Schlosser.27 However, to see
in Longhi merely a stylist is to underplay the in
tellectual basis of his writing. For it was through
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1 Piero della Francesca, Dream of Constantine, ca. 1466, San Francesco, Arezzo
the poetic description of the image that he sought to articulate the intuitive encounter with it. Pier
Vincenzo Mengaldo has outlined some of the dis
cursive tropes Longhi employed to this end. They include, amongst others: a refusal to employ the
traditional language of criticism and the inven
tion of novel technical terms on a work-by-work basis, a mixture of interpretative genres (icono
graphy, naturalistic depiction, poetic evocation,
biography, technical description, narrative), heavy use of adjectival verbs and nominal phrases.28 To
these one can add irony, wit, playfulness. A few
examples from his celebrated monograph of 1949 on Piero della Francesca illustrate the nature of
his writing.29 Discussing Piero's Dream of Con
statine (Fig. 1) he writes: "[...] il fiabesco nottur
nale del gotico collima col classicismo antico, col
luminismo struttivo del Caravaggio, con quello
magico del Rembrandt, e, persino, con la pesatura
pulviscolare del Seurat [...]."30 This broad characterisation of the painting's lu
minosity sets up a clear system of relations that weave back and forth in time, from the Gothic
past to the late nineteenth century, and which
foreground the distance between Longhi and tra
ditional art historical concerns with establishing historical sequences and relations. In this passage
adjectives become substantives (e. g. "fiabesco not
turnale"), substantives are turned into adjectives
("pulviscolare" from "pulviscolo"). In a slightly later passage Longhi summons up the range of
imaginative associations prompted by the paint
ing: "Si pensa alle tende Argive, al sonno di Anni
bale prima di Canne, a quello d'un gran Crociato in Asia [...] e subito un gran lume piove dall'alto, a
strapiombo, scrutando da presso, come un oc
chio di luna."31
There then follows a more prosaic descrip tive enumeration of the different objects and fig ures within the painting, before, extraordinarily,
Longhi refers to the space of the opening of the tent as "una concavit? di collinosa dolcezza" ("a
concavity with a hilly sweetness").32 There is a re
markable conceit in describing a negative space in
the terms of something as solid as a hill, although this is clearly aimed at evoking the tectonic quali ties of Piero's depiction of space, but equally chal
lenging is the notion of the "dolcezza," a lyrical sentiment that seems all the more incongruous
within an image marked by its Gothic, fantasti
cal qualities. In his discussion of Piero's fresco of
the Battle of Constantine and Maxentius (Fig. 2)
Longhi writes of the "velario segreto, ineffabile, di un lume" ("secret, ineffable, veil of light") in
which "le cose paion rifiorire [...] nel liquore so
lare" ("things appear to flourish in a solar liq uid").33 Turning first to the "cavalli teorematici"
("theorematic horses") of Constantine's army, which, he speculates, might owe their descent to
those of the Dioscuri or to the stallion of Sir John Hawkwood, he then describes the riders them
selves: "Su codesta nobilissima progenie animale
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2 Piero della Francesca, The Battle of Constantine and Maxentius, ca. 1466, San Francesco, Arezzo
ora s'incastellano quasi inumani, e pur civilissimi, non sai se pi? gli arti o le elitre dei guerriere cris
tiani [...] interiti sulle cavalcature, levano al cielo
la spalliera artificiale degli elmi mostruosamente
belli e in vista terrificanti [...]?"34
Longhi shifts between the mythical (the Dio
scuri) and the historical (Sir John Hawkwood), and his lexical register varies widely; the meta
phor of a terrible beauty was a widespread trope in modernist poetics, but he then adds the unu
sual scientific terms "teorematico", "elitro" ("the orematic" and "elytron"). "Teorematico", drawn
from mathematics is seldom associated with hors
es, although it richly evokes the strong geometries of Piero's depiction, while "elitro" is hardly en
countered outside of entomology, since it refers to the wing case of beetles.
In a later work on the Ligurian artist Carlo
Braccesco (1478-1501) Longhi adopts an entirely different voice. Discussing the Virgin in Brac
cesco's Annunciation he writes as follows: "Chi
sar? intanto questa Signora della Loggia? La 'pu cella' dello stile cavalleresco, suggerita dai mini
atori francesi del Duecento [...]? O non pi? che un ricordo di essa, gi? divenuta castellana un po' greve di riviera ligure e magari della Costa Az
zurra? Ancora alquanto 'bas bleu' ma, ormai, non
senza sospetto di 'bas de laine'."35
Having speculated on the art historical prece dents for such a figure, with an allusion to her class
equivalent in the Middle Ages and later, Longhi then goes on, in humorous vein, to allude to her
personal character. He writes of her "sguardo ac
corto e smarrito" ("shrewd and deamy gaze"), of the "ombra sorniona accoccata agli angoli della
bocca" ("the mischievous shadow at the corners
of her mouth") with the "aria di castellana saputa" ("air of a smug ch?telaine").36 The sacred charac ter of the image is almost thereby lost, an impres sion strengthened by his reference to the Angel
Gabriel "ronzando" ("buzzing") like a fly in the
hot summer sky. There are few more striking descriptions of in
dividual artworks than are to be found in the writ
ings of Roberto Longhi, and these few examples indicate the distinctiveness of his practice as an
art historian. The interp?n?tration of myth, his
tory and legend that occurs in his writing hardly concurs with the professional protocols of art his
torical argumentation. Instead, as one commenta
tor has noted: "The tendency to interpret works
of art in their cultural and historical setting, all
those things which distinguished the nineteenth
century, seem, in his work, to give way to a meth
od of seeing what was essentially grounded in the
immediate perception of the work of art itself."37 As I have suggested, this does not entirely summa
rise his approach; Longhis analyses look out be
yond the work to consider its relation to the wider
corpus of artistic masterpieces. However, Longhi
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pays little regard for traditional art historical con
cerns with chronology or inferences of influence.
Instead, he evokes trans-historical connections; within one sentence Piero is compared with Ma
saccio, Caravaggio and Rembrandt, or, later, with
Vermeer, Titian or Giorgione. Yet it is clear that
he is not positing a distinct tradition or pattern of influence; rather, he is describing the associ
ations conjured by the paintings for the viewer.
Thus Piero's profile portraits of Battista Sforza
and Federico da Montfeltro "si pensi ai profili del
Pontormo" ("make one think of the profiles of
Pontormo"), in an inversion of the chronological sequence one would normally expect from an art
historical account.38
Longhi uses such references not in the service
of art historical arguments, but as a way of ar
ticulating his own aesthetic response and, in par ticular, as a way of giving concrete form to such a response. As Mengaldo suggests, at the heart of
Longhi's approach was the problem of reconcil
ing the difference between the experience of the
painting, in particular, the experience of its pre sentness, its aesthetic immediacy, and the tem
poral basis of language.39 The title alone of his
journal Paragone betrays this concern with the
relation between word and image. He attempts to
overcome this difference by means of a play of as
sociations and a depth of metaphor that disrupts the flow of narrative and puts time into a kind of
suspension; the use of unfamiliar terms and un
orthodox grammatical constructions draw the
reader into the language of his texts, triggering an
aesthetic absorption that presents a discursive an
alogue of the visual perception of the image. The extent to which these practices provide a
model for another kind of art history, one free of
the charge of 'taming' the image, will be explored later. First, however, I consider a near contempo
rary of Longhi, Adrian Stokes.
Adrian Stokes
From the mid-1920s until his death in 1972 Stokes
produced a stream of articles and books on a wide
range of topics: from ballet, to contemporary art, ancient Greek art, modern painting, and Italian
art. His work defies easy categorisation. It can be
regarded neither as straightforward art criticism -
although some of his pieces were written while
he was art critic for the Spectator magazine - nor
as art history. Stokes' writing occupies a kind of
space between art criticism and art history, and
it also merges with other genres of writing such
as autobiography, travelogue and diaristic reflec
tion.40 He came increasingly to rely on the psycho
analysis of Melanie Klein as a source of insights into art, but not until his later writings did he at
tempt to apply this rigorously as an interpretative
methodology.41 In order to get some sense of Stokes' writing I
focus on an early text, The Quattro Cento (1932), which is also perhaps one of his most famous.42 On
one level it is a historical disquisition on the emer
gence of renaissance art and architecture in fif
teenth-century Italy, on the persistence of Gothic
in the period in question, and on the foreshadow
ings of the Baroque, and it has become the subject of no small amount of contemporary interest.43
It is shaped by some familiar art historical dual
isms: Florence stands in opposition to Venice (for
which, for reasons I shall come to shortly, Stokes
substitutes Verona); North stands in opposition to South. On this latter point Stokes frequent
ly refers back to the work of Josef Strzygowski, whose positing of a near Eastern origin for medi
eval Christian art Stokes accepts unquestioning
ly. He also adopts some of Strzygowski's theories
of the racial origins of art, seeing in Florentine art the expression of a distant racial memory of
Etruscan and, further, Semitic origins.44 At this point, however, further resemblance to
canonical art history ceases, starting with the title.
