Grammatology of Images: A History of the A-Visible 9781531500177

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Note to the English-Language Edition
List of Figures
Introduction: Toward a Grammatology of Images
1 The Trace and the Current Revaluation of Lines
2 Faces: Between Trace and Image, Encoding and Measurement
3 Indexical Images: Trace, Resemblance, and Code
4 Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and the Supplementary Economy of the Likeness (Ebenbild)
5 Defamatory Images: Disfiguration in Physiognomy and Caricature’s Two Bodies
6 Cult Images: Iconoclastic Controversy, the Desire for Images, and the Dialectic of Secularization
7 Angels: Images of Making-Appearance between Religion, Art, and Science
8 Perspectives of the Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

G R A M M AT O L O G Y O F I M A G E S

fordham university press New York 2022

commonalities Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

G R A M M AT O LO G Y O F I M AG E S A History of the A-­Visible

sigrid weigel Translated by Chadwick Truscott Smith

 Th is book was originally published in German as Sigrid Weigel, Grammatologie der Bilder © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2015. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-­Institut.

Copyright © 2022 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—­electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—­except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the per­sis­tence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-­party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or ­w ill remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www​.­fordhampress​.­com. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data available online at https://­catalog​.­loc​.­gov. Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca 24 ​23 ​22 ​5 ​4 ​3 ​2 ​1 First edition

CONTENTS

Note to the English-­Language Edition. . . . . . . vii List of Figures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Introduction: ­Toward a Grammatology of Images. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 The Trace and the Current Revaluation of Lines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 2 ­Faces: Between Trace and Image, Encoding and Mea­sure­ment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 3 Indexical Images: Trace, Resemblance, and Code. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 4 Effigiēs: Double, Repre­sen­ta­tion, and the Supplementary Economy of the Likeness (Ebenbild). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 5 Defamatory Images: Disfiguration in Physiognomy and Caricature’s Two Bodies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 6 Cult Images: Iconoclastic Controversy, the Desire for Images, and the Dialectic of Secularization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170

7 Angels: Images of Making-­Appearance between Religion, Art, and Science . . . . . . . . . 202 8 Perspectives of the Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture. . . . . . . . . . . 264 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347

vi Contents

NOTE TO THE E N G L I S H -­L A N G U A G E E D I T I O N

This book is a shortened and revised version of the original, which was published in German in 2015. The original manuscript has been shortened and two chapters ­were cut out: a chapter on tears as indexical signs and pathos formula of mourning in cultural and art history and a chapter on Benjamin’s epistemology based on his thinking-­in-­images (available in En­glish as “The Flash of Knowledge and the Temporality of Images: Walter Benjamin’s Image-­Based Epistemology and Its Preconditions in Visual Arts and Media History,” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 2 [Winter 2015]: 344–66). The final chapter, consisting of a short summary and the outline of perspectives beyond the fields examined in the book, as well as the footnotes about translation issues concerning the history of ideas and the etymology in German, have been written for this edition.

FIGURES

1 Joachim von Sandrart, The Origin of Drawing (1675) . . . . . . . . . 33 2 Jean-­Baptiste Regnault, The Origin of Painting: Dibutades Tracing the Portrait of a Shepherd (1786) ����������������� 34 3 Charles S. Pierce, Epistêmy (1859)��������������������������������������������������39 4 Charles S. Pierce, IT (1859)�������������������������������������������������������������40 5 Fritz Kahn, Muskel-­und Klingelleitung in ihrer fünfteiligen Übereinstimmung (1923) �������������������������������������������� 51 6 “Disgust” from the image atlas of the Facial Action Coding System (1975)����������������������������������������������������������������������53 7 The lab concept of attractiveness, “Rating and Keypress Results” (2001)����������������������������������������������������������������������������������54 8 Eye area of “surprise” in FACS (1975)��������������������������������������������58 9 Physiognomic orthography, photo­graphs from Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physiognomie humaine ou analyse électro-­physiologique de l’expression des passions (1861)��������������������������������������������������������������������������� 62 10 The anatomy of facial muscles, photo­graphs from Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physiognomie humaine ou analyse électro-­physiologique de l’expression des passions (1876)��������������������������������������������������������������������������� 64 11 Photography of the Shroud of Turin������������������������������������������� 67

12 Master of Saint Veronica, Saint Veronica with the Shroud of Christ (about 1420)������������������������������������������������� 68 13 Copy of Jan van Eyck, Vera Icon (1438)��������������������������������������� 70 14 Anonymous, The Child Murderer Hans von Berstatt (1540) ����������������������������������������������������������������74 15 Gerolamo Cardano, Metoposcopia (1558) ����������������������������������� 76 16 Charles Le Brun, drawings of “tranquility” and “violent movement” from his Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulaire des passions (1668)������������������������������������������������� 78 17 Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomic Fragments (1775)����������� 80 18 Stills from Jochen Gerz, Die kleine Zeit (2000)��������������������������81 19 Oliviero Toscani, photo­graphs of survivors in the exhibition I bambini ricordano (2003) ����������������������������������82 20 Jericho Skull (seventh millennium BC)��������������������������������������� 88 21 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Greyfriar’s Churchyard, Edinburgh (1848)������������������������������������������������������93 22 Kurt Westergaard, Muhammad cartoon, Jyllands-­Posten (2005) ������������������������������������������������������������������124 23 Edmond Guillaume, Les génies de la mort (1870) �������������������� 125 24 Robert Holoch, Modern Skull Study: The F ­ ather of the First Template for Overthrow (1879)����������������������������������126 25 Franz Füchsel, Muhammad cartoon, Jyllands-­Posten (2005) ������������������������������������������������������������������ 127 26 Annette Carlsen, Muhammad cartoon, Jyllands-­Posten (2005) ������������������������������������������������������������������128 27 Martino Rota, Pagan Gods (sixteenth ­century)������������������������129 28 Leonardo da Vinci, Hanging of Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli (1479)������������������������������������������������������� 140 29 Andrea del Sarto, Hanged Man (1530)���������������������������������������� 141 30 Schandbild of Bernhart von Wauer against Johann Breyde (1464)��������������������������������������������������������������������142 x Figures

31 Schandbild of Johann von Oppershausen against Kurfürst Joachim II, Elector of Brandenburg (1550)���������������� 145 32 Hans Brosamer, Seven-­Headed Martin Luther (1529)��������������147 33 Eduard Schoen, Devil Playing the Bagpipes (about 1535)����������148 34 Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Pope-­Donkey of Rome (1523) ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������149 35 Cranach’s workshop, The Pope and the Cardinals on the Gallows (1545)���������������������������������������������������������������������� 150 36 Anonymous, Alexamenos Worships His God (second ­century)�����������������������������������������������������������������������������151 37 Pier Leone Ghezzi, Caricature (about 1700)������������������������������ 154 38 Anonymous, Rufus est������������������������������������������������������������������ 156 39 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Caricature of a Cardinal (about 1650)������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 158 40 Charles Le Brun, Laughter (1668)������������������������������������������������ 159 41 Rodolphe Töpffer, Essai de physiognomie (1845)������������������������ 159 42 Caricature of Hjalmar Schacht (1932) ����������������������������������������160 43 Claus Arnold, Military (1983) ������������������������������������������������������ 161 44 Charles Philipon, The Pear Sketch (1831)������������������������������������ 163 45 William Thackeray, Louis XIV: Rex—­Ludovicus—­ Ludovicus Rex (1840) �������������������������������������������������������������������� 165 46 X-­ray image (2002) of the angel sculpture from the Crucifixion Group by Antonio Begarelli (­after 1534)��������������� 203 47 Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1920)������������������������������������������������� 207 48 Egyptian panel painting of the archangel (sixth ­century)������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 209 49 Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I (1514) ��������������������������������������������210 50 Édouard Manet, The Dead Christ with Angels (1864)�������������� 211 51 Nike on a terracotta lecythus (about 490 BC) �������������������������� 213 52 Sarigüzel sarcophagus (late fourth ­century)������������������������������ 215 53 Roman clipeus sarcophagus (late second c­ entury) ������������������ 215 Figures  xi

5 4 Barberini diptych (sixth c­ entury) ���������������������������������������������� 215 55 Fra Angelico, The Annunciation (about 1440) ������������������������� 220 56 Fra Angelico, marmor finti beneath the fresco Madonna of the Shadows (1438–1440)����������������������������������������221 57 Sandro Botticelli, Cestello Annunciation (1489)������������������������223 58 Carlo Crivelli, The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius (1486)����������������������������������������������������������������������225 59 Fra Angelico, Coronation of the Virgin (1430) ��������������������������227 60–61  Wilhelm Ternite, Drawings ­after Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin (1817) ������������������� 228–29 62 Gregory of Tours, De cursu stellarum ratio (about 580)����������238 63 Constellation of Hercules from The Leiden Aratea (­after 825)����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������239 64 Regiomontanus, Astrolabe for Cardinal Basilius Bessarion (1462) ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� 242 65 Archangel Raphael as stellar constellation, Julius Schlosser, Coelum stellatum christianum (1627)����������������������� 244 66–68  Sigmund Exner, Die Physiologie des Fliegens und Schwebens in den bildenden Künsten (1882)������������������������ 252–53 69 Copy of Gradiva (fourth ­century BC)����������������������������������������256 70 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Birth of Saint John the Baptist (1488)����������������������������������������������������������������������������257 71 Bartolomeo della Gatta, Annunciation (about 1470/1480) ��������������������������������������������������������������������������258

xii Figures

G R A M M AT O L O G Y O F I M A G E S

I N T R O D U C T I O N : ­T O WA R D A G R A M M AT O L O G Y O F I M A G E S

“Il faut penser la trace avant l’étant.”1 “The trace must be thought before the entity,” or better: before the existing.2 This grammatological imperative also holds true for images. The traces must be thought before the existing images, which means the traces that precede the images that we see. A grammatology (more precisely: a nonpositivistic grammatology)* of images calls attention to the traces of that which lies before the image, to that which does not (yet) appear and is not (yet) presented as ­either an iconic or a pictorial form, nor as a thought-­image: it is the other or the dissimilar of the image. Written within the horizon of t­ oday’s enthusiastically pursued interdisciplinary image studies,† which produce an overwhelming amount of publications, 3 the pre­sent book focuses on the complex transition of phenomena that ­either belong to a sphere inaccessible to the eye (and the senses) or originally have a dif­fer­ent, noniconic character, into the form [Gestalt] of an image [Bild].‡ It examines the * ​According to Derrida’s change of perspective from grammatology as a positive science, as discussed in the third chapter of his book Of Grammatology, ­toward a critical grammatological approach with a focus on the genesis of writing and the trace. †  ​Under the heading Bildwissenschaft, this is a subject area of cultural sciences [Kulturwissenschaft] in Germany. ‡  ​The German word Bild belongs to the Dictionary of Untranslatables. In contrast to the En­glish language, it comprises both picture and image and, at the same time, Bild is the center of a multifaceted semantic field forming a variety of dif­fer­ent forms of appearances, such as Urbild, Abbild, Vorbild, Ebenbild, Nachbild, Gebilde, Bildung, Einbildung, and so forth, which are often hard to translate. See Barbara Cassin, ed., Dictionary of Untranslatables:

procedures, figures, schemata, and interpretive patterns that bring about this transition. It is mostly concerned with visual images or pictures, though not exclusively. At the center of this book is the question of imaging [Bildgebung] in the most literal sense: the act of forming or providing an image of a physical body or idea. This question concerns, for one, the knowledge produced by and in images [Bildwissen] of physical or somatic phenomena whose conditions, movements, and utterances escape the image in real time ­because their “lives” play out under­neath or ­behind the vis­i­ble surface, and/or ­because they do not “as such” have an iconic character—­even if the techniques of digital imaging or scanning claim that they can capture the a-­v isible manifestations of the inner of the physical body in and as an image. On the other hand, the question of imaging involves the visual re/pre­sen­ta­ tion [Darstellung]* of something immaterial, intelligible, or transcendent: the scene of rendering a notion [Vorstellung] as an image [Ins-­Bild-­Setzung]. Thus, this book does not address the question “What is an image?” but rather addresses the question of which procedures make something that is not vis­i­ble or does not appear as an image into one: in what ways are phenomena such as emotions or affects, mourning and sadness, ridicule and admiration, prejudice and condemnation, super­natural beings and thoughts represented, interpreted, coded, and even mea­sured in and with images? In this re­spect, the images at issue are not simply pictorial repre­ sen­t a­t ions [Abbilder]—­t hey are not imitations of vis­i­ble t­ hings, bodies, or scenes. If I use the term imaging [Bildgebung] and not visualization, it is ­because the concept of visualization suggests that something invisible already exists in concealment and only has to be made (more) vis­i­ble. This concept is, in the strict sense, only appropriate as a terminus technicus for ­t hose procedures in which technical interventions enable the features or structures of

A Philosophical Lexicon, trans. Emily  S. Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2014), 107–11. * ​The German word Darstellung, which is often translated as “repre­sen­ta­tion,” is translated as “re/pre­sen­ta­tion” in this book in order to emphasize the simultaneity of the pro­cess of pre­sen­ta­tion and that which is represented and thus perceivable. The Darstellung is the counterpart to the Vorstellung in the mind, which only receives its specific form through the Darstellung.

2 Introduction

the ­matter investigated that cannot be seen with the naked eye to be made vis­i­ble. This may occur, for instance, through x-­rays, electron microscopy, contrast agents and dyeing, radioactive marking, and so on.4 However, the “manifold forms of the intervention into what ­shall be represented and of the manipulation of its components” that enable the “act of rendering vis­i­ ble” [Sichtbarmachen], t­ hose that Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger describes as “the fundamental gesture of modern science in general,” often dis­appear in the paradigm of visualization.5 To this extent, the concept is misleading from the start, ­because many of t­ hese procedures infiltrate and transform the material u ­ nder study, as is the case with most biotechnological and ge­ne­tic “visualizations”—in contrast to conventional microscopy. Microscopy has instead expanded the capacity of the h ­ uman eye dramatically and thereby tapped into fascinating, previously unreachable “image worlds, which dwell in the most minute.” 6 In contrast, the word imaging implies that more is at stake than a mere transition from the sphere of the nonvisible into that of the visual; imaging rather entails a fundamental shift between entirely dif­fer­ent, even heterogeneous, spheres: a shift from the a-­visible* or an-­iconic to the image. This is all the more true in ­those instances where intelligible or transcendent notions are conveyed in images. That which precedes the visual is not just invisible but rather still lies on this side of the iconic world: it is an-­iconic, virtual or latent.7 In analogy to the figure of the mise-­en-­scène, we could refer to a mise-­en-­apparition. This scene of making an appearance [In-­ Erscheinung-­Treten] pertains to the emergence of both visual images and thought-­images—­the latter concerning Walter Benjamin’s image-­based epistemology.8 Whereas my contribution to a grammatological theory of the image owes its fundamental concept of the trace to Derrida’s Of Grammatology, its concentration on the epistemology of the threshold is indebted to Walter Benjamin’s thought—­namely, the moment of appearance and the theorem of

* ​The term a-­visible is used in order to underscore the principal lack of a potential visibility. I prefer the term a-­visible, whereas Georges Didi-­Huberman uses invisible, calling attention to the difference between the nonvisual/nonvisible (potentially vis­i­ble) and the invisible (according to its character, outside of the sphere of the visual). See Georges Didi-­Huberman, “Near and Distant: The Face, Its Imprint, and Its Place of Appearance,” Kritische Berichte 40, no. 1 (2012): 61.

Introduction  3

the “historical index,” according to which (in contrast to the developmental model) we “only” consider ­t hose phenomena and constellations from history that are significant for the legibility of con­temporary questions about the image. The “cultural-­historical study of correlations” [kulturwissenschaftliche Zusammenhangskunde]* required by this approach draws on many years of engagement with the diverse (and absolutely heterogeneous) methodological paths followed by Aby Warburg.9 When Warburg, in his proj­ect on the figure of the nymph, directed “the philological gaze t­ oward the ground from which she arose,”10 this gaze set into motion an inquiry that led him into the most diverse directions and archives and to produce numerous studies—on Florentine merchants, their image praxis and mentality, on individual paint­ers, the migration of images, and many more: the duplication of origins. In order to shed light on con­temporary questions in the theory and politics of images, this book examines the (often implicit) image-­historical presuppositions and correspondences between diverse and sometimes even vastly scattered historical constellations, and in this way relies on a plethora of sources and specialized studies from a vast array of disciplines. The “laboratory for a cultural-­historical study of images” [Laboratorium kulturwissenschaftlicher Bildgeschichte]11—­where, according to Warburg, art his* ​The term Kulturwissenschaft that Warburg coined for his library and scholarship is the name for a certain constellation of intellectual history around 1900, including works by Freud, Simmel, Benjamin, and o ­ thers. It can be characterized as working in boundary areas or thinking at transitions. It is not to be conflated with “cultural studies,” ­because it takes a stronger historical perspective; it studies correspondences between sciences, art, and religion and addresses the afterlife of religion and rituals in modernity. Warburg’s wording “kulturwissenschaftliche Zusammenhangskunde” in “Heidnisch-­a ntike Weissagung” is translated in the En­glish edition as “contextual science of culture.” Aby Warburg, “Heidnisch-­a ntike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten,” in Werke in einem Band, ed. Martin Treml, Sigrid Weigel, and Perdita Ladwig (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 461; and Aby Warburg, “Pagan-­A ntique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the Eu­ro­pean Re­nais­sance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 625. However, in Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaft, culture is not just the content or subject ­matter but rather denotes the theoretical perspective. See Sigrid Weigel, “Intellectual Potential from the Other Side of Europe’s Colonial and Nationalist Past: Cultural Science/Kulturwissenschaft around 1900 and Its Relevance for Cultural Relations,” ifa-input, April 2021, www.ssoar​ .info/ssoar/handle/document/75824.

4 Introduction

tory and the study of religion w ­ ere to converge at the same desk—­today must considerably expand its circle of participating voices. Not only are works from religious studies (in the plural) and the philologies relevant—­those that Warburg consulted frequently in his own works—­but so too are t­ hose from the history of science, medieval studies, media studies, ethnology, and many more specialized studies. 1. C U LT U R A L H I S TO R Y A N D T H E T H E O R Y O F T H E I M AG E : T H E T R A N S F O R M AT I O N O F T R AC E S I N TO I M AG E S A N D I M AG E S W I T H O U T T R AC E S

The pre­sent book investigates the procedures and conventions of imaging and their origin, mutation, or usage by scrutinizing the imaging of empirically inaccessible physiological phenomena and functions, on the one hand, and the pictorial re/pre­sen­ta­tion of immaterial notions, on the other. The first ­w ill be discussed by using the example of the ­human face, the scene of a transformation of traces into images (Chapters 2 and 5); standing in for the second are angels (Chapter 7), who, conversely, have to be regarded as images without traces, images that are not preceded by any traces. On the one hand: where once t­ here w ­ ere traces, ­there are now images; on the other hand: the image is ­there, where ­there are no traces, it fills in for the lack of any trace. Between t­ hese two poles of image theory we find the figure of the effigiēs, in which a body-­like substitute or imitation, used as a person’s double, represents one of his or her attributes. With re­spect to image theory, the effigiēs is situated between the other two phenomena ­because it is also deployed where t­ here is no trace at all, yet it can stand in for both something immaterial and a physical body (Chapters 4 and 5). Whereas the deciphering of a face is meant to reveal the ­human condition, the expression of his or her personality, and affects, and while images of angels are intended to approach the super­natural and superhuman, effigiēs are deployed both in cults of exaltation and in practices of subjugation in ignoble pictorial actions [Bildhandlungen], as well as in rituals of sacralization such as consecration. Each mode of imaging decides in which way the image produces presence for or represents something ­else, decides how it refers to something ­else or how it understands it as “an indication of . . .” ­Because the concepts and interpretative patterns involved tend to be at work tacitly, one has to address Introduction  5

their epistemic and theoretical implications—as well as the question of their respective origins, modifications, and reutilizations. In this re­spect, con­ temporary prob­lems and controversies surrounding the image are entangled with old image-­questions. The initial point is the question concerning the “true image,” the “vera icon,” in current research and the image-­ theoretical and historical implications for con­temporary image wars. In the pro­cess, correspondences between scientific and religious contexts acquire a special significance. Both religion and science strive for access to the genuinely inaccessible and in-­or a-­v isible; both seek evidence and persuasive power by generating images that (should) bear traces of that for which they attest and what they show [zeugen and zeigen]. For both, images are media of the connection and access to a sphere of unsecured knowledge, if not of secrets. They bridge the abyss between the sensory world and thought. The interplay of videre and intellegere, of seeing and understanding [sehen and einsehen], pertains to t­ hose images; it was used by Saint Augustine to explicate the sacraments (of bread and wine): “The reason t­ hese ­t hings, ­brothers, are called sacraments is that in them one ­t hing is seen, another is to be understood. What can be seen has a bodily appearance, what is to be understood has spiritual fruit.” (“Ista, fratres, ideo dicuntur sacramenta, quia in eis aliud uidetur, aliud intellegitur. Quod uidetur, speciem habet corporalem, quod intelligitur, fructum habet spiritualem.”)12 Such a sacredly charged vision continues to exert an influence in the colorful digital repre­ sen­ta­tions of brain maps, cell and molecular structures, or images of outer space. ­These images achieve a near-­holy status—­especially when presented in popu­lar science media and frequently also during lectures delivered by luminaries in the research fields. The scene plays out something like this: images are projected on the wall—an outline, for example, that imitates the shape of the skull and its surface contours structured through the use of contrasting colors (Chapter 2.3)—­accompanied by the speaker’s rhetorical gesture proclaiming that “this is” the object of their research. With this gesture of “experts,” the technical image takes the place of the inaccessible ­t hing itself, as if it ­were a likeness, portrayal, copy, or replica. Louis Marin interprets the formula “this is” as an act of enunciation by which the host exhibited on the altar becomes the eucharistic sign by means of a statement invested with authority. And in this constellation of enunciation and host, he identifies the “matrix of all signs” (Chapter 6.4).13

6 Introduction

Augustine’s description of intellegere can be read as a reference to both sides of the pro­cess: something nonphysical is seen in that which is vis­i­ble and, conversely, the corresponding meaning inscribed si­mul­ta­neously on the “interior” of the viewer, w ­ hether that be the soul, mind, or imagination. Aesthetic theory ­later gave the latter the name “imagination” [Einbildung] in order to emphasize that the faculties of the imagination [Einbildungskraft] are based on pictorial perception and thought (Chapter  1.4)—­a secular form of the afterlife [Nachleben]* of Augustine’s “insight.” At the moment, a reverberation of pictorial practices from the history of religion can be seen at several sites of scholarship.14 Particularly in the desire for visual evidence that drives current imaging technologies, a desire for images lives on from a particularly Christian image problematic (Chapter 6.4).15 The paradox of Christ’s non­ex­is­tent bones, the missing evidence of the Son of God’s existence in h ­ uman form (which set in motion an unending production of images), t­ oday finds a late echo in particle physics’ efforts to furnish evidence for the big bang theory undertaken with the aid of experimental multi-­billion-­dollar systems designed to make suspected elementary particles vis­i­ble. With such contexts in mind, this book aims at an epistemology of images. The ensuing chapters reflect on the constellation of imaging theoretically and discuss case studies in the exchange of images between science, religious tradition, and art from a historical perspective. If, in the pro­cess, scientific images are associated with paintings and other artworks, it is by no means done to elevate them to the status of art; rather, the knowledge gained from old pictures and formulated in theories and discourses of artistic images is in many re­spects useful for an epistemological critique of scientific images. Indeed, many variations of the vera icon prob­lem can be uncovered in a plethora of scientific images. The traditional narratives about the particu-

* ​Nachleben, a fundamental concept in Warburg’s and Benjamin’s theories, is difficult to translate; it is usually translated as “survival” (in German, Überleben) or “afterlife.” In contrast to Darwin’s idea of survival, Nachleben does not follow a certain law of nature. The concept explic­itly expands the idea of life to cultural phenomena in order to decipher the mode in which ele­ments of former cultures, especially from cult, myth, and religion, produce effects or become part of the symbolic system of subsequent cultures, yet in a dif­fer­ent, transformed, or concealed form.

Introduction  7

lates left by the mortal body of Christ on the veil or shroud, as well as the transformation of ­t hese remains into paintings, concern an exemplary case of the transition from (bodily) traces into an (iconographic) likeness. The image-­theoretical questions raised by this transfer lead to the concept of the indexical image, a type of image defined by its physical connection to that which is being re/presented (Chapter 3). The figure of the angel, however, occupies the scene of a lack of visual-­bodily evidence in a twofold manner, since its image is positioned at the precise point where the bodily and the earthly do not exist—­neither bodily generation [Zeugung], as in the scene of incarnation (Chapter 7.3), nor evidence [Zeugnis] of the body, as in the scene of the angels announcing the missing mortal remains: “Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not h ­ ere, but is risen” (Luke 24:5–6). Th ­ ese scenes correspond to the two sides of the grammatological image-­question: on one hand, the birth of an image from (physical) traces, on the other, an image in place of missing (bodily-­material) traces. To think the trace before the “extant” image steers attention to the an-­ iconic, to the place where the image is not yet t­ here, to that which precedes the image or that which is re/presented in the image or appears as an image: to the Devant l’image and its prehistory—­yet not from an art-­historical perspective, but rather concerning the emergence of the individual image.16 Nevertheless, the historical index of this question sheds light especially on images from the era before art and beyond art, and therewith a concept of the image that is not yet or no longer ­shaped by panel images, paintings, repre­sen­ta­tionality, and iconography.17 And not by that “image” (in the narrow sense) that provides the model and ideal example to Eu­ro­pean art history, and whose invention in the ­fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has recently returned to the center of curiosity in image studies (Chapter 6.5).18 Attention to the “before” and “beyond” of this specific concept of the image developed by Eu­ro­pean art history has, not coincidentally, been refined in a situation wherein the (pictorial) image seems to have come to its “end” through both the diversity of artistic practices that push beyond the bound­ aries of painting (such as video, installation art, earthworks, or interior design, object art, or per­for­mance art) and new digital visualization technologies.19 Exactly from this crisis emerged the turn to the image-­question in a comprehensive sense that bears the name iconic turn (Boehm) or pictorial turn (Mitchell).20 Strictly speaking, this turn designates a shift ­toward image-­questions that go beyond the concept of the “image” (in the narrow 8 Introduction

sense), which ­were as much hidden from the scholarship on artworks as they largely fell outside of the par­ameters of “Visual Culture,” which is mainly interested in phenomena of popu­lar culture. Looking back on the image before the era of art, images from religious and cultic contexts become relevant for present-­day image theory once again.21 This applies both to the near-­sacred aurification of the world of technical images and the public and po­liti­cal engagement with images, one which partially takes the form of a new image-­conflict (if not outright image war), such as in the controversy involving the so-­called Muhammad caricatures: a clash of cultures that is carried out as a strug­gle over images. Traditional schisms of opposing the conception and evaluation of images continue to exert an influence in it—­schisms whose premises in cultic history and theological iconography must be reflected upon (Chapters 5 and 6). They touch on the afterlife [Nachleben] and continued influence of image theories and dogmas, of image conventions and practices that reach far ­behind in history. 2 . T H E T H R E S H O L D K N O W L E D G E O F T H E I M AG E A N D A R C H A E O LO G Y O F I M AG I N G P R O C E D U R E S

“Of many of Botticelli’s w ­ omen and youths one might say that they have just awoken as from a dream to consciousness of the outside world, and although they actively devote themselves to the outside world again, dream images still echo through their conscious minds.”22 Much as Aby Warburg ­here situates the figures in Botticelli’s paintings on the threshold between dream images and waking consciousness, they may be also understood as heralds of a threshold knowledge [Schwellenkunde] in whose posture their own becoming-­image is reflected. Bachelard recalls that, for classical philosophy, the threshold was something outside of ordinary sensing. “The threshold is something holy,” according to the poetics of the Neoplatonist Porphyry, which did “touch” him, even if he did not wish to pursue such a sacralization.23 In Benjamin’s thinking-­in-­images—­which evolved in a lifelong fascination for and contemplation on painting, art, and media—­the threshold is not conceived of as an artistic figure or as a poetical-­sacred idea. In his threshold knowledge, “waking up” occupies a privileged epistemological position and the “realization [Verwertung] of the dream ele­ments in the course of waking up is the paradigm of dialectical thinking.”24 This book Introduction  9

conceptualizes the question of images in accordance with one such threshold knowledge by concentrating on the constellation of “imaging”: the transition from traces to images and the scene of mise-­en-­apparition. From such a perspective, one must address both sides: on that which precedes the image and on the image itself, its side directed to the viewer or its user interface. Two legends—­that of the genesis of art or painting, on the one hand, and that of the disappearance of images, on the other—­read like scenes that each illuminate one of the two sides. The endlessly recounted scene from Pliny the Elder’s famous story of Butades’s d ­ aughter casts the creation of the image from a silhouette when she captures her departing lover’s image by drawing the outline of his shadow (Chapters 1.4 and 3.3); and then ­t here are the tales of desperate and unsuccessful attempts to capture a fleetingly appearing [aufscheinend] image such as a reflection in w ­ ater, or the stories of a broken mirror in which the image collapses in on itself. Louis Marin recalls a fable about the origin of painting that comes from André Félibien, registrar of the Royal Acad­emy of Painting and Sculpture, who, according to Marin, was a devotee of Poussin and “defender of the graphical and the classical art of repre­sen­ta­tion.” Marin, citing from Félibien’s “Philomath’s Dream” (Greek for “Lover of learning”), references how the allegory of painting (which ­here appears as the ­daughter of the Creator) tells of the ­water gods, who, in view of “the ease with which they know how to make a picture in a moment,” sought to copy her painting. Yet b ­ ecause of the w ­ ater gods’ mercurial nature, it is difficult to view their images, as their outlines are constantly distorting. Amor concurs, having commissioned his portrait from the ­water gods: “But when they finished my picture, I could not wrench it from their hands, and when I took my leave they even erased what they had made.”25 What on one side pre­sents itself as the primal scene of the artwork (Pliny) appears from the other side as the perpetual withdrawal of images that appear only ephemerally. The attention paid to elusive images is significant to the philosophically ­shaped studies of images of predominantly French provenance.26 A clear advantage afforded by this perspective is that it is ­free from paradigms operating ­under the auspices of an image-­text opposition, which often overlays image-­t heoretical reflections, even up to an absurd dispute over primogeniture [Erstgeburtsrecht]. Indeed, at the beginning ­t here is neither image nor text; at the beginning ­t here are traces that are supposed to become images, 10 Introduction

texts, and other artifacts. This is true both in the historical sense—­consider the cave painting of Lascaux—­and for each individual formation [Gebilde].27 At most, one can speak of individual historical phases or constellations in which the opposition between image and text determined the debate—be it the religiously motivated iconoclastic or be it the aesthetic dispute in the competition between painting/poetry characterized by the paragone. However, before and beyond the panel painting, the most diverse examples of interplay are to be found: the simultaneity of text and image characteristic for the ancient art of memory28 and for medieval cultures,29 the pictorial character of scripture [Schriftbildlichkeit],30 diagrammatics (Chapters 1.5 and 3.5), and, last but not least, a complete sublation of the text-­image opposition found in recent digital systems. In any case, the question of the image pursued ­here is concerned more with interrelations: between the an-­iconic and iconic, for example, difference and similarity, indicators and signs, traces and lines, encoding and legibility. The perspective that accompanies the transition from the involuntary or unmotivated trace to the trace instituée (Chapter 1.1)—­which is also to say from the immaterial to the iconographic image—­meets Benjamin’s view on the moment of entspringen—­literally meaning “to spring up,” “that is the moment,” “when something appears on the site”31—as well as Foucault’s discussion of “emergence” [Entstehung] in contrast to genealogy. Both topoi, with knowledge of what has come before, focus on the moment in which something appears as a figured form: as an idea, concept, image, or other shape. “Entstehung designates emergence, the moment of arising. It stands as the princi­ple and singular law of an apparition,” writes Foucault; “Emergence is always produced through a par­tic­u­lar stage of forces.” For him, Entstehung designates “the moment of arising. It stands as the princi­ple and the singular law of an apparition.” And it should not be forgotten: this is a “scene of confrontation.”32 Analogously, the image can be characterized in its relation to its anterior. In order to think that which precedes the images, Jacques Rancière introduces the concept of archi-­resemblance: “Archi-­ resemblance is the originary likeness, one that does not provide the replica of real­ity, but rather testifies immediately to the elsewhere whence it derives.”33 Archi-­resemblance is not the original resemblance in the usual sense but rather the first-­time appearance of the dissimilar in the register of resemblance, why Rancière also talks of it as alterity. In this sense, the archi-­resemblance is complementary to Walter Benjamin’s concept of Introduction  11

“nonsensuous similarity” [unsinnliche Ähnlichkeit], which describes the appearance of mimetic or magic ele­ments within the language as a system of signs.34 With regard to images, one central question ­w ill be ­whether and to what extent the traces that derive from the “otherwhere,” from an un-­ iconic sphere, are legible or vis­i­ble, ­whether they are marked or rather concealed, covered-­over, and forgotten. This formulation of the prob­lem describes the image-­t heoretical theme pursued in this book: a grammatology of images. Since this prob­lem, in contrast to Foucault, concerns not historical phenomena but rather artifacts, we must speak of imaging [Bildgebung] rather than image formation or emergence. Procedures, techniques, forms, conventions, and codes of pictorialization therefore become the focus: what ways and which materials and pictorial forms bring about the conversion with which we are dealing ­here, from physical, invisible, and immaterial phenomena into the world of images. And at issue are the preconditions in the history of images, cultures, and sciences for t­ hese pro­cesses. Starting from current controversial or precarious image-­questions and from the current “solutions” meant to deal with the relation between not-(yet)-­ image and the image itself, the individual case studies in this book examine ­these procedures. This concerned the ele­ments of specific pictorial models from cultural history that are actualized, used, and modified in con­temporary image practices. While art-­historical research examines, for example, the history of specific pictorial genres, techniques, forms, and perceptions from a systematic perspective and/or for clearly delineated historical epochs and individual artists, this study is concerned with the question concerning the manifold origins of current imaging practices. The approach can be described as a textual criticism of images analogous to editorial textual criticism’s methodology35—­which relies on a kind of archaeological research into the layers of transmission or levels of a frequently overwritten [überschrieben] text. While the editorial text criticism examines the manuscripts of a certain author, the interest ­here is directed at the imaging procedures and their prerequisites, which are not recognizable in the result. This is similar to the archaeological excavation of strata—­a pro­cess that Aby Warburg applies to readings of images, giving it the name “critical iconology.” Unlike the proj­ect in which he deciphered Indian deans in the frescos in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, the goal

12 Introduction

­ ere is not to clear away “incalculable layers” in order to expose potential h original symbols;36 individual imaging ele­ments should rather be investigated with re­spect to their historical index. This concerns the question of precisely which kind of epistemic, image-­historical, and cultural-­historical preconditions are active within the imaging procedure, even when they are not recognizable on the image’s surface. Therefore, this proj­ect is especially concerned with the afterlife and continued effect of bygone models of interpretation, image forms, and codes that are manifest in current pictorial practices and debates. In the following, this w ­ ill be accomplished by an alteration between a thematic-­historical and a systematic theoretical perspective: on the one hand, selected pictorial-­historical examples are examined as case studies, and, on the other, specific image-­t heoretical questions. First to the thematically oriented case studies: Chapter 2 investigates the conventions of imaging the face and facial expression in science and art, starting from the con­temporary use of facial codes in laboratory research. The problematic analyzed h ­ ere—­t hat of the imaging and decoding of traces of affects on the surface of the face—­w ill be extended by the pictorial field of distorted and disfigured ­faces. Chapter 5 turns to a disparaging and aggressive h ­ andling of p ­ eoples’ likenesses and their f­ aces in the form of caricatures and discusses this practice against the background of a doubled origin: as a defaming practice, on the one hand, and as a part of the history of physiognomy, on the other. In contrast, Chapter 7 is dedicated to images without traces, in which images of angels in art, astronomy, and the history of the sciences are investigated. The angels prove to function as the embodiment of (the procedure or scene of) appearing—­t hat is, of the phenomenon as such (from the Greek phainomenon); therefore, the angel is interpreted as a symptom of a (forgotten) image-­question. The systematic considerations that alternate with ­t hese thematic chapters investigate image-­questions from a theoretical and historical questions perspective. Chapter 1 looks at the line as a phenomenon in vari­ous pictorial theories in its tension-­filled relation to the concept of the trace. ­Because the question of the trace preceding the image in cases of bodily phenomena concerns indexical images in par­tic­u­lar, Chapter 3 discusses dif­fer­ent manifestations of indexicality in images. Chapter 4 is devoted to diverse cultural practices that use effigies as indexical images or as a double of the Introduction  13

­human body and analyzes their dif­fer­ent modes and subjects of repre­sen­ ta­tion. Chapter 6 addresses the relation between art and cult by discussing the religious-­historical conditions for a cultic treatment of images and the emergence of that type of image, which would determine the Eu­ro­pean history of art. In this context, the argument of a specific Christian desire for images is developed.

