Bildakt at the Warburg Institute 3110364638, 9783110364637

Table of contents :
Preface
On Warburg, Bildakt and Embodiment
I. Bildakt (Picture Act)
The Picture Act: Tradition, Horizon, Philosophy
Extended Imagery, Extended Access, Or Something Else?. Pictures and the Extended Mind Hypothesis
Bildakt Demystified. Remarks on Philosophical Iconology and Empirical Aesthetics
Picture Act Method. The Execution of Charles I in 1649 as a Picture Act
II. Traditions
Though This Be Madness: Edgar Wind and the Warburg Tradition
“Ein Geistvoller Amerikaner”. The Relevance of Charles S. Peirce to Debates on the Iconological Method
III. The Acting Body
Moving Speech. The Body of Language in Embodiment Theories and Rhetoric
“Not Only from his Hand But Also From his Temper”. ‘Movement’ in the Art and Art Theory of the Rembrandtists
Haptic Perception in Mattia Preti’s Doubting Thomas (1635/40)
The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela as a Tactile Theater
IV. The Living Body
Bodily Communication in Picture Acts
Life, but not as we Know it. Wax Images and the Denial of Death
Picture Credits

Citation preview

Bildakt at the Warburg Institute

BAND XII

ACTUS et I MAGO Berliner Schriften für Bildaktforschung und Verkörperungsphilosophie Herausgegeben von Horst Bredekamp und Jürgen Trabant Schriftleitung: Marion Lauschke

Bildakt at the Warburg Institute Edited by Sabine Marienberg and Jürgen Trabant

Publiziert mit Unterstützung der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft im Rahmen des Exzellenzclusters "Bild Wissen Gestaltung. Ein Interdisziplinäres Labor" der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Einbandgestaltung unter Verwendung von Francesco Colonna: „Hypnerotomachia Poliphili“, 1499 (Vorderseite) und Arent de Gelder: Esther, Ahasver, and Haman (or Mordechai?), Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum, photograph by Yannis Hadjinicolaou (Rückseite).

ISBN 978-3-11-036463-7 eISBN 978-3-11-036480-4 Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Dieses Werk ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Die dadurch begründeten Rechte, insbesondere die der Übersetzung, des Nachdrucks, des Vortrags, der Entnahme von Abbildungen und Tabellen, der Funksendung, der Mikroverfilmung oder der Vervielfältigung auf anderen Wegen und der Speicherung in Datenverarbeitungsanlagen, bleiben, auch bei nur auszugs­weiser Verwertung, vorbehalten. Eine Vervielfältigung dieses Werkes oder von Teilen dieses Werkes ist auch im Einzelfall nur in den Grenzen der gesetzlichen Bestimmungen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes in der jeweils geltenden Fassung zulässig. Sie ist grundsätzlich vergütungs­pflichtig. Zuwiderhand­ lungen unterliegen den Strafbestimmungen des Urheberrechts. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Mitarbeiterinnen dieses Bandes: Katharina Lee Chichester, Hanna Fiegenbaum, Patrizia Pecl, Johanna Schiffler, Patrizia Unger Reihengestaltung: Petra Florath, Berlin Druck und Bindung: DZA Druckerei zu Altenburg GmbH, Altenburg Printed in Germany Dieses Papier ist alterungsbeständig nach DIN/ISO 9706. www.degruyter.com

CONTENTS

VII

Peter Mack Preface

IX

Jürgen Trabant On Warburg, Bildakt and Embodiment

I. BILDA KT (PICT URE ACT)    3

Horst Bredekamp The Picture Act: Tradition, Horizon, Philosophy

  33

Joerg Fingerhut Extended Imagery, Extended Access, or Something Else? Pictures and the Extended Mind Hypothesis

  51

Sascha Freyberg & Katharina Blühm Bildakt Demystified. Remarks on Philosophical Iconology and Empirical Aesthetics

  69

Pablo Schneider Picture Act Method. The Execution of Charles I in 1649 as a Picture Act



II. TRADITIONS

  87

Franz Engel Though This Be Madness: Edgar Wind and the Warburg Tradition

117

Tullio Viola “Ein geistvoller Amerikaner”. The Relevance of Charles S. Peirce to Debates on the Iconological Method.



III. THE ACTING BODY

139

Sabine Marienberg Moving Speech. The Body of Language in Embodiment Theories and Rhetoric

151

Yannis Hadjinicolaou “Not Only From His Hand but Also From His Temper”. ‘Movement’ in the Art and Art Theory of the Rembrandtists

171

Ulrike Feist Haptic Perception in Mattia Preti’s Doubting Thomas (1635/40)

189

Stefan Trinks The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela as a Tactile Theater



IV. THE LIVING BODY

223

Marion Lauschke Bodily Communication in Picture Acts

231

Joris van Gastel Life, but Not as We Know It. Wax Images and the Denial of Death

252

Picture Credits

Peter Mack

PREFACE

When I became Director of the Warburg Institute in Autumn 2010 I enjoyed the privilege of being invited to the weekly meeting of the Bildakt group in Berlin. I was struck by the importance of the ideas which were being discussed and by the easy interchange of ideas and practical advice between art historians and philosophers, between internationally eminent scholars and post-doctoral fellows. It seemed to me that the Bildakt group offered a model of collaborative research. Together members of the group were exploring a complex of ideas around the relationships between bodies, art objects, language and thought at the same time as conducting philologically detailed research projects of their own. I was entranced both by their way of approaching the human responses to art and its relation to embodiment and language and by their style of working. It seemed to me that Anglophone cultural and art historians needed to experience their approach at first hand and that the Warburg Institute in London, which was already so closely connected to many of their research ideas and aspirations, was the right place to present this encounter. I was delighted when Horst Bredekamp, Jürgen Trabant and other members of the Bildakt group agreed to my proposal, spontaneously made at our first meeting and was very happy with the day which we managed to spend together at the Institute in January 2012. I hope that this book which presents in permanent form the papers delivered by members of the Bildakt group that day will provide readers with an idea of the inspiration which the London audience received from our visitors that day. Movement and speech, the making of objects and the crafting of words are primary human impulses. The Bildakt project asks us all to consider how images speak to us, how the embodiedness of the image enables its force, how the image depicts, creates and substitutes for a body, and how resp­ onding to an image involves bodily response, language and ideas.

Jürgen Trabant

ON WARBURG, BILDA KT A ND EMBODIMENT London, January 25th, 2013

Dear Peter Mack, dear colleagues, dear friends, Before I say a few words about our research group and what it is all about, I want to thank you for the honor of inviting us to the Warburg Institute. For our group, the Kolleg-Forschergruppe Bildakt und Verkörperung (“Collegium for the Advanced Study of Picture Act and Embodiment”), this place is not just one learned institution in London – a very prestigious institute, of course – but it is a legendary place. Aby Warburg’s intentions are simply fundamental for our work: the fusion of the history of art with philosophy and other humanistic disciplines – anthropology, ethnology, philology, literature, theology, sociology etc.–, transcending the history of art into a philosophy of the image or into a discipline that considers human cognition as the creation of symbolic forms. The structure of the Warburg Library beautifully represents the structure of the New Science founded by Warburg: image – word – orientation – action. This way of thinking is crucial for our research group. And we are also explicitly connected to Warburg: Horst Bredekamp, the director of our group, is one of the editors of Aby Warburg’s Gesammelte Schriften. Two of our books are directly Warburgian: In our book series Handapparat, Pablo Schneider has edited a beautiful Warburg volume: Nachhall der Antike (“Echoes of Antiquity”) as well as a Fritz Saxl book: Gebärde, Form, Ausdruck (“Gesture, Form, Expression”). Hence, coming to the Warburg Institute is like coming home. And since for many of us, it is the first time they are here, this is a very special emotional mo­­ment. The more so as we are aware of the fact that the London Warburg Institute is a glorious testimony of our country’s very inglorious past. Britain became the home of one of the great cultural activities Germany had evicted in her cultural suicide. The Warburg Library could survive and flourish in Britain and became one of the glories of Britain’s scholarly achievements. Inviting us here is a very generous gesture.

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So thank you for giving us the opportunity to be in a place we consider as something like our mythical place of origin. We feel as Franciscans must feel in Assisi. What is “Picture Act and Embodiment”? Horst Bredekamp and his friend, the American philosopher John Krois, had, years ago, the idea to join their philosophical endeavors. They both felt that the abstract and logical rationalistic approach to human thought, which was and still is the main conception of modern philosophy, was contrary to their philosophical convictions as well as to their human and artistic experiences. And, as far as their understanding of art was concerned, the widespread reductive view on art as representation was just as unsatisfactory: Art or images or pictures cannot be dealt with as primarily representing the world outside. Modern artistic production had already made that very clear: Art is a creative process, the picture thereby comes alive, it takes on an active role in the process of its reception. These modern artistic activities opened the eyes, if I may say so, of the theoreticians of the image and showed the way to a new conception of the image. The production of an image is not just the production of a dead object – flat and rectangular, or three-dimensional and static – but a process that, in its material manifestation, maintains all characteristics of a human activity and is therefore also perceived as such: It is a form, it is alive, and it calls for an inter-subjective encounter. In these characteristic features, the theory of the image comes very close to the theory of speech as a dialogical activity and an energeia, as Wilhelm von Humboldt called it. This theory transcends ages and spaces, it concerns all periods and cultures. Not only modern artistic experiences, but also the development of the visual media made it clear that art history as a philosophy of the image has to transcend the limits of art – a very Warburgian move: The picture has to be regarded as something fundamental in the human appropriation of the world. Here the theory of the image – already philosophical in itself – clearly joins philosophy. And Bredekamp joins Krois: The theory of the image is just one version of a theory of human thought. Art history as a philosophical reflexion of images imposes the image upon philosophy. The idea of embodiment is the connecting concept. For the philosophical art historian, the appropriation of the world through the creation of images is embodiment, the image is a creation of mental forces inseparable from the human body and then a body itself. The idea of “pure thought” – Kantian “reine Vernunft” – is necessarily an absurd idea for an art historian; but also for a philosopher like John Krois whose philosophy of embodiment was inspired by Cassirer and Charles Sanders Peirce. Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms is a philosophy that explicitly conceives of human understanding not as a creation of purely mental, immaterial thought but always as thought materialized in symbols, embodied forms. Here, the philosophy of language comes in: Language as an embodied way of thought shares

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ON WARBURG, BILDAKT AND EMBODIMENT

fundamental structural characteristics of the image. The same – post-Kantian – move can be found in Peirce’s philosophy: Human thought is always materialized in signs, and signs are not fixed objects but bodily and inter-subjective, interpretative processes. The term “embodiment” is a Peircean term. Thus, it becomes clear what attracted the theory of the image to the philosophy of embodiment: The triad of a modern picture theory – cognitive bodily process, aliveness, dialogical or inter-subjective embedding of these processes – is also the basic structure of a philosophy of embodied cognition. The motivation for Bredekamp and Krois to found a research group was the confluence of parallel philosophical intentions. A theory of the picture act had to be developed in close cooperation with a philosophy of embodiment and the philosophy of embodiment had to be developed in close cooperation with the theory of the image. This is the twofold main idea you can see in the schematic presentation of the founding document of our research group.

For their innovative project Bredekamp and Krois received a very generous funding by the DFG, the German Research Foundation, and they started the research group in 2008. The main structural feature of that specific kind of research group – Kolleg-Forschergruppe – was that it should be organized like Institutes for Advanced Study: complete freedom for research, generous possibilities to invite visiting fellows, funding for colloquia and conferences. External expertise for the permanent members of the research group was explicitly requested. And, indeed, I think all the important philosophers and art historians and theoreticians able to contribute to the project “Bildakt und Verkörperung” were invited to give talks or to stay with us for a couple of days or months. These

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JÜRGEN TRABANT

invitations as well as the specific investigations of the permanent members of the group considerably advanced the elaboration of a theory of picture act as well as of a philosophy of embodiment. In fact, Sehen und Handeln (“Seeing and Acting”) was the first volume, edited by Bredekamp and Krois, of our book series Actus et Imago. Horst Brede­ kamp published his Theorie des Bildakts in 2010. The tragic death of John Krois right in the middle of the way unfortunately weakened the philosophical part of the project. John could not finish his book. Although we published his essays on embodiment in the volume Bildkörper and Körperschema in 2011, we did not succeed in convincing our evaluators that we are vigorously pursuing the project of a philosophy of embodiment. Therefore, the funding for the project will end at the end of this year. It will end notwithstanding the fact that Bredekamp’s Theorie des Bildakts was one of the major publication events in 2010, that we have published seven volumes of Bildakt studies in our book series Actus et Imago, and four Warburgian volumes of our series of re-editions of classical texts, that seven doctoral dissertations, two Habilitationsschriften, and at least four master’s theses have been completed in the four years of our existence. But we will not scatter, we will try to find other financial support, and we will exist as an Ideal College ever after. Therefore, I want to show you the form our Collegium has taken on in the meantime, the form of the project we are presenting here: After the completion and publication of the Theorie des Bildakts by Horst Bredekamp, our project is aiming for a substantial contribution to the philosophy of embodiment and for the further elaboration of the picture act theory in eight columns, as depicted in the following schema:

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ON WARBURG, BILDAKT AND EMBODIMENT

We are honored and glad to be here, in our mythical founding place, in our Assisi. And in order to thank you once more for the invitation, we would like to donate to the Warburg Library the seven volumes of our book series with the Warburgian title Actus et Imago.

I . B IL DAKT ( PICTU RE ACT )

Horst Bredekamp

THE PICT URE ACT: TR ADITION, HORI ZON, PHILOSOPHY

1. Imag ines agentes and their Impact on Philosophy Viewers of Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man in the National Gallery in London, almost certainly a self-portrait of the artist (Fig. 1), are invariably overwhelmed by the interplay between the indistinct fur of the cloak, the photorealistic wrinkles around the eyes, and the tactile qualities of the shimmering fabric of the turban. The portrayed man observes the beholder with an intensity that fixes him wherever he stands.1 Nicolaus Cusanus reflects on this quality in a well-known passage of De Visione Dei that might almost refer to van Eyck’s picture: “Every one of you, from whichever place you may behold the picture, will think the picture is looking solely at yourself.”2 After considering various options, Cusanus concludes that the picture is active in an autonomous way, responsive simultaneously to every gaze, independent of the viewer’s position and movements, and hence an embodiment of the multi-perspectivity of the Visione Dei. This alone characterizes the painting’s activity as theorized by van Eyck himself, who allows his painting to speak in the first person singular. Along the lower edge of the frame, the picture declares: “Jan van Eyck me fecit” (Jan van Eyck made me).3

1 2

3

Lorne Campbell et al. (eds.): Renaissance Faces. Van Eyck to Titian, London 2008, p. 178. “Et quisque vestrum experietur, ex quocumque loco eandem inspexerit, se quasi solum per eam videri” (Nikolaus von Kues, Opera omnia, vol. 6, ed. by Adelheid Dorothee Riemann, Hamburg 2000, Praefatio, 3, l. 2f., p. 5). Reinhard Liess: Zum Logos der Kunst Rogier van der Weydens. Die “Beweinungen Christi” in den Königlichen Museen in Brüssel und in der Nationalgalerie in London, vol. 2, Münster/Hamburg/London 2000, pp. 772–775; Karin Gludovatz: Der Name am Rahmen, der Maler im Bild. Künstlerselbstverständnis und Produktions­

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HORST BREDEKAMP

Fig. 1  Jan van Eyck: Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban, 1433, oil on oak, London, National Gallery.

This recourse to the first person singular alludes to the fact that notwithstanding their non-organic materiality, pictures seem to be endowed with the capacity to act.4 No known culture, presumably, has failed to recognize this phenomenon of imagines agentes.5 Reflections on its universal validity are found in elaborations of a range of philosophical and biosemantic concepts,

4 5

kommentar in den Signaturen Jan van Eycks, in: Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstge­ schichte LIV (2005), pp. 115–175, pp. 126–133. Horst Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007, Berlin 2010, pp. 59–100; on van Eyck: pp. 81–85. With pointed irony, W. J. T. Mitchell has attributed the perception of pictures as being “alive” to: “primitives, children, the masses, the illiterate, the uncritical, the illogical, the ‘Other’” (W. J. T. Mitchell: What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago 2005, p. 7). For an early and lucid refutation of this position, see David Freedberg: The Power of Images. Studies in the History and Theory of Response, Chicago/London 1989.

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THE PICTURE ACT: TRADITION, HORIZON, PHILOSOPHY

which – while not necessarily related to one another and perhaps even mutually contradictory – agree that pictures act with an often uncontrollable semantic force. These theorems range from Aristotle’s concept of the intrinsic energy of forms6 and Lucretius’ conviction that seeing is a special form of being touched7 all the way to Charles Darwin’s concept of an evolutionary panorama that is a gigantic theater of bodies as imagines agentes. It was meant as a radical alternative to the principle of the survival of the fittest.8 In an unsurpassed way, Darwin declared the visually impelled force of sexual selection to be an essential contributor to evolution.9 No less important was Darwin’s avowal that although it would never reveal the reason for its existence, this force ought to be described and analyzed all the more precisely.10 Taking Darwin seriously, the imagines agentes belong to all phenomena whose effects are fully explicable, but whose reason for existence is and will probably remain obscure. Belonging to this realm in the natural sciences are gravity, the effects described by quantum physics, and the interrelationship of time and space. In cultural terms, the concept of imagines agentes is part of Ernst Cassirer’s “basis phenomena” (Basis­ phänomene). Notwithstanding their inexplicability, they must be considered whenever reflections on consciousness extend to the very ground of the problems it raises.11 The broad and profound framework of these thoughts reveal the misguidedness of every accusation that imagines agentes and their reflection in picture act theory are variants of animism.12 This kind of critique is grounded neither in essential philosophical traditions nor evolutionary theory. Its vain but understandable vehemence stems from a painful inability to overcome a constructivist conceptualization of subjectivity and its world-defining telos.   6

  7

  8

  9 10 11 12

Aristotle: Rhetoric, ed. and trans. by Franz Sieveke, Munich 1980, 1411b 25, p. 193. Cf. Valeska von Rosen: Die Enargeia des Gemäldes. Zu einem vergessenen Inhalt des Ut-pictura-poesis und seiner Relevanz für das cinquecenteske Bildkonzept, in: Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 27 (2000), pp. 171–208. Lucretius developed this conviction in book IV of “De rerum natura,” namely lf. 54–64. On this concept and the Lucretian tradition of chance images: Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts (as fn. 4), pp. 317–322. Charles Darwin: The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, London 1871 (facs. repr. Princeton 1981), vol. I, p. 61. Cf. Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts (as fn. 4), pp. 309–316. Darwin: The Decent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (as fn. 8), p. 249. Peter Dear: Laminates of Time. Darwin, Classification, and Selection, Uppsala 2014, pp. 21–27. Ernst Cassirer: Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen, ed. by John Michael Krois, Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, vol. 1, Hamburg 1995, p. 156. Beat Wyss: Renaissance als Kulturtechnik, Hamburg 2013, pp. 145f.; Whitney Davis: A General Theory of Visual Culture, Princeton 2011, pp. 185f. The refutation of these kinds of critique became the offspring of a new foundation of the picture act, see Sascha Freyberg/Katharina Blühm in the present volume.

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The description of active pictures as imagines agentes derives from the earliest known Roman treatise on rhetoric. To characterize pictures that act, the unknown authors coined the term imagines agentes.13 In early modern times, the qualities of imagines agentes were described by the Latin vis, virtus, facultas, dynamis, and the German terms Kraft, Tugend, and Wirkung.14 The praxis of mnemonics and the activation technique of imagines agentes can be traced back to the ancient cultures of Egypt.15 There, such active images comprised a multitude of mobile sculptures (Fig. 2), from the ‘singing’ colossi of Memnon to the statues of state of the Late Antique Corpus Hermeticum. The most famous of its texts, the Asclepius, includes a vivid report of living statues, fashioned by human hands, that ruled and pacified communities: “I mean statues that have life breathed into them, full of spirit and pneuma, that accomplish great and mighty deeds, statues that can read the future and predict it through priests, dreams and many other things, which weaken and heal men, create sadness and joy for every individual according to his merits.”16 Thomas Hobbes, who founded modern state theory, refers to this context when he draws on imagines agentes – and in particular the Egyptian statues mentioned in the Asclepius – when conceiving his central work, the Leviathan.17 The imagines agentes come to embody the commonwealth that would lead the citizens toward peace. According to Hobbes, all contracts remain empty words to those entering into them “when there is no visual power to keep them in

13 14 15

16

17

Rhetorica ad Herrennium, ed. and trans. by Theodor Nüßlein, Düsseldorf/Zurich 1994, III/37, p. 176. Karl Möseneder: Paracelsus und die Bilder. Über Glauben, Magie und Astrologie im Reformationszeitalter, Tuebingen 2009, pp. 73–162. Jörg Jochen Berns: Schmerzende Bilder. Zu Machart und Mnemonischer Qualität monströser Konstrukte in Antike und Früher Neuzeit, in: Roland Borgards (ed.): Schmerz und Erinnerung, Munich 2005, pp. 25–55. “Statuas animatas, sensu & Spiritu plenas, tanta & talia facientes, statuas, futurorum praescias, easque forte vates omnes somniis, multisque aliis rebus praedicentes, imbecillitatesque hominibus facientes, easque curantes, tristitiamque pro meritis” (Hermès Trismégiste: Corpus Hermeticum, ed. by Artur Darby Nock, trans. by André-Jean Festugière, Paris 1980, vol. 2, Asclepius, VIII, 24, p. 326, lines 4–8). In Hobbes’ ideal list of books, the number of editions of the Corpus Hermeticum is surpassed only by Euclid’s Elements. See Arrigo Pacchi: Una “Biblioteca Ideale” di Thomas Hobbes: il MS E2 dell’ Archivio di Chatsworth, in: Acme XXI/1 (1968), pp. 5–42; Karl Schuhmann: Thomas Hobbes und Francesco Patrizi, in: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie LXVIII (1986), pp. 253–279. See also: Gianni Paganini: Hobbes’s “Mortal God” and Renaissance Hermeticism, in: Hobbes Studies 23 (2010), pp. 7–28. Hobbes used an Italian encyclopedia which contained the complete Corpus Hermeticum, see Francesco Patrizi: Magia Philosophica, Hamburg 1593. The text on the living statues appears on p. 69. On identifying the edition see Horst Bredekamp: Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies, in: Patricia Springborg (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, Cambridge et al. 2007, pp. 29–60.

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THE PICTURE ACT: TRADITION, HORIZON, PHILOSOPHY

Fig. 2  Statuette of a Striding Man, probably reign of Pepi II, about 2246-2152 BCE, wood with some polychrome, 35 × 8,5 × 8,5 cm, Cambridge, MA, Harvard Art Museums.

awe.”18 The phrase “keep them” refers to an active force that is indispensable to the formation of a state. Abraham Bosse’s frontispiece to the Leviathan belongs to this class of pictures (Fig. 3),19 which convert the traces of memory into signs of action.20 Another philosopher of picture activity as relevant as Hobbes and no less inexhaustible is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. This is shown first by his concept of

18 19 20

Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan, ed. by Richard Tuck, Cambridge 1991, XVII, p. 117. Bredekamp: Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies (as fn. 17), pp. 33ff. Thomas Hobbes: De Corpore, II, 1f., in: id.: The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, vol. 1, ed. by William Molesworth, London 1839–1845, pp. 14f.

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HORST BREDEKAMP

Fig. 3  Abraham Bosse: Leviathan, frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, London 1651.

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THE PICTURE ACT: TRADITION, HORIZON, PHILOSOPHY

the coup d’oeil,21 according to which the overwhelming wealth of pictorial objects can be presented to the mind and impressed on it “as if in play and in a single gaze, without the circumlocution of words.”22 Leibniz wrote these words in relation to his Meditationes de Cognitione, Veritate et Ideis. In this fundamental treatise, he argues for the preconceptual but nonetheless superior (with respect to abstract thought) insights of artists.23 No less astonishing is his introduction of the concept of petites perceptions, which are either so slight or so enduring that they cannot be perceived sensually, yet all the same allow insights into virtually cosmic relations. One of his examples is the sound of the rising and falling of ocean waves, which become imperceptible to hearing at a certain moment even though it remains possible to feel the rhythm of ebb and flow, and hence to remain connected to the phases of the moon.24 Leibniz’s confidence in the consciousness-forming force of the environment was by no means limited to the natural surroundings; instead, one of his lifelong pursuits was the concept of a Theater of Nature and Art in which instruments and pictures would be essential. This theater was conceived as a picture-active laboratory where museological objects would assume an equally important role as thought organs, characteres, as embodied in models, instruments, and illustrations.25 No less instructive is Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova (editions of 1725, 1730, and 1744).26 In this treatise, the theorem that man is able to understand only that which he himself has produced is presented in such a fundamental way that its validity has become enshrined as the “Vico Axiom.”27 21

22

23

24

25 26 27

Thomas Puttfarken: Roger de Piles’ Theory of Art, New Haven/London 1985, pp. 39f., 102f.; id.: From Central Perspective to Central Composition: The Significance of the Central Ray, in: Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 21 (1986), pp. 156–164. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, ed. by the Prussian and later German Academy of Sciences at Berlin, Berlin 1923ff., series IV, 3, no. 116, p. 785, l. 5–7. For this concept see Horst Bredekamp: Die Erkenntniskraft der Plötzlichkeit. Hogrebes Szenenblick und die Tradition des Coup d’Oeil, in: Was sich nicht sagen läßt. Das Nicht-Begriffliche in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Religion, ed. by Joachim Bromand/Guido Kreis, Berlin 2010, pp. 455–468. Leibniz: Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (as fn. 22), series VI, 4, A, no. 141, p. 586, l. 19f.; Horst Bredekamp: Die Fenster der Monade. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ Theater der Natur und Kunst, Berlin 2004, pp. 108f. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Nouveaux essais, introduction, in: Leibniz: Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (as fn. 22), series VI, 6, p. 55, l. 5f. Cf. Bredekamp: Die Fenster der Monade (as fn. 23), pp. 243–245. Ibid., pp. 87–110. Giambattista Vico: La scienza nuova. Le tre edizioni del 1725, 1730 e 1744, ed. by Manuela Sanna/Vincenzo Vitiello, Milan 2012. Ibid.: edition of 1730, p. 480f.; edition of 1744, p. 894f. Cf. Ferdinand Fellmann: Das Vico-Axiom: Der Mensch macht die Geschichte, Freiburg/Munich 1976; Karl Löwith: Vicos Grundsatz: verum et factum convertuntur. Seine theoretische Prä­mis­­se und

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Fig. 4  Antonio Baldi after a design of Domenico Antonio Vaccaro: Frontispiece of Giambattista Vico’s La Scienza Nuova, Naples 1730.

The picture-theoretical problem emerges from Vico’s inclusion of an immensely complex frontispiece that refers to this very autonomy of emblematic hieroglyphs, without which no adequate reflection is achievable (Fig. 4). According to Vico, nature – being created by God – lies outside of human cognitive capacities, which can range only within the compass of that which they themselves have produced. The frontispiece is both an exemplar and a rejection deren säkulare Konsequenzen, in: Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Aka­­demie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Jg. 1968, 1. Abhand­lung, Heidelberg 1968, pp. 24–28.

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of this conviction. It was fashioned by human hands, yet brings forth a field of explanandum that does not immediately reveal itself, but instead dictates the conditions of its own comprehension. The emblematic hieroglyphs engender a sphere that is indispensable for world cognition; its own semantic force, however, not only possesses illustrative qualities, but a surprising and captivating pull as well. For this reason, Vico – like Hobbes in the Leviathan before him – prefaces his work with a description of the frontispiece.28 This ekphrasis is the

Fig. 5  Jean-Michel Moreau: Image from the cycle to “Pygmalion: Scène Lyrique” by J. J. Rousseau, engraving, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek.

product of the bridge position between man and nature that is assumed by the frontispiece: manmade, yet at the same time as inexplicable as nature itself. This is the very ambivalence that systematically gives rise to the sphere of the picture act: an autonomous field within the cosmos made by man. Through various contradictory movements, the 18th century as a whole brought about the triumph of the myth of the imagines agentes. The first tendency, stimulated by the seemingly autonomous movements of automata, hoped 28

Jürgen Trabant: Cenni e voci. Saggi di sematologia vichiana, Naples 2007; Thomas Gilbhard: Vicos Denkbild. Studien zur Dipintura der Scienza Nuova und der Lehre vom Ingenium, Berlin 2012 (Actus et Imago 3).

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or feared that the humanoid products of ingenious engineers would encapsulate the human being in its fullest sense.29 The Freemasons’ belief in animated matter, as enacted by the acting and speaking statue in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, corresponded to this model from the opposite side. In Don Giovanni, it is the statue of the Commendatore that “seems to live, seems to hear, and seems to want to speak.”30 The third element was introduced by the sensualist movement which – in its most extreme form – prompted Étienne Bonnot de Condillac to define the human being as a statue come to life.31 It was in this intellectual climate that the myth of Pygmalion became one of the epoch’s most famous narratives.32 Its perhaps most impressive formulation is found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion. In the decisive scene, the statue’s latent potential comes to the fore when it is transformed into a human being (Fig. 5), allowing an imago agens to become fully animate and sentient.33 Inspired by divination, which is not identical with superstition but represents a semantization of the environment,34 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy has bequeathed an unsurpassable framework to embodiment theory by claiming that all forms of materialization of the spirit have “lives of their own.”35 In a shaped environment, the mind acts dynamically through its own embodiment, drawing from this reservoir to produce artworks that are more than mere reflexes of the artist’s own investment. No better formulation of the picture act as related to imagines agentes can be found than Hegel’s description in the Aesthetics: “It is the completely subjective skill which in this objective

29 30

31 32

33

34 35

Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts (as fn. 4), pp. 130–133. “Par vivo! par che senta! / E che voglia parlar” (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Don Giovanni. KV 527. Il dissoluto punito o sia Il Don Giovanni. Dramma giocoso in due atti. Libretto von Lorenzo Da Ponte, Stuttgart 1986, II, 11, p. 136). Etienne Bonnot de Condillac: Traité des sensations, Tours 1984 [1754], chap. 4/9, p. 266. Andreas Blühm: Pygmalion. Die Ikonographie eines Künstlermythos zwischen 1500 und 1900, Bern/New York/Paris 1988; Victor Stoichita: The Pygmalion Effect. From Ovid to Hitchcock, Chicago 2008. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Pygmalion, Scène lyrique, in: Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, Paris 1961, pp. 1224–1231, p. 1226. Cf. Rainer Warning: Rousseaus Pygmalion als Szenario des Imaginären, in: Mathias Mayer/Gerhard Neumann (eds.): Pygma­ lion. Die Geschichte des Mythos in der abendländischen Kultur, Freiburg im Breis­ gau 1997, pp. 225–270, pp. 237f. Wolfram Hogrebe: Metaphysik und Mantik. Die Deutungsnatur des Menschen (Système orphique de Iéna), Frankfurt/M. 1992, pp. 155f. Shaun Gallagher/Anthony Crisafi: Mental Institutions, in: Topoi 28 (2009), pp. 45– 51, p. 49; Ivan A. Boldyrev/Carsten Herrmann-Pillath: Hegel’s “Objective Spirit,” Extended Mind, and the Institutional Nature of Economic Action, in: Mind & Society 12/2 (2012), pp. 177–202.

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Fig. 6  Charles Sanders Peirce: Sketches and notes, undated, pen, ink, and pencil on paper, Cambridge, MA, Harvard-University, Houghton Library, MS 1538.

way presents itself as the skillfulness of the instruments themselves, due to their liveliness and apparent ability to bring forth objecthood through themselves.”36 A final philosophical strand for which reflections on the picture act played a role before the turn of the 20th century is Pragmatism – at first glance opposed to Hegel, but extremely close with regard to the picture act question. William James, for instance, understood the shaped environment as that which is meaningful and which approaches the beholder. Here, he established a broad framework within which the picture act may be considered as a special case.37 The most radical position was held by Charles Sanders Peirce, whose philosophy is encapsulated by the dictum “I do not think I ever reflect in words.”38 Despite frequent claims to the contrary, it is not based on static processes, but instead on

36

37 38

Gottfried Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, II, vol. 14, Frank­ furt/M. 1970, pp. 228f. (my trans.); Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts (as fn. 4), pp. 271f. William James: Pragmatism, London/New York/Toronto 1946. Charles Sanders Peirce: Studies in Meaning, 1909, MS 619, p. 8. Cf. Franz Engel/ Moritz Queisner/Tullio Viola: Einleitung. Viertheit: Peirce’ Zeichungen, in: id. (eds.): Das bildnerische Denken: Charles S. Peirce, Berlin 2012 (Actus et Imago 5), pp. 39–50, p. 44.

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a dynamic semiosis of icons that shapes their “diagrammatological” dimension.39 Peirce produced tens of thousands of sketches that reveal his thought processes through seemingly independent movements of the pencil (Fig. 6).40 Peirce, then, has defined the very essence of picture act theory: “a great distinguishing property of the icon is that by the direct observation of it other truths concerning its object can be discovered than those which suffice to determine its construc­ tion.”41 Peirce has therefore been deemed the most authentic pioneer of picture act theory.42 Reflection on imagines agentes was reactivated in the mid-20th century by new formulas that served as modern equivalents. Significantly, various disciplines were involved. In 1947, the sociologist Henri Lefebvre coined the phrase L’image est acte,43 and was followed by Philippe Dubois, a theoretician of photography who in 1990 used the term image-act to characterize the active quality of this medium.44 Fundamental attempts to focus on the agency of artifacts, albeit limited by their linguistic framing, were developed by the ethnologist Alfred Gell.45 Literary historian Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht shaped a new approach to the world of objects by putting an end to the self-reflective tautologisms of 39 40

41

42

43 44

45

Frederik Stjernfeld: Diagrammatology. An Investigation on the Boderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology, and Semiotics, Dordrecht 2007. John Michael Krois: Image Science and Embodiment or: Peirce as Image Scientist, in: Ulrich Ratsch/Ion-Olimpiu Stamatescu/Philipp Stoellger (eds.): Kompetenzen der Bilder, Tübingen 2009, pp. 201–215; Engel/Queisner/Viola: Einleitung. Viert­ heit (as fn. 38). For drawing as a medium of extended mind see Rebekka Hufendiek: Draw a Distinction. Die vielfältigen Funktionen des Zeichnens als Formen der Extended Mind, in: Ulrike Feist/Markus Rath (eds.): Et in imagine ego. Facetten von Bildakt und Verkörperung. Festgabe für Horst Bredekamp, Berlin 2012, pp. 441–465. Charles Sanders Peirce: That Categorical and Hypothetical Propositions Are One in Essence, With Some Connected Matters (c. 1895), in: id.: Collected Papers, vol. 2, Elements of Logic, ed. by Charles Hartshorne/Paul Weiss, Cambridge 1932, § 279, p. 158. The frame and the consequences of this statement are discussed in John Michael Krois: Enactivism and Embodiment in Picture Acts. The Chirality of Images, in: id.: Bildkörper und Körperschema. Schriften zur Verkörperungstheorie ikonischer Formen, ed. by Horst Bredekamp/Marion Lauschke, Berlin 2011 (Actus et Imago 2), pp. 273–289. John Michael Krois: Eine Tatsache und zehn Thesen zu Peirce’ Bildern, in: Engel/ Queisner/Viola (eds.): Das bildnerische Denken (as fn. 38), pp. 53–64, pp. 63f. (“These 9”). Cf. also the fundamental critique by Mirjam Wittmann: Fremder Onkel. Charles S. Peirce und die Fotografie, in: ibid., pp. 303–322. Henri Lefebvre: Critique de la vie quotidienne, II, Fondements d’une sociologie de la quotidienneté, Paris 1961, p. 290. Philippe Dubois: L’Acte photographique et autres essais, Paris 1990, p. 13. For a more comprehensive history of these formations see Bredekamp: Theorie des Bild­ akts (as fn. 4) pp. 48f. Freedberg: The Power of Images (as fn. 5); Alfred Gell: Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory, Oxford 1998.

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deconstruction, pleading instead for an object-reflection of presence.46 Seminal attempts to analyze the phenomena of active pictures have been developed, among others, by the art historians Georges Didi-Huberman,47 W. J. T. Mitchell,48 Gottfried Boehm,49 and Hans Belting.50 With a point of departure in an interest in iconoclasm that extends all the way back to the 1970s, one shared with Martin Warnke and the author of the present essay, finally, the art historian David Freedberg has developed all of the aspects of the “power of images” that were seminal for the conceptualization and dissemination of the theory of the picture act.51

2. Spheres of the Picture Act (Bild akt) These diverse impulses towards reflections on imagines agentes are responses to the conditions of our times. No social theory and no philosophy of our epoch will arrive at its pulsating heart if it fails to take the activity of pictures into account. Each day, myriads of images are transmitted around the world by mobile telephones, television screens, the Internet, and print media, as if this high-tech civilization wished to pupate itself inside a cocoon (Fig. 7). It hardly seems possible for our view of the world to remain uninfluenced by this development; rather, an intermediary image sphere creates interference between the environment and the discerning and acting self, largely defining the potentials and limits of action. This involves opportunities for imaginative play as much as it does the destructive blurring of boundaries between video games and reality.52 It is in this framework as well that picture act theory as described in the present discus-

46 47

48 49

50

51 52

Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht: Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford 2004. Georges Didi-Huberman: Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde, Paris 1992; id: L’Image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg, Paris 2002. Mitchell: What Do Pictures Want? (as fn. 5). According to Gottfried Boehm the picture is “Faktum” and “Akt” (Gottfried Boehm: Repräsentation – Präsentation – Präsenz. Auf den Spuren des homo pictor, in: id. (ed.): Homo Pictor, Munich/Lipsia 2001, p. 13). Hans Belting: Die Herausforderung der Bilder. Ein Plädoyer und eine Einführung, in: id. (ed.): Bilderfragen. Die Bildwissenschaften im Aufbruch, Munich 2007, pp. 11–23. Freedberg: The Power of Images (as fn. 5). I am indebted to David Freedberg for many fruitful ideas and comments, some of relevance to this article. This manifests itself in its darkest form in the periodically recurring mass shootings. The most recent publication on this much-debated phenomenon: Armin Himmelrath/Sarah Neuhäuser: Amokdrohungen und School Shootings, Bern 2014.

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sion understands the active and activating force of shaped form, be it latent53 or instead effective through the actual or memory-driven processes that are evoked by pictures, and which then result in human action. If the threads offered by the ancient concept of active pictures, the late medieval multi-perspectivity with regard to pictures, the founding theory of the modern state, the picture-active elements found in philosophy from Leibniz to Vico, from Hegel to Peirce, and finally various 20th-century returns to these traditions are taken up, an actualized systematization becomes possible. Three fields evolve: the schematic, the substitutive, and the intrinsic picture acts. The schematic picture act shapes the first of these areas because it is connected with the body as the basis of all modes of semantic performance.54 Therefore the

Fig. 7  TV screens, 2013.

53

54

Horst Bredekamp: Die Latenz des Objekts als Modus des Bildakts, in: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht/Florian Klinger (eds.): Latenz. Blinde Passagiere in den Geisteswissenschaften, Göttingen 2011, pp. 277–284. Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts (as fn. 4), pp. 101–169.

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adjective schematic does not reflect the Kantian definition of the term schema and its later variations,55 but instead the Greek definition of schemata, according to which these forms provoke an imitation of the presented actions – an effect Plato first remarked upon in Egyptian art.56 This field touches upon all areas of artistic enlivenment as it appears in living pictures, as enacted from the late medieval era all the way up to the present, e.g. in Spencer Tunick’s tableau-vivantperformances of 2011 (Fig. 8).57 No less essential are the automatons constructed as far back as ancient Egypt. In their mechanical originality, 16th century automatons such as the Monk from Munich (Fig. 9) or 18th century humanoids such as Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s writing and drawing children present an almost unsurpassable quality of “acting” artifacts that remains a model.58 Playing a

Fig. 8  Spencer Tunick: The Naked Sea Project, 2011, Tableau vivantPerformance, Israel, Photograph by Casey Kelbaugh.

55 56

57 58

Ulrich Gaier/Ralf Simon (eds.): Zwischen Bild und Begriff. Kant und Herder zum Schema, Munich 2010. Platon: Nomoi, 656d, in: id.: Werke in acht Bänden. Griechisch und Deutsch vol. 1, ed. by Gunther Eigler, Darmstadt 2005, 8/1, pp. 86–89. Cf. Jan Assmann: Viel Stil am Nil?, in: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht/Ludwig Pfeiffer (eds.): Stil: Geschichten und Funktionen eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Diskurselements, Frankfurt/M. 1986, pp. 519–537, p. 520, and Maria Luisa Catoni: Schemata. Communicazione non verbale nella Grecia antica, Pisa 2005, pp. 294f. Nicole Moses/Jennifer Becker: Spencer Tunick – The Naked Sea Project, Israel 2011, in: Kunst 1111 “Nachhaltigkeit” (2011), pp. 11–17. Alfred Chapuis/Edmond Droz: Les Automates des Jaquet-Droz, Neuenburg 1949; Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts (as fn. 4), pp. 124–140.

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Fig. 9  Automaton, Figure of a Preaching Monk, detail: head, about 1560, iron and cottonwood, Munich, Deutsches Museum.

decisive role in the contemporary life sciences are hybrid organisms and combinations of organic and inorganic forms of the kind that have preoccupied humanity at least since Leonardo da Vinci’s attempts to construct mixed organic beings. Recent developments in synthetic biology are deeply implicated in pictureactive art theory.59 In contrast to the schematic picture act, which is determined by a dissolution of the boundary between artwork and organism, the substitutive picture act is produced by the reciprocal substitution of picture and body: bodies as pictures, pictures as bodies. The paradigm of this model is given by Christ’s vera icon, the portrait visible on the Veil of Veronica that displays not an image as such, but instead particles of the Savior’s body: just as the body has become an imago, the picture has become a legitimate substitute for the corpus.60 As shown

59

60

Frank Fehrenbach: Compositio corporum. Renaissance der Bio Art, in: Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus, vol. 9, Berlin 2005, pp. 131–176. On the hybrid art of our times see Ingeborg Reichle: Art in the Age of Technoscience. Genetic Engeneering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art, Vienna/New York 2009; Suzanne Anker/Sabine Flach (eds.): Embodied Fantasies: From Awe to Artifice, Bern et al. 2013. Herbert L. Kessler/Gerhard Wolf (eds.): The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, Bologna 1998.

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Fig. 10  Martin Schongauer: The Procession to Calvary, 1475–1480, copper engraving, Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung.

by Schongauer’s engraving, the imago is a picture solely by virtue of the fact that it contains particles of the body of Christ (Fig. 10).61 61

Gerhard Wolf: Kreuzweg, Katzenweg, Affenweg, oder: Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe, in: Christoph Geissmar-Brandi/Eleonora Louis (eds.): Glaube Hoffnung Liebe Tod, Vienna 1995, pp. 438–443.

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Fig. 11  J. Barner/R. Al-Hellani/A.D. Schlüter/J.P. Rabe: Macromolecule with a DNA molecule, 2010.

According to this model, all forms of substitution follow one of two vectors: from picture to body or from body to picture. It can be performed as a fullfledged presentation of an absent person in a picture. That is why the substitutive picture act can function both in a healing and analytic as well as in a destructive and iconoclastic way.62 In the first sense, substitutive pictures pervade virtually all fields of the natural sciences. It is nanotechnology – the most invisible technology of them all – that is impelled with the greatest force toward a visualization of its electrical stress analyses. Currently, the capacity of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to pick up and move objects of study is being used to assemble molecules (move), to fuse them by means of ultraviolet radiation (connect), and finally to analyze them by means of tension (prove) (Fig. 11). Here, the microscope actively shapes the observed object: the picture acts in a form-giving and procreative, substitutive way.63 The same is true of medicine, where imaging technologies have been dominant in both diagnosis and treatment (Fig. 12) for some time now. Given their emotional impact, MRI-sequences of beating hearts seem not only to show this essential organ, but to actually embody it. This amounts to more than mere symbolism. The translation of information concerning the physical, chemical, or biological states of human beings into mimetic pictures produces figures that are as complex as they are fragile, and which are moreover indispensable diagnostically – which is why physicians refer to them as “pictures in action.” In this

62 63

A pioneering work that covers both sides is, once again: Freedberg: The Power of Images (as fn. 5). Horst Bredekamp: In der Tiefe die Künstlichkeit. Das Prinzip der bildaktiven Disjunktion, in: id./John Michael Krois (eds.): Sehen und Handeln, Berlin 2011 (Actus et Imago 1), pp. 206–224.

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Fig. 12  MRT sequences of beating hearts, about 2005.

respect in particular, they are endowed with a proximity to life that makes us hesitate to call them pictures at all.64 The destructive side of the substitutive picture act starts with an iconoclastic attack on the picture with the intent of destroying the depicted person. In its most extreme and destructive form, it is enacted as the mutilation and killing of persons in order to allow them to become pictures.65 This last element is founded in the fact that, in times of asymmetric warfare, pictures have become the basic condition of war. The destruction of the Buddha statues in Bamiyan, resolved upon in February of 2001,66 was the prelude to a series of alternating 64

65

66

Harun R. Badakhshi: Körper in/aus Zahlen. Digitale Bildgebung in der Medizin, in: Inge Hinterwaldner/Markus Buschaus (eds.): The Picture’s Image. Wissenschaftliche Visualisierung als Komposit, Munich 2006, pp. 199–205, p. 204. Godehard Janzing: Bildstrategien asymmetrischer Gewaltkonflikte, in: Kritische Berichte, 33/1 (2005), pp. 21–35; Jörg Trempler: Vom Terror zum Bild – Von der Authentizität zum Stil. Gedanken zur historischen Begründung authentischer Bilder, in: Wilhelm Hofmann (ed.): Sprachpolitik – Bildpolitik. Beiträge zur sprachlichen und visuellen Kommunikation in der entwickelten Demokratie, Münster 2006, pp. 117–135; Peter Geimer: “Wir müssen die Bilder zeigen.” Ikonographie des Äußersten, in: Thomas Macho/Burkard Wolf/Karin Harrasser (eds.): Folter. Politik und Technik des Schmerzes, Munich 2007, pp. 119–132. Finbarr Barry Flood: Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum, in: The Art Bulletin LXXXIV/2 (2002), pp. 641–659.

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Fig. 13  Blasting of the Buddha sculptures of Bamiyan, March 2001, CNN.

attacks that used images as weapons, in the course of which names such as Abu Ghraib inscribed themselves into collective memory (Fig. 13).67 Asymmetry has become the rule in contemporary warfare, by definition involving wars that exploit pictures and images. It has hence become necessary to speak of a civil war of pictures in which the latter have become more than mere instruments of war: they actually fuel it.68 The intrinsic sphere that emerges from the form’s independent force marks the – from a formal perspective – supreme instance of the picture act. It refers to the externalization of the energetic quality of the shaped gestalt in the process of its shaping. Its most elementary motive is a consequence of the artist’s 67

68

Birgit Richard: Pictorial Clashes am medialen Gewaltkörper: Abu Ghraib, Nick Berg und Johannes Paul II., in: Birgit Richard/Klaus Neumann-Braun (eds.): IchArmeen. Täuschen – Tarnen – Drill, Munich 2006, pp. 235–255; John Limon: The Shame of Abu Graib, in: Critical Inquiry 33 (2007), pp. 543–572; Stephen Eisenman: The Abu Ghraib Effect, London 2007; W. J. T. Mitchell: Der Schleier um Abu Ghraib: Errol Morris und die “bad apples,” in: Ingeborg Reichle/Steffen Siegel (eds.): Maßlose Bilder. Visuelle Ästhetik der Transgression, Munich 2009, pp. 51–65; Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts (as fn. 4), pp. 227–230. Herfried Münkler: Symmetrische und asymmetrische Kriege. Der klassische Staaten­ krieg und die neuen transnationalen Kriege, in: Merkur 664 (2004), pp. 649–659.

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self-reflection regarding the active elements of his own artistic products: the self-evolvement of the autonomous form.69 The densest element of this energeia is the point, which oscillates between nothingness and the line, and is thus permanently active as an affective raptus.70 The dynamic latency of the point, as formulated by Leonardo, can be traced all the way to Roland Barthes’ theory of the punctum and even to nanotechnology, as defined by Richard Feynman.71 The line is the second element of an irresistible force that not only expresses meaning but also shapes the contents of imagination and factual processes through a mixture of mimesis, chance, and the unconscious. It is the medium of a thinking that not only expresses but also develops ideas through an interplay between expression and the self-evolvement of the line. From Albrecht Dürer’s marginal drawings for Maximilian’s prayer book72 to William Hogarth’s definition of beauty,73 a single line of thought extends to Charles Sanders Peirce’s plethora of drawings, through which he shaped his ideas.74 However, the employment of the drawing hand does not end there, but continues into the era of digital simulation, as evidenced by Frank Gehry’s endless scribbles, whose force of the drawn line is enlivened in the third dimension and used to shape buildings, which even in their finished form preserve the line’s energetic latency.75 The third element is color. An example of what is at stake here is the reverse of Albrecht Dürer’s Hieronymus in the National Gallery in London (Fig. 14). To this day, any plausible explanation for this painting, with its rapidly brushed, enigmatic eruption of color, is lacking.76 All evidence points toward a free play of color that was initiated and so to speak permitted by Dürer. 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76

Beat Wyss: Vom Bild zum Kunstsystem, 2 vols., textvolume, Cologne 2006, pp. 36–39. Cf. Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts (as fn. 4), pp. 231–306. Frank Fehrenbach: Licht und Wasser. Zur Dynamik naturphilosophischer Leitbilder im Werk Leonardo da Vincis, Tübingen 1997, pp. 322f., p. 330. Wolfgang Schäffner: Stevon, der Punkt und die Zahlen, in: Wolfgang Schäffner/ Sigrid Weigel/Thomas Macho (eds.): “Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail.” Mikrostrukturen des Wissens, Munich 2003, pp. 201–217; Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts (as fn. 4) pp. 249ff. A fundamental study on one of the most impressive examples: Irving Lavin: Il Volto Santo di Claude Mellan: Ostendatque etiam quae occultet, in: Christoph Frommel/Gerhard Wolf (eds.): L’immagine di Cristo dall’acheropita alla mano d’artista. Dal tardo medioevo all’età barocca, Rome/Vatican 2006, pp. 449–491, pp. 463–473. Friedrich Teja Bach: Struktur und Erscheinung. Untersuchungen zu Dürers graphischer Kunst, Berlin 1996, pp. 273–302. David Bindman: Hogarth and His Times, London 1997, pp. 168f. See above, fn. 40. Horst Bredekamp: Frank Gehry and the Art of Drawing, in: Mark Rappolt/Robert Violette (eds.): Gehry Draws, London 2004, pp. 11–28. Jean Michel Massing: Dürer’s Dream, in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 49 (1986), pp. 238–244; Elisabeth Heitzer: Das Bild des Kometen in der

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Fig. 14  Albrecht Dürer: Saint Jerome, verso, about 1496, oil on pearwood, London, National Gallery.

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Thereafter, this principle never yielded its grip on painters – at the latest once Titian and Rembrandt had begun to spread pigment on canvas without the mediation of a painting tool, modeling the painting as if it were a self-evolving relief.77 This practice was radicalized in the 18th century by Alexander Cozens,

Fig. 15  Alexander Cozens: “blot” drawing in progress for “Hannibal Passing the Alps”, verso, about 1776, black ink on crinckled paper, London, Victoria and Albert Museum.

who produced almost abstract, energetic pictures, such as Hannibal Passing the Alps, which displays the free play of a creased piece of paper and the blots of color on its surface (Fig. 15). In William Turner’s work, this seemingly automatic discharge of spuming color energy leads climactically toward a materialization of crystal-like grains: painting becomes body.78 This tradition reaches all

77

78

Kunst, Berlin 1995, pp. 83ff.; Hanho Jeon: Meditatio mortis. Zur Ikonographie des heiligen Hieronymus mit dem Totenschädel unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Lissaboner Gemäldes von Albrecht Dürer, Münster 2005, pp. 102ff. Daniela Bohde: Haut, Fleisch und Farbe. Körperlichkeit und Materialität in den Gemälden Tizians, Emsdetten/Berlin 2002, pp. 173–177; Yannis Hadjinicolaou: Malerei auf Stein, steinerne Malerei. Die Farbgestaltung bei Spranger und de Gelder, in: Joris van Gastel/Yannis Hadjinicolaou/Markus Rath (eds.): Paragone als Mitstreit, Berlin 2013 (Actus et Imago 11), pp. 211–235, pp. 218–231. Raphael Rosenberg/Max Hollein (eds.): Entdeckung der Abstraktion. Turner Hugo Moreau, Frankfurt/M. 2007.

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Fig. 16  Jackson Pollock at work in his studio, 1950, photography.

the way to Jackson Pollock, who repeatedly expressed the conviction that he was an organ of the work process: “I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life in its own. I try to let it come through” (Fig. 16).79 The abundant production of pictures that can be subsumed under the three spheres of schematic, substitutive and intrinsic picture acts forces us to fundamentally rethink the problem of pictures and perception: they should be understood less as objects of alienation than as agents of awareness-building.

79

Charles Lachman: “The Image made by Chance” in China and the West. Ink Wang Meets Jackson Pollock’s Mother, in: The Art Bulletin LXXIV/3 (1992), pp. 499–510, p. 508.

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3. Picture Act, New Phenomenolog y, Philosophy of Embod iment Pursuing this larger aim, reflections on the picture act phenomenon have come to represent an independent strand of contemporary cultural theory. They play a role in a tendency of thought that has emerged from diverse roots which have joined together in an attempt to overcome the Cartesian dualism of mind and body in all its varieties in order to understand the body and its interaction with the environment as an essential determination of intelligence and consciousness.80 Picture act theory is embedded in particular in today’s reformulation of phenomenology as practiced in the tradition of Edmund Husserl. His kinaesthetic consciousness, which emerges from the semantic determination of an ambience,81 has been converted step by step into an acceptance of the environment as a ­decisive factor for the development of consciousness. This includes Martin Heidegger’s being-in-the-world82 as well as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s intentionalité motrice.83 Of special significance in this context was Wolfram Hogrebe’s recent rehabilitation of the intuitive and mantic procedures of world-confidence, which led to a philosophy of a scenic cognition (szenische Erkenntnis) that is based in the primary senses but is nevertheless genuinely conceptual.84 And finally, these attempts to avoid interpreting the environment from an exclusively human perspective have led to the development of several varieties of Maurizio Ferraris’ and Markus Gabriel’s “New Realism.”85 This does not imply the acceptance of a naked world “in itself,” but of different signifying fields which, in their individual qualities (not unlike Hogrebe’s scene), are determined by the objects that belong to them and their interrelations.86 But they reveal themselves through their compositions and the semantics they offer in a 80

81 82 83 84 85

86

Joerg Fingerhut/Rebekka Hufendiek/Markus Wild (eds.): Philosophie der Ver­kör­ perung. Grundlagentexte zu einer aktuellen Debatte, Berlin 2014, also for the following. Edmund Husserl: Ding und Raum (Vorlesungen 1907), in: Husserliana, vol. 16, The Hague 1973, pp. 154–203. Julian Kieverstein (ed.): Heidegger and Cognitive Science, Basingstoke 2012. Sean Kelly: Merleau-Ponty on the Body, in: Ratio 15 (2002), pp. 376–391; cf. Fingerhut/Hufendiek/Wild: Philosophie der Verkörperung (as fn. 80), pp. 29–32. Wolfram Hogrebe: Riskante Lebensnähe. Die Szenische Existenz des Menschen, Berlin 2009. Maurizio Ferraris: Manifesto del nuovo realismo, Bari 2012; Mario De Caro/Maurizio Ferraris (eds.): Bentornata realtà. Il nuovo realismo in discussione, Turin 2012; Markus Gabriel: Auftakt eines Neuen Realismus, in: Paul Boghossian: Angst vor der Wahrheit. Ein Plädoyer gegen Relativismus und Konstruktivismus, trans. by Jens Rometsch, Berlin 2013, pp. 144–156. Markus Gabriel: Warum es die Welt nicht gibt, Berlin 2013, p. 113.

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way that surprises the beholder and moves him to change his convictions and his knowledge, and in a way that startles and entraps him. In this sense, the principle of asymmetrical corrections states that opinions can be changed through things, whereas things can be changed through opinions only to a lesser degree.87 Pictures and objects that unite to form semantically specified ensembles play a marked role in this asymmetric “opening towards the world.”88 Reflections on the picture act strive to provide all of these efforts with a sharper outline, insofar as they discern qualitative elements in the very zone that is manmade, shaped in a special sense that is proper to the outside world: to be autonomous as something external while nonetheless approaching the beholder semantically. In effect, the contemporary philosophy of embodiment presents a testing field for reflections on the picture act. In its variants on the embodied, extended, enactive, and embedded mind, the philosophy of embodiment aims for a comprehensive rehabilitation of the body, symbolic artifacts, and the environment as agents in the constitution of consciousness.89 But this can hardly be carried through without reflecting upon imagines agentes. An important source is a basic insight that emerges from embodied mind theory, namely that perception is by no means passive, but is a highly active process that involves the vision, the body, and movement.90 Pointing in the same direction is the concept of vehicle externalism, according to which memnonic devices and public signs participate in constituting action and hence must be considered in their determination.91 As a consequence, external vehicles act as enabling potentials that surpass the intended aim.92 This holds true as well for the concept of the enactive mind, according to which an organism’s autopoietic self-organization brings about a structural entanglement with the environment. In effect, the degree to which the ambience is shaped (gestaltet) has an influence on the process of sense-making, which determines cognition as a process of

87 88

89 90

91 92

Maurizio Ferraris: Documentality: Why it is Necessary to Leave Traces, trans. by Richard Davies, New York 2013, p. 318. Paradigmatic here is Wolfram Hogrebe: Die Wirklichkeit des Denkens. Vorträge der Gadamer-Professur, ed. by Jens Halfwassen/Markus Gabriel, Heidelberg 2007, pp. 11–35, and related to this, pp. 61–78; id.: Beuysianismus. Expressive Strukturen der Moderne, Munich 2011. Fingerhut/Hufendiek/Wild: Philosophie der Verkörperung (as fn. 80), pp. 65–91. Alva Noë: Action in Perception, Cambridge, MA 2004. This conforms to a basic concern raised by Robert Vischer: Über das optische Formgefühl. Ein Beitrag zur Aesthetik, Leipzig 1873. Andy Clark/David Chalmers: The Extended Mind, in: Analysis 58 (1998), pp. 10–23; Andy Clark: Material Symbols, in: Philosophical Psychology 19/3 (2006), pp. 1–17. Fingerhut/Hufendiek/Wild: Philosophie der Verkörperung (as fn. 80), p. 72. Cf. Richard Menary (ed.): The Extended Mind, Cambridge, MA 2010.

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THE PICTURE ACT: TRADITION, HORIZON, PHILOSOPHY

forth-bringing (enactivism). This conception of a sense-giving tie between organism and environment also suggests a picture-active faculty.93 This holds true in particular for the idea of a semantic offer made by an environment that displays no representative functions, but instead simply approaches, presenting and offering itself.94 But as yet, no systematic distinction has been made between the environment in general and the special form of the picture. This applies as well to research into mirror neurons, which seem predestined to provide picture act theory with an experimental foundation.95 It becomes all the more pressing, then, to cease to regard pictures as exceptional, and to see them instead as foundational for a theory of perception.96 The blind spot of the philosophy of embodiment is the unconscious legacy of the hostility towards the body and toward pictures against which the philosophy of embodiment itself so vehemently revolts: a deficient sensibility for the specific forms of artifacts and the resulting absence of a distinction between environment and artifact. By failing to focus on the problem of form, which affects a pictorially-shaped environment, the philosophy of embodiment falls short of its own most radical potential: to understand the organism not only through its reaching out into the environment, but also by means of its interplay with an ambience that leaves its own impression on the organism. By virtue of such a bipolar field of resonance, the focus on the first person singular and its constructivist centering might be overcome through a reflection on an interplay with active pictures. For this reason, John Michael Krois tried to develop a philosophy of embodiment in connection with picture-act-theory.97 In this sense, picture-act-theory is a philosophy of embodiment that has transgressed its self-created borders.

93

94 95

96

97

Francisco Varela/Evan Thompson/Eleanor Rosch: The Embodied Mind. Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge, MA 1991. In an enactivism that is both lived and experience-controlled, images could play a central role insofar as they are able to mediate between both levels. See Evan Thompson: Sensorimotor Subjectivity and the Enactive Approach to Experience, in: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (2005), pp. 407–427. James Gibson: Wahrnehmung und Umwelt, Munich 1982. Cf. David Freedberg/Vittorio Gallese: Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience, in: Trends in Cognitive Science 11/5 (2007), pp. 197–203, and the critique put forward by Shaun Gallagher, entitled Aesthetics and Kinaesthetics, in: Bredekamp/Krois: Sehen und Handeln (as fn. 63), pp. 99–113. Freedberg’s forthcoming book on this matter (2014) promises a solution of the problem. A splendid attempt to establish this claim has been made by Joerg Fingerhut: Das Bild, Dein Freund. Der fühlende und sehende Körper in der enaktiven Bildwahrnehmung, in: Feist/Rath: Et in imagine ego (as fn. 40), pp. 177–198. Krois: Bildkörper und Körperschema (as fn. 41).

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4. The Ego of Shaped Forms The term “picture act” as developed here understands the world of shaped forms as an entity that approaches the beholder with autonomous force. It can be called the Ego of shaped forms. Because the relationship between artifact and beholder is never linear, it can only be described as an ongoing interplay of responses. But

Fig. 17  Hopi snaker, 1924, photography, Washington, Library of Congress.

in contrast to constructivist theories that (albeit fruitfully) locate the energy of shaped forms in the eye of the beholder, the picture act presupposes a surplus of the artifact that goes beyond the receiver’s expectations and capabilities prior to this confrontation.98 At stake is not a transfer of the speech act concept into the visual sphere, but instead its inversion. The speech act relies on beings that change the world through their linguistic activity, while picture act theory 98

Mitchell: What Do Pictures Want? (as fn. 5), passim; Frederik Stjernfelt: Diagrammatology (as fn. 39), pp. 90f. Marion Lauschke frames picture act theory in the wider context of closely related approaches: Marion Lauschke: Bildakt-Theorie, at http://www.gib.uni-tuebingen.de/netzwerk/glossar/index.php?title=Bildakt-Theorie (10. 07. 2014).