Stokes splits the quattrocento of the title into its
two constituent words in order to communicate
that the concept is not defined as historical era, but rather as an aesthetic category. Central to the
character of Quattro Cento art in Stokes' sense of
the phrase is the handling of stone. He sees stone
as the quintessentially southern medium - in con
trast to the Northernness of wood - and key to its treatment of stone is evocation of its material 'pre sentness'. As such there is discernible here a par allel with Longhi
- although Stokes' intellectual
roots were rather different. Moreover, the interest
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3 Filippo Brunelleschi, Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1419-1441, Florence
in presentness became a more widespread concern
of modernist aesthetics. It found its most celebrat ed expressed within in mainstream art criticism
and history, such as in Michael Frieds reading of
modern sculpture, or in the aesthetic thought of more heterodox figures, such as the poet-critic Yves Bonnefoy.45
For Stokes presentness with the Quattro Cento
is linked to a particular subjective impulse. As he
puts it: "The process of living is an externalisa
tion, a turning outward into definite form of in ner ferment," and the Renaissance was marked by a compulsion "to throw life outwards, to make
expression definite on the stone."46 More specifi
cally: "I call Quattro Cento the art of the fifteenth
century which expresses this compulsion without
restraint. The highest achievement in architecture was a mass-effect in which every temporal or flux
element was transformed into a spatial steadiness
[...] At no other time have the materials that artists
used been so significant in themselves. The ma
terials were the actual objects of inspiration, the
stocks for the deeper fantasies."47
The grounds of such a notion of externalisation, which Stokes saw manifest in "spatial steadiness", are not developed in great depth in 'The Quattro Cento\ In his later autobiographical essay of 1947
Inside Out, for example, he would state that art,
as the product of an 'object-seeking' libido, "ex
presses the universal desire to translate life into an
outward attachment."48 There is little explicit psy
choanalytic terminology in 'The Quattro Cento'.
Stokes's concern with externalisation -
howev
er formulated in conceptual terms - informed his
historical judgements on Italian art. He saw this
compulsion as rooted in the geography and cli mate of Italy, "in that part of the South where light induces even a Northerner to contemplate things in their positional or spatial aspect as objects re
vealed, as symbols of realization."49 This placed Southern art in opposition to Northern art, which
Stokes, drawing on Strzygowski and, ultimate
ly, Gottfried Semper, regarded as an art of line,
rhythm and time. It was also rooted in geology; little Quattro Cento art was to be found in Flor ence because of the quality of its Fiesole marble:
"This stone cannot be seen as welling up gradually, as indicating some core within."50 Instead it was
cold and inhuman, pietra morte as he described
it. Brunelleschi's Duomo he regarded as domi
nated by an aesthetic of linearity that betrayed its
roots in the Northern (Etruscan) primitive under currents of Italian culture, and he contrasted the
"meaningless wall space" of Brunelleschi's Os
pedale degli Innocenti (Fig. 3) with Luciano Lau
rana's ducal palace in Urbino (Fig. 4), which he
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^^^^^^L^^^^B^E ?^ ' ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
4 Luciano Laurana, Ducal Palace, ca. 1465-1472, Urbino
proposes as the quintessential expression of Quat tro Cento art. In the palace Laurana accords a "su
preme individuality to each stone shape". Regard
ing the pilasters, for example, he writes: "[...] each
[is] designed to show the beauties of his neighbour as unique. There is no other traffic between them.
Their positions are untraversable, and no hand
shall dare to touch two stone forms at a time. They flower from the brick, a Whole made up of Ones
each as single as the Whole. What could be more
different from Brunellesque running lines [...]?"51 Stokes' book is remarkable in a number of ways;
it challenges the hegemony of Florence by attend
ing to the art of provincial centres such as Vero
na, Urbino, Jesi, Ancona, or Rimini, which all be come the 'true' sites of Quattro Cento art. Yet this
is not an art historical study as traditionally un
derstood. The chronological framework is vague,
the monuments are chosen to illustrate an aesthet
ic argument that also engages in wildly unhistori
cal speculations as to the relation between Renais sance and Japanese, Chinese and Oriental' art.52
Stokes further sees Florentine art as rooted in the
aesthetic values of Etruscan art, a first, completely
unsupportable claim reliant on a second, namely, that the 'brutality' of Etruscan art betrays the ag
gressive Semitic origins of the Etruscans.53
The reader is alerted from the very start that this
is not an orthodox piece of art historical scholar
ship; it opens with a description of Stokes' arrival one wet afternoon at the railway station in Jesi, and of his encounters with carabinieri, children
playing on the streets, the ear-blasts of the siren
of a silk factory, a street beggar, and his hesitation at ringing on the front door bell of the Palazzo del
Commune. No detached observer, Stokes projects
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himself into his subject, and this is evident, too, in his prose, which has a remarkable power to
conjure up the material, aesthetic qualities of the
works he refers to. I cite one instance, his descrip tion of Verrocchio's lavabo (Fig. 5) in San Loren zo in Florence. A minor work, he nevertheless
regards it as a masterpiece of Quattro Cento art -
ironically, despite its Florentine location.
"It glistens, ascended from an imaginative fund
whence strong roots have shot up in unexampled
profusion, necessitous thongs and twines bound for the light from stirred under-consciousness.
[...] the falcon is spread upon the background, rec
ognized mark nearest the depleted caves of under
consciousness, now shut with marmolite, with
which revolves a band of oak leaves and acorns. In
front, coming clear of this wall an urn, a cup and
bath, one inside the other; these upon their slopes and incrustations receive the large and slow rain
of beasts more primitive than to act prehensile, as
scales drop inch by inch, wet thorny tissues caught
by sun as iridescent mud upon the vessels grazed to warmth and wet. The hooded beast-rain is per
pendicular: any other that struck oblique would
over-balance the stoppered urn set in the precious cup standing in the bath."54
This richly metaphoric description continues
for four more densely written closely type-set pag es. It becomes clear from this passage alone how
'presentness' is not merely a theoretical concept; it
informs the discursive forms he employs. Indeed, his attempt to evoke 'presentness' through a wide
range of metaphorical tropes invites comparison with Longhi. As with Longhi, Stokes startles with
his use of unusual metaphors and grammatical contortions (e. g. "to act prehensile", or "hooded
beast-rain") but in addition he constructs chains
of metaphors, with extended sentences consist
ing of numerous subordinate clauses in which the
main verb becomes lost. Rather than functioning as a means of communication, language becomes a medium wherein the concrete presentness of the
Quattro Cento becomes manifest.
Stokes has been seen as the heir to Walter Pater, as the last, and perhaps most sophisticated repre sentative of English aestheticism.55 However, he
sought to distance himself from his Bloomsbury aesthetic contemporaries, maintaining a particu
5 Andrea del Verrocchio, Lavabo, ca. 1465, San Lorenzo, Florence
larly dismissive attitude toward Clive Bell, and
his own later intellectual trajectory moved in a
completely different direction. The conceptual framework of psychoanalysis, in particular that
of Melanie Klein, came increasingly to the fore in
his concern with 'presentness'. In a late work, The
Invitation of Art Stokes emphasis the central role
of projection and absorption within the act of aes
thetic contemplation: "[...] contemplation, even
crystal-gazing, the inducement of hypnotic states, is to some degree an awareness through an outer
form, as in art, of an aspect of our inner states [...]. And so we are immersed, a part of ourselves is im
mersed, in communion, through it be far short of a
hypnosis, since our separateness, and many kinds
of judgement, are evoked at the same time."
This description, which highlights a complex
interplay of immersion and distance, is remote
from the assumed attitude of detachment of the
disinterested aesthete.56
Stokes' work has been taken up by a range of commentators, such as Michael Ann Holly,
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Stephen Bann and David Carrier as offering an
alternative kind of art history.57 Its self-conscious
probing of the representational possibilities of
language, its refusal to fall back on the manda
rin terms of it to which art historians so often fall
prey, has been seen as freeing art historical writ
ing from the dead hand of institutionalised disci
plinary procedure.
Stripped of its specifically Kleinian psycho
analytic framing, it can be seen as instantiating the general problem of art historical represen
tation; addressing the gap between image or, in
Stokes's case, material object, and discourse. In
summoning up the different kinds of aesthetic
engagement, visual, tactile, at times even olfac
tory, with artworks, Stokes appears to be mobi
lising a trope within art history commonly asso
ciated with writers such Alois Riegl or the early W?lfflin. Riegl's notion of haptic seeing evoked
the complex interaction of the sense, while W?lff
lin's doctoral dissertation explored the corporeal
projective and empathie processes underlying the
aesthetic experience of architecture.58 Stokes, in
contrast, resists the temptation to provide a sys tematic taxonomy of such experience of the kind
that characterised their work; he also has no time
for the usual procedures of art historical scholar
ship, something which has made him all the more
appealing as a figure. He immerses himself mi
metically in his subject, and his work is dedicated to summoning up the material presence of his ob
jects, circumventing their 'taming' in the formal,
iconographie or conceptual meshes of traditional art historical interpretation.