14 Introduction

1 THE TRACE AND THE CURRENT R E VA L U AT I O N O F L I N E S

I have not sought to refine my strokes or my effects [in my drawings], but to manifest some sorts of linear patent truths, whose value would reside as well in words, written sentences, as in graphic expression and linear perspective. —­antonin artaud, the h ­ uman face An image-­t heoretical appeal to Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967/1976) requires an explanation—at least as far as visual images are concerned, ­because they are strikingly absent from his book. Nevertheless, Of Grammatology contains the theoretical foundations for his engagement with images in ­later publications: his reflections on the frame’s constitutive role in image formation in The Truth in Painting (1978/1987), his engagement with Roland Barthes’s theory of photography in “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” (1980/1981), or his deliberations on drawing, inscription, and the trait of the hand in his Memoirs of the Blind (1990/1993). Although Derrida’s primary interests in images in ­these proj­ects concern aspects not belonging “to the order of the visual,” he nevertheless also attends to images in the visual register.1 1. B E F O R E T H E I M AG E : T H E T R AC E A N D T H E OT H E R O F T H E I M AG E ( D E R R I D A )

The comprehensive concept of writing [écriture] developed in Of Grammatology is based on a “possibility common to all systems of signification”—­ namely, the instance of the trace instituée. According to Derrida, e­ very

version of signification implies this potential for the trace to be instituted, which exists even before the concept of writing is “linked to incision, engraving, drawing, or the letter, to a signifier referring in general to a signifier signified by it.”2 Derrida’s understanding thus incorporates each and ­every pro­cess through which meaning is produced by means of difference, regardless of the type of signifier. Reconceptualizing writing as a trace instituée, Derrida focuses his attention on the relation of the positive, instituted, or fixed trace, to that which is absent therein, to the anterior trace or that “irreducible absence” that appears in the “presence of the trace.”3 At precisely this point, Of Grammatology arrives at its true topic: the “other” of existing forms of signification, ­whether it be writing, engraving, or that of a visual image: “The trace must be thought before the existing [l’étant]. But the movement of the trace is necessarily occulted, it produces itself as self-­occultation. When the other announces itself as such, it pre­sents itself in the dissimulation of itself.” 4 He thereby directs his epistemological interest to the not (yet) instituted trace preceding the institutionalization of signs or the formation of the writing-­image [Schriftbild]. In Of Grammatology, the image appears—­initially and nearly solely—as the pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion of language or graphic form of the word. In this re­spect, Derrida’s point of departure is his critique of the secondary status of writing in linguistics—in par­tic­u ­lar, the subordinate position of writing in relation to the spoken word in Saussure. B ­ ecause in his perspective writing is positioned as the supplement of the spoken language, Derrida discusses it as the image of the word—­t hat is, the pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion of the word. The image’s role as a “dangerous supplement” is reflected upon critically in context of the notion of a natu­ral primal image in Saussure (as well as in Rousseau)5—­namely, the idea that the referent [représenté] ­were “nothing more than the shadow or reflection of the representer [représentant].” 6 But the topic of the image as such is not pursued any further as part of Derrida’s own concept of writing and trace. He touches the topic of the image only in a short passage, and h ­ ere he points to the core of the image-­ question when he characterizes the image as doubled, inscribed with a difference. As he emphasizes, t­ here are always at least three ­t hings in play: ­ ere are t­ hings like ­water and images, an infinite reference from one to Th the other, but no longer a source, a spring. ­There is no longer a ­simple origin. For what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition 16  Trace and Lines

to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its repre­sen­ta­tion, of the ­t hing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three.* The visual image is thus composed of a triad, ­because it is a double that is further divided in itself into the material ele­ment and the referent; this triad as the basis of the image’s plurality resonates with the way the image is conceived by several phi­los­o­phers, such as Kant or Husserl, and in the recent media-­t heoretical rereading of their concepts by Emmanuel Alloa as well.7 This triad is not to be confused, however, with the triplicity in the sign found in Charles Peirce’s semiotics: the material side, the manner of reference, and its function.8 For Derrida, whose Of Grammatology reaches back before semiotics, the image is rather a part of a supplemental economy of repre­sen­ ta­tion and difference. Yet, only one par­tic­u­lar mode of the image is discussed in his book: that which can be described as a reflection or double. What is not mentioned is the visual image’s special capacity to let the difference inscribed within it to appear at once; that which remains excluded is the iconic or pictorial mode of the image. Therefore, the reference to Of Grammatology for the theory of images does not entail following Derrida’s own theory of images (insofar as one could speak of one) but rather proceeding from the supposition that Derrida’s reflections on the trace provide a useful point of departure for addressing the genesis of images and questions relating to the image’s other—­that is, of the trace as the other of the image. The semantic range of the concept of the trace (Lat. vestigium, Fr. trace, Germ. Spur) has become incredibly broad: from an impress or imprint left ­behind by some physical t­ hing or something remaining from an event to an indication or evidence, and even up to and including a traffic lane.9 The meaning of the word trace that denotes something detached from the physically similar imprint a t­ hing leaves b ­ ehind first emerges in modernity, as Carlo Ginzburg demonstrates in his discussion of Morelli’s detail, Holmes’s clue, and Freud’s symptom in “Paradigma Indiziario” (1980), which unites

* ​Derrida, Of Grammatology, 36 (translation modified). I have modified the translation of des eaux, which is given as “reflecting pool” in the En­glish edition, to “­water,” according to Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967), 55.

Trace and Lines  17

dif­fer­ent signs identifying e­ ither persons or actions, events, and artistic authorship.10 The translation of this title as Evidential Paradigm in En­glish and Spurensicherung in German demonstrates its range from proof to indication. Derrida’s concept of the trace differs markedly from this register, as it does not belong to a hermeneutic approach of “reading traces”; it rather stands clearly in the lineage of Freud’s “scene of writing,” as his own essay on Freud acknowledges.11 The most impor­tant and significant characteristic of Derrida’s concept is the fact that he focuses on antecedents rather than that which is left b ­ ehind. In other words, he focuses on that which comes before each and e­ very semantic, semiotic, acoustic, or iconic difference; in this way the trace proj­ects into a prehistory [Vorzeit] of the image. With the conceptual shift from the trace left b ­ ehind to the preceding trace—­from similarity to difference, from extant images to the place where traces dis­appear into the unknown, heterogeneous, or immaterial—­ the question of imaging [Bildgebung] aims at the an-iconic before-­the-­image. Derrida’s theory of the trace focuses on the process—­occurring in a dif­ fer­ent time—of the production of difference, différance: It is not the question of a constituted difference ­here, but rather, before all determination of the content, of the pure movement which produces difference. The (pure) trace is différance. It does not depend on any sensible plentitude, audible or vis­i­ble, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, its condition.12 Presupposed to that which appears, this kind of trace also belongs to a dif­ fer­ent time, a dif­fer­ent quality and mode of temporality. It differs from the mode of simultaneity found in the formation of the image in two-­or three-­ dimensional space in the instant of appearance. The temporality of the trace is somewhat comprehensible as a dynamis, latency, virtuality, or a not-­yet-­ figurative idea, a meaning situated literally before figuration. Derrida’s trace can be understood as a kind of sedimented movement, a traced movement or facilitation [Bahnung].* It is nevertheless neither clearly vis­i­ble nor a-­v isible, * ​The word Bahnung, in Derrida’s writing and throughout this book, refers to Sigmund Freud’s concept. Therefore, it is translated as “facilitation,” according to the standard translation. Bahnung is a neologism derived from Bahn (“path/train”), which Freud introduced to illustrate the pathways produced by neurologic activity. Bahnung is the neurologic analogon to memory trace (Chapter 1.2).

18  Trace and Lines

neither unambiguously material nor immaterial. It lends itself to the heterogeneity accompanying ­every act that constitutes meaning ­because of the unavoidable boundary between the intelligible and the unintelligible. The emergence of the image, the procedures whereby an image appears as image [In-­Erscheinung-­Treten], is located at this threshold. “The trace is the différance which opens appearance [l’apparaître] and signification.”13 This grammatological proposition converges with vari­ous historical attempts to extrapolate the emergence of the image from traces— as for example in the case of the motif of the vera icon or the legend of Butades. Similar to Derrida’s trace, many narratives about the origin of images involve transitions, transformations, or an exchange between a physical body and an image. The most unpretentious variant of the primal scene of the invention of painting (and the sculptural portrait) is Pliny the Elder’s legend of the potter Butades and his d ­ aughter, which concerns the direct transfer of an immaterial shadow-­outline by projected light, as the edge of a silhouette onto solid ground (Chapter 1.4 and 3.3). This scene is legible as the configuration of imaging [Bildgebung] not only as a fixation of something transient or appearing ephemerally—in a primal scene depicting the metamorphosis of an indexical image into an iconic one—­but also as anticipating the absent primal image [Urbild]. It is the presence of an absence made permanent, the foundational structure of ­every repre­sen­ta­tion. At the same time, a complex temporal order enters the scene. This kind of image production directed t­ oward a ­f uture memory is tied to a distortion of linear time in the mode of remembrance and in the mode of the image: the posteriority [Nachträglichkeit]* of the image in relation to the trace, and simultaneity of the pictorial depiction that Gombrich calls the fruitful moment.14 The image’s relation to the trace is similar to the contrast between testimony [Zeugnis] and document [Dokument] found within the image itself. Referring to an extreme moment in the history of photography, Didi-­ Huberman analyzes the photo­graphs of the gas chambers at Auschwitz taken by members of the Sonderkommando, underscoring a twofold order: a concurrence of truth and opacity.15 Opacity is an aspect of the witnessing * ​Nachträglichkeit is translated as “posteriority” instead of “deferral,” as found in the Standard Edition of Freud, b ­ ecause Nachträglichkeit does not refer to something postponed but rather emphasizes the position post quem.

Trace and Lines  19

quality of images, ­because their blurring is due to the moment and place in which they ­were taken: secretly, in the darkness of the gas chamber with a hidden camera—to willfully “give light to the work of the Sonderkommando outside, above the cremation pits”16—in order to leave a witness to the monstrous events. It is precisely this aspect of opacity in which the conditions for the production of ­t hese images left their trace. ­These traces ­were, however, erased by editing [Bearbeitung], by the trimming and retouching of the photo­graphs for exhibition purposes—­t hat is, through their “normalization.” In his critique of this editing, Didi-­Huberman shows that the treatment robbed the photo­graphs of their testimonial quality—­namely, their ability to mark the field of view, lacking the black areas from which the sight falls on what happens outside. By eliminating the place and condition of the images’ coming-­into-­being, the vis­i­ble trace of their witnessing character is annihilated—­t hat is, the “marks of the conditions of their existence and of their very gestures” is thereby also eradicated.17 This is likely the most extreme case of photography’s testamentary trace [Zeugnisspur] being obliterated in the interest of producing a documentary image, a clear, historiographically and juridically exploitable photo­graph. 2 . T H E T R AC E , FAC I L I TAT I O N [ B A H N U N G ] , A N D M E M O R Y ( F R E U D, B E N J A M I N )

As a neurologist, Freud’s observations of the facilitations [Bahnungen] and cathexis [Besetzungen] in the ner­vous system underlie his concept of the memory trace (or Dauerspur, a permanent trace), which at the same time transgresses this neurological basis. ­Because one cannot capture psychical traces in physical or material form, only the effects of psychical works appear—be it as a dream image, symptom, slip of the tongue, or other form of a “language of the unconscious.” While the products of the psychic apparatus are only perceptible as vis­i­ble or audible phenomena, the memory traces are, conversely, lost in the nerve pathways and the dif­fer­ent time of memory. In his attempt to develop a psy­chol­ogy based on neurology in his uncompleted “Proj­ect for a Scientific Psy­chol­ogy” (Entwurf einer Psychologie 1895), Freud introduces the term facilitation [Bahnung] to refer to the durable modification of the neurons through a sequence of arousals [Erregungsablauf], producing increased contact or permeability, and is therefore able to describe memory as existing facilitations.18 This means that facilitation is the 20  Trace and Lines

neurologic counterpart to the permanent trace or memory trace in Freud’s ­later writings, which transgress neurologic explanations. When he works through the relation between neurological activity and the question of meanings in “Proj­ect for a Scientific Psy­chol­ogy,” he discusses an insurmountable epistemological barrier. ­There is no continuum between the two; they cannot be understood within the same par­ameters and cognitive means. In contrast to the neurological pro­cesses that are researched by means of empirical procedures and with quantitative concepts, Freud refers to psychical products as “qualities” and describes them as “dif­ fer­ent” [anders]: Consciousness gives us what we call “qualities”—­sensations which are dif­f er­ent [anders] in a ­great variety and whose Otherness [Anders] differs in its relations to the external world. Among this Otherness [Anders] ­t here are series, similarities and so on, but ­t here is nothing like quantities. We may ask how qualities originate and where qualities originate?* As qualities, the phenomena within consciousness are fundamentally dif­ fer­ent from neurological phenomena; the same holds true for the distinction between the image and the preceding trace. Brain imaging (the visualization of neural patterns) does not render this barrier in Freudian theory of memory obsolete; the quality/quantity prob­ lem has only faded into obscurity ­behind the illusion that one could make neural traces vis­i­ble. Both the complex technical-­informatic operations involved in visualizing the psychological-­neurological network (of the individual plasticity of the brain) and the indicators of specific activities are not vis­i­ble in the iconic image of the brain that superimposes electronically produced images over the psycho-­physical traces (Chapter  2.3). Many brain images are thus similar to Freudian screen memories [Deckerinnerungen] * ​Freud, “Proj­ect for a Scientific Psy­chol­ogy,” 369 (translation modified). This translation was modified b ­ ecause the Standard Edition lacks Freud’s remarkable usage of the word anders (i.e., “other” or “dif­fer­ent”): “Das Bewußtsein gibt uns, was man Qualitäten heißt, Empfindungen, die in großer Mannigfaltigkeit anders sind und deren Anders nach Beziehungen zur Außenwelt unterschieden wird. In diesem Anders gibt es Reihen, Ähnlichkeiten u. dgl., Quantitäten gibt es eigentlich darin nicht. Man kann fragen, wie entstehen die Qualitäten und wo entstehen die Qualitäten?” Sigmund Freud, “Entwurf einer Psychologie (1895),” in Texte aus den Jahren 1885 bis 1838, appendix of Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud (Frankfurt, Germany: S. Fischer Verlag, 1987), 401.

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in that they owe their existence to a pro­cess of displacement: “in the reproduction they represent the substitute for other ­really significant impressions against whose direct reproduction is hindered by some re­sis­tance.”19 ­These re­sis­tances are of a psychical nature in memory images and of an epistemic-­ technical nature in brain images and scans. The respective images obscure their referents (specific cognitive functions) with the image of something dif­fer­ent (an outline in the shape of a skull). In this way, they may be thought of as screen images analogous to screen memories. Images in the unconscious are dif­fer­ent, however, and emerge from the permanent trace of memory as singular i­magined figures or scenes, like a type of motivated figuration amid unmotivated memory traces. The sixth chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) on “dream work” is dedicated to the par­tic­u­lar character of such images and analyzes the pictorial mode of repre­sen­ta­tion in dreams as being an effect of a disfigured repre­sen­ta­tion and product of psychical work. When Freud emphasizes h ­ ere that dream images are not legible in terms of their image-­value,20 he distinguishes them from repre­sen­ta­tions of the dreaming subject’s memory story. In dream images, past and recent affects combine and are depicted in a condensed, disfigured form. It is impossible for such images to follow the grammatical and logical rules of language. From this fact, Freud develops rules governing a complex pictorial writing that follows its own combinatorial logic. In The Interpretation of Dreams, however, the question that gets lost is that of how, exactly, dream images are generated out of memory traces, the inscriptions located at the threshold between neurons and qualities. This pro­cess remains in the black box situated between physiology and imagination (between neuroscience and psychoanalysis). And current experiments with brain scanning are not able to shed light on it. Benjamin, however, filled this blind spot in the theory of memory with a scenic image. He describes the emergence of memory images as a sort of psychic imaging in which, due to a par­ tic­u­lar affective cathexis, individual images are isolated from “normal” memory. Benjamin’s theoretical image describes this pro­cess as a snapshot in which specific memories catch fire like the “­little heap of magnesium powder by the flame of the match,” becoming recognizable in a sudden flareup of light—­a pro­cess “that our memory owes its indelible images.”21 The significance Freud’s psychoanalytical concept of the trace has for material images is revealed in his “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914). The transition from trace to image involves the way in which traces of movement 22  Trace and Lines

and affect materialize in the form of a figure. In the second and third sections of the text, Freud develops a reading of the bodily attitude of the sculpture as an image of Moses’s ­earlier movements and excitements, similar to Warburg’s pathos formulas. Freud’s interpretation is concentrated in the statement: “The loop of the beard would thus be the trace of the path taken by this hand.”22 He interprets the sculpture’s frozen gestures and corporeal expressions as the “traces of the stormy movements that have taken place before,”* literally turning the sculpture into an image of movement in which the ­earlier involuntary traces have been condensed and arrested: a kind of dynamogram of affects carved in marble—or a dialectic in the standstill.23 In this reading of sculpture, Freud transfers the memory trace to images as a materialized recording of the embodied memory traces of ­human affect. The concept of the trace in Benjamin’s notes for his proj­ect on the Pa­ri­ sian passages is also grounded in a memory-­t heoretical perspective, yet it is not directed at a picture of motion arrested in a still image but rather the symbols and images of wishes turned to stone in the modern city. It involves its topography and architecture as much as it does interior design, fashion, and other cultural products: vis­i­ble traces left by the city’s residents leading their lives, vis­i­ble modifications to and in space legible as its signature. ­Here the traces themselves, as vis­i­ble remains of moving bodies, paint the picture: “The trace is appearance of a nearness, however far removed that, which left it ­behind may be. . . . ​In the trace, we gain possession of the ­t hing.”24 ­These traces are a way to connect to the no-­longer-­present, a possibility significant not only for the flaneur and for the methods of cultural science, but also of interest to administration and police investigation, as described in the notes to block “I The Interior, The Trace” of Benjamin’s manuscript. Benjamin’s concept of trace does not, however, coincide with the conventional understanding of a trace left b ­ ehind. Its time structure involves a historical asynchronicity when he interprets the environment

* ​Freud, “Moses of Michelangelo,” 228 (translation modified). The Standard Edition translates “die Spur des von dieser Hand zurückgelegten Weges” as “the effects of t­ hose stormy movements” and thus misses Freud’s point that the statue shows traces of what has happened before the standstill of the sculpted bodily gesture. Sigmund Freud, “Der Moses des Michelangelo,” in Werke aus den Jahren 1913–1917, vol. 10 of Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud et al. (Frankfurt, Germany: Fischer Verlag, 1999), 188.

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in which we live ­today as remains of the materialized dreams of our predecessors—­“Each epoch dreams the one to follow”25—­with the development of the forces of production having shattered the “wish symbols of the previous ­century, even before the monuments representing them had collapsed.”26 This asynchronicity leaves its traces in a “thousand configurations of life, from enduring edifices to passing fashions,” and thus produces images “in which the new is permeated with the old.”27 Michel de Certeau extends such a concept of the traces produced by life to the a-­v isible, immaterial traces inscribed into spaces by the habituated ways, practices, and movements of the city’s inhabitants, like pathways that structure the topography of the city as virtual permanent trace. Comparing them to the texture of written texts, he describes the structure of this art de faire as rhetorical.28 In this re­spect, both Benjamin’s and de Certeau’s traces can be understood as a permanent cultural trace of a corporeal writing. While Derrida’s concept of trace is characterized as being unmotivated and anterior to the trace instituée, Benjamin and de Certeau address the dissimilar traces left b ­ ehind by the life of h ­ umans, traces whose pattern formation takes place at the transition from traces of movements to figure and image. Unlike an imprint or engram, ­t hese traces often own a kind of disfiguration. When they are transposed into conventionalized figures, ele­ ments and symptoms of the unconscious or the involuntary remain embedded within such figures, in the same way as in all memory traces that have gained form or material, as within vari­ous notation systems of scripts or linguistic textures. But ­these kinds of traces are not in any case the “other” of the image. Similar to memory images that emerge from memory traces, they can also as such and directly form an indexical image (Chapter 3.1.)—­ for example, in the form of an imprint: “Plush—­the material in which traces are left especially easily.”29 The “epistemic traces” found in scientific experimental systems are to be distinguished from Derrida’s unmotivated traces as well b ­ ecause they are the result of recordings that are produced in the experimental pro­cess and then represented as data, symbols, formulas, diagrams, holograms, e­ tc. This case concerns less the transition from trace to image but rather the transitions between the technique of recordings and the system of transcription, notation, and encoding.30 ­These considerations raise the question of the character, materiality, and temporality of the traces involved, in addition to the specific mode in which 24  Trace and Lines

the individual image is re/presented. Above all, traces are not to be confused with lines and lines not to be considered visualized or materialized traces. 3 . L I N E : T H E D R A F T S M A N ’S CO N T R AC T A N D T H E G R A P H I C A L M E T H O D ( M A R E Y, D E R R I D A )

The line maintains a multifarious relationship to diverse modes of recognition [Erkenntnis]*, most of them transgressing the platonic order of knowledge. The “analogy of the divided line” in The Republic (Politeia) pre­sents a scale of ascending cognitive states for which the epistemological line (Gr. Γραμμή) functions as pa­ram­e­ter. U ­ nder the auspices of this line, Plato constructs a hierarchy of modes of recognition. Images—­eikones ­here referring to shadows [skias] and mirror images on the surface of the ­water [en tois hydasi phantasmata]—­occupy the lowest tier of cognition, the eikasia of conjecture.31 While Plato significantly devalues images in his linear configuration of cognitive modes, the line other­w ise rather mediates between images and scientific operations in many fields. The diagram that has recently become a prominent focus in image studies provides a compelling example of this. Traditionally, the interaction of images and the line in scientific systems was primarily the concern of studies on the history of astrology, which was of par­tic­u­lar interest to Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer as a “peculiar m ­ iddle and hybrid position between myth and science” (Chapter 7.6).32 The line occupies an extremely controversial position within the histories of dif­fer­ent genres and understandings of images.33 On one hand, the “mechanical tracing of the traits of the created nature,” or ritrarre (which gave its name to the portrait, Ital. ritratto), was regarded as a lower form of artistic practice during the Re­nais­sance, similar to “contrafacere, from which likeness [Konterfei] originates.”34 On the other, the hand-­drawn line is considered the perfect synthesis of observation and re/pre­sen­ta­tion of nature, an attitude also directed at the genre of drawing, at Leonardo’s and Galileo’s drawings, for example.35 The line in an image is thus associated with both the mechanics of illustration and—­t he exact opposite—­w ith a theory * ​There is no proper En­glish equivalent to the German Erkenntnis, which emphasizes the pro­cess of gaining knowledge; neither knowledge nor cognition nor recognition captures this idea.

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of an unmediated connection between the eye and the hand-­d rawn line; ­because of the latter, the line is considered as a privileged medium of knowledge [Erkenntnis]. The line cuts a wide path across traces, drawings, and the register of scientific images, such as graphs, diagrams, outlines, schemata, and ­others. Although the line, in recent theoretical interest in ­t hese phenomena, tends to step out of the shadows cast by the “classical-­idealist theory of disegno,” ­t here are several ele­ments of this traditional conception that are nonetheless revived.36 In reference to such prominent sources of inspiration as Paul Klee37 and Wassily Kandinsky, 38 MOMA in New York or­ga­nized the exhibition On Line, which situated the entire twentieth ­century “­u nder the sign of the line.”39 This was a somewhat unfortunate title, given that in modern art, lines mostly subvert or transgress the regime of signs. U ­ nder this “sign of the line,” however, one is already in the midst of the prob­lem ­because the line interacts with two quite dissimilar registers and interpretive models: hand drawing and graphics. The former has long led a shadowy existence in more conventional niches of art history but lately has become a popu­lar topic. The “drawing desire” is prob­ably not accidental, given the backdrop of technical images’ ascendancy and the wide disappearance of the practice of analyzing epistemic objects by drawing.40 The par­tic­u ­lar creativity ascribed to drawing is based in its mode as an originating act in which generation and re/pre­sen­ta­tion coincide.41 In the current history of scientific images, drawing therefore occurs in part as a kind of materialized trace of thinking or of the pro­cess of cognition. In con­temporary image studies, drawing in this way takes the place disegno held in the traditional understanding. The other model is constituted by multifarious graphs, curves, and diagrams found throughout experimental research:42 from Étienne-­Jules Marey’s La Méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales (The graphical method in experimental science, 1878)43 and the invention of numerous nineteenth-­century psychophysiological recording techniques up to ­today’s diagrams, with which laboratory results collected as data are represented and, in the act of “Drawing ­Th ings Together,” function as a “construction of hard facts.” 44 In the meantime, hand drawing has become a historical object. While the scientist or physician who worked alone with a pen still occupied a highly regarded position just a few de­cades ago, this figure has since nearly dis­appeared from research practices.45 Where not so long ago, the forms, qualities of, and 26  Trace and Lines

laws governing epistemic objects w ­ ere approached by means of the eyes and drawing, digital imaging technologies now stand between scientists and their objects. In Big Science, many scientists only come into contact with the subject of their research through instrumental images and algorithms, which convert data into pictorial repre­sen­ta­tions. The preceding genesis and complex scientific-­historical preconditions for ­these images form an epistemic reverse side of instrumental images that often remains hidden to ­t hose who use them in research, medicine, or therapy. This reverse side involves both the technical development of instrumental images and the prehistory of experiments, results, hypotheses, interpretations, and conceptualization, including the blind spots handed down in the development of the instruments. In this light, making distinctions in the field of lines becomes essential. Drawings and graphs are increasingly discussed within one and the same paradigm, or at least brought into close proximity to one another, above all when they are brought into relation with the topos of immediacy [Unmittelbarkeit]. ­There are, however, quite dif­fer­ent concepts of immediacy involved: w ­ hether in the notion of an unmediated relation between the intellectual perception and the lines brought to paper by the hand or with the idea of direct technical recording of physical expressions (blood pressure, pulse, and the like).46 In this re­spect, the question arises as to which relationship is considered immediate among the many pos­si­ble relations constituted by the myriad positions at stake (scientist or intellect, eye, hand, object of investigation, repre­sen­ta­t ion, tools or apparatus, observer). In stark contrast to the emphatic proposition of a technique-­f ree trait of the hand, for example, nineteenth-­century graphical methods triggered the dream of a direct operation on the body of the individual by means of recordings of physiologic movements and manifestations, which operate without h ­ uman agent and without language, and for precisely this reason is supposed to be f­ ree of the fallibility of h ­ uman perception.47 This kind of immediacy generated with the help of apparatuses such as the kymograph (wave recorder), sphygmograph (pulse recorder), myograph (registration of muscle movements), and vari­ous other recording devices was celebrated as “natu­ral writing” or graphique naturel. The graphical images of movement recorded by ­those apparatuses are “also images of time.” 48 The contrast between ­t hese two modes of drawing could not be greater: one kind of drawing includes the figure of a precise Trace and Lines  27

observer and the other dreams of eliminating the ­human observer—­a notion that is again prominent in current research, referred to as the elimination of “subjective ­factors” (Chapter 2.5). Hankins and Silverman aptly describe the way in which the Méthode graphique of the devices designed to rec­ord psychophysiological phenomena in fact functioned as the phantom of an unmediated, almost natu­ral recording of lines and curves and in this way created a black box: it is the instruments’ task to signify the external object as clearly and distinctly as pos­si­ble and “to ‘black box’ all the man-­made structure in between.” 49 This black box does not operate in the epistemological lacuna marked by Freud, one based on the unavoidable difference between empirical-­quantitative methods and questions of meaning, as discussed e­ arlier (Chapter 1.2). The paradigm of graphic method concerns another kind of black box, one that is produced through the concealment of the techniques from the w ­ hole pro­ cess. Although the technique of graphic plotter has to be distinguished from the famous chronophotography for which Marey is famous in art history, it is no accident that the path blazed by Marey’s many inventions also led to the cinematograph. It was not only the studies of movement in Marey’s, Muybridge’s, and o ­ thers’ chronophotography that paved the way for moving pictures but also ­these black box configurations produced in nineteenth-­century research laboratories. In the cinema, this black box in which the “man-­made structure” of the techniques remains in the dark becomes the scene of an entertainment medium. The illusion of apparatus-­ free images can be created in the cinema b ­ ecause the elaborate technical production pro­cess and the projectors themselves are rendered invisible as soon as moving pictures begin to roll across the screen in front of the viewer sitting in the darkness of a movie theater.50 An aftereffect of this hidden relation between the laboratory and the movie theater can be seen in t­ oday’s tele­v i­sion “science magazines” in which the latent proximity between scientific images and cinema becomes manifest. The graphical method has also not left our understanding of drawing untouched. Around 1900, the concept of natu­ral writing spawned a conviction within the teaching of drawing: one could consider hand drawing a “system of notations for psycho-­physiological phenomena and disturbances.”51 The notion is that by shutting out the mind, a kind of involuntary hand memory guides the hand while drawing lines. This idea represents a kind of pedagogic counterpoint to artistic programs of the avant-­garde, 28  Trace and Lines

­ hether the surrealist dream of an “automatic writing” [écriture automaw tique] or Paul Klee’s desire “to take note of experiences that could be transposed into lines in the blind night.”52 The idea that “in the beginning, ­t here ­were the trace and the line” governed an anthropological conviction that emerged from the interest in “primitive thinking” awakened in the nineteenth c­ entury; this idea also spurred on the study of c­ hildren’s drawing, as with Georges-­Henri Luquet, who established direct correspondences between L’art primitif (1930) and Le dessin enfantin (1927) in his highly influential work. Since the “awkward scribbles by ­children and patients” are often interpreted by drawing instructors as “a ­free condition of the line before its encoding as letters or pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion,” the hand-­drawn line ­here comes close to being interpreted as an unmotivated trace.53 This proximity becomes embodied in the figure of blind drawing and the blind draftsman. With his 1990 exhibition at the Louvre, Memoirs of the Blind (Mémoires d’Aveugle), Derrida lent this figure a renewed topicality that clearly possesses enormous appeal for the development of con­temporary theory. The exhibition displayed drawings on the motif of blindness, which Derrida relies on to develop a theory of blind drawing where that which is seen always includes instances of the nonseen or even unseen, aspects that refer both to that which is past and to the noumenon. To the extent that that which can be seen is per se occluded from the figure of the blind draftsman, he is predestined to bring the unseen to paper with a trait of his drawing hand, whereby the blind draftsman is transformed from a figure of lack into one of surplus, of a plus-­de-­vue. Generalizing this figure into one for drawing as such, it becomes a “quasi-­transcendental resource.” The hand’s trait, which then produces the line, moves close to a Freudian facilitation when Derrida situates it at the original facilitation: In its originary, pathbreaking [frayage originaire] moment, in the tracing potency of the trait, at the instant when the point at the point of the hand (of the body proper in general) moves forward upon making contact with the surface, the inscription of the inscribable is not seen.54 The trait thus appears as a movement that is not yet a line but that makes the line pos­si­ble, leading Derrida to describe it as a preceding “trait . . . ​in the night.” In generalizing the situation of the blind draftsman, Derrida replaces him with the meta­phor of the night. As the trait withdraws from the field of vision, it becomes a line existing in a state of latency. A trait thereby Trace and Lines  29

occupies a liminal position on the way to a materialized, vis­i­ble line on the page, which is situated by Derrida at the transition from trace to line: the possibility for the trace instituée. Drawing thus becomes the privileged scene for the moment of the image’s appearing. More than two de­cades ­after De la grammatologie appeared, Derrida ­here supplements his theory of the trace with a concrete scene from the field of the visual by invoking the movement of the tracing-­drawing trait. It is therefore striking that Derrida represents the withdrawal of the vis­ i­ble in the trait with a rather traditional image from aesthetic theory: the hand-­eye-­line triad. He dispenses, however, with a central ele­ment of this triad—­t he eye. ­Because the deprivation of the vis­i­ble, which stands at the center of his conception of the trait, operates by withdrawing the eye from the well-­k nown configuration, the complex theory of blind drawing owes itself to a rather s­ imple operation. 4 . T H E H A N D -­E Y E -­L I N E T R I A D ; O R , A N E Y E I N T H E F I N G E R T I P ( M O R I T Z , P L I N Y, D I S E G N O )

A prominent scenario within aesthetic theory is that of a line produced by a fingertip on a page, directly linked to the artist’s eye via the hand. It represents the special ability of the intellectually gifted fingertip, which constitutes a paradoxical configuration: as mediator of the immediacy between the eye and the image. “Since only ­there, where the thinking developed being [das denkend Gebildete]* completes itself in the outermost fingertips, is it capable to represent the beautiful again outside of itself with immediacy. . . . ​ The same beauty . . . ​which is represented by the visual artist’s hand suddenly comes to the eye,” as Karl Philipp Moritz writes in “The Signature of the Beautiful” (1788), a text in which the concept of the trace occupies a notable position.55 The background to this lies in a prominent eighteenth-­century

* ​Moritz pre­sents his idea of natu­ral history as a unified and ascending development of three steps: growing (i.e., plants) is characterized by formation [Bildung]; living and breathing (i.e., animals) by formation and movement; and living and thinking (i.e., ­human beings) by formation, movement, and sound. Karl Philipp Moritz, “Die Signatur des Schönen: Inwiefern Kunstwerke beschrieben werden können?,” in Reisen; Schriften zur Kunst und Mythologie, vol. 3 of Werke, ed. Horst Günther (Frankfurt, Germany: Insel Verlag, 1981), 583–84.