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THE PICTURE ACT: TRADITION, HORIZON, PHILOSOPHY

claims that the recipient of shaped forms is both the subject and object of their active and activating force.99 There is no need to emphasize that Aby Warburg’s concept of the pathos formula – as an alternative to Plato’s cave allegory – plays a fundamental role for picture act theory. The human being who uses his own body to distance himself from the fear of death and who symbolizes the deadly power of the snake with a thunderbolt in order to produce a “contemplative space” within which pictures acquire superiority: this model remains foundational for reflections on the picture act phenomenon (Figs. 17, 18).100 It was developed further by

Fig. 18  Altar of Sands of an Antelope Priest in Cipaulovi, book illustration after a drawing by Jesse Walter Fewkes, 1894.

Edgar Wind, a student of Ernst Cassirer’s.101 In his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer developed the concept of symbolic pregnance (symbolische Prägnanz), which proposes taking each shaped object not just as a medium of a

  99

100 101

John L. Austin: How to do Things with Words, Cambridge, MA 1962; John R. Searle: Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida, in: Glyph 1 (1977), pp. 198–208. The argument is discussed more broadly in Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts (as fn. 4), pp. 48–56. Ibid., pp. 293–306. See the article of Franz Engel in the present volume.

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HORST BREDEKAMP

projective interest, but also as the springboard of an event of which the observer is the object.102 The picture-driven conditions of our times oblige and even compel the observer to take up this tradition and to fulfill the theoretical promises underlying it. At stake is the framing of a cultural theory that understands the world of objects and pictures as being imbued with an energeia that approaches human beings independently, and ultimately liberates them from the ego-logics of constructivism, representationalism, and neurocentrism, and the rivalry between image and language as well as that between the visual and the tactile dissolves.103 Our times acquire the responsibility for defining the field that has generally been left empty by phenomenology, symbol theory, and the philosophy of embodiment: to define the Ego of created artifacts as the formative condition of the reflectively acting human being. The aim is to establish a cultural theory capable of grasping mankind in equal measure as the creators and products of the forms they themselves produce.

102

103

Ernst Cassirer: Philosophie der philosophischen Formen, vol. 3, Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis, Darmstadt 1954, p. 274. Cf. John Michael Krois: Problematik, Eigen­art und Aktualität der Cassirerschen Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, in: HansJürg Braun/Helmut Holzhey/Ernst Wolfgang Orth (eds.): Über Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Frankfurt/M. 1988, pp. 15–44, pp. 18–26, and Sascha Freyberg/Katharina Blühm, in the present volume. Van Gastel/Hadjinicolaou/Rath: Paragone als Mitstreit (as fn. 77).

­Joerg Fingerhut

EX TENDED IM AGERY, EX TENDED ACCESS, OR SOMETHING ELSE? Pictures and the Extended Mind Hypothesis

Introduction Up until now pictures have not been a focus of what has come to be known as the enactive, embodied, embedded, extended, and affective philosophy of mind (following common usage henceforth referred to as “4EA” approaches). While pictures have enjoyed notable treatment in subfields – for example in accounts that emphasize the role of bodily mediated emotions for aesthetic experience of pictures,1 or in Ed Hutchins’ classical treatment of the role maps and charts play in the navigation of a ship2 – they have rarely gained center stage in philosophical theories.3 4EA approaches counterbalance certain exaggerations, address certain neglected problems, and in some instances question the very foundation of what has long been the standard cognitivist picture of the mind. In this standard view – championed by most of cognitive science in the second half of the 20th century – the mind is first and foremost an information-processing device that operates

1

2 3

See e.g. David Freedberg/Vittorio Gallese: Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience, in: Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11/5 (2007), pp. 197–203, for an approach that discusses the importance of simulated embodiment and empathic engagement with works of art. See also Jesse Prinz: Emotion and Aesthetic Value, in: Arthur E. Shimamura/Stephen E. Palmer (eds.): The Aesthetic Mind, New York 2011, pp. 71–88, for a contemporary version of sentimentalism in aesthetics, i.e. the view that emotions are the central component of our aesthetic appraisals of works of art. Edwin Hutchins: Cognition in the Wild, Cambridge, MA 1995. This holds for the main proponents of 4EA approaches. For two notable exceptions that discuss pictures against the backdrop of 4EA ideas see John Michael Krois: Bildkörper und Körperschema. Schriften zur Verkörperungstheorie ikonischer Formen, ed. by Horst Bredekamp/Marion Lauschke, Berlin 2011 (Actus et Imago 2) and Frederik Stjernfelt: Diagrammatology, Dordrecht 2007.

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upon inner representational states and whose main operations consist of transformations of those inner states. The mind is therefore “tucked in” between perceptual inputs and motor outputs of the brain. Any science of the mind – or so proponents of this view argue – has best to concern itself with those processes and operations and the way they make up an intelligent system in order for this science to strive and fully mature.4 This image of the mind is rejected by 4EA approaches. What they provide instead, is a view of the mind that sees it as being scaffolded by environmental structures in order to perform many of its tasks (embedded), as being realized not only in the brain but also in the skillful body and its motor systems (embodied), or sometimes even including elements outside the body as proper parts of the mechanisms that constitute mental states (extended). The mind is seen as actively generating meaning through active engagement with its environment (enactive) and one therefore also should take the fundamental evaluative environmental relations that underlie these engagements into account, namely the affectivity of every organism and its needs and strivings (affective). I am not going to repeat the main arguments for these different views, just as I am not trying to identify a common denominator.5 Instead I will look into certain upshots that such views of the mind have for explanations of our interactions with pictures and artifacts, and vice versa. This paper introduces pictures more generally into the discussion of cognition and mind. I will argue that pictures play a decisive role in shaping our mental lives because they have changed (and constantly keep changing) the ways we access the world. Focusing on pictures will therefore also shed new light on various claims within the field of embodied cognition. In the first half of this paper I address the question of whether, and in what possible ways, pictures might be considered to be part of our extended mind. We will see however, that the explanatory means contingent upon the extended mind thesis – i.e. the claim that the vehicles of cognition are not confined to the boundaries of the individual organism – can only take us so far. Beyond such claims it will be pivotal to understand in what specific ways pictures might be regarded as being at the basis of certain perceptions of and interactions with the world. I will therefore address, in the second half of this paper, in what ways enactive and affective elements should inform our theory of the pictorial mind. In the course of this discussion it will become apparent that pictures are strange objects because they differ profoundly from other objects surrounding us. And it will also turn out 4 5

See Jerry Fodor: LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited, New York 2008 for a current defense of such a strategy. See for this the introduction in Joerg Fingerhut/Rebekka Hufendiek/Markus Wild (eds.): Philosophie der Verkörperung. Grundlagentexte zu einer aktuellen Debatte, Berlin 2013, pp. 9–104, esp. pp. 64–91.

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that pictures – beyond the fact that they can be considered to be tools for our mind (in the sense that they facilitate our access to the world) – are rather strange or stubborn tools6 in that something in them resists full integration into our cognitive routines.

Complementarity and Parity The extended mind hypothesis is the claim that extra-neural elements and even elements outside the boundaries of the human organism are proper parts of mechanisms that constitute cognitive processes and mental states. This is not just to say that our mind is about the world, but that the mind literally can leap into the environment: components of the external world are sometimes vehicles of our mental states. 7 This hypothesis has been prominently and elaborately defended by Andy Clark. In the same year that the (now classic) Extended Mind paper8 was pub­ lished, Clark also wrote a small paper that contains a defense against a critic who emphasized the striking and apparent differences between external (extended) and neural (brainbound) components.9 According to this criticism, such incongruities clearly speak against the claim that external elements could ever be a part of the physical machinery that realizes cognitive processes. In my view Clark’s twofold response elucidates quite well what the extended mind thesis was intended to cover. Firstly, he insists that what speaks in favor of the extended mind claim is that sometimes “extra-neural components

6

I am very much indebted to discussions with Alva Noë on the concept of “strange tools,” a concept that he has developed with respect to works of art and that has been working on over the last years. He currently is preparing a book on this topic with the title: Strange Tools. Art and Human Nature. 7 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Corresponding discussions of the extended mind claim outside the field of philosophy sometimes connect to the above claim only loosely. However, it is this claim in particular that has initiated an intense debate and has triggered strong objections in both philosophy of mind and philosophy more generally, including those camps that propagate other elements of the 4EA approaches. For a view that is e.g. in favor of embodiment and embeddedness yet opposes the extended mind thesis (with the argument – based on the threatened simplicity and conservatism of the psychological sciences – that elements outside the organism should not become a central focus in these sciences) see Robert Rupert: Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind, New York 2009. 8 See Andy Clark/David Chalmers: The Extended Mind, in: Analysis 58/1 (1998), pp. 7–19. 9 This paper is part of a special journal symposium on Andy Clark’s: Being There. Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, Cambridge, MA 1997. See Andy Clark: Being There. Putting Philosopher, Researcher and Student Together Again (Author’s Response), in: Metascience 7/1 (1998), pp. 95–104.

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can play a role similar to internal ones.”10 Clark directs our attention to the computational and functional organization of larger problem solving wholes that not only include resources of the brain but also those of the body of the cognizer and those of her environment. From this perspective we are able to identify elements outside the organism that play roles that resemble those normally filled by mechanisms within the brain. It is this similarity that provides support for the claim that external elements are also proper parts of cognitive routines. Secondly, Clark argues that once we take such a perspective on the whole organism-environment nexus we can also take into account that external elements “may play a role different from, but complementary to, the inner ones.”11 Simply by virtue of the pivotal functions certain bits and pieces of the environment occupy in our cognitive problem solving routines one has good reason to argue that they should be considered parts of the mechanisms that realize our cognitive states (and not only those elements that play similar roles as parts within the brain). While both of these elements are present in his account, the second point seems to be of particular importance to him: The argument for the extended mind thus turns primarily on the way disparate inner and outer components may co-operate so as to yield integrated larger systems capable of supporting various (often quite advanc­ ed) forms of adaptive success. The external factors and operations, in this model, are most unlikely to be computationally identical to the ones supported directly in the wetware – indeed, the power of the larger system depends very much on the new kinds of storage, retrieval and transformation made possible by the use of extra-neural resources […]. These new operations, however, may often be seen as performing kinds of tasks which, were they but done in the head, we would have no hesitation in labeling cognitive.12 Although we might sometimes be able to identify a similarity between external and internal components (i.e. the neural processes that are normally seen as realizers of mental states), it is nonetheless the interplay between very different kinds of components that especially facilitates cognitive problem solving. This interaction with elements that have something to add beyond the operations of the normal wetware in the brain might have been key to the evolution and the ontogenetic development of our minds. From this viewpoint, external elements 10 11 12

Ibid., p. 99 (my emphasis). Ibid. (my emphasis). Ibid. (my emphasis).

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EXTENDED IMAGERY, EXTENDED ACCESS, OR SOMETHING ELSE?

that are functionally isomorphic to inner states and processes might constitute a rather small, even neglectable class. It should be clear that in Clark’s account of the extended mind the biological organism (and its neuronal parts) still plays a central, even indispensable role. One can therefore distinguish three different claims with respect to the boundaries of cognitive mechanisms, all of which are in accordance with Clark’s theory. A cognitive mechanism can (a) (b)

(c)

reside fully within the organism (e.g. in cases where all components of the mechanism are neuronally realized); be partially realized within the boundaries of the organism yet include external parts whose functional roles resemble the role inner components already play; and be partially realized within, yet include external parts whose role is quite different from any functions that previously have been attributed to parts of the brain and body of the organism.

John Sutton distinguishes a first and a second wave within theories of the extended mind based on this difference between parity of contribution of inner and outer elements on the one hand (b), and complementarity of outer elements to the inner ones on the other (c).13 When one considers claims such as the one cited above, one could also argue that the second wave might be equiprimordial (if not prior) to the first, yet there is some justification for Sutton’s usage: it has been parity claims that have received most attention in the literature. But why is it – despite the above pledge for complementarity – that arguments based on simila­ rity and the promises and pitfalls of what has been labeled the “parity principle”14 are getting so much leverage within current philosophy? One reason might be that it seems dialectically advantageous to lean on a form of conservatism in the argumentation: what parity arguments could show is that even if one focuses on what cognitive science already sees as the 13

14

See John Sutton: Exograms and Interdisciplinarity. History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing Process, in: Richard Menary (ed.): The Extended Mind, Cambridge, MA 2010, pp. 189–222. See Clark/Chalmers: The Extended Mind (as fn. 8), p. 8, for what later has been called the parity principle: “If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive process.” Based on this formulation one could also consider to distinguish similarity claims (rather than parity claims) from complementarity claims. Parity of treatment does not require external elements to be similar to ones that can be found inside the head (and could therefore comprise similarity and complementarity). I will however retain the notion of parity as it is most commonly used in the literature, namely as the more confined concept based on similarity.

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central components of cognitive states, one might nonetheless be able to demon­ strate an inconsistency in the standard view of cognition. The inconsistency consists in the following: cognitive science draws an arbitrary line (at the boundary of skull and skin) that excludes components that it otherwise would see as explanatorily central elements and that – were they realized within the boundary of the brain – would count as part of a cognitive mechanism. The moral of the parity argument is this: components should be considered a part of a cognitive mechanism (or not a part of that mechanism for that matter) independent of the brute fact of their location. Consider the discussion of memory retrieval in the Extended Mind paper by Clark and Chalmers.15 Generally, if one wants to tackle human memory it seems that one should include components such as the means or mechanisms by which the brain accesses information as well as the information itself (stored in the brain). The latter then is the content of an episode of remembering and could also be characterized as a belief. Clark and Chalmers discuss the now famous (and slightly overused) fictional case of “Otto” who suffers from a mild form of Alzheimer’s. Although his memory is impaired due to his illness, he retrieves information from a notebook when needed (in the original thought example: the location of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, MoMA, on 53rd Street). He does so effortlessly and can act on the basis of such information with similar success as his healthy counterpart “Inga” who uses her biological memory (both are able to find the MoMA). Otto’s old-fashioned pen and paper notebook, so the story goes, is meticulously updated and always kept close by, which guarantees constant availability and the reliability of the stored information. Clark and Chalmers emphasize the comparable roles that inner (in the case of Inga) and outer (in the case of Otto) elements play in both scenarios. Otto’s seamless interactions with his notebook seem sufficiently similar to the cognitive operations of a healthy subject (at a certain level of description) and this might warrant the claim that Otto’s dispositional beliefs are literally in his notebook. What this argument therefore is meant to demonstrate is that even paradigmatic mental states (such as beliefs) do have “wide realizations.”16 One important line of counterarguments focuses, as could be expected, on the various ways that Otto’s memory nonetheless differs from the one real­ ized in Inga’s brain.17 Yet, Clark stands his ground by arguing that there is comparability on the level of description that is central for identifying the relevant 15 16

Ibid., pp. 12–16. See Robert Wilson: Two Views of Realization, in: Philosophical Studies 104/1 (2001), pp. 1–31. See e.g. Fred Adams/Ken Aizawa: The Bounds of Cognition, in: Philosophical Psy17 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� chology 14/1 (2001), p. 43–64. They make a distinction between derived (i.e. conventional) and non-derived content and argue that the latter is, as a matter of con-

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components of cognitive mechanisms. It is this coarse functional poise of the stored information (i.e. what role the respective information can play) that was, in both cases, sufficiently similar and that warrants similarity of treatment. Otto believed (even before consulting his notebook) that MoMA was on 53rd Street and acts accordingly. This similarity cancels out what might then seem as rather superficial differences in both cases.

Pictures as Extended Imagery Although pictures have not been primarily addressed in the extended mind literature, they might nonetheless fall under the parity story outlined above. Consider, for example, the possibility that Otto consults a map or an image (instead of a linguistic inscription) in his notebook in order to retrieve the relevant information about the location of MoMA. One might claim that this also resembles a mental operation because representations in the brain have, according to some theories of cognitive processing, been considered to be image-like. Stephen Kosslyn, for example, has argued since the 1970s for the depictive character of mental representations and has outlined a theory of how pictorial elements influence information processing and how they are neuronally realized. He defines a depictive representation as “a type of picture, which specifies the locations and values of configurations of points in a space.”18 Kosslyn conducted experiments in which subjects were asked to mentally scan (mentally “look at”) imagined objects. He was able to show that the relative size of subparts of an imagined object measurably affects the time that it takes to assess and report on those sub-parts: larger features are reported more quickly than smaller ones. Yet if information would be stored as propositional knowledge, then all information should arguably be available to be retrieved in equal ways and within the same time span.19 Kosslyn therefore argues that imagery is a sui generis form of mental representation that possesses properties that are distinct from those of linguistic or purely conceptual representations. Based on such a view of how mental representations are realized in the brain and how their set-up affects the way we access them, one can build an argument for a parity of usage of inner and outer pictorial representations. This means, one could argue for a similarity of the accessing of a map in Otto’s notebook and the accessing of a mental representation. It seems that the details of

18 19

tingent fact, only realized in brain-bound processes. This kind of content constitutes a “mark of the cognitive” (something that lacks in Clark’s account). Stephen M. Kosslyn: Image and Brain. The Resolution of the Imagery Debate, Cambridge, MA 1994, p. 16. See Stephen M. Kosslyn: Can Imagery Be Distinguished From Other Forms of Internal Representation?, in: Memory and Cognition 4/3 (1976), pp. 291–297.

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such an account could easily be filled in and what just has been described admits of a relatively straightforward translation into the original fictional “Otto” case study. Although such a parity argument is perfectly feasible it can be argued that it might not be very illuminative with respect to what pictures actually can do for our mind. Kosslyn defines pictures as pictures due to their preservation of certain spatial features that also pertain to the object that they depict. Yet a picture has to maintain only some (if any) spatial features in order to represent. Consider an example often used by Kosslyn: it takes measurably longer to move from the trunk of an imagined elephant to its tail (when e.g. asked questions about the respective shapes of both body parts while imagining to see these animals from the side) compared to the time it takes to shift mentally from a rabbit’s nose to its tail. Yet this is not due to anything that pertains to pictures per se. One can, for example, easily draw a rabbit and an elephant such that they occupy the same space on a piece of paper. Such effects are rather based on properties we encounter with real elephants and rabbits and that are preserved in imagery. One could therefore say that what explains the above effects of visual imagery are foremost visual elements (or more precisely those of our standard visual exploration of objects in our environment) and not primarily pictorial ones. At times Kosslyn is very well aware of this when he states that the picture metaphor of mental images “wrongly implies that images are reperceived much as pictures are perceived.”20 Mental images, in his view, do not require figureground separation or contour sharpening in order to be “perceived.” To this I would add that mental images also do not afford the perceptual relation of “seeing-in” when viewing them. The concept of “seeing-in” has been defended by Richard Wollheim (among others) who argues for the “twofoldness thesis” of our experience of pictures: the “visual awareness [is] not only of what is represented but also of the surface qualities of the representation.”21 In mental imagery this twofoldness does not seem to be part of the experience. When we imagine something we do not pick up on the properties of the object that does the representing. (After all: what would this object be? The respective brain state does not seem to be a good candidate for this.)22 With real pictures we do: we not only 20

21 22

Stephen M. Kosslyn/James Pomerantz: Imagery, Propositions, and the Form of Internal Representations, in: Cognitive Psychology 9/1 (1977), pp. 52–76, p. 54. See also Kosslyn: Image and Brain (as fn. 18), p. 13: “Clearly, mental images are not actual pictures in the head (there is no light up there, and besides, who would look at them?).” Richard Wollheim: Art and Its Objects, Cambridge, MA 21980, pp. 214f. Things get more complicated in cases where one specifically imagines to “look at a picture” (to imagine it with a frame, canvas, etc.). This might constitute a case of imagery where something akin to seeing-in is happening. But this nonetheless seems quite hard to do. To test the possibility of imagining pictures in the mind,

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grasp the pictorial content but we also interact with the very materiality of images (the canvas, the wall, etc.). We are even physiologically equipped to do so. The two kinds of information (of the material properties of the object that we share the same action space with and of the pictorial space) are processed in parallel, i.e. in two separate pathways of our visual brain.23 To sum up: if we endorse a strong account of pictures, such as the one just outlined, then there are no pictures in the brain. Pictures are particular objects out there in the world with properties that specifically pertain to them and we will have to focus on the special actions they afford us. We should however not be too hasty in dismissing parity claims completely. The parity argument does work on a certain level (Otto picks up visual information from his notebook in a way that roughly resembles his internal operations), and it may even work well as a means of initiating some doubts with respect to a fully internalist view of the mind (just as the original Otto case does). It nonetheless only takes us so far. With respect to pictures one could say that parity accounts that start on the “inside” (e.g. by focusing on highly localized operations of the brain and on the capacity to evoke imagery in the absence of direct interactions with the world) simply put the proverbial cart before the horse. Instead our starting point should be that our embodied mind already acts in a world that is occupied by artifacts and that it is “intimately intermingled with” such a world (to use a phrase by John Haugeland24). We should thus focus on those existing relations to pictures and how they might have enabled us to achieve certain performances that only could have accrued from specific perceptual and bodily engagements with pictorial objects. Importantly, pictures are objects that afford certain kinds of interactions. The desideratum therefore should be to investigate directly these interactions and thereby to focus especially on those specifics that are not, or cannot be, reproduced in imagery.25

23 24

25

one could conduct a study and test the hypothesis that it should not take longer for the “head-to-tail” jump when an elephant is imagined to be drawn on a piece of paper where it occupies the same size as a rabbit. For something along this line see the discussion of mental imagery in Evan Thompson: Mind in Life, Cambridge, MA 2007, pp. 267–311. For a discussion of the “Two Visual System Hypothesis” and picture perception see Mohan Matthen: Seeing, Doing, and Knowing, Oxford 2005, pp. 306–318. See John Haugeland: Mind Embodied and Embedded, in: Acta Philosophica Fennica 58 (1995), pp. 233–267 reprinted in Haugeland: Having Thought. Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind, Cambridge MA 1998, pp. 207–237, p. 223: “I want to suggest that the human mind may be more intimately intermingled with its body and its world than is any other, and that this is one of its distinctive advantages.” That imagery falls short of certain operations that we can undergo with external pictures is also addressed in Andy Clark: Mindware, New York 22013. He refers to experiments that show that “our mental images seem to be more interpretively fixed: less enabling of the discovery of novel forms and components” (ibid., p. 186).

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Homo Depictor Artifacts, and among them pictures, make up what could be considered our cultural and cognitive niches. Such niches are constructed, not just occupied, and they (as well as the objects they contain) fuel the power of the composite system “cognizer and object” in ways that could not be explained by only making reference to processes within the organism. We attach meanings and offload information to objects that occupy our world. We, for example, rely on public maps and road signs to find our way around cities; we sometimes draw complicated arrangements and complex relations between thoughts we have on a piece of paper in order to check whether things work out the way we imagine them. By externalizing our ideas this way we communicate them to ourselves at the same time as we are communicating them to others. In the following, I will address the question of how external props complement our inner resources – with a special focus on pictorial props – and how inner and outer resources together make us the kinds of minds we are. While one excellent way to understand the complex workings of pictures would be to address their role in the specific evolution of certain thoughts and ideas and by excavating some important changes in concepts they engendered (as it is sometimes done in the history of art and pictures and in media theory) I want to take a rather more fundamental perspective. By this I mean the way philosophers (before the advent of 4EA approaches in the philosophy of mind) explored how our minds might be defined by the very objects that we either pick up in the environment or that we construe ourselves. Consider for example what Ian Hacking calls his anthropological “fancy.” Hacking conjures up an image of man that goes beyond the widespread focus on language as the key element of what makes our minds human. He highlights another, also specifically human way to build relations to our environment: modern humans became capable of making and interacting with objects that were “likenesses” of the things around them. In other words, humans make and interact with objects of a particular kind, namely those that have the power to represent. Hacking emphasizes the material status of these representations and the ways in which they afford exploration. He writes in regard to this: “When I speak of representations I first of all mean physical objects: figurines, statues, pictures, engravings, objects that One example of an operation that can be better performed with external objects than with mental images is the switching between two versions of a bi-stable image (like the famous duck/rabbit). Several participants of a study were only able to switch between images once they actually drew them based on their memory and perceived them externally. See Deborah Chambers/Daniel Reisberg: Can Mental Images Be Ambiguous?, in: Journal of Experimental Psychology 11/3 (1985), pp. 317–328.

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are themselves to be examined, regarded.”26 Language is sometimes considered to be the uncircumventable a priori of our mentality.27 In contrast, Hacking claims – while nonetheless keeping language and the concept of humans as speakers as a necessary and important contrast class – that we are first and foremost homo depictors.28 If we underwrite the claim that the relation to pictorial artifacts is in such a way constitutive for the modern human, it should also be expected that related claims become important explanatory elements in theories of our mind. There are at least three ways in which our mental relations to the world might be determined or even constituted by pictures. Firstly, pictures are part of our external tool set and help us master cognitive tasks (i.e. they are complementary to our inner cognitive apparatus). This is a development of Clark’s initial extended mind idea (i.e. before its curtailment on parity that is based on similarities to inner processes), which was discussed in the first section of this paper. Pictures on such an account constitute an extended solution space. Secondly – over and above their role in specific solutions to cognitive problems – pictures may alter our perceptual skills and thereby our experiential relationship to the world: we might phenomenally experience the world differently by virtue of being schooled by and having interacted with pictures in our evolutionary past as well as in the culture that we are brought up in. Pictures are therefore part of our extended perceptual access. The third aspect I want to highlight gives this experiential element a further spin. A central, yet often overlooked, corollary of the homo depictor account is the idea that since the prehistoric past we have filled our world with objects that not only have representational but also emotional and affective powers: objects fascinate us, address us,

26 27

28

Ian Hacking: Representing and Intervening. Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science, Cambridge, MA 1983, p. 133. As, e.g., in the Wittgensteinian sense that our access to mental states is necessarily mediated by a (public) language. But also in the following way: paradigmatic mental states are often construed along the lines of inner sentences of a language of thought and it has been claimed that only as such they exhibit the features of systematicity and productivity that characterize our minds. See Fodor: LOT 2 (as fn. 4). See for this concept: Hacking: Representing and Intervening (as fn. 26), pp. 132ff. Recently the rising field of cognitive archeology has also addressed such claims. One has to be careful, however, to not collapse Hacking’s homo depictor idea into the more common homo faber aspect of hominid evolution. The latter concept and its relation to the extended mind thesis is discussed in Lambros Malafouris: How Things Shape the Mind, Cambridge, MA 2013. To claim that “the profound complexity of our engagements with tools and technologies” defines the modern human (ibid., p. 154) in my view undercuts the homo depictor idea by not acknowledging the important roles tools can take on beyond their initial (practical and cognitive) usefulness when they e.g. become ornamented or are seen as representations in Hacking’s sense.

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they become items of veneration and worship. My conjecture is that a theory of the pictorial mind can only claim its proper place within 4EA approaches when it attends to all of these three aspects. They provide important bootstraps for the multiple ways pictures could be theoretically incorporated into the sciences of the mind. I will address the three claims now in turn.

1. Pic t ures as Tools From the viewpoint of the extended solutions space our visual environment (and with it pictures) could be seen to be an extension of our possibilities for thought and action, and as enhancing our cognitive efficiency and accuracy. This aspect is, for example, reflected in the treatment of the role of pictures as a means to bundle, reduce, or alter information “to an ordered set of simpler pattern-completing operations of the kind our brains are most comfortable with.”29 Artifacts that structure information in these ways become intimately integrated in our problem solving routines. Signs, diagrams, charts, radiographs, etc. constitute information clusters that are not (and often cannot be) internally reproduced. Pictures have the power to depict previously inaccessible details, as well as abstract contents and complex topics and make these all available in ways that would not be graspable in the perception of a natural scene or in imagery alone. Consider how Daniel Dennett – in a paragraph entitled Making Things to Think With – discusses high-speed still photography as a “revolutionary technological advance for science because it permitted human beings, for the first time ever, to examine complicated temporal phenomena not in real time but in their own good time – in leisurely, methodical, backtracking analysis of the traces they had created of those complicated events.”30 Here pictures become a tool in that they overcome the limitations of our visual perception for certain epistemic tasks. This tool idea elucidates the extended mind claim most directly, since artifacts here become integrated into cognitive problem solving routines that otherwise would not be possible, were it not for features that they exhibit as external objects. And it is not least the indispensability of these external features to a cognitive solution that makes it feasible to treat them as proper parts of a cognitive process. External artifacts make us smarter by transforming the cognitive tasks to something our biological brain can more readily deal with (and sometimes enable it to operate in novel and advantageous ways) and it there­ fore seems increasingly arbitrary to single out the contribution of these external

29 30

Clark: Mindware (as fn. 25), p. 168. Daniel C. Dennett: Kinds of Minds, New York 1996, pp. 134–147, p. 143.

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elements as mere inputs to cognitive processes as opposed to them being part of the process itself. 31

2. Pic t ures and Percept ion Each of the three claims I am discussing builds on the fact that we have a complex and intricate sensorimotor, cognitive, affective apparatus that is concerned with vision. This biological set-up constrains our cognitive and experiential life, yet it also constitutes a large playing field of possible structured interactions with the world. Based on this, one can wonder whether the tools and artifacts we interact with could be considered to be changing vision itself. This idea needs some introductory notes: Vision in some theories of perception – especially in those that highlight the enactive aspect within the 4EA approaches – is primarily understood as a skill-based way of interacting with the environment. According to such theories, it is our structured interaction with the environment that realizes perceptual meaning and not the brain itself (e.g. by constructing inner representations of the environment). Consider the credo of sensorimotor enactivism: “experience is a temporally extended activity of exploration mediated by the perceiver’s knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies.”32 They claim that the content and character of what we perceive is fundamentally set up and constrained by what we can do. First of all, consider how our very movements (e.g. involuntary saccades of the eye or movements of the head and body) and the interdependent relations between movements, proprioceptive feedback, and sensory stimulations play a decisive role in this (as well as the morphological design of our eyes, head, and body that only allow for certain kinds of information processing). These structured interactions determine what we experience but also how we experience the world (the patterns underlying vision are e.g. quite different from those of

31

Such hybrid solutions for cognitive problems clearly fall under the scope of the sciences of the mind, yet some additional qualifications – i.e. specific coupling conditions between organism and artifact – might be needed to justify referring to them as proper parts of cognitive mechanisms. There is no fact of the matter that settles such a question but rather a continuum that spans from cases where artifacts are so intimately integrated into a problem solving routine that they are a proper part to cases where they rather function as scaffoldings to it. In the latter sense, the mind is characterized as embedded in a world of artifacts and not in the literal sense extended into it. For the embedded view see Kim Sterelny: Minds: Extended or Scaffolded?, in: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9/4 (2010), pp. 465–481. J. Kevin O’Regan/Alva Noë: A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Con32 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� sciousness, in: The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24/5 (2001), pp. 939–1031, p. 961.

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hearing or of taste). Such elements can be labeled ‘prenoetic’: they structure our conscious experience without themselves necessarily becoming the topic of the experience.33 Once we accept that the very means of interaction themselves constitute our experience, vision itself no longer needs to be understood as being limited to our biological apparatus. Vision includes and can change according to the different mediums (tools, technologies) through which we gain access to the world and through which the world affects us. They are not just input to the system but essential parts of the means of our access. Based on this one can also consider how pictures give our perception novel structures and thereby liberate us from biologically basic interactions with the world.34 We should therefore take into account, for example, how art can make certain connections visible that had not previously been conceived in this way. Or think of the way pictures might even have made our ways of perceiving perceivable. Take depictions of forest wildlife in renaissance paintings that cluster different animals as well as different stages of blossoming plants (that could not coexist at the same space or time) as an example of the first. Take textbook discussions of what impressionism or cubism did to our conception of vision as a case of the latter (think e.g. of how a face-perception might be different before and after you have seen a deconstruction of a face in a Picasso painting).35 This might initially sound as if all that has been gained by such an account is that pictures make new contents of perception available. But this would be a rather trivial fact. I am gesturing instead towards the possibility that pictures might also have a larger impact on us, namely that we have learned to perceive differently (e.g. by picking up patterns of saccadic jumps pictures impose upon us or by having made more conceptual relations perceivable that then become employed in the exploration of the non-artifact world more generally) and that our faculty of perceiving thereby has been enlarged and changed.36

33 34

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See Shaun Gallagher: How the Body Shapes the Mind, New York 2005, pp. 133–152. An analogy might help to illuminate the role of pictures in structuring our access to the world: the advent of the microscope not only allowed us to study new objects (like micro bacteria), it also made a new skill-set available – at the moment we learned to understand what we were seeing – and thereby enlarged our world: the world we have access to, the world we can now more directly interact with, and the world we understand as having an impact on us. The latter adds an important affective element to the story. Or, in order to include a more contemporary example, consider how the perception of color-constancy or light more generally is not the same after having been in one of the color rooms conceived of by James Turrell. This is of course a very contentious claim and one that would seem difficult to prove either right or wrong. Proponent of the impenetrability of perception, e.g., would allow that we “notice” different things by being schooled by art and modern

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Pictures not only directly influence (motor-)action-and-perception cycles through habituation with new viewing patterns but also more indirectly via the understanding that guides our explorations of the environment (an understanding that is also subject to change). Our skill-based active exploration of features of the environment therefore does not only rely on knowledge of expected changes in inputs due to different bodily movements, but also on our more intellectual faculties that alter what is accessible to us and thus changes what we experience.37 This could constitutes an additional way that pictures and art might affect changes on our experience of the world: by making novel things and ideas visible that make in turn new means of accessing the world available to our understanding. Importantly, vision in the views just discussed is not only evolutionary and developmentally plastic but is constantly subject to change even in the hereand-now. We must of course be careful how we develop this perceptual access idea and the role pictures might play therein. On the one hand, we should not underplay the stable and invariant aspect of visual experience (the very elements that are exploited by different visual artforms) by carrying too far the alluring possibility that vision is changed by different media we interact with. But on the other hand we should also take our plasticity seriously enough and not simply treat pictorial objects as concurring to our biological visual system. To illustrate this latter point consider how neuroaesthetics, in its early stages, has embraced the idea of art as an extension of our perceptual skill set. One of its founding fathers, Semir Zeki, claimed that “the overall function of art is an extension of the function of the brain.”38 This seems like a welcome inclusion of pictures as part of our access to the world. Given what I have discussed this far however, it should be clear that we must be careful not to subscribe to a view that ascribes to art (and pictures for that matter) very much the same functions as it does to the brain. Zeki claims that both (brain and art) identify the constant and essential features of objects and maintains “that no theory of aesthetics is likely to be complete, let alone profound, unless it is based

37

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media, yet still would claim that we “see” the same thing and that our faculty of perception remained unchanged. See Noël Carroll: Modernity and the Plasticity of Perception, in: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59/1 (2001), pp. 11–17. For the role of understanding in enactivism, or actionism as he more recently calls it, see Alva Noë: Varieties of Presence, Cambridge, MA 2012, pp. 9ff. I discuss these issues in more detail, although not with respect to pictures in: The Body and the Experience of Presence, in: Joerg Fingerhut/Sabine Marienberg (eds.): Feelings of Being Alive, Berlin/Boston 2012, pp. 167–199. Semir Zeki: Art and the Brain, in: Journal of Consciousness Studies 6/6–7 (1999), pp. 76–96, p. 76.

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on an understanding of the workings of the brain.”39 I take the latter to be somewhat trivially true if one sees aesthetics as being informed by psychological accounts at all. However, as long as Zeki models his view of art on the basis of the internal brain processes underpinning vision, he inevitably underplays the role of external artifacts. Art, in his view, must conform to the organizational and functional principles of the brain. Yet there are operations that the biological brain would not be able to achieve were it not for some special relations that have become possible due to the emergence of certain artifacts and were it not for the special relation we hold to them in the here and now. The nature of such operations would be necessarily left out in any account that complies with Zeki’s model.

3. Pic t ures as Externa l Embod iment By including questions of how we might construe new forms of perceptual meaning through our enactive engagements with pictorial objects we already shifted our scope away from the extended mind idea and its basic claims with respect to extra-bodily vehicles of mental states. Clark’s extended mind hypothesis is not a claim about the extended vehicles of experiential states. Such states in his view are realized by a highly dense interplay of neural resources within the central nervous system and not by loops through the environment.40 Clark’s extension claim gains its strength insofar as it relies on the idea that “the mental” refers to more than that which is consciously occurrent (as seen in the example of dispositional beliefs) and should include the computationally salient roles certain vehicles can play. It could therefore be said that both, Clark’s complementary and his parity account, argue for a cognitive externalism that features the ways in which the widespread use of cognitive technologies (in a wide sense) is able to expand and reshape the space of human reason and cognition. I have suggested that we should in addition consider how pictures might have changed our perceptual skills and how we consciously perceive the world. The enactive theory I discussed would claim that experiences do not supervene on the brain and that “[t]he substrate of experience may include the non-brain body, and the world.”41 This claim has been defended by means of denying that experiences are properties of states at all. According to the theory, it is a category error to consider brain states (or any “thing” more generally) as generating

39 40 41

Ibid., p. 94. See Andy Clark: Spreading the Joy? Why the Machinery of Consciousness is (Probably) Still in the Head, in: Mind 118/472 (2009), pp. 963–993 See Alva Noë: Experience Without the Head, in: Tamar Gendler/John Hawthorne (eds.): Perceptual Experience, New York 2006, pp. 411–433, p. 430.

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experiences. Rather, experiences should be understood as modes of interactions with (or modes of access to) the world. What the two aspects discussed so far have in common is that they both address pictures as being (or becoming) integrated into certain routines. Pictures might therefore be usefully understood as tools of the mind in the sense that they provide an extended cognitive solution space and in the sense that they structure our skillful perceptual relations to the world. However, pictures are recalcitrant and stubborn tools; something in them fundamentally resists integration and invites further exploration.42 Seeing pictures primarily through extended mind goggles (or through the lenses of other similar claims) would not only disguise this key insight but also the fact that we stand in a particular relation to pictures as external objects, a relation that is importantly dissimilar to that which we normally entertain in regard to external objects. This is because some pictures – from early cave paintings to works in the history of art – could be considered paradoxical objects. We experience them as being both close and transcending space and time, as being both inanimate and artificial and emotionally engaging us up to the point that we experience and treat them as agents.43 From this it should be clear that pictures might not have been exclusively selected for their cognitive functions. That pictures bear affective meanings, meanings that address us in specific ways, is the third and final aspect I want to highlight. Pictures might be just the kind of objects that, at some point in our evolutionary history, have developed the power to “look back.” By this I mean that they were so full of meaning, emotion, and affective potential that they fell somewhat out of the natural order of things (think of the advent of animism but also of the emotional power that great works of art can exert upon us) while they at the same time somehow remained to be objects. Such objects therefore do not just modify our cognitive computing power, nor do they just make things visible that previously had not been in sight and teach us to see differently. Critically, they also occupy our world with a very different kind of object. This is why I think that their external embodiment should be a crucial part of our account: pictures stand out insofar as they present us with man-made objects (or material structures in the environment that were picked up as meaningful) that we experience as beautiful, as uncanny, as challenging, and as inviting emotional and cognitive discovery. They are objects that embody ideas and contents in specific pictorial ways and

42

As Alva Noë (see fn. 6) and Andy Clark (see fn. 25) seem to acknowledge with respect to specific aspects of pictures. See for this Horst Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesun43 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� gen 2007, Frankfurt/M. 2010, and his article in the present volume.

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therefore also afford specific kinds of engagements.44 What I want to take away from this aspect of our interactions with pictures is that pictures gain pictorial status not least because they are not integrated fully into our cognitive or skillbased routines.

Conclud ing Remarks While the aspects outlined above are still somewhat speculative, I believe that they gesture towards promising research questions. Once we change the direction of explanation and address our interactions with pictures more directly, we can include aspects whose relevance for philosophy of mind has up until now been largely undervalued. Yet, as seen in the last sections, they might not be captured well under the general umbrella of the extended mind hypothesis. There is one final element that was implicit in the above claims but deserves some special attention to defend against possible misconceptions of the homo depictor account. It should be clear that pictures might originally have started out as representations, as “likenesses” in Hacking’s words, but from the very beginning they have also presented us with styles, modes of access, and powers that work independently of any rigid relation that they have to what they depict. What follows from this is that all mainly representational accounts of pictures must fall short of what a theory of pictures – in the sense envisioned here – should aim at. I mention this in closing because it underscores my plea in favor of an account that primarily addresses our interactions with pictures and that defines pictures primarily with respect to specific organism-object relations. Only when we grasp such characteristic properties of our interactions with pictorial objects more directly will we be able to relate them to our other embodied, enactive relations to the world. Only then will a more general account of pictures be able to make headway and truly inform us about the specific kinds of minds we are.45

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We already encountered one type of engagement with pictures that in my view is fundamental and that could also be brought to bear on explanations of the paradoxical nature of pictures, namely that of “seeing-in”. Pictures enable us to see something in an object that we share a common space with, yet that at the same time transcends this space. I am grateful to Mog Stapleton for helpful comments on drafts of this paper.

Sascha Freyberg & Katharina Blühm

BILDA KT DEMYSTIFIED Remarks on Philosophical Iconology and Empirical Aesthetics

If you like to phrase it so, philosophy is mystical. […] But the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism: not by explaining it away, but by the introduction of novel verbal characterizations, rationally coordinated. Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought

1. In face of a picture the routines of life world interaction get suspended. It is in this moment that pictures act upon us and that’s why their intensities are not reducible to intentions. This, in short, is the argument of the following paper. Everybody will agree, that the enormous presence of pictures today is making the question of how their influence and latent potency can be grasped and explained evermore pressing.1 The unsettling phenomenal fact of at times overwhelming experiences in front of pictures is known for a long time. It also inspired the aesthetics and theory of empathy (Einfühlung); a theory Aby Warburg followed in his search for an anthropological basis of the cultural history of images.2 Although the theory later was dismissed, its arguments seem to 1

2

Since David Freedberg’s The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago 1989), the problem of “living presence response” has appeared again more prominently in art history, visual studies, and what is called image science (Bildwissenschaft) in the German-speaking world. Another important contribution in this respect was Alfred Gell: Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory, Oxford 1998. Warburg once described the project of his library to the financing and coordinating committee as “Pionierwerk einer historisch-psychologischen Ausdruckskunde” (Aby Warburg: Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg. Hamburg, den 21. August 1929. Vor dem Kuratorium, in: id., Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, ed. by Dieter Wuttke, Baden-Baden 31992, p. 307).

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have a revival in todays empirical research in cognitive and neuroscience. But Warburg’s general idea of a theory of expression that integrates empirical with historical and practical resources is still a desideratum. In his book Theorie des Bildakts (2010) Horst Bredekamp presented artifacts and experiences of pictorial agency across the history of art and iconic practices to offer a proposal for a theory of Bildakt (picture act).3 Basically this theory states: “Bilder sind nicht Dulder, sondern Erzeuger von wahrnehmungsbezogenen Erfahrungen und Handlungen.”4 To place full emphasis on the agency of the picture itself may seem like a form of animism. That is indeed what some of the revievers claimed.5 They accused Bredekamp of performing a “mystic turn” based on fetishistic thinking,6 giving the picture subjective personal status, and they entitled the whole question of pictorial agency as purely mythological and unscientific.7 This is of course a heavy reproach and also explicitly contradicts Bredekamp’s aim to present his theory as a project of enlightenment. Here again, Bredekamp is following the Warburgian tradition, to which he refers right on the first page. The following is not concerned with analyzing the presentation of Bild­ akt given by Bredekamp and others.8 It only intends to show how one can understand the concept in a way that is free of any “mystical” connotations. Of course there are several ways to counter and different levels on which to meet the objections against the term. First of all it could be discussed on which kind of criteria the objections are build. Also several theoretical frames of explanation

3 4

5

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Horst Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007, Berlin 2010. “Pictures are not passive sufferers, but agents of perceptual experience and related actions” (ibid, p. 326). For Bredekamp this claim is “die Quintessenz der Lehre des Bildakts.” In German, there is no linguistic distinction between image and picture. For a short characterization of the approach to picture agency see the German glossary of image theory at: http://www.gib.uni-tuebingen.de/netzwerk/glossar/index. php?title=Bildakt-Theorie (15. 12. 2014). Freedberg received similar reactions to his book. See e.g. Ernst H. Gombrich: Review of David Freedberg, The Power of Images, in: Studies in the History and the Theory of Response, New York Review of Books, vol. 15 (1990), pp. 6–9; Arthur C. Danto: Review: The Power of Images, in: Art Bulletin 72 (1990), pp. 341f. See the review by Hanno Rauterberg in: Die Zeit, Nr. 50, 09. 12. 2010, p. 53. See Lambert Wiesing: Sehen lassen. Die Praxis des Zeigens, Berlin 2013. Wiesing labeled all these (often phenomenological) approaches as “Bildmythologie” (ibid, pp. 78–104). He thinks the whole approach lacks observable or perceivable criteria and thus is not falsifiable (ibid, pp. 100f., see fn. 8). Thereby he seems to follow a narrow conception of what can be counted as observable. Analogous to physicalism this approach can be called visibilism. Cf. e.g. the research of W. J. T. Mitchell, Georges Didi-Huberman, Hans Belting, and Gottfried Boehm.

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are possible.9 But facing the reproach of “un-scientificity”, involves giving an idea of what evidence regarding the psychobiological constraints of “picture acts” down to the organismic level could look like. If this leads to the questions of naturalism and pluralism or anthropological difference, which seem to be essentially antinomical, then we should examine the common ground on which contradictions are often built. This strategy was already proposed by Edgar Wind in his work on “Experiment and Metaphysics” for the solution of Kant’s cosmological antinomies: we have to find the tertium, the middle term on which both assumptions secretly rest and try to transform the hidden term into an experimental hypothesis. If we show the possibility of this “experimental reduction,” we have already solved the antinomy as such, even though we do not have the final empirical answer, yet.10 In the case of pictures and the problem of Bild­ akt, the corresponding criterion is to find the “unwilling” unintentional response to pictures and a way of explanation which can stand experimental resit.11 Thus two different but related approaches come into play. According to the first, the question of pictorial agency is seen as a – at least partly solvable – problem of experimental or empirical aesthetics in the broadest sense involving a theory of emotion and perception – and the empirical, psychobiological resources will be applied ������������������������������������������������������������������������� exactly in ����������������������������������������������������������������� this respect. According to the second, the framework of explanation is provided by Philosophical Iconology as envisioned by John Michael Krois, which is needed to provide an integrative framework for the connection of a theory of expression with a theory of images. This should be explained first, be­­­cause in this way the “facts” can be taken into account without suggesting the reducibility of the phenomenon to its preconditions.12 Whether Bildakt as a ter­   9

10 11

12

A social constructivist explanation could lead from Mauss to Serres, where the generative “power of things” gains momentum in reciprocal practices not only between humans but between humans and things, (quasi-)subjects and (quasi-) objects. This way would finally connect with Latour’s actor network theory. Another more obvious possibility would be to include recent studies in material culture and cognitive archaeology which try to establish a theory of “material agency.” See e.g. Lambros Malafouris: How Things Shape the Mind. A Theory of Material Engagement, Cambridge MA 2013. See Edgar Wind: Experiment and Metaphysics (1934), trans. by Cyril Edwards, Oxford 2001, § 32. Pure logical judgments cannot give us this criterion. Still, there is no need to think the particular impact is always basically the same or universal in a strong sense, we only need to agree that there is an impact at all. This way, one could also partly pacify the struggle in aesthetics between those who want to find or reconstruct human intentions and those claiming an emergent aesthetic impact and autonomous meaning of the object in artistic creation and/or intermedial transition. On different ways of (objectively) describing qualitative experiences and their limits see Sabine Marienberg: Die Grenzen der Vergegenständlichung qualitativen Erlebens, in: Matthias Jung/Jan-Christoph Heilinger (eds.): Funktionen des Erlebens. Neue Perspektiven des qualitativen Bewusstseins, Berlin 2009, pp. 41–58.

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minus technicus is justified cannot be decided a priori or by way of disqualification. The whole problem should be treated as a research question. By using certain empirical resources it may be possible to at least outline an approach free of disciplinary prejudice and free of the Grenzwächtertum Warburg disliked so much.

2. Warburg already fully realized that the effects of pictures cannot be grasped by their formal attributes only and therefore pointed to several connections between biological and cultural factors.13 In his talk on the serpent ritual of the Hopi, he spoke of the process of embodiment (Verleiblichung) in the dance performance: dancers becoming serpents. This was not meant metaphorically or psychologically but as a hint to the bodily basis of mimetic movements and the resonance between gesture and image. When Benjamin called magic the basic problem (Urproblem) of language theory, he was expressing a similar view on the importance of latent (semiotic) potency.14 It is not necessary to share the explanations given by Warburg and Benjamin for these phenomena,15 rather it is important to see the actual problem both tried to grasp, namely that animism seems to be a symbolic mode deriving from human embodiment.16 Its modes of description therefore are not metaphorical in the usual sense but “literal” with respect to certain modes of perception. This means that these often synaesthetic and pathic ���������������������������������������������������������������� experiences���������������������������������������������� emerge not so much from intentions or conventions as from the affective basis of human symbolic capacities. This was the basic assumption of Ernst Cassirer’s theory of “mythic thought” and forms a systematically important part of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms.17 13

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This idea is concisely expressed in a sentence from Warburg’s papers: “The formal approach to the image – devoid of understanding of its biological necessity as a product between religion and art – […] appeared to me to lead merely to barren word-mongering” (cited in Ernst Gombrich: Aby M. Warburg. An Intellectual Biography, London 1986, p. 88). See Winfried Menninghaus: Benjamins Theorie der Sprachmagie, Frankfurt/M. 1995. Cf. Kathrin Busch: The Language of Things and the Magic of Language: On Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Latent Potency, available online at: http://eipcp.net/ transversal/0107/busch/en (12.12.2013). See Matthew Rampley: Allegory and Mimesis. On Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, in: Art History as Cultural History. Warburg’s Projects, ed. by Richard Woodfield, 2000, pp. 121–149. This idea is also very present in Vico and Goethe. The second volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is devoted to this problem and systematized in the third volume where it is brought into relation with the symbol function of expression (Ausdrucksfunktion). See esp. Ernst Cassirer: Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Dritter Teil. Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis,

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This is also what John Michael Krois realized when interpreting Cassirer in the light of early pragmatism and the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty.18 The relation of organism and sign, perception and action forms one of the basic arguments of what he called Philosophical Iconology.19 In short, it can be characterized as an attempt to explore a semiotics of presence, closely connecting (expressive) phenomena and signs.20 Basically, it aims to investigate the “logic of images” ������������������������������������������������������������������������ but also try to meet the vision of Warburg’s concept, integrating different levels of explanation (conceptual, historical, empirical, practical etc.). Krois worked on the development of this conception for some time21 by trying to rela����� te the theory of expression, as a common ground of Warburg and Cassirer,22 to the semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce. As one of the leading specialists on Cassirer’s philosophy, Krois identified “symbolic pregnancy” as its basis and saw the broad concept of symbolism as a neglected research program,23 which he wanted to develop further in relation to Peirce’s concept of iconicity.24 In Cassirer the theory of expressive symbolism is the basis for his concept of “mythic thought” as a symbolic form. For Krois, this implied a fundamental

18 19

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Gesammelte Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe [ECW], vol. 13, ed. by Birgit Recki, Hamburg 2002, pp. 78–81. Cassirer’s concept of the symbolic form of myth was not widely discussed but influential at the time. It should be noted, that Merleau-Ponty already drew on Cassirer and the same sources in Gestalt and Developmental Psychology. Unfortunately, Krois died before he could finish a monograph on Philosophical Iconology, which would have given us a more definite concept. Some of his works (written in English and German) were posthumously collected in John M. Krois: Bildkörper und Körperschema. Schriften zur Verkörperungstheorie ikonischer Formen, ed. by Horst Bredekamp/Marion Lauschke, Berlin 2011 (Actus et Imago 2). Susanne Langer saw the similarities in Cassirer’s and Whitehead’s concepts of symbolism, claiming importance for the presentational modes. ���������������� Cf. Susanne Langer: Philosophy in a New Key, New York 1942. Krois first used the term in 2001 in his talk “Kultur als Symbolprozess,” now in: id: Bildkörper und Körperschema (as fn.19) , pp. 64–74. In a letter to Cassirer, Warburg stated the conception of a “Kulturwissenschaft als ‘Lehre vom bewegten Menschen’” as a common goal (Warburg to Cassirer, 4/15/1924, in: Ernst Cassirer: Briefe, ed. by John Michael Krois, Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte [ECN], vol. 18, Hamburg 2009. The relation of expression, resemblance, and mythical thought was exactly what Nelson Goodman and others rejected or ignored. “Cassirer’s theory of expressive symbolism was never completely worked out, but the program is there. It adds to the program that Peirce completed, and philosophy needs them both if it is to get beyond symbolisms and come to understand the indexical and iconic forms of meaning that have eluded it ever since logic was declared to be its sole concern.” John M. Krois: More than a linguistic turn in philosophy. The semiotic programs of Cassirer and Peirce, in: Krois: Bildkörper und Körperschema (as fn. 19), pp. 92–112.

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philosophical turn from the primacy of linguistic symbolism to that of action and ritual. From myth as a symbolic form emerges a physiognomic world-view on which the plurality of the other symbolic forms is based.25 That is why Cassirer spoke of culture and modern civilization as being built “on volcanic soil” because “mythic thought” is latent at the basis of all symbolic forms.26 A symbolic form, for Cassirer, is a way of world disclosure. However, from a more synchronic perspective, all these forms are based on three symbolic functions (expression, representation, pure meaning) and two basic modes of perception. Now, this is a very important point for Philosophical Iconology. Cassirer claimed that of the two different modes of perception (expression, thing) the primary mode is the perception of expression and not the perception of things.27 The affective, pre-linguistic level of expression phenomena thus forms the basis of all symbolic media, including pictures. Therefore Krois stated: “[t]he science of images must include the theory of myth.”28 Images and pictures thus cannot be reduced to visibility and logical reference but are based on bodily feelings as multi-modal iconic forms.29 In this way he followed Cassirer’s idea that the body-soul relation forms the starting point of every theory of symbol

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Obviously not myths in the sense of traditional narrations are meant but an imaginative and highly emotional world-view. Ernst Cassirer: The Myth of the State, ECW 25, Hamburg 2007, p. 264. The failure of the Cassirer reception lies exactly in not realizing this latency, presumably because the persistent presence of mythical thought counterposes the narrative “from myth to science.” This shows how far Cassirer went beyond traditional NeoKantianism, without giving it up altogether. This also marks the systematic difference to the Vienna Circle, which Cassirer otherwise felt very close to. However, Logical Empiricism and Neo-positivism only recognized thing perception and this neglect leads to a reductionist physicalism and behaviorism. Cf. Ernst Cassirer: Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften, in: ibid: Aufsätze und kleine Schriften (1942–1946), ECW 24, Hamburg 2007, pp. 357–486, pp. 391–413. John M. Krois: Cassirer’s ‘Symbolic Values’ and Philosophical Iconology, in: Philosophy and Iconology, ed. by Giulio Raio, Napoli 2008 (Cassirer Studies 1), pp. 101–118. Here, he also draws on Panofsky’s pre-iconographical level, which Panofsky also called the level of “vitale Daseinserfahrung” and which is crucial for the perception and description of pictures. Panofsky followed Cassirer in dividing this level into the perception of things (Sach-Sinn) and the perception of expression (Ausdrucks-Sinn), but he never really drew on the latter in his descriptions. Developmentally, the first sense emerging from synaesthesia in the perception of pictures actually is not vision but tactility. Cf. John M. Krois: Haptic Beginnings of Depiction, in: “31” 12/13 (2008), pp. 39–42. Here, Krois heavily draws on the research of John M. Kennedy, who revealed the pictorial abilities of blind people. Online available at http://www.ith-z.ch/media/pdf/0806557001286198119.pdf (15. 12. 2013).

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and culture.30 This led him to consider image theory as located between cultural studies, medicine, and biology,31 with emotion research forming a crucial hinge.

3. Aesthetics in its original sense is research on aisthesis.32 Empirical Aesthetics in the sense of a broad interdisciplinary research (concerning affective, perceptional, and epistemic levels) opens a path to answering some questions on pictorial agency. Traditionally, this concerned the relation of physiology to the reception of art.33 At the core this was always research on perception. Now, in recent debates on “embodied cognition” and perception, the sensorimotor level plays a crucial role, while the activation dynamics, which set the organism into motion in the first place, has rather been neglected.34 Yet, when asking how the experience of being directed by a picture can come about, the structure of the motivational organismic capacities seems crucial.35 The decisive explanatory hint can be found in the research program of Affective Neuroscience as developed by the psychobiologist Jaak Panksepp.36

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That is why he sees a convergence of Cassirer’s philosophical anthropology with research on embodied cognition. Cf. John M. Krois: Cassirer’s ‘Prototype and Model’ of Symbolism: Its Sources and Significance (1999), now in id.: Bildkörper und Körperschema (as fn. 19), pp. 44–63; id.: Philosophical Anthropology and the Embodied Cognition Paradigm. On the Convergence of two Research Programs, in: id.: Bildkörper und Körperschema (as fn. 19), pp. 176–192. Cf. Krois et al. (eds.): Embodiment in Culture and Cognition, Amsterdam/Philadelphia 2007. “Aesthetics was born as a discourse of the body” (Terry Eagleton: Aesthetics and Politics in Edmund Burke, in: History Workshop Journal 28/1 (1989), pp. 53–62, p. 53). Alexander Baumgarten just wanted to fill the gap in the Wollffian system following Leibniz. Thus, he gave logic (as higher, clear, and distinct cognition) a sister concerning the lower, confused cognition connected with sensibility. Often narrowed down to the artwork-beholder-relation, this was already a highly debated topic from Fechner to the forum of Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, which anticipated many of the arguments still in use today. See Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov: ‘Zoologen und Physiker als die berufensten Forscher in Sachen der Aesthetik’? Zur Bestimmung der experimentellen Ästhetik in der Allgemeinen Kunstwissenschaft, in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 58/1 (2013), pp. 11–34. Cf. Thomas Fuchs: Das Gehirn – ein Beziehungsorgan. Eine phänomenologischökolo­g ische Konzeption, Stuttgart 2008, p. 134. Thus emotions are focused on mainly as instances of activation dynamics. The locus classicus is Jaak Panksepp: Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, Oxford 1998. Krois, who saw Panksepp as an allied early advocate of emotion research, adopts his claim that feelings constitute a “Simple Ego-type Life Form” (=SELF) (cf. ibid., p. 309) in contrast to “a Cartesian ego or unified subject that has feelings” (John M. Krois: ‘A passion can only be

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All our appetitive world approach is organized by an emotional-motivational system the existence of which we mostly only realize in the case of dysfunction as in the amotivational state of severe depression. Jaak Panksepp calls this resource the SEEKING37 system and identifies it “as major foundational substrate for Spinoza’s concept of conatus.”38 A crucial point is that this activation system is involved in constituting the fundamental asymmetry between organism and environment, a configuration which is decisive for what agency means. While for a behaviorist mainstream emotional-motivational capacities were assumed to result solely from conditioning it has been Panksepp’s primary motivation to look for the unconditioned motivational capacities, as they are given with the life process. In retrospect, this was part of an anti-reductionist movement in biology that led back to organisms as a relevant explanatory unity. Panksepp found a number of evolutionarily acquired resources for prototypical emotional behaviors to be anchored in the brainstem.39 These capacities, according to Panksepp, are trained and connected to specific objects by conditioning and memory during a life span, unfolded by social interaction, and refined by conscious thought. In the mature human subject, the appetitive impulse generally is transformed into directed, highly selective and pre-specified processes. While other emotional-motivational systems (as underlying FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY) are only episodically active, the SEEKING system upholds a basic level of incessant activity. All systems (to different degrees) overlap each other, but the SEEKING disposition underlies not only all positive activity but also, as becomes clear in an evolutionary context, predatory aggression and its transformations. Rather than being fixed programs, these

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overcome by a stronger passion’: Philosophical Anthropology before and after Ernst Cassirer, European Review 13/4 (2005), pp. 557–575, p. 573, endnote 38). In Affective Neuroscience a term is capitalized (e.g. in SEEKING system) if the functional neural system is addressed but written in lower case (“seeking”) if the real emotional manifestation is meant. This was introduced to make sure not to confuse the real emotional manifestation with the necessary functions of the brain system. Jaak Panksepp: Brain Emotional Systems and Qualities of Mental Life: From Animal Models of Affect to Implications for Psychotherapeutics, in: Diana Fosha et al. (eds.): The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice, New York 2009. Antonio Damasio in his latest book switched over to Panksepp´s position of a brainstem origin of organismic emotional capacities (which then are specified in higher brain regions) and Panksepp´s account turned out to be pioneering part of overcoming an age old “corticocentric myopia”. See Antonio Damasio: Self Comes to Mind. Constructing the Conscious Brain, New York 2010, p. 75 and Josef Parvizi: Corticocentric Myopia: Old Bias in New Cognitive Sciences. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13/8 (2009), pp. 354–359.