There is a remarkable rhetorical and metaphori cal depth to Stokes' writing; when first published
The Quattro Cento was presented in part as an ex
ercise in creative writing, a demonstration of the
abilities of creative fantasies to reveal the roots
of Italian art. The opening chapter of Stones of Rimini, published in 1935 as a companion to The
Quattro Cento, consists of an elaboration of the
qualities of Venetian stone, followed by a 14-page
chapter on The Pleasures of Limestone. No other writer has managed to evoke with such richness
and depth the qualities of one particular artistic
medium and its incrustations of geology, history and politics.
These are admirable qualities of his writing, but
this is also where the difficulties begin in trying to take his work as a model for a possible 'other'
kind of art history. For Stokes' writing is too in
dividual, too rooted in his own personal aesthet
ic absorption in stone, for it to serve as means of
constructing a shared community of knowledge. As a reader one has the sense of being an outside
observer, almost of being an intruder into an in
tensely personal set of contemplations. As David
Carrier has observed in relation to Stokes' later
writings on carving, "Carving is made meaning ful for him because it is placed within a story of
personal development [...] we can understand
the [carved] work only by learning Stokes's life
history," and, more generally, "To understand
Stokes's account of art's presentness we need to
know about his childhood memories, his broth
er's fate, and the birth of his son."59 A similar issue
attends the work of Longhi; his descriptions of
the paintings of Piero della Francesca, Caravaggio, Artemisia and Orazio Gentileschi or of any of the
other artists he turns to are likewise rooted in a
highly subjective aesthetic response that can nei
ther be challenged nor confirmed. To refer to the
concave space of the interior of Constantine's tent
as possessing "una concavit? di collinosa dolcezza"
adds to the aesthetic and semantic depth of Piero's
painting, but cannot serve as prompt to further
historical investigation. Stokes opens up novel possibilities of analysis,
but the extremely personal nature of his identifica
tion of Quattro Cento 'presentness' raises further
questions: he detects the Quattro Cento quality in a variety of monuments, from the Sforza palace in Pesaro, to the Tempio Malatesta, or Alfonso of
Aragon's Triumphal Archway (Fig. 6) in Naples. But because this category is not supported by any reference to anything external to Stokes' own re
sponses, these buildings could, equally, be seen as
embodying completely different aesthetic princi
ples. Indeed, Stokes' 'Quattro Centism' is argu
ably as reductive as any other aesthetic term of
analysis; for all its suggestiveness, it functions as
a formal category that he employs to create an al
ternative taxonomic ordering of the Renaissance
architectural monuments of Italy.
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6 Francesco Laurana, Triumphal Archway for Alfonso V, ca. 1443, Castel Nuovo, Naples
Despite the attention to the material present ness of artworks, Stokes' writing, paradoxically, draws the reader away from the object and to
wards his own artful rhetoric. I already cited a
small excerpt from his description of the Verroc
chio lavabo, which gives a sense of this, and it is
evident, too in the following passage from The
Stones of Rimini: "Istrian marble blackens in the
shade, is snow of salt-white where exposed to the sun. Light and shade are thus recorded, abstract
ed, intensified, solidified. Matter is dramatised in stone [...] it is the sea that thus stands petri fied, sharp and continuous till up near the sky. For
this Istrian stone seems compact of salt's bright yet shaggy crystals. Air eats into it, the bright ness remains. [...] Again, if in fantasy the stones
of Venice appear as the waves' p?trification, then
Venetian glass, compost of Venetian sand and wa
ter, expresses the taut curvature of the cold under
sea, the slow, oppressed yet brittle curves of dimly translucent water."60
There is a poetic beauty about much of Stokes'
writing, which shows up the dreariness of much
academic art historical literature, but it is too id
iosyncratic, too embedded in personal response,
lacking any historical compass, for it to contrib ute to a stock of shared communal and transfer
able knowledge concerning Renaissance art and
architecture. And this throws up the very issue of
what art history is for. I shall return to this ques tion later, but turn first to the contemporary writ
ing of Mieke Bal.
Mieke Bal
The concern with presentness in the work of
Stokes and Longhi might now be regarded as
deeply problematic. Since the critique of Western
logocentrism by, amongst others, Jacques Der
rida, meaning and perception have come to be
understood as structured around a sequence of
delays.61 Ironically, given Stokes' concern with
psychoanalysis, this can be traced back to Freud's
analyses of the constitutive function of deferral
('Nachtr?glichkeit') which has come to play a
fruitful role in much recent and contemporary art
historical writing.62 It is this epistemologica! shift,
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and its consequences, that forms the central pre
occupation of Mieke Bal. Having started out her career as a literary critic and theorist - her earli est works were on narrative theory
- Bal's work
has come increasingly to focus on art and visual culture.63 In the 1990s she established a reputa tion within art history on the basis of her work on Rembrandt and Caravaggio, and has also writ ten widely on contemporary artists such as Lou ise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Balthus or Olafur
Eliasson.64 The Amsterdam School for Cultural
Analysis, in which she occupies a leading position, has also come to play an important role in chal
lenging traditional art historical practice. A recurrent preoccupation of Bal has been the
semantic complexity and indeterminacy of the
image. Following the lead of Derrida, Bal fore
grounds the uncontrollable dissemination of
meaning in paintings, her writings speculating on
the undecidable semiosis of the image. I cite an
instance, her reading of Vermeer's Woman Hold
ing a Balance. "Since the part of the woman's
dress that is illuminated is also the part that cov ers her womb, it may, through metonymy, repre sent the slit that stands for that archaic opening of the womb - the navel [...] we may come to as
sociate the woman in this painting with the preg nant Madonna [...] The woman's headdress and the blue colour of her mantle may then be seen as
emphasizing the visual similarity in the distribu tion of space between her and God in The Last
Judgement - a text whose embedded position un
derlines the intertextual status of the embedding work."65
One notes the tentative tone of her writing -
the introduction of the permissive mood by the use of the modal verb "may." What Bal deliber
ately leaves out is the question of which of these
alternatives one might opt for. As she states: "The
point is not to convince readers of its appropri ateness or truth, but to offer the speculative pos
sibility of demonstrating polysemy in principle."66 Indeed, elsewhere she fixes on Danae's navel in
Rembrandt's eponymous painting as a metaphor for such instability, a visual equivalent for what
Derrida had described by means of the figure of the hymen.67
Attribution of meaning is grounded in social
and power relations, and opening up pictorial
meaning to a radical undecidability forces the in
terpreter to reveal their own position in opting for one set of meaning over another. One s subject po sition as an interpreter
- an expository agent, Bal terms it - has to be declared and made transparent.
Her own writing exhibits such an approach: "At
the moment when I became really excited about
the painting, became a factor in its game", and
the first person pronoun became markedly more
evident in her discussion.68
Bal has made an important intervention in art
history, demonstrating on the basis of historical
examples many of the theoretical tenets of Derri
dean deconstruction. And of course she is correct
in highlighting the process of polysemy, and in
stressing that the choice of one meaning over an
other is a function of other extrinsic factors, such as the expository agent's subject position within a network of power relations, or the determining role of disciplinary paradigms and habits. Yet her
work also presents a number of difficulties. First, while it problematises the reading of images, it re
lies on a strangely Enlightenment commitment to
the idea that one's own subject position can, on the
contrary, be rendered transparent. With regard to
the self-identification above, can she really be sure
of having identified correctly the moment at which she became excited about Vermeer's painting? Per
haps there was some earlier moment of which she was unaware, which was repressed within the as
sumed objectivity of her discourse, but which was
always already informing her writing. Can she be sure what the basis of that excitement might be?