30  Trace and Lines

theory of imagination [Einbildung] and its key concept of Bildung, which stands for a specific idea of education: a condensation of aspects of aesthetic form [Bildung of the artwork—­i.e., the formation of the shape], inner education [innere Bildung], and physical-­biological formation [Bildungstrieb]— i.e., the “formative drive” of the epigenesis. While in the psychoanalytic theory of the trace, the image arises from the traces, eighteenth-­century “imagination” [Einbildung] is derived from the exact opposite constellation. The model for an ideal education is the perfect image of the ­human body in classical sculpture, whose vis­i­ble contours are impressed upon the soul—­a kind of literal Ein-­Bildung, imag(e)ination, in which the outline of the sculptural form is internalized as an “inner image.” Moritz’s “Signature of the Beautiful” arises from the question: To what degree can artworks be described? In reply, he develops a contrast between a re/pre­sen­ta­tion of the beautiful guided by the imagination and mediated through words and an unmediated repre­sen­ta­tion produced by the hand of the artist. The latter finds its more perfect expression in lines brought forth by the hand of the artist.56 For Moritz, however, the concept of the image does not rely on the artwork’s visual re/pre­sen­ta­tion. “Image” in this context rather denotes a kind of inner echo of the words, whereas the “trace” is the imprint left b ­ ehind on the imagination by t­ hese images. But Moritz furnishes his “trace on the ground of imagination” already with a perfect outline. The lines that shape the contours of the figure [Gebilde] crafted by the hand of the artist are the counterpart to the inner trace. As a result, the birth of the artwork describes e­ ither a path from the word, through inner images, to the trace left by them and its corresponding outline, or it occurs in an act of unmediated production through the hand of the artist in the form of lines and contours. The idea of immediacy plays a central role in his theory of an artwork that speaks for itself, within whose unity and ­wholeness any difference between the trace and the object vanishes into a “last trace”—­a trace that, according to Moritz, is similar to itself ­because of the immediacy between the eye and the repre­sen­ta­tion. If h ­ ere the immediacy of that which is impressed is due to the “gentle trace of seeing,” the immediacy of the re/pre­sen­ta­t ion requires the hand of the artist—­t he means of immediacy is the hand or, more precisely, the fingertip: the consummation of the ­human mind in the outermost fingertips becomes the unmediated re/pre­sen­ta­tion of the beautiful outside of itself. In Moritz’s conception of immediacy, the trace in the Trace and Lines  31

imagination thus corresponds to the vis­i­ble contours of the artwork in which the line (or contour of the shape) thus appears as a direct visual correspondence to the hidden trace at the bottom of the soul. In this way, “The Signature of the Beautiful” sketches out a phantasm of the trace’s unobstructed visibility in the age of handmade, nontechnical images. At the same time, the contour ­here ascends to be the ideal of art: “Since description by means of contours is indeed in itself more meaningful and definite than any description with words. Outlines unite, words can only separate one from the other.”57 ­Every ele­ment of heterogeneity is erased in this conception of a significant artwork that speaks for itself, one in which the beautiful is made manifest without mediation. Not only are the difference of the trace and the temporality of the image sublated in the ideal artwork, the image has at the same time practically dis­appeared from Moritz’s text. In this re­spect, “The Signature of the Beautiful” pre­sents an aesthetic theory in which the question of the image is repressed by the idea of the perfect artwork. Lines (drawing) and contours (sculpture) take the place of the trace and the image. In terms of the esteem in which he holds the line and contour, Moritz is in agreement with other authors of his time. Goethe and Schlegel, for example, both exhibit a striking appreciation of the outline, even including the contours of reproduced images that w ­ ere at that time increasingly circulated, mostly through copperplate reproductions of paintings (Chapter 7.10). Given this widespread attention, it is no surprise that Pliny the Elder’s story of the origin of painting became a prominent motif in the art of this time. A remarkable shift occurred, however, in depictions of this scene. Pliny’s story of Butades of Corinth in fact concerns the origin of the plastic arts and not painting. He introduces it by claiming that “quite enough has been said ­here about the art of painting. It is now time to say something about modeling.”58 In contrast, the well-­k nown seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century depictions of this legend often deploy the motif to depict the invention of drawing and sometimes also that of painting—as can be seen, for example, in Joachim von Sandrart’s copper engraving The Origin of Drawing (1675, Figure  1), Joseph-­Benoît Suvée’s painting The Invention of the Art of Drawing (1791), and Jean-­Baptiste Regnault’s Versailles painting The Origin of Painting: Dibutades Tracing the Portrait of a Shepherd (1786, Figure 2). In the course of this artistic reception, the scene of producing a plastic image is reduced to the generation of an outline from a shadow, even though 32  Trace and Lines

FIGURE 1. ​Plinius’s tale of the origin of sculptural art as founding legend of drawing. Joachim von Sandrart, The Origin of Drawing, engraving by G.-­A . Wolfgang (1675) a­ fter a watercolor by Sandrart, Albertina, Vienna. Image credit:

Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 68, no. 2 (2007): 173.

FIGURE 2. ​Plinius’s tale of the origin of sculptural art as founding legend of painting. Jean-­Baptiste Regnault, The Origin of Painting: Dibutades Tracing the Portrait of a Shepherd (1786), Chateau de Versaille. Image credit: Norbert Schneider, Geschichte der Kunsttheorie: Von der Antike bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Cologne, Germany: Böhlau und UTB, 2011), 16.

Pliny’s scene in fact describes a three-­part pro­cess: first, the shadow of a head is projected on the wall with the help of a lamp (which can also be read as the primal scene of prephotography); second, his ­daughter then traces the lines of the shadow [lineis circumscripsit] by hand on the wall, which gives rise to a silhouette; third, the f­ather then fills the silhouette with clay and thereby produces a clay figure [Typus] to be fired in a kiln. Yet this rather complex constellation is abbreviated and condensed in a pictorial motif favored in the eigh­teenth c­ entury: the production of an outline from a silhouette. During the same period, this kind of contour, as silhouette, became the medium for a dubious characterology in Lavater’s physiognomy (Chapter 2.9). The eye-­hand-­out/line triad found in Moritz’s aesthetic theory forms a paradigm for a theory of images that has had an enormous, if thoroughly uneven, impact. A c­ entury l­ater, his version of a theory of imagination 34  Trace and Lines

underwent a reformulation in the aesthetic theory of Einfühlung (empathy).* This time, however, the theory is developed from the observer’s point of view, where sensation and seeing, mediated by the hand, again meet in the contour. Robert Vischer’s work On the Optical Sense of Form (1873) established the concept of Einfühlung as the key concept of a psychologically oriented aesthetic theory. He understands “looking” [Schauen] as a mode of seeing animated in multiple senses and describes it as “line drawing” in which he “accurately trace[s] the contours, as though with [his] fingertip.”59 The two variants of the outline, which Moritz differentiated according to artistic genre (the line in drawing and the contour in sculpture), in this way surface again in the theory of Einfühlung. Theodor Vischer similarly thematizes two types of empathic attitude: one is graphic, in which the eye follows linear outlines, and one is plastic or sculptural, in which the eye grasps forms, surfaces, and pathways (and thus, again, formation). In contrast to Moritz, however, Theodor Vischer reflects on the “as if” of such “seeing with the fingertips”: “the eye follows outlines in a linear fashion, as if tracing them with a fingertip, thus it behaves graphically.” 60 The theory of Einfühlung rests precisely on the fact that it is an act of ensoulment or animation61 of forms, artifacts, and the cultural environment by the subject, one through which they are made “to speak” or, as Theodor Vischer articulates it, that “the observer let his own moods, passions, and temper be reflected [entgegenblicken] from the phenomena and movements of nature.” 62 The idea that the emotional impression of an artifact is perceived as its own expression provided the departing point for an influential field of art theory around 1900: from Heinrich Wölfflin’s dissertation on the psy­chol­ogy of architecture (1886) and his canonical Princi­ples of Art History (Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 1915) with the distinction of linear and pictorial [malerische] re/pre­sen­ta­tion as its central argument to Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 1907). The understanding of the image as a quasi-­“active” counterpart—­based on the premise that images are power­ful, living, or acting ­things—­has recently * ​A lthough translated as “empathy,” the nineteenth-­century concept of Einfühlung (literally “feeling into”) differs remarkably from the concept of empathy within the horizon of twentieth-­century experimental psy­chol­ogy. See Vanessa Lux and Sigrid Weigel, eds., Empathy: Epistemic Prob­lems and Cultural-­Historical Perspectives of a Cross-­Disciplinary Concept (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Trace and Lines  35

developed again into a prominent theme in image studies.63 The idea itself goes back to Re­nais­sance art-­theoretical treatises. Leonardo, who addresses the “vitality” of an image and its dynamics extensively, attributes it to the feelings of the observer, b ­ ecause “the observer receives the life of his senses and his affects from the image.” 64 Benjamin ­later conceives of this transfer of h ­ uman relations “to the relationship between the inanimate and man” as the aura. The aura does not appertain to the image but rather is grounded in the posture of the observer with re­spect to the artwork: “To experience the aura of an object means to invest it with the ability to look back at us [den Blick aufzuschlagen].” 65 Many theories of the living or animated image are actually based on the conceptualization of the eye as an organ capable of feeling through which the image becomes a living vis-­à-­v is. ­After the discovery of mirror neurons, a similar constellation has been addressed in recent experiments in the neurosciences with the conceptualization of a neurological resonance mechanism.66 Using examples from Lucio Fontana’s “spatial concept” images known as Espacialismo (monochrome images with a slash on the surface), a team led by Vittorio Gallese shows that vis­i­ble traces of the artist’s hand at work in the image trigger much greater arousal in the viewer than technically reproduced copies of the same images—as if a correspondence between traces of the soul and the soul of traces ­were at work.67 In terms of aesthetic effect, lines have to be clearly differentiated into traces, on one hand, and contours, on the other. In the Re­nais­sance, the components of the above-­mentioned triad—­t he eye (as an intellectual organ), the hand, and the line (or, more specifically, drawing)—­formed a canonical paradigm of art theory. In his Instruction for Mea­sur­ing with Compass and Ruler (1525) that departs from reflections on the line, Albrecht Dürer positioned the line on the threshold between the invisible and vis­i­ble: by drawing a straight line from one dot to another, the “invisible line” should be understood in the mind. The drawn line is described by Dürer in this context as a kind of signifier of the “inner mind in the outer work.” 68 Although Dürer’s reflections are ­shaped by a geometrical approach (which is evident by the graphical form of the three lines added to his text: one straight, one circle, and one serpentine line), the idea of the drawn line as a mediator between the mind and the vis­i­ble artwork is also fundamental for the concept of disegno; the latter was promoted in numerous art-­t heoretical treatises in sixteenth-­century Italy as the fundamental princi­ple of the arts (painting, sculpture, architecture). Disegno refers to 36  Trace and Lines

both an intellectual and a graphical outline—­t hat is, as an idea or concept in one’s head as well as a drawing executed by the hand, the “materialization of the idea.” 69 The Re­nais­sance authors, however, seem to believe in a much greater capability of disegno, as knowledge of the “idea and form of all natu­ral t­ hings,” as in Vasari. In this way, disegno comes close to divine creation—­t he pro­cess of producing an idea through the intellect and hand, which becomes manifested in drawing as form. For Vasari, “a certain image and judgment arises from this knowledge; it forms in mind the ­t hing that is l­ater s­ haped by the hand and called drawing.”70 For Benvenuto Cellini, disegno also endows man with an almost super­natural power that makes him so audacious “that he undertook to compete with the ­g reat ­father Apollo.”71 This analogy with divine Creation is, according to Didi-­ Huberman, carried to extreme in Federico Zuccaro’s 1607 text The Idea of Paint­ers, Sculptors, and Architects (L’Idea de’ pittori, scultori et architetti), where Zuccaro formed the anagram “segno di Dio” from the word di-­seg-­no and thus considered such a drawing a divine sign: literally as “another, created divinity” [un altro nume creato], “created by God the better to signify himself among angels and men.”72 In this exaggerated view of disegno, the angels would be not only God’s messengers but also his draftsmen. Through his hand, the godhead brings its signs to paper and into the picture: the drawing regarded as the signature of a divine writing in the image. Although this intensification does not apply to the concept of disegno in general, man within the art theory of disegno owes almost all his artistically productive abilities (as well as the advancement of the sciences and arts) to lines. If the intellect guides the hand, or the eye sits in the fingertip, cognitive faculty finds its ideal expression in the line.73 The idea of a line being an act of creation remains effective in modern theories, where it reaches beyond the arts and involves the expressive gestures and kinesthetic figures of the ­human body—­animated lines, as it ­were, such as the serpentine line, which is the leitmotif of Aby Warburg’s studies of correspondences between Native Americans’ rituals and symbols of the ancient cultures. Around 1900 the figura serpentinata migrated from artworks into the living ­human body. Henry van de Velde, the theorist of the line among modern architects, describes lines as “communicated gestures” and as a medium for the development of force: “The line is a force that ­w ill not deny its nature, not escape its fate”74 ­Here, movements in dance find their analogue in artifacts like buildings and furniture. For van der Velde, Trace and Lines  37

the dancer instinctively feels which further movements belong to “completion of the first step”; and as it is with the dance, so it is with the hand-­ drawn line. The revaluation of the line is the precondition for images’ entry into the logic of coding and calculation as well, particularly in the natu­ral sciences’ usage of images. In the history of science, images have repeatedly been described as an ideal interplay between h ­ uman vision (upgraded with instruments), the art of computation, and a graphic exploration of knowledge. Examples of this abound, such as in the case of Galileo,75 drawings in natu­ral history,76 and C.  S. Peirce’s drawings, which ­w ill be discussed below. However, outlines and schemata are used to reduce objects and phenomena to signs so that they can be inserted into further operations as quantitative values. Contours and lines have not only, in the form of reproduced images, advanced the ­career of popu­lar pictorial mediums like the caricature and the popularity of physiognomic images (Chapter 5.7 and 5.8), they are also—­often in the form of schemata and diagrams—­responsible for the enormous historical impact of visual repre­sen­ta­tions (literal templates for knowledge) in modern scientific history (Chapter 2.9 and 7.10). The heterogeneity between traces or indicators, on one hand, and visual repre­sen­ta­ tion or iconic images, on the other, largely falls into oblivion in t­ hese schemas and diagrams. Contours and schemata thus function as prominent mediums for the transfers between aesthetic theory and scientific practices of visualization—­w ith not inconsiderable side effects. 5 . P E I R C E ’S G R A P H I C S : B E T W E E N T H I N K I N G -­I N -­I M AG E S A N D D I AG R A M M AT I C R E A S O N

The recent discovery of Charles S. Peirce’s drawings has also had a hand in the line’s re­nais­sance. The drawings are shelved, unpublished, in Harvard University’s Houghton Library but are available online.77 Known for a long time mostly as the founder of semiotics, Peirce has recently been discovered to be an obsessive draftsman and theoretician of graphs.78 ­Until now, his work on “existential graphs” and Euler’s diagrams ­were more at home in narrower circles of specialization within the natu­ral sciences and mathe­matics,79 but recently a few of his drawings have achieved cult status: a caricature titled Epistêmy, for example, in which epistemology is depicted as a dangerous beast with a comically grimaced set of eyebrows pulled together over a gaping 38  Trace and Lines

FIGURE 3. ​Epistemology as a grim beast. Charles S. Pierce, Epistêmy, drawing (1859), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Image credit: Institut für Kunst-­und

Bildgeschichte der Humbolt-­Universität zu Berlin, http://­w ww​.­k unstgeschichte​.­hu​-­berlin​.­de​/­w p​ -­content​/­uploads​/­2012​/­04​/­epistemy​.­jpg (accessed April 25, 2014).

maw (Figure 3); or the drawing known as “The Labyrinth,” in the ­middle of which stands a tiny Minotaur, who reportedly masks Peirce’s dog.80 The archive of Pierce’s “drawings” contains a variety of sketches, graphics, diagrams, t­ ables, schemata, and multifarious other formations of lines that only fall ­under the same umbrella term ­because they are drawn by hand on paper: doodles, witty caricatures, sketches of movements, geometric figures, formulas, hieroglyphs, and more, up to and including the mathematical graphs. Among this assortment of drawings one also finds figures that are almost ornamental—­t he diagram IT (Figure 4), for example, in which the represented relationships are depicted as a circle dispersing into a ring of curves. It is not unlike Warburg’s experiments in his notebook “Symbolismus Trace and Lines  39

FIGURE 4. ​The ornament as natu­ral form of diagram. Charles S. Pierce, IT, drawing (1859), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Image credit: Harvard Library Image Delivery Ser ­v ice, http://­ids​.­l ib​.­harvard​.­edu ​/­ids​/­v iew​/­4 8444771​?­buttons​=­y (accessed April 29, 2014).

als Umfangsbestimmung” (Symbolism as determination of scope), which dismantle the classic knowledge form such as tableaux and genealogical trees into dynamic figures like circles and fans.81 Peirce’s drawings confirm that he was indeed a graphic thinker,82 as he says of himself: “I do not think I ever reflect in words: I employ visual diagrams.” His notations and drawings are so heterogeneous, however, that they are only partially suitable as examples of his theory of graphs, which constitute part of his studies on mathematical and natu­ral scientific logic and its repre­sen­ta­tion. He describes graphs in general as—­and ­here he takes the lead offered by his friends Clifford and Sylvester, who introduced the term—­“a diagram composed principally of spots and of lines connecting certain of the spots.”83 The graphic form composed of lines and points thus represents relations. This means that their “image” does not refer to objects but rather to preceding operations, the data of which in turn refer to experiments. In fantasy, according to Peirce, we form a variety “of diagrammatic, that is, iconic” repre­sen­ta­t ions of facts, as skeletal as pos­si­ble. Peirce sees an abstracted thought-­image in the diagram, whose character is visual or visual-­muscular, and the latter as a kind of embodied image.84 As a ­mental design for experimentation, it is a part of a “diagrammatic or schematic reasoning.”85 Thus Peirce’s graphs or diagrams are situated within the lineage of disegno. In the wake of the interest in Peirce’s graphical theory, this implicitly led to the rehabilitation of a concept that has long been less prized in art history: idea.86 Peirce considers his diagrams iconic, ­because he conceives of them as conventionalized repre­sen­ta­tions of interactions, “a repre­sen­ta­tion which is predominantly an icon of relations and is aided to be so by conventions,” but he also adds that indices are to be used for its production.87 This ambiguity regarding their place in his system of semiotic concepts raises questions concerning their place in the relation between iconic and indexical images (Chapter  3.5). If diagrams are iconic repre­sen­ta­tions of relation, whose “facts” have an indexical relationship to the object of investigation, then the prevailing model of images in con­temporary neuroscientific research represents a technical variant of this: brain images are repre­sen­ta­ tions of relations, whose data refer to physical phenomena. Most of ­t hese images, however, obscure their diagrammatic ele­ments and their origin in a mathematical logic ­because they appear as mimetic iconic images. Currently, t­ here is a tendency t­ oward (re)iconization that can be observed in user interfaces of scientific images—­many with body-­shaped outlines—­although Trace and Lines  41

­t hose images in fact represent the results of mea­sure­ments. The technically elaborate means of their own generation dis­appears in their iconic transcription. To return to the renewed interest in drawing: if Peirce’s graphs, whose nature is based in convention, belong to the world of drawing, then they constitute a pointed contrast to hypotheses regarding the immediacy of hand drawing. The decisive line of demarcation, however, does not run between signs and images; as long as the hand is involved as a medium of transcription and in the formation of lines, the creative moment of artistic cognition can come into play. This capability is attributed to the researcher accustomed to producing hand drawings, even if ­t here is no immediacy in play with Peirce’s graphs and their conventional and coded components. Presumably, the genre of hand-­drawn diagrams constitutes that happy equilibrium of thinking-­in-­images and calculation (a leitmotif in Aby Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaft) that has spawned the most ingenious epoch in the history of Eu­ro­pean intellectual history. Even t­ oday, however, the nimbus of many scientific images still profits from the idea of the line and the specific cognitive faculty attributed to it—­even if it concerns technical and frequently reproduced repre­sen­ta­tions or codes, and even if they are not drafts and design sketches but rather digital graphics, schemata, contours, and diagrams.

42  Trace and Lines

2 ­FA C E S : B E T W E E N T R A C E A N D I M A G E , E N C O D I N G A N D M E A­S U R E­M E N T

Now the temptation of the absolute mask (the mask of antiquity, for instance) perhaps implies less the theme of the secret (as is the case with Italian half mask) than that of an archetype of the ­human face. —­roland barthes, “the face of garbo” The era of physiognomic investigation into personality, character, and social types seemed to be over. Yet in the wake of electronic imaging techniques and brain scans, the face again stepped forward as an object for empirical research—as an indicator of emotions or personality traits such as credibility and predisposition to aggression, among ­others, or as an object for emotion detection. Moreover, the face and facial expressions [Mimik]* serve in many ways as auxiliary scientific instrumentation for current laboratory research. T ­ oday, the brain, the face, and emotions comprise a “research triangle” favored for collaboration between neurobiology, experimental psy­chol­ogy, and computer science. A 2002 study conducted at a London laboratory examined the activity in vari­ous brain regions as detected through brain scanning while the * ​The term Mimik exceeds the meaning of “facial expression.” It refers to the vis­i­ble movements of the face’s surface with re­spect to the facial features in general, ­whether expressing emotions or other characteristics, whereas Mienenspiel is used for the facial features in motion. The word Mimik also denotes the activity of actors in theater.

participants assessed the trustworthiness of ­faces. In the first step, they ­were asked to rate 120 photo­graphs of male f­ aces on a scale of one to seven (“least trustworthy” to “most trustworthy”), and in the second step they ­were to assign one of seven pos­si­ble emotions to the expressions depicted in the photos: neutral, happy, sad, angry, disgusted, anxious, or surprised.1 The article only marginally mentions that to assist the participants with the second task they ­were given a page of photo­g raphs taken from the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) developed by Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen. This setup is symptomatic of the use of a standardized schema in order to identify emotions based on facial expressions in photographic portraits used as aids for experiments in, among other fields, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and psy­chol­ogy. In the pro­cess, the ubiquity of mediated ­faces means that they have penetrated the digital methodologies of current laboratory research. FACS defines specific movement patterns of facial expressions as signs of (six or seven) distinct emotions; since this system is t­ oday integrated into empirical instrumentation, an interpretive model that can look back over a long and varied history has penetrated into the labs of current research. The form and expression of the face have always been the object of philosophical, artistic, and scientific curiosity: one tradition begins in classical rhe­toric and the poetics of affect and continues through studies of proportion in the arts, the range of interpretive models of h ­ uman physiognomy, and theories on h ­ uman facial expressions, the dramatic arts, and, fi­n ally, to expressive gestures utilized in s­ ilent film. Along another track, the face has been a primary object of investigation in the canon of medical-­ anatomical knowledge that was spurred on through the use of empirical instruments of mea­sure­ment, which has recently made enormous leaps with digital imaging techniques, and anthropological biometrics and forensic facial recognition that are currently making their way into face recognition in public spaces. In light of this history, the use of a one-­p age handout displaying a typology of seven emotional states is surprising. Not only are the test subjects’ perceptions preshaped by this, but it also attests to the—­i llusionary and fallacious—­b elief in the existence of a precise facial code. In real­ity, however, the interpretive models within the field of knowledge on ­faces are by no means uniform or consistent. 44  Faces: Between Trace and Image

1. O N T H E A N T I T H E T I C A L M E A N I N G O F E X P R E S S I V E G E S T U R E S’ P R I M A L W O R D S

In Della Pittura (1435), Leon Battista Alberti observes: How difficult it is when attempting to paint a laughing face to avoid making it more weeping than happy? Who could ever, without the greatest study express ­faces in which mouth, chin, eyes, cheeks, forehead and eyebrows all accord together to form a laughter or weeping.2 In order to depict emotions [movimenti d’animo], the painter should instead refer to the movimenti del corpo, as Alberti suggests. Thus he points to the same expressive bodily gestures that Aby Warburg ­will ­later call “pathos formulas”: formulaic ele­ments within images with which specific states of affect are expressed, remembered, and represented, although their specific character always carries a specific historical signature. Most artistic portraits refrain from depicting strongly animated facial expressions, which is why the slightly raised corner of the mouth in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting has become the proverbial “Mona Lisa smile.” Portraiture developed other means by which to characterize the emotional state of mind of the persons portrayed.3 ­These modes of painting are closer to the aesthetic theories of Einfühlung, which reflects the transfer of emotional values to t­ hings, works of art, and artifacts (Chapter 1.4), and to lit­er­a­ture’s kind of knowledge than they are to a mimic-­physiognomic paradigm. It is true that more than a few paint­ers (such as Charles Le Brun) have cosigned the history of facial expressions [Mimik] and physiognomy; likewise “aficionados of physiognomy” such as Theodor Piderit “relied on portraits of impor­tant men” (he used copper engravings of paintings, which is to say outlines).4 Indeed, many of the writers who penned scientific theories of expression refer to works of art—­the most prominent being Charles Bell’s Anatomy of Expression in Painting (1806). Yet Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s antiphysiognomy already claimed that artistic portraits are useless for investigations into character. It is not the still image, he claims, but rather it is the face’s “series of changes” that expresses character, and this cannot be shown in a portrait—­even less in Johann Kaspar Lavater’s silhouettes.5 Indeed, the pictorial formulas for facial expressions did not emerge from the history of art; instead, their index developed on the reverse side of the artistic Faces: Between Trace and Image  45

portraits: in caricatures (Chapter  5.7), which are remarkably similar to illustrations in treatises on facial expressions and physiognomy. The history of art could certainly be of interest to science more as an archive of observations and reflections on the h ­ uman face than as a source or visual aid. Alberti’s discovery of a kind of antithetical meaning of primal words6 in the field of emotional expressive gestures can be found again and again in discourses related to painting.7 Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art (1778) makes the same observation of opposites, comparing a frenetically laughing bacchante to Mary in mourning; it is “curious to observe, and certainly true, that the extremes of contrary passions are with very ­little variation expressed by the same action.”8 Though Charles Darwin claims to have benefited ­little from art history and the ­great masters’ paintings and sculptures while researching The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), he refers to this passage in chapter 7, on laughter.9 ­Here Darwin engages in an extensive discussion of observations on the sudden turn of crying into laughter and admits that “it is scarcely pos­si­ble to point out any difference between the tear-­stained face of a person ­after a paroxysm of excessive laughter and ­after ­bitter crying-­fit.”10 When explaining this phenomenon involving the “close similarity of the spasmodic movements caused by widely dif­fer­ent emotions,” he grounds ­these antithetical emotional expressions in a kind of biological natu­ral law. Si­mul­ta­neously, he banishes art-­ historical knowledge to the footnote, where he cites Reynolds. The traces of such ambiguities in facial expressions (as well as the complex contexts and constellations with which we “read” f­ aces in real time) are, however, dismissed as soon as facial expressions are used as codes for distinct emotions and turned into instrumental images. The scientific genesis and image-­theoretical premises of this system form the epistemic reverse side of instrumental images. Yet, implemented within current procedures as they are, ­these ambiguities are absent in practice and not recognizable in the user interface; the goal of critique of images used within scientific procedures is to illuminate them. 2 . A R E­N A I S­S A N C E O F “ E M OT I O N S”: A T R A D I N G ZO N E B O R N F R O M T H E S P I R I T O F T E C H N O LO G Y

At the turn of the millennium, Antonio Damasio’s books Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the H ­ uman Brain (1994) and The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999) marked 46  Faces: Between Trace and Image

both the “emotional turn” in cognitive science and the arrival of books on brain research in the popu­lar science market. The scientific “neglect of emotion in the twentieth c­ entury” and “absence of the notion of organism in cognitive science and neuroscience” are overcome, according to Damasio, ­because research into the brain has “fi­nally endorsed emotion.”11 Conversely, this turn ­toward emotions in neurosciences corresponds to a revaluation of the role of the brain in research into emotions, particularly in psy­chol­ ogy.12 It took, in the end, new imaging techniques to establish a trading zone between neurophysiology, brain anatomy, and experimental psy­chol­ogy—­ heralding the re­nais­sance of emotions.13 Its dictum is: the brain produces emotions and the face reveals and signifies them. With new imaging techniques, the old dream of “looking into the brain” seemed to be realized. While technologies like PET14 and fMRI15 can localize the neurons “firing” in individual regions of the brain, one needs to si­mul­ta­neously test subjects’ activities or cognitive per­for­mance to determine the significance of each respective region. With the heightened emphasis on new images, it is often forgotten that t­hese “neural maps” do not represent emotions but rather brain activity that is mea­ sured and recorded and to which meaning is only attributed l­ ater via secondary par­ameters. Emotions are, in fact, situated on the threshold between so­ma and sema and are recognizable only through a threshold knowledge [Schwellenkunde] operating between empiricism and semantics, between physiology and psy­chol­ogy—­between traces and images. This research strikes at the heart of a hot zone in the conflict between mea­sure­ment and interpretation. Considered agitations or excitations, ­t hese bodily or neural activities are only accessible through indirect indicators such as heart rate, blood pressure, and hormone secretions and are dependent on interpretation to be considered emotions or m ­ ental or psychological phenomena. The title of Damasio’s Descartes’ Error positions neuroscience’s emotional turn as an alternative to Descartes’s ubiquitously cited maxim: “I think, therefore I am.” Yet, Damasio’s book does not stand up to a closer reading of Descartes ­because already in The Passions of the Soul (Les passions de l’âme, 1649)—­a foundational text of modern affect theory—­the brain acts as a physical stage for emotions: the “passion of the soul” is nothing other than an “agitation,” whose “esprits” (a kind of vital spirit he compares to a flame) move a small gland found in the ­middle of the brain.16 Descartes already Faces: Between Trace and Image  47

assumed that emotions are tied to the activation of par­tic­u­lar areas in the brain and then transmitted to the muscles.17 How, however, does con­ temporary research into the brain understand emotions? Gerhard Roth, to take one example, defines emotions as the “evaluation of one’s own actions,” the “experiential expression of the pro­cess of the brain’s self-­assessment”; they are thus understood as phenomena that exceed neurological activity. Yet the production of emotions is localized within the brain and the limbic system, described as the “brain’s behavioral assessment system.”18 Memory and emotions facilitate “the adjustment of one’s own actions according to experience, that is to say, to avoid that which has proved harmful and to do that which has been proven to have pleas­ur­able consequences (where ‘harmful’ and ‘pleas­ur­able’ can range from primary unplea­sure and plea­sure to subtle anger and enjoyment).”19 Damasio further distinguishes between feelings and emotions. Feelings is his term for the subjective registration of one’s own bodily changes in excitation, while emotions are descriptions of them in the form of a distinct affect profile: “When the body conforms to the profiles of one of t­ hose emotions we feel happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgusted.”20 Feelings are given ­here the task of mediating between the subjective state of the body and “profiles” of traditional emotion types; in this role they are si­mul­ta­neously the mediator between physiological conditions and culturally formed meanings that are only clearly distinguished from one another based on their denotation. ­These profiles are preestablished patterns, culturally coded modulations of affects (as distinct phenomena) the specific difference between which is coded with the help of an extant lexicon. Such a transfer from physiology to semantics often lies latent and obscured in nomenclature and in translations between languages and eras. Despite the fact that the cata­log of affects has remained surprisingly stable since Aristotle,21 changes in prevailing scientific language have led to significant shifts in the meaning of emotions: beginning with the Greek pathé (what happens to one), to the Latin passio, French passion and sensibilité, and German Gemütsbewegung or Gefühl, and eventually the En­glish emotion; throughout, it was accompanied by the corresponding scientific term affect. The current revaluation of emotion or Gefühl can be read as the return of a rhetorical pathos formula from the era of sensibilité or Empfindsamkeit.22 Their c­ areers w ­ ere kicked off in the eigh­teenth c­ entury with the programmatic statement “I feel, therefore I am” (Marquis d’Argens, The Philosophy of 48  Faces: Between Trace and Image

Common Sense, 1746) or “I feel, therefore I exist” (Jacques-­Henri Bernardin de Saint-­Pierre, Studies of Nature, 1825).23 In this context, emotions w ­ ere discussed as a kind of medium between the two poles of sensibilité physique and sensibilité morale. Although the Encyclopédie devotes two separate entries to the phenomena (a long entry on sensibilité in the field of “medicine” and a short supplementary one in the field of “morals”), the same term is used for both, much in the same way the term emotion does ­today.24 Despite the current boom in emotions as a topic in both the sciences and the humanities, Freud’s question remains unanswered: “How [do] qualities originate and where [do] qualities originate?” (Chapter 1.2).25 Detached from its historical genesis in current research, however, the concept of emotion carries with it a semantic surplus that originates in its prehistory. 3 . I M AG I N G T E C H N I Q U E S : D ATA I CO N O G R A P H Y A N D D ATA S E M A N T I C S

To return to the “trading zone” between brain, face, and emotions, we see that the tools of each discipline in this zone are employed as secondary empirical indicators or control instruments in the other: neuroimaging in the form of brain mapping in empirical psy­chol­ogy and the interpretation of facial expressions in brain research. While research into the brain uses the code of facial expression to correlate with specific mapped brain activities, psychological research increasingly employs brain scans as a control mechanism, combining them with test subject interviews or mea­ sure­ments of other physiological correlates (like heartbeat, blood pressure, or skin temperature). Operating on the threshold between quantitative pro­cesses (blood oxygen level) and qualitative concepts (the typology of emotions, for example), the corresponding experiments touch upon the most sensitive epistemological prob­lems facing neuroscience—­t he same incompatibility of epistemes that led Freud to set aside his “Proj­ect for a Scientific Psy­chol­ogy,” and with it his intention to develop a biologically grounded theory of memory, and to abandon henceforth pinpointing psychical pro­cesses in specific physical locations.26 This black box at the translation of somatic indicators into the cata­log of affects manifests itself in the image-­forms and pictorial practices in the field, for which the complex prob­lems lying at the intersection between data iconography and data semantics are symptomatic. Faces: Between Trace and Image  49