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systems are infrastructures on which in a highly context-sensitive process a multiplicity of emotional phenotypes can emerge.40 It is important not to misunderstand these systems as independent entities. They are genuine parts of the organism and can exist only in this organised whole. They can be understood only with reference to the whole organism and its relation to the world. And, as Merleau-Ponty pointed out: “the unity [...] of organisms [is] a unity of signification.”41 The SEEKING system constitutes itself out of an incessantly active tonic42 baseline component and context sensitive fast variable phasic components of release of neuromodulatory substances (e. g. dopamine) from which in the encounter with the world on a moment to moment basis a self-strengthening tonic-phasic dynamic is disposed to unfold. Thereby (in the primordial mode, based on the presence of the tonic baseline release) approach activity without pre-specified aims (telos) can gain momentum. This impetus has been called “experience expectant” or “goad without fixed goal”.43 It is important to note that (1) pre-specified habitual modes of encounter but also (2) the disposition to be drawn into appetitive engagement even without pre-specified goal are concerned here.

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“Non-linear dynamical systems modeling” demonstrates that “an enormous variety of outcomes [can be] based on fairly simple control structures” (Klaus R. Scherer: Emotions as Episodes of Subsystem Synchronization Driven by Non-Linear Appraisal Processes, in: Marc D. Lewis/Isabella Granic (eds.): Emotion, Development and Self-Organization: Dynamic Systems Approaches to Emotional Development, Cambridge 2000, pp. 70–99, p. 93). Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Structure of Behavior, trans. by A. L. Fisher, Boston 1963, pp. 155f. The whole sentence reads: “The unity of physical systems is a unity of correlation, that of organisms a unity of signification.” For the human order, the following must be added: “The advent of higher orders, to the extent that they are accomplished, eliminates the autonomy of the lower orders and gives a new signification to the steps which constitute them” (ibid., p. 180). “Tonic” in our context means: very slowly variable. In the healthy animal, the component is always active, the release increases e.g. in a novel environment, and importantly there is a feedback relationship with phasic release. “Phasic” indicates context-sensitive, fast variable release (for details see Antonio Alcaro/Jaak Panksepp: The SEEKING Mind: Primal Neuro-Affective Substrates for Appetitive Incentive States and Their Pathological Dynamics in Addictions and Depression. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 35/9 (2011), pp. 1805–1820). Jaak Panksepp: Affective Neuroscience (as fn. 36).

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4. Life-world perception is situated and interaction-directed. It is not a picture-like neutral world scan i������������������������������������������������������������� n service of subsequent�������������������������������������� interpretation but lo���������������� oks������������� , in a senso44 rimotor as well as affective way, for options of action. This includes responding to affordances the world offers to us.�� Life-world perception of the mature human individual occurs in habituated, pre-directed secondary- or tertiarylevel processes of appetitive approach. Now: what will happen if we are confronted with something we cannot interact with in the usual life-world sense, that is, e.g. with pictures? Pictures, when perceived, are immediately recognized as such since what is depicted does not underly any shifts in perspective in the course of the perceptual process.46 Body-schematic processes, belonging to our faculty to coordinate our movements, register the lack of the usual perspectival shifts. This is an act of “embodied understanding” and does not require any reflection.47 This way a picture qua picturality falls out of the interaction directed life-world stream of world encounter. The habituated anticipatory routines do not hold any longer. The ongoing stream of world encounter is underpinned by multiple anticipatory procedures. The most prominent anticipatory procedures are feed-forward con���� trol systems�������������������������������������������������������������� . Here, the expected outcome of a movement is continually com44

This is also what Cassirer meant with “symbolic pregnancy”; a concept MerleauPonty was fascinated with. Cassirer’s Cousin Kurt Goldstein stated that the research should be focused on the total reaction of the organism which is never devoid of affective response (Kurt Goldstein: The Organism, New York 2000, p. 210). In other words: “There is no justification for the assumption that we first experience isolated facts [...] and then give them significance” (Hubert L. Dreyfus: What Computers Still Can’t Do, Cambridge MA, 1992, 269f.). “[W]hat we encounter as cognitive agents are never ‘bare’ objects or arrays of contingent features but, rather, meaningful situations.” Andreas K. Engel/Peter König: Paradigm Shifts in Neurobiology: Towards a New Theory of Perception, in: Roberto Casati/Graham White (eds.): Philosophy and the Cognitive Sciences, Kirchberg 1993, pp. 131–138. 45 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Beside ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� the affordance model ������������������������������������������������������ established by James J. Gibson, there ���������������������� are other������� ���������������� effective context dependent pop-up processes, like attention to faces (Yaqing Niu/ Rebecca M. Todd/Adam K. Anderson: Affective Salience Can Reverse the Effects of Stimulus-Driven Salience on Eye Movements in Complex Scenes, in: Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012), doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00336). As an extra class there are so-called orienting reactions. They refer to sudden or extraordinary strong stimuli and stimuli connected with the own name. There is of course a certain spatial extension in or rather on a picture belonging to 46 its material existence (up to pastose paint application), ���������������������������� b��������������������������� ut this is not the 3-dimensional depth of things to which our life-world interaction is adapted to. I also may interact with the picture as a thing, but this is outside of the mediality problem. For the seeing-in problem of simultanous twofold (dorsal/ventral) picture percep47 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� tion see: Joerg Fingerhut: Das Bild, dein Freund, in: Ulrike Feist/Markus Rath (eds.): Et in imagine ego. Facetten von Bildakt und Verkörperung, Berlin 2012, p. 197.

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pared with what is actually ������������������������������������������������������ perceived��������������������������������������������� , allowing, if necessary, for ongoing ��������������� anticipatory adjustments.48 Also, there is the incessantly updated top-down projection of expectations at the level of discharge-sychronization of the perpetually ongoing endogenous large-scale brain activity.49 It is the layer of these “automatically” occurring background processes, in which the life-world mode of encounter in the face of pictures gets ruled out by pictures. The interaction-directed routines get suspended ������������������������������������������������������������ (����������������������������������������������������������� in a next step, transformed into an as-if mode). When looking at a picture, we �������������������������������������������������������������� fall���������������������������������������������������������� – at ������������������������������������������������������� least for a moment – in ���������������������������� an unspecified mode of appetitive approach that works without a pre-existing goal or intention. The active role to determine the direction of the perceptual process thus shifts to the pictu������ re. This is not the usual way things attract our attention. Going on devoid of our own intention, rather because of the medial nature of the picture, this cognitiveemotional event comes to be lived through as what in German is called Widerfahrnis. In this sense, you experience (erfahren) something happening to you (widerfahren). A specific point of irritation is finding ourselves in unintended activity: exactly those phenomenal and operational channels through which we are accustomed to pursue our intentions are suddenly directed by the picture.50 Here we certainly are not the agents. That we cannot interact in a life-world sense with what is depicted by no means excludes our full capacity of perceiving expressions.51 The very same (������������������������������������������������������������������������������� embodied����������������������������������������������������������������������� )���������������������������������������������������������������������� creature is the beholder of a picture. As Krois realized, the possession of “embodied capacities” for understanding experiences of the life world practices is��������������������������������������������������������������������������� a precondition of the possibility of pictu�������������������������������� res – that is, for their production as well as their perception and understanding. Starting in the primordial mode of encounter does not make picture perception in any sense primitive or somehow bare of intellectual background. The integration of a stimulus in picture perception runs through the higher brain regions like any other stimulus. The primordial mode is by no means associated with atavistic behavior. This general appetition does not privilege any type of approach. Only secondary- or tertiary-level processes are pre-specified. The whole point of the primary-level impulse is exactly to be open, to be a “goad without goal.” As such, and as coming about outside of the life-world teleology, the

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In “predictive coding” there are probabilities integrating generative models at many levels. Paradigmatic is the work of Karl Friston. The locus classicus is Andreas K. Engel/Pascal Fries/Wolf Singer: Dynamic Predictions: Oscillations and Synchrony in Top-Down Processing. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2 (2001), pp. 704–716. This is a transition in quite another sense, as if our expectation within life-world perception were redirected by a surprising event. In this context, it is important not to confuse or blend Gestalt phenomena, expression perception, and picturality.

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course of approach in picture perception is in a categorically different sense directed by the stimulus than is usually the case in life-world perception. Primordial or uncircumventably basic actually is the immediate and undomesticated connection to the spontaneous appetitive impulse inherent to living organisms. Here symbolic and biological relations drive and reflect each other in the closest possible manner. The direct connection of the SEEKING system’s locus of origin with nuclei, immediately connected to the visceral milieu, is what inspires Damasio to write of “‘naked’ brain regions […] devoid of the protective blood-brain barrier, whose neurons respond directly to molecules travelling in the bloodstream.”52 The endogenous generation of spontaneity can, as it were, be grasped here. It is easy to see that this disposition is immediately bound up with the basic functions of life.

5. A genuine part of the activation dynamics of each appetitive world approach is a feeling of positive excitement: the (mild) euphoria of the flow of the appetitive engagement. It is exactly that feeling of increased animatedness that was classically known in aesthetic theory as the pleasure of successful aesthetic encounter. Emotional understanding, as is associated with sensorimotor resonance, has long been related to expression perception under the name of empathy. But this emotion (empathy) is not equivalent to the pleasure ascribed to aesthetic experience. Rather this is the second and interrelated pillar of emotions inherent to aesthetic response: the enthusiastic excitement inherent to the activation dynamics of the flow of fascinated inspection and inexhaustible contemplation of aspects of formal coherence and possible meaning called Euphoria. 

Euphoria

Empathy

related to the activation dynamics



related to expression perception





belonging mainly to the content of perception

belonging mainly to the activity of perception

Pictures possess multiple, often described means of keeping our glance captivated. Some are inherent to the medium as such,53 others depend on the specific

52 53

Antonio Damasio: Self Comes to Mind. Constructing the Conscious Brain, New York 2010, p. 78. If a random linear gesture is in the rectangle of a picture field, the beholder will immediately begin to see relationships.

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quality of the picture. Under the right circumstances, a self-strengthening pro­ cess is bound to arise, a euphoric effortless flow of the investigation and contemplation of an inexhaustible multiplicity of coherent relations and meaningful connotations we find in the picture. This, in some cases, is part of the phenomenon of being enchained by pictures. Strong activation dynamics allow a content to unfold and to come to bear in the competitive workings of the brain dynamics. The activation dynamics are disposed to unfold in cascade-like outbursts of activity. Originally, the faculty arose for the sake of ultra-fast mundane just-intime reactions. In the life-world, dramatic external challenges are related to overwhelming phenomenal experiences. When encountering pictures, excitement can occur without other external affordances – “being moved without motion” (Krois). This is lived through in relation to the content depicted. It is important to know that there is a medial phenomenon in play, which is dissociable from the content of a picture. The feeling of or heightened animation inherent to the aesthetic process has a characteristic phenomenal gestalt. It is not the type of consumptive reward, dependent on what has been consumed, fading away after the consummatory phase.54 Instead, the pleasure of euphoria, inherent to the process of fascinated inspection and self-sustaining reflection, can be mixed up with other feelings (specifically belonging to the content carried), but the core characteristic is a positively valenced excitement and a self-prolongation in contrast to satiation.55 The phenomena described arise not only without conscious intention, they are unavailable to intentional initiation. One cannot be fascinated deliberately. The neurobiological background of the dynamics of picture activity shows that although the onset is unavailable to conscious intention, the ongoing pro­ cess is open to cognitive intervention. In contrast to non-symbolic animals, the human animal can step out of the ongoing process to gain distance, and reflect. As long as picture-activity is stated without explanation as a given fact, this in 54 55

Although often of conditional efficacy, this momentarily results in the inhibition of the appetitive behavior. Winfried Menninghaus treats the effortless involvement in the contemplative flow as an autopoietic phenomenon that implies more than simply being affected by a stimulus or force, since the receiver of the stimulus is “derart ‘in Schwung versetzt’ [...], dass er die äußere Affektion in ein Geschehen der Selbstaffektion, also der potentiell sich selbst erhaltene Eigenbewegung umwandelt.” This produces a heightened, temporally indefinite state of sensing one’s own ‘being alive’-ness as an ecstasy of one’s own affective existence in space and time (Cf. Winfried Menninghaus: ‘Ein Gefühl der Beförderung des Lebens’. Kants Reformulierung des Topos lebhafter Vorstellung, in: Armen Avanessian et al. (eds.): Vita aesthetica, Szenarien ästhetischer Lebendigkeit, Zurich/Berlin 2009, p. 89). For the basis of this aesthetic encounter see Joerg Fingerhut/Sabine Marienberg: How It Feels to Be Alive: Moods, Background Orientations, and Existential Feelings, in: id. (eds.): Feelings of Being Alive, Berlin 2012, pp. 1–19.

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and of itself produces a force that can induce the phenomenon. Our convictions regarding ourselves affect our behavior in a relevant way.56 In order to do justice to the phenomenon of picture activity, we are neither forced to ascribe a subject status to pictures nor to suspect a projection of the beholder’s intentions.57 What we encounter is a novel perceptual interface between the community of human subjects and their (culturally co-constituted) world.58

6. We are born into a world (Mitwelt and Umwelt) of pictorial practices and learn how to use them. As both Cassirer and Peirce noted, it is in and through (semiotic) practices that (biological) dispositions get reshaped in the process of learning and using. The enactment of picturality can be seen as a case of exaptation.59 In a novel context, an evolutionarily already given resource enables new, additional functions. Adapted to the medial deixis of pictures, the ancient primallevel mode of appetitive approach is capable of unfolding activation dynamics of impressive phenomenal impact. Cassirer would see this as a significant point of the cultural history of vision or as construction of a symbolic medium. The understanding of expressions is already possible in the pre-symbolic sphere of animals and at first has a ‘mere’ signal function. But immediate expression understanding in Cassirer’s notion of symbolism is the core of a natural symbolism without which the rise of cultural symbolism would remain unintelligible.60 The picture as medium of symbolic world disclosure is a culturally enacted tool that allows for “[i]nterpretation of reality – not by concepts but by intuitions; not through the medium of thought but through that of sensuous forms.”61 Pictures arise as culturally enacted entities, not as frozen vision. In the light of 56

57 58

59 60 61

For socially determined functions the following holds: “Our beliefs about minds are in fact not just beliefs about our minds’ work, but also powerful tools for making them work as we believe. It is through our belief that our minds work in a particular way that we actually make them work that way.“ (Wolfgang Prinz: Open Minds. The Social Making of Agency and Intentionality, Cambridge MA 2012, p. xv). See Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts (as fn.3), p. 21. Picture active phenomena emerging qua picturality immediately in the perceptual process by no means exhaust the range of what we learned to call picture acts. Based on pictorial deixis, a realm of picture-active phenomena is derivative of multiple practices of picture use. Stephen Jay Gould/Elisabeth S. Vrba: Exaptation – A Missing Term in the Science of Form, in: Paleobiology 8/1 (1982), pp. 4–15. See John M. Krois: Cassirer’s “Prototype and Model” of Symbolism: Its Sources and Significance, in: id.: Bildkörper und Körperschema (as fn.19), pp. 44–62. Ernst Cassirer: On Man, in: Zur Philosophischen Anthropologie, Hamburg 2005 (ECN 6), p. 159.

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what we know today about the embodied and by no means picture-like nature of life-world perception this has become more obvious than before. With the medium picture a novel world interface beyond the interaction-related intentional structure has been enacted and has reshaped perception itself. There may be neurobiological conditions of possibility and constraint. But they by no means fully explain the emergence of certain cultural practices. Even if we succeed in tracing the development from emotional response to more distanced symbolic cognition, a structural difference between a reaction to signals and a symbolic system will remain. Therefore, there cannot be an exclusive neurobiological explanation for the enactment of picturality.62 Not only because there are essential non-neural factors in play (like the non-neural embodiment and the material and practical dimension of picture production). The actual driving force is the motivated interaction among the community of human beings in their world. The task is to study the dynamic principles of the multiple forms of world encounter. Nevertheless we have to ask about the connections of the structural differences of sign interpretation and its thresholds.63 Semiosis is parasitic of our life process and thus cannot be divided from it entirely. The peculiar interlocking in pictorial deixis bringing forth pictorial agency is irreducible to conscious, intentional actions. However, it can be explained to a relevant degree by the constraints of its becoming. When Peirce proposed a continuum of sign processes (semiosis) ranging from natural to highly formal, abstract, and conventional signs, he tried to focus this problem. Cassirer on the other hand puts full emphasis on the new order and validity of higher symbolic functions, but without negating the biological constraints and the ongoing relation to the affective basis. What he describes thus appears like the primal scene of mannerism: the incessant oscillation between nature and picture. Without habituation and symbolic order our perception would just be overwhelmed by stimuli. Yet, without this giant flow there would be no symbolic function at all and it is very unlikely that we ever find a clear cut border between life and sign empirically.64

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Thus, Cassirer’s claim that naturalized explanations of symbolic forms are limited is confirmed. On Cassirer’s use of empirical (especially psycho- and neuropathological) material see Sascha Freyberg, Symbolprozess als Metabasis. Cassirers Kritik des Symbolbewußtseins, MPIWG Preprint Series (forthcoming). Dewey clearly saw this problem. When he emphasizes the immediacy of aesthetic 63 experience, he furthermore states that every mediation needs a kind of sensed or felt immediacy (John Dewey, Art as Experience, New York 2005 [1934], pp. 123– 124). Goldstein speaks in the same sense of the inextricable relation of somatic and men64 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� tal processes. See Goldstein: The Organism (as fn. 44), pp. 263f.

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Philosophical Iconology following Peirce and Cassirer tries to concentrate on concrete phenomena and does not try to give a general answer to the problem of anthropological difference and naturalism. Nevertheless, it builds on the general semeiotical models of Peirce and Cassirer (especially drawing on Peirce’s iconicity and Cassirer’s concept of “symbolic pregnancy” and “symbolic values”). Philosophical Iconology treats these models as research hypotheses. The applied semeiotic is not identical to semiotics as it is sometimes understood. It includes the presentational symbolisms, which are broader than the discursive symbolisms of language and communication. Peirce’s conception of semeiotic followed the medical model of symptomatology in trying to already see the phenomenological as semiotic. In this paper only a very short moment was described. In this moment however a deliberately unavailable process of world disclosure qua picturality could be shown. The critical point is that what is involved are neither fully conscious actions on the part of the beholder nor “intentional” actions on the part of the picture in the sense of its being a “subject.” Rather, there are specific emerging phenomena in the mode of pictorial deixis. As has been shown, the reception-bound picture-active phenomena can be related to increased animatedness, the classical attribute of aesthetic encounter. Picture perception is a parasitic process of the incessant organismic activation dynamics, which in the face of pictures get decoupled from the stream of life-world routines. The picture thus comes to direct the stream of encounter in a way that differs from the lifeworld stimulus. Since the different operational and phenomenal features belonging to the activation process occur independently of our own intentions and bare of dramatic outer events that call for action, they often invited supra-natural interpretations. Without downplaying the intrinsic connection between form and content, it is important to see that the picture-active phenomena as intensified by form-giving are connected to the medium and not per se to a depicted content. The picture becomes the place where this process happens, thus establishing a field of interaction. One of the background assumptions of the critics of Bildakt is that if we want to speak of pictorial agency, we have to conceptualize the interaction in symmetrical terms. Thus, they understand it as if intentions or subjects were decisive. This, however, is not necessary. On the contrary, asymmetry is the basic feature of organisms and of interaction and it is unlikely that one asymmetry will be fully balanced by another.65 Thus, one can take context, formal

65

Asymmetry goes down to thermodynamics and further, allowing to call organisms metastable systems. Goldstein speaks of the organism moving from “catastrophe” to “catastrophe”. In this sense “disease” is just a manifestation of a change of state between organism and its environment. The organism cannot simply return

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features and intentional content serious without giving up the hypothesis that a picture will have a certain impact. Furthermore, asymmetry is the whole point of Warburg’s image concept, as Edgar Wind clearly pointed out. Like Warburg said: Du lebst und tust mir nichts.66 Images or pictures are conceived in dimensions spanning between empathy and distance, magic and logic, euphoria and horror. Although we may know that a picture is only an object, it nevertheless can strike us without declaration of consent whatsoever. If it is true that the perception of expression is primary to the perception of things, pictures hold a latent potency, which has to be ignored in everyday perception. This is no reason to dismiss but rather a good reason to intensify the research on the problem of pictorial agency. The idea of a Philosophical Iconology may help to integrate the different levels and issues at stake.67

.

66

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to the preceding state, but has to adapt to the conditions that caused the new state, thus always changing. English: “You live and don’t harm me,” Warburg’s motto of his fragments on the psychology of art. His research approach on cultural memory via visual artifacts seems to be confirmed also by the so-called “picture superiority effect” in cognitive and neuroscience. This paper developed out of a talk given by Sascha Freyberg at the Warburg Institute on January 25th, 2013. We would like to thank Dr. Hans Kolbe (Hannover/ Cuxhaven) for useful hints and helpful remarks on an early draft of the paper.

Pablo Schneider

PICT URE ACT METHOD The Execution of Charles I in 1649 as a Picture Act

1. Introduction – Methodological Ref lections The execution of Charles I, King of England, was one of the most impressive media events of the 17th century, one may even say of early modern times in general. The report of this event served the variety of public opinions as much as it shaped them. The following reflections will describe the different strategies of its visualization in a methodological connection to the theory of picture act. In 1642 William Dobson painted a portrait of Charles I (Fig. 1).1 The king is shown looking out of the picture and straight into the eyes of the beholder. The facial expression seems to be determined by a high level of emotional and self-control. Details like the simple armor, the collar, and the white color of the fabric never tend to detract attention from the face. What motivated its specific shape is difficult to fathom. The eyes are halfway between open and closed; the lips are slightly pressed, not too much and not too little. The face is entirely balanced – a central aspect of representation and of sovereignty.2 The king rules without any visible force, and thus complies with the natural state of good governance. Hence it does not suffice to identify the details. They are absolutely important, but they are associated with the actions of viewing and describing. The early modern concept of representation was conceived as a combination of visible and symbolic elements within a picture that were addressed to the eye, as suggested, for example, by the depiction of Charles as facing and looking at the beholder. This observation will become relevant again later in developing and describing some aspects of the picture act as a method.

1 2

Cf. Jane Roberts: The King’s Head. Charles I – King and Martyr, London 1999. On the concept of representation see Carlo Ginzburg: Repräsentation – das Wort, die Vorstellung, der Gegenstand, in: Freibeuter 53 (1992), pp. 3–23.

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Fig. 1  William Dobson: Charles I, 1642, oil on canvas, private collection.

First of all, from a methodological point of view, it is possible to analyse this picture with a focus on aspects of political iconography.3 The king, his sovereignty and the chronological events are part of an art-historical method that analyzes aspects of visualization in a political context. The aim of political iconography is to identify the objects in a picture that were of importance for a political process. This could be, for example, the collar or the armor and their symbolic meaning, though not so much the facial expression. The picture act method, in contrast, does not concentrate so much on the mentioned details, nor on recognizing the theme.4 For this method, it is more important to describe the effects of the observation in relation to the historical situation and the power of the image regarding the specific historical conditions.5 What does this exactly mean in the described case and with an eye to methodological questions? Some elements of the picture act are: first, the identification of given facial expressions and, second, the description of something that is – in a productive way – difficult to grasp with words.6 Moreover, the picture act is founded in a third point, 3

On the term “political iconography” see Martin Warnke: Politische Ikonographie, in: Andreas Beyer (ed.): Die Lesbarkeit der Kunst. Zur Geistes-Gegenwart der Ikonologie, Berlin 1992, pp. 23–28. 4 For the concept of the picture act theory see Horst Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007, Berlin 2010. 5 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� For the methodological background see Hans Belting: Bild und Kult. Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst, München 1990 and the contributions in Diarmuid Costello/Dominic Willsdon (eds.): The Life and Death of Image. Ethics and Aesthetics, London 2008. 6 On the aspect of self-control in early modern time see Norbert Elias: Die höfische Gesellschaft, Frankfurt/M. 1969 (The Court Society, Dublin 2006).

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Fig. 2  Anthony van Dyck: Triple portrait of Charles I, 1635, oil on canvas, London, The Royal Collection, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

namely, the fact that sovereignty is not itself depicted in the portrait. It can, however, be actualized in the process of observation and should be understood strictly as a historical phenomenon. Today, for instance, the echoes of the governance and representation of Charles I in the portrait by Dobson would only be read as self-awareness. In effect, this example shows that the method of the picture act necessarily refers to a historical context. Representation was an integral part of visual experience and Anthony van Dyck’s Triple Portrait (Fig. 2) from 1635 is another reflection of this fact.7 The execution of Charles I in 1649 formulates a paradigmatic case study for the picture act and its method. A long quarrel about political priority and the substance of God-given sovereignty had ignited the Civil War. The king was charged with high treason, found guilty, and condemned to death. The execution took place on January 30th, 1649. Van Dyck’s picture from 1635 was made for Gianlorenzo Bernini, to provide him with a portrait from which to make a

7 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ See Hans Vlieghe (ed.): Van Dyck 1599–1999. Conjectures and Refutations, Turnhout 2001.

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Fig. 3  Anonymous: Historiaels verhael, Van de Geboorte, Leven en Sterven, van... Carolvs Stvarts, Coningh van Engelandt, Schotlandt, en Yerlandt, Dutch broadside, 1649, engraving, London, British Museum.

marble bust of the king.8 Bernini made this sculpture and sent the work to London in the summer of 1637. Unfortunately, the bust disappeared in the fire that destroyed the palace of Whitehall in 1698. What is significant is that the portrait made by van Dyck substituted Charles I as a sitter. As Bernini pointed out later, he never attempted to make a copy of the face. Instead, his aim was to visualize the idea of a person, in this case a ruler, as the sculptor pointed out when he made the bust portrait of the French king Louis XIV in 1665.9 This assumes that the picture as an object and the political person himself could be understood to be equivalent.10 The sovereign was immediate to God in his person and in his representational objects. The political concept of absolutism did not construct an arbitrary monarch. Much to the contrary, the ruler was a sovereign only if he could decide absolutely independently. This was a theoretical but basic assump  8   9

10

Gudrun Raatschen: Plaster Casts of Bernini’s Bust of Charles I, in: Burlington Magazine 1125 (1996), pp. 813–816. See Anthony Blunt (ed.): Paul Fréart de Chantelou. Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini’s Visit to France, Princeton 1985; Pablo Schneider: Charles Le Brun versus Ginalorenzo Bernini – Künstlerische Imagination zwischen Lehrbarkeit und Unlehrbarkeit, in: Pablo Schneider/Philipp Zitzlsperger (eds.): Bernini in Paris. Das Tagebuch des Paul Fréart de Chantelou über den Aufenthalt Gianlorenzo Berninis am Hof Ludwigs XIV., Berlin 2006, pp. 415–433. See Ernst Kantorowicz: The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Mediaeval Political Theory, Princeton 1957.

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Fig. 4  Anonymous: Historiaels verhael, Van de Geboorte, Leven en Sterven, van... Carolvs Stvarts, Coningh van Engelandt, Schotlandt, en Yerlandt, Dutch broadside, 1649, engraving, London, British Museum.

tion in the conception and interpretation of kingship in the 17th century. Also, this concept marked not only a way of thinking but also a way of seeing. The facial expression in the portraits of Charles I by Dobson and van Dyck refers to the political concept of his immediacy to God and the independence of the ruler. Only if this was fulfilled could the monarch be considered sovereign. This comes from the powerful theory by Jean Bodin which was published in 1576 in the Six Livres de la République.11 But what happened in January 1649? Charles was beheaded on the 30th. The execution took place in the center of London in front of Banqueting House.12 The wide street provided sufficient space for a large number of witnesses. Not only did they watch as the death sentence was carried out but they were also witness to the public’s power to dispose of a ruler. A widespread Dutch copperplate engraving (Fig. 3) gives an account of the execution. It was printed and sold in three versions immediately after the event in 1649. The broadsides depict the

11 12

First English translation in 1606 by Richard Knolles. For the circumstances of Charles I execution see Sean Kelsey: The Death of Charles I, in: Historical Journal 4 (2002), pp. 727–754; Pablo Schneider: Political Iconography and the Picture Act. The Execution of Charles I in 1649, in: Udo Hebel/Christoph Wagner (eds.): Pictorial Cultures and Political Iconographies. Approaches, Perspectives, Case Studies from Europe and America, Berlin/New York 2011, pp. 63–83.

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site where the execution took place. Masses of people fill the area in the immediate vicinity of the scaffold as well as the windows, balustrade, and roof of Banqueting House. Most people in the crowd – men, women, and several youths – direct their attention toward the event. Only a single woman on the left side of the print and an old man further to the right are seemingly overwhelmed by what they are witnessing: while she seems to have fainted, he turns away from the scene and covers his eyes with his hand.13 On the stage, the king has been beheaded. The executioners present the head of the former king to the masses gathered around them. The masses, in return, greet the decapitated head in an appropriate manner and pay the executed ruler their last respects. In the center of the scene, the king’s soul flies to heaven – a tiny human figure with its hand folded in prayer, greeted by two angels in the clouds. The several versions of the prints are identical but for one significant difference. One variant (Fig. 4) adds an element to increase the visual impact of the extraordinary execution: Fountains of blood gush out of the body and head of the king, underscoring the drama of the situation. This alteration adds to the narrative scope of the print. The circumstance of the beheading is foregrounded, whereas the relevance of the individual, Charles I, diminishes. While one print records what happened, the other appeals to the emotions of the beholders, giving more room to feelings such as revulsion and craving for sensation. The event is the single motive for the picture, and the king serves that role. In effect, the specific political dimension inherent in the alteration of the representation acquires only secondary importance. The gushing fountains of blood significantly spotlight Charles I’s subordination. They evidence his legal position as a convicted man and negate his status as monarch. The judgment and the implementation of the execution not only ignored his divine right but actually nullified it. Charles I was part of proceedings that took away his sovereign status. Bodin had defined the condition of early modern rulers as being answerable only to God. This does not mean that they were granted infinite power. Instead, it defines a monarch’s independence and self-determination as a criterion for ruling. Both print versions deny this, allowing a unique, additional event to first arise in the image: The pictures do not primarily document the death of a king but the dissolution of his representative status. The images do not just show something, but rather perform the loss of sovereignty. The atrocity of the deed

13

For emotional reactions as forms of social distinction see Herman Roodenburg: “Beweeglijkheid” Embodied. On the Corporeal and Sensory Dimensions of a Famous Emotion Term, in: Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 60 (2010), pp. 307–318; id.: The Eloquence of the Body. Perspectives on Gesture in the Dutch Republic, Zwolle 2004.

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conveyed by the image is underscored when we look at a further broadside. In the very counter-strategy we find a profound contemporary understanding of the concept of sovereignty that is established in the picture and in the body.

2. The Counter-Image – Picture Act So far, we have seen two modes of pictorial presentation: the portrait of the king that has a representational quality and the engraving that does more than objectify the execution in a narrative way by defining the sovereign as a monarch who has become a political person and an object of a procedure. A second copperplate engraving was likewise published after the event, early in 1649, and inscribed with the title England’s Royal Pattern or the Execution of King Charles ye 1st Jany 30 (Fig. 5). The scaffold is now shifted slightly to the left, covered completely with black cloth and towering over the heads of the crowd of onlookers. The heavy dark railings seem like a reasonable addition because they emphasize the structure’s apparent height. But their functional purpose is mainly to

Fig. 5  Anonymous: Englands Royal Pattern or the Execution of King Charles ye 1st Jany 30, 1649, engraving, London, British Museum.

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Fig. 6  Anthony van Dyck: The Crucifixion, 1629, oil on canvas, Ghent, St Michielskerk.

heighten the visual impact on the beholder. In fact, they frame the event, setting it off very distinctly. This effect is underlined by one further detail: The windows of Banqueting House in this portrayal are depicted as black, without any spectators looking out of them. Thus, on the whole, nothing detracts attention from the pivotal scene, not even the crowd of witnesses. In keeping with this, the foreground is filled with uniform lines of soldiers mounted on horses. London’s residents can be espied in the background, to the left and right of the scaffold. They are without exception middle-aged men who are gaping with astonishment over the event they are witnessing. The stage is divided into three independent zones. In the one on the left, a group of six men are gazing at the center. In the background, one man has

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Fig. 7  Anthony van Dyck: The Lamentation, 1628, oil on canvas, Antwerpen, Koninskijk Museum voor Schone Kunst.

clasped his hands in a gesture of mourning. A scribe kneels in front of him with a quill and paper, his eyes also fixed on the middle part of the stage. The figure of the judge is standing close to him, holding a document in his right hand while he points with his left to the key figure. On the right, a group of two executioners and an assistant completes the constellation of the situation immediately before the king is beheaded. Charles I stands in the middle of the construction, portrayed as extremely lively and vital. One of the windows serves as a backdrop to the figure of the king, apparently framing him. This motive is reminiscent of an altarpiece, a fact which points to the category of iconographic connotations, which is also relevant to the picture act method.

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Fig. 8  Anthony van Dyck: The Stoning of St. Stephanus, 1622, oil on canvas, Tatton Park, Egerton.

With an erect posture, the condemned king bends his upper body slightly as he stands with his toes pointing outwards in front of the crowd. His head is turned to the right as he gazes upwards into an undetermined distance – a gaze reserved to sovereigns and saints. And this bears another connotation: The gesture he makes with his arms is especially remarkable, as he is stretching them out to either side with his palms turned upwards. We are easily tempted to interpret this gesture as the embodiment of je ne sais quoi.14 Such a motif was, 14

See Richard Scholar: The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe. Encounters with a Certain Something, Oxford 2005.

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Fig. 9  Anthony van Dyck: The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1631, oil on canvas, Dendermonde, Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk.

however, first developed and elaborated towards the close of the seventeenth and in the course of the eighteenth century. The way in which the English king is shown here is as remarkable as it is distressing. His person manages to attract our attention already by his mere corporeal presence. In contrast to the broadsheets scrutinized earlier, Charles I is shown here in action and full of dynamism, and as an agent over his fate. The impact he has on others can be observed among the people in the monarch’s immediate vicinity. They are completely captivated by his behavior and conform their own to his. The figure of Charles I is undoubtedly the main figure of the picture. Not only due to his gesture but also compositionally because he stands exactly above the central point of the

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scene. The picture is well thought out and not satirical. But why was Charles I presented in such a unique posture? My proposal is to understand his gesture as a part of iconographic connotations, which were a fundamental part of the methodological aspects of the picture act. The position of his hands and arms are the leading motive. The depiction of palms that are turned upwards belongs primarily to the iconography of saints and martyrs. There are several examples in the oeuvre of van Dyck which show this specific gesture, among them The crucifixion of 1629 and The Lamentation of 1628 (Fig. 6 & 7). Mary is shown with outstretched open palms, grieving over her dead son. In early modern times it was absolutely unthinkable to interpret her behavior as anything but positive – and her whole posture was contributed to this understanding. Also in the 1622 version of The Stoning of St. Stephanus and in The adoration of the Shepherds of 1631 does van Dyck use this gesture (Fig. 8 & 9). These details provide first evidence of a positive dependence of the representation of Charles I on these gestural forerunners. And the strong echo of this motive strengthens this assumption. An engraving from the year 1786, made for Raymond’s History of England, showing the meeting of the British King Vortigern, a historical figure of the 5th century, with the two Saxon Chiefs Hengist and Horsa, presents the same gesture (Fig. 10). With this in mind, iconography becomes something different. The knowledge about the pictorial connotation was a challenge for the early modern beholder. A copperplate engraving by Georg Pencz (Fig. 11) dating from the second half of the sixteenth century substantiates such a point of reference. The sheet displays a female figure sitting on a stone bench in a clearly structured room.15 In the background of the interior scene, a closed book is lying on a table. Slightly further to the foreground a Cupid is reading in another book. The female key figure of the composition gazes at him with a kind expression. However, her gaze simultaneously seems to be directed inwards, underscoring a selfreflective attitude as one of her personal characteristics. Her gown is fastened by a belt around her waist and she is wearing a laurel crown in her hair. These details and the clear-cut architectural structure place the scene in a humanistic and antique setting without determining an exact site or historical period. Her pose is significant. She slightly bends her arms at her sides, while her palms are turned upwards, the left hand more than the right. Consequently, her gesture can be compared to that of Charles I, and her mood is also not unlike the king’s immediately before his execution. The corporeal language in both cases is subdued

15

See Gottfried Boehm: Der Topos des Anfangs. Geometrie und Rhetorik in der Malerei der Renaissance, in: Ulrich Pfisterer/Max Seidel (eds.): Visuelle Topoi. Erfindung und tradiertes Wissen in den Künsten der italienischen Renaissance, München 2003, pp. 48–59.

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Fig. 10  Raymond’s History of England, 1786, engraving, London, British Museum.

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Fig. 11  After Georg Pencz: Rhetorica, about 1541–1600, engraving, London, British Museum.

and nevertheless animated. It articulates forms of action that are related much more to intellect and argument than to aggressive measures, such as taking to arms. In an open window in the background underneath the monogram of the artist, the title of the personification is found: Rhetorica.16 The affinity between the personification and the key figure in the execution scene is obvious.17 The three forms of connotation – Saints and Martyrs, the gesture of peace, and the gesture of rhetoric – converge in the bodily composition of Charles I. They could be seen as characteristics of the political person, though not of the indi16

17

For the significants of rhetoric see Paul Oskar Kristeller: Studien zur Geschichte der Rhetorik und zum Begriff des Menschen in der Renaissance, Göttingen 1981; Volker Kapp (ed.): Die Sprache der Zeichen und Bilder. Rhetorik und nonverbale Kommunikation in der frühen Neuzeit, Marburg 1990. On the notion of the rhetorical figure and its relevance in early modern times see Erich Auerbach: Figura, in: Archivum Romanicum 22 (1938), pp. 436–489.

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vidual person. On the scaffold stands the representative of the British kingdom or the state. According to the logic of the 17th century, only the self-determined king could be called sovereign and this was the cornerstone of Jean Bodin’s political theory: “On the other hand it is the distinguishing mark of the sovereign that he cannot in any way be subject to the commands of another, for it is he who makes law for the subject, abrogates law already made, and amends obsolete law. No one who is subject either to the law or to some other person can do this.”18 And this is exactly how Charles I acts. The text below the scene reports: “He [Charles I] made a suitable speech and meekly submitted his neck to the block and upon giving the Executioner the sign his head was severed from his body at one blow.” But this was only added to underline the pictorial expression.

3. Connotations and A llusions The iconographic connotations or iconographic allusions lead to the picture act method. The studies that follow this method are interested in the interaction between the different connotative references and the beholder. The representation becomes more challenging this way, as the viewer is summoned to analyze the symbolic information and it’s historical, political, and moral relevance. It is the described complexity of the king’s gesture which engenders the picture act. The active element in this example is the allusion made by the motive, which is closely related to Aby Warburg’s idea of the Pathosformel with its inherent energy. Significant for the connection to the picture act, as understood in the described context, are especially two elements: First, the possibility for the beholder to immediately understand the motifs of the Pathosformel as expressive gestures and movements of objects or bodies as motivated by natural causes. And second, the capacity of the Pathosformel to convey content from a cultural, political, and sociological sphere. In effect, the Pathosformel is not a particular set of motifs.19 It is rather the incorporation of significant motifs in a context of possible interpretations. So another active element lies in the manifold possibilities of interpretation, arising from an act of deliberation. The beholder might be familiar with the references and hence must make a judgment regarding their substantial meaning. The considerations concerning the artwork’s appeal to the moral judgment of the beholder are inspired by Michael Baxandall’s reflections on the high

18 19

Jean Bodin: Six Books of the Commonwealth, Oxford 1955, bk. 1, ch. 8, p. 28. See Matthew Rampley: The Rembrance of Things Past. On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin, Wiesbaden 2000.

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complexity of pictorial details.20 The relevance of the form is assisted by the knowledge of the contemporary beholder. He would know, for example, that Charles I was beheaded in 1649 and thus would be able to integrate the historical with the visual information. The application of the method was also inspired by Edgar Wind’s descriptions of the modes of knowing and their influence on the understanding of symbols and pictures.21 It is significant to note that the picture act as a method integrates the self-responsibility of the beholder into the process of seeing. The iconographic connotation is a fundamental element of this structure because it contributes to shaping the content. With this methodological paradigm it becomes possible to analyze the complex structure of the picture, the pictorial combinations and the interaction with the viewer. With this focus the picture act as method draws together the aspect of vitality as found in the structure of a picture’s motifs and the modes of understanding on the part of the beholder. The description of the various iconographical details is one step in the analysis. The methodological approach of the picture act tries to address the dynamic interaction of iconography and the visual memory of the audience.22 This involves the aspect of pictorial details that were immediately understandable to the viewer, even without comprehensive knowledge. The narration of the compositional structure is also part of this picture-act-focused configuration.23 So it is necessary to consider the picture act from two perspectives: as a configuration within the picture as an object and as a vital connection between picture and viewer. The complexity of the pictorial representation of Charles I perfectly lends itself as an example for demonstrating aspects of the picture act method. By virtue of placing the analytical focus on the interaction between object and beholder, it could be possible to describe the self-awareness of both, the picture and the individual.

20 21 22 23

See Michael Baxandall: Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, Oxford 1972. See Edgar Wind: Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, London 1958 and Wolfgang Iser: Emergenz, Konstanz 2013. This reflections in connection to Maurice Halbwachs: Das Gedächtnis und seine sozialen Bedingungen, Frankfurt/M. 1985. This methodological thoughts were influenced by Hanna Deinhard: Bedeutung und Ausdruck. Zur Soziologie der Malerei, Neuwied 1967.

II . TR ADITION S

Franz Engel

THOUGH THIS BE M ADNESS: EDGAR W IND A ND THE WARBURG TR ADITION

1. In 1984, replying to a review of a compilation of writings entitled The Eloquence of Symbols. Studies in Humanist Art by the then late philosopher and art historian Edgar Wind, the former director of the Warburg Institute in London, Ernst H. Gombrich, gave the following statement: SIR: Now that the editors of Edgar Wind’s writings […] have lifted the anonymity of his review […] of my biography of Aby Warburg (London, 1970), I should like to make known the letter he wrote to me in response to my sending him an offprint of the memorial lecture I had given at Hamburg University on the centenary of Warburg’s birth […]: My dear Gombrich, Thank you very much for your kindness in sending me your beautiful speech on Warburg. It is a most moving document, true and close to the original, and at the same time distinguished by a feeling of distance. Warburg would have been particularly pleased that, without diminish­ ing in the least the pathos of his history, you succeeded in saving him and yourself by a sense of humour. […] [T]he Kreuzlingen episode is handled with exemplary clarity and lightness of touch. What you say about the Warburg archive makes me hope that one day you will give us a comprehensive history, including the relationship of Warburg to Binswanger, which you alone would be able to elucidate. […] [I]n reading the lecture one has the feeling that you swam very safely, and that alone is a great achievement and a cause for warm congratulations. With best wishes and kindest regards, Yours, Edgar Wind

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It so happens that an English version of my centenary lecture is about to be published […]. Anyone interested will therefore be able to judge wheth­ er my interpretation of Warburg’s life and thought, an interpretation so highly praised by Wind, differs from the one in the book he found it his duty to drag through the mud.1 Gombrich’s reply referred both in style and content to one of the harshest reviews a member of the Warburg circle would ever write against another member of the same circle. Wind had slated Gombrich’s still often cited biography of Aby Warburg. It has been told that by reading the anonymously published review, Gombrich immediately knew who had written it, and, as Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann recalls, “remarked in passing that he was surprised it had not been even nastier.”2 Gombrich’s reply did not remain unanswered. It provoked reactions by the editor of Wind’s writings, Jaynie Anderson, as well as by the widow, Margaret Wind.3 Finally, one of the best scholars of Wind’s work, Bernard Buschendorf, tried to lift the discussion onto a more systematic level. He saw the root of the problem in whether Warburg should be seen as an adherent of associationism, as developed by Johann Friedrich Herbart, or, as Wind states it in his review and with which Buschendorf would agree, as a follower of the theory of empathy, as brought forward by Robert Vischer.4 Buschendorf’s concern remained unanswered. However, this case shows clearly that there are many unsolved 1



2 3 4

Letter in response to Charles Hope: Naming the Graces, a Review of Kenneth Clark’s “Art of Humanism” and Edgar Wind’s “Eloquence of Symbols,” in: London Review of Books 6/6 (5 April 1984), pp. 13f., at: www.lrb.co.uk/v06/n05/charleshope/naming-the-graces (5 March 2014); Gombrich’s memorial lecture was published as: Ernst H. Gombrich: The Ambivalence of the Classical Tradition. The Cultural Psychology of Aby Warburg (1866–1929), in: id.: Tributes. Interpreters of Our Cultural Tradition, Oxford 1984, pp. 117–139; Wind’s review of Gombrich’s Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography, London 1970, was anonymously published as: Unfinished Business. Aby Warburg and his Work, in: The Times Literary Supplement (25 June 1971), pp. 735f.; reprinted and supplemented with notes as Appendix: On a Recent Biography of Warburg, in: Edgar Wind: The Eloquence of Symbols. Studies in Humanist Art, ed. by Jaynie Anderson, revised ed., Oxford 1993 (first ed. 1984), pp. 106–113. As to the conception of this paper, I owe much to Sascha Freyberg. Many thanks also to Katharina Lee Chichester and Elizabeth Sears for their thoughtful insights and hints. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann: Speaking of Lilliput? Recollections on the Warburg Institute in the Early 1970s, in: Common Knowledge 18/1 (2012), pp. 160–173, p. 161. Letters in: The Times Literary Supplement 6/6 (5 April 1984) and 6/7 (19 April 1984), at: www.lrb.co.uk/v06/n05/charles-hope/naming-the-graces (5 March 2014). Letter, in: The Times Literary Supplement 6/21 (15 November 1984), at: www.lrb. co.uk/v06/n05/charles-hope/naming-the-graces (5 March 2014).

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questions concerning the relationship of Wind not only to Gombrich but also, as will be shown in the following, to the Warburg tradition as a whole. The term “Warburg tradition” is not at all a fixed term with a clear significance. It firstly refers to the members of a circle that were either personally or in another way acquainted with Aby Warburg and his library. But ever since Carlo Ginzburg, in 1966, wrote his ground-breaking essay From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method,5 at least two systematic levels have to be taken into consideration: firstly, the particular interpretation of Aby Warburg’s work as the point of departure for this tradition, and, secondly, the adoption or even the overcoming of Warburgian methods by the individual scholars. Beyond this, a third major level in analyzing the Warburg tradition has to be taken into account, which was disregarded by Ginzburg: it concerns the role the Warburg Institute played as an institution not only with respect to its scholarly but also to its political identity. When in 1933 the former Kulturwissenschaft­ liche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW) was transferred from Hamburg to London, almost nobody in the United Kingdom knew what the re-named Warburg Institute stood for, also because non of Warburg’s writings had been translated into English.6 Thus, every quarrel about the right interpretation of Warburg’s work and methodology must have, directly or indirectly, influenced the identity of the Warburg Institute. The story told here is about the way Edgar Wind would have liked the Warburg Institute to be seen and how it happened that his vision was only partially fulfilled.

5

6

Carlo Ginzburg: From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method, in: Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. by John and Anne C. Tedeschi, Baltimore/London 1989, pp. 17–59, notes 170–194; originally published as: Da A. Warburg a E. H. Gombrich (note su un problema di metodo), in: Studi medievali 3. ser. 7/2 (1966), pp. 1015–1065; at the same time William Heckscher: The Genesis of Iconologiy, in: Theorien und Probleme 3 (1967), pp. 239–262; and Erik Forssman: Ikonologie und allgemeine Kunstgeschichte, in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 11 (1966), pp. 132–169, were about the first to refocus on Warburg’s themes and methods. Major part of his writings were translated only by 1999: Aby Warburg: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of European Renaissance, Los Angeles 1999; before that, the only writing available in English was: Aby M. Warburg: A Lecture on Serpent Ritual, in: Journal of the Warburg Institute 2/4 (1939), pp. 277–292. In 1929, E. Wind’s first wife, Ruth, translated Warburg’s essay on Luther “Prophecy of Pagan Antiquity in Word and Image in Luther’s Times”, but it was never published; Warburg Institute Archive [WIA], GC, E. Wind to A. Warburg, 30 April 1929; for further sources see Dorothea McEwan: “Wanderstrassen der Kultur.” Die Aby Warburg–Fritz Saxl Korrespondenz 1920 bis 1929, Munich/Hamburg 2004 (Kleine Schriften des Warburg Institute London und des Warburg Archivs im Warburg Haus Hamburg, Heft 2), pp. 102, 116.

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2. Regarding the relationship between Wind and the Warburg tradition it is crucial that Wind saw himself as the crown prince in the intellectual succession to Warburg. Wind met Warburg in Hamburg in 1927 after Wind’s first stay in the United States 1924–1927. Already in 1922 he had written his dissertation at the newly founded University of Hamburg under the supervision of the art historian Erwin Panofsky, whose first doctoral candidate he was, and the philosopher Ernst Cassirer. During this time, he came in touch with the KBW. Warburg, however, was at the same time in the sanatorium in Kreuzlingen. With the end of the Great War 1918, his already instable mental condition completely collapsed. An acute psychosis forced him to retire for a long period and to put himself under the cure of the famous psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger. He was released only in 1924, at a time when Wind was already heading for America.7 There are no sources that clarify what impression the KBW had made upon the doctoral candidate Wind, who must have known that the founder and actual director of the library at which he was studying was far away in Kreuzlingen, and at that time without any assurance of ever coming home cured. It is likely that Wind’s supervisor Ernst Cassirer, who from April 10th to 11th, 1924, was one of the first of the KBW circle to visit Warburg in Kreuzlingen, had a major influence on the first picture Wind got of Warburg.8 Concerning the first meeting between Wind and Warburg, the latter writes in the KBW’s diary that he, Wind and Wind’s wife Ruth spoke about “astrological things” and that he, Warburg, was very impressed by Wind’s keen apprehension skills: “Mr Wind is a thinking type of the best sort.”9 This characterization fits well with Wind’s theoretical accomplishments up to the year 1927. His doctoral thesis on The Subject of Aesthetics and of Science of Art: A Contribution to the Methodology of Art History was highly appreciated by Cassirer and Panofsky.10 In it, Wind describes the artwork as the concrete visual   7

  8

  9

10

Warburg’s medical history can be retraced in Ludwig Binswanger and Aby Moritz Warburg: Die unendliche Heilung. Aby Warburgs Krankengeschichte, ed. by Chantal Marazia/Davide Stimilli, Zurich/Berlin 2007. See Wind: On a Recent Biography of Warburg (as fn. 1), p. 110; see also Ernst Cassirer’s address to the memory of Warburg: Nachruf auf Aby M. Warburg (1929), in: id.: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 17: Aufsätze und kleine Schriften 1927–1931, ed. by Birgit Recki, Hamburg 2004, pp. 374–386. Aby M. Warburg/Gertrud Bing/Fritz Saxl: Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg, ed. by Karen Michels/Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Berlin 2001, p. 104: [Warburg:] “Herr Wind ist eine Denktype bester Sorte.” Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. Wind’s dissertation has only recently been published at full length: Edgar Wind: Ästhetischer und kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand: Ein Beitrag zur Methodo­

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outcome of a former tension of conflicting powers within the mind: “In the mind, the problem has to be set, the solution of which can only be found in the visual.”11 The artwork is therefore understood as the solution of an artistic problem that is conceptually dependent. The art historian’s task is to reveal that particular artistic problem whose solution is embodied in the resulting work of art. Wind’s dissertation is very close to Panofsky’s early studies on the methodology of art history, in which he tries to identify the work of art as an embodiment of artistic problems that can only be approached via transcendental analysis.12 Wind’s stay in the USA from 1924 to 1927 had such a strong effect on his thinking that he modified his notion of the concept of the concreteness of the artwork. As a result, the former Kantian influences in his aesthetics turned into the opposite – a harsh critique of Kantian thought. This can be traced back to his acquaintance with the major figures of American pragmatism, such as John Dewey, Clarence Irving Lewis, and Sidney Hook, and especially with Morris Cohen who directed Wind’s attention to the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce.13 After he had published parts of his dissertation in English,14 he was asked to write an overview of the current state of German philosophy.15 Around this time, the idea was born to write an anti-Kantian book. He presented his ideas at a conference at Harvard University.16

11

12

13

14 15 16

logie der Kunstgeschichte, ed. by Pablo Schneider, Hamburg 2011 (Fundus-Bücher 192); initially, only an abstract and an extended chapter were published in Germany: Edgar Wind: Ästhetischer und kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand: Ein Beitrag zur Methodologie der Kunstgeschichte, Auszug aus der Inaugural-Dissertation, Hamburg 1924; id.: Zur Systematik der künstlerischen Probleme, in: Zeit­ schrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 18 (1925), pp. 438–486. Wind: Ästhetischer und kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand (as fn. 10), pp. 232f.: “Im Denken soll das Problem gesetzt werden, dessen Lösung nur im Anschaulichen zu finden ist.” See Erwin Panofsky: On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts for a Science of Art [1925], in: Critical Inquiry 35 (2008), pp. 43–71, esp. p. 45; for the influence Wind’s dissertation had on Panofsky see Michael Ann Holly: Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, Ithaca 1984, pp. 147ff. See John Michael Krois: Kunst und Wissenschaft in Edgar Winds Philosophie der Verkörperung, in: Horst Bredekamp et al. (eds.): Edgar Wind. Kunsthistoriker und Philosoph, Berlin 1998 (Einstein-Bücher), pp. 181–205, esp. pp. 187ff. Edgar Wind: Theory of Art versus Aesthetics, in: Philosophical Review 4 (1925), pp. 350–359. Id.: Contemporary German Philosophy, in: The Journal of Philosophy 22 (1925), pp. 477–493, 516–530. Id.: Experiment and Metaphysics, in: E. S. Brightman (ed.): Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy, Harvard University, New York 1927, pp. 217–224.

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Thus (philosophically) equipped, Wind arrived on January 22nd, 1928, at Hamburg to work as an assistant for the KBW.17 What followed were one and a half years of the most intense intellectual exchanges between Warburg and Wind.18 Beside his duties as assistant, Wind continued the philosophical project he had begun in the USA. Again under the supervision of Cassirer and Panofsky, he finished his habilitation in 1929.19 The last reference to Wind on the part of Warburg was written four days before he died: “spoke far-looking words between men with Wind.”20 It remains unclear what these “words between men” were about exactly; it is likely that they also concerned the future of the KBW. The atmosphere of confidence expressed here was adopted in a letter draft from 1954 to Jean Seznec, in which Wind retro­ spectively describes a vespertine encounter with Warburg that took place one month before the “words between men” were exchanged. It bears witness to the great hopes Warburg had in Wind. In this letter, Wind cites a sentence spoken by Warburg at this occasion through which Wind indirectly entitled himself to the true inheritance of Warburg: “‘[…] depuis que vous êtes dans cette bibliothèque, je n’ai plus peur; je sais que tout ira bien quand je serai parti.’ Il est mort un mois plus tard.”21 The question of how the KBW should position itself politically was from the beginning, i.e. already at the time when Warburg was still alive, a stumbling block between the members. While the major figures of the KBW, Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing, were of the opinion that scholarship should not act politically at all because of its neutrality claims, Warburg, on the other side, deemed the con17 18

19

20 21

See Warburg/Bing/Saxl: Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg (as fn. 9), pp. 184f. On the part of Warburg, one can get a notion of this intellectual exchange by tracing the diary notes concerning Edgar Wind in the Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaft­ lichen Bibliothek (as fn. 9), index s.v. Wind, Edgar; and of course the elaborate account of Bernhard Buschendorf: “War ein sehr tüchtiges gegenseitiges Fördern”: Edgar Wind und Aby Warburg, in: Idea. Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle 4 (1985), pp. 165–209. Published only in 1934: Edgar Wind: Das Experiment und die Metaphysik: Zur Auflösung der kosmologischen Antinomien, Tübingen 1934 (Beiträge zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte 3); re-edited by Bernhard Buschendorf, Frankfurt/M. 2000; English: Edgar Wind: Experiment and Metaphysics: Towards a Resolution of the Cosmological Antinomies, Oxford 2001. Warburg/Bing/Saxl: Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg (as fn. 9), p. 553: “mit Wind weithin blickende Männerworte geredet.” Letter draft to Jean Seznec, August 1954, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Special Collections, Edgar Wind Papers, Box I, 5, file iv; partly published in Buschendorf: “War ein sehr tüchtiges gegenseitiges Fördern” (as fn. 18), p. 183. Earlier, Warburg wrote to Saxl that he should not have the feeling that Wind is going to be his follower (WIA, GC, A. Warburg to F. Saxl, 10 August 1928 and A. Warburg to F. Saxl, 17 September 1928); see McEwan: “Wanderstraßen der Kultur” (as fn. 6), pp. 76, 79.

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scious creation of a political identity absolutely necessary. A concrete question, to begin with, was which persons and organizations should be allowed to use the library as a location to organize colloquia, conferences, etc.22 But beyond Warburg’s sympathies towards the daily political business in which the library was involved, it is Wind who deserves credit for pointing to the ethical dimension and for developing the action-theoretical implications in Warburg’s picture and symbol theory. Against Saxl and Bing, Wind claimed that scholarly and political concerns could never be separated to the extent that one excluded the other. Much to the contrary, with his pragmatist background, Wind could see clearly that Warburg thought of every historical interpretation as exerting influence on future actions.

3. Carlo Ginzburg criticized Wind’s account of Warburg as a distortion insofar as it rather contained programmatic statements of a main representative of the Warburg Library written shortly after the death of its founder than close readings of Warburg’s writings.23 Ginzburg claimed that Wind’s interpretation of Warburg introduces a too profound theoretical system that cannot be found in Warburg. In his 1971 review of the Warburg biography, Wind for his part criticized Gombrich for overemphasizing the value of Warburg’s unpublished notes and drafts while underestimating his published writings. According to Wind, Gombrich was thereby misleading the reader into a maze (in which he believed Warburg was lost out of sight) that had nothing to do with the economy and elegance of Warburg’s finished works.24 The omission of the Kreuzlingen episode, Wind continues, did not prevent Gombrich from imparting some “psychopathic

22

23

24

Charlotte Schoell-Glass/Karen Michels: Einleitung, in: Warburg/Bing/Saxl: Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg (as fn. 9), pp. IX–XXXVII, esp. pp. XXVII–XXXI; see also Ulrich Raulff: Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg einer Idee. Warburg und die Vernunft in der Republik, in: id.: Wilde Energien. Vier Versuche zu Aby Warburg, Göttingen 2003, pp. 72–116. Ginzburg: From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich (as fn. 5), pp. 22f.; in retrospect to his Warburg-essay, Wind recalls: “I tried to put Warburg’s basic ideas into a systematic order which I had learned from him in long conversations”, cited in Buschendorf: “War ein sehr tüchtiges gegenseitiges Fördern” (as fn. 18), p. 183; see ibid., p. 206, n. 79, for Buschendorf’s critique of Ginzburg’s account; ironically, Warburg once humorously called Wind his “Vordenker und Zurechtordner” (“prethinker and right-disposer”), 10 October 1929, in: Warburg/Bing/Saxl: Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg (as fn. 9), p. 546; see also Michael Diers: Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural History, in: New German Critique 65 (1995), pp. 59–74, esp. pp. 70ff. Wind: On a recent Biography of Warburg (as fn. 1), p. 107.

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ingredient that somehow sets the tone of the book,”25 and thereby actually overemphasizes Warburg’s mental illness. Wind seems to have feared that posterity could think of Warburg as a maniac. The quarrel about the intellectual heritage of Warburg can therefore be summarized as a quarrel about his madness. Or, to put it more precisely: a quarrel about the right interpretation of his madness. However, by attesting Gombrich a misunderstanding of this “demonic”26 side of Warburg, Wind himself tried to give this madness a Shakespearian turn: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” (Hamlet, II, ii, 203) But how, one must ask, can methodological sense be made out of a scholar’s madness? Certainly not by being skeptical about everything written by that scholar as potentially contaminated with “psychopathic ingredients.” Warburg’s madness should rather be thought of as a metaphor for the principle that every scholar disturbs the scientific process he is engaged in. During the Hamburg years following Warburg’s death (1929–1933), Wind systematically elaborated in a few, but all the more concise essays this implication of Warburg’s symbol and culture theory. In his book Experiment and Metaphysics, finished in 1929 but published only in 1934, Wind developed a theory of experiment by means of an elaboration of the concept of embodiment. What is meant by embodiment? According to Wind, in experiments, the laws which are to be discovered are already presupposed, that is to say, embodied in the instruments. Through the use of instruments, the experiment tests its own presuppositions. This appears circular, which it is. But, as Wind argues, the circle is not vicious but methodologically indispensable.27 Wind thus applies the hermeneutic circle to natural science. Even if it is clear what place the experimenter has within this experimental setting, at this point, Wind says little about his exact role. This was further developed in a lecture Wind gave in 1930 on the 4th congress of aesthetics in Hamburg entitled “Warburgs Begriff der Kulturwissenschaft und seine Bedeutung für die Ästhetik.”28 In his lecture, Wind claims that it was from the beginning Warburg’s intention to argue against that formalistic art historiography which postulates an immanent development of art by means of an autonomous history of form. Warburg fought against Alois Riegl on the one hand, but even more against Heinrich Wölfflin, on the other. 25 26 27 28

Ibid., p. 111. Ibid., p. 110. Wind: Experiment and Metaphysics (as fn. 19), p. 40. Edgar Wind: Warburgs Begriff der Kulturwissenschaft und seine Bedeutung für die Ästhetik, in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 25/ Beilagenheft (1931), pp. 163–179; English: Warburg’s Concept of ‘Kulturwissenschaft’ and its Meaning for Aesthetics, in: Wind: The Eloquence of Symbols (as fn. 1), pp. 21–35.