And at what moment did she become aware of the need to disclose her own investment in the image? For all her emphasis on subjectivity as a factor in
the interpretative process, Bal's writing is a little too self-controlled, too self-aware for it to be a
convincing performance of her own theoretical
position. What is the subject position of someone
wishing to foreground polysemy? What is their
location within the network of social and discur sive power? What determines their decision to de scribe such a location with the language that they do, rather than by employing an entirely different
terminology? Foregrounding the subjectivity of
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the interpreter in this way risks stepping out into
the quicksand of reflexivity that has preoccupied
philosophical thinking since Kant, and which has never been resolved, because unresolvable.69
There is a point, too, at which such self-reflec
tion, and in particular, making it into a feature of
the text, lapses into a rhetorical mannerism. In the case of Bal this includes, for example: the author
ostentatiously referring to her own attitudes, the use of rhetorical questions, extensive self-quota tion, the recurrent highlighting of small details
such as a nail, a navel, a dagger (another Freud
ian trope) that prompt speculation about the
(im)possibility of reading and provide visual met
aphors for Derridean conceptions of diff?rance, the hymen, dissemination.70 At other times ap
parently meaningless details become the point of
inversion, functioning as the axis of new readings. Thus a blot of ink in a Rembrandt, "once semi
otically framed, even becomes the central, crucial
sign of the image, the one that is capable of turn
ing the recognized story around and offering a
new one [...]."71
Bal's primary concern is to draw attention to
the treacherous waters of art historical interpreta tion; constructing the intertextual web of mean
ings within which the image and its interpreter can become caught, her aim is to destabilise the
act of reading. Yet the figure of the interpreter is a curiously ahistorical one. There is also little sense of the pragmatics of meaning, i.e. of the re
source of meanings available at a particular time, or of the meanings that might accrue to images in particular (historical or contemporary) situa
tions. Indeed, Bal distances herself from the his
torical and theoretical commitments that such an
approach would imply, and this is part of an ex
plicit series of criticisms of the values of art his
tory to which she gives voice. She criticises the
discipline on account of its desire to established
historical sequences, or to seek historical prec edents: "[...] iconography [...] construes the an
tecedent as a sounding board against which the
posterior visual work can stand out in its differ
ence, the narrative of anteriority uses the prior text or image as a measuring stick."72 The prob lem of such an emphasis, for Bal, is that it detracts
from the sense of originality of the work of art. As
she states, "it defeats the point of visual art which is not to reiterate but to innovate, to offer experi ences and insights, sights and sites that we did not as yet possess. This has nothing to do with roman
tic originality, but a lot to do with art's efficacy (rather than 'essence'); with an understanding of art as process; with cultural life at the crossroads of significant events."73 In other words, art history robs the art work of its vitality, and although Bal's
work is ostensibly to do with the theory of inter
pretation, this comment reveals her final concern:
the articulation of aesthetic response. Such an op
position between art history and aesthetics is not so straightforward however; relationality to other,
prior, works of art has always been a central aspect of gauging aesthetic response. One might think,
here, of the importance attached to the 'exempla riness' of the works of genius by Kant or, indeed, the central role played by relationality in the writ
ings of Longhi.74 As Bal herself admits, the "nar
rative of anteriority" plays a vital role in provid
ing some means of establishing the way in which
this artwork offers these particular new insights and experiences, but having first critiqued cer
tain types of narrative ("I know of no writing on
Bernini's Apollo and Daphne from 1622-1625, at
the Borghese Gallery in Rome, for example, that
does not 'explain' or 'describe' the sculpture in terms of Ovid's story"75) she rejects the idea of
any such narratives. Having initially critiqued the
resistance, among many art historians, to the idea
of the ambiguity of works of art, Bal embarks on a
trajectory that takes her further and further away from the discipline; her critical comments end up
having little relevance to the historical study of art. This raises more general questions to do with
the meaning and nature of art history, but before
turning to these I explore the work of one final
author: Georges Didi-Huberman.
Georges Didi-Huberman
A central pre-occupation of Didi-Huberman's
writing has long been the critique of the episte
mologica! and ontological foundations of art his
tory. He has repeatedly attacked its assumptions the image is accessible to visual description and
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interpretation. In contrast, as Didi-Huberman states: "C'est un fait d'exp?rience sans cesse r??
prouv?, in?puisable, lancinant: la peinture, qui n'a
pas de coulisses, qui montre tout, tout en m?me
temps, sur un m?me superficie - la peinture est
dou?e d'une ?trange et formidable capacit? de dis
simulation. Elle ne cessera jamais d'?tre l?, devant
nous, comme un lointain, une puissance, jamais comme l'acte tout ? fait."76
For Didi-Huberman art historians have de
vised a number of strategies for disavowing the evasiveness of pictorial meaning; one, first pio neered by Giovanni Morelli, is to adopt the mo
tif of the detail, based on the idea that the deter
mination of meaning depends on close attention to the picture.77 Another is to establish the causal
chains of influence, which seek to tie the artwork into a determinate sequence; a further strategy is
the iconographie method of tying the work down to its symbolic tropes and figures, the meaning of which can be determined through their place
within a stable lexicon of visual symbols. Under
pinning the resort to the detail is a positivistic
epistemology: "il postule que tout le visible peut ?tre d?crit, d?coup? en ses elements (comme les
mots d'une phrase, les lettres d'un mot) et compt? comme tout; que d?crire signifie bien voir, et que bien voir signifie voir vrai [...]."78
In place of this Didi-Huberman proposes an al
ternative approach that hesitates to impose mean
ing on the image and does not equate viewing with
knowing, indeed recognises that viewing is itself
governed by ambiguity, uncertainty and the de
ferral of meaning, and that the power of images derives precisely from such destabilising of vision
and meaning, rather than from their ability to
transmit knowledge about the visual world. Such an approach, he states, "exige donc un regard qui ne s'approcherait pas seulement pour discerner et
reconna?tre, pour d?nommer ? tout prix ce qu'il saisit - mais qui, d'abord, s'?loignerait un peu et
s'abstiendrait de tout clarifier tout de suite. Quel que chose comme une attention flottante, une lon
gue suspension du moment de conclure [...]."79 The image is to be understood as a rupture
("d?chirure") in the field of the visible, a site of
indeterminacy; in place of the idea of the image as a visual symbol
- central to the humanist tradi
7 Fra Angelico, Detail of Noli me tangere, 1437-1446, Con vent of San Marco, Florence
tion of art history - Didi-Huberman substitutes
that of the image as symptom. This use of psy
choanalytical terminology implies that the image is meant to be understood as the index of the un
conscious of the artist, but Didi-Huberman ex
plicitly rejects such a reading; the Freudian con
nection is solely in terms of the images resistance to interpretation, which bears comparison to the
multiple ambiguities of the dreamwork.80 As Didi
Huberman states, paraphrasing Freud, "le symp t?me [...] se pr?te justement ? une dialectique de
la dissimulation."81
Didi-Huberman focuses on artworks that ex
emplify such visual and semantic indeterminacy, and his work foregrounds in an astonishing man
ner the visual and semantic ambiguities of the im
age, casting fundamental doubt on the familiar
and traditional art historical trope of close read
ing. An example of this can be seen in the extend
ed discussions in his monograph on Fra Angeli co.82 The latter is the painter of dissemblance par excellence; in his Noli me tangere (Fig. 7) Fra An
gelico paints a number of red blotches that fune
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^m^S^ 'mt^?' j^^^^P^^ft v ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 1
'
8 Fra Angelico, Annunciation, 1441, Convent of San Marco, Florence
tion, in turn, as signifiers of the stigmata of Christ
and as flowers in the meadow. They are painted
identically; Fra Angelico makes the blotches rep resent both, as if to suggest that Christ is sowing his stigmata in the soil of the mundane garden, a
reading that binds together the allegorical and mi
metic registers of the painting. Yet more is stake
here. First, Fra Angelico is using the ambiguity of
these blotches - are they stigmata, flowers, or just blotches? - to displace pictorial meaning. Second, such a displacement of meaning is rooted in his
immersion in Thomist thought and in the nega tive theology of Dionysus the Areopagite, with
their concern of the non-representability of the
divine mystery: dissemblance and pictorial ambi
guity points towards the impossibility of such a
goal. In this respect Fra Angelico stands, for Didi
Huberman, as the opposite to the pictorial regime
emerging in the Renaissance, which found theo
retical expression in Alberti's De Pictura and also
provided a visual analogue to the practice of art
history itself - with its scientific pretensions and
its claims to clarity.
Although he privileges ambiguity within An
gelico's images and hence works to deny the pos
sibility of traditional iconological readings, Didi
Huberman's study is in other respects an orthodox
exercise in art historical scholarship; concerned
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9 Jan Vermeer, Detail of The Lacemaker, 1669-1670, Louvre, Paris
10 Jan Vermeer, Detail of The Lacemaker, 1669-1670, Louvre, Paris
with laying out the limits of interpretability in re
lation to the horizon of readings available in the
fifteenth century, it anchors the reading of Fra
Angelico to the reconstruction of a specific his
torical context of philosophical and theological
thought. The passing suggestion of a correlation between
the epistemology of the discipline of art history and the pictorial logic of the Albertian quattro cento implies the need for a different kind of inter
pretative discourse in order to be able to approach
images such as Ang?licos. However, Didi-Huber man has a more general critique of art history in
his sights, and elsewhere the Florentine painter serves as the prompt for a much more wide-rang
ing set of speculations on the nature and limits of art historical interpretation. In Devant l'Image his
discussion of Fra Angelico focuses on the enigma of Ang?licos Annunciation fresco (Fig.8) in San
Marco. In particular, the vacuity of the image, the
minimalism of the interior of the cell, the absence
of variet?, to use an Albertian term, presents an
interpretative dilemma. On the one hand it has
been seen as an indication of naivety on the part of Angelico, on the other, as a visual symbol of
divine mystery. Yet Didi-Huberman suggests an
alternative, namely, a suspension of the demand
that the image should 'mean' something. In his reading of Fra Angelico Didi-Huberman
dismantles the process of looking in order to dis
turb the readers ability to identify the object of
vision. Attention to details has usually served as
the key to definitive interpretation, but it is pre
cisely at this point, argues Didi-Huberman, that
the meaning and identity of the picture becomes most unstable. Yet it is in examination of the de
tails of a painting, of an image, where meaning
begins to unravel. Following on from the discus
sion of the red blotches of Fra Angelico I take as another example Didi-Huberman's reading of
Vermeer's The Lacemaker (Fig. 9). The focus of
the discussion here is the detail of what the lace
maker is actually doing, for although the picture as whole would appear to imply that it she is ob
viously sewing lace, closer inspection reveals, he
argues, that matters are not at all that clear-cut. Of
particular interest is the thread (Fig. 10). The dis
cussion is a long passage, but it is worth quoting in
its entirety: "En quoi consiste-t-elle, exactement?