The new images seem like voyages of discovery to regions that w ­ ere previously inaccessible to ­human vision. Viewed as images, their colorfulness and beauty catch one’s eye first, and t­ hese qualities testify to the degree to which t­ hese imaging techniques are (however unknowingly) informed by viewing habits practiced in the reception of art.27 Their aestheticized form makes one forget that they are not images but rather visualizations of data that rely first on complex operations of mea­sure­ment and calculation that are then transferred into an image. In a technical sense, one cannot speak of digital images at all. “The digital image does not exist,” as Claus Pias writes, “innumerable analog images represent digitally available data: on monitors, tele­vi­sions or paper, on movie screens, displays and so forth.” Digital pictures in which data are represented are rather “informatic illusions.”28 In the case of brain images, the illusion is achieved through a contour analogous to the shape of the ­human skull. Simply stated, when fMRI mea­sures blood flow and oxygen levels, the difference between the so-­ called resting state and an active one is calculated; the data derived through computer-­generated methods are then translated into distinct color values, and ­these are then entered into the schematic map of the brain. In effect, the differences in color appear like direct visualizations of neural actualities, as if it ­were an iconic likeness of the brain. Imaging technologies show something that lies beyond likeness and re/pre­sen­ta­tion, beyond mimesis and similarity.29 They do not represent ­things or events but rather functions, activities, characteristics, or actualities that ­were recorded using specific indicators.30 What an audience sees in talks presenting t­ hese images masks their complex and constructed nature. This fact is entirely neglected, when often an imperceptible shift between fMRI scans and sequences of virtual constructions frequently occurs, without commenting on the change in the status of the depictions: from indicator-­reference to virtual image. The latter are actually pictorial repre­sen­ta­tions of theoretical assumptions—­that is to say, digitally visualized models. In the aesthetic world of digital visualization, however, the differences between the repre­sen­ta­tion of data and speculative models dis­appear. The enormous power of suggestion wielded by this world of images (as if we are directly confronted with nature’s interior and secrets) is primarily ­because they appear to be iconic images or pictorial re/pre­sen­ta­t ions and thereby draw on t­ hose images’ authority steeped in tradition. Brain research’s digital visualization technique, however, replaces the iconographic 50  Faces: Between Trace and Image

FIGURE 5. ​Iconographic imagination in the history of science before the digital era. Fritz Kahn, Muskel-­und Klingelleitung in ihrer fünfteiligen Übereinstimmung (Muscleand bell line in a five-part accordance), chart (1923). Image credit: Jean Clair et al., Wunderblock: Eine Geschichte der modernen Seele (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1989), 174.

fantasy held for images in sciences from a time when the realm of the vis­i­ ble was still strictly separated from the secretive sphere of Creation. One need only recall the illustrations in Fritz Kahn’s The Life of Man (Das Leben des Menschen) (1923–1931), in which physiological functions are translated into iconic scenarios. The neurological meta­phor for the conduction of Faces: Between Trace and Image  51

stimuli, for example, is literally put into the picture (Figure 5)—­i nto an image that “holds the world together with ‘figures of knowledge.’ ”31 With regard to the new imaging techniques, the proclaiming of an iconic turn or pictorial turn is still misleading ­because their ubiquity does not indicate a turn to pictorial images but rather t­ oward a digital system of notation. The iconic images produced by brain research only appear on the user interface, for example, when the outline of the skull’s shape is used as a schema into which data is transcribed. The situation is dif­fer­ent with the images used for decoding emotions by devices pursuing electronically augmented emotion detection based on images of the face. The mea­sure­ ments taken of the face, although taken with seemingly precise methods, are actually based on traditional interpretive models from the history of physiognomy and facial expression, though this is unrecognizable in repre­sen­ta­tions composed of curves and diagrams. Misleading images thus surface in the trading zone of emotion research in two ways: first, as cryptoimages of the mind in which data appears as a likeness of the physical brain and, second, as diagrams in which schematic models of the face and the implicit codes are concealed. 4 . T H E FA B R I C AT I O N O F A N I M AG E AT L A S : T H E CO D I N G O F FAC I A L E X P R E S S I O N S ( FAC S )

The tool most commonly used to decipher emotions from facial expressions is, as already mentioned, the Facial Action Coding System. Developed in the 1970s, it is a system for reading the movements of facial muscles as indications of six so-­called basic emotions; the influence of this code has become widespread.32 FACS also underlies electromyographic (EMG) techniques for recording subtle muscle movements33 or the activation of the autonomous ner­vous system34 and computer-­assisted analy­sis of video recordings. It also forms the basic interpretative system for many programs of “affective computing” that rely on digital transformations of FACS’s analog codes. In many laboratory settings, ­these tools are combined with conventional empirical methods, visual stimuli such as photo­graphs or pictures taken from the International Affective Picture System, or the self-­ assessment questionnaires given to test subjects. It is, for example, likely not easy for laypersons to see the continuum between photos from Ekman and Friesen’s 1975 image atlas of emotions (on which FACS is based) (Figure 6) 52  Faces: Between Trace and Image

FIGURE 6. ​“Disgust” from the image atlas of the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Image credit: Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Expression (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-­Hall, 1975), 69.

and diagrams generated by research that came ­later, such as the “Rating and Keypress Results” diagram produced by fMRI analy­sis that can be seen in the empirical study “Beautiful ­Faces Have Variable Reward Value: fMRI and Behavioral Evidence.” This diagram (Figure 7), produced by a research group during the era of “Big Science,” shows comparative data from male and female test subjects whose brain activity was recorded with the help of fMRI.35 In this experiment, brain imaging was combined with the conventional tools of experimental behavioral science in the same manner as already described at the outset of this chapter. While experimental scientists often employ the latest technology, their methods repudiate the interpretive models that have been literally inscribed into their tools for centuries. Not insignificantly, the knowledge of the facial muscles’ movements used for emotion analy­sis is based on the conceptual history of physiognomy and expressive gestures amassed since Charles Darwin, whose nomenclature was systematized by Duchenne de Boulogne. Th ­ ese works then in turn refer to the cata­log of affects dating from Aristotle and Faces: Between Trace and Image  53

FIGURE 7. ​The lab concept of attractiveness: keypress data while viewing portraits correlated with fMRI of regions of interest in the brain. “Rating and Keypress Results,” in Itzhak Aharon et al., “Beautiful ­Faces Have Variable Reward Values: FMRI and Behavioral Evidence,” Neuron 32, no. 3 (2001): 538.

the paradigm of facial expression introduced by Charles Le Brun in the seventeenth ­century. The increasing exchanges between psy­chol­ogy and the neurosciences, inspired by the use of imaging technologies since the early 1990s, effected an intensified use of digital instruments in experimental psy­chol­ogy. Thus the “emotional turn” in the neurosciences led to a “digital turn” in psy­chol­ogy, which eventually led to the establishment of a new field. With affective computing, introduced in 1995 by Rosalind W. Picard at MIT, emotions fully entered the digital world, resulting in a reversed relation between the two: psychological questions are ­here determined by digital technology. Picard defines affective computing as “computing that relates to, arises from, or influences emotions.” Her programmatic text heralds a new age: computers are beginning to acquire the ability to recognize and express emotions, and they could soon also be given the capacity “to have emotions.”36 In further reflections, she admits, however, that individual emotions “cannot be directly observed by another person,” which is why one has to rely on “emotional expressions” or “symptoms.”37 ­Here, “facial expression” comes first again, ahead of vocal or other markers. Emotion detection technology ranks among the most successful of AI products to come out of the affective computing labs. Propelled by the promise of developing therapeutic programs, the industry’s success is based on emotional recognition software, which has since come to be of par­tic­u ­lar interest to marketing research.38 In the public discourse, emotion detection is often discussed within the same paradigm as face detection, although the techniques differ significantly. While in face detection the identification of a person via biometric markers (physiological traits such as head shape or surface texture) is linked to additional, previously stored personal data, emotion recognition works quite differently. H ­ ere, highly advanced artificial intelligence technology is combined with a very ­simple code, ­because the program is also based on FACS. Yet the more advanced and complex the technology of emotion recognition by facial expression becomes, the more reductive the interpretative patterns are. While Ekman’s six basic emotion patterns rely on a combination of more than sixty action units, several of the emotion detection devices available on the market utilize just twenty-­four or thirty (rarely up to sixty) markers on the eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth. A ­limited section of the face (from the upper edge of the brows to the point of the chin) is used to track and mea­sure the movements of the markers and then to interpret the resulting Faces: Between Trace and Image  55

pattern as joy, surprise, and other “basic emotions.”39 The claim of such emotion recognition devices is paradigmatic for the informatic illusion of so-­ called digital images, which involves the misapprehension of the reference object (Chapter 3.5). Yet what, exactly, is hidden b ­ ehind the interpretive model of FACS? A trend often observed in the history of the natu­ral sciences is also apparent in the affective sciences: as methods become canonized and institutionalized, knowledge of their genesis is forgotten. The Twelfth Eu­ro­pean Conference on Facial Expression (July 2008, University of Geneva) was dedicated to “Thirty years of FACS,” the anniversary of the publication with which Ekman and Friesen standardized their system, enabling it to become a tool for empirical research: Facial Action Coding System: A Technique for the Mea­sure­ment of Facial Movement (1978). Though this book became the foundational text for FACS, the system was fleshed out three years ­earlier in Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Expressions (1975). This book is a hybrid of self-­help book, image atlas of emotions, and a compilation of scientific theories on facial expressions—­a kind of textbook for learning how to read emotions on o ­ thers’ ­faces, as well as training one to control one’s own face with the help of a mirror. The main section of this book consists of an image atlas of photos of facial expressions that are associated with six “primary emotions”: surprise, fear, disgust, anger, happiness, and sadness, which the authors ­later coined “basic emotions.” As it closely follows a cata­log of emotions that has remained relatively constant since antiquity, it was not new. Yet Ekman and Friesen contributed to a nearly global spread of the system with the manual they subsequently developed from this book, one aimed at psychologists, personnel man­ag­ers, criminalists, and other professionals. In the 1975 book, they pre­sent basic assertions on the functionality and meaning of emotions, as well as their visibility on the surface of the face. ­Here, they refer to three “types of signals”: the static (such as skin color), slow (such as permanent wrinkles), and rapid (such as raising the eyebrows).40 The theoretical meta­phors used to describe ­t hese signal systems are remarkably inconsistent. The code for facial expressions is discussed, on one hand, in the model of a sender-­receiver system, which is comparable to an informational-­theoretical system. Yet, on the other hand, the three types of signals are described as a kind of generally understandable language with communicative functionality that extends into the meta­phorics 56  Faces: Between Trace and Image

of text: “rapid facial signals” would be used in order to transmit “emotion messages” and “emblematic messages”—­that is, they would function as “conversational punctuators.” 41 The fundamental thesis for the proj­ect assumes the universality of “primary” or “basic” emotions, for which the authors refer to Charles Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and to their own experiments. Ekman and Friesen presented photo­graphs to viewers from vari­ous cultures (Amer­i­ca, Japan, New Guinea)42 who ­were to have “recognized” the corresponding emotions without difficulty—­ considering this, however, one must be aware that the photos are posed, showing exaggerated facial expressions.43 In this re­spect, the “primary emotions” are likely less universal emotions than they are heavi­ly schematized, almost mask-­like expressive gestures in which it is easy to recognize what they “should” say. In a detailed critical analy­sis of the production, se­lection, and use of the photo­graphs, Ruth Leys shows that the ­whole procedure was “highly recursive, to say the least.” 44 The most remarkable ­thing about Unmasking the Face, however, is the way in which the photo­graphs ­were produced. The authors did not take pictures of ­people who ­were stimulated or provoked into displaying a par­tic­u­ lar emotion; they are, rather, the product of an elaborate staging: the two models (one actor and one scientist) w ­ ere instructed to move specific facial muscles according to a kind of screenplay. This script is based on a system of facial musculature that the authors compiled from vari­ous sources of natu­ ral scientific knowledge of expressive gestures that had been amassed since Darwin. Observations from Darwin, Duchenne de Boulogne, Ernst Huber, and Robert Plutchik ­were collocated by Ekman and Friesen and then registered into a ­table, “which listed all the facial muscles and the six emotions, entering into the ­table what ­these men had written about which muscles ­were involved in what way for each emotion.” B ­ ecause the two authors recognized that many gaps remained ­after producing this t­able consisting of single assertions from the history of sciences, they completed the t­able by their own assumptions.45 Each of the six “primary emotions” is detailed in a dedicated chapter that describes the individual movements for each of the three parts of the face—­a subdivision that is inherited from the history of facial physiognomy: eyebrows/forehead, eyes, and the bottom half of the face, including mouth or lip movements. Though it had played an impor­tant role in physiognomy since antiquity, the shape of the nose has been marginalized ­here (as it is in facial expression in general) due to the dominance of Faces: Between Trace and Image  57

FIGURE 8. ​Phantom images: the ars combinatoriae of the facial expression code. Eye area of “surprise” in FACS. Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Clues (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-­Hall, 1975), 40.

“rapid signals” (only including wrinkling one’s nose). With “rapid signals,” the strength of the movement, mea­sured as a deviation from a normal resting state, is the most impor­tant indicator. In order to break down the code into individual signs called “action units,” the movements in each of the three parts of the face are documented individually, resulting in portraits that ­were photomontages, combinations of each of the three parts of the face. In this way, the pro­cess of producing codes of distinct affects resembles the phantom images (in the technical sense of the word) of crime scene photos. Ekman and Friesen’s coding system thus yields an image atlas of so-­called primary emotions that proves to be the product of a multifaceted combinatorics: (1) a tableau of historical knowledge in the form of a compilation of physiologic expression knowledge [Ausdruckskunde], (2) a photographic rec­ord of their mimetic staging by living models, and (3) an ars combinatoriae of expressive facial gestures in the three parts of the face (Figure 8). 5 . M I C R O E X P R E S S I O N S : F R O M T H E AT L A S O F I M AG E S TO M E A­S U R E­M E N T

­ oday, FACS is firmly established as a toolkit for emotion detection and is T experiencing global, wide-­ranging application: from the publicly accessible manual available online46 to its use in psychotherapy and experimental psy­chol­ogy and Affective Computing’s laboratories. Ekman, who in the meantime emerged as a successful businessman with his Paul Ekman Group, has more recently undertaken work on so-­called microexpressions, the fleeting movements of facial muscles that appear for only a fraction of a second, elud58  Faces: Between Trace and Image

ing the naked eye. His work conjoins two aspects of microexpressions: first, the technical possibility of making microexpressions vis­i­ble by means of video recordings in slow motion; and second, the assumption that involuntary or uncontrollable expressions reveal “true” emotions that are betrayed before the person can bring them ­under control with a volitive display of the mien [Mienenspiel]. Voluntary expressions, conversely, are considered potentially deceptive, if not untruthful. In this way, his decoding of microexpressions offers its ser­vices as a lie detector to be used by law enforcement investigative and secret ser­v ices. Thereby, microexpressions or microphysiognomy—­ fascination with which was first sparked in early cinema—­turned into an instrument for the investigation of “true” feelings. The suddenly hypervisible facial play of expressions—­which was first seen in close-up on the movie screen—­plunged crowds into “the greatest perturbation,” 47 whereas the theoretician of ­silent film Béla Balázs was so fascinated that he praised the cinema as a kind of lyric poetry and the screen as a “magnifying glass of the cinematograph” and the close-up as a stage for the drama of h ­ uman emotions.48 At the reverse side of cinema, the cinematic optical techniques of slow motion and the blow-up have meanwhile been perverted into an instrument for police rec­ord departments. This investigative use of cinematic technique, in any case, does not detract from the cinema—­the drama of facial expression continues ­t here to this day. And if this drama t­ oday suffers heavy losses, it is due less to FACS than it is to the becoming-­vacant f­aces of the actors, whose range of facial expressions is literally made considerably narrower by Botox and facelifts. The fact that readings directly opposed to one another—­like Balázs’s and Ekman’s—­refer to the same concept (microexpression) points to the link between facial expression and the dramatic arts. In this context, the knowledge of facial expressions is beset by an incessant and insoluble doubt: the uncertainty of ­whether a facial expression can be regarded as a “true” manifestation of an emotion. The mimicking art of performing emotions in the history of theater and film—­the “as if” of acting, known since Denis Diderot as the “paradox of the actor” 49—­corresponds to a topic per­sis­tent within current face research—­namely, the discussion over the so-­called false smile, a concept that entirely misunderstands the role of the voluntary smile, which actually is expressed as a social gesture, which is indispensable for communication, especially for par­tic­u­lar professions. More in­ter­est­ing, however, is the question of ­whether the movements of facial muscles are exclusively Faces: Between Trace and Image  59

induced by affects or ­whether one can also evoke certain emotional states through willful movements of facial muscles. The fact that the footnote in Piderit’s 1858 Mimic and Physiognomy addressing this question extends across several pages, practically supplanting the main text, is symptomatic for the blind spot at the border between so­ma and sema.50 This blind spot stands at the center of the paradigm of facial expression to the extent that it is based on the hypothesis of a direct coupling of distinct affects with certain movements in the facial musculature, resulting in the identification of facial expression and emotion. Film, however (as is also the case in theater), is less concerned with the “truth” of the actor’s affect as it is with the viewer’s emotions and sympathy. And in research lit­er­a­ture? Even if FACS (which is a manual with 2D images) was subsequently replaced by other instruments, the model for coding emotions remains pre­sent in most of t­ oday’s laboratory tools like a palimpsest. Parts of empirical methods developed ­after FACS attempt to eliminate the moment of interpretation (by a ­human vis-­à-­vis). Described as a “subjective ­factor” or “sensitivity prob­lem,” the observer’s involvement, necessary to interpret the movements of specific facial muscles as expressive signs of distinct basic emotions, is in this context considered a disorder within “objective” procedures. According to a respective article titled “Unobservable Facial Actions and Emotions,” this “sensitivity prob­lem” has been reduced by the use of facial electromyography.51 In the pro­cess of replacing the semiotics of perceptible expressive movements with an EMG recording, however, a double shift takes place: first, a shift in what is considered an indicator—­ from the “overt facial expressions” to “covert somatic actions”—­and second, in recording techniques—­from photographic repre­sen­ta­tion to a mea­sure­ ment technique that rec­ords nonvisible modifications to facial skin, tissue, and musculature in real time. With EMG, science tries to get access to the test subject’s physical states preceding the moment when modifications of lines, wrinkles, and features of the face become vis­i­ble on the surface and thus interpretable as a code; the aim is to trace the emergence of expressive gestures in a nascent state and to identify the “true” emotions or a “true image” of emotions. By means of technical procedures for mea­sure­ment of the face, the research attempts to get, as it ­were, ­under its skin. Recording fleeting, imperceptible excitements is done in ser­v ice of identifying “unique signatures for specific emotions.”52 Replacing a h ­ uman vis-­à-­v is with precise methods thus appears ­here not as biometric facial 60  Faces: Between Trace and Image

mea­sure­ment but rather as a seismography of the “autonomic ner­vous system” and the involuntary motor function of the facial muscles. If it seems as if this technique bypasses the observer, this detour is in fact an illusion, ­because—­much like Benjamin’s famous dwarf hidden within the chess-­ playing automaton who “has to keep out of sight”53—­t he observer’s eye actually sits within the under­lying code, as well as in the anatomical nomenclature. The names of the individual facial muscles refer to the terminology in Guillaume-­Benjamin-­Amand Duchenne de Boulogne’s Mechanism of ­Human Facial Expression or an Electrophysical Analy­sis of the Expression of the Emotions (1861), which describes the face as a tableau of physiologically localized signs of emotions for which the names of the individual muscles are identical to the emotions they express. 6 . P H YS I O G N O M I C O R T H O G R A P H Y A N D T H E S E M I OT I C S O F FAC I A L M U S C L E S ( D U C H E N N E D E B O U LO G N E )

Photo­graphs of male f­ aces contorted by the application of electrical impulses can be considered the leitmotif (­really, leit-­icon) of the physiologic science of expressions (Figure 9). ­These distorted f­ aces, though considered the language of the passions, are actually the product of electricity and photography. Duchenne de Boulogne’s atlas of images, with its expressions of the passions, arises from a culture of experimentation that, with the use of new recording techniques, contributed to the rise of empirical methods in the second half of the nineteenth c­ entury (Chapter  1.3). While the ascent of experimental research, which a­ dopted methods of mea­sure­ment as its primary princi­ple, has been largely driven by the phantasm of a knowledge in­de­pen­dent of language, ­t here is yet still constant reference to language: both in the concept of a “language of the passions” and in the legion of alphabetic and semiotic meta­phors upon which Duchenne draws. Duchenne’s desire to explore the laws governing the expressions of ­human physiognomy grew out of George-­Louis Leclerc Buffon’s work on the face, who considered the face a tableau vivant through the movement of the soul.54 To this end, Duchenne de Boulogne spent years inducing contractions of facial muscles by means of electrical impulses in order to lead his test subjects “to speak the language of the emotions and the sentiments.” Photography allowed him to capture the “expressive lines of the ­human face” at the moment of the electrified muscle contraction, which he defined meta­ Faces: Between Trace and Image  61

FIGURE 9. ​Physiognomic orthography: the electro-­photographic system of facial expressions. Photo­graphs from Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physiognomie humaine ou analyse électro-­physiologique de l’expression des passions (1861). Image credit: Jean Clair et al., Wunderblock: Eine Geschichte der modernen Seele (Vienna:

Löcker Verlag, 1989), 219.

phor­ically as the “orthography of facial expression in movement.” Buffon’s concepts of trait and caractère—­trait (facial feature) as an expression of the movement of the soul and caractère (indicator) as the expression of each of its actions—­were condensed by Duchenne into “traits caractéristiques,” in which the features themselves become readable signs. He thus redefines the tableau vivant of the face in motion into a writing tablet. Characteristic facial features, the “distinctive lines” with which other physiognomists like Piderit indicate the facial expressions in “schematic outlines” and “contour outlines,” are projected directly onto the body in Duchenne’s orthography.55 This operation is supported by directly inscribing the semantics contained in the cata­log of affects onto the musculature of the face. To this end, he (1) outlines an anatomy of the facial musculature56 and (2) constructs a tableau of distinct expressions differentiated by both the muscles involved 62  Faces: Between Trace and Image

and the strength of their movement. Drawing on the nuanced descriptions of and nomenclature for the individual facial muscles contained in Charles Bell’s Essays on the Anatomy of Expressions in Painting (1806),57 Duchenne develops a bivalent semantics by complementing the Latin technical terms with new terms referencing distinct affects (Figure 10). This system operates by means of a s­ imple reciprocal assignment: if individual muscles are coupled directly to the register of emotional expressions in a “­table synoptique” and assigned to par­tic­u­lar regions of the face, then a cata­log of expressions is conversely associated with muscle movements in dif­fer­ent parts of the face.58 The way in which the anatomical nomenclature is short-­circuited by the semantics of expressive gestures can be seen in his synoptic t­able, which introduces the names of the muscles: muscle of joy, muscle of pain, muscle of attention, and so forth.

1. Completely expressive muscles (according to Duchenne) [Current name m. frontalis superior part of m. orbicularis oculi m. corrugator supercilii m. procerus

Duchenne’s terminology frontal orbiculaire palpébral supérieur sourclilier

Duchenne’s terms translated] muscle of attention muscle of reflection

pyramidal du nez

muscle of aggression

muscle of pain

2.  Incompletely expressive muscles and muscles that are expressive in a complementary way m. zygomaticus major m. zygomaticus minor

g­ rand zygomatique petit zygomatique

m. levator labii superious

elévateur propre de la lèvre supérieur elévateur commun de l’aile du nez et de la lèvre supérieur transverse du nez

m. levator labii superious alaeque nasi transverse part of m. nasalis m. buccinator

buccinateur

muscle of joy muscle of moderate crying or weeping muscle of crying muscle of crying with hot tears muscle of lust muscle of irony.59

Faces: Between Trace and Image  63

FIGURE 10. ​The anatomy of facial muscles: the physiologic semiotic of emotions.

Image credit: Guillaume-­Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physiognomie humaine ou analyse électro-­physiologique de l’expression des passions (Paris: J. B. Ballière et fils, 1876), 2f.

In this way, the physiological indicator is tied to a m ­ ental significance in an unmediated correspondence in Duchenne’s tableau, while the description of the facial muscles is borrowed from the respective associated emotion, as in, for example, the “muscle of pain.” In this way, his tableau holds at the ready an almost ideal coding system in which expressive movements are represented outright and without digression into physiognomy. It follows that physiognomic markers can then function as unambiguous signs of the passions. ­Because Duchenne’s nomenclature is still widely used to describe the anatomy of facial musculature, modern science has inherited its model of repre­sen­ta­t ion, one in which the complex relation between traces, lines, signs, and images dis­appears—­and with it, the very operation of its encoding vanishes as well. It is a system in which facial musculature functions as a physiological sign-­bearer for emotions while both bridging and obscuring the unresolved questions at the threshold between bodily traces and the meaning of facial expressions: the meaning of individual emotions and, even further, the question concerning the role of facial expression in expressing emotions overall—in relation to gestures, language, tears, and other bodily manifestations. From an image-­theoretical perspective, this threshold is the relation between physical traces left by a “living” face and the iconic image of that face. From both a cultural-­and an art-­historical perspective, this question corresponds exactly to that constellation conceived in the topos of the “true image”—­one of the primal scenes of occidental iconography. 7 . T H E V E R A I CO N : T H E H O LY FAC E B E T W E E N T R AC E A N D L I K E N E S S

From an art-­historical perspective, the transition from bodily traces to an iconic image is negotiated in the motif of the vera icon, which is a stand-in for the prob­lems posed by the possibility for an image of Christ’s face [Antlitz]* as well as a true, au­then­tic image. This figure proxies for the fundamental structure of the image, as it reveals the structural capacity for conversion and exchange between heterogeneous ­orders of real­ity. This everlasting movement

* ​The German Antlitz is used only for extraordinary f­ aces, such as t­ hose of deities; the “holy face” is always entitled Antlitz.

Faces: Between Trace and Image  65

between “what is and what represents” characterizes, according to Didi-­ Huberman, the par­tic­u­lar dialectic of the image.60 Lit­er­a­ture, too, demonstrates a consciousness of the form of dialectic par­tic­u­lar to images, with Heinrich Heine’s “Florentine Nights” (1834) serving as a prime example. The narrator—­whose memories consist of a series of images of painted, in-­ motion, and remembered figures—­believes that he understands “the signatures of all phenomena” but is then confronted by expressive gestures of a beloved w ­ oman—­indeed, a “danced enigma.” When he relates this encounter to the ailing Maria, the addressee of his memories, she raises the question concerning the inscrutable body of that ­woman: “Was Ma­de­moi­selle Laurence a marble statue or a painting—­was she dead or a dream?” 61 While the narrator often regards the d ­ ying ­woman Maria alternating between waking and sleeping “like a picture,” she still ­faces metamorphosis into an image, a change other figures have already under­gone. In this way, her position is that of the dialectic of an image in lit­er­a­ture. As a connoisseur of the threshold [Schwellenkundige] similar to figures in Benjamin’s theory of modernity, she radicalizes the mystery of the enigmatic figure’s status to the question of her “doubtful flesh”—­a reverberation of the vera icon in modern lit­er­a­ture.62 The complicated transition between the physical remnants of Christ’s face in the Veil of Veronica and its pictorial portrayal in paintings of Christ, negotiated in the vera icon, is characteristic of the genesis of Christian iconography.63 According to Hans Belting, the first “true images” of Christ, passed down since the sixth c­ entury, maintain a doubled authenticity in that the “indexicality inherent in an imprint” is paired with the “similarity of an image.” For this reason, he describes ­t hese re/pre­sen­ta­tions as a “hybrid of image and index.” 64 The transition from “traces of Christ’s earthly existence,” 65 which are shown to the beholder as evidence for his physical presence (or, better stated, in the conversion of bodily, material remains), into the painted face of Christ marks the metamorphosis of an imprint into an image—in other words, the transformation of traces into the likeness of the person. With this transformation, the tradition of iconic imagery was founded, whose lineage fundamentally ­shaped the occidental concept of the image. Iconic images owe their existence to the pro­cess that superimposes them on traces that precede them. ­These traces first had to be transposed into a picture in the shape of the ­human body, and thus reshaped, before the 66  Faces: Between Trace and Image

so-­called true image, the vera icon, can emerge. The vera icon thus represents a kind of figuration central to the history of images, in which the iconic image is testified to by an indexical image, in that its traces—as testimony—­ authenticate the image. Yet the witnessing character of traces undergoes a reversal when the attempt is made to transform them into vis­i­ble evidence by a photographic documentation—as is the case of photo­graphs taken of the Shroud of Turin. In the negatives to ­t hese photo­graphs, traces turn into a picture of traces in order to capture the portrait of a superhuman figure (Figure 11). The ­whole case of the vera icon may at the same time be regarded as the perfect model of an indexical image (Chapter 3). Due to the nexus of transitions, the vera icon is the image-­historical primal scene of différance and stands at the center of a grammatological critique of images—­insofar as the imprint or the traces of residues left ­behind by the physical, mortal body precede the likeness and painting. In ­these images, the anterior traces are (re)transformed into resemblant images that imitate the h ­ uman visage, a pro­cess comparable to the very resurrection around which the iconography of Christian culture revolves (along with the scene of incarnation) (Chapter 7.3). The motif of the Veil of Veronica (Figure 12)

FIGURE 11. ​The transformation of traces into a likeness by photographic negative. Left, positive; right, negative. The Shroud of Turin, Cathedral of Turin. Image credit: Dianelos Georgoudis, Wikimedia Commons, uploaded May 31, 2014, https://­upload​ .­w ikimedia​.­org ​/­i kipedia​/­commons​/­2​/­23​/­Turin ​_ ­shroud ​_­positive ​_ ­a nd ​_ ­negative ​_ ­d isplaying​ _­original ​_­color​_ ­i nformation ​_ ­708​_ ­x ​_­465​_­pixels ​_ ­94​_ ­K B​.­jpg.

Faces: Between Trace and Image  67

FIGURE 12. ​Vera icon: imaging the likeness through the pre­sen­ta­tion of testimonial remains within the painting. Master of Saint Veronica, Saint Veronica with the Shroud of Christ (about 1420, Alte Pinakothek, Munich). Image credit: Reinhold

Baumstark, ed., Die Alte Pinakothek München (Munich: Beck, 2002), 17.

refers to that which precedes the likeness and, in this way, pre­sents the genesis of the iconic image while at the same time reflecting upon the pro­ cess of imaging [Bildgebung]. In the following iconographic proliferation of the motif, this precondition dis­appears from the image; it literally falls out of the picture frame in order to bring forth the visage [Antlitz] of Christ as a portrait (Figure 13), which subsequently became the model for the portrait of man. The latter is most evident in Dürer’s famous Self-­Portrait with Fur-­Trimmed Robe (Selbstbildnis im Pelzrock, 1500), which looks like a twin of the holy face. According to Didi-­Huberman, the motif of the Veil of Veronica forms a kind of art-­historical remembrance of the image’s genesis in an imprint whose “explicit tendency is doubtless the formation of an ‘ideal’ portrait-­ type of Jesus Christ, which perhaps culminates in Jan van Eyck’s Holy Face. Just as the vocabulary of the impression [vestigium] survived the establishing of the Veil of Veronica as the portrait [imago], so paint­ers have not completely forgotten the pro­cess of engendering this image: they have sometimes tried to integrate it into their repre­sen­ta­t ions of the Holy Face.” 66 In image-­theoretical terms, the transition from imprint to portrait involves a conversion—­t hat is, an exchange and alternation between heterogeneous ­orders that establish a real­ity proper to the image.67 In it, the vestigium serves as the memory trace of the genesis of the image. This constellation underlies the images of the face as well, in both physiognomic and mimic registers: it is the transformation of bodily traces into a (de)codable iconography of facial expression. The history of physiological science, in aiming to decrypt ­human expression, exhibits a movement in the opposite direction as the genesis of the art-­historical image. It undertakes, as is outlined above, a shift from portrait to the muscular and ner­ vous activities, from static to transitory lines, from signs to mea­sured physiological traces. What all concepts have in common, however, is that they seek to describe the features and movements of the ­human face as a system of conventionalized and thus decodable signs that can be correlated to the traditional cata­log of affects; in some theories they are also understood as characteristic features.

Faces: Between Trace and Image  69

FIGURE 13. ​Christ’s visage [Antlitz] as portrait and model of the portrait of man. Jan van Eyck, Vera Icon (1438), copy. Image credit: “Seguidores de Van Eyck (vera icon),”

Dexedrina (blog), March 21, 2017, http://­dexedrina​.­blogspot​.­com​/­2017​/­03​/­seguidores​-­de​-­van​-­eyck​ -­vera​-­icon​.­html.