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Wölfflin’s notorious dictum that one “can as easily gain an impression of the specific form of the Gothic style from a pointed shoe as from a cathedral,”29 denies the pre-artistic functional differences arising from man’s use of different tools for distinct purposes as well as from the prospective usage of the respective artifact. These differences, however, are, according to Warburg, of constitutional character when it comes to explaining the form of an artifact. The refusal to adequately differentiate between artistic genres, as done by the protagonists of formalist art history, as well as to consider that art is made by “tool-using man”30 oversees the fact that every product of human culture is nothing but the result of an actual interactive process: “It was one of Warburg’s basic convictions that any attempt to detach the image from its relation to religion and poetry, to cult and drama, is like cutting off its lifeblood.”31 The history of form cannot be seen as something independent of those who operate (even if only reflectively) upon it. Within the reflective act of picture analysis, the art historian has a distinct place in the mnemonic process.32 Thus, Warburg would claim for art history what in quantum physics counts as the base stock of methodology: the observing scientist is never detached from the scientific process he is working on but permanently influences his results. Not enough that the art historian should be systematically involved in things he claims to be objectively true, Warburg holds that already in the “process of the formation of images”33 the human body plays a central role. For human muscles not only serve to move the body but also to produce mimic expression; they have both a physical and an expressive function: “All expression through movement of muscles is metaphorical […]. The stronger and more intense the psychological excitation released in the expression, the nearer the symbolic movement comes to the physical one. (In cases of extreme psychological 29 30

31 32

33

Ibid., p. 23, with reference to Heinrich Wölfflin: Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur, in: Kleine Schriften, ed. by Joseph Gantner, Basel 1946, pp. 44f. Ibid., p. 24; the term is borrowed from Thomas Carlyle: Sartor Resartus, I, v; see the edition with an introduction and notes by Kerry McSweeney/Peter Sabor, Oxford 2008, p. 32. Wind: Warburg’s Concept of ‘Kulturwissenschaft’ (as fn. 28), p. 25. Ibid., p. 26: “Warburg was convinced that in his own work, when he was reflecting upon the images he analysed, he was fulfilling an analogous function to that of pictorial memory when, under the compulsive urge to expression, the mind spontaneously synthesizes images, namely the recollection, or more literally, the revival of pre-existing forms. The word ΜΝΗΜΟΣΥΝΗ, which Warburg had inscribed above the entrance to his research institute, is to be understood in this double sense: as a reminder to the scholar that in interpreting the works of the past he is acting as trustee of a repository of human experience, but at the same time as a reminder that this experience is itself an object of research, that it requires us to use historical material to investigate the way in which ‘social memory’ functions.” Ibid., p. 30.

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revulsion we are also physically sick.)”34 If by means of a conscious act of reflection it is possible to tame those expressions that formerly were dependent on the body, then the process of the formation of images can be seen as the overcoming of an incipiently uncontrolled “madness” of the body. While Wind in his essay on Warburg’s concept of “Kulturwissenschaft” clarifies the constitutive role the observer plays within the scientific process, in another essay he draws from the same observation a more concrete question: what is the relevance of studying the survival of antiquity? In his “Introduction” to the first volume of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliographie zum Nachleben der Antike, which reviews every title concerned with this topic of the year 1931, Wind asks himself the difficult question of the ivory tower whether the study of the survival of the classics can be seen as relevant to the contemporary function of history.35 Wind begins with an attack against what at the time was the common notion of “Geistesgeschichte.”36 Firstly, as in the Warburg essay, he argues against the Wölfflinian art-historical method that limits itself to analyzing the purely artistic forms or, as he puts it in the English version, the “subjects as ‘things in themselves’”37 while disregarding pre-artistic factors. Secondly, Wind objects to that philosophical notion of history that would “transfer the unity of mind into its depth and thereby relinquish its expressions to an isolating treatment.”38 Instead of relying upon an inner intellectuality, cultural science should focus on the concrete products of culture. Wind denominates the “symbol” as the subject of Kulturwissenschaft. Under “sym34 35

36 37 38

Ibid. Edgar Wind: Einleitung, in: Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliographie zum Nachleben der Antike, vol 1: Die Erscheinungen des Jahres 1931, ed. by Bibliothek Warburg, Leipzig/Berlin 1934, pp. V–XVII; reprinted in: id.: Heilige Furcht und andere Schriften zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Philosophie, ed. by John Michael Krois/ Roberto Ohrt, Hamburg 2009 (Fundus-Bücher 174), pp. 321–346 (subsequently cited hereafter), p. 322; the idea to build up such a bibliography goes back to the Austrian scholar of literature Richard Newald who would propose it to Fritz Saxl; see Dorothea McEwan: Fritz Saxl – Eine Biografie: Aby Warburgs Bibliothekar und erster Direktor des Londoner Warburg Institutes, Vienna 2012, pp. 163ff.; with the move of the Warburg Library to London, the bibliographies also appeared in English: A Bibliography on the Survival of the Classics. First Volume. The Publications of 1931, ed. by The Warburg Institute, London 1934; the English version of Wind’s “Introduction” (pp. V–XII) differs considerably from the German; we know from a letter to Gombrich that Wind preferred the German version because the English version “was done under pressure and shows it”; Edgar Wind Papers (as fn. 21), Box I, 4, file iii, E. Wind to E. Gombrich, 5 June 1968. Wind: Einleitung (as fn. 35), pp. 324–327; this part was omitted in the English version. Wind: Introduction (as fn. 35), p. V. Wind: Einleitung (as fn. 35), pp. 326f.: “welche die Einheit des Geistes in seine Tiefe verlegt und dadurch seine Äußerungen einer isolierenden Behandlung preisgibt.”

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bol” Wind does not understand an object with a prefixed and conventionally codified meaning but rather a product of a historically grown process of interacting forces.39 Both the visitor of the former KBW building in Hamburg and the visitor of today’s Warburg Institute in London read the word ΜΝΗΜΟΣΥΝΗ, memory, when passing through the portal. Memory, according to Wind’s interpretation of Warburg, cannot be understood as an innocent act of a detached observation of a past event. It rather signifies a reflection on the inquiring subject that performs the act of remembrance through the power of symbols.40 The notion of mnemosyne employed here differs noticeably from the notion usually connected to Warburg, which focuses more on the function of memory as the capability of distancing. Wind was aware of the latter notion. Warburg personally gave Wind his Basic Fragments Towards a Pragmatic Study of Expression to study them closely and at the same time proposed another title which exemplifies just that notion: The Creation of Thinking Space as a Cultural Function. Essay on a Psychology of Human Orientation Based on a Universal Picture History.41 The idea that mnemosyne can also be understood as a process the symbol demands from the interpreter is emphasized in the last of Wind’s theoretical texts from the 1930s.42 Apart from the ability to distance oneself from the world through symbols, Wind focuses on another meaning-level of the human body: the intrusion of the observer. This seems to be the major point that Wind infers from Warburg’s madness, as far as this madness seemed always to have been involved in Warburg’s studies. Yet, Wind claims that this point has to be gene­ ralized:43 “The investigator intrudes into the process that he is investigating.

39 40

41

42

43

Ibid., pp. 228–233; id.: Introduction (as fn. 35), pp. VIff. Ibid., pp. VIIf.; see also Stephan Füssel: Vorwort, in: id. (ed.): Mnemosyne. Beiträge zum 50. Todestag von Aby M. Warburg, Göttingen 1979 (Gratia. Bamberger Schriften zur Renaissanceforschung, Heft 7), pp. 7–13, esp. p. 7. Warburg/Bing/Saxl: Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg (as fn. 9), p. 547: “Denkraumschöpfung als Kulturfunktion. Versuch einer Psycho­ logie der menschlichen Orientierung auf universell bildgeschichtlicher Grundlage”; see Aby M. Warburg: Frammenti sull’espressione. Grundlegende Bruchstücke zu einer pragmatischen Ausdruckskunde, ed. by Susanne Müller, Pisa 2011 (Bibliotheca 8); see Susanne Müller: Das Wasserzeichen des Gedankens, in: id.: pp. 7–20, esp. p. 10. Edgar Wind: Some Points of Contact Between History and Natural Science, in: Raymond Klibansky/Herbert James Paton (eds.): Philosophy & History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, Gloucester, MA 1975 (first ed. Oxford 1936), pp. 255– 264. For a different account, see Martin Jesinghausen-Lauster: Die Suche nach der symbolischen Form. Der Kreis um die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Baden-Baden 1985, pp. 19–26.

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This is what the supreme rule of methodology demands. In order to study physics, one must be physically affected; pure mind does not study physics. A body is needed – however much the mind may ‘interpret’ – which transmits the signals that are to be interpreted. Otherwise, there would be no contact with the surrounding world that is to be investigated.”44 Wind emphasizes that the processing or digestion of information not only happens through the apparatus but that the scholar himself becomes a receiver of signals. In this process of sign receiving and sign transmitting the scientist fulfills diverse functions. He is far from controlling everything within the research process. Much to the contrary, there can be extreme cases when he himself becomes subject to the whole process: By his intrusion into the process that is to be studied, the student himself, like every one of his tools, becomes part-object of investigation; ‘part-object’ to be taken in a twofold sense: he is, like any other organ of investigation, but a part of the whole object that is being investigated. But equally it is only a part of himself that, thus externalized into an instrument, enters into the object-world of his studies.45 If the investigator like every other phenomenon in the world can also be seen as a sign, just like the process of investigation itself is to be seen as a sign, then it is clear that the investigator, depending on the perspective from which he is seen, may fulfill one of the three Peircean sign poles: he can either be the sign, the object, or the interpretant. According to Wind, it is important to humanize the function of the interpretant: while the interpretant represents the general category of sign usage, the category of the interpreter may be part of it; at the same time, however, he carries a new category: responsibility. Thus, we find here that political implications are inherent in such seemingly harmless procedures as experimenting with physical objects or writing about historical documents. Still, the possibility of intrusion is the condition for a discovery. By actively intruding upon the process that he is investigating, the scientist will disturb the atoms the combination of which he wants to study and the historian will interrupt the sleep of a document by fishing it from an archive. What Wind wants to say here is that the whole of the research process can be fully understood only if we consider the repercussion of an individual observation as able to overcome even a worldview. Not only will our everyday actions or political decisions cause a meaningful effect in our lives but also within science and even in such seemingly

44 45

Wind: Some Points of Contact (as fn. 42), p. 258. Ibid., p. 259.

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idiosyncratic studies as the “survival of the classics” intrusion must be considered as crucial to the process of investigation: Every change of our ideas about our ancestors entails a change of our ideas about ourselves and will indirectly affect our behaviour. […] It is a puzzle where to draw the line between man and the objects of his environment. His head, we dare say, quite certainly belongs to him; without it, he would lose his “identity.” But how about his hair? And if we let him have that, how about his hat? If his hat is taken away, or its shape is altered, is not the entire form of the man altered as well? A man accustomed to walking with a stick becomes another man if this stick is taken from him. His gait changes, his gestures, possibly his whole constitu­ tion.46 The form of man – be it his bodily constitution or his idiosyncratic behavior – will bear an effect not only on the pragmatics of our everyday life but also on our scientific or art-historical thought. It was this methodological rule that Wind found in the madness of Warburg.

4. The metaphorical notion of madness understood as the systematic and inescapable intrusion of the observer into the scientific process played a major role not just in the quarrel between Wind and Gombrich but was already of great importance for Wind’s decision of 1945 to leave the Warburg Institute.47 Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, Wind was invited as a fellow to St. John’s College, Annapolis for five months. Due to the outbreak of the war, his London colleagues advised Wind to stay in the United States.48 Destiny wanted it that he should remain until 1955, the year he became professor of art history in Oxford. During the first years of the war, Wind traveled across the country to give lectures to an interested audience that had not yet been acquainted with 46 47

48

Ibid., p. 263. See Wind’s Report to Saxl 1939–1945 and his letter to Gertrud Bing, 15 June 1945, in the appendix to this text, pp. 107–115. I am indebted to Ben Thomas who kindly handed me out his unpublished lecture “An Art Historian’s Dilemma,” held at the Courtauld Institute London, 2009, which meticulously retraces the happenings between 1939–1945 according to the rich material to be found in the Edgar Wind Papers (as fn. 21), Box I, 5, files i–v; see also Elizabeth Sears: Edgar Wind on Michelangelo, in: Edgar Wind: The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo. The Sistine Ceiling, ed. by id., Oxford 2000, pp. xvii–xl, esp. pp. xxviif., ns. 48, 52, where parts of the report to Saxl are quoted. Cable from Fritz Saxl/Rudolf Wittkower/Gertrud Bing to Edgar Wind, 21 May 1940 (Edgar Wind Papers (as fn. 21), Box I, 5, file 1).

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Warburg’s themes and methods. The main purpose of these traveling years was to negotiate the transfer of the Warburg Institute to the United States for the duration of the war.49 In 1942, Wind was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago, which he gratefully accepted after the tiring years as a vagabond scholar. Soon Wind was thrown into the middle of an academic battle and found himself “surrounded by an atmosphere of martial violence.”50 The president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, had presented his plans for a radical reform of the university departments which would strengthen inter-departmental studies. He founded an Executive Committee on Social Thought, to which Wind was invited. It was soon attacked by a group of scholars lead by the philosopher Richard McKeon who were worried about the integrity of their departmental boundaries.51 In his report to Saxl, Wind made clear that he was “averse to the type of historical thinking which traces a motif à travers les ages and ends by becoming lost in the mazes of its own relativism.”52 Ever since his first visit to Rome in 1936,53 Wind had been fascinated by the idea to see attempts of picturing knowledge realized in major fresco programs, such as Raphael’s School of Athens,

49

50 51

52 53

Report to Saxl (as fn. 47), appendix, p. 112. Wind succeeded in obtaining offers independently proposed by the Metropolitan Museum, the National Gallery, Washington, and the University of Chicago. The National Gallery, together with the Library of Congress and the Bliss Collection at Dumbarton Oaks even submitted a formal invitation to host the Warburg library for the duration of the war which was refused by Saxl but surely strengthened his hand in negotiating the Institute’s incorporation into the University of London 1943–1944 (Edgar Wind Papers (as fn. 21), Box I, 5, file 1, E. Wind to Edward Warburg, 13 June 1942); in the same letter, Wind intended also to establish a sister institute in the United States that would teach Warburg’s methods and themes; see also WIA, Ia. 2.2.9. Annual Report 1940/41, p. 3; McEwan: Fritz Saxl (as fn. 35), p. 185. Report to Saxl (as fn. 47), appendix, p. 114. Although Wind calls this group “the enemy” (Report to Saxl (as fn. 47), appendix, p. 114 he seems to have had sincere respect for McKeon as is expressed in two letters: Edgar Wind Papers (as fn. 21), Box I, 1, vii, E. Wind to E. Panofsky, 24 October 1931 (copy); ibid., Box I, 5, file 1, E. Wind to Edward Warburg, 13 June 1942, p. 2: “My own appointment in Chicago was also attended by very specific expressions of interest in this direction, since Richard McKeon, the dean of the Division of Humanities, has watched the development of the [Warburg] Institute for many years and is possibly better informed than any other scholar in America about the scope and method of our research.” See also Pascal Griener: Edgar Wind und das Problem der Schule von Athen, in: Bredekamp et al. (eds.): Edgar Wind (as fn. 13), pp. 77–103, esp. p. 99, fn. 61. Report to Saxl (as fn. 47), appendix, p. 114. WIA, GC, E. Wind to G. Bing, 23 March 1936 and WIA, I.C., 1937–1938, I. 16, E. Wind to G. Bing, 11 June 1937, partly quoted in Elizabeth Sears: Die Bildersprache Michelangelos: Edgar Winds Auslegung der Sixtinischen Decke, in: Bredekamp et al. (eds.): Edgar Wind (as fn. 13), pp. 49–75, esp. pp. 70f., n. 46, 48.

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according to a concept of encyclopedia that was not yet covered by the more static meaning it was given through Diderot’s Encyclopédie. Here it was understood merely as a dictionary as its subtitle dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers attests. In the United States, Wind continued with studies in this direction. He even tried to establish a series of interdisciplinary studies called “Encyclopaedic studies” that should be edited by the Committee.54 When in 1944 Saxl informed Wind that he was about to travel to the United States to present to several institutes a plan for an Encyclopaedia of the Middle Ages which followed the model of the Pauly-Wissowa dictionary, Wind expressed his great disappointment also with reference to the fact that Warburg would not have appreciated such a project.55 After Saxl and Wind had met in New York, the latter wrote a long and ruminative letter to Gertrud Bing in London, in which he unexpectedly concludes that in Saxl’s projects “there is a tendency in all of this toward the conventional – and away from the discomfort of being an intellectual outcast (which, I hope you will agree with me, is today the only honourable position). If this tendency of Saxl’s prevails, the moment may come when the Warburg Institute is no longer the most suitable place for developing Warburg’s methods and ideas.”56

54 55

56

The project was never fulfilled; see Griener: Edgar Wind und das Problem der Schule von Athen (as fn. 51), pp. 99f. Edgar Wind Papers (as fn. 21), Box I, 5, file ii, F. Saxl to E. Wind, 8 March 1944; partly reproduced in Sears: Edgar Wind on Michelanglo (as fn. 47), p. xxix, n. 53. In 1939, still in London, Wind organized a lecture series at the Warburg Institute on Encyclopaedias; Wind himself lectured on “The Renaissance Encyclopaedia in Raphael’s Frescos,” whereas Saxl spoke about “Illustrated Mediaeval Encyclopaedias,” posthumously published in his Lectures, London 1957, pp. 228–241; WIA, Ia. 2.2.7. Annual Reports, lectures February to July 1939; see also Elizabeth Sears: Warburg Institute Archive, General Correspondence, in: Common Knowledge 18/1 (2012), pp. 32–49, esp. pp. 36f.; McEwan: Fritz Saxl (as fn. 35), p. 181. Appendix, p. 108; see also Edgar Wind Papers (as fn. 21), Box I, 5, file ii, E. Wind to R. Wittkower, 30 June 1945, and ibid., Box I, 5, file ii, E. Wind to E. Purdie, 5 November 1945, in which Wind gives further explanations of his decision to leave the Warburg Institute. Astonishingly, Saxl’s reaction to his week-long visit was quite the opposite to Wind’s; in a letter from 25 June 1945 written in German, seemingly unaware of Wind’s serious concerns, Saxl thanked Wind for a most pleasant week in which he finally had had the feeling of being “in vacation” and “with friends”; he further thanked for coffee, cigarettes, and matches, and that he was allowed to drink only half glasses of Vermouth which he likes so much more than full ones; no sign of a dispute whatsoever. After hearing of Wind’s decision to leave the Institute, Saxl wrote a note of acknowledgement without further explanation (ibid., Box I, 5, file ii, F. Saxl to E. Wind, 25 July 1945). On his second trip to the United States, Saxl tried to meet with Wind (ibid., Box I, 5, file ii, F. Saxl to E. Wind, 25 April 1946), but was refused by the latter (ibid., Box I, 5, file ii, E. Wind to F. Saxl, 28 April 1946).

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In a later, still unpublished manuscript of a study on Raphael’s School of Athens from around 1950, Wind gives an indirect answer to the question of what he thought to be the right definition of the term “encyclopedia” – one of the reasons for which he turned his back on Saxl and the Warburg Institute.57 Wind dedicated a whole chapter to “The Renaissance Encyclopedia” focusing on the etymological root of the concept and claiming that in the Renaissance, the word encyclopedia was understood to mean “education in a circle” and that instead of a synonym for lexicography it signified the “unity and coherence of knowledge.”58 According to Wind, the purpose of this coherence of knowledge was not to collect material according to a given theme and order, as proposed by Saxl, but to get involved in it in the way the experimenter is involved in the scientific process he is inquiring. For, as Wind holds, [...] the encyclopedist is disguised as an improviser who exercises, but does not parade, his awareness of the whole as implied in every part. Thus he makes (in the words of a seventeenth-century divine) ‘the whole Encyclopedia of Arts and Sciences but a brisker circulation of the blood.’ An ugly but not unfitting picture in Ripa’s Iconologia might be a spiritual image of this endeavour. (Fig. 1) Under the title “Exercise” it shows a bearded youth with an hour glass on his head, a rosary hanging from his girdle; his winged feet are placed between symbols of war and the peaceful implements of agriculture. He holds in one hand a kind of hoop, and in the other a scroll inscribed Encyclopedia.59 Wind thus finds in the Renaissance notion of encyclopedia what he had earlier already defined as the circulus methodicus, that is, the inescapable and indispensable condition of understanding.60 The relationship between the whole as implied in every part together with the intrusion of the one who is effecting this relationship is one of the major problems we find in both the philosophical and the art-historical studies of Wind.

57 58 59

60

Concerning Wind’s studies on Raphael see Griener: Edgar Wind und das Problem der Schule von Athen (as fn. 51), passim. Edgar Wind: The School of Athens, typescript, c. 1950, p. 107 (Edgar Wind Papers (as fn. 21), Raphael-Papers, Box 2, V, i). Ibid., pp. 112f.; the quotation is from Thomas Manningham: Two Discourses, London 1681, pp. 54f.; the ability to relate the part to the whole was also one of Wind’s major concerns in education; see Sears: Edgar Wind on Michelangelo (as fn. 47), p. xxix, n. 54. Wind: Experiment and Metaphysics (as fn. 19), pp. 33–46.

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Fig. 1  „Esercitio“ from Cesare Ripa: Nova Iconologia, Padova 1618, p. 595.

5. A fourth level, not mentioned above, concerning Wind and the Warburg tradition can be traced in the reception of Aby Warburg in the arts.61 The special case of Ronald B. Kitaj’s reception of Warburg via Edgar Wind was excellently reconstructed in a recent retrospective at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.62 In 1986, Kitaj made a portrait of Ernst Gombrich, which was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery (Fig. 2). It has been told that Gombrich accepted the portrait, but did not like it. This could not even be helped by his intervening in the process of painting by asking the artist to “wipe off” the “happy grin” of his face. When Kitaj did so, Gombrich thought that the features had “no coherent 61

62

See the most recent exhibition catalog: Lieber Aby Warburg – was tun mit Bildern? Vom Umgang mit fotografischem Material, ed. by Ines Rüttinger/Eva Schmidt, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Heidelberg/Berlin 2012. Edward Chaney: Warburgian Artist: Ronald Brooks Kitaj, Edgar Wind, Ernst Gombrich, and the Warburg Institute, in: Obsessions. R. B. Kitaj 1932–2007, Jewish Museum Berlin, Bielefeld 2012, pp. 97–103.

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expression at all.”63 This in mind, one indeed senses a slight distortion at the right corner of his mouth which seems less distinct and rather blurred. His eyes seem to prelude a friendly smile which has not yet arrived at that part of the mouth. Gombrich’s discontent with the portrait is likely to have been the result of an unconscious discomfort towards the intellectual background of the artist himself. Kitaj was one of the few painters who adopted art historiography as a subject for his works of art. In the late 1950s, while studying art in Oxford, he had frequently visited art-historical lectures by Edgar Wind. It was Wind who had introduced the writings (and perhaps also the myth) of Aby Warburg to Kitaj. The Berlin exhibition recollected Kitaj’s fascination for Warburg by welcoming the visitor with the picture “Warburg as Maenad” in the first room. (Fig. 3) The impression of a happily moved Warburg as a transvestite, probably referring to a Roman copy of a Greek statue of a maenad,64 is shockingly interrupted by the Baconian distortion of the left eye and the bloody red moustache under which white, shining teeth angrily protrude.65 Both “Warburg as Maenad” and the Gombrich portrait, when compared with one another, involuntarily create a tension between them that embraces those two poles of the symbol which Warburg believed to be indispensable for its conception: the dancing maenad opposed to the dolorous river god. The contradictions within the Warburg tradition might thus be seen as a sign of its enduring life.

63 64

65

National Portrait Gallery, London, Registered Packet, typescript note to item 5892, cited after Chaney: Warburgian Artist (as fn. 62), p. 97. Skopas, Dancing Maenad, Roman copy, Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen; see Martin Roman Deppner: Bilder als Kommentare. R. B. Kitaj und Aby Warburg, in: Horst Bredekamp/Michael Diers/Charlotte Schoell-Glass (eds.): Aby Warburg. Akten des internationalen Symposions Hamburg 1990 (Schriften des WarburgArchivs im Kunstgeschichtlichen Seminar der Universität Hamburg 1), Weinheim 1991, pp. 235–260. The note on the right side cites a description of the collapse of Warburg’s mental condition at the end of World War I by Gertrud Bing: Fritz Saxl (1890–1948), in: Donald James Gordon (ed.): Fritz Saxl 1890–1948. A Volume of Memorial Essays from his Friends in England, London 1957, p. 9.

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Fig. 2  R. B. Kitaj: Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, 1986, pastel and charcoal, 67,6 × 57,8 cm, London, National Portrait Gallery.

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Fig. 3  R. B. Kitaj: Warburg as Maenad, 1961/62, oil and collage on canvas, 193 × 92 cm, Düsseldorf, Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast.

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APPENDIX 66 1) Unsigned copy of a letter from Edgar Wind to Gertrud Bing, 15 June 1945, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Special Collections, Edgar Wind Papers, Box I, 5, file ii 15th June, 1945 Dear Gertrud, This letter is very difficult to write, and I therefore best begin with the weather. After an exceptionally cool spring, for which I thanked heaven in Saxl’s name, the temperature has now risen to its accustomed tropical height of over ninety degrees, and the poor man is travelling somewhere between New York and Princeton. The worst part is that he seems to enjoy it. Or does he merely feign it? He has changed remarkably little. I went to New York to meet him, and we spent a number of pleasant days together before he went off to Harvard, Washington, etc. etc. It seemed as if the intervening six years must have changed both him and me immeasurably. I know that they have changed me and that I have grown very much older. But he looks to me not a day older than when I saw him last. It must be a delusion, what with all that has happened. The only trace that I could detect – and this in its turn may be a delusion – is that he seemed a tiny little bit deaf toward arguments which did not quite suit his preconceived plans, and changed the subject whenever they occurred; but this will not deter me from presenting them to him. We have arranged that he will come to us quietly for a rest after he is through visiting and conferring with the “stuffed shirts” (Bonzen), of whom he sees in my opinion far too much and far too many. How he will react to my proposals I don’t know; for I am not absolutely happy about the plans which he has set for himself and the Institute. The “Encyclopaedia” frightens me. There are too many encyclopaedias already. Instead of leading to the sources, they have a tendency to supplant them; and I dislike the idea that we should add to their number. Moreover, Pauly-Wissowa should be a warning rather than a model. Ever since this wonderful instrument became available, classical studies have been on the decline. I have no authority to speak on medieval studies. Maybe they have reached the Alexandrinian stage and are ready for a great funerary monument in the style of Pauly-Wissowa. I know that this is not the case with Renaissance studies. They are not yet ready for the embalmer.

66

Courtesy of the literary trustees, Colin Harrison and Nigel Wilson, of the Edgar Wind Papers, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Special Collections.

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Furthermore, assuming that the “stuffed shirts” agree with Saxl – and there is a good chance that they might, for the Medieval Academy, of which I have the questionable honour of being a member, is so utterly dead (witness Speculum) that it might welcome a proper memorial – assuming that they agree with Saxl and decide to carry out the plan together: who are the people that will write the articles? You will know better than I how many or few there are in England. I can assure you that there are very few in America. To make the enterprise work at all, it would be necessary to mobilize all the forces available, with the result that the energies, particularly of the younger generation, which ought to be free for constructive research and produce new results, would be channeled into the unconstructive labour of compiling, and that for a period of at least two decades. I should be more easily reconciled to the plan if I were convinced that it was a logical or imaginative expansion of Warburg’s work and would serve the purpose for which the Institute was founded. I think it is the opposite – an expression of the centrifugal forces in Saxl and a flight into conventionality. Perhaps I should have been more insistent in dissuading him after his arrival. But he had written in advance to quite a number of people so as to interest them in his plan, and his gesture of consulting with me ex post turned out to be something of a fiction. Moreover, when I saw how much work and what excellent work of its kind had already been put into the preparation and how intensely he was preoccupied with the idea, I felt that I had no right to deprive him of what had certainly become to him a psychologically indispensable program. And I thought the thing ought to be given a fair chance even if I did not like it. You know that I am the last to belittle the value of Saxl’s urge to bring people together and make them work at a common task. But his missionary instincts sometimes mislead him, perhaps because he is too distrustful of the safety within and unduly yearns for safety from without. As a result, he has been repeatedly attracted by “projects” which were grand in plan but timid in invention. By timidity I mean that they followed a pre-existing pattern. Others had thought of producing an Aristoteles Latinus; so we followed suit and proposed a Plato Latinus. Others had thought of producing a Pauly-Wissowa for classical antiquity; so we follow suit and propose a Pauly-Wissowa for the middle ages and the Renaissance. I need not elaborate this with regard to Bartsch’s Peintre Graveur or the Klassiker der Kunst, to which Saxl would now like to publish improved counterparts. There is a tendency in all of this toward the conventional – and away from the discomfort of being an intellectual outcast (which, I hope you will agree with me, is today the only honourable position). If this tendency of Saxl’s prevails, the moment may come when the Warburg Institute is no longer the most suitable place for developing Warburg’s methods and ideas.

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I have seen this danger approaching for many years, and you know that I have done my best to counteract it. I shall do so again if it is decided that I am to return to London. This “if” will shock you, and it shocks me too. But ever since my conversation with Saxl I have been in doubt whether it is right for me to return to London at this particular juncture. The decision to the contrary would be very hard for me, and no less for Margaret who has prepared everything for our departure for more than a year. Our furniture has been in storage in Chicago, and we have been living here in a single furnished room in anticipation of our leaving. Not only Margaret’s sister in London but everyone here has been told of our impending departure, and you know best how much I like living in London. But nothing of this will deter me from making the reverse arrangements if necessary. Perhaps my doubts will be dispelled when Saxl is here and we discuss in detail the future organization of the Institute. Perhaps, when he hears my reasons, he will decide himself that it is better for me to stay here. At the root of the problem is the old question which I put to Saxl some years ago when he visited me in Devon and which I have kept repeating ever since: Is the Warburg Institute to be run primarily as a charitable institution for relieving – by more or less small pittances – the plight of distressed scholars? Or is its primary aim the development of a particular scientific method by scholars committed to this form of research, whether distressed or not. Both aims are honourable if they are kept apart. My criticism has been that they were persistently mixed – to the detriment of the integrity of the Institute whose forces, as you know best from yourself, have been distracted from their assigned tasks, and to the detriment also of the so-called beneficiaries who felt abused by the expectation of high returns from absurdly small investments. Too many of them have felt – not unjustly – that the assistance given to them was not sufficiently disinterested. In the words of the old Fontane: “Deine Wohltätigkeit ist mir zu geschäftstüchtig.” By your ambiguous and self-deceptive policy in these matters, both you and Saxl have substantially contributed to the increase of the intellectual proletariat. And in my opinion this is a crime. You see, I am still ranting in the old style. The reason is a somewhat humorous one. Saxl has already found – on these richly endowed shores – a sufficient number of distressed people to whom he has made promises which he shall probably not be able to keep. I foresee the usual sequence: (1) Resentment by these people because Saxl does not keep his promises; (2) Resentment by Saxl because these people are ungrateful; (3) Resentment by Gertrud Bing because people are so indecent as to induce Saxl to make irresponsible promises; (4) Attempts by Edgar Wind to silence the resentful people of the first mentioned group; (5) Outcry of these people in combination with Saxl against the brutality of Edgar Wind; (6) Ineffective protest against this outcry by Gertrud Bing; (7) Pele-Mele. Am I exaggerating?

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The tragedy is that some of the opportunities for thoroughly strengthening the staff of the Institute might be missed by these sentimental distractions. There is a good chance – and Saxl discovered it – that Seznec might join the Warburg Institute. He would be a superb addition, the most valuable that could be conceived; for Rudi, he, and I would supplement each other to perfection. But he has a good position at Harvard, and Saxl regrets any generous expenditure on the permanent staff because he would like to reserve sufficient funds for the support of a “floating population.” It is an old song, and you know what I think of it. Given the choice, I am not sure that he will not rather sacrifice Seznec. My own case – and I feel certain, that of Rudi also – is of exactly the same order. I was dumbfounded to learn that we are to be put into academic pigeonholes and classified as “professors”, “readers”, and God knows what. Saxl never mentioned a word of this in his letters, and neither did you. I think it is a very regrettable development since it impairs the collegiate character of the Institute. If we have to be called names, it should be “Fellows”. On the other hand, I can understand that the categories, if merely for the sake of estimating the appropriate salaries. In that case, Saxl should have made it clear that a research institute of this caliber, in order to be effective, requires either several professorships or none. The officers of London University, I am sure, would be the first to understand that people of professorial status (that is their term, if I am not mistaken) will not accept appointments if they are demoted, and their esteem for the Warburg Institute will only be heightened if several people of that status are prepared to join it. Now Saxl knew that I have held in short succession two professorships in this country, the one in Chicago, which was a full professorship in the Art Department, and the other that I am now holding here, which is the William Allan Neilson Professorship, formerly held by G. E. Moore, Carl Becker, D. Wilson, etc., and happens to be the highest paid in the College. It carries an annual stipend of $ 8000. I know that the Warburg Institute cannot pay me the equivalent, and I think I have always made it clear that I do not expect it. But the financial sacrifice should be reasonable. A reduction by one-half or more, which Saxl seems to regard as equitable, will not be so regarded by any impartial judge. Moreover, if academic classifications have to be made, which I would regret, I must remain in the same class in which I am here. Anything else would be interpreted as a public disavowal on your part of the recognition I have received here. Moreover, I have no intention of playing the role of an ungrateful fool; and I would deserve this appellation, and offend the sensibilities of those to whom I am indebted here, if I rewarded their generosity by preferring an inadequate appointment in London. I regret that I have to explain these things to you and Saxl. I think it is the kind of argument which should have come from Saxl’s side, not from mine.

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But I have found on former occasions that he waits for people, even if he claims they are his friends, to demand the things which he should have offered. I enclose the text of a report which Saxl asked me to write about the last six years. I hope it will amuse you. Yours, 30th June, 1945 P.S. I have delayed sending off this letter. In the meantime, Saxl has visited us for a week. I think he has enjoyed his stay and had a good rest. However, my doubts have only been deepened by our conversations, and I have decided not to return to England. There is no intention on Saxl’s part to give up his old habit of playing the benefactor at the expense of the permanent staff of the Institute. Though he knows my views, he has no scruples in speaking to outsiders in my own presence of the Institute as a “charitable institution”. He is adamant in his refusal to strengthen the permanent staff both scientifically and financially so as to give the Institute a healthy constitution. The old policy of minimum salaries for those who work, little pittances here and there for those who suffer, and lucrative gifts for those who visit, is to be continued in the old style. Under these conditions, Saxl’s complete concession of my own demands has no attraction for me. Nor was the process very engaging by which he tried to test my resistance. While he began by declaring that the budget could not possibly provide for me more than 950 pounds and that the post of a reader would be the maximum that the University would concede, he ended by assuring me that I would get a full professorship but turned a deaf ear to my suggestion that all such titles, including his own, should be abolished in favour of a community of fellows. I must also confess that I was shocked by the disclosure, as unexpected as the academic pigeon-holes, that the post of Deputy-Director has been abolished without telling me a word, and that you have resumed your old role under a new name. This proves to me that you are both incorrigible. I shall not waste another word on this matter, but you might as well know that you have substantially contributed to my decision not to return. Other reasons are of a more secondary kind. The many “mistakes” which Saxl has made on this trip – errors of tact, lack of patience, servility alternating with overbearing, but above all ambiguities and supposedly shrewd doubledealings – have convinced me that I should not relinquish prematurely the things which I have carefully built up in these years, and abandon all this work to the kind of foolish predatory raid which Saxl has undertaken so irresponsibly. My function here is perhaps more important, or at any rate more personal, that I myself had assumed; and I shall therefore not relinquish it until I find that it is

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sensible and safe to do so. While I cannot expect these arguments to have your assent, I know that they would have Warburg’s.

2) Report 1939–1945, originally attached to the above cited letter to Gertrud Bing, 15/30 June 1945, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Special Collections, Edgar Wind Papers, Box I, 5, file ii My first visit to the United States began in the spring of 1924 and lasted four years, the major part of which I spent at the University of North Carolina as an Instructor and Assistant Professor in Philosophy. A group of young scholars whose acquaintance I made in these years, were later entrusted with the reorganization of St John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, and made an attempt to transform the college into a school for the study of the humanities. In 1939 Mr Barr and Mr Buchanan invited me to return to America as a guest of St John’s. When I sailed in August of that year, I intended to stay for five months. By the outbreak of the war, this period was prolonged to six years. When it became evident that I would have to remain longer than I had planned, it was my intention to travel as much as possible and, therefore, avoid becoming affiliated with an institution. As the lectures which I had delivered had met with a response that went far beyond my expectations, and as these lectures were regarded as expositions of the method to which the Warburg Institute in London was committed, I inferred that it would be in the interest of the Warburg Institute if I made this method known in as many parts of the United States as possible. I lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, New York University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Dumbarton Oaks, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Carnegie Corporation in New York, the Frick Collection, the Morgan Library, and the Medieval Academy. I also spoke at the universities in the South: the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, and Duke University; in the Midwestern States, at the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa, and the Cleveland Museum of Art; and in the Far West at the University of California at Berkeley, Mills College, the San Francisco Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Huntington Library. I made a particular point of visiting the more provincial institutions, the Museums in Worcester, Hartford, Providence, and Buffalo; the colleges of the Connecticut Valley; and of recent years I have been occasionally a guest at Groton School. I had the satisfaction that less than a year after my arrival, in the summer of 1940, the Library of Congress, the National Gallery, and the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library issued a joint invitation to the staff of the Warburg Institute to settle in the United States for the duration of the war.

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To give a full account of these years would be impossible as well as tedious. In planning the lectures, it was my aim to discuss either a work of art of universal interest (for example, Raphael’s School of Athens), or to adjust the theme of the lecture to the objects of art preserved in the region where I was speaking. The appended list which comprises series of lectures only, will show that in several instances the lectures were accompanied by specially arranged exhibitions. I have not listed single lectures because, to my horror, they number seven­ ty-three and their subjects, with only a few exceptions, were either variants or parts of the larger series. A lecture on Bellini’s Feast of the Gods will be published by the National Gallery, and a study on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by the Houghton Library at Harvard University. After three years of this kind of activity, and with the knowledge that the war was far from ending, I felt that my strength would not permit me to continue the same course indefinitely. I therefore accepted in the autumn of 1942 an appointment by University of Chicago as a full professor in the department of Art, an appointment which entailed the rights of permanent tenure, old age insurance, and a seat in the University Senate. Although my colleagues at the Warburg Institute expressed severe disappointment at my accepting this post, I feel certain that if they had been present, they would have recognized this development as inevitable. At the time when I accepted the appointment in Chicago, two other institutions had approached me with tentative suggestions that I join them. The Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University inquired whether I would join in order to conduct general undergraduate courses in the humanities and an advanced seminar of Renaissance Studies in which several members of the faculty would take part. The program appealed to me very much, but when we began to discuss details, it became apparent that the amount of teaching would be so large as to prevent me from continuing my research. Also, Professor Sachs, then Chairman of the Department of Fine Arts at Harvard University, and Mr John Thacher, acting director of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Institute, which had become part of Harvard University in the autumn of 1940, discussed with me informally whether I would consider joining even though I was not a Byzantinist. I remember with gratitude the zest and gallantry with which both Mr Sachs and Mr Thacher fought for the inclusion of what they generously called a “humanist” in the research staff of the new institute. It was certainly not due to any reticence or omission on their part that the “departmental mind” won out on that occasion. My work in Chicago coincided with one of the great upheavals by which that institution has been visited at fairly regular intervals. When I arrived, the cleavage between President Hutchins and the majority of his faculty had been complete for some time. The University was split into two hostile camps, both

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bristling with plans to outwit their opponents, and the newcomer found himself surrounded by an atmosphere of martial violence. I thought at first that I could quietly work as a member of the Department of Art to which I had been appointed, and keep out of the range of the Homeric battles that were raging pleasantly around me. Being averse to the type of historical thinking which traces a motif à travers les ages and ends by becoming lost in the mazes of its own relativism, my interest lay in giving monographic courses which would bring the student face to face with a few great objects and a few great men. I gave a course on Michelangelo, a course on Raphael, a seminar on Leonardo da Vinci, another course on Eighteenth Century England, a seminar on the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds. However, it was soon discovered that my method of approach was apt to cut through departmental boundaries, and before I knew it I was regarded as a dangerous man – “a menace” was the official designation – and publicly branded as an “obscurantist”. To make matters worse, Mr Hutchings invited me to serve on a special committee which he had formed for the fostering of inter-departmental studies and of which he himself was a member. The other members were Mr Redfield (anthropology), Mr Nef (economics), Mr Knight (political theory), Mr Schwab (biology), Mr Katz (jurisprudence), Mr Wilder (theology). I remember the regular meetings of this committee as my most pleasant experience in Chicago. Discussion was as sharp, and division of opinion as relentless, within this committee as without. My only regret was that a series of public lectures that I gave under the auspices of the committee on such inoffensive subjects as Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling and Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, aroused such violent resentment on the part of “the enemy”, that the latter made an organized attempt, under the cover of a “committee on policy”, to prohibit me from speaking in public on subjects relating to the humanities. The succeeding debates in the University Senate, in which Mr Hutchins was attacked as a “revolutionary”, have given me an idea of the extremes to which unbridled passion can drive the misuse of intelligence; and while in retrospect it strikes me as humorous that the debate had to be carried on under police protection, I am happy to say that this particular struggle ended with a victory, however narrow, on the side of academic freedom. I was not displeased to leave Chicago, though a limited number of my colleagues regretted it. Smith College, which appointed me to the William Allen Neilson Research Professorship in the autumn of 1944, has proved refreshingly undramatic. The terms of the professorship are so liberal as to relieve the incumbent from any teaching obligation, although occasional lectures and seminars as well as consultation by students and faculty are admitted, though not required. President Davis was charmingly outspoken at my arrival and positively requested me not to assume any tacit obligations which were explicitly excluded by the terms of

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my appointment. As a result I have been as free as I have hardly ever been in recent years to pursue my own studies and to work at the completion of two books begun long ago, The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo and Philosophical Iconography of the Renaissance, and also a group of long delayed studies on the English Eighteenth Century. The little lecturing that I have done in the last year – a series on English Art in the Eighteenth Century, a small group of lectures on Pico della Mirandola, an occasional seminar on Michelangelo, a single seminar at Harvard University on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and a lecture at Dumbarton Oaks on The Return of the Palaeologi – has stimulated rather than interfered with my research; but I have made it a rule to decline more ambitious assignments of this kind, such as the Lowell Lectures in Boston which I was invited to give in the autumn.

Tullio Viola

“EIN GEIST VOLLER A MERIK A NER” The Relevance of Charles S. Peirce to Debates on the Iconological Method*

What is man’s proper function if it be not to embody general ideas in art-creations, in utilities, and above all in theoretical cognitions? Charles S. Peirce (CP 6.476, 1908)

1. Edgar Wind’s Two “Masters” According to a personal testimony, if asked who his truest “masters” had been, art historian Edgar Wind would give two names. Aby Warburg was the first. The second was Charles S. Peirce: the philosopher and polymath, father of semiotics and American Pragmatism.1 Now the first name is certainly not surprising: Warburg and Wind had been bound by a tight and friendly collaboration, and the latter explicitly presented his art-historical work as treading in the footsteps of the first. On the contrary, the prominence given to Peirce is at first perplexing. Wind had gotten to know the American philosopher only indirectly, a good decade after the latter’s death, during the years he spent as a lecturer in

* 1

Many thanks to Lucio Biasiori and Franz Engel for their comments. The testimony is originally from Edgar Wind’s wife, Margaret: “In so far as Edgar’s own method is concerned, he always said that he had two masters: Warburg and Peirce. […] [I]t was Edgar who introduced Warburg to Peirce, and there were conversations between them on this very subject before Warburg died.” (Copy of a letter to Jaynie Anderson, May 10th, 1984, Edgar Wind Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford [Box I, 3]). See John M. Krois: Kunst und Wissenschaft in Edgar Winds Philosophie der Verkörperung, in: id.: Bildkörper und Körperschema. Schriften zur Verkörperungstheorie ikonischer Formen, ed. by Horst Bredekamp/Marion Lauschke, Berlin 2011 (Actus et Imago 2), p. 6; id.: Einleitung in: Edgar Wind. Heilige Furcht, in: ibid., p. 31.

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the United States (from 1924 to 1927).2 What turned this apparently secondary encounter into such a decisive influence?3 To answer this question, we should not confine ourselves to reading Wind’s art-historical works, but rather look at his early, and still all too neglected, philosophical writings. Here, Wind laid out a theory of symbols and symbolic artifacts, the implications of which can be found again (although more implicitly) in the iconological researches of his later years. At the same time, his philosophical work makes explicit the theoretical background Wind was coming from, in a way his historical writings do not.4 A fundamental concept on which Wind’s philosophy hinges is the notion of Verkörperung, or embodiment. All symbolic entities, Wind observes, are themselves part of the world to which they refer: they are embodied in it. This means that the intellectual content these entities express also determines their own constitution, in a way that is akin to how a measuring apparatus embodies, and tests, the very laws that preside over its functioning. Figurative artifacts, in turn, may be seen as a specific case of this general condition. They, too, embody an intellectual content from which they cannot be detached. Their iconological study is thus justifiable not only on the ground of the virtual impossibility to separate “pure vision” from “pure thinking” but also on account of their obeying the fundamental rules of symbolic expression.5 With these reflections Wind indeed originally combined insights originating both from Warburg’s theory of symbols and from the philosophy of Peirce. From the first he especially borrowed the idea that symbols are doublefaced entities that oscillate between the poles of “attachment” to their content

2 3

4

5

For biographical information on Wind see Krois: Kunst und Wissenschaft (as fn. 1). I have dealt more thoroughly than here with the details of Edgar Wind’s and Erwin Panofsky’s reception of Peirce in: Tullio Viola: Peirce and Iconology: Habitus, Embodiment and the Analogy between Philosophy and Architecture, in: European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 4/1 (2012), pp. 6–31. The present paper aims to expand upon these results by placing them in a broader context. I shall draw especially on Edgar Wind: Warburgs Begriff der Kulturwissenschaft und seine Bedeutung für die Ästhetik (1931), in: id.: Heilige Furcht (as fn. 1), engl. trans. (with additions): Warburg’s Concept of Kulturwissenschaft and its Meaning for Aesthetics, in: id.: The Eloquence of Symbols. Studies in Humanist Art, Oxford 1983, pp. 21–36; Edgar Wind: Das Experiment und die Metaphysik. Zur Auflösung des kosmologischen Antinomien (1934), Frankfurt/M. 2001; Edgar Wind: Some Points of Contact between History and Natural Science (1936), in: Raymond Klibansky/Herbert R. Paton (eds.): Philosophy and History. Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, Oxford 21975. For a later reflection on similar issues, see id.: Art and Anarchy (1960), London 31985, pp. 22f. and the whole fourth chapter. I am not implying, of course, that these observations exhaust the problem of the connection between the two phases of Wind’s intellectual career (which is as much a biographical problem as a theoretical one).

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and “detachment” from it.6 Both Wind and Warburg, moreover, conceived this polarity as opening up a seamless spectrum of possibilities, which range from elementary bodily reactions (“all expression through movement of muscles is metaphorical”7) to the most abstract intellectual operations. At the same time, Wind’s notion of embodiment may be traced back to the writings of Peirce. The latter employed precisely this term to express the specific relationship that holds among the three metaphysical categories that undergird his philosophy. Rather idiosyncratically, he gave these categories the abstract names of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. But we may relabel them, more familiarly, as the aspects of qualitative immediacy, of materiality or reaction, and of rationality or signification that make up the world of experience. Now a crucial aspect of the third category (the category that encompasses all rational, understandable and communicable phenomena) is precisely what Peirce called its “embodied” nature. Thirdness or Rationality is defined by its governing material entities, or its being embodied in them, as their law of reproduction and transformation, without, for all that, being itself reduced to a sensible or material thing.8 This basic tenet of Peirce’s metaphysics seems to be reflected in the fundamental structure of artifacts and symbols as outlined by Wind. The distinctive trait of the latter, in fact, is to embody an abstract element into a material existence. Their intellectual purport then stems from the union and mediation between the two levels. At the same time, the implications of Peirce’s theory of categories also extend to his views on signs, thought, and actions, in a way that helps us better understand Wind’s interest for the American philosopher. Since, in fact, the category of Thirdness is coextensive with the sphere of signs, the notion of embodiment that characterizes it also determines their ontological status of them. The essence of a sign does not so much reside in the tangible instances that carry the semiotic relation here and now, but in the relation itself: in the “law” that engenders the potentially infinite sequence of its interpretants.9   6 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� See especially Wind: Warburgs Begriff (as fn. 4); id.: Introduction to the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliographie zum Nachleben der Antike (1934), in: id.: Heilige Furcht (as fn. 1). By Warburg see, e.g., the introduction to the Mnemosyne-Atlas, in: id.: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Martin Warnke/Claudia Brink, Berlin 2000, vol. II, 1, pp. 3–6.   7 Wind: Warburg’s Concept (as fn. 4), p. 31. “Aller Ausdruck durch Muskelbewegung ist metaphorisch und unterliegt der Polarität des Symbols” (Wind: Warburgs Begriff, as fn. 4, p. 102).   8 See, for instance, Charles S. Peirce: Lowell Lectures (1903), in: id.: The Essential Peirce. Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. by Nathan Houser/Christian Kloesel (vol. 1) and by the Peirce Edition Project (vol. 2), Bloomington/Indianapolis 1992– 1998 [EP], vol. 2, pp. 255f.   9 See the founding text of Peirce’s metaphysics, the 1867 New List of Categories, in: id.: Writings of Charles S. Peirce. A Chronological Edition, ed. by the Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington 1984– [W], vol. 2, pp. 49–59.

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This law, in turn, has direct bearing on the nature of human thought, because thought is itself a semiotic entity. (“By thought is meant something like the meaning of a word, which may be ‘embodied in’, that is, may govern, this or that, but is not confined to any existent.”10) And similarly, Peirce defines beliefs not as abstract “propositions in the mind,” but as habits of action, that is, as embodied rules that determine how people would react to given circumstances, without, however, being reducible to any finite set of such reactions.11 What can these ideas tell us regarding the more general question of Peirce’s relevance to the study of pictures? As Gertrud Bing once noted (speaking of Aby Warburg), “[i]nfluences are no matter of passive acceptance but demand an effort of adjustment, ‘eine Auseinandersetzung.’”12 The concrete threads that link one author to another are no mere matter of curiosity, but clues to disclose interpretive paths that run both up- and downstream.13 The fact that Wind had realized the significance of Peirce’s ideas for his own thought should be taken as an indication of possible convergences between Peircean pragmatism on the one hand, and the line of reflection on the purport and methods of iconology that developed around the Warburg Institute on the other. This question then becomes all the more urgent as traces of Peirce’s ideas may also be found in the works of Erwin Panofsky and, more indirectly, Ernst H. Gombrich.

10

Charles S. Peirce: A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic (1903), EP 2, p. 269 (my emphasis). Charles S. Peirce: Collected Papers, ed. by Charles Hartshorne/Paul Weiss (vol. 1–6) 11 and Arthur W. Burke (vol. 7–8), 1931–1958 [CP], 2.148 (1902): “[A] general belief, or opinion, is something on which a man is prepared to act, and is therefore, in a general sense, a habit.” (I quote from this edition as is customary in Peirce scholarship, by giving the volume and paragraph numbers instead of the page number). Another point of contact between Peirce and Wind is their naturalism, and the idea that intellectual faculties already characterize the primitive forms of organized matter. See, e.g., Wind: Warburgs Begriff (as fn. 4). 12 Gertrud Bing: A. M. Warburg, in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965), pp. 299–313, p. 310. On the Warburgian notion of Auseinandersetzung see also Ernst Gombrich: Aby Warburg: His Aims and Methods: An Anniversary Lecture, in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 62 (1999), pp. 268– 282. See Carlo Ginzburg: Lectures de Mauss, in: id.: Annales. Histoire, Sciences Socia13 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� les 65, 6 (2010), pp. 1303–1320.

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2. The Theoretical Gist: Habit, Habit us, Hex is One way to take these traces seriously is to focus on the notion through which Peirce integrated his views on the embodied nature of Thirdness into his theory of action and cognition: the notion of habit. Indeed, the main contention of my paper is that it is possible to provide an interpretation of Peircean habit that, while highlighting its philosophical background, also clarifies its relevance to at least two fundamental questions of iconological method. These are, (a) How can we articulate or make explicit the conceptual content of figurative artifacts? and (b), What role does the interaction of actors’ and observers’ viewpoints play in achieving this goal? To carry out this task most effectively, however, I will have to complicate the picture a bit by introducing a new element, which represented an indeed fundamental (if somewhat covert) source for Peirce’s ideas on habit: namely the Aristotelian notion of hexis. It may actually be shown that certain traits of this notion influenced Peirce’s philosophy in a way that may confer depth to its relevance to the iconological method. Let me begin, then, by briefly sketching these traits. Usually translated as “state” or “permanent disposition,” hexis is in fact the nominalized form of the verb echein, “to have.” It thus primarily denotes a possession; and was accordingly translated as habitus (from the Latin habere) by those scholastic authors through which Peirce came in touch with the notion originally.14 Though especially important in his ethics, where virtue is defined as the stable disposition “which makes a man good” and “makes him do his own work well,”15 hexis has a ubiquitous presence in Aristotle’s writings, including the Categories, the Metaphysics, and the De Anima. A unifying thread among all these usages of the concept seems to be its ontological structure. In this regard, Pierre Aubenque has aptly spoken of the “double face” of hexis. Aristotle says: “A hexis is determined by its activities [tais energeiais] and by its objects”;16 to which Aubenque comments that virtue “is not defined only by a certain type of disposition, but also by reference to a certain type of situation.”17 Overall, 14

15 16 17

For an overview of the history of reflections on habit, cf. Gerhard Funke (ed.): Gewohnheit, in: Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 3 (1958). In what follows I draw much from Pierre Rodrigo: The Dynamic of Hexis in Aristotle’s Philosophy, in: Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42/1 (2011), pp. 6–17; and Pierre Aubenque: La prudence chez Aristote (1963), Paris 1997. Aristotle: Eth. Nic.,1106a 23f. (trans. by William David Ross, London 1954, here and henceforth). Ibid., 1122b 1. Aubenque: La prudence chez Aristote (as fn. 14), p. 64: “Par cette formule que nous trouvons au milieu du développement sur les vertus morales, mais qui peut s’appliquer à toute hexis, Aristote manifeste la double face de la vertu, qui ne se définit

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hexis seems indeed to show an abidingly double, or intermediate, nature; suspended between subjective and objective circumstances, as well as between activity and potency, energeia and dynamis. In the Metaphysics, for instance, we read that hexis is both a “state” and “a certain activity [energeia tis] of the haver and the thing had [tou echontos kai echomenou].”18 And in the Categories, hexis relates to echein, the eighth category (also translated as habitus in the Middle Ages), exemplified by state-predicates as “is shod”, “is armed.”19 A similar dynamics may be observed in the De Anima, where the reflection on hexis goes hand in hand with the formulation of hylomorphism, or the doctrine that the soul is the form of the body. This is so, however, not in the sense of a full-fledged actuality, which would rather correspond (following Aristotle’s analogies) to the actual exercise of an activity, like walking, or actually putting into practice the knowledge one has acquired; the soul is rather actuality in the sense in which a man may be called “knower” if he has knowledge, without necessarily activating it: precisely as a hexis, or as Aristotle also says, a “first actuality” [entelecheia e¯ pro¯ t¯e].20 Aristotle then conceives in a similar fashion of sensation and intellect as hexeis: faculties that need to be “acted upon” by external realities in order to be properly exercised and to receive the form of the latter. This happens through the establishment of habits (in the stricter sense of ethos) radicated in our body, the repeated actualizations of which are then able to feed back into the potency, improving and reshaping it.21

3. Peirce’s Aristotelian Epistemolog y: Unconscious, Perception, Draw ing Peirce was an “Aristotelian,” as he said, “of a Scholastic wing”;22 and in point of fact his own notion of habit relates to this Aristotelian background mainly through the Scholastics. His main source seems to have been Duns Scotus’ distinction between three ways in which a concept may be “in the mind”: actualiter, or in an immediately present way, as a veritable energeia; virtualiter, or conceived in potency, as the possible implication of another thought; and habitualiter – that is, conceived in a way that is not totally conscious, but can be

18 19 20 21

22

pas seulement par un certain type de disposition subjective, mais aussi par la référence à un certain type de situation.” (First emphasis mine). Aristotle: Met., 1022b 4f. (trans. by Hugh Tredennick, Cambridge, MA./London 1933, slightly modified). Aristotle: Cat. 2a 3. Compare Rodrigo: The Dynamic of Hexis (as fn. 14). Aristotle: De An., 412b, 5f.; 417a, 22ff. See Aristotle: De An., 413a 1f.; 416b 33ff; 428a 1–5. I am much indebted to Alfredo Ferrarin’s construal of Aristotelian perception in: Hegel and Aristotle, Cambridge 2001, pp. 269–287, pp. 317ff. Charles S. Peirce: Harvard Lectures (1903), EP 2, p. 180.

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recalled to the mind “by means of mental associations.”23 Of this knowledge habi­ tualiter Peirce writes that “we can only judge by the conduct that it determines.”24 Such being in the mind habitualiter provided Peirce with a paramount model for articulating the implications of his own definition of beliefs as habits of action, or as that upon which one is prepared to act. And indeed, if we hypothetically accept this Aristotelian derivation of the notion of belief-habit, it is tempting to see in this idea a rephrasing of the Aristotelian definition of hexis quoted above – or at least of its first half: “a hexis is determined by its activities.” We could even go a step further and see in the fundamental binomial of Peircean epistemology, belief/doubt, a reflection of the Aristotelian couple echein/ster¯esis, “having” and “privation.”25 Peirce himself used to translate ster¯esis as “privation,”26 while at the same time defining doubt as “the privation of a habit.”27 Be that as it may, the main point I would like to make is that the ontology of hexis/habitus helps clarify a number of points of Peirce’s philosophy of action that not only have been traditionally perceived as problematic, but may render Peirce’s relevance to iconology more palpable. The first of these points concerns the degree of consciousness of beliefs, a topic on which Peirce’s affirmations may seem disconcertingly contradictory. In many texts he is adamant that beliefs are habits of which we are “conscious” or “aware.”28 The main urgency behind these statements is to confine the notion of reasoning to what can be submitted to normative critique; hence, to what the subject can control. Underplaying this aspect of Peirce’s theory of knowledge would no doubt be a mistake. And yet, at the same time, other texts admit that beliefs may be “mostly […] unconscious,” as other habits of mind more definitely

23

See Charles S. Peirce: Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension (1867), W 2, p. 75. This paper carries some important additions to the text from 1870 and 1893 (see W 2, p. 504, and CP 2.398n, where Alexander of Aphrodisias’ nous kata hexin is explicitly mentioned). In addition, see Charles S. Peirce: Knowledge (1902), CP 5.606; Id.: Pragmaticism, Prag [4] (c. 1905), CP 5.504; id.: Issues of Pragmaticism (1905), EP 2, pp. 347f. But most importantly, see the 1871 review to the works of Berkeley, W 2, pp. 472f. 24 Peirce: Issues of Pragmaticism (as fn. 23), p. 347. 25 Aristotle: Met., 1022b 22–1023a 25. See the entries: Opposition, Negation, in: James M. Baldwin’s Dictionary of Phi26 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� losophy and Psychology (1902), CP 2.608, 2.380. Charles S. Peirce: What Pragmatism Is (1905), EP 2, p. 337: “Doubt […] is not a 27 habit, but the privation of a habit. Now a privation of a habit, in order to be anything at all, must be a condition of erratic activity that in some way must get superseded by a habit.” An important difference, however, between Aristotle’s and Peirce’s views on habit is probably the latter’s stronger emphasis on imagination. See in particular Charles S. Peirce: Contributions to the Nation, vol. 3, ed. by K. L. Ketner/J. E. Cook, Lubbock 1987, pp. 276–279 (1906). Very clearly so, for instance, in: Charles S. Peirce: Short Logic (1895), in: ibid., p. 12. 28

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are.29 According to this view, beliefs are the rules that “govern” (or are “embodied in”) our behavior in a way that is necessarily in part opaque to ourselves – without, for all that, completely escaping our ability to recall them to the surface of consciousness. This seems to be the sense in which, in his fundamental Issues of Pragmaticism (1905), Peirce talks of our being “conscious habitualiter of whatever hides in the depths of our nature.”30 Then, in a small footnote of the same text, Peirce makes a similar point that is crucial for us. With a view to stressing the importance of historical learning for the study of past authors, he writes: “it is the belief men betray, and not that which they parade, which has to be studied.”31 Three decades later, Edgar Wind would quote the sentence with full approval in his polemic against intuitionism: Whatever objections may be made to the current psychology of the unconscious, it is undeniable that men do not know themselves by immediate intuition and that they live and express themselves on several levels. Hence, the interpretation of historical documents requires a far more complex psychology than Dilthey’s doctrine of immediate experience with its direct appeal to a state of feeling. Peirce wrote in a draft of a psychology of the development of ideas: “it is the belief men betray, and not that which they parade, which has to be studied.32 These two senses of “belief” (conscious and unconscious), however, are not necessarily at variance; for Peircean consciousness is said in many ways. If it means a “momentary mode of consciousness,” or its “immediate” feeling, it is indeed correct to say that beliefs are not so, for immediacy and feelings are “completely veiled from introspection.”33 In this sense, Wind’s construal of Peirce fully stands. It is, moreover, a necessary corollary of Thirdness’ embodiment in the world that habits (and signs) always possess a dimension that transcends the pheno­ mena they immediately govern. They are the eyebeam of our own eyes, as Peirce would have it.34 There is, however, another sense of consciousness which comes closer to the true nature of beliefs. This is the Aristotelian idea of the control we can

29 30 31 32 33 34

Peirce: What Pragmatism Is (as fn. 27), p. 336. Id.: Issues of Pragmaticism (as fn. 23), p. 347. Ibid., p. 349n. Wind: Some Points of Contact between History and Natural Science (as fn. 4), p. 258. See Peirce: What Pragmatism Is (as fn. 27), p. 336; id.: Issues of Pragmaticism (as fn. 23), p. 347; id.: “Phaneroscopy φαν” (1907), CP 1.310 (my emphasis). Peirce: CP 7.425 (c. 1893): “The only thought that is really present to us is a thought we can neither think about nor talk about. ‘Of thine eye I am eyebeam.’”