C'est un coulee de peinture rouge. Associ?e, l?, ?
une autre, blanche, moins circonvolu?e, mais non
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moins stup?fiante. Elle surgit du cousin, ? gau che de la dentelli?re. Elle s'effiloche d?raisonna
blement, devant nous, comme une affirmation su
bite, sans calcul rep?rable, de l'existence vertical et frontale du tableau. Le trac? y semble divaguer; son schema lui-m?me fait tache. Les emp?tements,
quoique subtils, les modulations de valeurs, tout
semble donn? comme fruit de hazard; une pein ture toute liquide, qui aurait ?t? en quelque sorte
laiss?e ? elle-m?me [...] nous voyons bien qu'il n'y a l? rien ? voir qu'un filet, un effilochement insen
s? de peinture [...] ce filet de vermilion deviant, ?
strictement parler, inidentifiable, sauf ? dire qu'il est de la peinture en acte; sa forme est domin?e
par sa mati?re, son statut repr?sentatif est domin?
par la dimension du quasi, pr?caire en cela, ni dis
tinct ni clair: il imite peut-?tre ?du fil' mais il n'est
pas d?peint comme du fil'; donc il est peint, peint comme de la peinture."83
The colour spills out of any determinable form
into a base materiality that defies interpretation. In his polemics against the art historical search
for meaning Didi-Huberman repeatedly turns to
the destabilising effects of colour; this is linked
to a persistent concern with the work of Merleau
Ponty in whose phenomenological investigations colour -
specifically, the colour red - also plays an
important role.84 However, it also bears compari son with Julia Kristeva's analysis of colour in the
history of art; here the denaturalisation of colour
by modernist artists such as van Gogh or Matisse
is part of a project to negate meaning by drawing on colour's appeal to the pre-symbolic drives of
the unconscious.85
Like Kristeva, Didi-Huberman is working
through the implications of Freudian thinking for
the understanding of interpretation, but he also
has more directly art historical objectives. His
discussion of the vermilion in Vermeer is part of a
longer polemic against Svetlana Alpers; specifical
ly, he targets her reading of Dutch art as concerned
with a kind of visual mapping, an art of describing, to use her famous phrase.86 Analysing other paint
ings by Vermeer such as his View of Delft (1658?
1660) or The Girl with a Red Hat (1665), Didi-Hu berman again takes apart their mimetic legibility; the art of describing is precisely what Dutch paint
ing - indeed painting in general
- is not.
For Didi-Huberman the compulsion to submit
works to art historical interpretation, to cfix' their
meaning, finds its most powerful expression in
the iconographical methodology of Panofsky. The
latter's creation of an interpretative 'system' seems
designed to minimise the possibilities of semantic
slippage or indeterminacy. Didi-Huberman con
sequently draws a marked contrast between Pa
nofskian iconology and the intellectual enterprise of Aby Warburg.87 Indeed, Aby Warburg is seen
as providing a kind of counterpoint to the reduc
tive iconology of Panofsky (who, for Didi-Huber
man, stands for the entire discipline). In his penetrating and exhaustive study of War
burg, Didi-Huberman covers a wide range of is
sues, considering Warburg's place within art his
tory, his intellectual debt to anthropology and his
relation to Ludwig Binswanger, at whose clinic in
Kreuzlingen he was a patient in the 1920s.88 As
with Didi-Huberman's other works, the symptom is again a central topic, and particular prominence is accorded to Warburg's notion of 'Nachleben', a
kind of collective recurring unconscious, which
Didi-Huberman reads as a symptomal disruption of time: "Ce que Freud a d?couvert dans le symp t?me - et Warburg dans la survivance - n'est autre
qu'un r?gime discontinu de la temporalit? [,..]."89 The constant reappearance of repressed trau
mas from a distant past - their recurrence in a
variety of symbolic images -
disrupts the clean
chronologies of art history, and also challenges the measured, contained interpretation of Renais sance culture associated with Panofsky. Warburg's
tracing of the migration of symbolic images of fear
-pathos formulae - across time and space, indeed,
his concern with their ability to leap across great
temporal and spatial intervals, becomes for Didi
Huberman the model of an alternative theory of
the image that dispenses with many of the most
problematic aspects of orthodox art history.90 Al
though persuasive, this is, however, only a partial account; Warburg's published writings always in
cluded a meticulous scholarly apparatus that dis
played an exhaustive concern with historical and
chronological minutiae of the kind dismissed by Didi-Huberman. While the transhistorical image
plays a key role in Warburg's thinking, a central
strand of his project is to consider how such an
23
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image is translated and modified at particular his
torical moments.91 Moreover, from his first ma
jor work, the doctoral thesis of 1893 on Botticelli,
through to later texts, such as study on Reforma
tion propaganda in sixteenth-century Germany,
Warburg unearthed masses of primary material
precisely to legitimise certain interpretations as
authoritative. There is little of the sense of ambi
guity or uncertainty valued by Didi-Huberman.
It might also be noted that Warburg's project was
only ever conceived as a particular thematic in
vestigation within the much wider field of art his
tory (or, indeed, Kulturwissenschaft), and not as a
replacement for a vastly larger discipline. In one
sense, of course, this is irrelevant to Didi-Huber
man's own goals, yet it highlights potential diffi
culties in his claims on behalf ofWarburg. Didi-Huberman undermines many basic as
sumptions about paintings, painterly representa tion and art historical interpretation. Yet is pre
cisely where he is most critical of art history that
the difficulties attending his own project begin to
emerge. In her study of Dutch painting, for ex
ample, Svetlana Alpers attempts to describe a dis
tinctive culture of pictorial representation, plac
ing the images of Vermeer and his contemporaries into some kind of social context. This is, with
the exception of his monograph on Fra Angeli co, missing in Didi-Huberman's writing. In Didi
Huberman's work there is little sense of the con
crete historical task facing Vermeer or indeed Fra
Angelico, or of the nature of his or her singular response to questions of pictorial representation
bequeathed by earlier painters. Didi-Huberman
discusses Fra Angelico, for example, in terms of
larger abstractions - chief among which are the
opposition between medieval and renaissance
(modern). Whether dealing with the interpreta tion of Fra Angelico, Vermeer, or any other painter or image-maker, the conceptual problems are the
same, with an attenuated sense of the historical
specificity of each of their work.92 Of course, in
Didi-Huberman's defence it might be simply stat
ed that this is a typically art historical response, which fundamentally misunderstands the nature
of his project. However, the question then has to
be posed as to what kind of alternative art history he envisages.
Didi-Huberman's emphasis on the semantic in
determinacy of the image provides an important corrective to many of the guiding assumptions of
traditional art historical investigation. However, even here criticisms can be voiced, and he even
provides the tools of critique. In his discussion of
Vermeer's The Lacemaker he states that the rea
son we read the vermilion paint as 'red thread' is
because of the larger context of the painting. Spe
cifically: ??[...] l'?conomie g?n?rale d'une oeuvre
comme celle de Vermeer est une ?conomie mim?
tique [...]. C'est ainsi que, malgr? tout, nous croi rons y voir clair: nous reconna?trons, sans presque
y r?fl?chir, du fil, du fil rouge qui s'?pand hors d'un
n?cessaire ? couture."93 In other words, the desta
bilising detail of the "pan" ("patch") of vermilion
only achieves its effect if we suspend the overall
representational regime of the picture. With this
apparently minor incidental comment Didi-Hu
berman opens up the entire question of the prag matics of viewing and interpretation. We then ask, under what conditions, what kind of reading does
the vermilion patch disrupt the mimetic reference
of the painting? This is, of course, a question that was already being addressed some 40 years ago
by Gombrich, who examined the ways in which
cultural expectations literally determine what the
viewer sees, or at least think they see. Drawing on
the communication theory of Shannon and Weav
er, Gombrich explored the ways in which read
ing - whether of text or of image
- compensates
for 'blanks' and constructs meaning as if they did
not exist.94
In speaking of Gombrich, I am not trying to
establish a counter-theory to that of Didi-Hu
berman, most especially since Gombrich's un
derstanding of images and interpretation has it
self been the object of a sustained critique.95 On
this particular point, however, his work implies that the significance of the detail within the paint
ing as a whole is less than Didi-Huberman's argu ment might suggest. Given that the undecidabil
ity of the vermilion only becomes apparent upon
suspending its representational logic, it seems that
Didi-Huberman is not offering a theory of inter
pretation at all, but rather, an account of aesthetic
experience; his call for a detached gaze that re
sists the temptation to search for meaning recalls
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a rather more familiar notion, namely, the disin
terested observer of Kant's aesthetic theory. Didi
Huberman depicts his idealised viewer as opting to occupy a space of ambiguity, where the mean
ing of the image, even its physical identity, is put into suspension. This suggests a lineage that can
be traced back through Derrida to Barthesian no
tions o? jouissance, but it also evokes the free play of the imagination and the understanding that
was so central to the Kantian formulation of aes
thetic experience.96 In other words, the art histo
rian seems to be replaced by the aesthete, and with
this we are brought back to many of the problems we observed in Stokes and Longhi. I shall con
sider these within the context of the wider issues
that the work of all four writers I have examined
raises.