8 . E N FAC E : ­H U M A N ­FAC E S A N D U N H U M A N

The difficulty posed by the idea of a “true image” for art history is thus able to illuminate the epistemological prob­lems lying at the base of any scientific decoding of “true” emotions, and the difficulties inherent to representing the emotional code can also be traced back to the pictorial history of ­faces. In FACS’s iconography, a form of facial repre­sen­ta­tion stretching back to antiquity is revived, one that is tied to very specific meanings. In that in the FACS manual, the significant features of the face are inscribed in the en-­face outline of an isolated head detached from a body, its schema recalls the rich tradition of the mask.68 Specifically, the graphical schemata consisting of dif­fer­ent patterns of the “facial units” are comparable to character masks that have been handed down from the theater of antiquity, which constituted a system of expressive face-­t ypes representing vari­ous characters. Ancient theater masks had no individual traits but represented “ge­ne­ tic types”—­i.e., types characterized by specific physical features.69 The conception of the persona in antiquity, in which the mask and the person ­were indistinct, is manifest in the image of a face disconnected from a body: without neck or chest. F ­ aces ­were only l­ater augmented by ­t hese body parts when the portrait was elevated to the role of the quin­tes­sen­tial embodiment of the h ­ uman face. Before the era of early modern portraiture, the two-­dimensional repre­sen­ta­tion of a h ­ uman visage en face was somewhat unusual. Prefigured by the distorted ­faces of Dionysius and Gorgon, the frontal view in antiquity is mostly encountered—in addition to the mask—­w ith re­spect to the dead, and in this context mostly in likenesses on stelae. On Greek painted vases, the figures are mostly seen in profile, while the ­dying warrior who has just left the world, in contrast, is shown from the front—­just as the “intermediary creatures” (such as Gorgons, the muse Calliope, and Dionysius) appear in “frontality of the ­dying.”70 The history of the form’s influence, which links a frontal schema to the features of the ­human facial expressions, culminates in the facial code for emotions, although this lineage did not proceed in a straight line. In his studies on classical masks’ afterlife, Moshe Barasch traces the transformation of the mask into the image of a face along several lines. In the Re­nais­sance he (re)discovers vari­ous characteristics of tragic masks—­t he drawn-­together eyebrows, open mouth, and a full, curly head of hair—in several images: in the f­aces of the mourning Mary and of John in Andrea Faces: Between Trace and Image  71

Mantegna’s engraving The Entombment of Christ (ca. 1460),71 in Mary’s face in Masaccio’s Florentine fresco Expulsion of Adam and Eve (1427), in Mantegna’s depiction of Saint Sebastian (Louvre and Vienna), in the figure of Judith in Mantegna’s drawing Judith with the Head of Holofernes (Uffizi), and in the horrified ­women’s ­faces on a tapestry with the motif of the infanticide from the Raphael school in the Vatican museum.72 In contrast to antiquity, where the tragic mask can be found in a wide variety of postures, Re­nais­sance paintings usually depict the respective expressive gesture in profile or with the head facing inclined downward or upward—as shown, for example, by Eve in Masaccio’s Expulsion. Both of t­ hese head and face positions may be regarded as transitional images from character masks to ­human portraits, from which the posture critical to the image-­t ype of the portrait arose since portraiture in painting pre­sents the face mostly in a three-­quarter view, which was to become, according to Gottfried Boehm, the pictorial formula for the autonomous portrait.73 This early modern portrait, which for the first time claims to pursue a faithful likeness of an individual’s distinctiveness, has since become the ideal practice for the re/pre­sen­ta­tion of ­faces within Eu­rope’s cultural history. It ­couples similarity and individuality with the reciprocity of the gaze: “The person in the autonomous portrait, who looks out of the portrait into an ‘immanent’ world of individuals who are capable of images—­a lthough not always worthy of being portrayed—­demands for its realization a fellow h ­ uman being, the in­de­pen­dent observer, to whom he turns.”74 Yet this ­human likeness is not only an ideal, it is also the special case or exception among the innumerable ­faces presenting themselves as image. While the iconography of the three-­quarter view can be considered a genuine re/pre­sen­ta­tion of a ­human countenance, throughout the history of science, by contrast, one mainly encounters en-­face images—­above all outlines, schemata, masks—­and profiles. If the frontal part of the ­human head only becomes a face [Angesicht]* in the vis-­à-­v is, then images of the face in the scientific register are deprived of exactly this ­human trait.75 The en-­face image thus appears as an image formula for the super­human as well as the un­human face. This ambivalence is reflected in Benjamin’s description of Klee’s Angelus

* ​The German language distinguishes between Gesicht and Angesicht, the latter having a stronger connotation of humanity and demanding a constellation of mutuality.

72  Faces: Between Trace and Image

Novus: “His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look.”76 Thus introduced as unhuman, the Angel of History takes a position opposed to and incompatible with our own.77 In the sciences, however, the frontal view of the face is the most commonly used as schema when presenting the ­human face as the object of interpretation, coding, or investigation: in patterns of facial expressions that emerge from the study of physiognomy, Bertillon’s anthropometric photo arrays of mug shots, and FACS. Sometimes t­hese schemata are supported by images in profile—­such as in Bertillon’s system, in Lavater’s silhouettes, and the profile heads of racial anthropology. It would thus seem to be no coincidence that one of the first crime scenes in art history shows the perpetrator in a frontal view (Figure 14). This format establishes a continuum within the historical photo archive of criminology right up to the biometric passport photos. It is only logical that the guidelines for an acceptable headshot for an e-­Passport include precise instructions with both mea­sure­ments and lines for positioning one’s head in order to produce the correct frontal view of the face.78 In mediaeval art, however, the en-­face portrait, or “frontal icon,” was initially reserved for Christian cult imagery—­particularly for the face of Christ (mostly as an isolated face without a body)—­and was, at most, sometimes used for images of Mary and the saints as well.79 It is particularly remarkable that in ­these pictures the face is usually presented without any sign of emotional expression, with an undirected gaze, and without looking at the viewer. This mode of re/pre­sen­ta­tion has remained surprisingly stable “over several periods and styles (from Byzantine and Romanesque to Northern and Italian Re­nais­sance),” even as the understanding of facial expressions had other­w ise changed radically in the meantime.80 But if the isolated-­face icon emerged as the image of absent emotion, it becomes all the more remarkable that this schema became the surface onto which the mimic systems of signs w ­ ere inscribed. The isolated frontal view of both the entranced divine face and the unhuman face likewise devoid of all signs of ­human emotion thus provides the template and writing surface on which to inscribe the doctrines of the h ­ uman facial expression of emotion. In the course of the scientification of the paradigm, it has—as it has itself turned into an abstract schema—­become the icon for the science of facial decoding and encoding. The history of this science reads like a perpetual proj­ect of writing over the surface of the en-­face countenance with vari­ous systems of writing and signs.81 Its outlines represent a view of the exterior, from Faces: Between Trace and Image  73

FIGURE 14. ​En face: the face of the unhuman. Anonymous, The Child Murderer Hans von Berstatt (1540), Schloßmuseum Gotha. Image credit: Sabine Haag et al., eds., Dürer, Cranach, Holbein: Die Entdeckung des Menschen. Das deutsche Portrait um 1500 (Katalog des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien und der Kunsthalle der Hypo-­Kulturstiftung München, 2011), 233

which the interior is supposed to be legible. It seems that the absence of traces of affect is precisely what makes this image format particularly suitable as a matrix for any kind of semantization or coding. 9 . E N FAC E : T H E FAC E A S W R I T I N G S U R FAC E F O R P H YS I O G N O M Y

Scientific repre­sen­ta­tions of f­ aces, accompanied by claims of empiric methods and the use of mea­sur­ing techniques and diagrams, almost by nature tend to rec­ord their interpretative systems in the frontal or profile view ­because in this format the face can best be disassembled into individual components and categorized. The form of the mask or frontal view seems particularly suited for superimposing diagrams on top of an outline s­ haped like the h ­ uman head, 82 while the profile can apparently be easily mea­sured. Meeting in Frankfurt in 1884, the World Congress of Anthropologists agreed upon an anthropomorphic procedure for head and facial mea­sure­ment; the so-­called Frankfurt plane or auriculo-­orbital plane is produced by laying a horizontal virtual line over the profile between the left eye socket and the porion (the upper margin of the ear canal). By contrast, FACS’s atlas of images, which proj­ects a semantics of emotion onto the surface of the h ­ uman face as a system of signs, always uses the en-­face schema as its base. The literally delineated face is an object of observation, mea­sure­ment, decryption, and criminal investigation, one for which a reciprocity of the gaze is not envisaged. The production of such a writing surface is carried out with clarity in Piderit’s Mimic and Physiognomy. In order to produce “­simple schematic drawings” that are “very artificial,” he first precisely copied the template of the same physiognomy e­ ither in profile or en face and then incorporated the mimic expression “with few characteristic lines.” In this way, he had “sought to give the drawings the firmness and distinctness of geometric figures as much as pos­si­ble.” For this, he copied the originals or photo­graphs “with meticulous care” so that the characteristic lines w ­ ere copied; the shadows and shadings, however, ­were omitted. Through this pro­cess, the contour drawings “gained sharpness or clarity without losing fidelity.”83 How, however, did the face become a schema composed of a field of lines? An early example of this can be found in the lines projected on the forehead, which the doctor and mathematician Girolamo Cardano in his work Metoposcopia (1658, posthumous) interpreted as indicators of a person’s disposition Faces: Between Trace and Image  75

with reference to the planets. In his description of the lines and features of the face, it becomes apparent that physiognomy arises out of the semiotization of the corporeal features and shape of the face.84 When facial features are considered a type or a sign, physiognomy is born from the character (from the Greek Χαρακτήρ, charakter, “engraved stamp”) in the double sense of the word: as a written character and the character of a person (Figure 15)—­physiognomy as

FIGURE 15. ​The face’s lines as signs of the character. Gerolamo Cardano, Metoposcopia (1558, print Paris 1658). Image credit: Jean Clair et al., Wunderblock: Eine Geschichte der modernen Seele (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1989), 160.

76  Faces: Between Trace and Image

the literal imprint of the person’s character into the physical features. As a consequence of this idea, the face became a “cabbalistic focus” for anthropology. Already by 1586, a systematic re/pre­sen­ta­tion of physiognomic knowledge had appeared in the form of the multivolume work by the physician Giambattista della Porta, and the main part of his De humana physiognomia (On ­Human Physiognomy) is taken up with a consideration of the face. The most influential and consequential atlas of images showing facial expressive gestures, however, comes from Charles Le Brun, Chancellor of the Royal Acad­emy of Arts in Paris. His 1668 lecture to the acad­emy, Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière des passions (Lecture on the general and par­tic­u­lar expression of the passions), relied on facial expressive gestures in painting, while his remarks on emotions ­were considerably dependent (though this remains unsaid) on the version of a cata­log of affects found in Descartes’s Passions of the Soul (Passions de l’âme, 1649).85 Le Brun’s concept of expression is based on a natu­ral similarity to that which it represents: “Expression, in my opinion, is a naïve natu­ral resemblance to the t­ hings one wishes to represent: From all components of the painting it is necessary; a picture could not be perfect without expression.”86 This statement is followed by a short designation of six basic passions, which are largely based on Descartes’s cata­log: wonder/amazement [l’admiration/surprise], love [l’amour], hate [la haine], desire [le desire], joy [la joie], and sadness [la tristesse]. This list is then complemented by a series of “mixed emotions” before his real concern becomes apparent: the description of the vis­i­ble facial movements that are significant of each of t­ hese emotions. Already this text describes the very interplay between the brain and face that still determines ­today’s model: “If it is true that ­t here is one interior part where the soul exercises its functions most immediately, and that this part is the brain, then we may also say that the face is the part where it makes its feelings most apparent.”87 The fact that he considers the eyebrows to be the primary and determining part is clearly motivated by the fact that the eyebrows are located closest to the brain. The subsequent descriptions of the movements for each individual passion are so knotty that it is often difficult to form an idea of the respective facial features’ movements. In this light, it is not surprising that Le Brun found it necessary to supplement, if not replace, his descriptions with drawings. Yet in this case, while the image is used as a solution to escape the prob­lems inherent to description, this attempted rescue by means of images h ­ ere turns Faces: Between Trace and Image  77

into its opposite, b ­ ecause Le Brun’s schematic drawings of facial expressions consistently look like grotesque masks that lack any resemblance to the ­human face. Only with the aid of the images’ captions can they be assigned to the represented passions. The facial outline schema into which the patterns of lines that indicate muscle movements are inscribed appears as a literal character mask, and this tends to veer into a grimace. Absent a title, all of the images from the physiognomic register often seem to function as caricatures, which is just as true for Le Brun’s portraits of facial expressions (Figure 16). The ­faces in his drawings, distorted beyond recognition, ­were widely disseminated in engravings by Jean Audran and are easily confused with the kind of caricatures that w ­ ere becoming increasingly popu­lar at the time (Chapter 5.7). The long-­enduring “pre-­eminence of the figure over the face” in the perception and valuation of another person, which Davide Stimilli describes

FIGURE 16. ​Character masks: the disfigured countenance of passions. Charles Le Brun’s drawing of “tranquility” and “violent movement” from his Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulaire des passions (1668). Image credit: Jean Clair et al.,

Wunderblock: Eine Geschichte der modernen Seele (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1989), 164.

78  Faces: Between Trace and Image

as a “legacy of Greek humanism,”88 terminated at the latest in the Re­ nais­sance when the likeness of an individual face became the “true portrait” of men.89 ­A fter the expressivity of the individual ­human face had attracted the paint­ers, science also discovered the face as an object of investigation. Yet it first became an object of veritable characterology only when the sign system of facial expression in the age of emotions was underlaid by a system of moral values—­w ith the intention, according to Johann Heinrich Praetorius in his 1715 Physiognomik (Physiognomy), of perceiving “from the countenance / gestures and stature / someone’s affection for good and evil.”90 Fi­nally, with Johann Caspar Lavater’s Physiognomic Fragments (1775), the interpretation of facial forms and features became the proj­ect to determine a “foundation of all h ­ uman knowledge”—­that is, the ability to infer interior qualities of a person from their external features, “to perceive by means of some natu­ral expression that which does not appear directly to the senses”91 (Figure 17). Lavater, who proceeds from the assumption that the organ­i zation of the ­human body distinguishes the ­human among “all earthly creatures,” defines physiognomy as the surface and outline of this organ­i zation.92 Thus, the division of the face into three parts (as par­a meters for interpretation), which has since become convention, is derived from the concept of the threefold nature of the h ­ uman, which he distinguishes with three types of life: “the animal, the intellectual, and the moral.” In this way, the chain of beings is reflected in a three-­tiered concept of the life of the ­human, whose hierarchy again appears mapped on its face in its three parts: the forehead and eyebrows are regarded as a mirror of the intellect, nose and cheeks as a reflection of moral and sentimental life, and mouth and chin as mirroring the animal life in the ­human.93 Lavater’s physiognomy uses this schema primarily for the interpretation of the face’s fixed contour, though the same trisection also appears in most codes of facial expression. Hegel, too, in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (1835–1838), follows such a system. In his discussion of “the Greek Profile” (in the section on sculpture), he mixes the princi­ple of beauty with a natural-­historical consideration of the face. The latter is divided according to a practical relation—­t his is the same for ­humans and animals—­a nd a theoretical or ideal relation. For him, too, the upper part of the “­human countenance” Faces: Between Trace and Image  79

FIGURE 17. ​The outline of a physiognomic profile: mea­sur­i ng the character. Drawing from Johann Caspar Lavater’s Physiognomic Fragments (1775). Image credit:

Jean Clair et al., Wunderblock: Eine Geschichte der modernen Seele (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1989), 166.

embodies the “spiritual character” and the lower part the practical, while the ­m iddle part, the nose, stands “in the m ­ iddle between practical and theoretical be­hav­ior t­ owards the outside world.”94 In most cases, the sign systems used for the interpretation of individual facial features and movements are underlain by an anthropological model that shines through the codes of facial expressions and ties them to the history of the species. 80  Faces: Between Trace and Image

10 . T H E D I F F É R A N C E O F FAC I A L I M AG E S I N CO N­T E M P O R A R Y A R T

The scientific and cultural history of facial re/pre­sen­ta­tions that has been sketched h ­ ere provides a backdrop for the questions as to how con­temporary art treats ­t hese depictions and in which ways art’s ­handling of the ­human face differs from ­t hose of scientific research. This question arises from the fact that artistic works of/with the face likewise operate at the threshold where physical or bodily traces become images. Indeed, also beyond the conventional iconography of the autonomous portraits, many artistic works refer to the conventions of this prominent image formula. Jochen Gerz’s 2001 film Die kleine Zeit: Ein Beitrag zur viele Jahre dauernden Diskussion um das Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (The ­little time: Contribution to the years-­long discussion on the memorial to the murdered Jews of Eu­rope), for example, is composed of the portraits of more or less famous personalities, yet he pre­sents ­t hese ­faces in a peculiar way: they are mute, but in their silence, they are nevertheless the most telling facial features (Figure  18). He only shows ­those moments that precede the

FIGURE 18. ​Traces of hesitation preceding the speech. Stills from Jochen Gerz’s film Die kleine Zeit: Ein Beitrag zur viele Jahre dauernden Diskussion um das Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (2000). Image credit: Kurt Wettengel, ed., Das

Gedächtnis der Kunst: Geschichte der Erinnerung in der Kunst der Gegenwart, exhibition cata­log (Frankfurt, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2000), 122f.

Faces: Between Trace and Image  81

respondents’ answers to questions he posed to them—­t hat is, the brief moment before speech, before feelings and contemplation form into distinct expressions. The silence and facial expressions thus capture precisely ­t hose imperceptible or barely noticeable impulses that precede expressive gestures. In contrast to EMG recordings of involuntary movements in facial musculature, this is not an attempt to come to terms with “true” utterances. It is rather a constitutive dialogical situation manifesting itself in uncertainty and reflection. The film cuts out and blows up, as it ­were, the silence from the flow of the debate; in this way, Gerz interrupts the medial circulation of public statements, highlighting precisely ­those moments of hesitation that dis­ appear b ­ ehind formulaic language used in communication. The goal, therefore, is to focus attention on the traces of affect preceding the language of discourse, to concentrate on the traces of hesitation and indeterminacy that precede and facilitate the distinct meanings of evocative expressive gestures.

FIGURE 19. ​Corporeal memory traces beyond language. Oliviero Toscani, photo­graphs of survivors in the exhibition I bambini ricordano, Museo Storico della Resistenza, Sant’ Anna di Stazzema (2003). Image credit: Oliviero Toscani, Sant’ Anna die Stazzema 12 Agosto 1944. I bambini ricordano, (Milan: Feltrinelli 2003), 22, 105.

82  Faces: Between Trace and Image

While the matrix of empirical emotion research FACS, with its six “basic emotions,” captures only a few extremely schematized mimic poses—­ which is the reason this system can also serve as a model for graphically abstract emoticons—­t he archive of art history has a far more complex and nuanced repertoire of possibilities for the re/pre­sen­ta­tion of individual expression and specific frames of mind. Still, even the latter does not come close to the a­ ctual variety and richness of in vivo traces buried in h ­ uman ­faces. Th ­ ese traces of life and memory speak an entirely dif­fer­ent language, neither the language of muscle movements that induce expressive gestures nor that of the moment of hesitation that participates in and accompanies the formation of discourse. Traces that have never been expressed in language and ­will never enter communication speak a completely dif­fer­ent language. Such memory traces—­t he other of language—­are, for example, vis­i­ble in the features of ­t hose survivors whose photo­graphs Oliviero Toscani exhibited ­u nder the title I bambini ricordano (­Children remember, Figure 19) in Sant’Anna di Stazzema, a place in the Apuan Alps not far from Tuscan Mediterranean coast in the province of Lucca. The exhibition consisted of photo portraits of the few survivors of a massacre committed by the Waffen-­SS on August 12, 1944, in that village, whose population was almost completely wiped out. In the f­aces of the then two-­to-­eighteen-­year-­olds, in the folds and furrows of their facial features, traces of the horror are inscribed: memory traces that lie beyond traditional cata­logs of affect or facial expressions and any physiognomic sign system. This extreme example of the portraits of survivors may indicate how much more complex the meaning of facial features is than that which could be captured and decoded by any sign systems or technology, however advanced and precise.

Faces: Between Trace and Image  83

3 INDEXICAL IMAGES: TRACE, RESEMBL ANCE, AND CODE

One is nowhere more disconnected from the trace of life than ­t here, where one seeks to imitate this trace. It was as if I w ­ ere trying to use my hand to make a footprint in the sand. —­wolfgang hildesheimer, tynset The issue of traces lies at the heart of the idea of indexical images—­images that have a material or physical connection to that which they depict. The foundation for this concept was laid by Charles S. Peirce’s notion of the index, “which show(s) something about t­hings, on account of their being physically connected with them.”1 Despite its origin in semiotics, however, the index transcends a theory of signs, at least ­t hose signs that are understood as being arbitrary or conventional. The physical connection between the re/pre­sen­ta­tion and that which it re/presents is particularly relevant to a theory of images. Indexical images are anchored in some concrete, namable relationship to an object, t­ hing, or figure, even if it is “just” the shadow of a physical living body produced by light rays. Indexical images are based on preceding traces as well as ­t hose left ­behind. Depending on the kind of physical connection, dif­fer­ent phenomena can be distinguished in terms of image theory: from imprints to masks, contact relics, fingerprints, shadows, footprints, material remains, symptoms, folds, photograms, and expressive gestures, and even to the most diverse indicators, markings, and visualizations in laboratory research. For image forms circulating among cult, art, and science, this diversity is particularly charged.

The image-­t heoretical application of Peirce’s concept of the index is hindered, however, by its origin in semiotics.2 ­Because of this basis, the concept has been made a part of art history’s criticism of the linguistic turn, in the wake of which the specificity and uniqueness of images falls out of the analy­sis. Yet this prob­lem depends on which understanding of semiotics or semiology is operative: e­ ither the doctrine of σημεῖον (sēmeĩon, signs) from ancient medicine, which deciphered the symptoms and indications of diseases and which has developed into the art of reading all conceivable meaning-­generating phenomena, be they physical, acoustic, written, gestural, or visual;3 or the concept of a two-­sided, arbitrarily defined sign offered by modern linguistics—­t hat is, a coupling of signifier and signified based in convention. The latter is an analogue to programs of codified pictorial language found in the traditional archives of visual images, such as classical iconography and the cata­logs of allegorical images. In terms of modern language theory, only one of the three concepts in Peirce’s semiotics (icon, index, symbol) would be regarded as a sign. 1. P E I R C E ’S S E M I OT I C S : I N I M AG E -­T H E O R E T I C A L T E R M S

Only Peirce’s symbols, “which become associated with their meanings by usage,” are signs in the narrow sense—­t hat is to say, a sign qua convention.4 The other two concepts, icon and index, are much more complex and more suitable to image-­t heoretical concerns, if not indispensable. He describes the icon, which he also calls a likeness, as the mediation of the “idea” of a ­t hing through imitation: “icons, which serve to convey ideas of the ­t hings they represent simply by imitating them.”5 His definition h ­ ere is first and foremost of interest to the study of visual images, inasmuch as it concerns resemblant images, pictorial replica, or pictures of something, though it can also be extended to ­mental and linguistic images. Peirce himself expands the concept to such an extent that he conceives of every­t hing as an icon as far as “it is like that ­t hing and used as a sign of it.” 6 He introduces, for example, from the viewpoint of imitation, a type of rudimentary language that precedes the Babylonian plurality of languages and therefore seems universally intelligible—­understanding “by imitative sounds, by imitative gestures, and by pictures.”7 This perspective distinguishes his icon from the traditional, art historical understanding of the iconic, for which the shift in grammatical gender is symptomatic: from the ikon (the portrait of Saints)—­feminine (as Indexical Images  85

in the vera icon) and derived from the Greek eikon—to the neutral icon in En­glish. The iconic image’s entry into semiotics involves a certain neutralization of the image. The most in­ter­est­ing and consequential ele­ment, however, is Peirce’s index, which he defines by its capacity to indicate and, as already discussed, by its physical connection to an object, of which it shows an aspect. The latter does not actually require a direct physical connection or direct contact but rather requires a connection through a sign whose reference to the signified object is based on being “­really affected” by it.8 This affectation can take very dif­fer­ent forms: natu­ral (pulse), causal (thermometer), involuntary (symptom), but also unintentional (body language) or crafted (street signs). Yet t­ hese last two are called “degenerated indices” and then distinguished from the other, genuine ones by Peirce. To accurately differentiate among distinct types of indexicality, however, it is also necessary to go beyond Peirce’s system and to distinguish between indices [Indizien], indicators, and an index. While indices are e­ ither signs unintentionally left ­behind or hints that ­w ill ­later be interpreted by ­others’ evidential proof (in court, for example), indicators are indirect signs whose diagnostic value is part of a certain interpretative system yet remains open to dispute (for example, in experimental research). An index, however, is understood as a secondary system of orientation with which texts, numbers, and maps become accessible or legible, such as a register. Carlo Ginzburg’s “paradigma indiziario” (1980) also discusses diverse types of signs or indicators and evidence (Chapter 1.1).9 While both animal tracks (which are natu­ral imprints) and clues of a crime obtained through criminalistics actually belong to the register of indices, the physical characteristics of a painting, which scholars like Giovanni Morelli use to identify the artist of a work, are indicators. Psychoanalytic symptoms, however, are also involuntarily produced indicators and also only retrospectively deciphered. Yet deciphering symptoms involves much more complex questions, ­because the fact that they are generated by the psychic apparatus introduces conversions between psychical and physical phenomena—­similar to the interactions discussed in the last chapter through the example of the face. In Peirce’s theory, an unmotivated index is the extreme antipode to the symbol. What is of par­tic­u ­lar interest for image-­t heoretical considerations is the relation between indexicality and iconicity, as well as the relationship between indexicality and visuality. My reference to Peirce’s concept of the 86  Indexical Images

index, however, does by no means aim to classify images. Even for Peirce it was clear that symbol, icon, and index are rarely encountered in their pure form—an index least of all. Their properties rather mix and overlap when manifest in concrete phenomena. In the context of indexical images, Peirce’s distinctions are only relevant in light of the question of how the relationship between differing types of indexicality are fashioned into ­either resemblance or convention (or coding) in specific images. 2 . R E S E M B L A N C E T H R O U G H CO N TAC T O R TO U C H

For a long time, natu­ral history considered the Typographia naturalis or physiotype the ideal repre­sen­ta­tion: the impression of the leaf as an unmediated image of itself.10 To produce ­these images, objects (mostly dried herbs and plants) are pressed onto paper with the aid of the application of soot, oil, or paint in order to obtain a “true to nature” image of their form and structure. This kind of natu­ral self-­printing finds its limits, however, in the corporality or three-­dimensionality of most objects, which eludes the technique of pressing. In order to achieve resemblance by means of direct physical contact, other techniques ­were developed for the production of “true to nature” images of plastic or anthropomorphic objects: a natu­ral imprint or cast instead of a nature’s self-­print. This includes not only all variants of (negative) imprints [empreinte] already found in cave paintings but also, and in par­tic­u­lar, the sculptural image forms produced by (positive) imprints, or casts, or coatings of physical objects that resemble the body, for which the casts or coatings of the deceased’s skull in prehistorical funerary cults serve as the prime example.11 In as far as the imprint can serve as the paradigm for an archaeology of resemblance, the changing techniques for taking impressions also lead to dif­fer­ent va­ri­e­ties of resemblance. In the imprint, the image emerges directly (even if with the help of vari­ous techniques) from traces of the material; imaging is ­here essentially shaping. To the degree that this is due to a technical procedure, Georges Didi-­Huberman speaks of a technical unconscious, analogous to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “optical unconscious” of the camera, and describes it as the nonwork par excellence.12 Reverse to the imprint, another kind of physical-­morphological resemblance occurs when the cover or repository of a natu­ral object conforms to the shape of its content, as the “bodily images” found in molded reliquary covers are said to do.13 Indexical Images  87

FIGURE 20. ​Molded cast as an-­iconic resemblance by contact. Jericho Skull (seventh millennium BC). Image credit: http://­w ww​.­pictokon​.­net​/­bilder​/­2008​-­11​-­bilder​-­fotos​

/­vorgeschichte​-­ bilder-­jericho-­mit-­gipsmasse-­ueberzogener-­schaedel​-­schaedelkult-­a hnenkult-2. jpg (accessed May 15, 2014).

The famous Jericho Skull (seventh millennium BC) is one of the oldest exemplars from the early history of imaging practices in the veneration of the dead (Figure 20).14 The skull, separated from the buried body and cleaned of decayed flesh, was recast with a layer of limestone or clay and painted so that “the skull of the dead serves as a literal matrix for a moulding that resembles a ‘portrait’ of the deceased,”15 leading Didi-­Huberman to speak of “ressemblances par contact.”16 Such sculptures, based on bodily remains, could be understood in terms of the paradoxical concept of a natu­ral artifact. The Imagines maiorum in Roman ancestor worship stand in the lineage of this type of touch or contact resemblance, although they differ significantly from the prehistorical skulls b ­ ecause they do not use remains of the dead but rather take the place of the dead. ­These masks ­were casts of heads made of wax or other material “with astonishing fidelity,” as the Greek 88  Indexical Images

traveler to Rome Polybios reported in his Historiae (second ­century BC). Preserved in the atria of noble h ­ ouses in the Roman republic, t­ hese masks then worn by actors at the pompa funebris became the main players in Roman burial rituals.17 Julius von Schlosser, in his history of wax portraits, uncovered a par­t ic­u ­lar “magic of the portrait” in the “closest pos­si­ble resemblance to life” of ­t hese heads.18 In addition, G. E. Lessing had already emphasized the moment of resemblance in his text “On the Ancestral Portraits of the Ancient Romans” (1769),19 which, according to Wolfgang Brückner, has “guided us on the right track to the reconstruction of Roman wax portraits of which we have no example.”20 As ideal examples of indexical images, t­ hese body-­resembling masks refer to the image-­function of effigies as well, due to their function of serving memoria and making the dead pre­s­ ent by representing them at the funerary ritual (Chapter 4.2). In the transition from death cult to art, the improntare di naturale (imprint of nature) becomes the likeness of a person, a portrait.21 Sculptural busts in the Re­nais­sance, which ­were modeled on a death mask or on a life mask—­t hat is, based on an “imprint of the ­human face”—­increasingly acquired individual facial features.22 ­These Re­nais­sance busts have stood for the idea of likeness in portrait in art ever since. Although ­t hese busts differ significantly from their prehistorical pre­de­ces­sors, the Jericho skulls, both instances of indexical images serve the aim of visually surviving the life of the person. The historical development of this method of re/presenting a person’s face or head is characterized by an alternation of dominance within the interplay of its two components—­between contact (to the object) and resemblance—­for which the Re­nais­sance busts embody a clear turning point. The tendency t­ oward resemblance coincides with the transition from death to life—­t hat is, from an imprint of the skull to an imprint of the living face—­which occurs si­mul­ta­neously with the shift from sculptural to two-­dimensional images. The autonomous portrait marks the triumph of the resemblant image, a likeness that no longer requires corporeal contact with its model. A similar transition takes place regarding the treatment of the deceased’s body during funeral rituals in modern Eu­rope. Katharina Sykora’s brilliant book on the related affinity between death and photography, Die Tode der Fotografie (The deaths of photography, 2009), includes a detailed description of the way in which the body of the deceased is transformed into an image during a span of time between the moment of death and burial: from death, which leaves the corpse “nothing other than the Indexical Images  89

trace of itself” via the production of a “beautiful, prepared dead body as an effigy of the formerly living person,” which initiates a transformation into an iconic image that is completed by means of the postmortem photo­graph.23 Masks are also boundary cases of indexical images, though in another re­spect—­namely, that of the surface’s features. Their multitudinous versions and diverse cultural manifestations range from death masks to theatrical masks. The facial features of many masks, above all theatrical masks, are not modeled on a physical body but rather imitate (in the case of Eu­ro­pean theater) typical facial expressions with which imitation takes the role of indexicality. This is exactly the case with the Facial Action Coding System discussed in the previous chapter. In the context of byzantine image theology, by contrast, the idea of direct contact—­not so much physical as super­ natural—is linked to typos. According to Bissera V. Pentcheva, “Painting (graphe) is best understood as imprint (typos and sphragis).” The image in this context is not the imitation of form but rather “the imprint of form.” Byzantine mimesis is understood as a simulation of a presence, brought about by the interplay between an “imprinted form (typos)” and the changing environment.24 This kind of imprint has a completely dif­fer­ent nature. A literally metaphysical (being more than physical) connection to that which is represented underlies it. It points to the idea of “real presence” of the image, as is claimed for cult images and which transgresses all semiotic concepts (Chapter 6.3). 3. SHADOW RESEMBLANCE

The founding myth of painting passed down from Pliny the Elder tells of an indexical resemblance that is not produced by an imprint or contact but nevertheless comes into being in a quasi-­natural way—­t hrough light. As shown ­earlier (Chapter 1.4), that part of the legend that has become canonical concerns how the image is produced from a shadow. The emblematic status this scene holds in art history and painting is likely explained not only by the founding myth’s popularity but also by the magic of the shadow image.25 The shadow in general maintains a special relationship to the image. According to Hans Belting in his remarks on image theory in Dante’s Divine Comedy, “the arcane analogy between shadow and image lies in their common mimesis of our bodies that is yet so dif­fer­ent.” He interprets Dante’s (fictive) shadow painting as an effort to oppose “the image of the face to the 90  Indexical Images

facelessness of death.”26 And, in this way, the silhouettes—or, rather, shadow bodies—­t hat populate Dante’s underworld actually represent foreign bodies within the Christian conception of the text ­because the shadow as the double of the dead stems from ancient sources. Due to the separation of the body and the soul [psyche], the souls of the dead wandering in Hades as shadows are thus indeed bodiless, though they resemble bodies—­t hey are regarded as shadowy likenesses. The ancient shadows can thus also be conceived of as a kind of bodiless effigy (Chapter 4). Sometimes referred to as eidolon, this bodiless image serves as an example of the ancient concept of the phantasm [Trugbild], understood as a “false” image—in accord with the aforementioned hierarchy of modes of cognition in Plato’s analogy of the divided line (Chapter 1.3). The souls of the departed, whom Odysseus encountered in Hades, are, for example, described as both psychē and eidolon.27 In contrast, generating a likeness from the silhouette of another (or, ­really, of a beloved) can be interpreted as the victory of a more friendly-­to-­life way of living on of t­ hose who are absent or have left us. Even more stark is the contrast between the foundation myth of painting and the negative connotation attached to the silhouette in ancient philosophy, one that originated in Plato’s allegory of the cave: the prisoners in the cave only see the silhouettes of objects from the outside world projected onto the cave wall and falsely take t­ hese to be real­ity.28 As a result, the mimetic image [eikon] and the shadow and phantom image [eidolon] ­were significantly devalued in comparison with ideas. In the ancient concept of images, a mirror image on the w ­ ater’s surface, an indexical image par excellence, is also a phantasm; like a shadow, it emerges from ephemeral physical effects—­from traces—­and dis­appears again. The shadow image thus moves between the worlds: between the living and the dead, the body and bodilessness, and fixation/duration and withdrawal. As a kind of immaterial double, a strain of magic frequently adheres to it, one that finds its strongest expression in the specific significance of the double in animism. This quality has leveraged the breakthrough of cinema, in par­tic­u ­lar. Jacques Aumont, theorist of film, recalls what Lotte Eisner said about the “demonic screen” when he explains that shadows in film appear mostly as a “zone for crime or danger.” He draws attention to the ambiguity of the word shadow, to “shadows as a milieu,” and the shadows of bodies as a form, schema, or figure.29 Film traffics in both, just as painting does. In the strict sense, however, only the shadow image that has Indexical Images  91

been captured and recorded is relevant to a discussion of indexical images. Painted shadows (light and shadow effects in painting), however, are not germane h ­ ere; only shadows produced as an effect of light refer to indexicality. The portrait drawn from a silhouette (usually produced by tracing the outline of the profile’s shadow) found a late echo and dubious fame in Lavater’s physiognomic studies, where it s­ topped being the mythical foundation of art and instead became a mythic science (Chapter 2.9). The desire to overcome the ephemeral character of images produced as effects of light has, however, motivated the development of techniques able to rec­ord optical effects—­from the camera obscura up to the camera. The x-­ray is a special case of shadow images, ­because in this case of imaging physical effects generate analog pictures of the bones, which could then be thought of as shadow images of the body’s interior.30 The foundational scene of painting found perhaps its strongest impact in a late, technically conditioned afterlife in photography: photography became technology’s shadow theater.31 Photography, however, marks a significant divergence from tracings of shadows in the legend of Butades, ­because the camera is able to capture details that escape the photographer’s eye—­namely, moments of involuntary recording. A photo­graph becomes an image in which the intended copy—­the trace instituée (Derrida, Chapter  1.1)—is supplemented or disturbed by inadvertent traces. From the beginning, t­ hose traces that are involuntarily captured have inspired the par­tic­u­lar fascination and scandal that photography posed to viewers.32 In this way, photography oscillates between being a shadow image (yet not produced by the ­human hand) and the production of its photographic recording, b ­ ecause the photo­g raph operates as both at the same time. The pen, guided by a ­human hand, is replaced by a fin­ger on the trigger of the device. It captures what the eye sees—­and much more. Owing to the role of the light in photography—­t he German Ablichtung for photography includes light [Licht]—­that is, recording traces of light and shadow to produce a resemblant image of an object or scene, photography became perhaps the most beloved and contested case of indexicality for image theory. Sometimes it is even regarded as a trace of the real.33 The theoretical obsession with photography has been especially pronounced ever since Roland Barthes discovered a magical trace of bygone life in photography, transported by the physical radiations of the lighted object, and saw in this trace an “emanation of the referent”: “From a real body, which was t­here, 92  Indexical Images

FIGURE 21. ​Long exposure time of early photography: “technical determinedness of the auratic appearance” (Benjamin). Photography by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Greyfriar’s Churchyard, Edinburgh (1848).