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exercise over beliefs themselves. Being habits, beliefs are always liable to undergo a process of gradual improvement and control; and it is in fact in this “process of self-control in its entirety” (in this “self-preparation”) rather than in the purport of the action here and now that lies “the secret of rational consciousness.”35 Between consciousness and the unconscious there is no clear-cut divide, but a spectrum of nuances; and the fact that habits are conscious habitualiter means that they have a transitional nature, one that is able constantly to cross this fuzzy boundary. Although they do not normally lie at the surface of consciousness, self-control can bring them afloat – and indeed must do so, if logic as a normative science is to play a role at all. The task of clarifying the structure of this process of self-control is in great part entrusted to the theory of perception. We here touch upon a second major point of Peirce’s epistemology; one that shares with the problem of consciousness its being marked by strong ambiguities.36 On the one hand, perception is direct. We do not perceive sense data, or signs of external realities, but the external realities themselves, which directly impinge upon us, as in the muscular effort that accompanies our dealings with the world. On the other hand, perceptual judgment as a cognitive element is always the result of an inference that is separated from abductive or hypothetical inferences only by its lower degree of consciousness. This in turn raises the problem of the paradoxical nature of perceptual inferences. As with all other inferences, their results must already somehow be contained in the premises. And yet, Peirce also says that they are able to create new knowledge. A partial way out of these problems37 is to insist on precisely those traits of Aristotelian psychology that Peirce arguably borrowed from the Scholastic tradition, by emphasizing what I should like to call the spiral-like character of Peircean perception. The perceptual judgment as a cognitive element is the result of an abduction triggered by the percept. But the conclusions of such abductions are normally not so much created instantaneously, as they are already present in the mind habitualiter: in the form of “general idea[s]” embodied in habits of action. These are then gradually strengthened and corrected through an alternation of hypotheses, deductions, and inductions that is not only analogous to an experimental procedure, but is also inherently embodied, 35 36

37

Peirce: Issues of Pragmaticism (as fn. 23), p. 347. Among many contributions to the topic, see Richard J. Bernstein: Peirce’s Theory of Perception, in: Edward C. More/Richard S. Robin (eds.): Studies in the Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce. Second Series, Amherst 1964, pp. 165–189; Mats Bergman: Representationism and Presentationism, in: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 43, 1 (2007), pp. 53–87. What I am offering here is of course only a sketch of an interpretive line to which I intend to come back more thoroughly in the future.

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in a sense different from the metaphysical one I have already introduced, but related to it. This means that hypothetical, deductive, and inductive inferences are only possible through the subject’s possessing a body that moves in, probes, and manipulates the surrounding environment.38 This schema brings to the fore the interplay between (to return to Aubenque’s vocabulary) the direct impact of situational elements and the dispositions of the subject.39 The inferential character of perceptual judgment does not prevent external reality from coming up to us directly through the answers it gives to our experimental inquiries. A third and final point I want to mention is that a very similar dynamics presides, more generally, over Peirce’s notion of creative reasoning. There, we have to make sense of the idea that abduction is, at the same time, a downright logical inference, and the only means by which new knowledge can be created.40 But again, it is not so much abduction as such that carries out this task, as the whole Aristotelian spiral of inferences that governs our dealing with the world as well as the formation of our habits. Without this element, reasoning would have no creative power at all. As Peirce writes: “Reasoning is not done by the unaided mind, but needs the cooperation of the eyes and the hand.”41 Though the “unaided mind” is similar to a “machine” in its inability to go beyond the limits of its engineering, “the mind working with a pencil and plenty of paper has no such limitations.”42 The mind, the eye, the hand, pencil and paper – we suddenly seem to be talking about drawing. This is no accident. Peirce’s ideas on embodied perception and reasoning merge with his beliefs about the heuristic potentialities of icons to stress the crucial importance of the creation and manipulation of images and diagrams as a means for thinking. It is “a great distinguishing property of icons,” Peirce writes, “that by the direct observation of it other truths concerning its object can be discovered than those which suffice to determine its construction.”43 This is the reason that every creation of new knowledge ultimately has an iconic 38

A particularly clear text on this aspect is Charles S. Peirce: The Law of Mind (1892) W 8, pp. 135–157. 39 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� Compare Michel de Fornel/Louis Quéré: Présentation, in: La logique des situations. Nouveaux regards sur l’écologie des activités sociales, Paris 1999, p. 19. 40 See Harry Frankfurt: Peirce’s Notion of Abduction, in: Journal of Philosophy 55 (1958), pp. 593–596; Jaakko Hintikka: What is Abduction? The Fundamental Problem of Contemporary Epistemology (1998), in: id.: Inquiry as Inquiry. A Logic of Scientific Discovery, Dordrecht 1999; Claudine Tiercelin: Abduction and the Semiotics of Perception, in: Semiotica 153/1–4 (2005), pp. 389–412. 41 Peirce to J. M. Hantz, March 29th, 1887, quoted in Nathan Houser: Introduction, W 6, p. xxix (my emphasis). 42 Charles S. Peirce: Logical Machines, ibid., p. 71 (1887; my emphasis). 43 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Charles S. Peirce: CP 2.279 (ca. 1895) On this point see Frederik Stjernfelt: Diagrammatology. An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology, and Semiotics, Dordrecht 2007, pp. 90ff.

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dimension. His conviction that “[a]ll knowledge whatever comes from ob­­ser­ vation”44 can then refer both to the observation of the world and to the observation of icons. It would be more to the point, however, to complement “obser­­­ vation” with “active experimentation”: we create a diagrammatic description of the situation we want to understand, then go on to manipulate the diagram, and finally observe the conclusions. This is indeed the process that lies at the center of Peirce’s philosophy of mathematics as well as of his famous visual system of logic (the Existential Graphs: Fig. 1).45 But also beyond the bounds of logic and mathematics, Peirce admitted that “visual diagrams,” were his favorite means for thinking; and many drawings of every kind with which his Nachlass bristles (from scientific and mathematical drawings to caricatures, charts and figurative sketches) are a visual underpinning of this statement (Fig. 2, 3).46 The age-old topic of drawing as an Aristotelian techn¯e (again, a hexis47), through which we learn to see and think better, finds in Peirce an unexpected new representative.

4. Panofsk y: Habit us and Iconolog y A consequence of Peirce’s views on embodiment, habit, perception, and creative reasoning is thus that drawing (variously intertwined with verbal expression) is a means for thinking. But the same point can also be approached from a slightly different angle, more related to the interpretation than to the production of images, if we go back again to Peirce’s reflections on “betraying” versus “parading.” As we have seen, the dy­­namics of Peircean embodiment encompasses the relations both between habits and behavior, and between signs and their interpretants (both partaking of the category of Thirdness). This, in turn, entails that human actions and their products may also be regarded as the interpretants of the habits that have brought them about, in a way that is not immediately accessible to the 44 45

46

47

Charles S. Peirce: CP 1.238 (1902). See the texts collected in the fourth volume of the CP, as well as in: Charles S. Peirce: Philosophy of Mathematics. Selected Writings, ed. by M. E. Moore, Bloomington/ Indianapolis 2010. Charles S. Peirce: Studies in Meaning (1909), in: ibid.: Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, MS 691, p. 8: “I do not think I ever reflect in words. I employ visual diagrams, […] because this way of thinking is my natural language of self-communion.” The conference volume ed. by Franz Engel/Moritz Queisner/Tullio Viola: Das bildnerische Denken: Charles S. Peirce, Berlin 2012 (Actus et Imago 5), is a first step towards a study of the topic, which will have to be strengthened in the future. Yet another perspective is offered by Stefan Trinks: Die Angst am Rande. Charles Sanders Peirces marginale Zeichnungen, Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte 6/3 (2012), pp. 83–100. See Aristotle: Eth. Nic., 1140a 20–21, where techn¯e is defined as a hexis tis meta logou al¯ethous poi¯etik¯e. [“a state concerned with making, involving a true course of reasoning.” Trans. Ross (as fn. 15)].

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subjects themselves but requires the presence of a second person who is able to grasp the purport of the “betrayed” habit. (An important proviso here is that this second person may also be a “subsequent phase” of the same subject’s flow of thought). We seem to come very close to the idea of “iconological content,” as Erwin Panofsky has formulated it. Let us look, then, at what Panofsky himself wrote in his Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955): Content, as opposed to subject matter, may be described in the words of Peirce as that which a work betrays but does not parade. It is the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion – all this unconsciously qualified by one personality, and condensed into one work.48 Panofsky almost surely took the Peircean sentence from Edgar Wind, who was his student in Hamburg and exerted a strong influence on him.49 The importance he saw in it may be measured by the fact that he quoted it on at least three other occasions. Most significant among these is perhaps the first version (1932) of his celebrated paper Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst, which seizes upon the words of this “geistvoller Amerikaner” (as he says) to articulate the idea of the “documentary meaning” of artworks.50 Having brought to the fore the purport of Peirce’s distinction between betraying and parading, as well as the history of its reception via the works of Edgar Wind, helps us cast an interestingly new light on Panofsky’s iconological program. But it is at least equally interesting to notice that the relation runs in the other direction as well. That is, reading Peirce through Panofsky may allow us to better appreciate the function of those kinds of “proto-iconological” observations which pop up sporadically in some of Peirce’s more historically oriented pages, and which scholars have so far proved unable to appraise adequately.

48 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Erwin Panofsky: Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History, Garden City 1955, p. 14 (first emphasis mine). 49 The 1936 text in which Wind quotes Peirce was probably read by him in 1930 in Hamburg as Probevorlesung for his Habilitation, which Panofsky no doubt attended since he was his supervisor. ����������������������������������������� See Wind: Das Experiment und die Metaphysik (as fn. 4), p. 254n. 50 Erwin Panofsky: Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst (1932), in: id.: Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, 2 vol., ed. by K. Michels/ M. Warnke, Berlin 1998, pp. 1064–1077. See also id.: Erasmus and the Visual Arts, in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969), pp. 220–227, p. 224; and the letter to H. M. Kallen, May 8th, 1950, in: id.: Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968. Eine kommentierte Auswahl in fünf Bänden, ed. by D. Wuttke, Wiesbaden 2001– 2011, vol. 3, p. 25.

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Fig. 1  Charles S. Peirce: Logical Graphs and fractal-like structures, June 29th, 1903, black ink on paper, 25,4 × 20,7 cm, from the “Logic Notebook”, MS 339, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA.

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Fig. 2  Charles S. Peirce: Drawing for a work in the theory of perception, 1903, black and red ink and pencil on paper, 21,1 × 17,3 cm, from the Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism, MS 315, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA.

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Fig. 3  Charles S. Peirce: Study of metaphysical systems, 1903, black ink on paper, 21,1 × 17,1 cm, from the Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism, MS 305, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA.

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To be sure, Peirce is far from becoming a full-fledged iconologist ante litteram: for, as the motto I have chosen for this paper clearly shows, his interests lay “above all in theoretical cognitions.” And yet it is important to make the most of this aspect of his thought if one wishes to take seriously his conviction that “general ideas” are also embodied in “art-creations,” “utilities,” images.51 In one of these sporadic observations, we read for instance that “Greek architecture […] betrays” – again that verb – “a passion for unity.”52 But still more significant are the texts in which Peirce extensively dwells upon the affinity between his beloved Scholastic philosophy and Gothic architecture.53 Of course, this is no reason to assume that Panofsky had these pages in mind when writing his own celebrated, book on Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951).54 In the course of the nineteenth century, lingering over this parallel had in fact become very common for anyone wanting to explore the problem of the relation between the art and the culture of a period.55 And yet, if we now turn to Panofsky’s book, this significative coincidence (significative precisely because of the intellectual pregnancy of the analogy) does help us read it under a partially new light. Through this lens, in fact, it will be easier to appraise the theoretical significance of his reliance on the habitus of architects as the element that can explain their connection with philosophers. Panofsky came to see in the scholastic notion of the “principle that regulates the act” (as Aquinas’ definition of habitus reads56) a more tenable solution to the problem of iconological meaning, more anchored in human psychology and less likely to lapse into the pitfalls of a Hegelian Zeitgeist. 51 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� The distinction Peirce here makes between “general ideas” and “theoretical cognitions” may seem trifling, but is consistent with his relational understanding of the three categories. Taken per se, “general ideas” may be said to already partake of a semiotic nature. In this context, however, they indicate the qualitative (Firstnessrelated) element that is embodied of “art-creations, utilities, and […] cognitions”. They are thus the ground of those more concrete semiotic entities. Charles S. Peirce: Historical Perspectives on Peirce’s Logic of Science. A History of 52 Science (1892), 2 vol., ed. by Carolyn Eisele, Berlin/New York/Amsterdam 1985, p. 204. 53 The most important text here is the 1871 review of Frazer’s edition of George Berkeley’s works (as fn. 23). But see also Peirce: Historical Perspectives (as fn. 52), pp. 350–355, as well as a number of other scattered hints. 54 Erwin Panofsky: Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism: An Inquiry into the Analogy of the Arts, Philosophy, and Religion in the Middle Ages (1951), New York 1957. See Paul Frankl: The Gothic. Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight 55 Centuries, Princeton 1960, pp. 487f., 591f. and passim; Ernst Gombrich: In Search of Cultural History. The Philip Maurice Deneke Lecture 1967, Oxford 1969, p. 28. 56 ������������������������������������������������������������������������ “[P]rincipium importans ordinem ad actum.” Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae (1265–1274), ed. by Thomas Gilby et al., Cambridge/New York 1964–1973, I–II, 49, 3.

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In recent times, Panofskyian iconology has often been charged with upholding an overly intellectualist approach to the interpretation of pictures. The role played by the unconscious content of images has been perceived as being too unbalanced towards the observers’ standpoint; and the iconologists’ focus on translating verbally this very content has raised the charge of not taking enough account of the immediate, emotional, and bodily reactions of beholders.57 These criticisms may be well-taken; but one should also be aware that they rely on a reception of Panofsky that did not make much of his late interest in habitus. Despite the enormous success of the 1951 book, the theoretical gauntlet it implicitly threw down has not really been picked up, yet.

5. Gombrich and Pragmatism It is, however, well-known that another leading exponent of iconological studies, Ernst Gombrich, had voiced strong skepticism even regarding this last solution of Panofsky’s methodological concerns. Indeed, this still appeared to him (who followed Popper’s critique of historicism) too dangerously Hegelian in its quest for shifty super-individual entities supposed to convey the true essence of an age, and governing human action in a way that is almost altogether opaque to the actors themselves, if not even in conflict with their own intuitions. Iconology, according to Gombrich, should abandon this path, avoid the temptation to go after “physiognomic” likenesses among cultural phenomena, and turn into a more sober study of “the meaning of works of art” that focuses rather on individuals’ actions and intentions.58 The inescapable questions of the historical changes of style and of the relation between figurative artifacts and their his-

57

See, e.g., the insightful text by Herman Roodenburg: The Visceral Pleasures of Looking. On Iconology, Anthropology and the Neurosciences, in: Barbara Baert/ Ann-Sophie Lehmann/Jenke Van Den Akkerveken (eds.): New Perspectives in Iconology. Visual Studies and Anthropology, Bruxelles 2012, pp. 211–225. A “linguistic” interpretation of Panofsky goes back at least to Émile Benveniste: “Sémiologie de la Langue” (1969), in: id.: Problèmes de linguistique générale, vol. 2., Paris 1974; and Giulio Carlo Argan: “Ideology and Iconology,” in: Critical Inquiry, 2, 2, 1975, pp. 297–305. 58 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� See in particular Gombrich: In Search of Cultural History (as fn. 55); id.: Introduction: Aims and Limits of Iconology, in: id.: Gombrich on the Renaissance, vol. 2.: Symbolic Images (1972), London 31985; id.: On Physiognomic Perception, in: Daedalus 89/1 (1960), pp. 228–241; Id.: Art and Scholarship (1957), in: id.: Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art, London 1963; id.: The Logic of Vanity Fair. Alternatives to Historicism in the Study of Fashions, Style and Taste, in: Paul A. Schlipp (ed.): The Philosophy of Karl Popper, La Salle, Ill. 1974 (reprinted in: Ernst Gombrich: Ideals and Idols. Essays on Values in History and in Art, Oxford 1979).

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torical context must then receive a new answer, which can be articulated in two prongs. The first – to which Gombrich’s masterwork, Art and Illusion, is devoted – lies at the level of individual psychology, and hinges upon a broadly cognitivist account of visual perception. Perception only works by dint of unwitting inferences that draw upon our previous knowledge of the world and of the images we have already seen, both of which aspects are embedded in our “schemata” and “habits.” Two complementary consequences follow from this principle. On the one hand, the pictures artists produce owe more to those they have already seen than to a direct confrontation with reality. On the other hand, beholders may decode the information embedded in pictures only by relying upon what they have learned from previous experiences. Together, the two aspects account for the inescapable historical dimension of figurative artworks: the way the latter are produced and interpreted necessarily depends on historical tradition. Elements of genuine novelty can push their way through the “stickiness” of this chain of borrowings only by means of a gradual process of accommodation of our habits which is akin to an experimental procedure.59 With this account of visual experience, Gombrich was famously countering the ecological approach of psychologist James J. Gibson.60 Against the latter’s emphasis on the direct influence of the situational elements upon the perceiver, he recalled the role of the subject’s active dispositions in bringing about the perceptual judgment. As in the case of artists dealing with the world they want to represent, such dispositions are then liable to be modified through procedures of trial and error. Once again, the main influence behind these ideas was Popper, with his experimentalist account of perception and reasoning. Still, the affinities with Peirce (and Pragmatism in general) leap to the eye. Nor is this accidental, if we consider the vicinity between Popper and Peirce (whom the first had called “one of the greatest philosophers of all time”) as regards the relation between perception and inference, its paradigmatic status for a theory of knowledge, and the role of experimental reasoning.61 59 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Ernst Gombrich: Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960), Princeton/Oxford 112000. Of “stickiness” (vischiosità) aptly speaks Carlo Ginzburg: Da A. Warburg a E. H. Gombrich. Note su un problema di metodo (1966), in: id.: Miti emblemi spie. Morfologia e storia, Turin 32000, p. 78. 60 See the correspondence published in: Leonardo 4 (1971), pp. 195–203; and 12 (1979), pp. 174ff. Richard Woodfield has gathered these and other relevant documents and put them online at http://gombrich.co.uk/gombrichgibson-dispute/ (last accessed: February 2014). On Popper and Peirce, see, among many contributions, Eugene Freeman/Henryk 61 Skolimowski: The Search for Objectivity in Peirce and Popper, in: Paul A. Schlipp (ed.), The Philosophy of Karl Popper (as fn. 52), pp. 464–482. Popper’s appreciation of Peirce as “one of the greatest philosophers of all time” is in: Karl Popper: Objec-

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With the second prong of Gombrich’s answer to the problem of style, however, we seem to move suddenly away from these pragmatist overtones – albeit not from Popper. In a long article published in the volume of the Library of Living Philosophers dedicated to the latter, Gombrich suggested that alongside the psychological account given in Art and Illusion, stylistic changes may also be studied as purely social phenomena. In this he followed his friend’s suggestion that the “spirits” of the ages postulated by historicist philosophers should be substituted by a “detailed analysis of the logic of situations” in which human behavior unfolds and may end up assuming unexpected, or unintended, consequences. In other words, scholars should move from the idea – contrary to the Panofskyian method – that actors’ behavior has to be understood from the point of view of actors themselves, and by making “the assumption of complete rationality […] on the part of individuals.” These aspects of artistic productions (as of every other social phenomenon) which betray the latter’s dependency on a specific historical context should not be explained by reference to some sort of unconscious influence that super-individual entities may exert upon actors. Rather, they are the upshot of the actors’ rational, and conscious, dealing with what the situation itself commands. Models for the study of this kind of behavior come from domains as distant as fashion, the evolution of language, and economics.62 Gombrich has brilliantly shown the heuristic potentialities of this approach. Bracketing the psychological aspects of individual choices may indeed bring to the fore a number of aspects that would remain out of focus otherwise – most notably the logic of competition among different “players,” which presides over the development of stylistic elements. Yet if taken as a general method, the price paid for this bracketing quickly becomes too high: it lapses into a disembodied and artificial account of behavior which is based upon forced presuppositions about the actors’ rationality. Moreover, such a clear-cut division of labor between psychological accounts on the one hand and sociological or situational ones on the other is likely to bring about tensions between the two levels of explanation. From the viewpoint of these difficulties, it probably bears asking whether precisely those experimentalist insights contained in Art and Illusion (which bring Gombrich closer to Peircean epistemology) may help trace a more viable perspective.

62

tive Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1972), Oxford 21979, p. 212. Gombrich explicitly mentioned Peirce in his review of Charles Morris: Signs, Language and Behavior, in: The Art Bullettin 31/1 (1949), pp. 68–73, p. 72. More interesting are some explicit references to William James’ theory of perception, in: Gombrich: Art and Illusion (as fn. 59), pp. 203ff., p. 383. Gombrich: The Logic of Vanity Fair (as fn. 58). Compare Karl Popper: The Poverty of Historicism, London 1957, pp. 141–152.

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To start answering this question, let me go back to the duality between situational and dispositional urgencies that I have suggested reading into Peirce’s notion of habit. On the one hand, habits do play the role of the tacit knowledge that governs behavior, perception, and reasoning; and the full purport of which cannot be grasped immediately, but can become explicit only through the chain of its subsequent interpretations. But precisely as dispositions radicated in our body, habits also are the linchpin of an interaction with the outer world, upon which actors may learn to exert control. The upshot of these procedures is a set of rules that are rational because they are purposive, perfectible, and creative. Taking seriously the implications of this double standing of habitual action may help mitigate the risks that lurk in Panofskyian methodology, without giving up its most precious insights about the dimension of partial opacity that is inescapably inscribed in our actions. At the same time, stressing the “inner rationality” of the habits offers the opportunity to adopt a perspective that emphasizes the actors’ viewpoint, and their ability to deploy rational tools in dealing with the situation at hand, while avoiding the hyper-rationalistic excesses of game-theoretical approaches.63 From this angle, Peirce’s Aristotelian declension of pragmatism brings him close to that focus on the “practices” of actors that is the most important contribution of subsequent pragmatists (John Dewey above all64) to the methodology of cultural history. Edgar Wind’s two “masters,” Warburg and Peirce, may then appear as the initiators of two lines of thought that, approximately coeval, have shared the project of a contextualist inquiry upon the philosophical pregnancy of actions and artifacts. The duality of Peircean habit helps us pinpoint an element of unity among these two traditions.

63

64

These difficulties notwithstanding, an interesting game-theoretical understanding of Peirce’s logic has been put forth by Ahti-Viekko Pietarinen: Peirce’s Game-Theoretical Ideas in Logic, in: Semiotica 144/1–4 (2003), pp. 33–47; id.: Multi-Agent Systems and Game Theory – A Peircean Manifesto, in: International Journal of General Systems 33/4 (2004), pp. 395–414. Pietarinen also draws on Jakko Hintikka’s classical Logic, Language, Games, and Information, Oxford 1973. See in particular John Dewey: The Public and Its Problems (1927), Athens 1954. I have been very much inspired by Simona Cerutti: Microhistory: Social Relations versus Cultural Models? Some Reflections on Stereotypes and Historical Practices, in: Anna-Maija Castrén/Markku Lonkila/Matti Peltonen (eds.): Between Sociology and History. Essays on Microhistory, Collective Action, and Nation-Building, Helsinki 2004, pp. 17–40.

III . THE ACTING BODY

­Sabine Marienberg

MOVING SPEECH The Body of Language in Embodiment Theories and Rhetoric

1. Embod iment Views on Language Embodiment in general is not a clear-cut label for a well defined branch of empirical investigation and philosophical reflection. It is rather a kind of umbrella term for a multitude of research areas and approaches. This also holds true for theories in the field of embodied language. There are, however, some generally shared convictions: – The basis for our linguistic structuring of the world is provided by bodily experience. Therefore we often refer back to bodily states when describing psychical conditions, e.g. by mapping the physical experience of lying down when we are sleeping and being in an upright position when we are awake on expressions for being conscious or unconscious, as in ‘waking up’, ‘falling asleep’, or ‘being under hypnosis’.1 – When trying to linguistically get hold of something, we proceed by way of analogies and metaphors from what is concrete and palpable to the more abstract – a practice that ranges from expressions like ‘making a step towards peace’ or ‘watering down an argument’ to the conception of ideas as objects and theories as buildings. ­– What matters is not just the kind of body we have or certain bodily states we find ourselves in, but bodily activity. According to theories of symbol grounding, to understand for example the expression ‘chair’ implies not only to reliably distinguish chairs from other things and to recognize them as objects with more or less stable properties. It also presupposes knowing how to physically deal with them: to be experienced in what it

1

George Lakoff/Mark Johnson: Metaphors We Live by, Chicago 1980, p. 14.

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means to sit, to carry a chair around, to craft one, etc.;2 knowing what a chair is implies knowing what to do with it, and is thus eventually based on sensorimotor experiences. Referring to something that is not rooted in any pragmatic context (which, in the end, is always a physical one) would be tantamount to the exchange of vocables in Searle’s Chinese Room. While on the one hand language is bodily informed, on the other hand, it helps a great deal in structuring bodily behavior. Besides the rather trivial fact that we can hardly speak of carrying out an action if we do not categorize it and are aware of it as a so-and-so-action, empirical studies show that probands accomplish unaccustomed bodily tasks more effortlessly when they comment on what they are doing in self-directed speech. Language is here understood as a computational tool to facilitate problem-solving.3

Hence, our bodily-based ways of acting and perceiving and our ways of symbolically dealing with something can be theoretically distinguished, while practically they are always intertwined. Bodily prerequisites are present in linguistic articulation as much as linguistic distinctions affect the way we articulate our bodies. But despite the insight that there is no neat division between what is given and what is constructed, what is found and what is made, embodied approaches tend to fall short of giving a more detailed account of how action and cognition as well as body and language mutually shape each other. Furthermore, the line between body and language is all too clearly drawn: the concept of ‘body’ is tacitly restricted to our natural bodies as given entities, while ‘language’ is narrowed down to verbal language as a system (including the rules for its use). Accordingly, what counts as symptomatically present is attributed to the body, while what is considered symbolic is mostly associated with language. The fact that also the body has a symbolic side and also language has, so to speak, its own body is acknowledged in general, but scarcely investigated in particular. Moreover, centering only on how what we say is determined by how we sense and act, and how what we are able to do is enhanced and structured by public linguistic knowledge, induces us to assume that we dispose of a language-free approach to the body itself – and that language as a set of meanings and rules is

2 3

See Michael L. Anderson: Embodied Cognition: A Field Guide, in: Artificial Intelligence 149 (2003), pp. 91–130, pp. 101f. Cf. Andy Clark: Magical Words. How Language Augments Human Computation, in: Peter Carruthers/Jill Boucher (eds.): Language and Thought. Interdisciplinary Themes, Cambridge 1998, pp. 162–183.

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always already at hand.4 What is left aside is that the body is theoretically accessible only in our notions of it that vary over time and across cultures.5 It is semiotically articulated in multifarious contexts from both natural and cultural points of view. Also concerning bodily activity we distinguish between natural signs that unintentionally show themselves (like blushing or twitchy movements) and signs that are produced and understood according to a conventional repertoire of gestures. Meanings, in turn – irrespective of whether they are assigned to verbal or bodily sign actions – have first of all to be attained, to be gained and regained by habitualization and agreement. And also in sign actions we encounter symbolic aspects (when the representational aspect of a sign comes to the fore) as well as symptomatic ones (e.g. in phonetic features, prosody, diction, gestural mannerism and other stylistic facets). Finally, by accentuating above all the common bodily basis of language and shared linguistic means, we are merely confronted with an outside view on both the body and language as objects. Thus we are missing out on the interior perspective of a sign action while it is being performed, and on the subjective traits of how it is built up. Language is traced back to its bodily underpinnings, be it in form of bodily metaphors or syntactical structures, but the body in question is not the living body (Leib). What language mirrors in this perspective is the lived body (Körper) – seen as a whole made of components and properties, but not as a whole that is becoming what it is in the course of acting, and that is grasped in a likewise ongoing process. While in theories of embodiment much has been achieved concerning our understanding of language, speech is still waiting to be fully addressed.

2. Delivery A more promising scenery opens up in the field of rhetoric, where language is looked at as a poietic and pragmatic force, as a flexible means for shaping subjects, turning around situations, and convincing others – and this, not least, due to its corporeality. In order to illustrate just how subtle the interplay between body and language can be acted out, in the following, I will focus on a paragraph

4

5

This is obviously not the case in studies on language acquisition. But since they generally aim at how to construct shared meanings and neither consider processes of individuation nor the performative side of speech acts, they can be subsumed under the approaches offering only exterior views on language (see next paragraph). Even though the cultural shaping of body images is much discussed in cognitive science and theories of the body as a social construct have a long tradition, the internal differentiation of both body and language into a symptomatical and a symbolical side, respectively, is rarely pursued.

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of Cicero’s Brutus in which bodily language is both explicitly addressed and implicitly present in the textual movements themselves. Brutus offers a synopsis of Roman rhetoric, with ample portrayals of Cicero’s oratorical predecessors and contemporaries, and is written in the form of a dialogue between Cicero, Brutus, and Atticus. In the passage under consideration, Cicero is dwelling on Marcus Calidius, an orator of his time he counts among the most gifted. Calidius’ language is a diaphanous raiment, delicately clinging to the subject of his speech; his way of arguing is crystal clear, his tropes and figures are neither too common nor too chosen, his use of rhythm is masterly, in short, his eloquence is beyond reproach – except for one thing: he lacks declamatory power, the capacity to stir the passions of the audience by use of voice and gesture. Thus when once he incriminated Q. Gallius of attempting to poison him, he pleaded in such a listless, inexpressive manner that Cicero, who was the advocate of the accused, used Calidius’ way of presenting his case as an argument for the untenability of the charge:6 ‘Tu istuc, M. Calidi, nisi fingeres, sic ageres? praesertim cum ista eloquentia alienorum hominum pericula defendere acerrume soleas, tuum neglegeres? ubi dolor, ubi ardor animi, qui etiam ex infantium ingeniis elicere voces et querelas solet? nulla perturbatio animi, nulla corporis, frons non percussa, non femur; pedis, quod minimum est, nulla supplosio. itaque tantum afuit ut inflammares nostros animos, somnum isto loco vix tenebamus.’ sic nos summi oratoris vel sanitate vel vitio pro argumento ad diluendum crimen usi sumus.7 [‘You now, Marcus Calidius, if you were not faking, would you be acting like this? Above all when with that eloquence you are used to fiercely defending others from dangers, you should neglect your own? Where is the pain, where the ardor of the soul that even from inarticulate minds usually elicits voices and laments? No agitation of the mind, none of the body, no smiting of the forehead, none of the thigh; with the foot, what is the least, no stamping. And so you were so far from inflaming our souls that here we could hardly avoid falling asleep.’ This way we made

6

7

In Ciceronian Rome it was not uncommon to disparage one’s adversaries by pointing out the unmasking character of their bodily behaviour. Even someone’s walking manner could be marked as unnatural and thereby be used to dismiss his position as implausible (see Anthony Corbeill: Nature Embodied. Gesture in Ancient Rome, Princeton 2004, pp. 107ff.). Marcus Tullius Cicero: Brutus, Lateinisch-Deutsch, ed. and trans. by Bernhard Kytzler, Munich/Zurich 41990, 80.278. Quotes from Cicero’s texts are referred to according to the traditional numbering of the paragraphs in the respective work and can therefore be looked up in any edition.

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use of a great orators sensibleness or defect as an argument to refute his charge.]8 In Roman rhetoric, the relation between res and verba, as well as between res and actio, was considered to be a natural one. Arrangement of arguments, choice of words, composition of periods, rhythmical patterns, facial expressions, and gestures were not seen as sheer additional features to reinforce or embellish a talk but as a way to do justice to a subject – to cope with it by treating it in the most refined and useful manner. To speak with dignity and grace and to deliver a useful speech are one and the same thing in an almost organic way, as are the parts of the body in respect to its function.9 The notion of “natural”, though, does not entail that this happens anyhow and by itself. Making speech and matters naturally meet requires talent, art and practice.10 So if Cicero states that every issue demands its natural oratorical expression,11 it is to be understood in this sense – which leaves room for failure. Now what stands at the centre of Cicero’s sally against Calidius is precisely that he fails to present a unity of subject and delivery: if he acts that calm while reporting an assault on his life, he can hardly be serious. If there is no remarkable deflection from everyday behavior in his movements, probably there was no remarkable event that caused him to be stirred, so why should the audience be? Commotion can only be transmitted to others by embodiment in a delivery that itself is moved. This is not so much accomplished by just increasing the intensity of facial expression, tone of voice, and bodily movements, but rather by carrying out a series of gestures associated with particular emotions. Delight, enragement, fear, and grief all have their oratorical demeanor. But although a traditional gestural and intonational repertoire exists,12 plausible delivery is not about denoting a state of mind by deliberately choosing from an inventory of   8

  9 10

11 12

Ibid. (my trans). Unfortunately, the existing official translations are rather careless about some significant syntactical and dictional details of the original, thus much of what is examined in the following does not show up in them. To cast some more light on Cicero’s textual strategy, a literal translation that tries to preserve the main oratorical features is therefore preferable. Since in the quotes passage ‘animus’ refers rather to the psychical and affective dimension of the the mind, it is translated with both ‘mind’ and ‘soul’. Marcus Tullius Cicero: De Oratore/Über den Redner, Lateinisch-Deutsch, ed. and trans. by Theodor Nüßlein, Düsseldorf 2007, 3.178f. The term Cicero uses to characterize, for example, the parts of the human body or the leaves and branches of a tree in respect to their purpose is arte, not natura (ibid., 3.179). Ibid., 3.216. Pedis supplosio, for example, the stamping with the foot, is mentioned various times by Cicero as a sign of emphasis to be used at the beginning or the end of a part of the speech (Brutus, 37.141; De Oratore, 3.220). Nonetheless, it is not an

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codified moves; it is about effectively displaying it. Only retrospectively, i.e. by turning back to what has been delivered, is it possible to assign an emotional state to the orator according to certain aspects of it that have been revealed. Whereas, while following the course of the speech, one undergoes the phases of the oratorical action and takes part in an evolving situation that is also physically lived.13

3. Language in Motion In Cicero’s account of the moment he undermined Calidius’ charge, we have to manage without any trace of his delivery, which is actually put in double parentheses. He presents us with an only quoted speech, embedded in a feigned dialogue between Brutus, Atticus, and himself. Nonetheless, the passage (which should rather be heard than read) gives a vivid example of how to physically draw the audience into a conjoint situation. While explicitly naming the lacking signs of inner movement in Calidius’ speech, Cicero exemplifies his own motions and emotions – incredulousness, tedium, attack – in a multitude of corporeal and kinetic textual features. Instead of just reporting his states of mind and linguistic actions, he enacts them, gradually building up his speech along with his reasoning. The phase-wise unfolding of his persuasive strategy is organically directed towards the whole of his argument and at the same time it is the outcome of compositional artifice. This two-sided process can be traced in semantical, syntactical, and rhythmical patterns. For a better overview, here once again the quotation. For easier reference, the single sentences are numbered: ‘1. Tu istuc, M. Calidi, nisi fingeres, sic ageres? 2. praesertim cum ista eloquentia alienorum hominum pericula defendere acerrume soleas, tuum neglegeres? 3. ubi dolor, ubi ardor animi, qui etiam ex infantium ingeniis elicere voces et querelas solet? 4. nulla perturbatio animi, nulla corporis, frons non percussa, non femur; pedis, quod minimum est, nulla supplosio. 5. itaque tantum afuit ut inflammares nostros animos, somnum isto loco vix tenebamus.’ 6. sic nos summi oratoris vel sanitate vel vitio pro argumento ad diluendum crimen usi sumus.

13

arbitrary sign, but a natural one which therefore can be easily understood even by people of another language (De Oratore 3.223). For a detailed philosophical background of phase and aspect as the pragmatic and semiotic side of an action see Kuno Lorenz: Artikulation und Prädikation, in: id.: Dialogischer Konstruktivismus, Berlin/New York 2009, pp. 24–71; id.: Rede zwischen Aktion und Kognition, in: id.: Dialogischer Konstruktivismus, Berlin/New York 2009, pp. 72–93.

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The opening of Cicero’s refusal of the charge contains his entire argument in a nutshell (1). The suspicion of a false accusation is cleverly stressed by creating a grammatical correspondence between the two verbs, including a phonetic identity of their endings that extends to the last letter of the radical: si non fingeres, sic ageres? More than a mere suggestion, this is a claim of identity: acting the way Calidius did and faking are one and the same thing. In the following, Cicero elaborates step by step what made him reach this conclusion. The first semantic opposition is followed by another antithetical figure (2): why should Calidius fail to invest his well-known eloquence into his own case when he is used to deploying it with utmost naturalness for the defense of others? The implausibility of his line of action is accentuated by the choice of the closing verb, neglegeres which echoes the homeoptoton fingeres – ageres. Subsequently, Cicero recalls the natural course that the transmission of an emotion should take – originating from the inside of the orator who displays it with such an ardor that it immediately inflames the souls of the audience (3). His modal switch regarding the verb both sentences have in common (soleas – solet) strengthens the presumption of falsehood: not only is Calidius behaving contrary to his own well-known habits, but his delivery also does not comply with the general principles of emotional transference. The ensuing list of normally expectable – and here missing – gestural indicators of emotion moves all the way down the body from forehead to foot (4). As in the preceding sentence, the underlying structure is a polar opposition, i.e. a contrast between two poles that are relative extremes on a scale: inside-outside in the first case, higher body part-lower body part in the second one. This brings both sentences into an antithetical relation to (2), which presented the not gradable but absolute opposition between the use and the lack of eloquence; whereas (1) and (2) are again antithetical with respect to each other, (1) claiming an identity, namely between Calidius’ way of presenting his case and faking, and (2) denoting a contradiction between his oratorical capacities and his poor performance. Moreover, also the sentences (3) and (4) are in opposition inasmuch as (3) concerns a mental state while (4) expounds its corresponding visible symptoms. (5) is internally playing with the contrast between emotional involvement and overwhelming fatigue and, as a whole, is opposed to (1)–(4) in that it shifts the focus from Calidius to his audience. Finally, (6) reflects upon the whole scene and marks the transition from the reported speech to the Brutus dialogue. This catalogue is far from complete and further analysis would reveal an even more filigree web of antithetical relations, chiasms, and parallelisms. But the findings are sufficient to illustrate the antithetical procedure as the moving principle of thought and speech. Antitheses have both a separative and a synthetical function. In their separative quality they sharpen the edges between the particular aspects of a situation. In their synthetical capacity they lead to abstrac-

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tions: by way of comparing and relating, the contrasting elements are integrated into larger units and understood as parts of a whole. Instead of starting with a matter of common knowledge and fanning out its various characteristics, the attempt to progressively balance the antagonistic tension between opposites urges the audience to form a matter of fact in the course of listening. The active participation in the single phases of the speech allows for the audience to gradually develop an interior view of the facts that cannot be deduced from any preexisting state of affairs or shared world view. What makes this process so intriguing is that it takes place on different scales. Actually, we are confronted with a plenitude of intricately interwoven antitheses which cannot be easily depicted in a strictly hierarchical scheme but ask for the flexible identification of wholes in different orders of magnitude, and for continuous motion in a strikingly individual landscape. The comprehending and reconstructive movements of the audience are further controlled by figures of speech, such as, for example, the enumeratio, which Cicero uses extensively in his objection to Calidius, as in nulla perturbatio animi, nulla corporis, frons non percussa, non femur; pedis, quod minimum est, nulla supplosio. [No agitation of the mind, none of the body, no smiting of the forehead, none of the thigh; with the foot, what is the least, no stamping.] One of the functions of enumeration is to divide a subject into parts and evoke every single aspect of its perception, thereby vividly visualizing it. Enumeratio can both follow and precede the (not always explicitly stated) subject it dissects.14 When the subject is already known, as is also the case here, listing its adjuncts might cause tedium. The predictability of paratactic details is therefore countered by presenting them in a climactic way, i.e. by an ascending arrangement of linguistic elements which can concern phonological weight and syntactical complexity as well as semantic emphasis. This compositional strategy is also known as the “law of augmented parts” or the “law of increasing constituents,”15 which implies that linguistic constituents are normally ordered from smaller to larger and from less to more emphatic – so that words, subordinate clauses, or phrases with the most weight, length, or complexity tend to come last. In the example presented above, Cicero follows a more complicated but likewise traditional course,

14 15

As in “Nothing better than italian food: pizza, lasagne, prosciutto, not to mention italian cheese” or in “Doubts, suspicions and hasty moves – fear is a bad advisor.” See Otto Behaghel: Beziehungen zwischen Umfang und Reihenfolge von Satzglie­ dern, in: Indogermanische Forschungen 25 (1909), pp. 110–142, p. 139.

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apt to longer increasing forms, by bringing a strong element at the beginning, followed by several weaker ones, and placing the semantically, syntactically, and rhythmically strongest one at the end.16 To end a linguistic unit with a maximum of emphasis suits the orator’s intention of involving his listeners. They will follow with growing attention and, given that the final elements in a series are easier to remember, keep in mind best what matters most. The ascending order is therefore considered to be in line with the ordo naturalis, the natural order of things.17 Syntactically, one cannot speak of a complete movement that with “nulla supplosio” has found its end. The hurriedly spluttered particles have an accelerating but at the same time disorienting and arousing effect, as could have had the gestures described, would Calidius have only performed them. The series of nouns is grammatically as incomplete and dependent as the series of observations remains a set of fragmentary impressions without the idea of an underlying emotion – a breathless staccato of disparate elements still waiting to be integrated into an overarching framework and to come to rest. On the smallest compositional scale, first significant resting points that assist the audience in understanding are created by a period, i.e. a both syntactical and logical whole that integrates (at least) two thoughts or thought elements, creating tension in its first part and resolving it in the last one: itaque tantum afuit ut inflammares nostros animos, somnum isto loco vix tenebamus. [And so you were so far from inflaming our souls that here we could hardly avoid falling asleep.] Suspense is here built up and effectively resolved not only due to the incompleteness of the first part, but also by holding back the sense-revealing finite verb till the end. Period borders do not necessarily coincide with sentence borders, and what makes a period has sometimes to be left to the intuition of the perceiver. The sensation of a periodic structure, though, is enormously supported by the most palpable body-related feature speech has to offer, and that is rhythm. Period endings are highlighted by clausulae, rhythmical patterns that unfold a 16

17

The sequence strong-lighter-strongest is an approach Cicero also advises on the argumentational level in forensic speech, where a strong argument should be brought at the very beginning (to move the judges) and the strongest one at the end (to finally convince them). See Ulrich Ernst: Ordo, in: Gert Ueding (ed.): Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, vol. 6, Tübingen 2003, pp. 416–423.

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slowing down effect, thereby giving the listener an almost physical impression of completeness. They are rather intuitively felt than consciously perceived. To fulfill the task of deceleration in an intriguing and complaisant way, clausulae in prose should amongst other things be subtle, ametrical, and rich in variety.18 In the example above, Cicero ridicules Calidius’ sopoforic delivery by blatantly disregarding all three rules: itaque tantum afuit ut inflammares nostros animos somnum isto loco vix tenebamus ‒ ‒ ‒ ‒ ‒ ‒ ‒ ˘ ˘ ‒ ‒˘ The monotonous sequence of spondeic and dactylic metrical feet (which moreover both consist of four beats) turns the second part of the period into a caricaturesque lullaby that causes deep sleep instead of forming a momentary and structurizing pause. Without actually delivering, Cicero is prosodically walking around in the costume of an unconvincing accuser – and rhythmical tedium is the linguistic equivalent of boring the audience with a poor physical presentation in all respects, including rhythm itself.

4. How Natural is Naturalness? According to Cicero, no theory is required to feel and judge the quality of rhythmical cadences; they convey themselves immediately to experts and uneducated listeners alike.19 In fact, he considers the sense for rhythm to be so natural to mankind that it is doubtful that people who lack it are human at all.20 However, rhythm is not to be mistaken for an amorphous flow, but understood as an ordered movement that is both natural and intentionally formed. As such, it is determined neither just by the continuous respiratory movements of the orator21 nor by the dividing punctuation marks of the writer: the varied alternation of long and short syllables is as consciously formed with respect to limitlessly flowing breath as it is fluxional with respect to punctuation. To disguise the craftedness of rhythmic speech and leave no trace of the long and careful exercise behind its effective use, thus merging art and nature, is what distinguishes the experienced practitioner from a schoolmasterly theorist. And yet more than 18

19 20 21

Heinrich Lausberg: Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik. Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft, Stuttgart 1989, § 990ff. On Roman prose rhythm see also Hans Drexler: Einführung in die römische Metrik, Darmstadt 1967 and especially Walter Schmid: Über die klassische Theorie und Praxis des antiken Prosarhythmus, Wiesbaden 1959. De Oratore, 3.195. Marcus Tullius Cicero: Orator, Lateinisch-Deutsch, ed. and trans. by Bernhard Kytzler, Düsseldorf/Zurich 41998. Speech that is measured not by art but by breath alone betrays the layman (De Oratore 3.175).

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with the sophisticated concealment of artifice, in rhetoric we are dealing with the constant attempt to exploit effective natural laws that pervade us from within by closely observing and practicing them. The forms that touch us are the forms we are made for. Also antitheses on a semantical level, which are hardly conceivable without intentional positing, are seen as naturally unfolding. All there is to do is to become aware of their inner relations, and the appropriate sensuous form, leading to their pleasant and convincing perception, will arise by itself. Eventually, this means that inappropriate elocutionary forms are a sign of running counter to natural laws. The annihilation of Calidius’ delivery could not be more devastating. However, what counts as natural and what as artificial is not established once and for all. The ordo naturalis includes both “[orders] given by nature or habitually regarded as having been given by nature,”22 thus leaving open whether a natural order is marked by naturalness as opposed to deliberate oratorical action or by internalized convention. Obviously, naturalness is an essentially ambiguous concept. It can come along as an ontological as well as an epistemological one – and it is questionable how both notions can be told apart at all, if not in the sense that what characterizes naturalness “given by nature” is that its cultural underpinnings cannot be determined anymore. Even the use of rhythmical cadences, the utmost natural and corporeal trait of language, is no timeless and universal phenomenon. Cicero knows very well that in Greek rhetoric, for a long time, there were no periodic clauses. They first had to be discovered and developed, and their absence or application bears the marks of a particular historical circumstance – as does Cicero’s own notion of delivery. From a distance, his understanding of the symbolic dimension of gesture reveals particular symptomatical traits that allow for its association with a certain time, cultural setting, and individual attitude. The cited elements of body language, for instance, are rather strange for today’s readers. And already Quintilianus had his doubts about the smiting of the thigh as an authentic oratorical gesture.23 What should be kept in mind, however, is that the benchmark of forensic speech is not the successful communication of knowledge by means of conventional signs but the capacity to bring about a change of situation for one’s own benefit. Its quality is therefore to be judged first and foremost by how well it serves its persuasive purpose. The presented facts, rather than being merely noticed, are meant to encourage decisions and actions by appealing to both (cul22 23

Lausberg: Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik (as fn. 18), § 448. Fabius Marcus Quintilianus: Institutio Oratoria/Ausbildung des Redners. Latei­ nisch und Deutsch, ed. and trans. by Helmut Rahn, Darmstadt 1995, XI 3, 123.

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turally shaped) bodily responsiveness and (body-based) cognitive insight – as does speech in general when focusing the cognitive and pragmatic aspect of language. The vital dynamics of body and language, acting and knowing, formulating and grasping can neither be found in accounts of language as a system nor do they spring from the body as a natural object. And the body of language can only be lived, i.e. perceived and understood, to the extent to which it lives inside us.

Yannis Hadjinicolaou

“NOT ONLY FROM HIS H A ND BU T ALSO FROM HIS TEMPER” ‘Movement’ in the Art and Art Theory of the Rembrandtists For Λευτέρη Βογιατζή

1. In the vita Arnold Houbraken wrote about his friend from Dordrecht, Arent de Gelder, and which was published in 1721, he mentioned de Gelder’s passion cycle, painted around 1715. Houbraken understood the series as a work in progress and commented accordingly: “His last work is a Passion […] in which, artfully, the many passions and movements of the soul are revealed in the facial features shown.”1 In this spirit, several motions and emotions dominate the Crucifixion (today in Aschaffenburg): Not only are the facial characteristics of the figures as such and their affects recognizable, but they are also in unison with their bodily reactions (Fig. 1).2 These affects are related to the landscape and to the weather shown in the painting (the approaching storm) and resonate in the thin, even fragile, surface of the painting in the form of some opaque areas that look like glowing blots in the darkness (see for instance the yellow and red macchie, as affect-substitutes, on Maria Magdalena under the cross) (Fig. 2). Formal aspects, such as the brownish–red color behind the “gothic-mannerist” Jesus, reminiscent of a Goya palette (Fig. 4), are interwoven with narrations, conveyed by the

1

2

For valuable comments as well as translations (as indicated) I would like to express my gratitude to Herman Roodenburg. See Arnold Houbraken: De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen, vol. 3, Den Haag ²1753, p. 208: “Het laatste van zyne werken is de Passie […] waar in konstig de menigerhande hartstogten, of gemoedsdriften, uit kennelyke wezenstrekken te zien zyn.” Trans. by Herman Roodenburg. Guus Sluiter: ‘De passie, anders de Historie van den lydenden Christus.’ Arent de Gelders Passionsfolge, in: ex. cat.: Arent de Gelder [1645–1727]. Rembrandts Meisterschüler und Nachfolger, ed. by Dordrechts Museum/Wallraf Richartz-Museum/ Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon, Gent 1998, pp. 71–85.

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Fig. 1  Arent de Gelder: Crucifixion, around 1715, oil on canvas, 71,8 × 59,9 cm, Aschaffenburg, Schloss Johannisburg, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.

figures, who are looking towards the beholder or covering their faces (following the tradition of Timanthes Agamemnon, which Samuel van Hoogstraten refers to), or pointing to the crucifixion, so as to affectively engage the spectator. Color and brushstrokes in the form of spots drastically take over the action in the picture. For instance, Centurio, who is depicted in an upright position, “motionless,” not by chance placed underneath the right cross, is shown, like Magdalena, with red and yellow blots on his face which bring him into “motion” (Fig. 4).

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Fig. 2–4  Detail from Fig. 1.

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Samuel van Hoogstraten, de Gelder’s first teacher before he became a student of Rembrandt’s around 1661–1663, mentions in his Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst: Anders de Zichtbaere Werelt (Introduction to the High School of the Art of Painting: or The Visible World, 1678) the oogen­ blikkige beweeging (the “instantaneous movement”).3 The term beweeging (movement) is meant to designate something that is corporeal and mental at the same time.4 Following this concept, we can also understand Rembrandt’s claim to have achieved the most natural movement.5 Van Hoogstraten refers to this intrinsic quality of a picture by his use of the term beweeglijkheyt: “It is not enough for a picture to be beautiful, it must have in it a certain moving-quality.”6 The preposition in speaks for the vitality of the artifact, which emerges from it and acts upon the external environment in an instantaneous way. This effect can be compared to the rhetorical concept of ante oculos ponere.7 The Dutch 3

4

5

6

7

Samuel van Hoogstraten: Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst: Anders de Zichtbaere Werelt, Rotterdam 1678, p. 116: “datmen allenlijk een oogenblikkige beweeging, welke voornamentlijk de daed der Historie uitdrukt, vertoone.” See Thijs Weststeijn: The Visible World. Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age, Amsterdam 2008, p. 183. Van Hoogstraten: Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (as fn. 3), p. 109. See Weststeijn: The Visible World (as fn. 3), p. 182; Eric Jan Sluijter: Rembrandt´s portrayal of the passions and Vondel’s ‘staetveranderinge,’ in: Stephanie S. Dickey/ Herman Roodenburg (eds.): The Passions in the Arts of the Early Modern Netherlands, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 60, 2010, p. 290. Sluijter translates this term as “an instantaneous motion and emotion that takes place at one single moment.” Lydia de Pauw – de Veen: Over de betekenis van het woord ´beweeglijkheid´ in de zeventiende eeuw, in: Oud Holland 74 (1959), pp. 202–212. De Pauw-De Veen shows how the concept of beweeging has simultaneously a corporeal and an emotional quality; John Gage: A Note on Rembrandt’s ‘Meeste Ende die Naetuereelste Beweechgelickheijt,’ in: The Burlington Magazine 111/795 (Jun., 1969), p. 381; For the quotation of Rembrandt’s letter to Constantijn Huygens of January 12th, 1639 concerning this issue, see ex. cat.: Rembrandt. Der Meister und seine Werkstatt, ed. by Christopher Brown/Jan Kelch/Pieter van Thiel, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Amsterdam/Berlin/London 1991, p. 157: “Deesen twe sijnt daer die meeste ende die natuereelste beweechgelickheijt in geopserveert is dat oock de grooste oorsaeck is dat die selvijge soo lang onder handen sij geweest.” Van Hoogstraten: Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (as fn. 3), p. 292: “‘t is niet genoeg, dat een beelt schoon is, maer daer moet een zeekere beweeg­ lijkheyt in zijn.” See the translation of Weststeijn: The Visible World (as fn. 3), p. 185. Valeska von Rosen: Die Enargeia des Gemäldes. Zu einem vergessenen Inhalt des Ut-pictura-poesis und seiner Relevanz für das cinquecenteske Bildkonzept, in: Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 27 (2000), p. 171. See further to the topic of Enargeia: Rüdiger Campe: In der Stadt und vor Gericht. Das Auftauchen der Bilder und die Funktion der Grenze in der antiken Rhetorik, in: Bildwelten des Wissens. Kunsthistorisches Jahrbuch für Bildkritik 6/2 (2008), pp. 42–52; Ulrich Heinen: Huygens, Rubens and Medusa. Reflecting the Passions in Paintings, in: Dickey/Roodenburg (eds.): The Passions in the Arts (as fn. 4), pp. 151–178.

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poet Jan Vos speaks of the amazing force of an unexpected situation, something that is connected to the principle of instantaneous movement.8 Van Hoogstraten uses the terms oogenblikkige beweeging and daedt (action) as synonyms.9 He refers in a pre-de Pilian sense (the coup d’oeil) to the possibility of a painting to involve and move the spectator instantly upon sight (eenstemmich).10 Emotional movement and bodily action are, following the tradition of Alberti, equal in that they are identical “movements of the soul.”11 According to this understanding, the passions are to be defined as embodied processes. In a similar manner, much later, one of the “founders” of the Philosophy of Embodiment, Edgar Wind, argues that: “All expression through muscle movement is metapho­rical.”12

2. The movement of the brush, the color-application as well as the motoric action with a tool like the pallet-knife (which can be used to create scratches) are embodied processes that bear a certain relationship to the action and motion within the painting. For instance, what is interpreted from far away as a handwritten text (possibly the accusation against Haman that Esther reads to the King, a dramatic text so to speak) appears at a closer look as a series of violent scratches (Fig. 5 and Fig. 6). De Gelder can therefore only partly control the motoric action of his hand. The beholders are able, through their own body schema, albeit from different social positions, to partly reenact the making of

  8   9 10

11

12

Gregor J. M Weber: Der Lobtopos des “lebenden” Bildes. Jan Vos und sein “Zeege der Schilderkunst” von 1654, Hildesheim 1991, p. 199. Van Hoogstraten: Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (as fn. 3), pp. 115f. See Weststeijn: The Visible World (as fn. 3), p. 185. Van Hoogstraten: Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (as fn. 3), p. 116. For the coup d’oeil tradition and Roger de Piles see: Horst Bredekamp: Die Erkennt­ niskraft der Plötzlichkeit. Hogrebes Szenenblick und die Tradition des Coup d´Oeil, in: Joachim Bromand/Guido Kreis (eds.): Was sich nicht sagen lässt. Das Nicht– Begriffliche in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Religion, Berlin 2010, pp. 455–468. Van Hoogstraten: Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (as fn. 3), p. 116: “dat de doeningen of beweegingen des lichaems met de lydingen des gemoeds overeenkomen.” My trans. Edgar Wind: Warburgs Begriff der Kulturwissenschaft und seine Bedeutung für die Ästhetik, in: Vierter Kongreß für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Hamburg 7.–9. Oktober 1930, Beilagenheft zur Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 25 (1931), pp. 163–179, cited in: Edgar Wind: Heilige Furcht und andere Schriften zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Philosophie, ed. by John Michael Krois/Roberto Ohrt, Hamburg 2009, p. 102: “Aller Ausdruck durch Muskelbewegung ist metaphorisch.” See Franz Engel’s text in this volume.

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Fig. 5  Arent de Gelder: Esther, Ahasver, and Haman (or Mordechai?), about 1680, oil on canvas, 105 × 150 cm, Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum.

the traces, which the hand of the artist has left behind.13 The body is a multisensoric instrument. In this sense, the spectator is, metaphorically as much as literally, moved by the picture. Van Hoogstraten considers the motoric motion of the hand as an action comparable to language: “As far as the hands are concerned, these mainly express all deeds or actions; indeed, their movements are almost comparable to a universal language.”14 This idea is taken almost word by word from Quintilian (the main difference being located between language, in the case of van Hoogstraten, and speech, in the case of Quintilian, though both employ the notion of articulation), and could also be placed in the tradition of John Bulwer’s Chironomia (1644): “As for the hands, without which all action 13

14

Cf. in this context in general David Freedberg: Empathy, Motion and Emotion, in: Klaus Herding/Antje Krause Wahl (eds.): Wie sich Gefühle Ausdruck verschaffen, Taunusstein ²2008, pp. 17–51. For the difference between body schema (unconscious) and body image (conscious), which derives from Herbert Head, see Shaun Gallagher: How the Body Shapes the Mind, Oxford 2005; John Michael Krois: Bildkörper und Körperschema, in: id.: Bildkörper und Körperschema. Schriften zur Verkörperungstheorie ikonischer Formen, ed. by Horst Bredekamp/Marion Lauschke, Berlin 2011 (Actus et Imago 2), pp. 253–271. Van Hoogstraten: Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (as fn. 3), p. 117: “Wat de handen belangt, door dezelve worden voornamentlijk alle daden ofte doeningen uitgewerkt, ja der zelver beweegingen zijn byna by een algemeene spraeke te vergelijken.” Trans. by Herman Roodenburg.

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Fig. 6  Detail from Fig. 5.

would be crippled and enfeebled, it is scarcely possible to describe the variety of their motions, since they are almost as expressive as words.”15 Houbraken arrives at the heart of the matter in his biography of Rembrandt, probably repeating something that he might have heard from his teacher and Rembrandt’s pupil, van Hoogstraten: “hundreds […] of sketches […] wherein the passions of the soul in all kinds of situations are so explicitly and artfully shown […] Anger, hatred, sorrow, joy and so on, everything represented so naturally that one can read the meaning from the [very facial features themselves] (Trans. by Herman Roodenburg).”16 15

16

Quintilian: Institutio Oratoria, XI 3, 85, cited in: Jacqueline Lichtenstein: The Eloquence of Colour. Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford 1993 [French 1989], p. 102. Trans. in: David Rosand: Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation, Cambridge/New York 2002, p. 226. See Houbraken: De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen (as fn. 1), vol. 1, p. 270, p. 264: “honderden […] van schetsen […] waar in de dristen van ´t gemoed ontrent allerhanden voorvallen zoo konstig en duidelyk zig in de wezenstrekken vertoonen […] Stel eens, men moet vreugt, blydschap, droefheid, schrik, toorn, verwondering, veragting enz. Dat is, de menigerhande leidingen van de ziel, door vaste en kennelyke wezenstrekken vertoonen.” For the relationship between Arnold Houbra­ ken and Samuel van Hoogstraten see: Hendrik J. Horn: Great Respect and Complete Bafflement: Arnold Houbraken’s Mixed Opinion of Samuel van Hoogstraten, in:

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Through the strokes of a tool it is possible to feel and understand the affects of the painter because the created forms evoke certain sentiments. This “Ideology of Paint” deriving from Rembrandt is of a bodily nature and makes the painting process a vehicle for action. The often uncontrolled and processual strokes and color applications of the Rembrandtists that reveal the painting process are similar to the processual actions depicted in a painting. This can be described as Handeling, which, besides its meaning as “manner”, is still today understood as action.17 Handeling is an act which could be described as a form-act.18 The motion of the hand that guides an instrument to produce action in a picture itself becomes an action. Rosand argues regarding the drawings by Rembrandt that: “it is the passions of the draftsman’s hand that so move us […] Rembrandt eventually lived the drama on the paper.”19 In the Dutch rhetorical theory of Gerardus Vossius, Handeling is used, as Weststeijn points out, “to describe the orator’s ability to involve his audience in his argument appealing to mind and body and all five senses […] Handeling is situated in the body.”20 Jacob Campo Weyerman, an acquaintance of de Gelder’s understands the different Handelinghe of an artist as direct visualizations of his temper: “We call manner a certain Handeling of the painter, not only [deriving] from his hand but also from his temper.”21 Friedrich von Hagedorn refers to Handlung in the sense of manner, namely, in which way an artist holds and uses the brush or other instruments so as to give the picture its own character.22

17 18

19 20 21

22

Thijs Weststeijn (ed.): The Universal Art of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678). Painter, Writer, and Courtier, Amsterdam 2013, pp. 208–239. See Handeling in: Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal at http://gtb.inl.nl/. In the first chapter of the second edition of his Teutsche Academie (1679), for instance, Sandrart uses the word Handlung: http://ta.sandrart.net/, TA 1679, III, p. 12 (edition page 1000): “daß man gleich anfangs einer zierlichen saubern Zeichen-Manir und Handlung/ es sey gleich mit der Feder/ Kreiden/ oder Pensel/ zu dieser edlen Zeichenkunst/ sich befleisse und gewöhne.” Rosand: Drawing Acts (as fn. 16), p. 226. Weststeijn: The Visible World (as fn. 3), p. 234. For Vossius in general see Peter Mack: A History of Renaissance Rhetoric. 1380–1620, Oxford 2011, pp. 192–196. “Wy noemen manier, een zekere handeling des Schilders, niet alleen van zyn Hand maar van zyn Gemoed.” Jacob Campo Weyerman: De levens-beschryvingen der Nederlandsche konst-schilders en konst-schilderessen, vol. 1, Den Haag 1729, p. 27, cited in Weststeijn: The Visible World (as fn. 3), p. 179. Hans Joachim Dethlefs: Gerard de Lairesse and the semantic development of the concept of Haltung in German, in: Oud Holland 122 (2009), p. 218.