Concluding Thoughts
In a recent commentary on Adrian Stokes Michael
Ann Holly asks: "Surely it is not too absurd to
wonder why we do not write today as Stokes once
did", adding later that "[...] the romance of writ
ing about the past has been squeezed out of our
profession, and I think that is why I have turned
to Stokes to put some of it back in again."97 Im
plicit in her question is an acceptance of the no
tion that art history does indeed constitute a kind
of taming of the image. This taming can take
place at a number of levels. It can be at the level of
emotional response - where the affective encoun
ter with art works is repressed under the guise of
connoisseurial detachment, or buried under the
apparatus of dry 'scientific' scholarship. It can
also be at the semantic level, where the image is
controlled through its immersion in hermeneutic
and historical grids and systems. One might broaden Holly's question in order
to consider how, in general, art history might be
enhanced by a poetics of the image of the kind
undertaken by the authors explored here. On one
level it is clear that their work serves as an impor tant critique of the ease with which art histori
cal writing can lapse into turgid prose reliant on
stale interpretative procedures. On another level,
however, it can be argued that these four authors
undertake a different kind of taming, in which the
artwork is used as a prompt for a certain kind of
speculation on subjective response and the limits of
interpretation. No longer lost in the hermeneutic
jargon of art history, they become lost in another
kind of discourse, in which the language of repre sentation blots out the object of discourse.
Of course, to view the issue as merely one of
art historical stylistics risks offering a superficial
interpretation of the significance of these writers
for the practice of art history. I have on several
occasions highlighted a difficulty that attends the
work of each author, namely, its intensely personal nature. This is most evident in the case of Longhi and Stokes, but it is present, too, in Didi-Huber
man and Bal. This stems from an important ap
proach shared by all of them; their work is less an
exercise in art historical investigation and rather more the attempt to objectify their own aesthetic
response to varying types of artwork. The ques tion is then no longer one of rhetoric but instead
focuses on the role of aesthetics within art his
tory.
In order to address this I wish to turn to a no
tion I have referred to at several points: that of art
history as a collective enterprise. This can be un
derstood in a number of different ways. First, one
can point to a Kuhnian notion of scholarly en
deavour as governed by institutionally and socially constituted paradigms.98 Such paradigms outline not only the object domain and dominant meth
odologies of the discipline in question, but also its
working procedures and basic epistemological is
sues, including what counts as evidence and how.
Other authors, such as Imre Lakatos have laid a
similar emphasis on the collective basis of schol
arly research that relies on a shared understanding of basic norms of argumentation and demonstra
tion. 99 Within this analytical framework we can
think of writers such as Bai or Didi-Huberman as trying to effect a paradigm shift, to employ a
Kuhnian metaphor, reshaping the boundaries, as
sumptions and procedures of art history. The dif
ficulty in thinking about their work in such terms
(much less that of Stokes or Longhi) is that while
the paradigm may shift, the collective basis of the
discipline persists. Indeed, it is meaningless to talk
of a paradigm as anything other than a commu
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nally binding framework. Seen as such, it is diffi
cult to identify what paradigm is being established in place of the old art history; no set of proposi tions about Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Piero della Francesca or Vermeer is being advanced that could
be the subject of debate. Stokes's observation that
Verrocchio's lavabo, for example, displays "neces
sitous thongs and twines bound for the light from
stirred under-consciousness" can play little role in
any body of knowledge, other than as the articu
lation of a specific aesthetic response. Alternative
ly, one might ask what kind of discourse art his
tory might be in which Stokes's poetic description could comprise a body of knowledge? Although it
opens up possibilities for a new aesthetic sensibil
ity, it does not, for example, provide insights that
would generate further interpretations of Verroc
chio. With regard to Longhi, his lasting contribu tion to art history as a collective activity lay rather
more in the orthodox and traditional area of attri
butions than in his expansion of the range of de
scriptive rhetoric available. A similar observation
could be made of Bal and Didi-Huberman; they offer a meta-theoretical reflection on art historical
interpretation, but much else about the artists they
discuss remains the same. This is not merely due, in the case of Bal, for instance, to the conserva
tism of much Rembrandt scholarship. Rather, it
is because the open up of a space of interpreta tive possibilities without committing to a specific
reading that might be the object of contention. It
is possible to re-orient the reading of Rembrandt,
Vermeer, Fra Angelico and others around appar
ently random ink blots, patches of vermilion, in
significant nails, and so forth. What is not made
evident is what might be gained, in art historical
terms, from such interpretative reversals.
Considering the four authors I have examined, it appears that while basic weaknesses within art
history are exposed, constructing a counter-dis course creates as many difficulties as it solves. The
image remains 'tamed,' albeit in a different way. What does emerge out of this discussion is the
need to consider not simply the contribution of
individual authors, but also more fundamental is sues to do with the status of art history as a shared
enterprise and the implications that might have for a critical assessment of how art historical knowl
edge is generated, what 'knowledge' in this con
text means, and to whom it is addressed.
Notes
1 Paul Barolsky, Writing Art History, in: The Art
Bulletin, 78, 3, 1996, 398. 2 Paul Barolsky, Art History as Fiction, in: Artibus
et Hist?ri??, 17,34, 1996, 17.
3 See, for example Michael Podro, The Critical Hi storians of Art, London/New Haven 1982; Do
nald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History. Meditati ons on a Coy Science, London /New Haven 1989;
Mark Cheetham, eds. Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, The Subjects of Art History. Histo rical Objects in Contemporary Perspective, Cam
bridge 1998; Keith Moxey, The Practice of Persua sion. Paradox and Power in Art History, Ithaca
N. Y. 2001; Hubert Locher, Kunstgeschichte als
historische Theorie der Kunst 1750-1950, M?n
chen 2001; Regine Prange, Die Geburt der Kunst
geschichte, Berlin 2004. 4 Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, Lon
don/New Haven 1989, 83.
5 See August Schmarsow, Grundbegriffe der
Kunstwissenschaft, Leipzig 1905; Hans Tietze, Die Methode der Kunstgeschichte, Leipzig 1913;
Heinrich W?lfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grund
begriffe. Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst, M?nchen 1915; Robert He
dicke, Methodenlehre der Kunstgeschichte. Ein Handbuch f?r Studierende, Strassburg 1924; Jo sef Strzygowski, Grunds?tzliches und Tats?chli
ches, in: Die Kunstwissenschaft der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, ed. Johannes Jahn, Leip zig 1924, 157-81; Erwin Panofsky, Introduction, in: Studies in Iconology, Oxford 1939. On the
question of 'strenge Kunstwissenschaft' see Hans
Sedlmayr, Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft, in: Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen, I, 1931,
7-32; Eberhard Hempel, Ist ,eine strenge Kunst
wissenschaft' m?glich? in: Zeitschrift f?r Kunst
geschichte, 3, 3, 1934, 155-163. 6 "The best art history I can think of is one in which
the word 'beautiful' never appears." Moriz Thau
sing, Die Stellung der Kunstgeschichte als Wis
senschaft, in: idem, Wiener Kunstbriefe, Leipzig
1884,5. 7 See, for example, Preziosi (as in Note 4).
26
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8 One of the first to comment on this was, of course,
Svetlana Alpers, whose The Art of Describing, Chicago 1983, offered an alternative interpreta tive model that dispensed with iconological con cerns with symbolic and allegorical meaning.
9 Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History, in: The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. idem, Oxford 1998,521.
10 Preziosi (as in Note 9), 519. See too Preziosi, Brain of the Earth's Body: Art, Museums, and the Phan
tasms of Modernity, Minneapolis 2003. 11 Johann Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des
Alterthums, Dresden 1764. This has been explored by Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal. Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, London/New
Haven 1994. Whitney Davis, Winckelmann's
'Homosexual' Teleologies, in: Sexuality in An
cient Art, ed. Natalie Kampen, New York 1996, 262-275.
12 Whitney Davis, Homoerotic Art Collection from 1750 to 1920, in: Art History, 24, 2, 2001, 252.
13 See Roberto Longhi, I Pittori Futuristi (1913) and La Scultura Futurista di Boccioni (1914), in: idem, Opere Complete. Tomo I: Scritti Giovanili 1912?
1922, Florenz 1961, 47-54 and 133-162. 14 German translations of his work include: Kurze,
aber wahre Geschichte der italienischen Kunst,
K?ln 2002; Caravaggio, Dresden 1993; Venezia nische Malerei, Berlin 1995; Masolino und Ma
saccio, Berlin 1992. English editions of his work include: Three Studies. Masolino and Masaccio,
Caravaggio and his Forerunners, Carlo Braccesco,
ed. David Tabbat, New York 1995 and Piero della
Francesca, transi. David Tabbat, New York 2000.