Image credit: National Galleries Scotland, https://­w ww​.­nationalgalleries​.­org ​/­a rt​-­a nd​-­a rtists​ /­7 1810​/­g reyfriars​-­c hurchyard​-­d ennistoun​-­monument​-­d avid​-­o ctavius​-­h ill (accessed December 31, 2020).

proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am h ­ ere.”34 Walter Benjamin also referred to the phenomena of a sometimes uncanny presence of a person’s appearance in photography; yet he did not describe this as a magical effect but rather as an effect of the time of the image itself, which can be accounted for by the technology available to early photography (Figure 21): ­ ere was an aura about them, a medium that lent fullness and security Th to their gaze even as it penetrated that medium. And once again the technical equivalent is obvious: it consists in the absolute continuum from brightest light to darkest shadow. . . . ​The way light strug­gles out of darkness in the work of a Hill is reminiscent of mezzotint: Orlik talks about the “comprehensive illumination” brought about by the long exposure times, which “gives ­these early photo­graphs their greatness.” . . . ​So much for the technical determinedness of the auratic appearance.35 Benjamin h ­ ere focuses on the temporal mode of the traces that precede the photo­graph and then appear in the image in a continuum from brightest light to the darkest dark as a specific iconic difference. Insofar as the shadows in the photographic image are not “natu­ral” shadows that have been fixed in place, the photographic image indeed emerges from traces; it is, however, not ­limited in this transposition. ­W hether described as a trace of light, as a synthesis of index and image,36 or as modernity’s vera icon,37 photography has become the touchstone for the concepts of the index and the trace.38 It is not, however, “the trace of light,” “which acts on a photosensitive matrix”;39 it only arises by fixing this trace (by means of a chemical procedure). More precisely, the photo results from recording the différance of shadow and light and its transformation into an image: an indexical image par excellence. The entry of photography into the digital world, however, induces at the same time its withdrawal from the register of indexical images. Photographic images became dynamic thanks to several developments: chronophotography’s moving pictures, the serial recordings of moving objects (by Étienne-­Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge), the artistic pro­ cesses found in Adam Magyar’s Photos of Time, Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia’s Futurist photodynamism, and, fi­nally, in the genre of film, also called cinematography—­literally the “writing of movement” (from Gr. κίνημα, kìnema). The idea of film itself has a long prehistory in the development of techniques for producing moving pictures. Wilhelm Leibniz, for example, designed a “veritable shadow theater” with the help of the laterna 94  Indexical Images

magica. He tried to bring movement to images by playing with the size of the shadows: “­There would be unceasing wondrous, metamorphoses, salti mortali, and flights.” 40 In contrast to shadow theater and chronophotography, Francis Galton’s composite photography sets the component of resemblance in motion. When photo­graphs of several ­people are superimposed over one another, the physical reference points multiply, which leads to the disfigurement of resemblance. A boundary case of shadow resemblance, however, is found in a certain kind of photocopying, where an object comes into direct contact with the photographic plate so that its image appears in its a­ ctual size, b ­ ecause in this case of recording the distance from the physical object falls away. The fascination with an unmediated transference of the shadow to the image lives on t­ oday in the age of photography, as shown by the work Flies by Patrick Bailly-­Maître-­Grand: the silhouettes of t­ hese photocopied insects on a screen appear in their ­actual size.41 This work, which reflects the paradigm of the trace in technically refined ways, can be seen as a play on the idea of real-­time photography. 4 . N O N R E S E M B L A N T T R AC E S

An entirely dif­fer­ent type of indexical image to t­ hose formed from an impression or shadow is found in the existing or locatable traces of absent, bygone objects or events that do not add up to a ­whole or resemblant image. This case concerns pure indexicality, indication, or imprint that does not generate or form an image: indexical traces that do not precede the image but rather exist in the posteriority [Nachträglichkeit] of that of which one seeks to grasp an image. The unrivaled example of an-­iconic indexicality, however, is an image that is not made by ­human hand, the acheiropoieton: a term that attributed an unimpeachable authenticity and authority to contact relics in early Chris­ tian­ity.42 Usually t­ hese relics are fabrics on which one finds trace ele­ments of a dead body’s physical remains, the Shroud of Turin being the most famous and the model of the vera icon. ­Because the physical body to which the material ele­ments attest is irretrievably absent, t­ hese images acquire a testimonial character. They are mediums ­toward a sphere inaccessible and unreachable by the beholder, which is why they are primarily encountered in the context of sacral, magical, or mystical interpretive models. In t­ hese contexts, the observer’s imagination is the necessary prerequisite to decipher Indexical Images  95

or make out an image of a past or absent figure. The transformation of traces into an image involving this moment of interpretation resembles an act of restitution, a kind of resurrection in the image. Benjamin’s description of the trace applies h ­ ere in the most precise sense, as “appearance of nearness, however far removed that, which left it b ­ ehind may be.” 43 Indexical images of dissimilar traces are images prior, as it ­were, to art. They are characterized by a significant kind of temporality, as their perception and decipherment are always ­shaped by their posteriority. The transformation of traces into an iconic image cannot take place without the imagination. Yet even iconic images drawn from this temporality—­artifacts like paintings of the vera icon (Chapter 2.7)—­still draw on the authority of the acheiropoieton. The most extreme manifestation of indexical images, in which rudimentary traces of past events do not coalesce into an image of what happened, can be found in the surviving photo­graphs taken in the crematorium at Auschwitz by members of the Sonderkommando: “Four Pieces of Film Snatched from Hell.” 44 In this re­spect, the controversial debate about the “representability” of the holocaust passes this kind of image by, b ­ ecause such photo­g raphs do not bring about a picture of what happened at that place (Chapter 1.1). They are witnesses to and from another place to which the viewer has no access. A boundary phenomenon of nonresemblant traces are tears, as they are located on the threshold from traces of physical manifestations to an image or other kinds of signification: from bodily indicator to iconographic sign. In terms of image theory, the difference between physical tears, on one hand, and painted or photographed tears, on the other, is tremendously significant. H ­ uman physical tears are construed as traces of grief or physical pain, while painted tears are in the strict sense images of indexical signs or iconographic signs. In the case of tears, iconography artificially imitates ­t hose indexes of grief, which are regarded as natu­ral signs. This mediated appearance of tears in the image, however, rarely occurs without additional connotations produced by vari­ous aesthetic means. In this re­spect, tears in an image are, in the strictest sense, not indexical images but rather images of indexes—or, rather, of secondary indexes.45 Within the sciences, it is archaeology above all that makes use of nonresemblant traces—­here, the production of images from the past is always a restoration, one that cannot be achieved without speculation and construction. This construction is, however, projected into what has been and thus 96  Indexical Images

wrongly bears the name reconstruction. Yet when physiological indicators are decoded in a similar way to archaeological traces and remains, ruins, and imprints, the moment of inaccessibility shifts from the temporal structure of posteriority [Nachträglichkeit] to the dimension of corporeal space. In the physiological sciences, coded interpretive models take the place of image-­t heological imagination or archaeological speculation. But with this we are already entering the field of indicators. 5 . D I AG R A M S A N D CO D E D I N D I C ATO R S

Not ­every shadow spawns an indexical image. The sundial’s network of lines, for example, distinguishes itself from the “simultaneous shadow cast by a body” as a part of painting’s founding myth. The sundial does not produce a shadow image or likeness; it is rather the product of a “more complicated logic of projection,” of a gradual progression of a shadow in which only “two features abstracted from the Gnomon (its length and orientation)” are relevant.46 Steffen Bogen uses this comparison for a “general distinction between image and diagram.” Understood in this way, the shadow on a sundial is a phenomenon at the transition from a resemblant image to geometric construction; it marks the boundary case of indexical images. In their work on a diagrammatic turn, Felix Thürlimann and Bogen attempt to f­ ree the diagram from the oppositional text–­image paradigm: However, the diagram is not a mere hybrid form, which could be understood as a combination of text and image ele­ments. From the perspective of its form and function, diagrams have very specific semiotic properties; they are communicative instruments with irreplaceable features.47 As previously discussed in the context of Peirce’s graphs (Chapter 1.5), diagrams are graphic repre­sen­ta­tions of calculated relations. As such, diagrams are not indexical images, even though the individually represented ele­ments of the calculated relation are based on the recorded physical characteristics or manifestations. Many diagrams in fact inhere “a specific type of absence of a body’s image . . . ​with a focused lack of interest in morphological structure and form. Its epistemic object is not the body, but rather a model of the body, which is characterized by pro­cesses such as regulation, and pro­cessing or feedback, which by no means must be realized only in organic beings.” 48 Diagrams are not likenesses. Even when a diagram appears as an image due Indexical Images  97

to its (icono)graphic composition, it is preceded by a logical, mathematical, or procedural operation, one whose outcomes have been conceptualized or pictorialized in a diagram. From an image-­theoretical perspective, diagrams could at best be considered secondary images—­images of relationships between other indicators, signs, symbols, or indexes. They share this characteristic with many images produced by new imaging techniques that appear iconic on the surface yet are in fact pictorializations of coded indicators or calculated data (Chapter 2.3 and 2.5). When exploring physical phenomena inaccessible to the eye, a pro­cess that relies on indirect recording techniques, the interpretive model in play takes on as dominant a role as it does in archaeological reconstruction. In contrast to how one proceeds to read or decipher remnants of bygone structures, however, interpreting physical phenomena involves characteristics that are, as indicators, attributed a certain meaning of the organism’s functions that are not accessible as such. The indicators are indirect signs of nonresemblant, inaccessible traces of something a-­v isible, such as thinking, emotion, and the like; the latter are not, however, restored but are rather decoded. Consequently, the epistemological prob­lems inherent to the ways in which physical indicators are interpreted underlie the ever-­changing techniques, tools, instruments, and rules of a par­tic­u ­lar discipline. The usage and coding of certain indicators is always the product of arguments and controversies within specialized fields of sciences. The complex operations involved in transferring physical indicators into images work at a threshold where several barriers need to be bridged: between inaccessibility and visibility, between quantity and quality, and between measurability and resemblance. In the era of brain research and molecular biology invested with digital technology, older techniques for recording temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, electrical activity in the brain (EEG), or muscle movement (EMG) and other physical manifestations have been supplemented not only by brain scans and other digital visualization techniques but also by procedures for making organic materials vis­i­ble in the laboratory: optical enlargement, light microscopy, radioactive marking in individual cells, and techniques for contrasting or enhancing neuronal and biochemical properties.49 In ­these procedures, the ele­ment of interpretation is so much intertwined with the technologies for visualization that the epistemic and image-­t heoretical 98  Indexical Images

premises are unrecognizable in the user interface. This can be seen most clearly in the aforementioned transformation of data from brain scans into vari­ous color values and contrasts, which then become the medium for translating quantitative accounts into iconic images—­and on this basis then into qualitative statements. And the production of contrast formation (of color and brightness) is, according to Gottfried Boehm, the basal function of iconic difference—by virtue of which patterns, figurations, objects, bodies, and entire scenes appear and, in this way, generate visual images.50 Digitally generated images in current research owe their presentiveness and suggestive power to the prominent role played by color in its dual function as both color value, on one hand, and as the means of repre­sen­ta­t ion of iconic images, on the other: color becomes the borderline phenomenon of quantity and iconicity. The iconization of calculated difference, however, ­causes the traces’ différance to dis­appear. Although the critique of scientific images has developed into one of the most sophisticated branches of interdisciplinary image studies, it is uncertain w ­ hether and to what extent its analyses ­w ill have any effect in a more reflective and adequate engagement with instrumental images and imaging techniques in the empirical sciences themselves—in biomedicine, brain research, psy­chol­ogy, or sociology, in physics, astronomy, and climate science. With the entrance of images into the digital area, the grammatological imperative to think the trace before the existing becomes even more urgent, yet also more complicated, at least if one does not fall into the trap of the “informatic illusion.”51 So-­called digital images insinuate to enter the a-­ visible world and make it vis­i­ble for us (Chapter  2.3). As already mentioned, ­there is no such t­hing as a digital image; t­here are, rather, analog screen images representing digitally available and computed data. A w ­ hole system of digital functions is interposed between the traces or reference objects and the visual repre­sen­ta­tion: a complex computing pro­cess with its algorithms and the conversion of recorded phenomena into data and their transformation into a pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion that surfaces on the screen as if it w ­ ere an image.52 Trevor Paglen points to the reverse side of this system—­namely, the transformation of photos into an immaterial, machine-­readable form, which produces an “invisible visual culture,” a machine-­to-­machine seeing apparatus.53 The fleet of photos recorded by the surveillance systems in public Indexical Images  99

spaces and working places become invisible to ­human eyes when they become converted into “machine-­readable files” and dis­appear in the huge databases of companies and intelligence agencies operated and controlled by machines. Paglen’s intention is to question “the assumption of a ­human subject” in the theoretical discourse and to argue that this kind of machine-­ vision system no longer needs the h ­ uman viewer. This w ­ hole system, however, only works and constantly grows ­because the machine-­readable files appear temporarily in the guise of images to the ­human eye. And in this way they answer the desire for images so that the ­humans continue to feed the apparatus.

100  Indexical Images

4 E F F I G I Ē S : D O U B L E , R E P R E­S E N­TA­T I O N , A N D T H E S U P P L E M E N TA R Y E C O N O M Y OF THE LIKENESS (EBENBILD)

Statues’ f­ aces and figures in paintings or photos are favorite targets of destruction motivated by iconoclasm. Yet it is not always clear w ­ hether the attack is aimed at the material image itself—­t hat is, the fact that an artifact, a statue, or a painting functions as a cult object and recipient of veneration— or w ­ hether it concerns the re/pre­sen­ta­tion of a certain figure whose image is taboo. In any case, images and figures often enter into an almost imperceptible union—­similar to the etymology of the German word Bild (“image”), the meaning of which derives from Menschenbild (“the idea or image of ­human being”), as the equivalent of eikon.1 Among the unending variety and forms of visual images and the vari­ous labels that describe them, the Latin word effigiēs has been established as the term used for the image’s specific function as a stand-in for an absent or dead person.* Though effigiēs—­derived from ex (“out”) and fingere (“to shape to form”)—is usually understood in terms of sculptural concepts, many sources make no real distinction between three-­dimensional replicas of faces/bodies and two-­dimensional * ​The En­glish equivalent effigy can be traced back to 1539. See Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “effigy,” accessed 2019, http://­w ww​.­oed​.­com​/­v iew​/­Entry​/­59754. Since the use of the word in modern En­glish has also been extended to pictorial re/pre­sen­ta­tions beyond ritual contexts, the Latin word, which has a more precise meaning, is preferred ­here in many cases.

likenesses or portrayals. This lack of differentiation adheres to descriptions of effigiēs used for funerary veneration and in royal burials, as well as defamatory and punitive practices in effigy, including the executio in effigie. Yet, in the image-­t heoretical reflections ignited in the context of effigiēs, its specific function is the central aspect (rather than the form): that the effigiēs may stand in for [vertreten], substitute for [ersetzen], or represent [repräsentieren] a person; to embody their persona; or to stage a kind of as-if presence for them—­the image as a double. Due to the dominant role played by the effigiēs in developing the conception of The King’s Two Bodies (his mortal body and his po­liti­cal body— i.e., the dignitas of kinghood) in the po­liti­cal theology of the M ­ iddle Ages, this type of image has evolved into an object of study par excellence for scholarship in cultural science.2 Within the horizon of the continuing influence exerted by Ernst Kantorowicz’s book, the effigiēs has been intensely examined especially in reference to the cult of the dead, to burial rituals, and to pro­cessions of both secular sovereigns and ecclesiastical dignitaries. In this context, effigiēs are replicas made of wood, stone, wax, or leather that represent or substitute for the deceased; they are objects of memorial and worship, of mourning and triumph. As an object of historical investigation, however, the effigy is positioned at the intersection between the image-­t heoretical fascination with images’ emergence from the cult of the dead and the extensive field of research on the h ­ uman body as an image and image as a body within the history of culture.3 In addition to funeral rites, effigies are often encountered as pitture infamanti or Schandbilder within the policy of defamatory pictures in the ­Middle Ages and in the so-­called punishments in effigy [Bildnisstrafen], in which a sentence was carried out on a portrayal or replica of the convicted person rather than on the person’s body (Chapter 5.4, 5.5).4 Veneration of effigies of the dead or of kings and shame or punishment on/with likeness are two sides of the same coin; nevertheless, the issues that are pertinent to each side are quite dif­fer­ent. The study of funerary culture is primarily concerned with transformations of body into an image and from mortality to the repre­sen­ta­tion of super­natural, immortal ideas. Scholarly research into defamation and punishments in effigy, however, is occupied with the contentious question of the spell cast by images, or image-­magic, that extends throughout as a leitmotif. 102  Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and Supplement

The concept of the effigiēs touches upon a dif­fer­ent facet of the nature of the double than does the idea of double as a kind of animistic doppelgänger-­ spirit to ­humans in ethnology, its survival as revenant figures in the tradition of Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture of the uncanny,5 or the notion of the shadow as the noncorporeal and immortal double of the mortal body that has been handed down from classical my­t hol­ogy (Chapter 3.3). Compared to t­ hese understandings, the effigy pre­sents an inverse constellation: the likeness or replica resembling the body substitutes for a person who himself or herself remains in shadow or for a persona that has no body of its own. What nevertheless does connect effigiēs to myth and magic is the fact that they are often entrenched in a discussion of image-­magic. In addition to religious cults of images and iconoclasm, punishment in effigy has also become an impor­tant example of the ways in which p ­ eople engage with the remarkable power of images, one that cannot be explained in terms of reason or semiotics. Recently, a series of sophisticated image-­theoretical concepts have addressed the “power of images” with theories of perception: how images are able to work affectively, to “speak” to the viewer, or how they appear “as if” they w ­ ere a kind of living counterpart.6 In contrast, the punishments in effigy raise the issue of a reverse potency of impact—­namely, the debate about ­whether practices in effigy are based in the belief that the image is the person and that the person is actually struck when punishing his or her likeness. Opinions differ widely on this issue, with completely incompatible arguments.7 One line of thought assumes that a “magical” belief in the power of images is operative, w ­ hether one understands this hypothesis as an explanation in re­spect of a certain historical peculiarity of perception or tries to make it psychologically plausible in terms of general experience.8 The other side vehemently rejects image-­magic by arguing that punishments in portrait belong to a specific system of imagistic ­legal thought and law enforcement laden with symbolism (at least, in the tradition of German law).9 The prob­lem cannot, however, be resolved with such an appeal to the history of law, since it merely defers the need for explanations to that of symbolic and imagistic ­legal practice. The strangeness of historical practices likely cannot be fully “understood” or explained—­either by historicization or psychologization. Yet the dispute over the magical power of images obscures the more significant image-­t heoretical question: what, exactly, is the relationship between the effigy and the person or that person’s par­tic­u ­lar status—in Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and Supplement  103

what ways does it embody, make pictorially pre­sent, replace, or represent this person? The idea of the image as double touches on a specific mode of pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion that leads to the heart of the question of repre­sen­ta­ tion in general. The practice of effigiēs presupposes a corporeal object that is absent or acquires a precarious presence; the effigy takes its place in order to simulate the object’s presence or “bring it before the eyes.” In this sense, the effigiēs can be regarded as the embodiment of the paradoxical structure inherent in the idea of repre­sen­ta­tion par excellence. In the case of an effigy, the complex image-­t heoretical phenomenon of repre­sen­ta­tion is not only sharpened, it can also be differentiated. 1. T H E D O U B L E A N D T H E Q U E S T I O N O F R E P R E­S E N­TA­T I O N

The structure of repre­sen­ta­t ion has mostly been illuminated through the history of Eu­ro­pean royal funerals (which in fact bear the name repre­sen­ ta­tion) and by the analy­sis of images of the dead as a form of “pre­sent absence” in which the “primal meaning” of an image is manifest, in par­tic­u­lar with regard to the proxy of the dead in images.10 In epistemological terms, it concerns “re-­presentation’s capacity to achieve presence.” With reference to Leon Battista Alberti’s discussion of painting’s “ forza divina”—­t hat is, of making distant p ­ eople pre­sent and the dead to appear “quasi vivi”11—­ Gottfried Boehm sees the capability to make the dead or absent pre­sent in an “act of showing” [Zeigehandlung] that “possesses a special temporality.”12 The image as double is thus an effect of a multivalent différance. The function of images to re/present absent or dead persons is inscribed by the same temporal, spatial, and physical difference that Derrida exposed in lit­er­a­ture and writing, be it as différance or as a postal structure.13 It has been pointed out repeatedly that an ambiguous semantics, one that goes far beyond modern understanding, is inscribed in the concept of repre­ sen­ta­tion; it pertains to both the Latin repraesentatio and the French représentation. In an investigation into “Roman Repraesentatio” and Roman imperial funerals, the classical philologist James Ker argues that in the semantics of repraesentatio, the connotation of a “revival” resonates across its semantic range, from “bringing back into the pre­sent (what is dead, lost, ­etc.),” in addition to the meaning of “recall or depict vividly” (from the homonym from the economic realm: repraesentatio as “pay immediately”).14 ­These two aspects—­a living evocation and restitution—­mark precisely the 104  Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and Supplement

ambiguity produced by the re in repre­sen­ta­tion; this ambiguity forms the epicenter of debates surrounding the concept. In an essay on the word, concept, and subject m ­ atter of the French représentation, Carlo Ginzburg cites vari­ous sources for his discussion of its doubled semantics: The Annales historian Roger Chartier, for one, speaks of two contradicting meanings, with reference to Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel (Universal dictionary)15—on one hand, the repre­sen­ta­tion that “makes an absence vis­i­ble, what presupposes a clear distinction between that which represents and that which is represented”—­and, on the other, the repre­sen­ta­tion as the “display of what is pre­sent.” Additionally, Ginzburg quotes the entry from the Petit Robert, which also pre­sents a divided meaning of repre­sen­ta­tion, the first understood as “an action to put something in front of the eyes or the mind” and the second one “to replace someone in order to act in his place.” Yet, Ginzburg insists that both aspects have something in common: “the idea of substitution or replacement (that evokes absence).”16 This juncture is exactly the position occupied by the effigiēs, of whose history his contribution sketches several stations: from reference to the Greek funerary statue kolossos (which Émile Benveniste once described as a doppelgänger), up to the effigiēs used in French royal funerals, a ritual called, in fact, représentation.17 Actually, the effigy is encountered in quite dif­fer­ent phenomena and cultural practices whose variegated manifestations compose the entire span between the two aspects of repre­sen­ta­tion mentioned above, with very dif­ fer­ent modes of substitution, replacement, doubling, and symbolic forms of repre­sen­ta­tion. Not ­every case of an effigy is a double of a body; sometimes the representative function refers to a par­tic­u­lar aspect of the person—­such as honor, fama, or “good name.” The question as to the dif­fer­ent types of image involved can be solved neither by classifying the vari­ous pos­si­ble aspects of the concept of representation—­idea [Vorstellung], re/pre­sen­ta­tion [Darstellung], substitution [Stellvertretung],18 for example—­nor through the cultural historical distinction between magical, sacral, and po­liti­cal repre­ sen­ta­tion.19 Instead of taking ­t hese paths, in what follows the vari­ous ways in which practices “in effigy” refer to the respective person or a specific aspect of the person s­ hall be discussed. In this way, the focus is on the respective modes of repre­sen­ta­t ion produced by likeness, mimetic image, or replica, as well as the specific aspect or status of the person re/presented in the image. In the following discussion, the two poles of the effigy that have an entirely unambiguous image-­f unction can be ignored—­namely, Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and Supplement  105

the monument (a resemblant likeness as sheer repre­sen­ta­tion) and the cult image (which has the image-­f unction of creating a real presence of its respective sacred figure); the latter ­w ill be discussed in subsequent chapters (Chapter 6.3). Considering the effigiēs of the dead, the effigiēs of kings, defamatory portraits, and punishment in effigy jointly opens the possibility of examining the variety of ways in which the image appears as a double and working out differences between them—­not least to ­counter the pathos-­loaded idea of the image based in its emergence from the funerary cult, which unfurls an enormous power of fascination and suggestion. The following investigation of the ways in which the effigy substitutes for a person and how it relates to that person and his or her body and status w ­ ill, again, be concerned with the tension between resemblance and code, in a similar way as the systematic discussion of indexical images (Chapter 3). For not ­every effigy is, in fact, a resemblant image [Ebenbild]. 2. SUBSTITUTION AND (NON-) RESEMBLANCE: T H E D O U B L E I N P L AC E O F A B O DY O R P E R S O N

Indeed death, but not the dead, lies at the origin of the idea of the image being a double. This difference is evident in the colossus when compared with the Jericho skulls from the pre-­Christian seventh ­millennium used in burial rituals, in which the skull of the dead was reshaped and painted so that its physical remains formed the material basis of the gravestone (Chapter 3.2). In contrast, the colossus in ancient Greece took the place of the dead, with stone monuments replacing the often-­missing bones. In a chapter titled “The Repre­sen­ta­tion [orig. figuration] of the Invisible and the Psychological Category of the Double: The Kolossos” (1965/1983), Jean-­Pierre Vernant, founder of an anthropology of the ancient world, shows that “all Greek statuary evolved out of ‘aniconic figures’ ” and that for the Greeks the statue was “a substitute, a stand-in and not an image.”20 In his article on the colossus, Vernant interprets the stone stelae of the Mycenaean Necropolis at Dendra (near Midea in Peloponnese), remnants from the thirteenth ­century BCE, as a practice of substitution. The massive, roughly carved stones, whose slightly anthropomorphic form indicates the shape of a neck and head, ­were placed above a cenotaph, an empty grave. In this way, they replace the missing bones for the veneration of the dead. Above an empty grave, furnished 106  Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and Supplement

with objects belonging to the deceased, the colossus symbolizes a “substitute for the absent corpse. It took the place of the dead man.”21 As a substitute for the absent corpse, the colossus marks the place of commemoration of the dead in vis­i­ble form: as a replacement and repre­sen­ta­tion in stone at once. According to Vernant, the issue h ­ ere is not in fact “à reproduire les traits du défunt” (“imitating the features of the deceased”) in order to create the illusion of their physical presence. For this reason, he positions the colossus beyond image and resemblance and differentiates its role as the double from the concept of the image: the “colossus” is not an image; it is a “double” in the way death itself is the double of the living.22 Vernant’s usage of the term l’image is obviously to be read as a resemblant image or the Greek eikon, ­because, following the Greek understanding of images, Vernant assigns “colossos et psuché” instead to the register of the eidola, next to shadow images [skia], super­natural phenomena [phasma], and the dream images [oneiros]—­a ll of which are immaterial images (Chapter 1.3). Possessing both form and materiality, the colossus occupies a unique position in this register as stony, unmovable “effigies of a gigantic, ‘colossal’ dimensions.’ ”23 Nevertheless, this oversized double maintains a par­tic­u ­lar relationship to the realm of shades. When Vernant describes death itself as the double of the living and posits the colossus as its analogy, the colossus must be, on one hand, understood as the representative of death in the earthly world in the literal sense (“enfoncé en terre”) and, on the other hand, regarded as the antipode to the soul [psuché], the immaterial double of death or the corpse. Vernant consistently describes “colossos et psuché” as interconnected concepts throughout. For him, they form two extreme aspects of the same function as mediators between two divergent spheres. As counter­parts of the homme vivant, they relate to him in comparable yet differing ways. In this re­spect, Vernant emphasizes the colossus’s “rootedness in the Earth” and its complete immobility; yet as a double and médiateur between two opposed worlds, the meaning of the colossus exceeds pure repre­sen­ta­tion. Regarding the colossus, Vernant raises a tension that is symptomatic for religious symbols in general: namely, the claim that the colossus’s presence “down ­here” [ici-­bas] produces real contact with “up above” [au-­dela]: “the colossos has the ambition to establish a real contact with the beyond and bring about its presence in this earthly world.”24 “Real” contact is naturally to be distinguished from the “contact resemblance” of the Jericho skulls, which Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and Supplement  107

have an indexical relationship to the bones of the dead. Real contact is a ­matter of establishing a connection between the living and the dead, the “­here” and the “­there,” to bring about a presence of the beyond in the earthly world. Central aspects of “real presence,” which are generally attributed to Christian cult images (Chapter 6.3), are hence anticipated in the colossus. It is thus no coincidence that it is the site of a cenotaph, which corresponds to that of Christ’s empty grave, the primal scene that gives rise to the specific Christian desire for images, as argued in a l­ater chapter (Chapter  6.4). Whereas the colossus substitutes the missing corporeal remains, in Chris­ tian­ity the absent corpse refers to the idea of the resurrection of the God’s son, si­mul­ta­neously mortal and immortal. Vernant’s reading of the colossus forms a primal scene for the effigiēs: its emergence from the stony, immobile mark that mediates between the earthly and the beyond, between the vis­i­ble and the immaterial. As a concrete sculptural image of the double, it is associated with a complementary immaterial image. In this re­spect, one could speak with regard to the double—­and this in contrast to the “real presence” of the Christian cult image—of the idea of a real contact to that which it substitutes and yet at the same time represents. In this way, a specific and quite complex mode of the paradoxical nature of repre­sen­ta­tion is condensed in the effigiēs: an ­actual presence based on the idea of the substitute’s real contact, through which it gets connected with something absent in an inaccessible sphere. Instead of re-­ presentation, one would actually have to speak of a substituted presence, or, more precisely, of a substitute-­real-­contact-­presence. Such sesquipedalians, however, do not lead the discussion further. Against the backdrop of such ideas, which have become alienated from the modern understanding of images,25 let us turn to other, historically newer practices in which the effigy is also used as substitute—­practices in which the likeness or replica of a person (or part of a person, and specifically the head or face) is used as a surrogate or double. Classical examples of this have already been cited: one involves the wax masks (imagines) of the Roman pompa funebris worn during the funeral pro­cessions through the city, which w ­ ere discussed as examples of contact resemblance (Chapter 3.2); and the second is the modern Eu­ro­pean punitive practice of executio in effigie, in which a likeness or a dummy figure was hanged at the gallows if the condemned had escaped penalty. In both cases, the effigy is a substitute for the dead or absent body, producing a kind of “as-if presence” of the person. 108  Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and Supplement

­ ese practices combine substitution with repre­sen­ta­tion b Th ­ ecause the absent or dead person (the condemned criminal or an ancestor) is made pre­s­ ent by means of a surrogate body. As a replacement, both the imago and the effigiēs embody the persona. As the Greek Polybius reported on the Roman funerary pro­cessions in the second c­ entury BCE, wax masks of ancestors w ­ ere the main protagonists of the ritual, ­behind which the role of t­ hose being buried receded.26 When the imagines maiorum, which ­were kept in special wooden shrines in the homes of Roman nobility, ­were brought out for a funeral, carried by the living through the city to the forum for the laudatio funebris, and then placed on exposed chairs, this ritual was primarily dedicated to the making-­ present of the deceased; their as-if presence was guaranteed by the imagines as their surrogate persona. The masks give image to revenants in order to allow their momentary resurrection to appear as corporeal as pos­si­ble— as if, Polybius writes, they ­were still “alive and breathing.”27 In their function, wax masks, cast from the ­faces of the dead, resemble ­those masks found in funerary cults in Native American cultures as described in Marcel Mauss’s cultural theory of the gift.28 Polybius characterizes this image of the dead as “prosopon, which displays the shape and features with astonishing fidelity.” In order to support the aspect of resemblance, the imagines ­were carried by p ­ eople who looked as similar as pos­si­ble to the deceased in size and appearance; they ­were also arrayed in the ceremonial garb and insignia of the offices the dead held during their lives.29 This kind of self-­representation of the Roman nobility was abandoned at the beginning of the Principate and Augustus’s regency, prompting a severe restriction and regulation of the ius imagines, the right to be re/presented as a statue and honored in public.30 The early modern executio in effigie or punishment in effigy (Bildnisstrafe) is also a cultural practice in which an “as if” is staged with the aid of an image that serves as a substitute body. The modern point of view comes into play, however, when historical narratives describe this practice as mock execution. When, by contrast, talking of an “­actual mock execution” (tatsächliche Scheinhinrichtung) this wording signifies the way in which the ­legal system at the time was based in the paradoxical structure of repre­sen­ ta­tion, since the executio in effigie is a sanctioned l­egal act executed on a surrogate body.31 Even so, this action is not a substitutive act. In as far as one aim of punishment within the early modern ­legal system was the restoration of order, the penalty in effigy had to suffice for this purpose if the condemned Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and Supplement  109

person was physically absent. According to Wolfgang Brückner, this ­legal practice of “substitutional torturesome punishment” (that is to say, corporal punishment enacted on a likeness or replica) was first established in Eu­ rope ­ under sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­ century absolutism during the state’s codification of criminal law. It generated several juridical prob­lems (in par­tic­u­lar, the question of compatibility with the Roman tenet of ne absentes damnentur, the prohibition on sentencing an absent person), which ­were intensely debated among ­legal scholars at the time. In addition to the term executio in effigie, other nomenclature was in circulation: poena imaginaria, poena repraesentativa, supplicium effigiatum, figurata executio, and supplicia vicaria. All of ­t hese terms represent variations in the characterization of the Bildnisstrafe—­either placing emphasis on the objects on which it is performed (picture, figure) or focusing on the nature of the per­for­mance of the punishment (qua imagination, repre­sen­ta­tion, substitution). The image h ­ ere assumes a complex function: it is a substitute for the convicted individual’s body, which in turn did not stand in for the living but rather for the l­ egal person. B ­ ecause in the early modern system of “torturesome punishment” [peinliche Strafen]* the person is sentenced but the punishment is carried out on the body. Due to the instable material nature of the images used in such practices, the image-­t heoretical question as to which role the aspect of resemblance played is difficult to determine. In some historical sources, however, one can see even efforts to achieve resemblance to ­t hose who are absent in the image. As a report of an executio in effigie from 1673 in The Hague reads, the subject was “painted in life-­size from head to toe, cut out according to the proportion of his body, and his name written in large letter upon the breast.”32 ­Matters ­were dif­fer­ent in the Spanish Inquisition, where executio in effigie had already been common since the end of the fifteenth ­century. Since the persecution of so-­called infidels often led to mass executions, half-­ scale puppets ­were used—­carried on poles without a claim to being an imitation of the condemned. More importantly for the policy of the Inquisition was to equip the dummies with symbols of disgrace (such as heretic’s caps, infamy miters, and sanbenito of the doomed men). Sometimes, statuae

* ​Peinliche Strafe is a technical term for punishment enacted on the body of a convict; we translate it as “torturesome punishment.”