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3. As demonstrated by the work of the Rembrandtists, the different manifestations of Handeling change or even create the concept of Idea itself. This fits to van Hoogstraten’s notion of accident as used in his reference to the painting contest said to have taken place between the artists Knipbergen, van Goyen, and Porcellis. All three had to paint the same landscape. Three completely different results came out, connected to the different concepts of Usus, Fortuna, and Idea. According to the Neoplatonic art theory of Rembrandt’s former pupil van Hoogstraten, Idea, and thus Porcelles, won. Of special interest in this context, however, is Jan van Goyen’s painting. The forms that appeared in his case and consequently under the reign of accident were “as though the mind and the eye were placed in the artist’s hand.”23 This concept of a “thinking hand” was adopted, among other Rembrandtists, by Arent de Gelder himself. Von Rosen conjoins the concepts of Color and Enárgeia, as they constitute the power of a picture.24 Without Enárgeia there is no impact on the sentiment of the beholder, writes van Hoogstraten.25 The atmospheric quality of color, its force and application activate the spectator.26 The sensory-motor movement of the hand becomes the picture’s seismograph. The contradictory effects of the surface of a painting, created by the artist’s various tools, in the case of the Rembrandtists (and in contradistinction to the smooth and evenly applied paint of a fine manner) generate a tremor, a restlessness that directly confers specific affects to the beholder. These vary socially and culturally, but can be experienced through the body-schema. Or as Alva Noë puts it: “To perceive like us, you must have a body like ours.”27 Handeling could be similarly understood as an iconic action in the sense of Embodiment. Body and Mind are conceived as one entity. In how far Handeling is to be considered an iconic action as a result of sensory-emotional engagement is brilliantly described by Bellori (1672) in his

23

24 25

26

27

Van Hoogstraten: Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (as fn. 3), p. 237: “zijn oog en verstandt schijnen in zijn hand geplaetst te zijn.” For this matter see also Yannis Hadjinicolaou: Malen, Kratzen, Modellieren. Arent de Gelders Farb­ auftrag zwischen Innovation und Tradition, in: Markus Rath/Jörg Trempler/Iris Wenderholm (eds.): Das haptische Bild. Körperhafte Bilderfahrung in der Neuzeit, Berlin 2013 (Actus et Imago 7), pp. 227–252. Von Rosen: Die Enargeia des Gemäldes (as fn. 7), p. 184. Van Hoogstraten: Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (as fn. 3), p. 293: “Zoo is’t ook met de Schilders, zy beroeren ‘t gemoed niet, zooze deeze beweeg­ lijkheyt overslaen.” Thomas Kirchner: L’expression des passions. Ausdruck als Darstellungsproblem in der französischen Kunst und Kunsttheorie des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, Mainz 1991, p. 61. Alva Noë: Action in Perception, Cambridge, MA 2004, p. 25.

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Fig. 7  Arent de Gelder: Selbstbildnis als Zeuxis, 1685, oil on canvas, 144 × 169 cm, Frankfurt/M, Städelsches Kunstinstitut.

biography of Domenichino: “And he [Domenichino] would add, that in dealing with actions in painting, it is necessary not only to contemplate and come to know the emotions to be depicted but also to feel them in oneself, to do and suffer the very things that [are] being represented; hence at times he could be heard talking to himself and uttering cries of sorrow and joy, according to the passions expressed.”28 This also shows that both “North” and “South” of the Alps painting processes were described in similar terms by academic, idealistic art theory.

28

Giovanni Pietro Bellori: The lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects. A new translation and critical edition, ed. by Alice Sedgwick Wohl/Hellmut Wohl/Tomaso Montanari, Cambridge, MA 2005, p. 266; id.: Le Vite de Pittori, Scultori, ed Architetti Moderni, Rome ²1728, vol. 1, p. 214: “Ed aggiungeva, che nelle azzioni della pittura bisogna, non solo contemplare, e riconoscere gli affetti, mà fentirli ancora, in se stesso fare, e patire le medesime cose, che si rappresentano; onde alle volte udivasi ragionare da se solo, e mandar voci di duolo, e d´allegrezza secondo l’affezzioni espresse.” Thomas Kirchner: De l’usage des passions. Die Emotionen bei Künstler, Kunstwerk und Betrachter, in: Klaus Herding/Bernhard

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Similarly de Gelder must have engaged himself bodily with the reality of human affects in order to understand them – something that can be seen in his self-portrait as Zeuxis, who was the paradigm painter of affects in antiquity (Fig. 7).29 “Laugh with the laughing”, to paraphrase the dictum of Horace. De Gelder’s laughter is, however, not dangerous or fatal (as it was for Zeuxis) but instead reveals a self-distancing and role-play. This empathetic strategy of distancing was followed by van Hoogstraten, who in this was also influenced by Rembrandt. The goal of visual theatricality, though not in a rhetorical academic perspective, is to explore the secrets and motions of the human body and to try to depict them on a two-dimensional surface.30 The theater as a lesson for and about the body and its sensorimotor powers therefore played an important role for van Hoogstraten, who himself participated in theatrical activities, not least for pedagogic reasons.31 This was considered helpful for the depiction of natural movement as well as for improving the ability to empathize. As Houbraken mentions, van Hoogstraten […] also on occasion allowed his disciples to stage, or perform, in order to refresh their high-strung minds, a shadow dance: serving not only for enjoyment, but especially through such an example to have them know and understand the many rapidly-changing and lengthening or shortening shapes of shadows, (arising from the proximity to or distance from the light).32

29

30

31

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Stumpfhaus (eds.): Pathos, Affekt, Gefühl. Die Emotionen in den Künsten, Berlin 2004, pp. 357–377, p. 376. The role of Zeuxis as a painter of affects is mentioned also by van Hoogstraten (in relationship to the depiction of Centaurs). Van Hoogstraten: Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (as fn. 3), p. 299. Roodenburg speaks of “kinesthetic empathy” and argues further that “similarly Rembrandts meeste en de natureelst beweechgelickheit must have encompassed not only an affective but also a corporeal and sensory dimension.” Herman Rooden­ burg: Beweeglijkheid Embodied: On the Corporeal and Sensory Dimensions of a Famous Emotion Term, in: Dickey/Roodenburg (eds.): The Passions in the Arts (as fn. 4), p. 311, p. 316. Svetlana Alpers: Rembrandt’s Enterprise. The Studio and the Market, Chicago 1988, pp. 34–57. See furthermore Tomaso Montanari: Bernini e Rembrandt, il Teatro e la Pittura. Per una Rilettura degli Autoritratti Berniniani, in: Daniela Gallavotti Cavallero: Bernini e la pittura, Rome 2005, pp. 187–201. With many thanks to Joris van Gastel for drawing my attention to this article. Trans. in: Hendrik J. Horn: The Golden Age Revisited. Arnold Houbraken’s Great Theatre of Netherlandish Painters and Paintresses, vol. 1, Ghent 2000, pp. 22f.; Arnold Houbraken: De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen (as fn. 1), p. 163: “Ook liet hy zyne Discipelen by wylen tot verver­ singe hunner opgespannen gedagten, een schaduwdans vertoonen, of spelen: dienstig niet alleen tot vermaak, maar in zonderheid om hen door zulk een voorwerp,

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This performative character, described as a relaxed activity, nevertheless demanded a corporeal effort. In a similar way, as Roodenburg mentions, Agostino Carracci maintained that “painters should strive to understand their figures through physical imitation, through their own sense of the body. Literally incorporating the postural and gestural repertories of the actors.”33

4. In van Hoogstraten’s shadow dance several figures are depicted, seen from a position high up inside a huge interior (Fig. 8).34 Their movements appear as shadows upon a stretched cloth. The shadows are created by the light of the candle positioned in the left foreground. The persons acting are at the same time beholders of their own shadows. However, they are not alone. Behind the stretched cloth appears a vast theater with an audience. It is looking at the play as if it were watching a movie in which the different, mirror-inverted shadow-images are generated by a constant movement. A figure blurs the boundary between audience and actors by looking behind the cloth and hence directly onto the stage and the performance. This scene summarizes, beyond van Hoogstraten’s epistemological conceptions,35 the importance he attributed to the understanding of bodily movement. This plays a role when the artist is simultaneously involved in a performative action (Closeness-Empathy) and is a beholder of his own actions (Distance-Alienation), a constellation usually involving the presence of a public. Van Hoogstraten’s shadow dance could therefore be understood as a technique corporelle for understanding beweeging. Another narrative about performative techniques in the sense of articulation or expression, which van Hoogstraten used as a pedagogical tool for his students, sheds yet more light upon this notion.36 It again derives from Houbraken, who, like de Gelder, must have been acquainted with similar body techniques37:

33 34 35

36 37

de menigvuldige veranderingen en verlengingen of verkortingen der licht verwisselende gedaanten der schaduwen, (spruitende uit de nabyheid of afstand van ’t licht) te doen kennen en begrypen.” Roodenburg: Beweeglijkheid Embodied (as fn. 30), p. 312. Van Hoogstraten: Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (as fn. 3), pp. 259ff. See Horst Bredekamp: Die Fenster der Monade: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ Theater der Natur und Kunst, Berlin ²2004, pp. 71ff.; Victor Stoichita: Brève  histoire  de l’ombre, Genève 2000, pp. 137f. See Herman Roodenburg: The Eloquence of the Body. Perspectives of Gesture in the Dutch Republic, Zwolle 2004, pp. 115f. Celeste Brusati: Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten, Chicago 1995, pp. 89ff.

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Fig. 8  Samuel van Hoogstraten: Shadowdance, in: Samuel van Hoogstraten: Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst: Anders de Zichtbaere Werelt, Rotterdam 1678, p. 260.

It so happened that one of his pupils showed him [Samuel van Hoogstraten] the sketch of his figure composition [ordonantie] (which every­ one had to do each week) but had given little attention to the proper movements of the figures and just set them down haphazardly. Soon came the pronouncement, ‘Now read the text.’ And then the question, ‘Is that supposed to be the figure who is speaking that?’ If the answer was yes, then his reply was usually, ‘Imagine that I am the other person to whom you must say that and say it to me.’ If the pupil then gave the speech according to the letter of the text, without expression and with his hands in his pockets, or if he spoke as stiffly as a statue, Van Hoogstraten would say, ‘Pockets were made to carry and to keep money from slipping through one’s fingers.’ Then he would immediately get up from his place and let the pupil sit in it, saying, ‘Now I will show you how it is done. Pay attention to the gestures, the stance, and the posture of my body as I speak’ and indicate this (as the proverb says) with finger and thumb […]. In order to give his pupils a firm impression of these gestures and movements and to make them more accustomed to these; he selected the most able of his Disciples […] and gave each a role to play in his [own], or someone else’s

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play: to which they were then permitted to invite their Parents and close acquaintances, as spectators, of the performance.38 The role of theater in this context is based on the action and interaction of bodies with the world. The common feature of an actor and an artist is their performative body. The difference lies in the fact that the actor moves within another role while remaining inside the same medium, namely his body – even if he distances himself visibly from his role (Diderot’s Paradox). The artist, in contrast, has to transfer his bodily experience into another medium, an artifact, which records the traces of his bodily engagement with the material that had to be formed. The visual manifestation of the intrinsic forces of the body becomes a picture. As Pamela Smith has postulated concerning the artists of the early modern period north of the Alps, “they knew nature through the practice of their bodily art.”39 The perception of nature can only be achieved through a bodily engagement.40 Because artists like de Gelder were involved in such plays on stage but were also in the role of the spectator, they were trained simultaneously as creators and beholders of any kind of movement. As beholders they had the possibility of observing at a distance (actio per distans). They trained their own body schema and used it when applying various sensorimotor skills. As spectators

38

39 40

Trans. in: ibid., p. 87; and Horn: The Golden Age Revisited (as fn. 32), p. 22. See Arnold Houbraken: De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen (as fn. 1), pp. 162f.: “‘T is gebeurt dat een van zyn Discipelen de scets van zyn ordonantie (gelyk ieder alle week doen moest) aan hem vertoonde, maar weinig agt gegeven ha dop de regte werkinge der beelden, die hy zoo maar had neergestelt. Straks was hetz eggen, Lees den Text; en gevraagt, Will dat nu het Beeld wezen dat zulks zeit? Antwoorde zy dan Ja, zoo was gemeenlyk zyn zegge: Verbeeld u eens dat ik die andere Persoon ben, daar gy zulks tegen moet zeggen; zeg het tegens my. Als zy dan de reden volgens de letter van de Text, zonder aandoeninge, met de handen in de zak, of als stokbeelden uitspraken, was zyn zeggen: de zakken zyn gemaakt om dat het geld in ’t dragen niet door de vingeren zoude druipen; en stond met een van zyn plaats op en liet den Discipel daar zitten, zeggende: Nu zal ik het u voordoen, le top de Gebaarden, wyze van staan, of buiging des lichaams, als ik spreek, en beduide het (als het spreekwoord zeit) met vinger en duim […]. Om van deze gebaareden, en roeringen die een Konstige Redevoeringe behoorden te verzellen, zyne Leerlingen een vaster indruk te geven, en zg daar aan meerder te doen gewennen; koos hy de bekwaamste van zyne Discipelen uit […] en gaf hun yder een Rol van zyne, of een´s anders Toneelstuk te spelen: tot het welke zyden vermogten hunne Ouders en goede Bekenden te noodigen, tot aenschou­ wers, van het Spel.” Pamela H. Smith: The Body of the Artisan. Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution, Chicago 2004, p. 238. Ibid., p. 239.

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they could even study their own body image. Van Hoogstraten also recommended the use of another trick for making a picture: If one wants to gain honour in this most noble aspect of art, the render­ ing of affects, one must transform oneself entirely into an actor. It is not sufficient just to make a history feebly recognizable […]. You will derive the same benefit from acting out the passions you have in mind, chiefly in front of a mirror, so as to be actor and spectator at the same time.41 The performative nature of such practices is their most significant feature. The force lies in the making and not merely in imagining. It is not productive to understand a depiction only as an illustration of a mental state, rather it must be conceived the other way around: Any action and movement that could fundamentally change a former idea begins with the process of elaboration. Apart from van Hoogstraten’s lesson in sensorimotor techniques, another element permits a closer understanding of de Gelder’s bodily perception with respect to his picture-making, namely Houbraken’s remark that he possessed a mannequin: “as he also has the habit of clothing his dummy from head to toe, and of arranging it in such a guise as he needs, which he then imitates with his brush, or with his thumb and finger.”42 Through the haptic positioning of the 41

42

Van Hoogstraten: Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (as fn. 3), pp. 109f.: “Wilmen nu eer inleggen in dit alleredelste deel der konst, zoo moet men zich zelven geheel in een toneelspeeler hervormen. Ten is niet genoeg, datmen slaeuwelijk een Historye kenbaer make […]. Dezelve baet zalmen ook in t´ uitbeel­ den van diens hartstochten, die gy voorhebt, bevinden, voornaemlijk voor een spiegel, om te gelijk vertooner en aenschouwer te zijn.” Trans. by Weststeijn: The Visible World (as fn. 3), p. 183. Such a recommendation is given also by Franciscus Junius and Gerard de Lairesse, respectively. De Piles is very close to van Hoogstraten in his understanding of Empathy. He sees a potential for the artist in observing mutes and recommends the mirror as a further instrument. See Kirchner: L’expression des passions (as fn. 26), p. 57, p. 116. Trans. in: Horn: The Golden Age Revisited (as fn. 32), p. 539. Houbraken: De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen (as fn. 1), p. 207: “gelyk hy dan ook voor gebruik houd, zynen Leeman van hoofd tot teen te be­­ kleeden, en in zulk een gedaante te zetten, als hy noodig heeft, ’t geen hy dan met het penceel, of met duim en vinger nabootst.” Concerning the usage of the mannequin see: Markus Rath: Die Berliner Gliederpuppe, unpublished master’s thesis, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2008; H. Perry Chapman: The Wooden Body. Representing the Manikin in Dutch Artists Studios, in: Ann-Sophie Lehmann/ Herman Roodenburg (eds.): Body and Embodiment in Netherlandish Art, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 58 (2008), pp. 188–215; Katja Kleinert: Atelier­ darstellungen in der niederländischen Genremalerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, Petersberg 2006, pp. 77–81. In his chapter dedicated to drapery, Sandrart mentions the role of the mannequin as a model that could sometimes even be seductive, http:// ta.sandrart.net/ TA 1675, I, Book 3 (Painting), p. 82 (edition page 169): “Es ist/ in den Gewändern/ zuvörderst der Unterschied zu beobachten: weil deren Form/

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mannequin to show different body movements or the use of draperies (which goes together with social conventions regarding habit), this can be understood as an extended model of the body, with respect to the body schema as well as the body image. It gave an artist like de Gelder the opportunity to keep a certain distance from his own body by working out the different movements of the mannequin with his brush and fingers during his painting performance. In a similar sense, the Rembrandtists made small models in order to create drawings after them from different angles.43 Even the drawing lessons themselves involved a multi-perspectival approach,44 so that if the different drawings of the students had been combined they would have produced a “total view” of the drawn figure, almost as a sculpture with three dimensional qualities.45 Many models in Rembrandt’s workshop were themselves students and took on different roles during the drawing lessons as in a theatrical performance.46 Also the use of a mirror played an important role, as Konstam has shown, because “the multiple images so produced increased his spatial and sculptural grasp of the subject, an aspect of vision in which he excelled.”47 This means that Rembrandt not only thought in terms of vision but also considered the relationship between body and space for conceiving his pictures. He also carried out motoric exercises with his students, so that their hands could achieve the right

43 44 45

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Farben und Falten/ nach Alter/ Stand und Stellung der Personen/ nach dem Männund Weiblichen Geschlecht/ auch nach alt- und neuem Lands-Gebrauch und al modo ganz ungleich sind. Dieses wol zu begreifen/ pfleget man/ nächst fleißiger Beschauung der Lebens/ die so-genannte kleine Wachs-Modellen zu machen/ oder Gliedmänner mit Röcken oder Mänteln von rauher Leinwat oder nassem Papier zu überlegen: welches dann angenehme Falten macht/ und sich wohl erzeigt/ wann mit guter Bescheidenheit in und zu großen Bildern gefolget wird; wiewol man dadurch/ weil die Bewegung manglet/ leichtlich kann verführet werden.” Weststeijn: The Visible World (as fn. 3), pp. 163f. For this practice see: Alexander Perrig: Michelangelo und die Zeichnungswissenschaft. Ein methodologischer Versuch, Frankfurt/M. 1976. There are, in fact, drawings showing this practice. See for instance the Constantijn van Renesse drawing Rembrandt and his Pupils Drawing a Female Nude Model (c. 1650), black chalk, pen and brown ink, brown wash, heightened with white, 18 × 26,6 cm, Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, in: ex. cat.: Old Drawings, New Names. Rembrandt and his Contemporaries, ed. by Peter Schatborn/Leonore van Sloten, Rembrandthuis Amsterdam,Varik 2014, p. 120. Nigel Konstam: Rembrandt’s Use of Models and Mirrors, in: The Burlington Magazine 119 (1977), p. 97. Ibid., p. 97. Van Hoogstraten refers to Giorgione, saying that he used a mirror in order to make things visible from different angles. Van Hoogstraten: Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (as fn. 3), p. 275: “Het verstant van deeze konst gaf aen Giorgione de stourigheyd van staendete houden […] want hy schilderde een naekte figuur, die in zijn werk wel van achteren, maer van d´eene zijde in een spiegel, van d´andere in een blank waepen, en van vooren in een glad afstraelende waeterqueel te zien was.”

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“drive,” as Busch has indicated,48 an ability of extreme importance for their Handeling and the proper depiction of the passions through “affected lines.”

5. Although color and its materiality reveal the objecthood of the picture, through them, the latter becomes enlivened and gains the quality of an agent.49 The same can be said of Handeling, which cannot be wholly controlled by, and is therefore emancipated from the acting producer. It comes back to its maker or beholder as shaped form.50 The intrinsic force of a painting, which can captivate the spectator, is described by van Hoogstraten as “macht over d’aenschouwers” (“power over the spectators”).51 The more moving and active a painting is, the more passive and motionless becomes the beholder in the sense of a “medusa effect.” The natural movement of a picture, depending on its content, evokes different e-motions in the spectators, as remarked by Gerard de Lairesse following Horace.52 This multi-sensoric dimension of a picture, according to van Hoogstraten, is at work when the beholders of a brutal scene, feel the pain with their own body.53 The conflict between picture and beholder, however, is not one-dimensional. Neither does the picture completely control the spectator, nor does the spectator control the picture. It is an interaction that does not require a sovereign. The triad Artist-Picture-Beholder changes its position continuously as in a rotation.54 On the one hand, beholders can be directly affected by pictures through the body schema. On the other hand, their engagement with a picture is always 48 49

50

51 52 53

54

Werner Busch: Wirklich Rembrandt? 400 Jahre nach seiner Geburt gibt der Maler der Forschung noch immer Rätsel auf, in: Der Tagespiegel, 25.6.2006. See Frank Fehrenbach: Kohäsion und Transgression. Zur Dialektik lebendiger Bilder, in: Ulrich Pfisterer/Anja Zimmermann (eds.): Animationen/Transgressionen. Das Kunstwerk als Lebewesen, Berlin 2005, p. 20. Horst Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007, Berlin 2010. This issue is mostly treated in the section “Der intrinsische Bildakt: Form als Form” (“The intrinsic picture act: form as form”, my trans.). Van Hoogstraten: Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (as fn. 3), p. 292. Weber: Der Lobtopos des “lebenden” Bildes (as fn. 8), pp. 206f.; Gerard de Lairesse: Groot Schilderboek, vol. 1, Haarlem ²1740, pp. 135ff. Van Hoogstraten: Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der Schilderkonst (as fn. 3), p. 121: “Pithagoras Leontinus maekte zynen Hinckepoot zoodanig, dat d´ aenschouwers de smerte zijns verzwooren beens meenden te gevoelen.” See for instance Alfred Gell: Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory, Oxford 1998, p. 29. Gell however focuses too much on crude schematic divisions of the interaction between passive and active poles, such as the active spectator against the passive artwork and vice versa. See the critique by Frank Fehrenbach: “Du lebst und thust mir nichts”. Aby Warburg und die Lebendigkeit der Kunst, in: Hartmut Böhme/Johannes Endres (eds.): Der Code der Leidenschaften, Paderborn 2010, pp. 124–145.

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Fig. 9  Daniel Chodowiecki: Kunst Kenntnis – Connoissance des Arts, engraving in: Natürliche und affektierte Handlungen des Lebens. Zweite Folge, 1779. Fig. 10  Daniel Chodowiecki: Kunst Kenntnis – Connoissance des Arts, engraving in: Natürliche und affektierte Handlungen des Lebens. Zweite Folge, 1779.

connected to the knowledge and the dominant interests of the period as well as to the ideologies of the respective society. In his print series “Natural and Affected Actions in Life” (1779), Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki shows two wholly different reactions to one and the same statue, although Flora appears slightly differently in each case (she is smiling at the bourgeois on the left, who is lost in contemplation) (Figs. 9 and 10). These diverging behaviors do not depend on a body schema, but on the body image and the different social conventions of the time, here appearing as a critique in the spirit of the Enlightenment.55 55

Werner Busch: Das sentimentalische Bild: die Krise der Kunst im 18. Jahrhundert und die Geburt der Moderne, Munich 1993, pp. 324ff.; Kirchner: De l’usage des passions (as fn. 28), p. 369; on Chodowiecki in general: Martin Kirves: Das gestochene Argument. Daniel Nikolaus Chodowieckis Bildtheorie der Aufklärung, Berlin 2012.

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Marcell Mauss in Les techniques corporelles combined the body image (hair, face, and limbs as social instances) with the body schema (biologically based bodily processes such as breathing or gesturing). The body follows this notion at the same time as subject, object, and medium.56 This triadic, not static but rotating relation could be applied to a picture: Through the Rembrandtists’ bodily engagement with form as captured by the term Handeling, the artifact “moves” its beholders in different ways.

56

Marcell Mauss: Die Techniken des Körpers, in: id.: Soziologie und Anthropologie, vol. 2, Munich 1975, pp. 199–220, cited in: Erika Fischer-Lichte: Verkörperung/ Embodiment. Zum Wandel einer alten theaterwissenschaftlichen in eine neue kulturwissenschaftliche Kategorie, in: id: Verkörperung, Tübingen 2001, p. 18.

Ulrike Feist

H A P TIC PERCEP TION IN M AT TI A PRETI’S DOU BTING THOM AS (1635/40)

On a rectangular oil painting in transverse format measuring 123 × 173 cm, five male figures are depicted in front of a dark brown background (Fig. 1). Their bodies are truncated by the frame, rendering only their upper bodies visible. The composition is symmetrical; both on the left and on the right two men stand sideways, facing the central figure, who is the only one turned so as to face the viewer. A light source beyond the frame throws a bright spotlight from the upper left-hand corner onto the somber scene, which is mostly kept in hues of blackish-brown.

Fig. 1  Mattia Preti: Doubting Thomas, about 1635/40, oil on canvas, 123 × 173 cm, Genoa, Musei di Strada Nuova, Palazzo Rosso.

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It is evident at first sight that the painting represents Christ with four of his disciples. Light is shed on Christ’s bare, muscular and sinuous upper body and illuminates his right shoulder as well as parts of his arm and chest. The disciple to the left, clad in a blue mantle and a red cloak, is touching Christ’s chest with all ten fingers, causing his skin to stretch down gently, thereby just slightly opening the side wound, into which the disciple gazes with astonishment. The disciple standing in the background to the left has placed his left hand on the right shoulder of Christ. However, he seems to be glancing past the side wound and instead observes the events taking place in the right half of the scene. Christ has bent his left arm in such a way that his hand and palm protrude outwards into the foreground. The disciple diagonally behind him is almost completely veiled in shadow. He is looking at his right index finger, which he has inserted into the nail wound (Fig. 2). Two wounds are visible on Christ’s hand –

Fig. 2  Detail from Fig. 1.

one in the palm, the other in the heel of the hand. They appear to represent both the entry and the exit wound. The finger is entering the wound in the heel of his hand in exactly the same axis as the nail once pierced the skin, as if it were to penetrate flesh once more and exit through the second wound. The disciple on the far right is clenching the heavy cloth of his cloak with his left hand, while his right hand passes under the arm of Christ in a gesture of excitement. With wide eyes and a furrowed brow he is staring alarmed at the finger penetrating Christ’s flesh. Christ himself is observing the events with a weary, but gently smiling expression.

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HAPTIC PERCEPTION IN MATTIA PRETI’S DOUBTING THOMAS

Mattia Preti produced the painting around 1635/40, which hangs in the Palazzo Rosso in Genoa today.1 I will in a moment return to the title – Doubting Thomas – and show that Preti’s composition represents a unique treatment of the subject matter. However, in a first step, I would like to refer briefly to the biblical sources as well as the iconographic tradition of the subject, and subsequently analyze the special haptic aspects of the painting.

Textual Sources Of all four Gospels of the New Testament, merely the Gospel of John mentions the encounter between Christ and Thomas. After Christ’s resurrection, he appeared to his disciples. However, according to John, Thomas was not present during this first appearance (John 20, 19–23); he therefore did not believe the other disciples’ account of the encounter and said to them: “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” (John 20, 25). Eight days later, Christ appeared again to bring the greeting of peace to his disciples. Addressing Thomas, he spoke: “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” (John 20, 27) And Thomas responded: “My Lord and my God!” (John 20, 28). Then Jesus said, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” (John 20, 29) The text of the Gospel does not describe the touching of Christ itself, and hence leaves some uncertainty about the act’s execution. This uncertainty regarding the actual touch led to numerous diverging interpretations in the exegesis of the Gospel of John.2 Augustine of Hippo already distanced himself from the idea of an occurred bodily touch in his commentary on the Gospel of John.3 According to Sabine Schunk-Heller, it is ultimately irrelevant to Augustine whether the recounted “seeing” was in fact a concrete touching of Christ by the doubter since seeing was understood exegetically as a general sense that comprises all others.4 1 2

3

4

Genoa, Musei di Strada Nuova – Galleria di Palazzo Rosso, inv. 338. Concerning the exegesis of the St. Thomas-scenes, see Sabine Schunk-Heller: Die Darstellung des ungläubigen Thomas in der italienischen Kunst bis um 1500 unter Berücksichtigung der lukanischen Ostentatio Vulnerum, Munich 1995, pp. 6–12. See Frank Zöllner: Andrea del Verrocchios “Christus und Thomas” und das Dekorum des Körpers. Zur Angemessenheit in der bildenden Kunst des Quattrocento, in: Herbert Beck/Maraike Bückling/Edgar Lein (eds.): Die Christus-Thomas-Gruppe von Andrea del Verrocchio, Frankfurt/M. 1996, pp. 129–141, here pp. 133–137. See Sabine Schunk-Heller: Zur Ikonographie der Christus-Thomas-Gruppe von Andrea del Verrocchio, in: Beck/Bückling/Lein (eds.): Die Christus-Thomas-Gruppe (as fn. 3), pp. 121–127, p. 122.

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According to the more recent judgment of Glenn W. Most, the phrasing in the Gospel of John implies that an actual touch did not take place: “Thomas’ attempt to found religious faith upon the empirical sense of touch fails utterly: to suppose that Thomas might actually have touched Jesus, and thereby have been brought to belief in his divinity, is to misunderstand not just some detail of John’s account, but its deepest and most fundamental message.”5 Most believes that adequate evidence lies in Christ’s statement in John 20, 29: “Because you have seen me [and not: touched me], you have believed.” This could only mean that Thomas saw, and did not touch.6 A strong haptic counterargument was put forth by Hartmut Böhme, among others: The verification of Christ’s real presence was carried out through the sense of touch; touch, however, was referred to as “seeing.”7 In effect, Thomas quasi saw with his finger. Only the experience of haptic contact could hence have provided sufficient proof of Christ’s divine presence.

Iconographic Trad ition The fact that the moment of actual tactile contact was chosen for the painting despite Augustine’s skeptical comment, shows that this reading of the biblical source was much more tempting for an artistic interpretation and treatment of the subject matter. It is indeed remarkable that, from around the 13th century onward, the concrete depiction of the tactile act became increasingly prominent despite a loss of exegetical interest in the matter among theologians of the Middle Ages.8 The earliest extant Thomas motif can be found on a gravestone relief on the late 4th or early 5th century tomb of St. Celso in S. Maria presso S. Celso in Milan (Fig. 3).9 Both on the early Christian sarcophagus and the example of medieval illumination from the Evangeliary of Otto III from around the year 1000 (Fig. 4), the story of Doubting Thomas is presented as a sequence in the narrative of the resurrection of Christ. Starting in the 13th century, a representational tradition developed in central Italy that brought forth numerous variations on the subject matter well

5 6 7

8 9

Glenn W. Most: Doubting Thomas, Cambridge, MA 2005, p. 58. Ibid. Hartmut Böhme: Der Tastsinn im Gefüge der Sinne. Anthropologische und histo­ rische Ansichten vorsprachlicher Aisthesis, in: Tasten, ed. by Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland GmbH, editorial staff Uta Brandes et al., Göttingen 1996, pp. 185–210, p. 186. See also Zöllner: Andrea del Verrocchios “Christus und Thomas” (as fn. 3), pp. 133f. Zöllner: Andrea del Verrocchios “Christus und Thomas” (as fn. 3), p. 134. See Schunk-Heller: Die Darstellung des ungläubigen Thomas (as fn. 2), p. 13.

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Fig. 3  Anonymous from Pisa: Doubting Thomas, late 4th or early 5th century, gravestone relief on the tomb of St. Celso, Milan, S. Maria dei Miracoli presso S. Celso.

Fig. 4  Master of the Evangeliary of Otto III: Doubting Thomas, end of the 10th century, fol. 251r, detail, Munich, Bavarian State Library.

into the 16th century, while maintaining an overall similar iconographical scheme.10 Duccio’s Doubting Thomas on his Sienese Maestà altar of 1308–1311 (Fig. 5) and Giambattista Cima da Conegliano’s representation of St. Thomas of around 1502–1504 (Fig. 6), today in London’s National Gallery, may serve as 10

See ibid. and also Schunk-Heller: Zur Ikonographie der Christus-Thomas-Gruppe (as fn. 4), pp. 122f.

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Fig. 5  Duccio di Buoninsegna: Doubting Thomas, 1308–1311, Maestà altar (verso), detail, Siena, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. Fig. 6  Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano: Doubting Thomas, about 1502/1504, detail, London, National Gallery. Fig. 7  Andrea del Verrocchio: Doubting Thomas, 1476–1483, Florence, Orsanmichele.

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cases in point.11 Christ is shown among his disciples. Thomas has approached Christ from the left and is thus standing to his right. He is touching the side wound, or rather: he has reached out to touch it. Christ is in the act of opening his garment and has raised his hand for the greeting of peace, or to show the wounds on his hands. In Andrea del Verrocchio’s Christ-and-Thomas group (Fig. 7), the visual representation of the story of St. Thomas is concentrated on the two main protagonists and omits other disciples.12 But even in this example from the field of sculpture, the basic iconographical composition type is easily recognizable. Thomas reaches for the side wound, but does not actually touch it. In view of the strikingly veristic carnality of the sculpture’s open wound, one could, as Zöllner proposes, speak of “haptic distancing,” due to which the depiction of the actual touch becomes unnecessary, if not prevented.13

Caravaggio and the Caravaggists of Utrecht Regarding to Mattia Preti’s painting, the influence of Caravaggio and the Utrecht Caravaggists is striking. In his painting Doubting Thomas of around 1601/02, Caravaggio presented a radically new interpretation in iconographic and stylistic respect (Fig. 8).14 It is the first representation of Thomas in which not all apostles are present but instead only two further disciples, presumably

11

12 13 14

See Schunk-Heller: Die Darstellung des ungläubigen Thomas (as fn. 2), pp. 46f., 69–72. For Cima’s painting see also Steffen Siegel: Der haptische Blick oder: Vom Begreifen der Bilder, in: Marcel Lepper/Steffen Siegel/Sophie Wennerscheid (eds.): Jenseits des Poststrukturalismus? Eine Sondierung, Frankfurt/M. 2005, pp. 127– 147, here pp. 127ff. For more information, Beck/Bückling/Lein (eds.): Die Christus-Thomas-Gruppe (as fn. 3). Zöllner: Andrea del Verrocchios “Christus und Thomas” (as fn. 3), p. 138. For Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas see Andreas Plackinger: Visus und tactus, Affekt und Wahrheit in Caravaggios Ungläubigem Thomas. Überlegungen zum religiösen Sammlerbild im Rom des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts, in: kunsttexte.de 4 (2010), pp. 1–13; Erin Benay: The Word Made Flesh: Sensory Experience and the Doubting Thomas in Italian Renaissance Art, in: Athanor 27 (2009), pp. 43–49, esp. p. 46; Marianne Koos: Kunst und Berührung. Materialität versus Imagination in Caravaggios Gemälde des “Ungläubigen Thomas”, in: Johann Anselm Steiger (ed.): Passion, Affekt und Leidenschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit, vol. 2, Wiesbaden 2005, pp. 1135–1161; Nicola Suthor: Bad touch? Zum Körpereinsatz in Michelangelo/ Pontormos “Noli me tangere” und Caravaggios “Ungläubigem Thomas”, in: Valeska von Rosen/Klaus Krüger/Rudolf Preimesberger (eds.): Der stumme Diskurs der Bilder, Munich 2003, pp. 261–281; Silvia Danesi Squarzina (ed.): Caravaggio in Preußen. Die Sammlung Giustiniani und die Berliner Gemäldegalerie, Milan 2001, pp. 278ff.

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Fig. 8  Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: Doubting Thomas, about 1601/02, Potsdam, Sanssouci Picture Gallery.

Peter and Luke.15 The figures are truncated to form three-quarter portraits, bringing them into close proximity to the viewer. For the first time, Thomas is approaching Christ’s left side and is hence standing to the right. The artist has taken care to avoid all insignia of divinity and transcendence;16 there is neither a greeting of peace nor a gesture of blessing. The penetration of the wound by Thomas’ dirty finger had never before been represented so drastically.17 Not Christ but Thomas has become the central figure of the scene. 15 16 17

See Suthor: Bad touch (as fn. 14), p. 268. See Koos: Kunst und Berührung (as fn. 14), pp. 1139–1142. Plackinger claims that in Italian painting, Caravaggio’s depiction of Thomas was the first to show not merely the moment just before the touch, but the actual, effected touch. See Plackinger: Visus und tactus (as fn. 14), p. 4. Suthor describes the penetration of the wound in Caravaggio’s painting as unillustratively vivid (unanschaulich anschaulich); see Suthor: Bad touch (as fn. 14), p. 270. Mieke Bal refers to the wound as “shockingly surgical”; see Mieke Bal: Quoting Caravaggio. Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, Chicago/London 1999, p. 32. Siegel emphasizes the progression from an act of grasping (“Begreifen”) to an act of penetrating (“Eindringen”); see Siegel: Der haptische Blick (as fn. 11), p. 131. Suthor: Bad touch (as fn. 14), p. 271, and Bal: Quoting Caravaggio (as fn. 17), p. 37, furthermore stress the sexualization and the homoerotic tension of the representation, which is, so they say, not only evoked by the penetration but also by the age difference between the young, beautiful Christ and the elderly apostles who are staring at their object of desire.

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Fig. 9  Hendrick ter Brugghen: Doubting Thomas, 1622, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

While earlier depictions had visualized a narrative that began with the apostles and, by means of Thomas’ outstretched arm, had drawn the viewer’s attention to Christ’s greeting of peace, the figures in Caravaggio’s painting form a circle in which the eye of the beholder wanders from the body of Christ, along the depictions of the apostles, to Thomas, and finally comes to rest on his finger, staring with it into the open wound. The beholder becomes an eyewitness; he observes the scene from the perspective of a potentially present fourth apostle. In reference to Thomas’ strained expression, Thomas Plackinger aptly commented: “Seeing seems to be the apostle’s way to verify the experience of touch, and not vice versa.”18 Even more convincingly, Böhme remarked that Thomas’ finger becomes the true eye, and hence performs the touch that is implicit in “seeing.”19 Hendrick ter Brugghen was one of the so-called Utrecht Caravaggists, a group of artists who spent several years in Rome at the beginning of the 17th century during which time they intensively dealt with the art of Caravaggio.20 18 19 20

Plackinger: Visus und tactus (as fn. 14), p. 9. Böhme: Der Tastsinn im Gefüge der Sinne (as fn. 7), p. 195. For the Utrecht Caravaggists Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerard van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen see Liesbeth M. Helmus: Il carattere olandese del caravaggismo di Utrecht, in: ex. cat.: Caravaggio e l’Europa. Il movimento caravaggesco interna-

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Ter Brugghen’s association with this group becomes evident in his painting of Doubting Thomas of 1622 (Fig. 9), which today can be seen in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.21

Preti’s Special Solution Mattia Preti was born in Calabria in Southern Italy in 1613 and came to Rome in circa 1630, where he lived for 20 years before moving to Naples and later to Malta.22 He produced the painting of St. Thomas around 1635/40, which is to say, a few years after his arrival in Rome.23 It is unknown whether Preti made a stopover in Naples on his way to Rome and hence had already seen works by Caravaggio as well as the Neapolitan Caravaggists, such as Jusepe de Ribera, there.24 However, in Rome, at the latest, he came into direct contact with the original works of Caravaggio as well as of the numerous northern Caravaggists who were active in Rome during the 1620s and 1630s. For example, both Ter Brugghen and Preti produced versions of The Calling of St. Matthew that most certainly were inspired by the immense success of Caravaggio’s composition for

21 22

23

24

zionale da Caravaggio a Mattia Preti, ed. by Vittorio Sgarbi (Milan, Palazzo Reale, 15th October 2005 – 6th February 2006), Milan 2005, pp. 87–97. For Ter Brugghen’s Doubting Thomas see also Suthor: Bad touch (as fn. 14), pp. 275f. For the biography of Mattia Preti and the history of his œuvre, see Bernardo De Dominici: Vita del Cavalier F. Mattia Preti detto il Cavalier Calabrese, in: id.: Vite de’ Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti Napoletani, vol. 3, Naples 1743, pp. 314–388; John T. Spike (ed.): Mattia Preti. Catalogo ragionato dei dipinti. Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Florence 1999, pp. 13–21; Mariella Utili: Mattia Preti, caravaggesco sui generis, in: Sgarbi (ed.): Caravaggio e l’Europa (as fn. 20), pp. 117–123; Mariella Utili: Lo ‘Stile plasticoluminoso’, eclettico, di Mattia Preti, in: ex. cat.: Mattia Preti: tra Roma, Napoli e Malta, (Naples, Museo di Capodimonte, 28th March – 6th June 1999), ed. by Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Napoli e Provincia, Naples 2003, pp. 27–61. Utili dates the arrival of Preti in Rome to the mid-1630s, see ibid., p. 28. Leone, however, suspects that Preti was already present in Rome during the second half of the 1620s. See Giorgio Leone: Mattia Preti, pittore di cardinali. Per una storia della fortuna collezionistica del Cavalier Calabrese, in: ex. cat.: Le stanze del Cardinale. Caravaggio, Guido Reni, Guercino, Mattia Preti, ed. by Vittorio Sgarbi/Stefano Papetti (Caldarola, Palazzo dei Cardinali Pallotta, 23rd May – 12th November 2009), Cinisello Balsamo 2009, pp. 49–61, p. 50. The painting is not dated; the precise order in which he produced his early works in Rome cannot be determined with certainty. See Spike (ed.): Mattia Preti (as fn. 22), p. 15. See Nicola Spinosa: Mattia Preti e il barocco a Napoli, in: Mattia Preti: tra Roma, Napoli e Malta (as fn. 22), pp. 15–25, p. 15. Furthermore, as Spike has argued, the influence of Bolognese painters, such as Guercino, can be found in his works. See Spike (ed.): Mattia Preti (as fn. 22), p. 143.

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the Contarelli Chapel in S. Luigi dei Francesi in Rome.25 In the 1630s and 1640s, Preti rose to being one of the best-represented artists in Roman collections. To this day, his works are part of the collections of the families Aldobrandini, Barberini, Colonna, Pallavicini, Pamphilj, Sacchetti and Spada. Although Mattia Preti’s representation of St. Thomas (Fig. 1) is not quite as drastic, the influence of Caravaggio and the Caravaggists is evident. The Chiaroscuro, the diagonal spotlight, the dark hues, the arrangement of figures that, in part, stand with their backs to the viewer, the intimate proximity, the plasticity, and the physiognomy of the figures with their beards and furrowed brows mark clear parallels. However, one iconographic particularity in Preti’s painting catches the eye: One apostle tentatively approaches the side wound with his hands while another apostle digs his finger into the wound of the hand. This raises the question as to which of them is Thomas? As the previous account of the iconography of St. Thomas should have made clear, Thomas is traditionally shown in the act of touching the side wound, or otherwise reaching out to touch it. Sabine Schunk-Heller has pointed to five depictions of St. Thomas dating to the year 1500 or earlier, which, instead of bearing the title Doubting Thomas, should more appropriately be called Ostentatio vulnerum.26 The textual source, Schunk-Heller argues, is not the Gospel of John (20, 24–29), but of St. Luke, namely the inspection of Christ’s wounds by the disciples, of which Luke gives an account (Luke 24, 36–40). When Christ appeared to his disciples after his resurrection, they initially believed him to be a ghost (Luke 24, 36–37). Consequently, he spoke to them: “Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” (Luke 24, 39) When he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet (Luke 24, 40). Luke does not explicitly mention Thomas, but instead refers to the community of disciples. What is at

25

26

For Preti’s painting The Calling of St. Matthew from about 1635, today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, see Spike (ed.): Mattia Preti (as fn. 22), p. 356. For Ter Brugghen’s painting The Calling of St. Matthew from about 1620, today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre, see Helmus: Il carattere olandese del caravaggismo di Utrecht (as fn. 20), p. 94. Other works by Preti that betray the strong influence of Caravaggio are, for example, The Concert (Madrid, Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza) and Cardsharps (private collection); see Mattia Preti: tra Roma, Napoli e Malta (as fn. 22), pp. 78f., 82f. For Preti’s half-figure history paintings, see Sandra Gianfreda: Caravaggio, Guercino, Mattia Preti. Das halbfigurige Historienbild und die Sammler des Seicento, Emsdetten/Berlin 2005, pp. 62–67. See Schunk-Heller: Die Darstellung des ungläubigen Thomas (as fn. 2), pp. 90–133. The Ostentatio vulnerum in the Gospel of Luke should not be confounded with the Imago pietatis, in which Christ, the “Man of Sorrows,” shows the beholder his wounds. See ibid., p. 131.

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Fig. 10  School of Giovanni di Balduccio from Pisa: Ostentatio vulnerum, after 1336, relief on the gravestone of Cardinal Luca Fieschi, Genoa, Museo Diocesano d’Arte Sacra, Cloister of S. Lorenzo.

stake is the collective act of doubting; however, the disciples are not shown in their doubt but in their overcoming of doubt.27 An example for such an Ostentatio vulnerum can be found in the 14th century relief on the gravestone of Cardinal Luca Fieschi in the cathedral San Lorenzo in Genoa (Fig. 10).28 Thomas is reaching for Christ’s side wound with his hand while three other apostles have placed their fingers immediately beside the wounds in his hands and feet in order to feel them. Another apostle approaches the wound on Christ’s right foot with his lips, wanting to kiss it. But even here the apostle Thomas touches the side wound, and not the nail wound in the hand. Mattia Preti’s painting is evidently a blending of the two different accounts from the Gospel of John and Luke. I was not able to find any other examples that likewise neither fully relate to the visual canon of Doubting Thomas nor comply completely with the iconographic type of the Ostentatio vulnerum. Considering the biblical source, the passage cited earlier from the Gospel of John was most certainly the decisive one for Preti, namely when Thomas says: “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where 27 28

See ibid., p. 110. See ibid., pp. 120ff.

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the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” (John 20, 25) The fundamental iconographic scheme for depictions of St. Thomas consisted in the touching of the side wound, but Preti’s choice fell on the touching of the wound in Christ’s hand. In effect, Thomas is doubtlessly meant to be the disciple who is digging his finger into the wound. In the sparse literature on Preti’s painting, the title is given as Doubting Thomas.29 At the Palazzo Rosso in Genoa, where the painting hangs today, the plate below the picture reads Christ appears to the disciples. On the museum’s website, the title is noted as Christ appears to the disciples/Doubting Thomas.30 This uncertainty with regard to the painting’s title is easily explained by Preti’s amalgamation of the two distinct biblical narrations within one depiction.31 Furthermore, scholars may have been hesitant to give the painting the title Doubting Thomas because the face of the main protagonist is veiled in shadow. Although it seems plausible iconographically, in view of the story of St.  Thomas, to show the resurrected Christ in bright light while doubting Thomas stands in shadow, it is nevertheless remarkable that – apart from the tip of his nose – solely the hand of Thomas is illuminated. However, precisely this detail makes Preti’s painting even stronger with regard to the question concerning haptic pictures.

The Haptic Picture 32 The apostle Thomas owes his pictorial existence to his touching hand, which is brightly illuminated, as if caught by a spotlight. In contrast to Caravaggio, Preti abstains from a drastic portrayal of the wound. His effects are of a more subtle kind: In a compositional line reaching from the tip of Thomas’ nose and along his outstretched forefinger, the already described dynamism develops, which discharges in the finger’s penetration of the wound in the heel of the hand in a

29

30 31 32

See Spike (ed.): Mattia Preti (as fn. 22), p. 143; Sgarbi (ed.): Caravaggio e l’Europa (as fn. 20), p. 480. In his biography of Preti, Bernardo De Dominici mentions two representations of Doubting Thomas, however, he adds both times that Thomas’ finger was penetrating the side wound: “[…] il medesimo Redentore, che si fa porre un dito nella piaga del Costato da S. Tommaso Apostolo per accertarlo della sua Resurrezione“, see De Domenici: Vita del Cavalier F. Mattia Preti (as fn. 22), p. 339; “[…] l’incredulo Apostolo S. Tommaso, che pone le dita nel Costato del Salvatore”, see ibid., p. 375. Hence, the picture from Genoa is not mentioned. See www.museidigenova.it. This amalgamation is also mentioned in Sgarbi (ed.): Caravaggio e l’Europa (as fn. 20), p. 480. On the haptic picture, see the fundamental essay collection Markus Rath/Jörg Trempler/Iris Wenderholm (eds.): Das haptische Bild. Körperhafte Bilderfahrung in der Neuzeit, Berlin 2013 (Actus et Imago 7).

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Fig. 11  Mattia Preti: Doubting Thomas, about 1656/60, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

way that suggests its complete piercing of the flesh of the hand and subsequent exiting through the wound in the palm. The line continues along the illuminated, extended fingers of Christ. The effect evoked by the finger about to penetrate the body could be described with the words of Frank Fehrenbach as “aesthetic surplus” (“ästhetischer Überschuss”), which emanates from the painting.33 Incidentally, Preti later also painted several pictures of Doubting Thomas that comply with the traditional representational canon, in which Thomas touches the side wound, among them a painting of 1656/60 (Fig. 11), which today hangs in

33

Frank Fehrenbach: Kohäsion und Transgression. Zur Dialektik lebendiger Bilder, in: Ulrich Pfisterer/Anja Zimmermann (eds.): Animationen, Transgressionen. Das Kunstwerk als Lebewesen, Berlin 2005, pp. 1–40, p. 18.

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Fig. 12  Mattia Preti: Doubting Thomas, 1675, Valletta, National Museum of Fine Arts.

the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and a painting of 1675, which is presently in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Valletta, Malta (Fig. 12).34 In the painting of around 1635/40 from Genoa, the story of St. Thomas indeed provides the narrative frame, but the actual theme seems to be the haptic encounter. The light in the painting mainly falls onto the skin of the figures – the largest tactile organ of the human body.35 The smooth skin of the right apostle’s bald patch and his furrowed forehead, the muscles and tendons of Christ’s naked upper body are almost haptically perceptible for the beholder. After his crucifixion and resurrection Christ becomes tangible, touchable in his fleshly form. In addition to the skin itself, the theatrical lighting highlights the body’s foremost organ of touch: the hand. Altogether seven hands form the painting’s center of focus, five of which stand in tactile contact with skin. One hand of the 34 35

See Spike (ed.): Mattia Preti (as fn. 22), pp. 342f., 356. For the terms for skin and flesh in Italian art theoretical treatises from the 15th to 17th century, see Daniela Bohde: “Le tinte delle carni.” Zur Begrifflichkeit für Haut und Fleisch in italienischen Kunsttraktaten des 15. bis 17. Jahrhunderts, in: Daniela Bohde/Mechthild Fend (eds.): Weder Haut noch Fleisch. Das Inkarnat in der Kunstgeschichte, Berlin 2007, pp. 41–63. The term “flesh” was central to the art theoretical discourse between 1400 and 1700. See ibid., p. 42.

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disciple to the far right is clutching the fabric of his garment while his other hand reaches into the empty space above the bottom edge as if, in his excitement, he were reaching towards the viewer. Also the fingers of Christ seem to reach out of the painting’s frame. The fingertips, with their high density of sensitive tactile receptors, are brightly illuminated. The physical sense of touch was generally considered the lowest, brutish sense. However, by reference to a sermon given by Carlo Borromeo in 1584, Erin Benay was able to show that even leading representatives of the Counter Reformation did not condemn the tactile sense, but rather “urged the faithful to use their senses, just as Thomas did, to imagine Christ’s suffering.”36 In his sermon, Borromeo demanded: “Put your hand into his side, and you will understand how much God is horrified by the excesses of flesh, by cupidity, vanity, pride, impurities […]. Put your hand into his side and you will recognize how beautiful virtue is.”37 This citation spells out Borromeo’s reading of the story of St. Thomas: The haptic touch purifies carnal lapses.38 Tactile inquiry is a source of spiritual truth and essential for salvation. With respect to Caravaggio’s representation of St. Thomas, Marianne Koos has stated that, by virtue of its sleek surface, a “noli me tangere” is inscribed in the painting.39 For Koos, the key to Caravaggio’s composition lies in the prominent accentuation of Christ’s skin, the immaculate appearance of which reminds the viewer of the painting’s canvas.40 The painting points to its materiality as a painting and hence also to the possibilities and limits of painting. The touch displayed in the picture is transformed in the recipient through feelings of disgust or pain, which are aroused in the beholder as a result of the evocation of tactile experiences – touch is transformed into a state of being touched affectively.41

36 37 38 39

40 41

Benay: The Word Made Flesh (as fn. 14), p. 45. Cited in Benay: The Word Made Flesh (as fn. 14), p. 46. See Most: Doubting Thomas (as fn. 5), pp. 152ff. See Benay: The Word Made Flesh (as fn. 14), pp. 46f. See Koos: Kunst und Berührung (as fn. 14), pp. 1149f. For another detailed account see Marianne Koos: Haut als mediale Metapher in der Malerei von Caravaggio, in: Bohde/Fend (eds.): Weder Haut noch Fleisch (as fn. 35), pp. 65–85. See Koos: Kunst und Berührung (as fn. 14), p. 1146; Koos: Haut als mediale Metapher (as fn. 39), pp. 68, 73. “Vision of another person being touched automatically activates the cortical network of areas that are normally involved in the experience of being touched.” David Freedberg/Vittorio Gallese: Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience, in: Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11 (2007), pp. 197–203, p. 201. See also Plackinger: Visus und tactus (as fn. 14), pp. 6–9.

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When Koos however writes that painting is only capable of evoking bodily and affective experiences through the eye and when she claims that ­Caravaggio restricted the reception of his artworks to the visual sense,42 she is disregarding the fact that beholders never only see with their eyes. As the eyes are always integrated into the organismic totality of the body, sight must be a whole-bodily process, which, just like haptic touch, always stands in inextricable connection with the movements of the entire body. The fact that Preti’s painting, which also does not show any visible traces of the paintbrush, is by no means limited to the visual sense, but instead is concerned with materiality and embodiment, should have become evident by now. It becomes clear that painting neither won nor lost the alleged paragone-competition between the different artistic media in the Early Modern era; much rather, the relationship between the media must be understood as a competitive collaboration (“Mitstreit”) that spurred the artists to greatest artistic achievements in all fields and which expressed itself in the tension between the painted surface and the corporeal effects of the painting.43 Even Aristotle was already convinced that seeing is just another manner of touching.44 And just like touching, seeing is an active, explorative process. In his De Anima, which is founded upon an analogy between thought and touch, Aristotle rejected the Platonic interpretation of thinking as a kind of seeing.45 “The mind rather grasps than sees,” as Stanley H. Rosen put it in a nutshell.46 To Aristotle, the sense of touch was the lowest, but at the same time also the most fundamental of all five senses.47 It is bound up with the most woeful and the

42

43 44

45 46 47

Koos: Kunst und Berührung (as fn. 14), pp. 1150f. Also Plackinger interprets Cara­ vaggio’s picture as a demonstration of the power of painting and of seeing. See Plackinger: Visus und tactus (as fn. 14), p. 9. See the elaborate essay collection Joris van Gastel/Yannis Hadjinicolaou/Markus Rath (eds.): Paragone als Mitstreit, Berlin 2013 (Actus et Imago 11). See Stanley H. Rosen: Thought and Touch. A Note on Aristotle’s “De Anima”, in: Phronesis 6 (1961), pp. 127–137, p. 132. See also Richard Sorabji: Body and Soul in Aristotle, in: Philosophy 49 (1974), pp. 63–89, p. 88: “sight, which is the function of eyes, and of touch”. See Rosen: Thought and Touch (as fn. 44), p. 129. Ibid, p. 132, fn. 6. For the discussion of Aristotle in relationship to the sense of touch see Elizabeth D. Harvey: Introduction: “The Sense of All Senses”, in: id. (ed.): Sensible Flesh. On Touch in Early Modern Culture, Philadelphia 2003, pp. 1–21, here pp. 4f., 11f.; Cynthia Freeland: Aristotle on the Sense of Touch, in: Amélie Oksenberg Rorty/Martha C. Nussbaum (eds.): Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, Oxford 1992, pp. 227–249; David Summers: The Judgment of Sense. Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics, Cambridge 1987. I thank Tullio Viola for valuable information regarding Aristotle’s De Anima.

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most enjoyable experiences of pain and lust.48 On the one hand, it was considered indistinct, since it cannot be localized in a single sensory organ, on the other, it was believed to be the most determinate, because non-deceiving sense, armed against deception through its immediacy. For Aristotle, this trait follows from the fact that flesh is the medium of touch, and the sense of touch perceives through itself.49 For the biological existence of man as well as of any other kind of creature, the sense of touch is constitutive, in Aristotle’s view; without it, life is impossible.50 However, according to his theory, man outmatches animals with regard to the exactitude and delicacy of his tactile sense, and it is to this superior tactile discrimination that Aristotle attributes man’s superior intelligence.51 Elizabeth Harvey’s comment in reference to Aristotle, namely that “touch is located wherever skin is – indeed throughout the body, and localized with special intensity in particular areas”52 like the hands (and for Aristotle the hand was “the instrument of all instruments”53) – seems equally well tailored to Preti’s painting. In its almost obsessive accentuation of skin and hands, Preti’s depiction of St. Thomas is a thoroughly haptic picture; he incorporated the very notions and effects in his painting that the theory of picture act and embodiment has recently pointed out.54

48

49 50 51 52 53 54

See Hans Körner: Schmerz – Lust – Erkenntnis. Auguste Clésingers Femme piquée par un serpent und Gustave Courbets Femme au perroquet als Allegorien des Tastsinns, in: Andrea Gottdang/Regina Wohlfahrt (eds.): Mit allen Sinnen. Sehen, Hören, Schmecken, Riechen und Fühlen in der Kunst, Leipzig 2010, pp. 85–104. De Anima, 423a, 435a. De Anima, 434b, 435b. De Anima, 421a. Harvey: Introduction (as fn. 47), p. 21. De Anima, 432a. For a detailed account, see Horst Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007, Berlin 2010 as well as his article in the present volume.

Stefan Trinks

THE CATHEDR AL OF SA NTI AGO DE COMPOSTEL A AS A TACTILE THE ATER

Fig. 1  José de Vega y Verdugo, Canon of Santiago: Drawing of the Romanesque facade with monumental stairway before Baroque alteration, 17th century, Santiago de Compostela.

In the 12th century, the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela was the biggest pilgrim church in the world (Fig. 1). With men exposing phalli and women presenting their vulvas as corbels on the south portal, it was, more than that, an exceptional one.1 A belt of extremely animated stone figures runs around the 1

For the thriving power of eroticism especially along the pilgrimage roads see for instance Horst Bredekamp: Wallfahrt als Versuchung – San Martin de Frómista,

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entire church.2 Not only do they flock together at the portals, but even on the stone rooftops of the chapel’s choir life-size witches are riding on lions or wild beasts.3 In their liveliness and in their ability to represent non-objective sentiments, in their wild and dangerous corpo-reality, Santiago de Compostela’s pilgrim church becomes the picture act cathedral par excellence.4 Santiago de Compostela was neither an everyday-church nor a minster with almighty canons.5 Even though it was the archbishop’s seat, it was not the classical cathedral of a bishopric because Santiago’s powerful and ambitious bishops were clever enough to use the glory of the pilgrim church to hide from Roman ecclesiastical influence and to maintain their independence.6 Their cathedral and the artists working for this “state of exception” pilgrim church had one main purpose: to impress pilgrims and to stage unrepeatable and unforgettable moments with the help of picture acts, in short: to make history.7

2

3

4

5

6

7

in: Clemens Fruh et al. (eds.): Kunstgeschichte – aber wie?, Berlin 1989, pp. 221– 258, Anthony Weir/James Jerman: Images of Lust. Sexual Carvings in Medieval Churches, London 1986; and Angel García del Olmo: Erótico en Cantabria, Palencía 1988. Important for the different concepts of animation is Spyros Papapetros: On the Animation of the Inorganic. Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life, Chicago 2012, esp. the chapters “Animation Victims: An Abridged History of Animated Response” and “Animated History – The Movement of Accessories”, pp. 1–27 and 31–69. Cf. ex. cat.: Compostela and Europe. The Story of Diego Gelmírez, ed. by Manuel Castiñeiras González, Milano 2010, pp. 18f; Stefan Trinks: Antike und Avantgarde. Skulptur am Jakobsweg im 11. Jahrhundert. Jaca – León – Santiago (Actus et Imago 4), Berlin 2012, pp. 25–26. Horst Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007, Berlin 2011; see also the lucid articles in John M. Krois: Bildkörper und Körperschema. Schriften zur Verkörperungstheorie ikonischer Formen, ed. by Horst Bredekamp/Marion Lauschke, Berlin 2011 (Actus et Imago 2); and for foundational texts regarding the philosophy of embodiment see Joerg Fingerhut/Rebekka Hufendiek/Markus Wild (eds.): Philosophie der Verkörperung – Grundlagentexte zu einer aktuellen Debatte, Berlin 2013. Manuel Castiñeiras González: La catedral de Santiago de Compostela (1075–1122): obra maestra del románico europeo, in: Pedro Luis Huerta (ed.): Las siete maravillas del románico español, Aguilar de Campoo 2009, pp. 227–289. Around 1100, the extremely ambitious archbishop Diego Gelmirez even wanted to become pope and tried to install Santiago as a Second Rome, cf. Richard A. Fletcher: Saint James’ Catapult. The Life and Times of Diego Gelmirez of Santiago de Compostela, New York 1984. As a popular medieval metaphor regarded “the church as the body of Christ”, it is noteworthy, that a cathedral functioned as a kind of meta-body, cf. Adolf Katzenellenbogen: The Sculptural Programs of Chartres Cathedral, New York 21964, p. 73; Beat Brenk: Der Concepteur und der Adressat oder: Von der Verhüllung der Botschaft, in: Joachim Heinzle (ed.): Modernes Mittelalter. Neue Bilder einer popu­ lären Epoche, Frankfurt/M. et al. 1994, pp. 431–450; Tanja Klemm: Bildphysiologie. Wahrnehmung und Körper in Mittelalter und Renaissance, Berlin 2013.