15 Eduard H?ttinger, Stilpluralismus im Werk von Roberto Longhi. Ein kunsthistoriographischer Versuch, in: idem, Portr?ts und Profile. Zur Ge
schichte der Kunstgeschichte, Sankt Gallen 1992, 210. Amongst Italian writers on Longhi see, for ex
ample, Gianfranco Contini, Contributi Longhia
ni, in: Altri Esercizi (1942-1971), Turin 1972; Pier Vicenzo Mengaldo, Note sul Linguaggio Critico di Roberto Longhi, in: idem, La Tradizione del
Novecento, Milan 1975; Giovanni Romano, Storie
dell'Arte. Toesca, Longhi, Wittkower, Previtali,
Rom 1998; Giorgio Patrizi, Narrare l'Immagine. La Tradizione degli Scrittori d'Arte, Rom 2000. The critic Contini had a long and complex relation with Longhi and modelled his work, in certain re
spects, on the approach of Longhi. On the relation
between the two see: Manuela Marchesini, Scrit
tori in Funzione d'Altro: Longhi, Contini, Gadda, Modena 2005.
16 See, for example, Denis Mahon, Contrasts in Art
Historical Method: Two Recent Approaches to
Caravaggio, in: The Burlington Magazine, 95,603,
Juni 1953, 212-220; Per Jonas Nordhagen, Rober to Longhi (1890-1970) and His Method: Connois
seurship as a Science, in: Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 68,2, 1999, 99-116.
17 Roberto Longhi, Proposte per una critica d'arte, in: Paragone, January 1950, 1, 5-19.
18 "The work of art, from a Greek vase to the Sistine
Chapel ceiling, is always a masterpiece in exquisi tely relative terms. The work of art does not exist
in isolation, it is always a relation to something else. To begin with: at the very least, a relation to
another work of art. A work of art isolated in the world would not even be understood as a human
product, but would be guarded with reverence and horror, like magic, like a taboo, like the work of God or of a magician, not of man [...] the sense
of a relation makes a critical response necessary. The response includes not only the connection of
one work to another, but that also between the
work and the world, society, the economy, reli
gion, politics and whatever else takes place.", in:
Roberto Longhi, Proposte per una critica d'arte,
(as in Note 17), 16. 19 "To establish the relation between two works is
also to establish the concepts of art history, as I at least understand it, that is, nothing other than the
development of figurative styles [...]", in: Roberto
Longhi, Breve ma veridica storia dell'arte italia
na, Florenz, 1980, 36. These were notes originally written 1913-1914.
20 "[...] the relations between one work to another
inevitably dispose themselves in a historically de
veloping series [...]", in: Roberto Longhi, Review
of E. Petraccone, Luca Giordano, in: LArte, 1920, 92-93.
21 Julius von Schlosser,,Stilgeschichte4 und ,Sprach geschichte' der bildenden Kunst. Ein R?ckblick, in: Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische Abteilung, M?nchen, 1935, 3-39.
22 Schlosser (as in Note 21), 22. 23 The key work by Croce was Estetica come Scien
za dell'Espressione e Linguistica Generale: Teoria
e Storia, Bari 1908.
24 "[...] the real and true 'history' of all art can mean
nothing but the torch race of eminent creative in
dividuals, in: Schlosser (as in Note 21), 8. Schlosser was tireless in his efforts to disseminate the ideas of Croce across Austria and Germany, translating
much of Croce's work into German. Examples in
clude: Goethe, Z?rich 1920; Randbemerkungen eines Philosophen zum Weltkriege, 1914-20, Z? rich 1922; Gesammelte Philosophische Schriften,
T?bingen 1929. 25 "We think [...] it is possible to and useful to esta
blish and represent the formal structure of the
27
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work in clear and appropriate words, with a kind of verbal transfer that might have literary value, but only ever [...] insofar as it maintains a con
stant relationship to the work it aims to depict." in: Longhi (as in Note 20), 93.
26 As H?ttinger remarks, ?Roberto Longhi hat nie die N?tigung gesp?rt, sich systematisch und ex
plizit ?ber die Prinzipien seiner Kennerschaft, seiner Arbeit ?berhaupt, auszusprechen." in:
H?ttinger (as in Note 15), 219. 27 As Schlosser wrote: ?Longhis eigenth?mlicher,
oft fast barocker, jedenfalls aber ganz pers?nlicher Stil macht namentlich dem Ausl?nder die Lekt?re nicht eben leicht; aber er ist niemals phrasenhaft und snobistisch, sondern auch in seinen Neubil
dungen schlagkr?ftig und bildhaft.", Schlosser, K?nstlerprobleme der Fr?hrenaissance, in: Sit
zungsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, 214, 5, 1933,5.
28 Mengaldo (as in Note 15), 274-275. 29 Roberto Longhi, Piero della Francesca (1927), in:
idem, Piero della Francesca, Florenz 1975, 9-111.
30 "The nocturnal fabulousness of Gothic blends with ancient classicism, with the constructive
illumination of Caravaggio and the magic illu mination of Rembrandt, and even with the dust
weighing of Seurat [...]", in: Longhi (as in Note
29), 55-56.
31 "You think of the Argive tents, of Hannibal's
sleep before Cannae, or of the slumber of some
great crusader in Asia [...] and suddenly a great
light rains sheer down from above, searching clo
sely, like an eye of the moon." in: Longhi (as in Note 29), 56.
32 Longhi (as in Note 29), 55. 33 Longhi (as in Note 29), 56. 34 "[???] on this noblest animal progeny tower up, al
most inhuman, and yet most civil, either the limbs or the elytra, I don't know which, of the Christian warriors [...] Upright on their mounts they raise to heaven the artificial trellis of their monstrously beautiful helmets, terrifying to behold [...]", in:
Longhi (as in Note 29), 57. 35 "In the meantime, who is this Lady of the Log
gia? Is she a 'damsel' in the chivalric style, of the kind hinted at by the French miniaturists of the thirteenth century [...]? Or nothing more than a
memory of her, having already become a slightly course chatelaine of the Ligurian Riviera or the C?te d'Azur? She is still something of a 'blue stok
king' though not without the suspicion of bour geois wool." Roberto Longhi, Carlo Braccesco
(1942), in: idem, Lavori in Valpadana, Florenz 1973, 272. The text is also available in English translation in: Longhi, Three Studies (as in Note 14), 159-187.
The passage in English here is cited from 167.
36 Longhi, Carlo Braccesco (as in Note 35), 167. 37 Vitale Bloch, Roberto Longhi Obituary, in: The
Burlington Magazine, 113,1971, 610. 38 Longhi (as in Note 29), 86. 39 Mengaldo (as in Note 15), 260. 40 David Carrier, The Art Historian as Art Critic:
In Praise of Adrian Stokes, in: Stephen Bann, ed., The Coral Mind, London 2002, 151-159.
41 This is most evident in texts such as Inside Out. An
Essay in the Psychology and Aesthetic Appeal of
Space (1947), in: Adrian Stokes, Collected Critical
Writings, London, 1978, II, 139-182; idem, Smooth and Rough (1951), in: ibidem, 213-256, or Greek Culture and the Ego (1958), in: ibidem, 77-141.
42 Adrian Stokes, The Quattro Cento, in: Collected Critical Writings, I (as in Note 41), 29-180. All references will be to this edition.
43 A new edition was recently published as 'The Stones of Rimini' and 'the Quattro Cento': A Different Conception of the Italian Renaissance, London 2002, with interpretative essays by Ste
phen Bann, David Carrier and Stephen Kite. 44 On Stokes' subscription to various racial theories
see Richard Read, Art and its Discontents. The
Early Life of Adrian Stokes, London 2002, 173ff. 45 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, in: Artfo
rum, 5, 1967, 12-23; Fran?oise Ragot and Daniel
Lan?on, eds., Yves Bonnefoy: Ecrits sur l'Art et
Livres avec les Artistes, Paris 1993.
46 Stokes (as in Note 42), 40. 47 Stokes (as in Note 42), 40. 48 Stokes, Collected Critical Writings, II (as in
Note), 180-181. The character of Stokes' aesthetic
(though with little reference to its psychoanalytic dimension) is discussed in greater detail in Da vid Carrier, The Presentness of Painting: Adrian Stokes as Aesthetician, in: Critical Inquiry, 12, 4, 1986, 753-768.
49 Stokes (as in Note 42), 40. 50 Stokes (as in Note 42), 78. 51 Stokes, (as in Note 42), 134. 52 Stokes' orientalism is explored by Stephen Kite,
'South Opposed to East and North': Adrian Stokes and Josef Strzygowski. A Study in the aes thetics and historiography of Orientalism, in: Art
History, 26, 4, 2003, 505-532. 53 "I believe the Etruscans were Semitic or Hittite by
race. Certainly one attributes to them [...] the par
ticularly graphic mode of Semitic, but particularly representation; also sadistic propensities in gene
ral, brutalities of a kind that we have always asso ciated with the East.", in: Stokes (as in Note 42), 65.