110  Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and Supplement

duplicatae ­were also used—­dummies that had to represent several absent doomed candidates for death. In mass executions or mass burnings, the resemblance of the likeness recedes into the background in contrast to the surrogate body. The image used as substitute of the body is also encountered in the practice of poena cadaveri, a punishment enacted on corpses, which historically emerged si­mul­ta­neously with executio in effigie; it was performed if the condemned died before the conclusion of the trial. In the con­temporary juridical debates, the ­legal prob­lems emerging with this practice ­were discussed in parallel to ­t hose involved in the execution of the portrait. Image and corpse ­were thus equally regarded as a substitute for the living body, the most impor­tant object in the practice of torturesome punishment. 3. SUBSTITUTION AND RESEMBLANCE: A S S AU LT S O F T H E P E R S O N W I T H A N D I N I M AG E S

The case of the pitture infamanti, an image-­politics documented during the strug­gle for power over northern Italian cities in the f­ ourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is dif­fer­ent, as are the Schandbilder that ­were developed around the same time within the framework of the German law of obligations. In both constellations—­both of which belong to the prehistory of the caricature as defamatory image practices (Chapter 5)—­images serve the function of allowing for a proxy assault on the person: on their honor or their social or personal l­egal status. Image-­t heoretically, this kind of repre­sen­ta­tion of a specific person in the public exhibition of his or her picture is to be differentiated from the substitutionary portrait, in which patrons of the pieces of art are represented by a scaled-­down likeness or a fictitious figure in a painting.33 Also, differently than delegating remembrance to a pictorial representative of one’s own person, the defamatory portraits depict an opponent in order to act against him by offending a picture of him. When images of enemies and traitors who could not be apprehended ­were painted in a humiliating manner on the walls of public buildings in Florence and other northern Italian cities, this attack was aimed at the fama, a person’s reputation. Based on the Roman code of honor, the pitture infamanti are, in the most literal sense, disgraceful likenesses of enemies and ­those who have been banished, showing them as hanged men or in degrading poses. Samuel Y. Edgerton describes this practice as social habitus related to the institution of infamia: Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and Supplement  111

a person’s po­liti­cally defined status.34 Thus the practice was reserved for individual city governments or municipal authorities, whereas privately produced pitture infamanti ­were forbidden. Although no judicial act underlaid them, they had an official character: a public assault with and in images on ­t hose who ­were branded as traitors or declared enemies of the city. In this re­spect, this practice can be understood as an image-­politics of enmity. ­Those depicted w ­ ere mostly men of the upper classes or members of noble families. The humiliating exhibition of the likeness on the walls of the Palazzo del Podestà or other city government buildings was thus a symbolic operation by means of which the person’s status was transferred into that of infamia. B ­ ecause the public display of the picture is in this case not directed at one’s body but rather at one’s honor, the image stands in not for the legal person (as in the case of executio in effigie) but for his status. The person’s status, however, cannot be replaced but only represented—in this case, with the picture of the person. It thus involves a humiliation both with and in the image at the same time. Since the recognizability of a par­tic­u ­lar individual is a precondition for the effectiveness of this image-­practice, resemblance is particularly significant ­here. For this reason, the order for ­these images was often given to the most respected paint­ers in the city. For them ­these commissions w ­ ere not only of pecuniary interest; the artists also used them as an opportunity for physiognomic and anatomical studies, as the sketches by Andrea del Sarto and Leonardo da Vinci show (Figures 28 and 29 in Chapter 5).35 The equivalent central Eu­ro­pean practice to the pitture infamanti, the defamatory Schandbilder, in contrast, took place in the realm of contract law and played out between creditor and debtor. The image ­here becomes part of a contractually sanctioned practice, legitimated by “clauses of condemnation and defamation in obligation, with which the debtor mortgaged their honor to the creditor.”36 Thereafter, the use of so-­called Schmäh-­or Scheltbriefe (reviling or berating epistles) and Schandbilder (infamous pictures) was strictly regulated; they ­were used as a means to push debtors or their guarantors into the so-­called Einlager (obstagium, an enforced sojourn at an inn ­until the debt has been resolved, to be financed by the debtor).37 For defaulters, such stipulation meant that their honor could be pilloried by their creditor; the latter was entitled to display defamatory, insulting images of 112  Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and Supplement

the debtor in public places like the pillory or church door or sometimes upside-­down on the gallows. Therefore, this practice also concerns an attack against the person with and in the image, in this case as the image represents both the ­legal persona and honor. In contrast to the pitture infamanti of the northern Italian cities, physical resemblance is unimportant in Schandbilder; they are less concerned with portrait likeness than with “speaking images” (Chapter 5.5) whose scenarios refer to the subject m ­ atter of the dispute—­similar to the system of “corporal punishment that mirrors the crime” [spiegelnde Strafen] encountered in medieval and early modern ­legal practice.38 4 . S YM B O L I C R E P R E­S E N­TA­T I O N : T H E P E R S O N ’S I N S I G N I A

The image-­practice of pictorial defamation that is directed not at a picture of the person but rather at signs and symbols by which the person or his ­family are represented or identified—­especially heraldry and f­ amily name—­ operates beyond resemblant portraits, surrogate bodies, and substitution. Both names and coats of arms w ­ ere used frequently in the politics of defamatory images and in the act of executio in effigie. The name or heraldic sign, for example, ­were hung on the gallows, the coat of arms upside-­down, similar to the image of the opponent; this produced symbolic defamation of one’s kin. Schandbilder that abuse the name of an adversary are most often encountered in the context of a so-­called shame sanction (e.g., in the case of desertion or prohibition on duels). Thus, the politics of defamation through images includes va­ri­e­ties of a nonresemblant repre­sen­ta­tion of the person and their kin, whose honor is pictorialized by symbols. The visual environment of the medieval city was ­shaped considerably by heraldry, as the rulers and patricians endeavored, with the help of their insignia, to visually define their territory within the city. It was also customary for holders of public office to decorate “the facades of their official residences with their personal coats of arms.”39 Within the framework of knightly heraldic law, a dishonored pre­sen­ta­tion of the coat of arms meant a “death of the f­ amily crest” [Wappentod] comparable to civil death in modern law. In any case, the portrait likeness does not ­matter at all in heraldic iconography and symbolic repre­sen­ta­tions ­because they do not bear on the individual person but rather on the “good name” and the ­family’s honor. Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and Supplement  113

5. RESEMBLANCE AND THE DOUBLE: THE EFFIGIĒS AS SUPPLEMENT

The image’s mode of repre­sen­ta­tion becomes much more ambiguous if the body itself, on which the effigy has been modeled, remains in play, occupying a place in the ritual next to the effigy, so that the image does not completely take its place—­neither pure substitute nor pure representative. This is the case with the deceased, whose effigiēs becomes, as it ­were, the doppelgänger of the corpse—­with a significant difference between the dead and its double. While mortality is visibly manifest in a corpse, the suggestion of another continuity enduring in the image adheres to the portrait or figurative replica of the dead. In contrast to monuments and other memorial statues, busts, or images that represent the object of tribute or memorialize ­those depicted by taking the place of their bodies, the image of the dead only becomes a double if the corpse is ritually substituted for and supplemented. Since the corpse can only visibly manifest death and mortality for a l­imited time ­until it dis­appears into the invisibility of the tomb, the effigy’s function of duplication is temporally ­limited. This position corresponds precisely to the complex structure of the supplement as unfolded by Derrida in Of Grammatology: the supplement as a chain in the economy of différance or supplementarity, which he also identifies as a play of presence and absence.40 Classical examples include the rituals of Roman consecratio or imperial apotheosis41 and En­glish and French royal burials we have accounts of since 1327, when the first ceremony of its kind was witnessed for the death of Edward II of ­England.42 In both of ­these traditional rituals,43 a resemblant image was produced ­after the death of the sovereign, which then took the place of the corpse in subsequent cele­brations—­a wax likeness or wax statue (imago) in Rome, whereas funerary ceremonies for other Eu­ro­pean kings mostly used effigiēs (of wood, leather, or wax), often puppets, whose production was based on the death mask.44 In both cases, the “effigy-­dummy” 45 was dressed in ceremonial garments and outfitted with the insignia of the monarch “as though the dummy w ­ ere the living king himself” 46 and was offered food and paid homage. This practice required mimetic images that resembled the living image of the regent, a “figure or image ad similitudinem regis.” 47 And in both rituals (the imperial apotheosis and royal funeral) the image is intended to establish a connection to immortality—­a lbeit in very dif­fer­ent ways. 114  Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and Supplement

The role the effigiēs plays as the corpse’s doppelgänger becomes most apparent in the ritual of a double burial, when not only w ­ ere the mortal remains of the monarch buried but an imperial or royal replica was also buried at the end of the ceremony. This practice has been documented in both historical examples, although in ­England the royal effigiēs was kept rather than interred.48 Ginzburg interprets the burial of the effigy [funus imaginarium] as a ritual “that was not just definitive but rather eternalizing. The emperor was consecrated as a god; the king, through the declaration that the monarchical function was everlasting, would never die.” 49 As regards the role the effigy has in illustrating the immortality of the sovereign, t­ here are, however, fascinating differences between the pagan Roman ritual and the po­liti­cal theology of the king’s two bodies in the ­Middle Ages. The ritual of the Roman imperial apotheosis, which transfers the status of the emperor a­ fter his death to that of a god, was introduced during the age of the so-­called Adoptive Emperors (also known as the Nerva-­Antonine dynasty) and handed down through the accounts of the funeral cele­brations held a­ fter Pertinax’s death in the year 193 (in the seventy-­fifth volume of Cassius Dio’s Roman History) and of the death of Septimius Severus in the year 211 (in the fourth book of Herodian’s Roman History). Dio’s account describes the fabrication of the wax image, its exhibition (in a posture as if the double ­were sleeping), the homage paid to the imago, and fi­nally its cremation on Campus Martius as an ea­gle flew overhead. It ends with the words “Kai ho men Pertinax houtos ethanatisthe” (Thus Pertinax became immortal).50 Since only the ritual grants the departed earthly sovereign immortality, his imago functions as a transitional medium that transforms him into a god postmortem. Why this consecratio was performed by means of a double remains a mystery to scholars. Apparently, this ritual was born of two already extant conventions: First, the Romans practiced a burial in effigy in cases where a Roman citizen died outside of the empire and was buried locally where they died, while receiving a second symbolic burial in Rome, a funus imaginarium.51 Second, the idea of an immortal sovereign, who is embodied in his resemblant image. According to Ker, this idea first surfaced in the context of the elaborate cele­brations for Drusus, Augustus’s stepson (who died in 9 BCE on a military campaign against the Teutons), when the emperor arranged for a statue of Drusus to be erected on the Forum of Augustus (also known as the Imperial Forum) as a model for ­f uture emperors.52 He had already cleared the forum and the Capitoline of statues Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and Supplement  115

and restricted the public rights to images [ius imagines] in order to reserve it for the imperial cult.53 In consecratio, the transformation of the dead ruler into a divine entity is performed on the emperor’s effigy (a temporary body double), which operates as a transitional medium between an earthly mortal and a divine immortal. The image achieves this transfer into a super­ natural kingdom, as it ­were, by means of the wax portrait’s threefold function: as a body double, as the emperor’s ephemeral substitution, and as a medium of conversion. In Christian iconography, it is the figure of Mary that takes over the function of a medium for transition, albeit in the face of an entirely dif­fer­ent image of a God: Mary as mediatrix between the divine and h ­ uman spheres. In contrast to imperial apotheosis, the funerary effigies of the En­glish and French kings serve to substitute for the king’s immortal, po­liti­cal body—­ that is to say, a substitution for the kingship itself. According to the conception of the king’s two bodies, this function is other­wise embodied by the king’s personal, mortal body. Yet, since he cannot exercise this function a­ fter death as a corpse, he must be represented by an image during interregnum. The idea that the kingship rather than the ruler is immortal precedes the ritual, which then serves not to transition into immortality but rather to ensure the interregnum. Kantorowicz emphasizes the ritual’s aspect of visibility—­namely, the fact that “the two bodies, unquestionably united in the living king, w ­ ere visibly segregated on the king’s demise,” since the other­w ise a-­v isible “po­liti­cal body” is paraded in the shape of “the effigy in its pompous regalia,” a practice he sums up by saying: “A persona ficta—­ the effigy—­personified another persona ficta, the dignitas.”54 The under­lying ambiguity of ficta (perfect participle of fingere)—in the semantic spectrum ranging from modeled/shaped/created to envisioned/imagined—is a symptom of the enormous complexity of the image-­f unction in play in the ritual. The dummy, as a double of the dead, embodies the kingship by means of a doubled function: as a replacement body and substitute of the king. At the end of the interregnum the effigiēs is buried, while the living body of the new king takes its place. In this interval, something becomes vis­i­ble that in the two-­body doctrine of kingdom remains “sheer” dogma: the doubled royal body. The “usual” physical embodiment of kingship—­t he personal body of the king—is extended by the effigiēs throughout the interregnum. Thus three bodies of the king are actually involved during the interregnum: the corpse of the king, the effigiēs, and the po­liti­cal body. Although the 116  Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and Supplement

effigiēs mediates ­here between the other positions, it is, unlike in the Roman ritual, not a pure medium for transition. In contrast to the Roman ritual, the effigiēs ­here acquires an image-­f unction that has again increased: supplement, surrogate, substitute, and embodiment all at once. The politico-­t heological conception of the two bodies clearly launches a proliferation of image-­functions: it puts into motion a supplementary economy of absence and presence. Only with the historical disappearance of the ritual did the king’s portrait become a mere template for a memorial statue whereby his image became a mere repre­sen­ta­tion. It is no coincidence that, at the same time, cabinets for wax figures emerged in which the effigies no longer possess a cult value but rather possess an entertainment value (see Chapter 6.2). As long as the dignitas and the existence of the monarchy needed to be ensured by such a strained likeness, this image, as the phantom of kingdom, represents “something rotten” in the laws of royalty.55 In this re­spect, it is symptomatic that the strug­g le for the monarchy was—­ similar to the religious war—­conducted as a strug­gle on and by means of images [Bilderstreit]. John Milton’s famous treatise Eikonoklastes (1649), for example, refers to the image [eikon], though in fact referring to the king himself. The same substitution occurs when the fight against monarchy as an institution is executed at the mortal body of the king: as the act of regicide. Yet, the images apparently had the stronger impact, as is attested to by the enormous popularity of the fictitious autobiography of the king against which Milton’s treatise was directed. In the treatise Eikon Basilike: The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Maiestie in His Solitude and Sufferings (1649), the author attempted, as it ­were, to produce a kind of written substitute for the effigiēs, which the revolutionary republicans naturally did without when burying the decapitated king, according to the motto: “Enough with two bodies!” As a fictitious attestation to the dead king, the publication replaces the role of the corpse’s double in order to be representative of the monarchy throughout the republican interregnum, u ­ ntil the restoration of the monarchy with the coronation of Charles II as king of ­England in 1660—to champion it and to represent it: a further link in the chain of the supplemental economy of the effigiēs. This fight over the Eikon Basilike—­the king’s image—­points to the dialectic of the war of images, in which the worship of images and iconoclasm fuel each other and induce a proliferation of images. This w ­ ill be addressed in the context of the case of a specific desire for images within a culture s­ haped by Chris­tian­ity (Chapter 6.4). Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and Supplement  117

5 D E FA M AT O R Y I M A G E S : D I S F I G U R AT I O N I N P H Y S I O G N O M Y A N D C A R I C AT U R E ’ S T W O B O D I E S

A passively humorous character is not in itself a satiric subject, for who would elaborate a satire and caricature about a single monstrosity? The deviation of the small ­human needle must be aligned with and indicate the deviation of the g­ reat earth-­magnet. —­jean paul, school for aesthetics The potential pitfall faced by artists that the depiction of a laughing face can unintentionally turn out as an image of sadness—­which already Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Pittura discussed (Chapter 2.1)1—­may explain the closeness between the history of physiognomics and that of caricatures—at least as far as it concerns unintentional caricature. Not a few tableaux of expressive gestures in physiognomic writings, which ­were furnished with serialized drawings of head shapes and individual parts of the face, could just as well have been taken from a manual for drawing caricatures. Physiognomic knowledge, in fact, shares with caricatures the conviction that one can read the character of a person in the shape of their head and facial features. The fact that the Austrian essayist Rudolf Kassner claimed to see unintentional caricatures in many portraits in modern painting is, on the contrary, due more to the reservations the conservative cultural phi­los­o­pher had regarding modern art. It rather seems that modern art’s departure from capturing a resembling likeness in portraiture has taken the sting out of the caricature—at least insofar as it concerns portraiture. Another explanation

for the defanging of the caricature’s effectiveness is its rise to the status of art form: “Caricature has paid for its elevation in rank by losing its aggressiveness. ­Today in caricature—­t his enfant terrible of art—we see the farce of its denunciation and the penetration of its distorting grimace weakened by the vari­ous movements of modern art.”2 A politico-­historical dialectic accompanies this aesthetic dialectic. With the establishment of freedom of the press, the caricature seems to lose its explosive brisance: the image’s capacity to be used as a weapon.3 In the place of attacking jokes and satirical drawings, which in modernity became a popu­lar means of po­liti­cal criticism and the exposure of public personalities triggered by the advancement in techniques for reproduction in picture prints and journals, t­ oday other satiric picture genres have emerged: on one hand, parodic cartoons that poke fun at fashions, opinion, and the habits and quirks of an individual social group or type and, on the other, the practice of taboo-­breaking by means of an over-­the-­top violation of norms. ­Today, heightened attention is primarily paid to t­ hose caricatures that breach taboos on religious motifs, dogmas, or authorities that therefore have become the center of public controversy, even if they are by no means dominant in quantitative terms.4 The vehemence with which such publications are fought over is not only rooted in content and the tendency t­ oward blasphemous or “desecrating” repre­sen­ta­tions of religious symbols or cultic figures like Jesus, Muhammad, and the pope, each of which touches upon extremely dif­fer­ent norms of piety and sensitivities. Their dissemination through mass media also touches on the highly sensitive valuation of pictorial re/pre­sen­ta­tion in general, which varies significantly between dif­fer­ ent denominations and also engages the long historical fusion of controversies over both religion and images (Chapter 6.1). The controversy that erupted in 2005 a­ fter the publication of drawings that became known as the Muhammad cartoons or Muhammad caricatures in this way progressed u ­ nder a misleading name. While, however, the caricature (in the proper meaning of the term) first emerged in the seventeenth ­century with the ritrattini carichi (exaggerated portraits) as a pictorial medium intertwined with the development of a secular public sphere, the current religiously colored controversy over images revived aspects of an image-­rhetoric belonging to a tradition that dates back even further. The iconography and pictorial form of the so-­called cartoons controversy refer to the premodern Eu­ro­pean religious wars. They originate in the prehistory Defamatory Images  119

of the caricature as a genre of the modern image, which in contrast is closely linked to the ­career of the physiognomic paradigm. The origin of pictorial satire [Bildsatire]—­leaving aside the occasional comic-­satirical repre­sen­ta­ tions in antiquity—­can actually be found in the defamatory images [Schand-­/ Schmähbilder] from the late M ­ iddle Ages and in the leaflets with which opposing camps fought the confessional war during the Reformation. ­Today, the latter are often referred to as caricatures in the historiography of the genre,5 yet in this case, a modern term is projected back onto premodern image practices. One of the preconditions for t­ hese pamphlets was the media-­ historical revolution unleashed by the invention of the printing press in the ­middle of the fifteenth c­ entury. The printed medium of defamatory pictures was preceded by lesser-­k nown hand-­made genres: the pittura infamante, mural images produced in fourteenth-­century Italian cities (Chapter 4.3 and 5.4), and the Schandbilder, pictorial public defamation of defaulting debtors in fourteenth-­century northern Eu­rope (Chapter  4.3 and 5.5). In terms of the history of the genre, t­ here are two divergent image-­historical trajectories: First, the defamatory images used in religious and social conflicts, in which enemies are degraded and dishonored in effigy or revenge is taken out on a pictorial substitute. Second, ­there is the emergence of distorted portraits as caricatures or perfetta déformità. Their goal was, as Annibale Carracci formulated, “to capture the perfect deformation as to expose that which is essential to a personality.” 6 Very dif­fer­ent concepts of the image are attached to t­ hese two origins, as ­will be shown. Only by looking at the differences in t­ hese two historical signatures of opprobrious images is it pos­si­ble to examine the phenomena and modes in which older, premodern ele­ments in modernity and the pre­sent e­ ither continue to have an effect or return. 1. CO N T R O V E R S Y O V E R I M AG E S , R E L I G I O U S WA R , AND FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

At times, the rapidly escalated conflict surrounding the so-­called Muhammad cartoons assumed features of the kind of culture war in which defenders of opposed and irreconcilable princi­ples face each other as regular combatants: one side v­ iolated religious values and the other the fundamental demo­cratic rights of freedom of the press and of expression. If one side claimed that a series of satirical drawings (published in a paper that was 120  Defamatory Images

other­w ise outside of the scope of international attention)7 has hurt the religious sentiment of millions, the same images became a symbol of freedom of the press par excellence to the other. While one side interpreted the satire as a war on Islam, the other understood the defense of freedom of the press as a defense of the West, a position for which statements like “The West must not bend”8 and “Freedom of expression is non-­negotiable”9 are emblematic. The debates in Eu­rope gave the impression that the conflict was about confronting a backward, unenlightened culture, in which the satirical repre­sen­ta­tion of religious symbols could create a kind of mass hysteria, and a modern, secular society defending their values of freedom. In fact, however, ­t here are remarkable similarities and correspondences between the two camps. The mass indignation and arson attacks on Eu­ro­ pean embassies in some cities in the Near East, which w ­ ere retaliation for the desecration of the prophet by the press in Jyllands-­Posten, suppressed or covered over the fact that Arabic media by no means refrain from the contempt or defamation of Jewish and Christian religious motifs. In the same vein, the empathic plea for absolute freedoms of the press and of expression seems to have forgotten the cases of criminal prosecution of pictorial satires aimed at the pope or Jesus, like the con­temporary incrimination, for example, of Gerhard Haderer’s cartoon The Life of Jesus.10 The object of both sides’ manifestations of outrage remained conceivably abstract. The violation of specific emotions felt concretely by individuals was as much absent from the debate as the specific statements to be defended as freedom of speech, and just as ­little as t­ here was a discussion about the sense and quality of the drawings at issue. The rhe­toric of several Jyllands-­Posten’s defenders, reminiscent of the pathos formulas of Christian confessio,11 was opposed to the mass outrage over the mockery made of Islam as such, and in this way assumed religious features as well: as a confession of dogmas of the West and of democracy. The vehement pleas for freedom of the press frequently fall short of the constitutive contradictions between the protections given to freedom of speech and t­ hose that ensure freedom from violent hostility that are inscribed in the basic laws. On one hand, the United Nations, in its commentary on article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Po­liti­cal Rights concerning “Freedoms of Opinion and Expressions,” unambiguously states that “prohibitions of displays of lack of re­spect for a religion or other belief systems, including blasphemy laws, are incompatible with the Covenant.”12 Defamatory Images  121

This general princi­ple seems to emerge from a literal supernational standpoint, above and beyond any real-­time culture. The text, however, returns to the real world when it immediately mentions an exception obviously intended to draw a line at blasphemy, referring to article 20, paragraph 2, where one reads: “Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or vio­lence ­shall be prohibited by law.”13 This means that, in the United Nations’ view, blasphemous publications are acceptable as long as they do not instigate hostility or discrimination. But who decides where the line must be drawn? And what would a blasphemous image look like when it is deprived of any thorn in the flesh to the attacked ideology, symbol, or authority? The contradictions between freedom of speech and the protection of religious re­spect and personal dignity, which are necessarily full of tension, form the very site where dif­fer­ent cultural traditions clash and produce more and more violent conflicts. The way in which dif­fer­ent national constitutions deal with the relation to both princi­ples is symptomatic for the cultural and religious tradition under­lying and preceding their ­legal system.14 German Basic Law (Grundgesetz, GG), for example, defines significant and impor­ tant “limitations” on freedom of the press and of expression for the protection of privacy and of ­children; § 5 GG and § 130 of the German criminal code (Strafgesetzbuch, StGB), concerning the “Incitement to Hatred,” penalizes publications that “incite hatred against segments of the population or a national, racial or religious group.” Th ­ ere is, however, an exception in § 86 StGB: the so-­called Art Provision for art, science, scholarship, and teaching. According to this exception, derogatory repre­sen­ta­t ions of religious or other symbols, which would be punishable when expressed frankly, are pos­si­ble within the reservation of art. U ­ nder the auspices of the freedom of art, a detachment from the real­ity princi­ple is not only secured but actually demanded; the price for the autonomy of art is the relativization of other­wise valid norms of factual reference and evidence. Conversely, this license implies an expectation that one speaks of sensitive m ­ atters in a dif­ fer­ent, perhaps more subtle (but, in any case, more complex) manner than in plain language. Yet the caricature occupies a paradoxical position regarding this Art Provision not only b ­ ecause it usually amounts to a clear punch line or payoff. For one ­thing, as with irony and satire, their rhe­toric makes it pos­si­ble to depict something in a disfigured or disguised manner and to say what would face an internal or external censor if said “seriously,” and 122  Defamatory Images

their effect feeds precisely off of this mode of expression. However, the caricature occupies a par­tic­u­lar place within the fourth estate. In print media or online newspapers, a distinct section is usually reserved for caricatures and cartoons. The exclusive right of art reigns ­here, yet its critical potential evaporates when this delimited space turns into a playground for the fool’s license—­generating a paradox of the caricature between freedom of the press and the Art Provision. In the wake of the recent global return of religious war to history’s stage, some caricaturists are now trying to turn rubric assigned to their drawings back into a hot zone. Yet to which image-­rhetorical tradition do the drawings in the Jyllands-­ Posten belong? To which genre-­historical index do they refer? The drawing at the center of the controversy—­which makes terrorism an attribute of the head of the prophet by replacing his turban with a bomb—­borrows its visual rhe­toric from the iconographic tradition of portrait-­caricatures (Figure 22). The symbolic character of the drawing, however, is evident by the fact that this head does not caricature a person with individual features but refers rather to the “head” of Islam. Such a fusion of a head and a symbolic attribute is well known from the po­liti­cal iconography of portrait-­caricatures. It is reminiscent of a repre­sen­ta­tion of Bismarck, for example, wherein his head is fused with a spiked helmet and skull, and thus condensed into a “génie de la mort” (Figure 23).15 Or, in another case, a caricature in which his head is composed entirely of or completely overwritten by decrees such as the Anti-­Socialist Laws (Figure 24). In addition, the drawing of Muhammad’s head utilizes the technique of abbreviation (as do most modern caricature portraits)—­reduction of pictorial ele­ments, however, not in the pro­cess of graphic repre­sen­ta­tion but rather as an abbreviation of the visual argumentation.16 It equates Muhammad’s head, as the symbol of Islam, with terrorism and turns it literally into the seat of terroristic vio­lence. This conceivably ­simple pictorial rhe­toric is undercut by another drawing in the Jyllands series: an image of two turbaned villains with swords and contorted f­ aces (Figure 25). Their physiognomic disfigurement is reminiscent of the ways in which ugliness and dev­ilishness w ­ ere equated with evil in Christian iconography, which can be seen in the pictorial satire of religious wars, above all in pamphlets from sixteenth-­century confessional wars. Within the bifurcated space of the drawing, the diabolic figures in the left half are contrasted to a figure arrayed in equally orientalist garb standing Defamatory Images  123

FIGURE 22. ​The head of Islam, defamed as the site of terrorism. Kurt Westergaard, Muhammad cartoon, Jyllands-­Posten (2005). Image credit: http://­www​.­perlentaucher​.­de​

/­cdata​/­K 4​/­T2​/­A 2888​/ ­k w2​.­jpg (accessed March 4, 2014).

upright on the right. The contrast between the left and right image spaces is further reinforced by an archway leading outside that appears ­behind the figure on the right, which opens the room to the daylight and thus to the brighter realm of an enlightened attitude, which is presented ­here as especially serene and tranquil. With an outstretched arm, the right-­hand figure calls a halt to the villains. Only the caption, which comments on the gesture, adds a joke to the scene, which is expected of a caricature: “Easy my friends, when it comes to the point it is only a drawing made by a non believing Dane . . .” ­These words reveal the third figure to be the personification of an enlightened Islam, which corresponds to the Eu­ro­pean dream. But, as 124  Defamatory Images

FIGURE 23. ​Pictorial rhe­toric in the tradition of allegoric caricature: the skull as embodiment of Prus­sia. Edmond Guillaume, Les génies de la mort (1870). Image credit: Gerhard Langemeyer et al., eds., Bild als Waffe: Mittel und Motive der Karikatur in fünf Jahrhunderten (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1984), 125.

FIGURE 24. ​The head of Anti-­Socialist Laws, overwritten with his decrees (caricature of Bismarck). Robert Holoch, Modern Skull Study: The F ­ ather of the First Template for Overthrow (about 1879). Image credit: Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek:

Kultur und Wissen online, https://­w ww​.­deutsche​-­d igitale​-­bibliothek​.­de​/­item​/­6OMVGWI33ON NUC3PMJRMKBQM5VARFNWW (accessed December 31, 2020).

FIGURE 25. ​Scenario of contrasts: sinister villains and the personification of an enlightened position. Franz Füchsel, Muhammad cartoon, Jyllands-­Posten (2005). Image credit: http://­w ww​.­perlentaucher​.­de​/­cdata​/­K 4​/­T2​/­A 2888​/­muhammed ​_­f ranz ​_­f uchsel​ _­jyllands​_ ­posten​_­cartoons​.­jpg (accessed April 25, 2014).

systems theory teaches, such self-­referential irony only functions inside of the same system, not outside. Another drawing from the Jyllands-­Posten series, which employs the setting of a lineup as part of a criminal investigation, pre­sents a group of seven figures with turbans or other similar headgear: two w ­ omen and five men, four of whom are bearded (Figure  26). The characterizations and attributes are used to represent the figures as known types, such as a hippie or pacifist, a h ­ ouse­w ife, ­etc. Its manner of drawing cites the style of con­temporary cartoons whose characters often seem to have sprung from a freak show. The speech b ­ ubble given to the man standing in the foreground (the witness, of whom only his head and shoulders are vis­i­ble, is marked as Eu­ro­pean by his clothes and haircut) says, “Hm, I ­don’t recognize him.” It remains an open question, in image-­rhetorical terms, whom he is attempting to identify, but it is suggested by the caption “Mohammed.” In this regard, Defamatory Images  127

FIGURE 26. ​Muhammad, distorted beyond recognition at a police lineup. Annette Carlsen, Muhammad cartoon, Jyllands-­Posten (2005). Image credit: https://­photos1​.­blogger​.­com​/­blogger​/­4159​/­384​/­1600​/­a nnette​-­carlsen​.­0​.­g if.

the scene can be read as a repre­sen­ta­tion of the idea that the perpetrator cannot be recognized among a group of masked Muslims, or of the inability to distinguish Muhammad in a collection of false prophets. Iconographically, the image stands in the tradition of satirical repre­sen­ta­tions of foreign gods, also known from the history of religious wars. One is reminded of the grotesque heads that can be seen in the print Pagan Gods from the sixteenth ­century (Figure  27), a work by the successful Dalmatian painter Martino Rota, who was in the ser­v ice of Rome and the Habsburgs. At that time, it was the direct, deliberate degradation of the ancient gods in a physiognomically malformed portrait,17 and ­here it is an indirect negation of the prophet: he is disfigured beyond recognition or has become unidentifiable amid the turban-­wearing figures in the lineup. 2 . S C E N E S O F CO N­T E M P O R A R Y I CO N O C L A S M S

Yet when the heated controversy had passed its boiling point, the conflict was enflamed once again when it found a sequel in Berlin—­one that added yet another variant to the history of pictorial satire. In 2006, Hans Neuenfels added an epilogue to his production of Mozart’s Idomeneo at the Deutsche 128  Defamatory Images

FIGURE 27. ​Disparagement of foreign gods. Martino Rota, Pagan Gods (sixteenth ­century). Image credit: Gerhard Langemeyer et al., eds., Bild als Waffe: Mittel und Motive der Karikatur in fünf Jahrhunderten (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1984), 95.