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To fully outline this exceptional function and to reflect further on the church, its evolution is first to be recapitulated.8 Santiago de Compostela is the only apostolic grave in Europe north of the Alps (apart from the grave of Saint Mathew in Trier, who cannot count as one of the signature-apostles and whose veneration does not match the veneration of the others). The significance of the pilgrimage route to Rome, having been the most important pilgrimage in the Roman church over centuries next to the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, is surprising in view of the fact that Christ had never been to Rome and Peter’s relics were not even on display. The immense popularity of Santiago is even more astonishing, however, as it lured thousands of people every year to the end of the thenknown world – Capo Finisterre, the literal end post of the Christian civilization, being only a few miles away.9 Its attraction was even more remarkable as Santiago had been only a small necropolis in the 9th century, with a humble church built on a plain field. Legend has it that a star marked the location of James’ grave, Campus Stellae – therefore every pilgrim could feel like one of the biblical Magi following the star. Starting in the second half of the 11th century, and especially in the 12th century, the cathedral of Santiago was erected as it stands today and embellished with a comprehensive set of extraordinary artworks.10 Rumors about this marvel spread like wildfire through the Christian world. As the oral culture of the time was all about rumors, soon more and more pilgrims came. In result, this characteristic mixture of ornate legends and exceptional picture act-artworks made Compostela’s cathedral the most important pilgrimage center of the Christian world up to the present.11 The period in which the cathedral was built coincides with what English historians of the 1920’s coined the “Renaissance of the 12th Century.”12 Its relentless and undying hunger for individuality in so many respects outshines, at times, the later Italian Renaissance.13 It is hardly a coincidence then that this early aesthetic awakening of individuality was born, of all places, in the pilgrimage   8

  9 10

11 12 13

Recommendable as a concise introduction to the vast literature on Santiago’s cathedral is Jens Rüffer: Die Kathedrale von Santiago de Compostela (1075–1211). Eine Quellenstudie, Freiburg i. Br. 2010. Klaus Herbers: Der Jakobskult des 12. Jahrhunderts und der “Liber Sancti Jacobi”, Wiesbaden 1984. Serafín Moralejo Álvarez: On the Road: The Camino de Santiago, in: The Art of Medieval Spain, A.D. 500–1200. Ex. cat.: Metropolitan Museum of Art New York 1993, ed. by Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1993, pp. 175–183. Cf. Trinks, Antike und Avantgarde (as fn. 3), p. 1. Charles Homer Haskins: The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, Cambridge 1927. Adam J. Kosto: Reconquest, Renaissance and the Historians of Iberia, ca. 1000– 1200, in: Thomas F. X. Noble/John van Engen (eds.): European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century (Notre Dame Conferences in Medieval Studies), Notre Dame (IND) 2012, pp. 93–116, p. 101.

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city of Santiago.14 One should not forget that, as in Rome, the destination of the pilgrims’ long walks was dedicated to a common man. All of these gigantic and majestic churches were built in the name of “Peter”, a fisherman, or “James”, another son of a fisherman and hard laborer, a fact that must have spoken to the pilgrims, the absolute majority of whom came from humble backgrounds themselves.15 Nearly everywhere in Santiago apostles and saints could be encountered face to face, all of whom the pilgrims had met before on their route through Europe. Along this route were some St. Mary’s or Savior Churches but mainly churches dedicated to popular saints who served as guardian angels for pilgrims on their way to Santiago.16 Literally step-by-step the saints prepared them for what was awaiting them in Spain, an iconic acquaintance with popular Christian legends.17 The official function of this harrowing trip to the end of the world (often from one end to the other, as sources tell us of pilgrims coming from Novgorod in Russia) was walking to the cross in Christ’s footsteps: most people longed for transcendence through suffering.18 Documents of the 12th century refer to the western assembly hall of Santiago as Galilaea.19 The term stems from the liturgy of the time, in which a procession started the mass. The procession symbolically re-enacted the apostles’ path to Galilaea where they were to meet the resurrected Christ. “I will proceed you to Galilaea”, Jesus said to Peter (Mt 26,32), which in the Middle Ages caused Galilaea to be interpreted as a transitory space between life and death, between crucifixion and resurrection.20 Interestingly enough, even our modern 14

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18 19 20

Interestingly enough, Hennig Brinkmann, one of the main promoters of the “Renaissance of the 12th Century” besides Haskins, wrote his opus magnum about liturgical plays, in which whole city communities, instead of just priests, performed; cf. Hennig Brinkmann: Zum Ursprung des liturgischen Spieles, Bonn 1929. Still worth reading for a different sociology of the Middle Ages is Aaron J. Gurjewitsch: Stumme Zeugen des Mittelalters. Weltbild und Kultur der einfachen Menschen, Weimar et al. 1997. Klaus Herbers: Der Jakobsweg. Mit einem mittelalterlichen Pilgerführer unterwegs nach Santiago de Compostela (Schriftenfolge des Europa-Zentrums Tübingen). Tübingen 41991. For the not only etymological relationship between the early verse romances, the developing chanson de geste, and Romanesque Art see Serafin Moralejo Álvarez: Artes fígurativas y artes literarias en la España medieval: románico, romance y roman, in: Boletín de la Asociación Europea de Profesores de Español 32–33 (1985), pp. 61–70. Barbara Haab: Pilgerfahrt – Weg und Bewegung, in: Archiv für Religionspsychologie 23 (2000), pp. 144–163, p. 146. Cf. Rüffer: Die Kathedrale von Santiago de Compostela (as fn. 8), p. 48. Kristina Krüger: Architecture and Liturgical Practice: The Cluniac Galilaea, in: Nigel Hiscock (ed.): The White Mantle of the Churches. Architecture, Liturgy, and Art around the Millenium (International Medieval Research; 10), Turnhout 2003, pp. 138–159, here especially pp. 149ff.: “The name galilaea – A clunic particular”

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word gallery/galleria (“hall with columns” like the Greek stoa), as referring to a hall with paintings and people hanging around, derives from this transformation of an ancient biblical landscape, which was considered to be thoroughly pagan, into a space in ancient Roman churches where the not yet baptized could gather; in the Middle Ages this became the term for the western part of churches where the pilgrims paused before entering.21 At the end of their journeys the pilgrims often literally looked like Christ on the Cross: haggard and half dead.22 After climbing a high castle-like but Romanesque stairwell (Fig. 1) into the entrance hall they finally found themselves in front of a larger-than-life figure of James sitting on a throne (Fig. 2). James with his right hand resting on his stick under a nimbus made of gemstones looks even more impressive than Christ as the Man of Sorrows in the tympanum above him. This rivalry is not meant to be ironic, though: No one but this imposing James can welcome every pilgrim as one of his kind and this way serve as a mediator to heaven. He honors the pilgrims through his splendor, so that every single Christian is in a way accepted into the community of saints. This stony sacra conversatione of holy figures is rendered cunningly authentic through the applied colors and their wavy clothes,23 competing in vitality and dynamism with the real-life pilgrims themselves. All these traits of extreme authenticity should not be confused with realism, however. Their faces seem to be inspired by Ancient Greek theatre masks (Fig. 3a, b) and through this hyperbole they strangely seem to come to life not less but even more. As in a burning glass the whole palette of human

21 22

23

because the term galilaea first occurs in the Liber tramitis of Cluny II (between 1027–1048) and because Santiago was heavily influenced by Cluny. Friedrich Kluge: Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, Berlin/New York 231999, p. 295. The fact that Santiago’s Christ as Man of Sorrows at the main portal, which was the first image the entering pilgrims saw, is surrounded by angels holding the Arma Christi brings to mind Robert Suckale’s words that the theme of the Arma Christi leads directly to the core of medieval seeing and meditation practice, cf. Robert Suckale, Arma Christi. Überlegungen zur Zeichenhaftigkeit mittelalterlicher Andachtsbilder, in: Städel-Jahrbuch N. F. 6 (1977), pp. 177–208, p. 192: Images of the Arma Christi were widely used as a meditative stimulus, designed to arouse compassion with the suffering and the death of Jesus. The aim of such scenes was to invoke in the viewer similar pain and agony as that depicted, as if he or she were recalling and reliving a personal memory. For some excellent insights and new photographs showing the original colors of the sculptures after their restoration see Francisco Prado-Vilar: La culminación de la Catedral románica: El maestro Mateo y la escenografía de la Gloria y el Reino, in: Enciclopedia del Románico II: A Coruña, ed. by Fundación Santa María la Real, Aguilar de Campoo 2013, pp. 989-1018, who emphasizes the transformation of the cathedral into a royal monument for great events like coronations, knighting ceremonies, etc.

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Fig. 2  Magister Matheus: St. James, 1188, Santiago de Compostela, Pórtico de la Gloria.

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Fig. 3a  Magister Matheus: Prophets Jeremiah, Daniel, Jesaiah, and Moses, 1188, Santiago de Compostela, Pórtico de la Gloria.

emotions is gathered in this hall as in a scientific compendium about what man is and can do. Their gestures seem momentarily frozen and not made out of stone, they display the cosmos of human emotions. Instead of standing as truthful representations, their theatrical over-accentuation lends the stone-figures actual depth: “Only the exaggerations are true”, as Theodor W. Adorno put it.24 Here, an overdose leads to ecstatic truth. It is evident that the “Renaissance of the 12th Century” did not care about reproducing nature or “reality” and it should be clear that Santiago was not an isolated case in following this new style. Its works can be compared with other sculptures of the 12th century, for example the monumental relief of the Raising of Lazarus at Chichester Cathedral (Fig. 4a, b). As in Santiago, the expressive 24

“Aber nur die Übertreibung ist wahr”, vgl. Max Horkheimer/Theodor W. Adorno: Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, Frankfurt/M 1979, p. 106.

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Fig. 3b  Detail from Fig. 3a: Jesaiah.

facial features of the still mourning women on the upper left hand side seem influenced by Greek Tragedy masks.25 Deeply engraved into their faces are the lines of sorrow on the forehead and the cheek, each mouth is pointed as if about to cry. Such theater masks were passed down to the Middle Ages through the

25

Of the vast literature on the decisive influence of liturgical plays in the Middle Ages see especially Clifford Davidson/John H. Stroupe (eds.): Drama in the Middle Ages. Comparative and Critical Essays, New York 1991; Richard B. Donovan: The Liturgical Drama in Medieval Spain, Toronto 1958; Gunilla Iversen (ed.): Sapientia et eloquentia. Meaning and Function in Liturgical Poetry, Music, Drama and Biblical Commentary in the Middle Ages, Turnhout 2009; and Thomas Kirchner: Raumerfahrung im geistlichen Spiel des Mittelalters (Europäische Hochschul­ schriften/30; 20), Frankfurt/M. 1985. For the medieval tradition of Terence’s picture act parodies mirroring daily live see Florentine Mütherich and Joachim E. Gaehde: Carolingian Painting, New York 1976, p. 21: “The plays of Terence survived Antiquity largely because of the purity of their Latin. Quoted even by the Church Fathers, they were much admired during the Middle Ages, as is evidenced by the survival of about a dozen illustrated manuscripts dating from the ninth to the twelfth century. While the earliest copy of about 820 (Rome Biblioteca Vaticana, vat. Lat. 3868) faithfully reproduces the style and painting technique of the miniatures of its fifth century model, the animated pen and ink drawings of this later manuscript from Reims evoke the play’s discourse in a more lively and expressive manner by exaggerating the players’ gestures.”

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Fig. 4a  Detail from Fig. 4b: Mourning women. Fig. 4b  Anonymous Master: Raising of Lazarus, about 1140, relief, Chichester Cathedral.

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plays of the Roman author Terence (Fig. 5) who was widely read in medieval schools at the time.26 Illustrated copies of his works were powerful and engaging enough to be understood even by the illiterate.27 At the same time the distance between pilgrims and sculptures was brought to disappear. The saints have come down from heaven, they can be faced and spoken to almost at eye level. The saints of Compostela are saints at the pilgrims’ fingertips, summoning the new arrivals to draw closer, not with words but by their sheer presence alone. In a ceremony that will potentially last forever they invite everyone to join them and to be one of them. Every evil, every sorrow is banned from their world (the main tympanum does not, as one would expect, show damned but only blessed people). Indeed, the whole outcome would be put at risk if after a long and exhausting journey the well-known ecclesiastical admonitions were to be applied once more. In a synaesthetic Spectaculum accompanied by moving liturgical chant the pilgrim finds in this experimental as well as experiential space a true, spiritual home. The following – in tracing the paths of a medieval procession – tries to sketch out by which means the sculptures in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela urged the spectator to perform a distinct action or reaction. Critics will argue that such forms of “affective religion” did not exist before the 14th and 15th century.28 Indeed, the question of a “period eye” is still an open problem. Hein26

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For Greco-Roman masks as inspiration, e.g. those in the famous mid-12th century manuscript of the Comedies of Terence in Oxford (Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Auct. F.2.13, fol. 16r) see Willibald Sauerländer: The Fate of the Face in Medieval Art, in: Charles T. Little (ed.): Set in Stone. The Face in Medieval Sculpture, New Haven/London 2006, pp. 2–24, p. 8: “It is possible that his [the satyr’s on a capital from Saint-Lazare at Autun; ST] features were inspired by the masks of comic actors in Roman theatres”; cf. also David Wiles: The Poetics of the Mask in Old Comedy, in: Martin Revermann/Peter Wilson (eds.): Performance, Iconography, Reception. Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin, Oxford et al. 2008, pp. 374–394. In Warren Sanderson’s view, what is closest to the figure of the monumental mourning St. John the Evangelist of the Crucifixion fresco in the crypt of St. Maximin in Trier (around 885) is the gesture and style of a figure in the Ambrosiana-Terence in Milan on folio 85v (around 880), see Warren Sanderson, Archbishop Radbod, Regino of Prüm and Late Carolingian Art and Music in Trier, in: Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 24 (1982), pp. 41–61, p. 43. According to pope Gregory the Great, images were the “Litterae laicorum”, the letters of the laymen, and according to Wilhelm Durandus in his Rationale Divinorum Officiorum (I, 3.4) “Art seems to move the soul more than the Holy Bible” (“pictura plus videtur movere animarum quam scriptura”), cf. Gregor M. Weber: Augen der Entrückung, in: Andreas Henning (ed.): “Der himmelnde Blick.” Zur Geschichte eines Bildmotivs von Raffael bis Rotari (Ex. cat. Galerie Alte Meister Dresden), Emsdetten/Dresden 1998, pp. 5–16, p. 9. For all aspects of affective religion brilliantly: Herman Roodenburg, Empathy in the Making. Crafting the Believer‘s Emotions in the Late Medieval Low Countries, in: BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 129/2 (2014), pp. 42–62.

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Fig. 5  Publius Terentius Afer: Comoediae-manuscript with theater masks, about 825, Comoedia, manuscript, Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 3868, fol. 3v.

rich Wölfflin emphasized that the human eye is ever changing “cultural-biologically.” The presumption made here is that the eye remained the same, as body and mind cannot and should not be divided. New affirmation for this assumption is given by David Freedberg who claims that the human body and the mirror neurons link past and present because the same mirror neurons that were activated then are still activated today.29 Furthermore, the medieval credo of incarnation and the practical experience of animation shall be linked to current picture act theory, and proof for this theory given under medieval auspices.30

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David Freedberg: The Power of Images. Studies in the History and Theory of Response, Chicago et al. 1989, p. 7. The corporeal experience with all senses is described by the extremely influential encyclopedian Isidore of Seville in Etymologiae XI, 1, 18: “They are called sensus, because by them the anima thrives throughout the body in a very elaborate way through the power of feeling [sent-ire, i.e. moved-by-senses; S.T.]. This is the reason why also praesentia [the present things; S.T.]) is called like this, because it is before the senses (prae sensibus).” Cf. Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, ed. by Wallace M. Lindsay, Oxford 1911.

Fig. 6  Magister Matheus: Galilaea hall, 1188, Santiago de Compostela, Pórtico de la Gloria.

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Fig. 7a  Detail from Fig. 3a: Prophet Jesaiah from the left. Fig. 7b  Detail from Fig. 3a: Jesaiah from the right.

Santiago Cathedral as a Space for Experiencing Picture Acts Since its completion in 1188, the pilgrims entered Santiago Cathedral through the monumental assembly hall of the Pórtico de la Gloria in the West (Fig. 6), the so-called “portal of fame”, with its dozens of life-size apostles, prophets, and saints.31 They surround the entering pilgrims on all four sides like the hundreds of life-size and true-to-life statues did on a Greek Agora or a Roman Forum.32 In the postures and faces of this assembly of saints (Fig. 3a) a catalogue of all conceivable emotions is mirrored to the pilgrim. Fear, joy, and anger are to be seen, often in one and the same highly asymmetrical face (Fig. 7a, b). Sometimes the delicately chiselled features can even become the cause for relieving

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For these “neo-Roman” figures and the specific Spanish idea of a continued anti­quity first presented at the 2010 conference on Santiago cathedral in Bern see Horst Bredekamp/Stefan Trinks: Das Prinzip der Junktion. Antike Motive vom Fernandokreuz bis zum Pórtico de la Gloria, in: Bernd Nicolai/Klaus Rheidt (eds.): Die Kathedrale von Santiago de Compostela in neuer Perspektive, Bern 2014. The philosopher Babette Babich explains the abundance of shimmering bronze statues on a greek agora as a means of reflecting the conditio humana, cf. Babette Babich: Greek Bronze: Holding a Mirror to Life, in: Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society (2006), pp. 1–30.

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Fig. 8a  Magister Matheus: St. James, 1188, Santiago de Compostela, Pórtico de la Gloria. Fig. 8b  St. Peter, 4th century, Rome, St. Peter; formerly over the central door of Old-St. Peter’s, today in the Vatican Grottos.

laughter or generate disgust,33 as in the case of the facial landscape of the prophet Josiah. The two-faced Josiah with his intimidating Mr. Hyde-features also raises the philosophical question whether the idea of an inherent and incarnate evil in mankind is expressed here or an eccentric prophetic madness and furor under Christian auspices.34

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For the ambiguity of laughter in the Middle Ages see Winfried Wilhelmy (ed.): Seliges Lächeln und höllisches Gelächter. Das Lachen in Kunst und Kultur des Mittelalters, Regensburg 2012. Jürgen Ebach: Genie und Wahnsinn der Propheten? Suchbewegungen am Beispiel Ezechiels, in: Bernd Effe/Reinhold F. Glei (eds.): Genie und Wahnsinn. Konzepte psychischer “Normalität” und “Abnormität” im Altertum, Trier 2000 (Bochumer

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But how was it possible without risking blasphemy that the famous sculptor Magister Matheus, who mentions himself proudly in an inscription on the architrave, made the statue of St. James (Fig. 8a), who sits on the column like an ancient idol, nearly of the same measure as Christ the Savior above.35 The legitimizing reason for St. James’ size is apparently the status of Santiago as a Roma secunda, a second Rome.36 The cathedral of Santiago was to exceed Old-St. Peter’s in Rome in every detail,37 starting with the entrance. In Rome, the medieval visitor was received by a life-size seated marble figure of St. Peter from the 4th century (Fig. 8b) situated over the huge Roman bronze door of the main entrance and holding a key,38 symbolizing Peter’s ability to open the doors of heaven for the arrivals – or to lock them –39 whereas in Santiago St. James occupies this place. Even for a secularized individual it seems hard to walk into the cathedral unimpressed by such an awe-inspiring doorman with his authoritative gaze.

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altertumswissenschaftliches Colloquium; 46), pp. 25–44, for Jesaiah who even performed naked in public see p. 29. Christ appears as Man of Sorrows presenting his stigmata for the first time in Santiago as Horst Bredekamp has pointed out, see Horst Bredekamp: 800 Jahre Pórtico de la Gloria, Kritische Berichte 16/4 (1988), pp. 96–104. For the empathyevoking formula of the Man of Sorrows as imago pietatis see Rudolf Berliner: Bemerkungen zu einigen Darstellungen des Erlösers als Schmerzensmann, in: Rudolf Berliner (1886–1967): “The freedom of medieval art” und andere Studien zum christlichen Bild, ed. by Robert Suckale, Berlin 2003, pp. 192–212, p. 194. William Hammer: The Concept of the New or Second Rome in the Middle Ages, in: Speculum XIX (1944), pp. 50–62. For Old-St. Peter’s as a model in the 11th and 12th century see Richard Gem: English Parish Churches as a Second St Peter, in: Colum Hourihane (ed.): Romanesque Architecture, Princeton (NJ) 2013, pp. 43–63. Interestingly enough, to give the fisherman an appreciable intellectual touch, an antique philosopher’s statue was chosen to be re-used, see Christian Beutler: Statua. Die Entstehung der nachantiken Statue und der europäische Individualismus, Munich 1982, p. 43. “once placed over the central door of the Constantinian basilica und subsequently moved to the chapel dedicated to Saint Sebastian (later Madonna della Bocciata […]).” See Anna Bortolozzi: Recovered Memory. The Exhibition of the Remains of Old St. Peter’s in the Vatican Grottos, in: Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 80 (2011), p. 90– 107, p. 98. The sources for the medieval location are collected in Francesco Caglioti, Schede, no. 1723 and 1724, in: La Basilica di San Pietro in Vaticano. The Basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican, ed. by Antonio Pinelli, Modena 2000, vol. 1.2, pp. 879–882, pp. 879f.; and Carlo La Bella: Recuperi di antichi frammenti tracce dell’eredità dei restauri Baroniani nelle Grotte Vaticane di Paolo V Borghese, in: Luigi Gulia (ed.): Baronio e le sue fonti. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Sora 10–13, ottobre 2007, pp. 791–830, pp. 807ff.

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Haptic Stimuli I – The Hands Start to Move at the Entrance In the middle of the central marble column with the Tree of Jesse (Fig. 2), out of which St. James rises over the figure of the much smaller Christ, a heavily polished area catches the eye (Fig. 9). For the past 800 years pilgrims have placed their hands on this spot that has deepened over the centuries. The gesture is comparable to the age-old gesture of taking an oath with a hand raised in order to generate a public image that allows further procession. A similar gesture is made by Barack Obama on a photograph showing him taking an oath with his flat hand on the bible, the embodiment of the religion-based constitution of the United States, in order to proceed with the next legislative period (Fig. 10).40

Fig. 9  Magister Matheus: Tree of Jesse with curb of hand, 1188, Santiago de Compostela, Pórtico de la Gloria, central marble column. Fig. 10  Anonymous Photographer: Inauguration ceremony of US-President Obama, Washington, 20.1.2013.

40

Compare for instance the performative gesture of oath in juridical manuscripts like the Sachsenspiegel etc. in Hanna Sofia Hayduk: Rechtsidee und Bild. Zur Funktion und Ikonografie der Bilder in Rechtsbüchern vom 9. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert, Wiesbaden 2011, pp. 13–18; and Ulrich Haltern: Obamas politischer Körper, Berlin 2009.

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The question is why almost all visitors, not only Christians, lay their hands on the column of St. James. One obvious explanation would be curiosity. The dauntless temptation to touch the unknown, to experience a new sensation: How does it feel? Is the curb humid since it is shining so much? What will happen when one’s own hand locks in place with the ancient contour? The image of a hand always calls for a comparison with one’s own, starting with cave paintings of the stone age: color is sprayed around a hand on the cave’s wall; with the next painter putting his hand next to it, the deviation of differing hands, smaller or larger, with phalanges missing or crippled, enables these ancient artists to discover themselves as individuals.41 Even today the visitor feels the force exerted by a material highly polished by innumerable touches; it is perceived as a recommendation of the predecessors. Millions of people cannot be mistaken. Here there must be something of interest. It seems obvious, that the artist here deliberately chose marble instead of the granite columns backing the Tree of Jesse. Furthermore, it is not unlikely that the original reason for the pilgrims’ touch was also the form of St. James’ marble column. It almost urges the beholders to act: They are tempted to feel the relief consisting of complex, enlivened tendrils and showing a variety of deep and elevated parts calling out to be touched. Centuries later this will lead to the crucial Assumption of the Enlightenment: “Only what has been in the senses can enter the mind”, 42 which is nothing new but only a written fixation of an age-old human practical experience.

41

42

The cover of Mats Rosengren’s book on Neolithic art shows such a sprayed hand as a sign of individuality as well as with an apotropaic function, as reflected in street art, see Mats Rosengren: Cave Art, Perception, and Knowledge, Basingstoke 2012. E. g. Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Fröbel, Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder. Nature, Herder writes, gave mankind “nicht leere Anschauungen und Wortformen a priori, sondern wirkliche Sinne.” These real senses (“wirkliche Sinne”), thus Herder argues against Kant, are “naturgegebene Organe” which not only enable our mind to perceive but prepare to receive (“die dem Verstand seinen Stoff nicht etwa nur möglich machen, sondern vorbereiten”), see Johann Gottfried Herder: Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in: id.: Sämmtliche Werke. Zur Philosophie und Geschichte, Tübingen 1830, vol. 16, p. 137), nearly at the same time wrote about this issue. See also Hans Körner: Der fünfte Bruder. Zur Tastwahrnehmung plastischer Bildwerke von der Renaissance bis zum frühen 19. Jahrhundert, in: Artibus et Historiae 21/42 (2000), pp. 165–196, who emphasizes the close relationship between the eroticism of the tactile approach and the frequent literary theme of sexual intercourse with seductive sculptures, as well as Johannes Myssok: Bildhauerisches Denken und haptische Bilder, in: Markus Rath/Jörg Trempler/Iris Wenderholm (eds.): Das haptische Bild. Körperhafte Bilderfahrung in der Neuzeit, Berlin 2013 (Actus et imago 7), pp. 185–208.

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Fig. 11  Magister Matheus: Melancholicus with apotropaic hand, 1188, Santiago de Compostela, Pórtico de la Gloria, left side of central marble column.

On the left side of the Tree of Jesse43 column, just under the entrenched mould, one of Christ’s harbingers (Fig. 11) seems to ironically mirror the gesture of the touch-hungry “tactilophile” pilgrims. Like Christ on the Mount of Olives he sits in a melancholic position poring over his existence in agony. He seems to repel all the pilgrims wanting to get too close to him by deliberately averting his gaze and rejecting apotropaically any beholder with his flat, outstretched right. On one and the same column the sculptor, Magister Matheus, therefore reflects not only on the tactile allurement of this pseudo-living marble surface – he also creates a visual antidote to idolatry. Thus, the “Noli me tangere”attitude of this stone figure fences off all demons and serves as a testament of purity.

43

For the iconographic peculiarities see Marta Poza Yagüe: Santo Domingo de la Calzada-Silos-Compostela. Las representaciones del Árbol de Jesé en el tardorrománico hispano: particularidades iconográficas, in: Archivo Español de Arte 295 (2001), pp. 301–313, p. 306.

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Fig. 12  Lapitated statue of Venus Trier, 2nd–15th century, formerly St. Mathew, today Rheinisches Landesmuseum.

Over time, the interaction of the pilgrims with the column heavily altered it. A new sculpture was created and this obviously was appreciated by the multitude of lay sculptors. The same holds true for the Roman statue of Venus in Trier (Fig. 12), which was lapidated at the church with the grave of Apostle Mathew, and which did not cease to be a target for stone throwers even when it was not a dangerous image anymore, lacking any similarity with the Roman goddess.44 At this point we cannot speak of iconoclasm any longer, but must consider the appeal of creative destruction.45 The enthusiasm for the producing of a new image comes into play both in Santiago and Trier. Again, the piece of art triggers a repeated reaction, even if it is its own mutilation.46 44 45

46

Bredekamp: Theorie des Bildakts (as fn. 4), p. 41. The term itself stems from economics, see Hugo Reinert/Erik Reinert: Creative Destruction in Economics, in: Jürgen Backhaus/Wolfgang Drechsler (eds.): Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), New York 2006, pp. 55–85. Uwe Fleckner/Maike Steinkamp/Hendrik Ziegler: Produktive Zerstörung. Konstruktion und Dekonstruktion eines Forschungsgebietes, in: id. (eds.): Der Sturm der Bilder. Zerstörte und zerstörende Kunst von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart, Berlin 2011, pp. 1–11.

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Fig. 13  Magister Matheus: Bocca della verità monster gorges, 1188, Santiago de Compostela, Pórtico de la Gloria, under central column.

Haptic Stimuli II – Hands in the Romanesque Bocca della verità Stepping closer to the entrance of the cathedral, it becomes even more obvious that the sculpture of Santiago was planned to get the pilgrims involved. After having touched the saint, the pilgrims knelt, and still kneel down to put both arms into the deep gorges of two monsters of stone (Fig. 13).47 As in Rome at the Bocca della verità,48 before entering the church and by means of the sculptures, the pilgrims create a public image of themselves as free of sin. Whose arms are not swallowed may enter.

47

48

For the Freudian aspects of Romanesque monsters see Martin Büchsel: Monströse Gefühle – die Gefühle von Monstern. Überlegungen zu emotionalen Strukturen in der marginalen Skulptur der Romanik und Gotik Frankreichs, in: IMAGO. Interdisziplinäres Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse und Ästhetik 1 (2012), pp. 1–27. Indeed, the rite of putting the arms in the Bocca is first described by Magister Gregorius in Romanesque times.

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Fig. 14  Magister Matheus: Self portrait, 1188, Santiago de Compostela, Pórtico de la Gloria, backside of central column.

Haptic Stimuli III – Hands on Magister Matheus Having passed the portal, most visitors mirror the position of a kneeling figure at the backside of St. James’ trumeau (Fig. 14), who like a new Atlas appears to carry the weight of the church on his shoulders. The figure is Magister Matheus, the architect of the portal, as an inscription on his scroll still conveyed at the beginning of the 20th century.49 Most of the pilgrims kneel down and put their hand on the head of the Atlas-Architectus.50 In fact, the place where they lay their hands in order to feel the eye-catching curls (the reason why the statue in Spanish is also called “Santo dos Croques”, the “Saint with the buckles”) is highly polished. Again, the interaction with an image created a partly altered image.

49

50

Ernst H. Buschbeck: Der Pórtico de la Gloria von Santjago de Compostela. Beiträge zur Geschichte der französischen und der spanischen Skulptur im XII. Jahrhundert, Berlin/Vienna 1919, p. 14. For the iconography of Atlas in Romanesque art see Christine B. Verzar: Text und Bild in der norditalienischen Romanik: Skulpturen, Inschriften, Betrachter, in: Herbert Beck/Kerstin Hengevoss-Dürkop (eds.): Studien zur Geschichte der euro­ päischen Skulptur im 12./13. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt/M. 1994, pp. 495–504, pp. 500ff.

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Haptic Stimuli IV – Hugging St. James Finally, the pilgrims reached the summit of this peregrinatio of enlivened images. The visitor of the Cathedral climbs up the High Altar (Fig. 15) and kisses the shoulder of the 12th century statue of St. James from behind.51 Like the touching of the foot of the bronze statue of St. Peter in Old St. Peter’s or of the breast of the figure of Julia in Verona, this habit would be too easily described as a mere following of the masses. The mentioned images are designed to be enlivened effigies provided with their own traditions that have to be followed as when confronted with a living and acting person. The described series of interactions could, of course, be a folkloristic ritual in a sense that was soon lost. On the contrary, it shall be argued here that these various facets of an applied picture act generated an entirely new reality for the pilgrims who had finally arrived at the legendary destination of their journeys. In a time (1188) when the great gothic cathedrals with their ethereal, inapproachable sculptures arose, the enlivened Santiago-individuals must have appeared to speak to the spectators, top the “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century”, and coin art history for centuries with their daring presentation of all the aspects of the conditio humana, even the dark sides. In a further step, on the basis of a sculpture at the southern portal and a pilgrim’s report from 1134, the qualities of the images at Santiago will be sketched out, that enable them to initiate whole series of deliberate interactions between pilgrims and sculptures. This famous and fortunately preserved pilgrim’s guide is unique in art history. Being part of the Codex Calixtinus and compiled in 1134 by the Frenchman Aimeric Picaud, it reveals a close interaction between art and beholder in the response to the sculptures considered as animated. The most telling sentences are hence given in extenso. They describe the figures of the former northern portal in present tense as if they were living and acting, only once using the word imago: “Above the column […] sits the Lord in Majesty, giving His blessing with His right hand and holding a book in His left hand. And encircling His throne are the Four Evangelists, as if supporting the throne.”52 The pilgrim’s report continues, as if he were describing a medieval 51

52

For comparable architecture which “demanded that people move through it in prescribed patterns, its sculptures played elaborate games alternating between concealment and revelation”, see Mickey Abel/Sarah Blick Ashley/Laura D. Gelfand (eds.): Push Me, Pull You. Imaginative, Emotional, Physical, and Spatial Interaction in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art, 2 vols., Leiden 2011. “residet Dominus in sede maiestatis et manu dextera benedictionem nuit, et in sinistra librum tenet, et in circuitu t[h]roni eius sunt quatuor evangelist[a]e, quasi t[h]ronum sustinentes”. All english translations by Paula Gerson/Annie ShaverCrandell/Alison Stones: The Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela: A Critical Edition, 2 vols., London 1998, 2: pp. 72ff.

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Fig. 15  Anonymous Master: Sitting statue of St. James, 12th, altar 18th century, Santiago de Compostela, High altar.

liturgical play, by naming the functions of the actors:53 “But over the doorway which is on the left as we enter the basilica – that is, within the arch – the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary is sculpted. There the Angel Gabriel also speaks to her.”54 To emphasize the liminal act of entering the portal,55 demonic forces and beasts with evil eyes are introduced as watchmen:56 “Two large and ferocious lions are found against the exterior wall, their gaze always

53

54 55

56

When Lynette R. Muir wonders that “Liturgical Latin plays are virtually unknown in Spain except in Catalonia which had been reconquered earlier” (Lynette R. Muir: The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe, Cambridge 1996, p. 189) this type of stony multi-figured liturgical play on Spanish church facades could be one important answer to why there are almost no records. “in ciborio scilicet Beate Mariae virginis annunciacio sculpitur. Loquitur etiam ibi angelus Gabriel ad eam.” Herbert L. Kessler: Evil Eye(ing). Romanesque Art as a Shield of Faith, in: Colum Hourihane (ed.): Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century. Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn, Princeton (NJ) 2008, pp. 107–135. For all aspects of the liminal act see Calvin B. Kendall: The Allegory of the Church. Romanesque Portals and Their Verse Inscriptions, Toronto 1998.

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fixed as if to watch the doors”57 and: “Higher up on the jambs are four apostles […] with their raised right hands giving a blessing to those who enter the basilica.”58 Finally, the stone itself becomes a living one, a saxus vivus from which monsters arise (“ex liminaribus exiliencium”):59 “But also, above the head of each apostle, heads of oxen are sculpted, jutting out from the jamb.”

The Ma ximization of Haptic Stimuli The cathedral of Santiago de Compostela’s southern portal (Fig. 16) is home to the larger-than-life size ‘Woman with a skull in her lap’ (Fig. 17), featured in almost every publication on Romanesque sculpture.60 It was probably created almost exactly at the turn of the 11th century for the original main entrance of Santiago, the northern portal called Porta Francigena (“Portal facing France”). However, this portal, decorated with the three temptations of Christ, among other scenes, was destroyed during the storming of the cathedral in 1117. Its surviving sculptures were newly arranged across the two tympanum fields that form part of the southern double gates, in a manner resembling a surrealist collage (Fig. 16) or a kind of Warburgian Mnemosyne Atlas, as the tympanum binds together different Roman and Christian iconographies, styles, stone materials (marble, granite), thus constantly creating new narratives and images that go far beyond the biblical canon. The pilgrim’s guide praises the skin-like texture of the material61 used for the sculptures on the tympana of the southern 57 58 59 60

61

“Duo vero leones magni et feroces forinsecus in parietibus habentur, qui valvas quasi observantes semper respiciunt”. “In liminaribus vero sursum quatuor apostoli […] et dextris manibus elevatis introeuntibus.” Trinks: Antike und Avantgarde (as fn. 3), pp. 365–370. The crucial stages are Ole Naesgaard: Saint-Jacques de Compostelle et les débuts de la grande sculpture vers 1100, Aarhus 1962; John Williams: La mujer del cráneo y la symbología románica, Quintana 2 (2003), pp. 13–27; Robert A. Maxwell/Kirk Ambrose: Introduction: Romanesque Sculpture Studies at a Crossroads, in: Robert A. Maxwell/Kirk Ambrose (eds.): Current Directions in Eleventh- and Twelfthcentury Sculpture Studies, Turnhout 2010, pp. 1–22; and Claudia Rückert: A Reconsideration of the Woman with the Skull on the Puerta de las Platerías of Santiago de Compostela Cathedral, in: Gesta 2 (2012), pp. 129–146. The following is an extended version of Stefan Trinks: Sheela-na-gig Again – The Birth of a New Style From the Spirit of Pornography, in: Hans Maes (ed.): Pornographic Art and the Aesthetics of Pornography. An Interdisciplinary Conference, Basingstoke 2013, pp. 162–182. In treating the ability to enliven marble and other polished stones through a skinlike shimmering surface, Bertold Hinz cites the influential Roman state author Ausonius who lets Niobe speak the following words: “I lived, I became stone, but polished by the hand of Praxiteles I live again as Niobe”; cf. Bertold Hinz: Aphrodite. Geschichte einer abendländischen Passion, Munich 1998, pp. 27f.

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Fig. 16  Various artists: Left tympanum, about 1117, Santiago de Compostela, Puerta de la Platerías.

portal and describes the sculpture not as one would describe a depiction, but as if it were an animate creature of flesh and blood: “Nor should be forgotten the woman who stands next to the Lord’s Temptation, holding between her own hands the stinking head of her lover, cut off, by her rightful husband, which she is forced by her husband to kiss twice a day. Oh, what ingenious and admirable justice for an adulterous wife; it should be recounted to everyone!”62 The present tense used in the travelers’ guide – “osculans illut [caput] bis per diem coacta”63 – conveys the impression that time and time again, Pygmalion-like, the sculpture comes to life at fixed times of the day in order to perform one and the same action, like one of the famous medieval clockworks with figures in churches. This becomes the topos of all later travelers’ guides.64 There are at least two reasons why the identification of the woman as an adulteress is 62 63

64

Gerson/Shaver-Crandell/Stones: The Pilgrim’s Guide (as fn. 52), pp. 75, 77. The whole sentence is: “Nec est oblivioni tradendum, quod mulier quedam iuxta dominicam temptacionem stat, tenens inter manus suas caput lecatoris sui fetidum, a marito proprio abscisum, osculans illut bis per diem, coacta a viro suo. O quam ingentem et admirabilem iusticiam mulieris adulterate omnibus narrandam!” Ibid., pp. 74, 76. For numerous examples of effectively movable figures in the Middle Ages see Johannes Tripps: Das handelnde Bildwerk in der Gotik. Forschungen zu den Bedeutungsschichten und der Funktion des Kirchengebäudes und seiner Ausstattung in der Hoch- und Spätgotik, Berlin 1998. Not far away from Santiago de Compostela the trumeau figure of Saint James at the portal of Ourense cathedral was able to raise his right arm with a sword.

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Fig. 17  Master of the Swollen Cheeks: Woman with skull, about 1117, relief, Santiago de Compostela, Puerta de la Platerías, left tympanum.

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legitimate. Despite diverging identifications by scholars, the official language regime in the 12th century seems to have been the narrative of the adulterous wife. Hence a French pilgrim like the author of the pilgrim’s guide, Aimeric Picaud, would have been told this story in the 1130’s.65 Secondly, it is relatively safe to assume that such a short time after the creation of the sculpture around 1100 any information regarding its meaning was probably still close to the original intention.66 In any case, the sculptor of the “animated”67 adulteress makes full use of the titillation potential of a not only life-size, but also life-like figura. Only her right breast is completely exposed (Fig. 17). The gossamer fabric of her garment tightly embraces the upper part of the body. The same juxtaposition of veiling and unveiling is repeated in the region of her legs, as her right leg is covered only to emphasize the nude elegance of her left leg even more. However, her body’s supple tension, poised as it is between sitting and standing,68 could also feed a male beholder’s hopeful expectation that she might rise at any moment from her throne and, with the uninhibited promiscuity she embodies, pounce on her next “victim.” Her open, plentiful hair curling in snakelike ringlets seems

65 66

67 68

Robert A. Maxwell and Kirk Ambrose doubt that. Cf. Maxwell/Ambrose: Current Directions (as fn. 60), p. 20. Claudia Rückert argued that already the French pilgrim Aimery Picaud could have been given wrong information about the iconography of the figure 30 years after its making; she proposed that the original setting of the northern portal would have been that of a penitent porch with the accompanied King David relief as “spouse” and the Woman with Skull as Bathsheba/“sponsa.” Nevertheless, with its strongly differing measurements (King David: 171 × 51 cm; Woman with Skull: 93 × 32 cm) the King David with Fiddle relief stems from a different artistic hand. The two reliefs do not seem to belong together in form or content, not even in two different rows of reliefs as Rückert proposed (Rückert: A Reconsideration of the Woman with the Skull (as fn. 60), p. 141): David’s tight cheeks (which contrast with the swollen ones of the Woman), the delicately carved arcade crowning only him and the coliseum-like throne he sits on, and especially the fundamental difference between the fold pattern of David’s garment disposed only on the surface and the corporeal folds of the Woman can support this claim. Their appearance as well as their iconography therefore do not allow an identification of the Santiago Woman with the skull in her lap as Ecclesia, as Rückert has argued (ibid., p. 140), with King David absorbed in thought as he is playing his fiddle as the psalmist being the Sponsus of this seductive woman. The term focused on figures in Jan Białostocki, Begegnung mit dem Ich in der Kunst, Artibus et Historiae 1/1 (1980), pp. 25–45, p. 27. Robert A. Maxwell/Kirk Ambrose interpreted the pilgrim’s description of her ambivalent posture as an inaccuracy: “It is also worth noting that this description [in the pilgrim’s guide; S.T.] is not entirely accurate: he describes the head as fetid (‘fetidum’), which it is not, and the woman as standing (‘stat’), which she is not.” Cf. Maxwell/Ambrose, Current Directions (as fn. 60), p. 19, n. 70.

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to confirm this.69 There are at least two obvious connotations: on the one hand, this is the snaking hair of Medusa, whose gaze meant banishment, on the other hand, though, it draws the beholder closer, like a myriad of beckoning fingers. The titillation potential of the imagined tactility of skin, hair, and body is fully tapped, the extreme contrast between her corporeality, the pure embodiment of life, and the blank skull with its hollow eye sockets, the embodiment of death, is obviously intentional.70 Even the throne on which she is seated, embellished with the lions’ paws and heads so typical for the Romanesque period, cleverly becomes part of this thrilling game: viewed from above and bare, her large feet touch the smooth, cold tiles of the slanted roof on which she sits – endowed with magical powers like one of Hans Baldung Grien’s witches in the Renaissance. The extremely hairy lion’s head that seems to grow out of her naked right knee features a significantly more hirsutely curled mane than its companion on the other side. In turn, the formulaic pathos of the moving momentum of her garment, fluttering upwards from her covered shin, caresses the lion’s paw in such a way that it creates the impression of giving additional cover to the coat of a living animal. Moreover, the tip of the slightly bent, overlong index finger of her right hand gently touches the skull’s cheekbone, just like the thumb of the other hand reaches for its upper row of teeth. From the artist’s point of view, the intention must obviously have been to create a maximum of erotic frisson for the sexually starved pilgrims ravenous for these kinds of images. Presumably, they were totally fascinated by this unprecedented radicalness.71 69

70

71

“Independently of its intended meaning, an antique source may be guessed as for the style and some iconographic features of the piece. The long untidy hair and the exhibition of one breast are characteristic of maenads and barbarian captives or personifications of conquered provinces in Roman iconography.” Cf. Serafín Moralejo Álvarez: The Codex Calixtinus As an Art-Historical Source, in: John Williams/Allison Stones (eds.): The Codex Calixtinus and the Shrine of St. James, Tübingen 1992, pp. 207–223, p. 218, n. 34. Willibald Sauerländer was the first who briefly mentioned the sensual treatment of the adulteress, comparing her appearance to images evoked by troubadour songs of the time, see Willibald Sauerländer: Nisi transmutetis mores. Riflessioni sull’ambiguità dell’iconografia románica, in: Enrico Castelnuovo/Antonio Peroni/ Salvatore Settis (eds.): Wiligelmo e Lanfranco nell’Europa romanica. Atti del Convegno Wiligelmo e Lanfranco nell’Europa Romanica, Modena, 24–27 ottobre 1985, Modena 1989, pp. 151–154, p. 153, n. 27. Unfortunately we have no traces of its reception from 12th century Santiago but some revealing sources from Rome. One of the controversial issues is whether there is evidence for masturbation in front of art in ancient times, which would make the life-like character of erotic statues even more evident – the telling medieval documents for this strange “proof” have been collected by Bertold Hinz: Statuenliebe. Antiker Skandal und mittelalterliches Trauma, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 22 (1989), pp. 135–142; and in: id.: Aphrodite. Geschichte einer abendländischen Passion, Munich 1998. For instance, around 1150 the “Kaiserchronik”

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Fig. 18a  John Henry Fuseli:­Wolfram watching his wife in the dungeon, 1812/20, oil on canvas, 97 × 70 cm, Schweinfurt, Museum Georg Schäfer.

The sculptor also fails to deliver a moralizing testimony of some sort through the more than ambivalent captivating power of his creation – at the very least, any kind of possibly moralist statement is stifled by the woman’s overwhelming erotic appeal. It is by this artistic partisanship that an anachronistic comparison may be permitted. Around 1820 Henry Fuseli painted the story of the adulteress (Fig. 18a),72 in which the insect-like “rightful husband”, in

72

reports the story of a young man called Astrolabius in Rome, who fell in love with a statue of the goddess Venus and maculated her (cf. Hinz: Statuenliebe, pp. 135f.). At the same time, the well-known Magister Gregorius in his guide to the splendors of Rome (De mirabilibus urbis Romae) shows himself absolutely convinced that the adored marble Venus lives, so that he visits her in “her home” three times, despite having to walk quite far (cf. Hinz: Statuenliebe, p. 140). Fundamental for statue love and Pygmalionism is also George L. Herse: Falling in Love with Statues. Artificial Humans From Pygmalion to the Present, Chicago 2009. Cf. Ex. cat.: Traum, Märchen, Thriller: Phantasiestücke von Johann Heinrich Füssli, Arnold Böcklin bis Max Slevogt; aus dem Bestand des Museums Georg Schäfer, ed. by Sigrid Bertuleit, Schweinfurt 2001, pp. 30–35.

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Fig. 18b  Gian Lorenzo Bernini: The ecstasy of St. Teresa, 1647–1652, Rome, Santa Maria della Vittoria.

his plate armor and with his sword drawn, stares at his imprisoned wife who, veiled in a flowing white garment of innocence, embraces the skeleton of her lover. She is shown in a mixture of dreamful sleep and ecstasy, visualized by the light falling into the dungeon behind her head – very much like Bernini’s St. Teresa in the Capella Cornaro of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome (Fig. 18b), which is the incarnation of viral emphatic sexual ecstasy,73 and evidently served as a model. Fuseli’s sympathy as well as his artistic empathy obviously reside with the couple coalesced, much the same as the early 12th century sculptor’s. A paradox of Santiago’s adulteress (Fig. 17) strikes the beholder. Two fundamentally contradicting temporal levels are brought together in this oversexed figure with its skull attribute: although she already has the skull in her lap as the instrument of her punishment, meaning that the situation would actually 73

For other 19th century receptions apart from Fuseli see Antonio P. Torresi: Ricorrendo al Bernini. La Santa Teresa e tre d’aprés novecentisti, Libero 5 (1995), pp. 32–38.

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demand for a plain and demure dress to be worn by the penitent, she is still dressed up, just as if she were planning her next seduction. Also, the moment when she actually kisses the skull is still to come, as her facial expression shows no traces whatsoever of the expected disgust after the kiss. What she therefore intends to do with the outstretched index finger and the skull in her lap remains up to the beholder’s imagination. It is precisely this indicator that is important for the early picture act of around 1100 and might have provoked Aimery Picaud’s detailed story of the enlivened adulteress – it stimulates the power of the imagination precisely by not revealing all, and showing just enough to remain engaging. The fundamental paradox of the Pilgrims’ Way iconography loses nothing of its piquancy; the misdemeanors which the penitents repent – in this case, infidelity – and for which they are supposed to leave generous amounts of monetary expiation in the respective churches must be illustrated in the form of depictions that are as powerful as possible. The artists, commissioned from all over Europe for vast sums of money, were given complete artistic freedom, partly because they otherwise would hardly have followed the call to what was then the “Wild West” of Europe and partly because there were no references for their subjects of depiction in the centuries between Late Antiquity and the 11th and 12th century. In consequence, their works featured unprecedented extremism and life-likeness – as obviously demanded and legitimized by the theologians responsible for the iconographic programs – and challenged the beholders. The three-dimensional art of sculpture had and still has a singular effect on penitent pilgrims confronted with its physicality. It worked: As effects such as deep cavities caused by continuous touch show, the beholders were keen on interacting with the sculptures in responsive, re-enacting, and emotional ways. Santiago de Compostela, as the biggest pilgrimage church of the Middle Ages, seems exceptional in every respect. Nevertheless, as it was intended to be a second Saint-Peter’s, it is in fact comparable in its use of powerful pictures of often astonishing artistic freedom.74 The sculptural program of Santiago also shows the enormous appeal of the iconography of the sinister which against the background of and sometimes in harsh contrast to Christian ideals is much more suspense-packed than the iconography of the sinister in an itself sinister Anti­quity. It is thus in the Middle Ages that the picture act begins.75 74 75

Rudolf Berliner: The Freedom of Medieval Art. Gazette des beaux-arts 26 (1945), pp. 263–288. “Medieval Art like no other is apt to show the mutual influences between mind and body, their interactions with the physical world, and the creation of symbolic forms”, cf. Horst Bredekamp/Marion Lauschke/Alex Arteaga (eds.): Bodies in Action and Symbolic Forms. Zwei Seiten der Verkörperungstheorie, Berlin 2012 (Actus et imago 9), p. 22.

IV. THE LIVING BODY

Marion Lauschke

BODILY COMMUNICATION IN PICT URE ACTS

Introduction “Bodily communication” or “body language” in the vernacular sense is understood as a non-verbal tactile or non-tactile communication with the help of bodily means of expression, such as looks, mimics, gestures, postures, proximity/ distance behavior and touch, which all either take place involuntarily, are employed strategically, or become artistically condensed and heightened to Pathos Formulas as in the performing arts, dance, or pantomimes. Because our bodies are visible and express whatever we are moved by, we cannot prevent communicating with them, even if we try to conceal our emotions and thoughts. Our bodies communicate in social interactions, even without our conscious control. This paper uses extended concepts of “body” as well as of “communication”. “Body” can be understood in a broader sense as an intellectual-bodily continuum encompassing the body’s biological existence as well as the psychosomatic manifestations in which it is accessible to us in our lived experience, and which, according to the concept of “picture act” developed by Horst Bredekamp, can also be extended to artifacts. Constitutive for the concept of “communication” used here is that it is not a transfer of discrete cognitive units between a sending and a receiving organ, and that a distinction between medium and message cannot be made. The type of communication addressed here is realized by embodied sub-personal, interpersonal, as well as picture-active processes. The focus is hence on processes of sensorimotor interconnection and dynamics of sense-making that are located between pre-semantic indeterminacy and conceptual differentiation, always under the bodily influence of media and involving an interaction between beholder and artifact. The paper concentrates on those aspects of picture agency that become manifest during aesthetic experiences. Aesthetic experience is per se an experience of picture agency and is founded on bodily communication. For this reason

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the two terms “aesthetic experience” and “picture agency” are used as synonyms. The following two sections elucidate which kinds of interactive processes between beholders and artifacts are captured by the concept of bodily communication. In the last part the concept will be related to positions outlined by Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer.

Aesthetic Experience as Resonance: Rhythmic Organization of Vital Processes and Art works Aesthetic experience is characterized by a double focus: through the sensory perception of an object accessible to art theory and through the psycho-somatic experience of a higher state of excitement or vivacity. The bodily perceptible pro­ ce­s­­­suality of experience is constitutive of aesthetic experience. Both aspects – the comprehension of a structure, a form, or an object and the experience of this perception – are indistinguishable in the aesthetic experience itself, as it is a relational experience of attunement or resonance. This relational experience of resonance has been treated by Thomas Fuchs, John Dewey, and Susanne K. Langer. The psychiatrist and philosopher Thomas Fuchs aptly describes the feeling of being alive, which is constituted by a continuous basal bodily experience and conation, as the turning point that unites life and the feeling of being alive as two sides of the same life process. “[B]asic, bodily and affective functions of awareness […] arise from the vital regulatory processes that continuously run between brain and body.” “The feeling of being alive […] continually integrates the entire state of the organism-in-its-environment.” The feeling of being alive and other basal feelings inform organisms about the relationship between them and their environment.1 This feeling of being alive in its intensified form is traditionally also at stake in aesthetics. Hence, according to Kant, the aesthetic judgment is related “entirely to the subject, indeed to its feeling of life.”2 The feeling of beauty is the effect of a “the activity of the subject with regard to the animation of its cognitive powers”3 in free play and therefore, as Birgit Recki writes: “the desire for functionality that has become independent [verselbständigte Funktionslust].”4

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Thomas Fuchs: The Feeling of Being Alive. Organic Foundations of Self-Awareness, in: Joerg Fingerhut/Sabine Marienberg (eds.): Feelings of Being Alive, Berlin 2012, pp. 149–165, p. 161. Immanuel Kant: Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. by Paul Guyer, trans. by Paul Guyer/Eric Matthwes, Cambridge, MA 2000, p. 90. Ibid., p. 107. Birgit Recki: Kultur als Praxis. Eine Einführung in Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Sonderband 6, Berlin 2004, p. 120.

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Also the pragmatist John Dewey was concerned with a heightened liveliness when he, as is well known, defined art as experience, that is, as a certain type of experience. He determines the degree of consistency or fitting that is evoked by aesthetic experience in relation to the rhythmic organization of energies. “[…] an esthetic experience, the work of art in its actuality, is perception. Only as these rhythms, even if embodied in an outer object that is itself a product of art, become a rhythm in experience itself, are they esthetic.”5 An experience is aesthetic if it is based on a rhythm, which in turn is dependent upon the existence of such a rhythm in nature.6 These rhythms that define and organize energies are forms of order and renewal, of resistance and dissolution, of repetition and augmentation.7 Susan K. Langer is thinking of such forms of organization when in Feeling and Form she focuses on analogies between emotions and musical forms. She calls “forms of growth and attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm, or subtle activation […] or everything vitally felt.”8 The following longer citation clarifies what is meant: Sentient beings react to their world by constantly changing their total condition. When a creature’s attention shifts from one center of interest to another, not only the organs immediately involved (the two eyes seeing a new object, the two ears receiving and ‘placing’ a sound, etc.) but hundreds of fibers in the body are affected. Every smallest shift of aware­ ness calls out a readjustment […] Underneath this variable process of what one might call ‘waking life,’ constantly influenced by things outside the creature‘s skin, is another sequence of changes, more simply rhythmic, the system of vital functions.9 Music for Langer is an analogue to the felt life: “We comprehend the process of life and sentience through its audible, dynamic pattern.”10 Despite the importance of these analogous patterns for the understanding of aesthetic experience, aesthetic experience cannot be reduced to the feeling of heightened liveliness. This would negate the complex activities of interpretation that it comprises and ignore the meaning that aesthetic experiences have within processes of cognition.   5 ­  6   7   8   9 10

John Dewey: Art as Experience. The Later Works. 1925–1953, vol. 10: 1934, ed. by Jo Ann Boydston, Carbondale, IL 1989, p. 167. Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., p. 199. Susanne K. Langer: Feeling and Form. A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key, London 1953, p. 27. Ibid., p. 371. Ibid., p. 31.

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However, those resonance phenomena between human bodies and aesthetic forms that are of interest from an aesthetic perspective are perceptible through the body and hence can be called bodily communication. The study of aesthetic experience can function as a link between neuro-physiological theories of the lived body (Körper) and phenomenologically oriented theories of the living body (Leib), since it allows for the experience of life processes in an intensified and prototypical form. But how can these resonance phenomena be explained?

Body-Schematic Affection as a Principle of Aesthetic Experience Bodily, for example neuro-physiological, processeses that preconsciously determine the forms of our consciousness are of central importance for the explanation of aesthetic experience. John Michael Krois has presented a neurological explanation for the state of being affected by artifacts. It is brought about by unconscious reactions of the human body schema, which is organized through proprioception, in response to the affectively structured, spatial organization of artifacts.11 The neurological body schema of which Krois speaks is a kind of internal representation of the body, a continuously updated model of the body’s posture that processes sensorimotor impulses and guarantees a unified proprioception, meaning an integrated perception of the body’s position and movement in space by analysis of muscular tension, orientation of the joints, and the organ of equilibrium. It is an “embodied self-consciousness” that stands at the end of the body’s processing of proprioceptive perceptions. More familiar to us than bodily communication processes between beholders and artifacts are forms of sensorimotor linkage between individuals. A well-known socio-physiological phenomenon brilliantly put on scene by Woody Allen in his “Zelig” is the “chameleon effect”: the spontaneous, unconscious imitation or mirroring of another person’s movements in moments of interaction, in which our bodies become synchronized with those of others. Common examples are legs crossed in parallel or arms crossed simultaneously. Based on the observation that the perception of a certain behavior in others significantly increases the likelihood of behaving this way oneself, the hypo­th­ esis of a “perception-behavior link” has been formulated.12 When somebody observes the movements of other persons, his motor cortex becomes activated. 11

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John M. Krois: Bildkörper und Körperschema, in: id.: Bildkörper und Körperschema, ed. by Horst Bredekamp/Marion Lauschke, Berlin 2011 (Actus et Imago 2), pp. 252–271. Tanya L. Chartrand/John A. Bargh: The Chameleon Effect. The Perception-Behavior Link and Social Interaction, in: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76/6 (1999), pp. 893–910.

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This activation is part of the process of perception and facilitates the unconscious imitations of others. For, while observing an action, the same muscles that would partake in carrying out the action are activated and transferred into a state of readiness: “monkey see, monkey do!” Our bodies become independent of our control and engage in interaction with others. They do this especially when we feel sympathy with someone or wish to belong to a group, but it happens independently of our conscious control and only when we are not paying attention to our bodily actions. This type of motor simulation can be attributed to the mirror neuron system.

Embod iment: Form Processes in Transition From Lived Bod ies to Signif ying Bod ies Of special interest in this context is, first, how complex aesthetic perceptions originate in bodily communication and, second, the processes of sense making in transition from presymbolic indeterminacy, which is perceivable as a symbolic virulence, to iconic forms, in which they emerge, and finally to conceptual formulations, in which they obtain stability and discursiveness. The term “embodiment” describes such changes of bodily conditions. It does not signify an incarnation in the sense of a becoming-corporeal of thought but instead a transforma­­tion in the medium of bodies – in the transition from bodies to sign-bodies. An especially telling example for such a transformation is Mark Rothko’s series of color field paintings, which have been discussed in the context of the sublime. The semiotic process, in this case, stretches from basal physiological reactions to the attempt to symbolize the immeasurable. The bodily perceptible effect, for example the feeling of vertigo that often affects beholders of Mark Rothko’s color field paintings, is a phenomenon that calls for the inclusion of somatic processes in the explanation of aesthetic experience. With the help of chromatic differences, transparent layers of color, and the avoidance of sharp edges Rothko creates impulses and impressions of movement that evoke the sense of a “virtual body of surfaces and energies” unfolding over time.13 The beholders actively partake in the creation of these dynamic spaces through the movement of their eyes while scanning the picture, the turning of their heads or of their entire bodies, and the resulting shift of weight. Depending on the parts the beholder tries to focus upon, a different dynamism of the 13

Gottfried Boehm: Das Lebendige. Rothkos Zugänge zum Bild, in: ex. cat.: Mark Rothko. Retrospektive, ed. by Hubertus Gaßner/Christiane Lange/Oliver Weck, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg 2008, pp. 180–184, p. 183.

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picture parts as well as a different interaction between picture and beholder develop. The movements and shifts of weight occurring in the process of perception are registered proprioceptively and integrated into the body schema. While beholding Rothko‘s color-field paintings, the body of the beholder is continuously involved in the process of perception as he/she does not succeed in distancing the impressions and stabilizing them by recognizing forms. This failure to construct consistent spatial relationships has a disorienting effect on the body, which is accustomed to aligning its statics with the statics of its environment. We cannot achieve a stable relationship to Rothko’s paintings because we cannot fix them and hence fall into motion ourselves due to our inability to objectify them. We find ourselves determined and permeated by these dynamic image-bodies. It is this inability of the beholder to “get a grip on” Rothko’s paintings that has caused their association with the sublime. But it is not primarily a “Geistesgefühl”, a “feeling of spirit” on which Kant founded the sublime, but an opaque bodily sentiment that is elicited through the paintings – which by use of the term becomes intellectualized and distanced.