54 Stokes (as in Note 42), 72. 55 David Carrier, England and its Aesthetes, in:
idem, ed., John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Adrian
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Stokes. England and its Aesthetes, Amsterdam,
1997, 1-24: "Ruskin, Pater and Stokes, noted art
critics, are not primarily concerned - in the wri
tings collected here - with artworks; they are con
cerned with perception as a way of knowing, and
with self-knowledge gained from aesthetic expe rience. Art for them comes afterward" (6).
56 Adrian Stokes, The Invitation in Art, London
1965,53. 57 Stephen Bann, The Case for Stokes (and Pater), in:
Poetry Nation Review, 9, 6,1,1978, 6-9; Geoffrey Newman, Adrian Stokes and Venice, in: British
Journal of Aesthetics, 35, 3, 1995, 254-261; Eti enne Joll?t, To Bring Distant Things Near: Di stance in Relation to the Work of Art in Stokes's
Thought, in: The Coral Mind. Adrian Stokes's En
gagement with Architecture, Art History, Criti
cism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Stephen Bann, Uni
versity Park, PA 2007, 189-198. 58 Alois Riegl, Sp?tr?mische Kunstindustrie, Wien
1901; Heinrich W?lfflin, Prolegomena zu einer
Psychologie der Architektur, M?nchen 1886. 59 David Carrier, Artwriting, Amherst 1987, 69-70.
60 Adrian Stokes, The Stones of Rimini, in: idem (as in Note 41), I, 185.
61 Jacques Derrida, La Diff?rance, in: idem, Marges de la Philosophie, Paris 1972, 1-29.
62 See, for example, Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge MA 1996, 21-25.
63 See Mieke Bal, Complexit? d'un Roman Popu laire, Paris 1974; idem, Narratologie. Essais sur la
Signification Narrative dans Quatre Romans Mo
dernes, Paris 1977.
64 Mieke Bal, Reading Rembrandt, Cambridge 1991; idem, Quoting Caravaggio, Chicago 1999; idem, Louise Bourgeois's Spider: the Architecture of
Art-Writing, Chicago 2001; idem, Earth Aches: the Aesthetics of the Cut, in: idem, Doris Salce do: Shibboleth, London 2007, 40-63; idem, Light Politics, in: Take Your Time Olafur Eliasson, ed. Madeleine Grynsztejn, San Francisco 2007, 153
182; idem, Balthus. Works (Interview), Barcelona 2008. A sample of her work has been published in German as: idem, Kulturanalyse, Frankfurt am
Main 2002. 65 Mieke Bal, Dispersing the Image, in: idem,
Looking In. Vermeer Story, Amsterdam 2001, 73.
66 Bal (as in Note 65), 73. 67 As Derrida notes, "La syntaxe de son pli interdit
qu'on en arr?te le jeu ou l'ind?cision", in: Jacques
Derrida, La Diss?mination, Paris 1972, 283-284.
68 Bal (as in Note 65), 75. 69 See Manfred Frank, Die Unhintergehbarkeit von
Individualit?t: Reflexionen ?ber Subjekt, Person und Individuum aus Anla? ihrer ,postmodernen
Toterkl?rung, Frankfurt am Main 1986, and idem, Selbstgef?hl. Eine historisch-theoretische Erkun
dung, Frankfurt am Main 2002.
70 In terms of organising readings around details,
Bal is of course enacting an art historical procedu re that has been well-established since Giovanni
Morelli or Aby M. Warburg. On the art historical use of details see Daniel Arasse, Le Detail, Paris
1996, and Carlo Ginzburg, Spurensicherung. Die Wissenschaft auf der Suche nach sich selbst, Berlin
2002.
71 Mieke Bai, Semiotic Elements in Academic Prac
tices, in: Critical Inquiry, 22, 3, 1996, 576. 72 Mieke Bal, Narrative Inside Out: Louise Bour
geois' Spider as Theoretical Object, in: Oxford Art Journal, 22,2, 1999, 116.
73 Bal (as in Note 72), 117. 74 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Frank
furt am Main 2006, ?46. 75 Bal (as in Note 72), 115. 76 "We are repeatedly made aware of the painful fact
that painting, though it has no hidden exits and shows everything at once on a single surface, pos sesses a strange and awesome capacity to dissimu
late. Painting will never cease to be there in front of
us, like a distant horizon or some potential act, but
never the act itself", Georges Didi-Huberman, De
vant l'Image, Paris 1990, 273. English translation
taken from Didi-Huberman, The Art of Not De
scribing: Vermeer - the Details and the Patch, in:
History of the Human Sciences, 2, 2, 1989, 135. 77 See Giovanni Morelli, Die Werke italienischer
Meister in den Galerien von M?nchen, Dresden
und Berlin, Leipzig 1880. 78 "It postulates that the visible, in its entirety, can
be described, cut up into its elements (like the words in a sentence or the letters in a word), and
counted, just like anything else; it postulates that to describe means to see well, and that to see well
means to see the truth.", in: Didi-Huberman, De
vant l'Image (as in Note 76), 275. English trans lation from The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer, 136.
79 "[???] demands a way of viewing that would not
focus on looking and recognising [...] but rather
one which would first step back and abstain from
seeking clarity immediately. A sort of floating at
tention, a lengthy suspension of the moment of
reaching a conclusion [...]", in: Didi-Huberman, Devant l'Image (as in Note 76), 25.
80 SigmundFreud,DieTraumdeutung, Leipzig/Wien, 1900.
81 Georges Didi-Huberman, La Peinture Incarn?e, Paris 1984,31.
82 Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico. Dissem
blance et Figuration, Paris 1990. Published in
29
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German as: Fra Angelico. Un?hnlichkeit und Fi
guration, M?nchen 1995.
83 "What exactly does it consist of? It is a run of red
paint. Joined by another, white this time, and less convoluted, but no less stupefying. It springs out
from the cushion, to the left of the lacemaker. It
frays out unreasonably, right in front of our eyes, like a sudden affirmation, like a sudden affirmati on - in no way calculated, apparently
- of the ver
tical, frontal existence of the canvas. The outline
seems to wander, causing the pattern it makes to
spread. The thick layers of paint and the modulati ons in colour values, though subtle, seem to be of
fered as the product of chance. A completely liquid painting appears to have been somehow left to it
self [...] we can see perfectly well that there is in
fact nothing there to see other than a meaningless,
ragged-edged run of paint [...] the run of vermi
lion becomes, strictly speaking, unidentifiable, other than to say it is painting in action. Its form
is dominated by its matter, and its representatio nal status, being dominated by the dimension of the not quite, is precarious in this respect. Neither
distinct nor clear, it perhaps imitates ca piece of th
read', but it is not depicted 'like a piece of thread'. It is therefore painted, painted like paint, not th read.", in: Didi-Huberman, Devant l'Image (as in
Note 76), 301. English translation from: The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer, 154-155.
84 See Georges Didi-Huberman (as in Note 81), 42. The text in question was Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'Invisible, Paris 1964.
85 Julia Kristeva, La Joie de Giotto, in: Polylogue, Paris 1977,383-408.
86 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing, Chicago 1981.
87 See Georges Didi-Huberman, Artistic Survival:
Panofsky vs. Warburg and the Exorcism of Im
pure Time, in: Common Knowledge, 9, 2, 2003, 273-285.
88 Georges Didi-Huberman, Histoire de l'art et temps des fant?mes selon Aby Warburg, Paris 2002.
89 "What Freud discovered in the symptom - and
Warburg in Nachleben - was nothing other than a
regime of discontinuous time.", in: Didi-Huber
man (as in Note 88), 317. 90 See Aby Warburg, Die Erneuerung der heidni
schen Antike, Berlin 1998. 91 See Matthew Rampley, Iconology of the Interval.
Aby Warburg's Legacy, in: Word and Image, 17, 4, 2001, 303-324.
92 Similar criticisms were made by Alexander Nagel, Review of Georges Didi-Huberman, Tra Angeli co' and William Hood, Tra Angelico at San Mar
co', in: The Art Bulletin, 78, 3, 1996, 559-565.
93 "Vermeer's work functions, overall, within the
general order of mimesis [...] thus we will believe, in spite of everything, that we understand what
we see: almost without thinking about it, we will
recognize thread, red thread spilling out of a se
wing-box.", in: Didi-Huberman, Devant l'Image
(as in Note 76), 300. English translation from: The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer, 154.
94 Ernst Gombrich, The Evidence of Images, in: In
terpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles
Singleton, Baltimore 1969, 35-104.
95 The first, and best known, criticism of Gombrich remains Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting.
The Logic of the Gaze, London 1983. 96 See Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du Texte, Paris
1982.
97 Michael Ann Holly, Stones of Solace, in: Stephen Bann, ed., The Coral Mind, London 2002, 200, 208.
98 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revo
lutions, Chicago 1960. 99 Imre Lakatos, ed., Criticism and the Growth of
Knowledge, Cambridge 1970.
Photo Credits
All Figures: Middlesbrough, University of Teesside
Library
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