Picture Acts: Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer As mentioned above, aesthetic perception cannot be reduced to the resonance of bodily communication. And also the neuroscientific approach that integrates the interactions between humans and artifacts into a stimulus-response model and, for instance, reduces it to an interlockage of schemata does not do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon. The term “resonance” denotes a type of relationship that neither belongs fully to the scientific realm of causalities and necessities nor to the human realm of freedom. However, exactly because this is the case, resonance phenomena can help us trace the transitions between the two fields. Aesthetic resonance is a relationship between humans and objects in which the objects’ power to form can be seen as the determining force. This performance or aesthetic picture agency does not have a compulsory character, though, that could bridge the gap between the dead materiality of the objects and the animated materiality of humans by means of an uninterrupted chain of causation. In order to become effective, it has to encounter a human predisposition. In the aforementioned social situation, this inclination to adapt in a chameleon-like way would, for instance, result from sympathy or the wish to belong to a group. Attention aimed at these unconscious processes inhibits them. And there can be no doubt that it is also possible to pass a painting by Mark Rothko and remain unaffected. No matter how tempting the assumption of a true force emanating from objects may be: the concept is not very convincing in light of the possibility to sidestep aesthetic experience as well as the importance of aesthetic and art-historical

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education for an object’s aesthetic appreciation. Aesthetic resonance can neither be completely understood as a purely bodily reaction, nor as an exclusively mental action. Moments of being influenced by objects exist in interactions with pictures, but there is always also the option of critical distancing. Ernst Cassirer and Aby Warburg are two thinkers who dealt with both aspects to different degrees. Especially Warburg, due to his systematic indecisiveness regarding the conception of picture agency, points to still unanswered questions. Both Ernst Cassirer’s and Aby Warburg’s thoughts on the form processes of pictures describe a continuous development starting with impressions that “get up close to the body” (“auf den Leib rücken”) or that are experienced bodily, and end with visually communicated contents. The transformation and canalization of the state of immediate affectedness by sensual impressions into concepts is decisive for the cultural development of humans. Both scholars describe the gain through transformation as a “realm of reflective reasoning” a “Denkraum der Besonnenheit”14: “The conscious creation of distance between oneself and the outside world can be described as the founding act of human civilization.”15 While Cassirer postulates a process of civilization that is more or less fragile and endangered by remythization but nevertheless teleologically oriented and dependent upon the integration of different symbolic forms, the Warburgian model of social processes is polar, or even elliptic. Dangers to human civilization lurk just as much in the pole of overwhelming chaotic affection as in a sterile, still-standing mechanized society in which the creative potentials are exhausted. Pictures are Warburg’s preferred object of study for examining emotional states that oscillate between ecstatic excitement and discretion in a manicdepressive way. This is because images, due to their sensual form and suggestive force, possess a greater “somatic performance”16 than text documents. Although all symbolic forms originate in the transformation of states of psychosomatic arousal, picture documents have the greatest ability to preserve the invested energy, to keep it virulent and discharge it during reception, acting as a stimulating source of creativity. They can invite calm contemplation and pleasure in that which is unthreateningly alive, but they can also impose the re-experience 14

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Aby Warburg: Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeit, in: Aby Warburg. Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, Baden-Baden 1980, pp. 199–290, p. 267. Aby Warburg: Einleitung, in: Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. by Martin Warnke et al., Berlin 1929, p. 3. Trans. by David Freedberg, in: Pathos a Oraibi: Ciò che Warburg non vide, in: Claudia Cieri Via/Pietro Montani (eds.): Lo Sguardo di Giano. Aby Warburg fra tempo e memoria, Turin 2004, pp. 569–611. Hartmut Böhme: Aby M. Warburg (1866–1929), in: Axel Michaels (ed.): Klassiker der Religionswissenschaft. Von Friedrich Schleiermacher bis Mircea Eliade, München 1997, pp. 133–156, p. 139.

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or embodiment of their generative affect onto the beholder and cause an intensification of emotions. Pictures stand in a tension between these two poles. To Warburg, pictures are “energy preserves” (Energiekonserven) which can for centuries conserve and transmit energies they were once invested with. It remains unclear, however, in which medium Warburg believes this energy to be transmitted. Does he, as suggested by his organismic metaphors and his adoption of the term “engrams” from Richard Sermon’s teachings about the inheritance of learned behavior by means of neurological inscription, presume a physiological theory of memory, according to which arousal patterns are not only stored for the lifetime of an organism but can survive for generations? The assumption of a “social mneme as a preserver of the antique dynamograms of sign language”17 points in this direction. Or does he, in order to explain the stylistic changes in Renaissance painting, argue in the sense of a cultural history, claiming that pictures and symbols are transmitted through the process of reception, in which they act in an energizing way? Warburg creates a shortcircuit between cultural processes of development and reception and a quasigenetic inheritance without explaining the transmission. It is unclear whether Warburg wanted the efficacy and transmission of Pathos Formulas to be understood as a communicative act or an involuntary bodily process. His descriptions oscillate between “the presentation of a ‘conventional symbol’ and the expression of a ‘natural symptom’ in a world of bodily conduct.”18 Perhaps Warburg himself was not certain on which level he would like his Pathos Formulas to be placed. It cannot be ruled out that his syncretistic procedure and the resulting effects were intentional. In phrases like “the libidinal entanglement of the human mind with the a-chronologically layered matter”19 the psycho- and picture-historian Warburg exploits the creative potential of his language and by approximation of cultural and biological concepts, which are already united by force in the term “Pathos Formula,” produces two effects: the enlivenment of pictures and the embodiment of psychic arousal. The metaphoric and magical potency of his language gains a heuristic function: It represents a poetic vanguard intended to mark a claim that has yet to be fulfilled.

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Aby Warburg: Notiz vom 17.VII.1927, in: Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg mit Einträgen von Gertrud Bing und Fritz Saxl, in: Gesammelte Schriften. Siebte Abteilung, vol. 7, ed. by Karen Michels/Charlotte SchoellGlass, Berlin 2001, p. 120. Joachim Knape: Gibt es Pathosformeln? Überlegungen zu einem Konzept von Aby M. Warburg, in: Wolfgang Dickhut/Stefan Manns/Norbert Winkler (eds.): Muster im Wandel, Göttingen 2008, pp. 115–137, p. 135. Aby Warburg: Einleitung, in: Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. by Martin Warnke et al., Berlin 1929, p. 4.

Joris van Gastel

LIFE, BU T NOT AS W E K NOW IT Wax Images and the Denial of Death*

On the second of April, 1635, the young Roman patrician Giacinto Centini was put to death on the Campo dei Fiori in Rome for an attempt on the life of Pope Urban VIII.1 The events leading up to his execution can be reconstructed with some detail, though for the present argument, some fragments from the sentence pronounced on the day of the execution may suffice. […] you, Giacinto, son of the late Giovanni Centini d’Ascoli, 38 years of age, are under the grave suspicion for this holy tribunal of having invited to your villa in Spinetoli, […] brother Bernardino Montalto, a man excellent in the art of necromancy, who told you that your uncle should be pope as was your wish and, having seen and considered the prophecies of the abbot Giovachino, he affirmed that after the present pope [Urban VIII] your uncle would be pope, and that only you would need the heart to make it so, and that you could have the present pope die at your wish, for which he would make a statue of wax that, when subsequently it would be consumed, would result in the pope’s death, and in order to do so, in the said villa of yours a convocation was planned where circles and characters were drawn to constrain a spirit.2 *

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Research for this paper was made possible by a fellowship graciously granted by the Kolleg-Forschergruppe Bildakt und Verkörperung, Berlin. Earlier versions have been presented at the Sculpture and Animation workshop at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the EnBAch conference Baroque Bodies in Vienna; on both occasions I received helpful comments. Moreover, I wish to thank Philipp Zitzlsperger for a stimulating exchange of ideas and Katrin Weleda for providing me with a number of significant references. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. Peter Rietbergen: Power and Religion in Baroque Rome. Barberini Cultural Policies, Leiden 2006, pp. 349–360; Gino Benzoni in: Mario Caravale (ed.): Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 23, Rome 1979, s.v., “Centini, Giacinto.” Biblioteca Nazionale di Roma [BNR], Fondo Sessoriano 270/1483; quoted in Michele Rosi: La congiura di Giacinto Centini contro Urbano VIII, in: Archivio della R. società

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And indeed, “the said brother Bernardino […] shaped a statue of virgin wax of the present pope with mitre and pluvial,” the whole setup was prepared, with circles and characters, a special dagger was casted to stab the wax image, and a fire was made to have it melt away.3 One father Cherubino held the image to the fire, but at the moment supreme he burnt his fingers and dropped the image into the flames. A spirit failed to appear, pope Urban VIII reigned for another 14 years, and Giacinto’s uncle died of natural causes before any ascension to the papal throne was even possible. Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s striking marble portrait of the same pope had seen the light only a few years before Centini’s execution.4 (Fig. 1) Already at the time, the bust was praised for its striking vivaciousness. “It is alive, alive, Bernini, Urban’s sacred head,” one poet exclaimed.5 Another author went a step further, arguing that Bernini, “with his own hands,” had “transformed a piece of marble into His Holiness himself”.6 In the light of the events described above, such common expressions of praise become somewhat ironic, as the suggested conflation of portrait and prototype is obviously not without its dangers. To understand how the marble portrait could nonetheless flourish in the early modern period, it becomes pertinent that we consider the relation between marble and wax. As several scholars have noted, the wax image has a problematic position in the history of art. Bernini himself considered it a cosa di donne, a thing for women, and even though he was clearly impressed by the colored waxes by

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romana di storia patria 22 (1899), pp. 366f.: “Essendo che tu Giacinto figlio del quondam Giovanni Centini d’Ascoli, d’anni 38, fusti gravemente inditiato in questo santo tribunale d’haver fatto venire alla tua villa di Spinetoli, territorio d’Ascoli, del 1630, fra Bernardino Montalto, huomo eccellente dell’arte di negromantia, acciò ti dicesse se tuo zio dovesse esser papa come desideravi, et havendo vedute et considerate le profetie dell’abbate Giovachino, affermò che, dopo il presente pontefice, tuo zio sarebbe papa, e che gli bastasse l’animo d’oprare che riuscisse papa il detto tuo zio, et di far perciò morire il papa presente quando a lui piaceva, mentre egli havesse formata una statua di cera, la quale poi consumandosi sarebbe morto il papa, che perciò in detta tua villa si fece una convocatione con circoli et caratteri per costringere un spirto con l’intervento & c.” BNR, Fondo Sessoriano 270/1483, quoted in Rosi: La congiura (as fn. 2), p. 367: “una statua di cera vergine del presente papa con mitra e piviale”. Sebastian Schütze in: ex.cat.: Bernini scultore. La nascita del barocco in casa ­Borghese, ed. by Anna Coliva/Sebastian Schütze, Galleria Borghese, Rome 1998, pp. 242–251 (with further bibliography on p. 242). Pier Francesco Paoli: Rime varie, Rome 1637, p. 210: “Vivo, vivo è, Bernino, / Sacro il volto d’Urbano, / Opra de la tua mano”. Letter from Lelio Guidiccioni to Cav. Giovan Lorenzo Bernini, June 4th, 1633, in: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana [BAV], Barb. Lat. 2958, quoted in Joris van Gastel: Il marmo spirante. Sculpture and Experience in Seventeenth-Century Rome, Berlin/ Leiden 2013, p. 214 [f. 203v, 8]: “havendo di sua mano cambiato un marmo in Sua Santità medesima”.

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Fig. 1  Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Bust of Pope Urban VIII, 1632, marble, 83 cm, Rome, Palazzo Barberini.

Antoine Benoît which he saw during his stay in Paris, he could not refrain from remarking that they “would particularly appeal to lovers.”7 In other words, the artist subtly places it outside the realm of serious art, foregoing any exchange between “real art” and the wax image. 7

Paul Fréart Seigneur de Chantelou: Journal de voyage du cavalier Bernin en France, ed. by Milovan Stani c, ´ Paris 2001, p. 143; ibid., p. 259: “ces portraits étaient pour plaire beaucoup aux personnes qui s’entr’aiment.” For the negative connotations of the feminine in art, see Philip Sohm: Gendered Style in Italian Art Criticism from Michelangelo to Malvasia, in: Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995), pp. 759–808.

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It is, then, all the more significant that in his 1902 essay Bildniskunst und Florentinisches Bürgertum Aby Warburg sought to explain the rise of the renaissance individualized portrait in Florence by looking at what he called the “fetishism of the waxwork cult.”8 Like the many wax votive images that crowded the church of the Santissima Annunziata, he argued, so too the painted portraits were to make the portrayed present in the vicinity of the Divine.9 Warburg focuses on what we may call a pre-Vasarian association between waxwork and portrait, something that, arguably, was specific for this particular moment in history. A parallel and not unrelated development took place in the field of portrait sculpture, where the experiment of the first lifelike portrait busts involved an explicit engagement with death masks.10 However, these associations between waxwork and portrait, death mask and bust, were short-lived. Where, in following centuries, death masks were used for portrait busts, the association was carefully avoided. As much is suggested in a letter, dated 1561 and addressed to Alvise Contarini, concerning a portrait of his uncle Cardinal Gasparo Contarini to be made after his death mask. “It will be necessary,” writes the sender, “to first cast it in clay or wax, and then to remove from it that appearance of death, which every master who is not an idiot will know how to do […].”11 With regard to the wax portrait, the association with death appears less easy to dispose of. As Julius von Schlosser indicates at the outset of his classic   8

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Aby Warburg: Bildniskunst und Florentinisches Bürgertum, Leipzig 1902, p. 11; trans. id.: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity. Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. by David Britt, Los Angeles 1999, p. 190. For a further underpinning of this argument, see Robert Maniura: Ex Votos, Art and Pious Performance, in: Oxford Art Journal 32 (2009), pp. 409–425. On ex votos see also Megan Holmes: Ex-votos. Materiality, Memory, and Cult, in: Michael Wayne Cole/Rebecca Zorach (eds.): The Idol in the Age of Art. Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World, Surrey/Burlington 2009, pp. 159–181; Roberta Panzanelli: Compelling Presence. Wax Effigies in Renaissance Florence, in: Roberta Panzanelli (ed.): Ephemeral Bodies. Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, Los Angeles 2008, pp. 13–39; Hugo van der Velden: Medici Votive Images and the Scopes and Limits of Likeness, in: The Image of the Individual. Portraits in the Renaissance, ed. by Nicholas Mann/Luke Syson, London 1998, pp. 126–137. Jeanette Kohl: “Vollkommen ähnlich”. Der Index als Grundlage des Renaissanceporträts, in: Similitudo, ed. by Martin Gaier/Jeanette Kohl/Alberto Saviello, Pa­­der­­ born 2012, pp. 181–206; Panzanelli: Compelling Presence (as fn. 9); Jeanette Kohl: Gesichter machen. Büste und Maske im Florentiner Quattrocento, in: Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 34 (2007), pp. 77–99. Letter from Ludovico Beccadelli to Alvise Contarini, January 4th, 1561, quoted in Gigliola Fragnito: Memoria individuale e costruzione biografica. Beccadelli, Della Casa, Vettori alle origini di un mito, Urbino 1978, pp. 19f., fn. 18: “sarà bisogno com’ho detto gittarlo in prima, o di creta, o di cera, et torgli poi quello aspetto di morto, il che saprà far ogni maestro che non sia goffo”. Cf. Thomas Martin: Alessandro Vittoria and the Portrait Bust in Renaissance Venice. Remodelling Antiquity, Oxford 1998, cat. 69.

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study on the wax portrait, in religious contexts, the art of ceroplastics has been related to two “closely interrelated” sets of ideas: “the relationship of the living individual to the deity” – here we may think of Warburg’s voti­ – “and that of the dead to the Beyond […].” Moreover, he notes that these sets of ideas are “born of primitive psychology.”12 As to the nature of this psychology, however, the reader is kept in the dark. Schlosser speaks of “superstitious reasoning” and “sympathetic magic,” though it remains unclear what he precisely means by this.13 Strikingly, these considerations do not play much of a role in Schlosser’s discussion, at the end of his essay, regarding the exclusion of wax portraiture from art history. Rather, opposing it to a classicist, idealist aesthetic, he argues: “Portraiture in wax was naively realistic, was given to quite uninhibited use of color and of natural materials, and took simple imitation (l’imitation simple) to the most extreme lengths possible.”14 The question remains, then, to what extent there is any specific role for the material of wax and its relationship with magical thinking. More recently, also Georges Didi-Huberman has stressed the absence of the wax image in art-historical discourse, attributing this “censorship,” as he calls it, to the material’s ambiguous nature, its “aesthetic viscosity,” which results in a “dual uneasiness of degradation and excess.”15 For Didi-Huberman, it is these particular material qualities that relate it to Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny. In fact, Freud, here following Ernst Jentsch, does mention the impression made by waxwork figures in his well-known essay on the uncanny, but relates this impression not so much to the material itself as (quoting Jentsch) to “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not, in fact, be inanimate […].”16 With this, the 12

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Julius von Schlosser: Tote Blicke. Geschichte der Porträtbildnerei in Wachs. Ein Versuch, ed. by Thomas Medicus, Berlin 1993, p. 13; trans. id.: History of Portraiture in Wax, trans. by James Michael Loughridge, in: Panzanelli (ed.): Ephemeral Bodies (as fn. 9), p. 175. More generally on wax and wax images: Jessica Ullrich: Wächserne Körper. Zeitgenössische Wachsplastik im kulturhistorischen Kontext, Berlin 2003; Charlotte Angeletti: Geformtes Wachs. Kerzen, Votive, Wachsfiguren, Munich 1980; Reinhard Büll: Das große Buch vom Wachs. Geschichte, Kultur, Technik, 2 vols., Munich 1978; Reinhard Büll: Keroplastik. Ein Einblick in ihre Erscheinungsformen, ihre Technik und Ästhetik, in: id (ed.): Vom Wachs. Hoechs­ ter Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Wachse 1, Frankfurt/M. 1963, pp. 417–526. Schlosser: History of Portraiture in Wax (as fn. 12), p. 176. Ibid., p. 296. Georges Didi-Huberman: Viscosities and Survivals. Art History Put to the Test by the Material, in: Panzanelli (ed.): Ephemeral Bodies (as fn. 9), pp. 154–169. Cf. Christine Göttler: Last Things. Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform, Turnhout 2010, pp. 219, 253–254. Sigmund Freud: Das Unheimliche, in: Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Anna Freud, London 1947, vol. 12, pp. 227–268, p. 237, engl. The ‘Uncanny’, in: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. by James Strachey, London

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question remains open whether these doubts are the result of an excess of naturalism, or suggest that we should, as Didi-Huberman’s concept of degradation appears to imply, rather look for something which goes beyond the question of representation.

The Denial of Death This paper will argue that an answer should be sought in anxieties related to our own corporal existence and mortality. As Hans Belting has shown in his 2001 Bild-Anthropologie, rituals surrounding absence and death, and more in general the questions of how people deal with death, are central to the power of images.17 To further explore the specific role of death, we may refer to Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death of 1973, as well as to more recent experimental research that takes this book as a point of departure, however sidestepping its strong psychoanalytic tone.18 Becker’s central thesis is that, in order to cope with daily life, we develop strategies to suppress or deny our own mortality from early on. The ways in which we frame our own existence as well as the world at large block out eminent death, introduce an illusion of control, and transpose our faith to a higher being. When, coincidently, we are made aware of our mortality, we cling even harder to the ideas that we have built up to guard our egos. Most important for our discussion is Becker’s point that our tendency to buffer death anxiety also implies a problematic relationship to the human body. Man’s body, he writes, “is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways – the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die.”19 A similar point is developed by Julia Kristeva in her Powers of Horror. Echoing Céline’s repeated reminder that we are “nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotted viscera,” she defines the corpse as “the most sickening of wastes” and “death infecting life,” presenting it as the horizon of our identity that, unsuccessfully, we attempt to fight off.20 More recently, Jamie Gol­denberg and her colleagues have explored further implications of Becker’s ideas, arguing that current phenomena such as the lavish use of Photoshop to alter the appearance of the body in the media, but also depilation – we will return to the role of

17 18 19 20

1999, vol. 17, p. 226. Cf. Ernst Jentsch: Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen, in: Psychiatrisch-neurologische Wochenschrift 8 (1906), pp. 195–198, 203ff., here p. 197 and on waxworks p. 198. Hans Belting: Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft, Munich 2001, part. pp. 143–188. Ernest Becker: The Denial of Death, New York 1973. Ibid., p. 26. Julia Kristeva: Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez, New York 1982, p. 3; Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Journey to the End of the Night, trans. by Ralph Manheim, New York 1983, p. 291.

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Fig. 2  Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Bust of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, 1632, marble, 80,1 cm (without base), Rome, Galleria Borghese.

hair below – and plastic surgery, can be understood as ways of objectifying the body, thus blocking out associations of decline and decay.21 Art, and particularly sculpture, it may be argued, is susceptible to similar processes of objectification. As already Leon Battista Alberti suggested, the portrait is inevitably tied up with death, indeed a point also Freud hints at when 21

Jamie L. Goldenberg et al.: Fleeing the Body. A Terror Management Perspective on the Problem of Human Corporeality, in: Personality and Social Psychology Re­­ view 4/3 (2000), pp. 200–218.

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he relates the ancient Egyptian practice of making “images of the dead in some lasting material” to the “invention of doubling as a preservation against extinc­ tion.”22 That such a concern was prevalent also in the seventeenth century be­­ comes immediately clear when we look at the ways in which the marble portrait is treated in contemporary poetry. A striking example comes from the pen of poet Pier Francesco Paoli, in a sonnet written in praise of Bernini’s Bust of Cardinal Scipione Borghese. (Fig. 2) Vivo è Scipio in quel marmo, E vivrà eterno ancor con doppia palma Ne la corporea salma; Che rivolta la Parca al vivo sasso Stenderà in lui la mano, E credendo haver casso Di vita il gran Borghese, Non s’armerà, per le seconde offese. Bernin, che deve a te ’l Heroe sovrano, Se fai nel marmo impresso Vivo il suo volto, ed immortal lui stesso?23 [Alive is Scipio in that marble, / and he will live for all eternity with double glory / in the corporeal body; / for Death, turning to the living stone, / will reach out to him / and believing to have drained / of life the great Borghese, / he will not arm himself for a second assault. / Bernini, how much must he not owe to you, that sovereign hero, / now that you have impressed in the marble, / his living face, and [made] him immortal?] The poem can be understood in terms of Freud’s idea of “doubling” (taken from Otto Rank) as a means to overcome the fears instilled by our mortality – indeed, its concetto is precisely that the double is here devised to overcome inevitable death.24 There is something particular to the material that appears to underline

22

23 24

Leon Battista Alberti: Opere volgari, ed. by Cecil Grayson, Bari 1973, pp. 44–45 [II.25]; Freud: Das Unheimliche (as fn. 16), p. 247, trans. id.: The Uncanny (as fn. 16), p. 235. Cf. Joanna Woodall: Hieronymus Cock’s Effigies. Living Presence in Portrait Prints after the Death of the Original Model, in: The Secret Lives of Artworks, ed. by Caroline van Eck/Joris van Gastel/Elsje van Kessel, Leiden 2014, pp. 262–289; Belting: Bild-Anthropologie (as fn. 17), pp. 143–188; David Rosand: Alcuni pensieri sul ritratto e la morte, in: Giorgione e l’umanesimo veneziano, ed. by Rodolfo Pallucchini, Florence 1981, pp. 298–308. Pier Francesco Paoli: Rime varie, Rome 1637, p. 260. Freud: Das Unheimliche (as fn. 16), p. 247; cf. Otto Rank: Der Doppelgänger. Eine psychoanalytische Studie, Leipzig/Vienna/Zurich 1925.

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this time-transgressing quality. As marble, the “living stone,” has the apparent ability to remain untouched by the teeth of time, the choice to keep its material visible seems particularly poignant. The absence of polychromy, then, more than any remnant of ancient tradition, can be said to be an actual necessity for the work to be understood in terms of eternity; through the absence of color, it distances itself from the once living body as a body of flesh, prone to decay.25 A similar kind of distancing is much more difficult in the case of the wax image.26 The double’s precarious relation to life and death is at stake in the wellknown anecdote recounted by Filippo Baldinucci in his biography of the Carrarese sculptor Pietro Tacca (1577–1640) regarding the latter’s wax bust of Grand Duke Cosimo II. Adorned with “real eye lashes, beard, and hair, and eyes of crystal with such a colour [macchia] that they seemed his own,” the portait, writes Baldinucci, seemed “not a feigned person, but real and alive.” It was a life, though, that carried in it the association of the sitter’s passing. After the premature death of the Grand Duke – he had died at age 31 – his mother, Cristina of Lorena, when visiting Tacca’s house, “before doing so, ordered the portrait to be taken from its place, her heart not being able to bear to see again alive, but rather in a mute statue, her beloved son that had already fallen prey to death.”27 Here, through the common conventions of praise, we sense a more profound getting to grips with the agency the wax image exercises on the spectator; “[f]rom having been an assurance of immortality,” we may quote Freud for one last time, “it becomes the ghastly harbinger of death.”28 If for Cristina of Lorena the wax image came to function as a kind of unsettling déjà-vu, on other occasions it was explicitly employed to capture the last flutterings of fleeting life. A case in point is presented by the events following the execution and decapitation of the fisherman Masaniello, leader of the Neapolitan revolt of 1647. Cleaned up and sewn together, his body was exposed 25

26 27

28

Cf. ex. cat.: The Color of Life. Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present, ed. by Roberta Panzanelli/Eike D. Schmidt/Kenneth D. S. Lapatin, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 2008; Frank Fehrenbach: Coming Alive. Some Remarks on the Rise of “Monochrome” Sculpture in the Renaissance, in: Source 30 (2011), pp. 47–55. Cf. Ullrich: Wächserne Körper (as fn. 12), pp. 149–198. Filippo Baldinucci: Notizie dei professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua, ed. by Ferdinando Ranalli/Paola Barocchi, vol. 4, Florence 1975, p. 99: “testa con busto del granduca Cosimo II, con ciglia, barba, e capelli veri, ed occhi di cristallo di tal macchia, che sembravano i suoi propri, e tutto il ritratto non persona finta, ma vera e viva [sembrava]; […] madama sereniss. Cristina di Lorena la madre […] entrata per suo diporto nella casa del Tacca per vedere l’opere sue, prima di farlo, ordinava, che si facesse togliere di luogo il ritratto, non soffrendole il cuore di tornare a vedere vivo, ma però in una muta statue, il caro figliolo già fatto preda della morte.” The passage is discussed by Schlosser: Tote Blicke (as fn. 12), pp. 70f. Freud: Das Unheimliche (as fn. 16), p. 247; trans. id.: The Uncanny (as fn. 16), p. 235.

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at the church of the Carmine where it was treated almost as that of a saint, people touching, even kissing the body or the sheets that covered it, some touching it with their rosaries. Tommaso De Santis writes in his account of the revolt how at the occasion portraits were made, not only painted but also sculpted in wax, the latter “extremely lifelike.” “No sooner was he put up to be portrayed,” he continues, “than a voice called out, saying that he had risen from the dead, and with a smiling face had publically blessed the people.”29 The wax portraits, then, here appear to assume the character of relics, not unlike the hairs torn from Masaniello’s head by “many women,” who saved them “at their chest, as if they were relics […].”30 In a context where the boundary between life and death is transgressed, and a more personal transgression of boundaries is indicated by the ritualized touch of the lifeless body, the wax image takes up its role as double. Wax, then, functioned in contexts where people’s relationship with death – or rather the absence of such a relationship – was under pressure, that is, in contexts where death is irrefutable but at the same time challenged. What are the qualities of wax that allow it to take on this role? In the remainder of this paper, four interrelated perspectives will be discussed.

Wa x as Flesh “Was there ever anything that came so close to the real?” asks the poet Giovan Battista Marino rhetorically in his poem on a wax portrait of Cardinal Odoardo Farnese.31 Its liveliness, however, appears to reside not only in its appearance but also in the very wax itself. It is sculpted in viva cera, writes the poet, “in living wax.”32 It is true that, as we saw in Paoli’s poem on Bernini’s bust of Scipione Borghese, poets as easily write of living marble, but there is a significant difference between marble and wax, for while marble is alive only for the eyes, wax deceives also the sense of touch.33 In the popular story of Pygmalion in Ovid’s

29

30

31 32 33

Tommaso de Santis: Historia del tumulto di Napoli, Leiden 1652, pp. 150f. [17 July 1647]: “Molti pittori fecero il suo ritratto, e ne furono formati ancora alcuni in cera molto al naturale: ogn’uno ne cercava, ogn’uno ne voleva uno, senza guardar’ à prezzo. Mentr’era accomodato in postura di ritrarlo, eccoti sparsa una voce d’esser resuscitato, e che con faccia ridente avesse bendetto publicamente il Popolo.” Giuseppe Donzelli: Partenope liberata, Naples 1647, p. 67: “Molte donne gli strap­ parono i capelli, serbandogli in petto, come fussero Reliquie.” Cf. ex. cat.: Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli, ed. by Silvia Cassani, Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte, Naples 1984, vol. 2, p. 47. Giambattista Marino: La galeria, ed. by Marzio Pieri/Alessandra Ruffino, Trent 2005, p. 412: “Qual fu mai tanto al ver finto simìle?” Ibid., p. 412. On marble and the sense of touch see Joris van Gastel: Il marmo spirante. Sculpture and Experience in Seventeenth-Century Rome, Berlin/Leiden 2013, pp. 135–167.

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Metamorphosis, we read how the sculptor’s experience of the coming to life of the statue of Galathea under his touches is likened to that of molding hard wax, which, as recounted in a seventeenth-century Italian edition, “made more soft and warm with the fingers, in order to give it any kind of shape, becomes more and more tractable and less firm.”34 Here the evocation of the living flesh of the sculpture and the soft, warm wax overlap, and strengthen one another. In a more literal way, Giacomo Vivio assures Cardinal Alessandro Peretti di Montalto in his Discorso sopra la mirabil opera di basso rilievo that his portrait in colored wax “not only shows the color of skin [carnagione] to the eye, but will feel to the touch as your very own flesh.”35 Conversely, flesh itself could have a wax-like quality to it. A seventeenthcentury biographer of Saint Francesca Romana, for example, wrote that, when her coffin was opened some four and half months after she had been buried, “almost all that were present touched and felt that blessed body, and her hands and arms, and they found that it moved easily, as were it a living body, or of soft wax […].”36 Of the blessed Colomba of Rieti it was said that when her body was recovered, her heart, bathing in blood still “full of life, bright and pure,” was of a wax-like consistency. Her biographer could only explain this with reference to Psalm 22: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. […] thou hast brought me into the dust of death.”37 Here, with the decaying bodies of saints, we are already in the context of death itself. Due to its flesh-like softness and the way it retains the heat of touching hands, wax is like flesh a transient substance, a substance that may ooze, break open, and wither away. It does not, then, seem to be a coincidence that the

34

35

36

37

The Italian translation in Publius Ovidius Naso: Le metamorfosi di Ovidio, Ridotte da Gio. Andrea dall’Anguillara, in ottava rima, ed. by M. Gioseppe Horologgi/ M. Francesco Turchi, Venice 1610, book 10, p. 157v: “Come se preme alcun la cera dura, / L’ammolla con le dita, e le riscalda, / E per poter donarle ogni figura, / Viene ogn’hor piu trattabile, o men salda”. Giacomo Vivio: Discorso sopra la mirabil opera di basso rilievo di cera stuccata con colori scolpita in pietra negra, Rome 1590, p. 8: “dimostra la carnagione, non solo al vedere; ma si rende al tatto come la propria carne”. Cf. Maarten Delbeke: Matter Without Qualities? Wax in Giacomo Vivio’s ‘Discorso’ of 1590, in: Sébastien Clerbois/Martina Droth (eds.): Revival and Invention. Sculpture through its Material Histories, Oxford 2011, pp. 91–120. Virgilio Cepari: Vita di Santa Francesca Romana, Rome 1675, p. 363: “e quasi tutti toccarono, e palparono quel benedetto corpo, e le sue mani, e braccia, e le trovarono facili ad essere mosse, come se fosse stato corpo vivo, ò di cera molle”. Sebastiano Bontempi in: Acta sanctorum, Maii V, Antwerp 1685, p. 389 [cap. LXI, 217]; quoted after Katharine Park: Holy Autopsies. Saintly Bodies and Medical Expertise, 1300–1600, in: Julia L. Hairston/Walter Stephens (eds.): The Body in Early Modern Italy, Baltimore 2010, p. 66. Cf. psalm 22:14.

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Fig. 3  Gaetano Zumbo: Anatomical Head, c. 1695, wax on a human skull, life size, Florence Museo della Specola.

Sicilian wax modeler Gaetano Zumbo, among the first to make colored anatomical wax models, thematizes the decay of flesh in his works. In his tableaus of the Plague and the Triumph of Time bodies in varied states of decay are strewn about, and even his anatomical head of a man, modeled around a real skull, has lost its freshness.38 (Fig. 3) With the almost closed eyes set in deep, bony sockets and parched dark skin, the man appears to hover between illness and death, an 38

Jane Eade: The Theatre of Death, in: Oxford Art Journal 36 (2013), pp. 109–125; Maria Grazia Cordua et al.: Mirabili orrori. Cere inedite di Gaetano Zumbo dopo il restauro, in: OPD restauro 21 (2010), pp. 71–87; Anja Wolkenhauer: “Grausenhaft wahr ist diese Geschichte”. Die Wachsfiguren von Don Gaetano Zumbo zwischen Kunst und medizinischer Anatomie, in: Gabriele Dürbeck et al. (eds.): Wahrnehmung der Natur, Natur der Wahrnehmung. Studien zur Geschichte visueller Kultur

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image that is further strengthened by the drops of curdled blood in his left nostril and at the side of his mouth. In 1587, the young Dutch humanist Aernout van Buchel would note down his impression of the voti in the church of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence, writing that, at first entrance, it “appeared as a field of cadavers.”39 Only in 1665 had the voti been moved from the church to a small cloister, and we may wonder whether Zumbo’s depictions carried some of the associations of this spectacle.

Casts of Saints Throughout the early modern period, the wax portrait remained associated with the cast. The accounts of Pliny the Elder and Polybius of wax portraits of ancestors kept in the houses of Roman patricians and carried around in funeral processions were repeated time and again in early modern sources.40 These include Giovanni Baglione’s Vite, where, not coincidently, it is mentioned in the biography of Rosato Rosati, a sculptor of wax portraits.41 Filippo Baldinucci refers to Pliny’s account in his Notizie, where he gives it a central part in his brief history of portraiture that introduces the biography of Medici court portraitist Justus Sustermans.42 Vasari traces the origins of the modern portrait bust to Verrocchio’s workshop, where the modeling of figures in wax “portrayed after

39 40

41 42

um 1800, Dresden 2001, pp. 71–85 (with further refences in fn. 1); Paolo Giansiracusa (ed.): Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, Milan 1988. Arnoldus Buchellius: Iter italicum (1587), quoted in Warburg: Bildniskunst (as fn. 8), pp. 348f.: “ad primum ingressum cadaverorum campum crederes.” Pliny: Natural History, trans. Harris Rackham, vol. 9, Cambridge, MA 1952, XXXV.ii.6; Polybius: The Histories, trans. by William R. Paton, vol. 3, Cambridge, MA 1923, VI.53. Giovanni Baglione: Le vite de’ pittori scultori et architetti, Vatican City 1995, vol. 1, pp. 173f. Baldinucci: Notizie (as fn. 27), vol. 4, p. 473.

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life and painted with oil” coincided with the making of death and life masks “made so well and natural that they seem to be alive.”43 However, more often the wax casts functioned in a different context. In the life of Saint Filippo Neri written by Giacomo Pietro Bacci, for example, we read about the many wax casts of his face that were made “for the consolation of the many devotees that longed to have his effigy close to them […].”44 It has been suggested that a drawing in the Albertina, attributed to Guido Reni, depicts the saint as he could be seen when his body was excavated to make a new death mask.45 (Fig. 4) Even if the documents pertaining to this new cast leave some room for interpretation, the image is evocative and it should remind us that the making of a death mask involved a direct application of matter to the deteriorating face of the subject. And indeed, from accounts of the life and afterlife of Saint Camillo de Lellis (1550–1614, canonized 1746), we learn that the making of such a cast was not without danger: “in making the […] mask, to great displeasure of the fathers, his face remained somewhat damaged, and burned, because the oil was too hot.”46 Returning to Filippo Neri, we may get an idea of the status of the wax death masks that were produced for the “many devotees” from the account of the display of a wax effigy at the Bolognese church of Santa Maria di Galliera during the celebrations of the Saint’s canonization in 1622: “On the altar, between various reliquaries and other precious silver objects, stood in the middle a box of cypress wood, clothed all over with red satin lined with silver, in which was kept a wax effigy of the saintly Father, made on his very own face after the ties that bound his glorious soul and body had dissolved […].”47 43

44

45

46

47

Giorgio Vasari: Le vite de’ più eccelenti pittori scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. by Rosanna Bettarini/Paola Barocchi, vol. 3, Florence 1966, pp. 543f. (ed. Giuntina). Giacomo Pietro Bacci: Vita di S. Filippo Neri, Bologna 1666, p. 336: “per consolatione di molti divoti, che bramavano di haver’ appresso di se la sua effiggie, fù permesso da’ Padri, che ne fosse fatto il cavo in gesso: dal quale ne sono poi state gittate molte in cera, che lo raffigurano al naturale.” Veronika Birke/Janine Kertész: Die Italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina, vol. 4, Vienna 1997, p. 2189, inv. 17665; Olga Melasecchi in: ex. cat.: La regola e la fama. San Filippo Neri e l’arte, ed. by Claudio Strinati, Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia, Milan 1995, p. 536, cat. 96. Mario Giuseppe Lanci: Vita del venerabile padre Camillo de Lellis, Mondovi 1671, p. 360: “Ancorche nel farsi la […] maschera [di gesso] con grandissimo disgusto de’ padri gli fosse restato alquanto offeso, & abbruggiato il viso, per essere stato l’oglio troppa bollente”. Giovanni Marciano: Memorie historiche della congregatione dell’oratorio, Naples 1699, p. 16: “Nell’Altare frà varii reliquiarii, & altre galanterie d’argento stava nel mezzo una cassa di cipresso soderata da per tutto di raso rosso co’ suoi finimenti d’argento, in cui era una effigie di cera del Santo Padre fatta sù la sua faccia istessa dopo che l’anima gloriosa restò sciolta da’ legami del corpo”.

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Fig. 4  Guido Reni, attr.: Saint Filippo Neri, 1614?, pastel colours on blue gray paper, 24,3 × 17,8 cm, Vienna, Albertina.

As this account illustrates, the wax mask was very much regarded, not as a work of art – above the altar was in fact a painted portrait of the saint – but rather as a relic.48 Indeed, the account makes very explicit the moment of touch; it was “made on his very own face,” even if, in fact, the wax itself would never have touched it.

48

Christine Göttler discusses a similar mode of display of wax “souls,” see Göttler: Last Things (as fn. 15), p. 228.

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Wa x and Magic If this association with the cast is something that appears to cling to the wax image in general, there is a further association that should be taken into account. To explore this, we must return to the use of wax images in magical practices, for if Centini’s account is exceptional in its detail, it is certainly not unique. In his Anotomia d’amore profano of 1642, Matteo Palma warns for the power that women may gain over men by making use of images, speaking explicitly about wax portraits. Palma refers to Vergil: “As this clay hardens and as this wax melts in one and the same flame, so may Daphnis melt with love for me”; and also to Ovid’s Medea: “She vows to their doom the absent, fashions the waxen image, and into its wretched heart drives the slender needle […].”49 And if this may seem to be something of a very distant past, also at the time, it soon becomes clear that they are to be taken very seriously. In fact, noting without further elaboration the popular accounts of witch trials penned down by Paolo Grillandi and Jacob Sprenger, Palma argues that they are indeed very true.50 An interesting case of such a use of wax can be found among the records of the Holy Office of Venice, where in 1588 a young lady named Elena Cumano stood trail for witchcraft. The accusation followed the discovery of a wax figure near the altar in the Cathedral of Feltre. What the priests celebrating Mass first thought to be a small child turned out to be a wax figure of a nude man, with “many needles stuck all over it, especially the eyes, temple, heart and phallus.”51 Elena was soon found out, and declared that she had employed the figure to bring back her husband who had deserted her and fled to Flanders. We learn, moreover, that she had had the figure made by a local artisan named Pietro Grevo who, significantly, was in the business of making wax votive images. Pietro’s testimony indicates that, after a first exemplar was rejected because it lacked “a virile member and testicles,” he modified his moulds with beans to achieve these details.52 It will, at this point, come as no surprise that wax votive images, too, could be used to get at the portrayed. In fact, the destruction of the wax voto of pope Clement VII in the Santissima Annunziata was referred to by

49

50 51 52

Matteo Palma: Anotomia d’amore profano, Venice 1642, pp. 345f.; Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, trans. by H. Rushton Fairclough, Cambridge, MA 1916, VIII.80; Ovid: Heroides and Amores, trans. by Grant Showerman, Cambridge, MA 1931, VI.9; cf. Daniel Ogden: Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds. A Sourcebook, Oxford 2002. Palma: Anotomia (as fn. 49), p. 346. Guido Ruggiero: Binding Passions. Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance, New York/Oxford 1993, p. 57. Ibid., p. 71.

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one contemporary as his “murder.”53 Of course, this is also confirmed by the attempt on the life of pope Urban VIII instigated by Giacinto Centini. Although most accounts of magic involving wax are fairly unclear about what qualities of the material make it so suitable for use in such practices, common associations may at least help us formulate some hypotheses. In Girolamo Menghi’s popular Compendio dell’arte essorcistica, reprinted at least thirteen times within fifty years following the first edition of 1576, we may read how wax, but also hair, nails, and lead, may be used by magicians to constrain daemons.54 Nor does this association with hair and nails seem to be a casual one. The disturbing case of a possessed woman, described by Antonio Benivieni at the beginning of the sixteenth century, involves her giving up “long, bent nails, bronze pins, together with hair and wax all mixed in a ball.”55 Like wax, nails and hair are organic materials, though not actually alive. Moreover, the mentioning of wax among hair and nails suggests that the material may have similar taboo-like associations. Indeed, as James George Frazer already writes in his Golden Bough (1922), “[t]he notion that a man may be bewitched by means of the clippings of his hair, the parings of his nails, or any other severed portion of his person is almost world-wide.”56 Often, Frazer’s examples illustrate, they are associated with wax.57

Infectious Matter To further understand the implications of this association, however, we should delve somewhat deeper into the discussion of hair, which, moreover, also is of interest for the wax portrait itself. Tacca’s bust of Cosimo II, we may recall, had “real eye lashes, beard, and hair,” as indeed holds true for Zumbo’s Anatomical Head. As Janice Miller has pointed out, hair, and in particular disembodied hair, is something both familiar and alien; dissociated from the living body, it remains 53

54

55

56 57

Gio. Battista Busini: Lettere a Bemedetto Varchi sugli avvenimenti dell’assedio di Firenze, ed. by Gaetano Milanesi, Firenze 1860, p. 189: “anche tu ti trovasti ad ammazzare il papa nei Servi.” Cf. ibid., p. 33 and Richard C. Trexler: Public Life in Renaissance Florence, New York/London 1980, p. 123. Girolamo Menghi: Compendio dell’arte essorcistica, Venice 1605, pp. 65f.: “alcuna volta con certe cosette superflue, et di miuno valore facilmente [i demoni] si fanno mancipij, & servi de’ Maghi, & incantatori; & alcuna volta gli constringono ò nei capegli, ò nelle unghie, ò nella cera, ò nel piombo, overo con un debile filo li legano.” Antonio Benivieni: De abditis nonnullis ac mirandis morborum et sanationum causis, Florence 1507, ch. 8, quoted and translated in Piero Camporesi: The Incorruptible Flesh. Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore, trans. by Tania Croft-Murray/Helen Elsom, Cambridge 1988, p. 120. James George Frazer: The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion, abridged ed., New York 1925, pp. 231–237. Ibid., p. 13.

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as a “reminder of the transient nature of the human body,” but also as a relic, something once attached and touching, seemingly alive but in fact dead organic waste.58 Significantly, early modern accounts discuss body hair as “excrement,” something that, like sweat, is excreted by the body and bears associations of infections and disease.59 Lucrezia Borgia’s lock, once hidden between the papers of the poet Cardinal Pietro Bembo, may remind us of the fact that also in lyric poetry hair had a problematic status, shifting between sign of beauty and tormenting snare that binds the lover’s soul.60 Recent research in psychology and biology indicates that hair, like nail clippings, intestines, wounds, and indeed dead bodies, evokes a response that is labeled with the emotion of disgust. Departing from an evolutionary account of human behavior, authors such as Paul Rozin have argued that disgust can be understood as a hard-wired behavioral defence against infection.61 Organic materials, and particularly those associated with the sick or decaying body, harbour the danger of infection and an inborn inclination to shy away from them is a good way to safeguard one’s capacities to produce offspring. Although disgust does not seem to be directly related to the uncanny, scholars in the field of robotics have made precisely this connection in discussing responses to all too human androids.62 The common denominator is the role of death and, more specifically, that of the mortal body. The most forceful triggers of disgust appear to be directly related to the more animal side of our being. Maybe surprisingly, the eyes too may have the kind of negative connotation evoking disgust, at least for the early modern public (though eyes also play a central role in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann of 1816, analyzed in detail by Freud in his essay on the uncanny and by Rank in his work on the double).63

58

59 60

61

62

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Janice Miller: Hair Without a Head. Disembodiment and the Uncanny, in: Geraldine Biddle-Perry/Sarah Cheang (eds.): Hair. Styling, Culture and Fashion, Oxford/New York 2008, pp. 183–192; cf. ex. cat.: Cheveux chéris. Frivolités et trophées, ed. by Yves Le Fur/Odile Gilbert, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris 2012. Sandra Cavallo: Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy. Identities, Families and Masculinities, Manchester 2007. See e.g. Francesco Petrarca: Canzoniere, ed. by Marco Santagata, Milan 1996, no. 197: “le chiome bionde, e ’1 crespo laccio, / che sì soavemente lega et stringe / l’alma, che d’umiltate e non d’altr’armo.” For an overview see Valerie Curtis/Adam Biran: Dirt, Disgust, and Disease. Is Hygiene in Our Genes?, in: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44 (2001), pp. 17–31; cf., more generally, Winfried Menninghaus: Ekel. Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung, Frankfurt/M. 2002. Karl F. MacDorman/Hiroshi Ishiguro: The Uncanny Advantage of Using Androids in Cognitive and Social Science Research, in: Interaction Studies 7 (2006), pp. 297– 337; Masahiro Mori: Bukimi No Tani [The Uncanny Valley], in: Energy 7 (1970), pp. 33–35. Freud: Das Unheimliche (as fn. 16), pp. 238ff.

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Referring again to Menghi’s text on witchcraft – though here he is not writing about witches in particular – we may read how runny and teary eyes may hurt [offendere] the person who meets their glance. “This comes about,” he argues, “because their eyes, being infected with a bad quality [mala qualità], infect the air that is between the one and the other [person], and this infected air, in turn, infects the eyes that confront the eyes of the diseased.”64 A significant addition to this idea can be found in Gregorio Comanini’s Il figino, an art-theoretical text published in 1591. Here, following the work of Marsilio Ficino, the author speaks of a “vapor of corrupt blood” that emanates from runny and bloodshot eyes, “contaminating with the same disease the eyes that meet them.”65 With the eyes and hair we have arrived also at the adornment of the wax portrait; the real hair and eyelashes, the eerie glass eyes. As particularly the magical accounts we have discussed illustrate, however, the wax itself has very similar associations, seemingly appealing to the same mechanisms of disgust. Moreover, we may expect one to reinforce the other; in the wax image the uncanny and the abject appear to overlap. These are associations, then, that are deeply ingrained in the material itself, evoking responses that, though partially structured by culture, have their origins in deep-rooted instincts. Wax straddles the dark line between life and death. In its adaptability, its fleshlike quality, its warm, organic nature, wax manages to cling on to life, to draw it in and retain it. And yet, wax, in being so close to life, is actually too close to death. The very material draws attention to the body as a physical body and thus a body that is prone to decay. While its life-like qualities are at the centre in contexts where actual death is present or eminent and culturally acquired notions of powerful and protective agents are invoked and reinforced, outside such contexts its life carries associations of death.66 Where previous studies have 64

65

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Menghi: Compendio (as fn. 54), pp. 373f.: “L’essempio chiaro, & manifesto vediamo in quelli c’hanno gli occhi lippi, & piangenti li quali alle volte col loro aspetto, & guardo offendono gli occhi di quelli che gli guardano & questo avviene perche gli occhi loro sendo infetti di mala qualità infettano l’aria che è frà l’uno, & l’altro, & l’aria infettato poi infetta gli occhi che sono incontro a gli occhi dell’infermo”. Gregorio Comanini: Il figino, in: Paola Barocchi (ed.): Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, Bari 1960, vol. 3, pp. 300f.: “Dice [Ficino] di più, che con questi raggi esce un vapore spirituale, e con questo vapore esce sangue; come si conosce dagli occhi lippi e rosseggianti, i quali ammorbano della medesima infermità gli occhi di chi li rimira (la qual cosa non averrebbe, se col raggio non uscisse un vapore di sangue corrotto), e come ancora si può discernere dalla femina menstruata, che con gli sguardi oscura e macchia lo specchio.” Cf. Thijs Weststeijn: Seeing and the Transfer of Spirits in Early Modern Art Theory, in: John Hendrix/Charles H. Carman (eds.): Renaissance Theories of Vision, Surrey 2010, pp. 149–169. Cf. Pascal Boyer: Religious Thought and Behaviour as By-Products of Brain Function, in: Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (2003), pp. 119–124.

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Fig. 5  Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Bust of Pope Gregory XV, 1622–23, marble, 63,5 cm, Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario.

focused particularly on the role of naturalism, the sources here discussed make clear that this is not all there is to the wax image. Having said this, it must be stressed that the distinction between “high art” and wax image is not absolute; rather we should think in terms of a continuum. There is always the danger that also the marble bust falls back into the category of the wax portrait. We may note that Matteo Palma stresses in his

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book that the power of the portrait is not confined to wax images alone but also may encompass “cold stone, devoid of graceful colours and liveliness.”67 Even the works of Bernini may cross over to the other side. In an inventory of the Ludovisi family published by Eva Krems, Bernini’s Bust of Pope Gregory XV (Fig. 5) is described as being dressed up “with a cap [berrettino] in red satin and a drape [coperta] of red taffeta […].”68 As we may recall, the wax image of pope Urban VIII modeled for Centini, too, was clothed with these papal robes, and it seems no coincidence that, as Krems points out, the clothing of the marble bust coincided with the recent death of the pope. Generally, though, the confines of the aesthetic remain strongly guarded. The marble bust is much more about eternity and purity, indeed a theme that is repeated time and again in contemporary poetry. If it refers to death, it does so in a more abstract, and less physical manner, combining such references with a hint at eternal life. The wax image, to the contrary, flourishes in the realm of death, where, if not for eternity, it manages to contain a life that is both vibrant and organic, powerful but prone to decay.

67 68

Palma: Anotomia (as fn. 49), p. 346: “anco dalle fredde pietre prive della gratia colori, e vivezza, si sà […] esser stato acceso questo fuoco pestifero ne’ cuori altrui”. Eva-Bettina Krems: Die ‘Magnifica Modestia’ der Ludovisi auf dem Monte Pincio in Rom. Von der Hermathena zu Berninis Marmorbüste Gregors XV., in: Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 29 (2002), p. 138: “Un petto di marmo della S. Memoria di P Gregorio X e V posta su un’ scabellone di noce dorato […] con’ un bettettino di raso, rosso, et una Coperta di taffettà rosso lunga p.i 5, di mano del Bernino.” Cf. id., pp. 141f; Philipp Zitzlsperger: Bernini’s Bust of Pope Gregory XV. The Reception of a Magic Portrait Cult, in: Sculpture Journal 20 (2011), pp. 223–238.

PICT URE CREDITS

The Picture Act: Tradition, Horizon, Philosophy Fig. 1: Lorne Campbell et al. (eds.): Renaissance Faces. Van Eyck to Titian, London 2008, p. 213. Fig. 2: Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of Nanette Rodney Kelekian, 1996.136. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College. Fig. 3: Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan, London 1651, frontispiece. Fig. 4: Giambattista Vico: La Scienza nuova, Naples 1730, frontispiece. Fig. 5: Staatsbibliothek Berlin. With kind permission. Fig. 6: Cambridge, MA, Harvard-University, Houghton Library. Fig. 7: iStockphoto, erikreis. Fig. 8: Nicole Moses/Jennifer Becker: Spencer Tunick – The Naked Sea Project, Israel 2011, in: Kunst 1111 “Nachhaltigkeit” (2011), pp. 11–17, p. 13. Fig. 9: Filmstill from Video, ca. 1978 (personal property of the author). Fig. 10: Hartmut Krohn/Jan Ni­­ colaisen (eds.): Martin Schongauer. Druckgraphik im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin 1991, p. 181, Fig. 22. Fig. 11: Macromolecular Rapid Communications 31/4 (2010), Front Page. Fig. 12: Harun Badakhshi: Körper in/aus Zahlen. Digitale Bildgebung in der Medizin, in: Inge Hinterwaldner/Markus Buschaus (eds.): The Picture’s Image. Wissenschaftliche Visualisierung als Komposit, Munich 2006, pp. 199–205, p. 204. Fig. 13: CNN. Fig. 14: National Gallery London, http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/albrecht-durer-saintjerome/*/viewReverse/1. With kind permission. Fig. 15: Ex. cat.: Entdeckung der Abstraktion. Turner Hugo Moreau, ed. by Raphael Rosenberg/Max Hollein, Frankfurt/M. 2007, pp. 72–85, p. 75. Fig. 16: Ex. cat.: Action Painting – Jackson Pollock, ed. ��������������������� by Delia Ciuha/Raphael Bouvier/Christopher Wynne, Fondation Beyeler, Ostfildern 2008, p. 191. Fig. 17: Aby Warburg: Gli Hopi. La sopravvivenza dell’umanità primitiva nella cultura degli Indiani dell’America del nord, ed. by Maurizio Ghelardi, Marene 2006, Fig. 109. Fig. 18: Paul Ehrenreich: Ein Ausflug nach Tusayan (Arizona) im Sommer 1898 (1899), in: Cora Bender/Thomas Hensel/Erhard Schüttpelz (eds.): Schlangenritual. Der Transfer der Wissensformen von Tsu’ti’kiva der Hopi bis zu Aby Warburgs Kreuzlinger Vortrag, Berlin 2007, pp. 23–58, Fig. 8. Picture Act Method Fig. 1: Malcolm Rogers: William Dobson 1611–1646, London 1983, p.76. Fig. 2: Andreas Beyer: Das Porträt in der Malerei, München, 2002, p. 206. Figs. 3–5: British Museum. Figs. 6–9: Christopher Brown/Hans Vlieghe (eds.): Van Dyck 1599–1641, New York 1999, p. 71, p. 66, p. 167, p. 70. Figs. 10–11: British Museum. Though This Be Madness Fig. 1: Courtesy Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Abteilung Historische Drucke, Nv 6586 R. Fig. 2: Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London. Fig. 3: Courtesy Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf.

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“Ein geistvoller Amerikaner” Fig. 1: Charles S. Peirce: “Logic Notebook”, MS 339, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA. Fig. 2: Charles S. Peirce: Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism, MS 315, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA. Fig. 3: Charles S. Peirce: Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism, MS 305, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA. All Figs. with the friendly permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. “Not Only From His Hand but Also From His Temper” Fig. 1: Ex. cat.: Arent de Gelder. Rembrandts Meisterschüler und Nachfolger, Dordrechts Museum 1998, p. 241. Figs. 2–4: Photograph by Y.H. Fig. 5: Ex. cat.: Arent de Gelder. Rem���� brandts Meisterschüler und Nachfolger, Dordrechts Museum 1998, pp. 154f. Fig. 6: Photograph by Y.H. Fig. 7: Ex. cat.: Arent de Gelder. Rembrandts Meisterschüler und Nachfolger, Dordrechts Museum 1998, p. 175. Fig. 8: Horst Bredekamp: Die Fenster der Monade: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ Theater der Natur und Kunst, Berlin ²2004, p. 72. Fig. 9: Jens Heiner Bauer (ed.): Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki. Das druckgraphische Werk, Hannover 1982, p. 95, Fig. 572. Fig. 10: Jens Heiner Bauer (ed.): Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki. ������������� Das druckgraphische Werk, Hannover 1982, p. 95, Fig. 571. Haptic Perception in Mattia Preti’s Doubting Thomas Il movimento caravaggesco internazionale da CaraFig. 1: Ex. cat.: Caravaggio e l’Europa. ������������������������������������������������� vaggio a Mattia Preti, ed. by Vittorio Sgarbi, (Milan, Palazzo Reale, 15th October 2005– 6th February 2006), Milan 2005, p. 481. Fig. 2: Detail of Fig. 1. Fig. 3: http://www.santamariadeimiracoliesancelso.it/tl_files/immagini/sarcofago020.jpg (05.01.2014). Fig. 4: Prome­theus Image Archive, http://prometheus.uni-koeln.de/pandora/image/show/dadaweb-572e9343a 3cef­713c1cc7a17eb79790b7c699a5a (05.01.2014). Fig. 5: Prometheus Image Archive, http:// prometheus.uni-koeln.de/pandora/image/show/digidia-34210e8ef5f1c4382aa744b47da58025a220167c (05.01.2014). Fig. 6: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cima_ da_Conegliano_ London_NG_Incredulita_STommaso_1504.jpg (05.01.2014). Fig. 7: Prometheus Image Archive, http://prometheus.uni-koeln.de/pandora/image/show/genf810a932475fc7e3f0f0e9f12a286877fc3c03a91 (05.01.2014). Fig. 8: Prometheus Image Archive, http://prometheus.uni-koeln.de/pandora/image/show/digidia-dd5b9b7118310c6dcb5108570245426dc36e0fba (05.01.2014). Fig. 9: Prometheus Image Archive, http://prometheus.uni-koeln.de/pandora/image/show/artemis-ae4714246d18e3024957125acccbfb5aab6da563 (05.01.2014). Fig. 10: http://www.flickr.com/photos/genovacittadigitale/ 5880566243/ (05.01.2014). Fig. 11: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mattia_Preti_003.jpg (05.01.2014). Fig. 12: John T. Spike (ed.): Mattia Preti. Catalogo ragionato dei dipinti. Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Florence 1999, p. 79. The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela as a Tactile Theater Fig. 1: Consellería de Cultura de la Xunta de Galicia. Fig. 2: Wolfgang Metternich: Bildhauerkunst des Mittelalters, Darmstadt 2008, p. 36, Fig. 25. Fig. 3: Adolph Goldschmidt Zentrum Berlin Fig. 4a: George Duby and Jean-Luc Daval: Skulptur. Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Cologne1999, p. 323. Fig. 4b: Xavier Barral i Altet et al.: Romanische Kunst. 2. Nord- und Westeuropa: 1060–1220. Le monde roman, Munich 1984, p. 134. Fig. 5: Ex. cat.: Vedere i classici. L’illustrazione libraria dei testi antichi dall’eta romana al tardo medioevo, ed. by Marco Buonocore, Rome 1996, p. 171. Figs. 6–9: Adolph Goldschmidt Zentrum Berlin. Fig. 10: Anonymous Photographer: http://thetablet.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/ Obama-swearing-in.jpg; 27.5.2014. Fig. 11: Adolph Goldschmidt Zentrum Berlin. Fig. 12: Norberto Gramaccini: Mirabilia, Mainz 1996, p. 41, Fig. 10. Figs. 13–17: Photograph by S.T. Fig. 18a: Courtesy Museum Georg Schäfer Schweinfurt, Inv. Nr. MGS 5264. Fig. 18b: Alessandro Angelini: Gian Lorenzo Bernini e i Chigi tra Roma e Siena, Siena 1998, p. 84, Fig. 69. Life, but Not as We Know It

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Fig. 1: Philipp Zitzlsperger: Gianlorenzo Bernini. Die Papst- und Herrscherporträts. Zum Verhältnis von Bildnis und Macht, Munich 2002, Fig. 34. Fig. 2: Andrea Bacchi/Catherine Hess/Jennifer Montagu (eds.): Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture, Los Angeles 2008, p. 186. Fig. 3a, 3b: Paolo Giansiracusa (ed.): Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, Milan 1988, pp. 108f. Fig. 4: Vienna, Albertina. Fig. 5: Maria Grazia Bernardini/Maurizio Fagiolo Dell’Arco (eds.): Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Regista del barocco, Milan 1999, p. 102, Fig. 41.

ACTUS et I MAGO Berliner Schriften für Bildaktforschung und Verkörperungsphilosophie Herausgegeben von Horst Bredekamp und Jürgen Trabant Bilder sind keine Abbilder, sondern erzeugen im Bildakt, was sie darstellen. Sie verfügen über eine handlungsstiftende Kraft und wirken selbst lebendig. Bildkompetenz lässt sich keineswegs ausschließlich aus der traditionell überbewerteten Visualität des Menschen ableiten: Menschen reagieren auch deshalb auf Bilder, weil ihr unbewusstes neurologisches Körperschema, das aus der Integration taktiler, propriozeptiver, vestibulärer, visueller und akustischer Informa­ tio­nen entsteht, durch Bildschemata affiziert wird. Diese neuere Erkenntnis der Kognitionswissenschaften entspricht älteren Vorgaben der Verkörperungsphilosophie, die eine genuine Tradition im europäischen Sprachraum hat. In den Studien der Reihe „Actus et Imago“ wird eine Bild- und Verkörpe­ rungstheorie entwickelt, die in der Lage ist, Bildproduktion, Bildverstehen und Bildakte zu erklären. Im Ausgang vom belebten Leib leisten sie einen Beitrag zum Verständnis des menschlichen Reflexionsvermögens, das sich in ikoni­schen wie sprachlichen Formen und Interaktionen verkörpert.

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