Oper, in which he brought an execution of sacred figures in effigy to the stage. Mozart’s drama in m ­ usic Idomeneo, re di Creta (1781) recasts the biblical sacrifice of Isaac—in which God rescinded the sacrifice demanded of Abraham at the last minute—in a mythical ancient setting. H ­ ere, Poseidon—­who rescued the Cretan king from a storm during his return from the Trojan War—­demands in return the pledged h ­ uman sacrifice, although the agreed-­upon mode of choice met Idomeneus’s son, of all ­people. Yet in the end, Poseidon forgoes the execution on the condition that the Cretan king renounces his throne. This resolution is similar to other eighteenth-­century operas that thematize the myth of ­human sacrifice but end happily ­because the gods revoke the demand for sacrifice, as in the Iphigénie operas by Gluck. With his epilogue, Neuenfels’s staging added an iconoclastic conclusion to Mozart’s drama of unequal strug­gle between divine power and princely sovereignty. The gods are fi­nally defeated when the director lets the hero (stricken down by the ancient gods’ power) drag Poseidon’s bloody head onto the stage—as well as the severed heads of the found­ers of three religions: Muhammad, Jesus, and the Bud­dha. Although the vio­lence carried out against the heads of the three religions in effigy took place this time on an opera stage—­whose space is clearly defined as a space for art—­t he e­ arlier escalation of vio­lence that had occurred in the conflict over the image of Muhammad caused the production’s cancellation a­ fter Berlin’s Office of Criminal Investigation assessed it as an increased security risk and warned the director. The ensuing debate then focused more on this decision (considered mostly unfortunate) than it did on the opera and its production. Neuenfels wanted the scene to be understood as a radical act of liberation from any and all religious rule. Yet the dramaturgical effect of the epilogue, with its lurid proclamation of an antireligious disposition, literally slays the more subtle ways of addressing both the sacrificial cult and the world of the gods within the medium of operatic art—­which in no way led to a clear message in Mozart’s work. The iconoclastic per­for­mance of the epilogue cites a practice well known in the history of religion, particularly from the ­battle against idols or the combat against sacred figures and icons from foreign religions. The Taliban’s destruction of statues of the Bud­dha in 2001 was one of the most spectacular acts of this type in recent history. As incomparable as the real iconoclastic vio­lence and the staged decapitation of the religious leaders in the artistic sphere are, they produce similar 130  Defamatory Images

image-­political effects—­a typical paradox of iconoclasm. In the mountains of Af­ghan­i­stan and on an opera stage in Berlin, idols, the images of gods, ­were destroyed, and tremendously power­f ul images w ­ ere si­mul­ta­neously produced. Iconoclastic acts can be certain of garnering media attention ­because of this doubled imagistic power. Images re/presenting iconoclasm turn into globally circulated icons that become just as power­f ul as the images of the saints and idols that are destroyed in the pro­cess. In both settings—­Bamiyan and the Berlin opera stage—­a remarkable exchange of images between religion and art took place. While in Eu­rope one lamented the destruction of the statues of Bud­dha as the annihilation of artworks and not of religious idols, the stage sacrifice of Muhammad and the other religious heroes was discussed as a critique of religion by means of art. When the destruction or burning of images occurs at a real po­liti­cal site (such as in the case of the Iraq War, when puppets or photo­graphs of then U.S. President George W. Bush w ­ ere burned in many places), t­ hese acts are usually regarded as acts of image magic—­acts that confer a power to ­t hese images that they lost in the course of secularization, profanation, and transformation into art (Chapter 4.3). While the destruction of images is traditionally done in the name of a “true God” or other higher truth, it was done on Neuenfels’s stage in the name of “individual freedom” and “freedom of art”—­t he names of two basic rights that in this way assume the role of new gods. The history of the caricature is indeed intertwined with this kind of history of the freedom of the press and freedom of art. In his studies on the caricature, Ernst Gombrich observes the rise of ­these concepts as “divine idealized abstractions,”18 ­because po­liti­cal caricatures of the nineteenth ­century, in which and with which the b ­ attle over freedom of the press was fought, w ­ ere often depicted as “mythic personifications.” In Honoré Daumier’s prints and other caricatures of the time, freedom of the press is often portrayed as an allegorical personification: as antagonists of t­ hose figures or personalities that represent or symbolize the state and its ruling powers. The image-­t heoretical and religious-­cultural constellation, in which the current image conflicts over caricatures and defamatory cartoons are carried out, can in no way be described as a ­simple opposition: on one side, the prohibition of images and iconoclasm based on the idea of a power of images that goes far beyond s­ imple repre­sen­ta­tion; on the other, a medial flood of images and a freedom of the press in which the power of images Defamatory Images  131

dis­appears due to their sheer quantity. Not only is the reawakening of religious conflict accompanied by the return of older, partly cultic imagistic practices; the genre of pictorial satire and caricature also conveys from its history quite dif­fer­ent functions of re/pre­sen­ta­tion that are connected to the picture or portrait of a person: between the extreme conceptions of the double and allegory. In this re­spect, the ­Middle East and Europe—­East and West, Islam and secularized Christian cultures—­a re not clearly distinct camps t­ oday. To the degree that the idea of an adversary is constitutive of pictorial satire, an echo of the adversary’s image is also at play in the politics of caricature—in the respective concrete motif of the image, as well as in the concept of the image itself. To modify an observation from Heinrich Heine’s Lutetia—­“The thunder of the cannons of Beirut is re-­echoed in the hearts of all Frenchmen”—­one could ­today speak of an echo of the Eu­ro­ pean press in the bombs in Beirut and, conversely, an echo of the bombs in Af­ghan­i­stan on theater stages in Eu­ro­pean capitals.19 As in the case of decapitation in effigie in Berlin, ­these also herald the return of aggressive forms of premodern image-­politics. 3 . I M AG E M AG I C , J O K E S , A N D C A R I C AT U R E S : P S YC H O A N A LY T I C A N D A N T H R O P O LO G I C A L I N T E R P R E TAT I O N S

Ever since Austrian art historian Ernst Kris, coeditor of the journal Imago, gave a lecture on the psy­chol­ogy of caricatures at the 1934 International Psychoanalytical Congress in Lucerne, the caricature has been connected to the spell of images and magical thinking. He was also the one who drew attention to the fact that one of the roots of the modern caricature reaches back to the Schandbilder, “to the insulting and derisive repre­sen­ta­tions with which punishment w ­ ere carried out (in the real sense in effigie) when the culprit had put himself beyond their reach.”20 In his work, Kris places the caricature in the lineage of magical thinking, but he sees it at its height only when the assault on one’s adversary in an imagistic medium takes place no longer ­under the sway of magical thinking—­even if this practice had inherited the very idea of a directed aggression enacted through images. For while it is true that the method of action is changed, the intention remains unchanged; the action is performed in relation to an image which is regarded as identical to the person it represents. But where 132  Defamatory Images

caricature is concerned, this belief no longer holds good in consciousness or in the preconscious. Caricature indeed also tries to produce an effect, not, however, “on” the person caricatured, but on the spectator, who is influenced to accomplish a par­tic­u ­lar effort of imagination.21 In his interpretation, two aspects of the caricature’s distance from pictorial magic are significant. On one hand, the caricature, even as it stands in the lineage of images’ spell, addresses its aggression in effigy (at the image of an opponent, an authority, or a politician) to a modern public or­ga­nized as an audience. On the other, it involves an altered relationship between the person re/presented and the i­magined actions. The caricature no longer assumes that the image is the person it depicts. Kris emphasizes ­here the character of aggression in images that comes with the knowledge that it is a symbolic act and not a magical one, which would still believe in the immediacy of the image act and the identity between image and its subject.22 With reference to Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s theory of symbols, one could characterize the aggression in the caricature directed at the image of a person as a m ­ iddle position between a mythical attitude or a “believing personification” (in which “image and interpretation are confounded”) and an enlightened attitude; Vischer captures this m ­ iddle position in the striking formulation “poetic 23 faith.” For Ernst Kris, psychoanalysis comes into play at this point in order to discuss such an attitude with regard to the caricature’s psychic work: Adult comic invention, and certainly the comic in its tendentious forms, helps in obtaining mastery over affects, over libidinal and aggressive tendencies warded off by the superego; the ego acting in the ser­v ice of the plea­sure princi­ple is able to elude them by taking the path of the comic expression. The instinctual trends of the id are given their way, but this does not mean that they are gratified in their true and original form. Instead of a direct action, we have a reproduction, the half-­measures characteristic of the comic.* ­ ere, Kris analyzes the caricature in the narrow sense, as a redirection of H aggressive affects into the comic—­t hat is, as a pictorial practice motivated * ​“Instinctual trends” refers to the German word Triebregung; ­today, this term is generally translated as “drive” in order to distinguish Freud’s concept of Trieb from the biological Instinkt. Kris, “Psy­chol­ogy of Caricature,” 183.

Defamatory Images  133

by the unconscious and that cites the image-­magical ele­ments from previous visual cultures yet is enlightened in its procedure and intending a psychological response of the viewer. The image-­t heoretical consequences of his analy­sis are remarkable. While at the level of magical thinking, the “traits of the picture” are of a lesser importance, the caricature depends on resemblance as the fundamental requirement and the presupposition of its social function: the “distorted reproduction of a recognizable likeness.”24 Kris thus emphasizes the difference in image perception between early Schandbilder and the modern caricature, yet his observations have often been taken up in the research lit­er­a­ture in an abbreviated form—­namely, as a theory of the caricature’s image magic—­interpreting the caricature as an executio in effigie: “Like the ­legal practice of the executio in effigie, in which the fugitive criminal was vicariously executed, by hanging his effigy on the gallows for example, the caricature also makes a symbolic execution: it kills with ridicule.”25 But the relation between executio in effigie and Schand­ bilder is not that smooth, as w ­ ill be discussed in the next section. Kris’s interpretation is based on Freudian psychoanalysis, from whose perspective “the formation of all art and symbols, pre-­conscious or unconscious, . . . ​comes from the cult and ritual that permeates ­human life.” One of the most impor­tant achievements of Kris’s contribution is the elaboration of Freud’s concise remarks on the caricature in his work on jokes. Before addressing Kris’s analy­sis, however, it is necessary to address Sigmund Freud himself. In his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) (in which Freud regards joke-­work with analogy to dream-­work), t­ here is a relatively short passage on the caricature in a section on the va­ri­e­ties of the comic: “Caricature, parody and travesty (as well as their practical counterpart, unmasking) are directed against ­people and objects which lay claim to authority and re­spect, which are in some sense sublime.’ They are procedures for Herabsetzung (degradation), as the apt German expression has it.”26 Based on an eco­nom­ical approach to psychic energy, Freud thus interprets the caricature as a conservation of the additional expenditure required by the sublime—­namely, the par­tic­u­lar expenditure of the means of expression like voice, gesture, facial expression, and posture. If the sublime is instead treated as ordinary, this creates a “difference in expenditure which can be discharged by laughter.” In this pro­cess of degradation, Freud emphasizes the isolation of a single feature “that is comic in itself”; only thereby w ­ ill the humor, which is overlooked in the general picture, be made vis­i­ble and the 134  Defamatory Images

comic effect achieved. And he adds that when such a trait is missing in real­ity, the caricature creates it “by exaggerating a trait that is not comic in itself,” without this “falsification of real­ity” interfering with the effect.27 In this context, Freud discusses vari­ous forms of the comic. While he regards the caricature as a form related to the joke, he distinguishes it from travesty and parody in terms of the specific methods of degradation and not by the “production of comic plea­sure.” In further reflections on the comic, in which he addresses the infantile roots of the comic (with reference to Henri Bergson’s Le Rire, 1900), Freud comes back once again to the caricature—as an exaggeration. He discusses the comic plea­sure that arises by means of a comparative eye from the perception of a comic difference. He offers a typology of dif­fer­ent types of comparisons: (a) comparison between the other and the I/self, (b) comparison entirely within the other, (c) and comparison entirely within the I/self. The caricature falls u ­ nder (b) in that it concerns comic effects that take the other as their object. In this way, he sees the caricature as the case for which “the introduction of the infantile point of view proves most useful.”28 Exaggeration, which still gives plea­sure to adults in so far as it can find justification with their critical faculty, is connected with the child’s peculiar lack of a sense of proportion, his ignorance of all quantitative relations, which he comes to know l­ater than qualitative ones. . . . ​The relation of c­ hildren to adults is also the basis of the comic of degradation, which corresponds to the condescension shown by adults in their attitude to the life of ­children. . . . ​This relief, which gives the child pure plea­sure, becomes in adults, in the form of degradation, a means of making ­t hings comic and a source of comic plea­sure.29 For Freud, the caricature is thus a means of degradation whose comic effect is directed against authority. Its psychic energy springs from infantile plea­sure, operates according to the law of saving expenditure [Aufwandsersparnis], and is released in laughter. Following Freud’s approach to caricature as part of his psychoanalytic theory of jokes and comedy, Ernst Kris investigates the source of the plea­ sure gain from the caricature. To this end, he investigates the caricature’s relation to the dream-­work and the joke. In analogy to Freud’s theory of the “dream-­work,” he speaks of a “caricature-­work,” b ­ ecause the language of Defamatory Images  135

the caricature, like that of the dream, is a product of the primary pro­cess of the psyche. The analogy to the joke, however, is expressed in the succinct formulation that the caricature is “the graphic form of wit” and talks of “the hieroglyphical nature of caricature.”30 It “returns to typical ele­ments in the graphic forms of expression (drawing) of the child” (Chapter 1.3).31 Similar to Kris, Georg Simmel, in his short essay “On the Caricature” (1917, published in the journal Der Tag), suggests that the caricature can be traced back to an anthropological penchant to boundary crossing and exaggeration—­ “the ­human is a born transgresser”—­a penchant particularly pronounced in ­children, dreams, and Indigenous p ­ eoples. Unlike Kris, however, Simmel considers the caricature a distinctly intentional exaggeration executed consciously and with purposiveness.32 An additional remarkable facet of Kris’s analy­sis is his reflection on the temporal index of caricatures—on their historical “durability.” Just as the per­for­mances of comic expression age very quickly, older caricatures ­will become obscure, if not enigmatic, to us. Yet in the same way that caricatures become incomprehensible, their pictographic character emerges: “We are impelled to resolve connections and allusions by guesswork; the caricature has changed into a rebus.”33 ­Because caricatures always address their contemporaries, they are only perfectly understandable in their own pre­sent. For this reason, he positions the image-­theoretical character of older caricatures in close proximity to allegory; even their symbolic meaning becomes unrecognizable when the key to their meaning is forgotten. ­These reflections on the caricature’s effective aesthetics, which are tied to a specific time, illuminate the above-­discussed aesthetic-­historical dialectic of the genre once more from another perspective. The less the content of the caricature’s allusion is disclosed to us directly—in a flash, as in a joke—­the more strongly the formal aspects come to the fore. In this way, the caricature only becomes art when it is cold or stale—­and is then incorporated into art history and rendered in­effec­tive. Kris’s reference to caricatures’ time-­boundedness can explain why historical caricatures (or cartoons from other countries that make fun of customs in their own culture) often leave us cold. Pictorial satire is only hot when it is part of an ongoing conflict that concerns us. In the vein of Freud and Kris, and in par­tic­u ­lar following the perspective of an art historian conversant in Freudian psychoanalysis and cultural-­ historical contexts, one could conclude that pictorial satire is a product of the interaction between plea­sure and censorship, of affects and their social 136  Defamatory Images

domestication, of aggression and commandment not to kill. In this way, pictorial satire—­the course of its outlet into the comic and the diversion of aggressive affects to one’s rival’s image—­plays a cunning game with the image as a double: while knowing that it is “merely” an image, it operates with the suggestion that the image is the person it depicts. In this light, the cooling-­off of historical caricatures is a result not only of temporal distance from the occasion, constellation, and motif of the drawing but also of the fact that this suggestion only has an effect if the depicted person exists, if he or she—­still—­lives. Only then does the idea that affecting the image is a means with which to affect the person themselves become effective—­ however simulated this may be. In the case of caricatures whose subject ­matter is holy or sacred symbols, ­these presuppositions are not given, ­unless one belongs to the community of faith that worships them as cult images, thus giving them an iconic presence (Chapter 6). Without this presupposition, all that remains is pure defamation. Holy and religious authorities live on in the image, so to speak (in their followers’ understanding); the satirical citation thus transforms their images into ordinary likenesses, and in this way profanes them. Instead of the caricature’s play with dif­fer­ent concepts of the image (which shows the genre at the height of its subtle economy), sheer disparagement of the sacred sublime takes place—­which is why such satires appertain an infantile trait. Yet from the perspective of cultural history, how did the relation between defamation and caricature arise? 4 . E X E C U T I O I N E F F I G I E , O R T H E C A R I C AT U R E ’S T W O B O D I E S

As mentioned above, the caricature is often described as a “symbolic execution” that kills through ridiculousness—in which, however, it is obvious that “death by ridicule” is a meta­phoric statement. The ­matter becomes more complicated, however, when the caricature is compared to the ­legal practice of executio in effigie, in which the fugitive criminal was vicariously executed, for example, by hanging his effigy on the gallows. Are ­t here, in fact, any similarities between this ­legal practice and vio­lence against the image of a person in a caricature? While the previous chapter addressed effigies in terms of their vari­ous representative functions, it is now necessary to discuss the dif­fer­ent forms of aggression that make use of images in distinct ways. In order to probe Defamatory Images  137

the popu­lar characterization of the caricature as a form of executio in effigie, the image-­concepts operative in both practices need to be analyzed. It is not sufficient simply to compare the substitutional practice of hanging the image and the satirically distorted depiction of a person. In addition, the images of an executio in effigie handed down through late medieval Schand­ bilder, in which an opponent is depicted hanging from the gallows, must be taken into account. ­These are pictorial re/pre­sen­ta­tions of a hanging, not the hanging of an image. And fi­nally, the destruction of images of the gods, graven images, or other idols belongs to the register of an execution of an image as well. We are therefore dealing with at least four dif­fer­ent acts of vio­lence in effigy: (1) the iconoclastic execution of an idol or graven image, (2) the execution of an image instead of the person (in the practice of torturesome punishment—­executio in effigie), (3) the repre­sen­ta­tion of an execution in an image (Schandbild), and (4) symbolic execution through a defamatory or distorting likeness. ­There is still a need for further differentiation; it concerns the corpus of medieval Schandbilder, which (considering the historical development of the genre) is one of the roots of pictorial satire. The corpus includes the municipal image policy of public defamation (pittura infamante), the custom of the dishonoring depiction of defaulting debtors ­under private law (Scheltbriefe and Schmähbilder), and printed pamphlets with monstrous, degrading likenesses of one’s antagonists—­chiefly the pope and Luther—in the context of confessional war. It is therefore necessary to draw a distinction between the image as dishonoring or accusation and the image as weapon against one’s adversary. The former emerged from late medieval forms of public policy of dishonor (Lat. diffamatio) as a means of the town government or extrajudicial conflict resolution, sanctioned by the laws of debt and obligations.34 The latter, however, are the product of the religious conflicts during the Reformation. Pictorial defamation practice has been attested to since the f­ourteenth ­century: the pittura infamante in Italy and the Schandbilder in Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Bohemia, and Moravia,35 and the pictorial satire of sixteenth-­century religious image war (which are often considered the first caricatures in the research lit­er­a­t ure). Given their history, they can rather be seen as a kind of confessional-­political complement to previous image practices concerning politics of honor and money. The genesis of pictorial satire and caricature thus has less to do with executio in effigie 138  Defamatory Images

than with a pictorial attack and an ­imagined, depicted punishment—in other words, an aggression by means of images that re/present a rival in an opprobrious way. Many of ­these images pre­sent their antagonists hanging from the gallows (Figure 28), often upside down (Figure 29), or show them as the object of torturesome punishments as they are broken upon the wheel or quartered (Figure 30). The pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion of a hanging is, however, not an executio in effigie; it differs from this penal practice in both l­egal and image-­political terms. While executio in effigie is a regular part of governmental, absolutist criminal justice,36 the Schandbilder used in an ­earlier period are, from the ­legal perspective, pre-­judicial and extrajudicial practices accepted by private law.37 The Italian equivalent of the pittura infamante is an instrument of power politics used by city governments against their enemies. When depicting an opponent’s torturesome punishment, the physical vio­lence remains imaginary, even while the person’s dishonoring is socially effective. The image is the product of a fantasy of vio­lence that acts as a threatening gesture, an assault on honor, and the destruction of the social persona. In the acts of dishonor and vilification in images, the wish for a rival’s punishment can be vented. In this re­spect, Schmähbilder are indeed related to the psychoanalytic economy of caricatures. Analogous to the dream, they can be characterized as re/pre­sen­ta­tions of an aggressive wish in a fulfilled form.38 Instead of turning to executio in effigie, a completely dif­fer­ent kind of comparison can be drawn from the cultural-­historical complex of effigies. Taking aim at the body of the depicted person, Schmähbilder actually aim at their honor. It is precisely in this structure that modern physiognomic caricature inherits the premodern pictorial defamation practice: by re/presenting the personal body of a par­tic­u­lar personage in a disfigured or distorted manner, they aim to target their po­liti­cal body. The po­liti­cal caricature in par­tic­u­lar (as it has developed since the eigh­teenth c­ entury) operates in the posthistory of the two-­body conception. The king himself, however, did not become the object of pictorial satire ­until absolutist power was fading. From a historical perspective, the modern caricature receives the inheritance of the monarch’s doubled body, the po­liti­cal theology of the “king’s two bodies” to which the image-­political practice of the caricature’s two bodies corresponds. First, however, let us more closely examine the imagistic practice of Schandbilder. Defamatory Images  139

FIGURE 28. ​Hanging of the adversary in effigy. Leonardo da Vinci, Hanging of Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli (1479). Image credit: Samuel Y. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Re­nais­sance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 107.

FIGURE 29. ​Headfirst hanging: pittura infamante as anatomical study. Andrea del Sarto, Hanged Man (1530), Uffizi, Florence. Image credit: Samuel Y. Edgerton,

Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Re­nais­sance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 115.

FIGURE 30. ​Assault on the adversary’s honor: torturesome punishment in effigy. Schandbild of Bernhart von Wauer against Johann Breyde (1464). Image credit:

Matthias Lentz, Konflikt, Ehre, Ordnung: Untersuchung zu den Schmäbriefen und Schandbildern des späten Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (ca. 1350 bis 1600) (Hannover, Germany: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2004), 200f.

5 . S C H A N D B I L D E R : S U B S T I T U T I O N A L AT TAC K S O N A N A D V E R S A R Y I N I M AG E S

Both forms of pictorial defamations (the pittura infamante and Schandbilder) are practices based on the public exhibitions of images: ­either painting government and administration buildings’ walls39 in Florentine public city spaces or affixing text and image to public buildings like town halls, church doors, and bordellos during trade fairs or meetings of the Reichs­ tage40—an image practice of public pillory beyond the stake. Initially used by the “petty nobility, it was also undertaken by Counts and Princes and quickly a­ dopted by money-­lending citizens.” 41 The texts accompanying Schandbilder (in which the cause and course of the dispute up to that point is elucidated) address themselves almost formulaically to the “princes, counts, lords, knights,” and the everyman. The Schandbilder thus operate in a premodern public sphere where both plaintiffs and addressees belong to the same community. The complaint is not lodged with an institutional authority but rather with the community, which embodies the agency of righ­teousness. In this type of accusation, a true (yet in no way extant) righ­teousness is assumed as a generally valid norm in order to be able to denounce the breach of agreement of a contractual partner, who was then transformed into an adversary. Popu­lar variants to the dishonoring Schmähbilder w ­ ere attacks on the “honor of the h ­ ouse” by, for instance, “attaching ignominious symbols on the ­house door, defouling the ­house door, affixing a ‘declaration of enmity.’ ” 42 In contrast to the modern concept of the civic or bourgeois public, this public sphere is constituted as a community neither through communication nor by opposing it to the private sphere.43 It is understood, rather, as a community in which a precondition for participation in social and economic life is to be recognized morally: a community of honorable citizens with re­spect for the sanctity of contracts and who are addressed as a kind of moral court. H ­ ere, the valid currency is good repute, a good name, and righ­teousness. Armed with Schandbilder as means of exerting pressure to abide by the contract compliance in the credit system, the creditor changes the currency: from debts to “loyalty and honor.” Despite their public nature, the majority of Schandbilder ­were produced before the invention of the printing press and thus belong to the time before art in its age of technical reproducibility. The examples that have been Defamatory Images  143

handed down—­Matthias Lentz’s Illustrated Cata­log of Tradition contains two hundred examples—­are mostly colored pen or watercolor and ink drawings by an unknown artist, as well as some woodcuts. In addition to the mechanical reproduction of woodcuts, which had been common since the fifteenth ­century, the genre of Schandbilder tended t­ oward mass production and also used more rudimentary methods of replication, such as using a stamp to print a figure on a sheet of paper, the size of which ranged from around 8 × 6 inches to 16 × 12 inches, and sometimes larger. If the victims of Schandbilder ­were to tear down the offending sheets, the pictures could easily be replaced, the stamps enabling easy duplication. Such typification in the figures was pos­si­ble ­because the genre was based not on resemblance and recognizability of the person (the accompanying text identified the subject of the indictment) but rather on an assault on their honor, which was represented in the image by their name and heraldic sign. In the case of the pittura infamante, it is unclear what, precisely, they looked like, ­because they are only relayed to us through written reports and a few sketches made by paint­ers. But it is unlikely that the surviving pages from Leonardo da Vinci (Figure 28) and Andrea del Sarto (Figure 29), which seem more like anatomical studies, are typical examples. In contrast to ­t hese sketches (which Samuel Y. Edgerton situates on the threshold of art), Schandbilder appear naive in terms of their craftsmanship.44 They are mostly s­ imple depictions of drastic, grobian scenes one may think of as a pictorial rhe­toric of curse. In addition to the concretized aggressive wish fantasies pre­sent in an image depicting the punishment of one’s opponent, ­there are numerous scenes of speaking images. Schandbilder develop a kind of idiomatic iconography in which figures of speech are illustrated as scenes of actions or deeds. ­These often refer to the central object of the conflict: the contractual word of honor, certified by guarantors with a seal or signet bearing their heraldic sign. Repeatedly, and with ­little variation, the scene of a “sow r­ ide” crops up in which the symbolic devaluation of the seal (that materially has actually already occurred through a failure to repay) is depicted by showing the guarantors as they, riding backward on a sow or donkey, impress their seal on the animal’s hindquarters (Figure 31). It is this iconography, from which a specific anti-Semitic pictorial rhe­toric has emerged, the “Jewish pig” (Judensau). The defamatory image practices discussed ­here shed light on the genesis of this rhe­toric discrimination of Jews that occurred in the context of the evolving credit 144  Defamatory Images

FIGURE 31. ​Idiomatic defamatory iconography: sow ­ride as devaluation of the heraldic seal. Schandbild of Johann von Oppershausen against Kurfürst Joachim II, Elector of Brandenburg (1550). Image credit: Matthias Lentz, Konflikt, Ehre, Ordnung:

Untersuchung zu den Schmäbriefen und Schandbildern des späten Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (ca. 1350 bis 1600) (Hannover, Germany: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2004), 288.

system, in which the Jews occupied a paradoxical position (of social exclusion, on one side, and the privilege to take interest, on the other): as a visual-­ rhetorical fusion of the phrase of the “seal of Judas”—­a meta­phor for the betrayal of a word of honor (“the deal is sealed”)—­and the scene of a pig ride—­which serves as a defilement of insignia of repre­sen­ta­tion. 6 . P O­L I T I­C A L T H E O LO G Y O F P I C TO R I A L S AT I R E

The pamphlets from the confessional war refer to the idiomatic visual rhe­toric and drastic iconography of the Schmähbilder.45 ­Here, however, the pictorial degradation of an adversary is the explicit aim and not a means to an end. In the “woodcut press campaign [Bilderpressefeldzug],” 46 pictures in which the opponent is literally transformed into the devil are deployed not as means of exerting pressure but rather as mediums for propaganda. When the character of a feud in the historical constellation shifts from the practice ­under the law of obligations to the confessional Defamatory Images  145

battlefield, the debtor [Schuldner] is replaced by somebody guilty [Schul­ diger] in the theological sense—­g uilty before God. It is not a breach of contract that is decried but rather a “false” theological authority. Unlike in financial disputes, moral authority and the public diverge h ­ ere, b ­ ecause the strug­g le over religious truth (whose final authority is not founded in this world) is conducted as a fight for discipleship. In this re­spect, t­ hese pamphlets reflect premodern forms of a popu­lar mass medium and a prebourgeois public sphere.47 The pictorial satires from this religio-­historical context also stand out due to their grobian style. In t­ hese images, the caricature’s “redirection into the comic” outlined above had not yet been developed. As with Schandbilder, ­these pamphlets also made use of speaking images: the pope and Luther (or their respective followers) are, for example, re/presented as hydras with seven heads, with the devil down their necks, as a dragon or fool in extreme ugliness, or in monstrous or disfigured form (Figures 32 and 33). One of the well-­k nown means of humiliation was to equate an opponent with animals (particularly with animals considered unclean, like pigs) or, as in the Inquisition, to pull animal masks over so-­called heretics’ heads. Since in the war of images between the pope and Luther both, as each other’s opponent, ­were denounced as the Antichrist, the animalistic traits of monstrous figures w ­ ere distinctly endowed with dev­ilish features—­the unholy thus superimposed on the animalistic and impure. The cultural-­historical background for this lay in the con­temporary belief in miracles and the widespread culture of divination, in which accounts of monsters and deformities, accompanied by impressive pictures, ­were interpreted as bad omens of coming disaster. Thus the report of the appearance of a “ghastly chimera said to have been thrown ashore by the Tiber in 1495” and the account of a cow birthing a monstrosity in Saxony in 1523, for example, “could become,” according to Aby Warburg, “a po­liti­cal interpretation that made them into an assault weapon of unrestrained coarseness.” 48 ­These two sensations w ­ ere the bases for the famous caricatures of The Pope-­ Donkey of Rome (Figure 34) and “Luther as monk’s calf,” which ­were republished and modified many times over a long period of time. In this context, too, aggressive affects can veer into fantasies of concrete vio­lence, when an image depicts the opponent hanged at the gallows, for example—as we see in a 1545 sheet from the Cranach workshop, in which the pope and three cardinals are hung together at the gallows while their 146  Defamatory Images

FIGURE 32. ​The image as weapon in confessional war: Luther as seven-­headed hydra. Hans Brosamer, Seven-­Headed Martin Luther (1529), Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Germany. Image credit: Herbert Päge, Karikaturen in der

Zeitung: Engagierter Bildjournalismus oder opportunistisches Schmuckelement? (Aachen, Germany: Shaker Media, 2007), 38.

FIGURE 33. ​The devil in the neck and in the ear. Eduard Schoen, Devil Playing the Bagpipes (about 1535), Landesmuseum Gotha, Germany. Image credit: Hans Belting, Das echte Bild: Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen (Munich: Beck, 2005), 199.

FIGURE 34. ​Belief in miracles and religious war: the pope as chimera. Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Pope-­Donkey of Rome (1523). Image credit: Matthew J. C. Hodgart, Satire: Origin and Princi­ples (New Brunswick, N.J.: Routledge, 2010), 25.

souls are hauled away by small monsters that hover over the scene (Figure 35). Or when debasement and the desire to subjugate one’s opponent are portrayed literally and bodily, as they are in a 1521 woodcut in a pamphlet titled Luther’s Triumph over Murner. ­Here, one sees the figure of Luther standing upright and elevated “like a pillar of indomitability above the dragon” laying on the ground and representing his antagonist—­a pose citing the ancient Roman poses of triumph and defeat.49 When the languishing figure is portrayed as a dragon or snake, the picture also draws on the Christian iconography of a b ­ attle with a dragon. Not only is the victor of this strug­g le triumphant in b ­ attle, but in victory he also vanquishes evil from the world. In this way, the defamation of an adversary is combined with the (self-)exaltation of one’s own side in the confessional war, embodied by their respective representative. The images of the bodies of the pope and Luther thus became the contested objects in the confessional image war. Defamatory Images  149

FIGURE 35. ​Imag(in)ing vio­lence: hanging of the pope in effigy. Cranach’s workshop, The Pope and the Cardinals on the Gallows (1545). Image credit: Gerhard

Langemeyer et al., eds., Bild als Waffe: Mittel und Motive der Karikatur in fünf Jahrhunderten (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1984), 201f.

Mocking another religion or degrading and desecrating foreign gods is one of the oldest tactics deployed during religious controversies. Among the earliest known pictorial satires is a second-­century anti-­Christian caricature, Alexamenos Worships His God, discovered carved into a wall at the imperial palace during excavations in Rome (Figure 36). The critique of the worship of

FIGURE 36. ​Roman primal scene of a pictorial satire in religious strug­gles. Anonymous graffito, Alexamenos Worships His God (second c­ entury), Palatine in Rome. Image credit: Michele George, ed., Roman Slavery and Roman Material Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), fig. 3.2.

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cult images ­here already makes itself use of an image; the fight against idolatry is waged with an image. Since the Son of God is portrayed as a donkey hanging on the cross, both the Christian and the cult figure worshipped by him as divine are mocked equally. The iconography of one of the earliest pictorial satires thus already utilizes the visual arsenal of the interplay between religious and image war that can still be observed in the current conflict over caricatures. During the confessional war, however, which concerned a schism internal to Chris­tian­ity itself, the object of mockery shifts. An earthly authority claiming to represent the true interpretation of Christian theology takes the place of the cult figure and its followers. ­Here, it is not a foreign god but its secular representative that is pilloried with his own image. At the same time, this brings another model of repre­sen­ta­tion into play. In the pope’s case, not only is his person attacked but also his claim to be the earthly representative of Christ. Similar to the doctrine of the king’s two bodies, the structure of the papacy (which is embodied in a mortal and represented by a single individual ­until his death) is conceived of as an institution as eternal and immortal.50 This model of repre­sen­ta­tion, evinced by the “pope’s two bodies,” may explain why Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation from his office in 2013 caused such confusion. As the new Pope Francis took office, should one have assumed the existence of three—or even four—­bodies of the pope? This question is especially evident in images of encounters between the two popes, in which both wear identical robes. Unlike in the case of Schandbilder, which bring shame to the debtor represented in the image, the attack on the image of the pope’s body is an assault on the papacy and on the institution of the Catholic Church. In Luther, we are confronted with a somewhat dif­fer­ent proxyship; he is the representative of a movement, one that, however, claims a superworldly relevance. Its claim for an extrahistorical legitimacy is not least attested by con­temporary astrological writings and images in which prophecy of world-­historical events blends with the controversy on Luther’s nativity: in the association of the flood prophecy in 1524 (­under the sign of a calculated coincidence of Saturn and Jupiter, the product of a “crass fear of planetary influence”) with the dispute over Luther’s birth year, which became a weapon in the confessional war.* In his * ​Warburg, “Pagan-­Antique Prophecy,” 617 (translation modified). Warburg, in keeping with the idiom of many con­temporary sources, always writes Sündflut (in En­glish, “sin flood”) instead of Sintflut (“deluge”), thus repeating the popu­lar etymological

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person, a new age announced itself. Through the enemy-­constellation, in which Luther appears as the antipode to the pope, Luther’s representative power neared that of the pope. As a mortal h ­ uman, he embodied the new po­liti­cal theology of Protestantism. The caricatures from the age of Reformation can be regarded as negative counterimages to the king’s effigy. ­Here, the central image-­political structure that has become especially influential for the modern caricature is formed: namely, to attack the institutional body (theological or po­liti­cal) through the deformed image of the personal body of the pictured individual. Against this backdrop, the Schandbilder of the sixteenth-­century religious wars must be considered one of the origins of Eu­ro­pean pictorial satire and a prerequisite of the modern caricature. 7 . D I S TO R T E D R E S E M B L A N C E : O N T H E R E L AT I O N B E T W E E N P H YS I O G N O M Y A N D T H E C A R I C AT U R E

The second precondition for the genesis of the modern caricature was the ascent of the physiognomic paradigm within modern science since the sixteenth ­century and the increasing popularity of portraiture. The cartoon portrait stands at the origin of caricatures in the modern sense. They are often described as a kind of intensification of the means of re/pre­sen­ta­tion that is already at play in the portrait. Its inventors w ­ ere “academic artists of high standing,” according to Gombrich. They would have recognized in the course of the development of physiognomics “how ­little the impression of likeness depended on an accurate mapping of the sitter’s features. A few strokes might suffice to catch a characteristic expression and yet transform the man into an animal.”51 In this light, cartoon portrait would “just” be an exaggerated portrait, and its most adequate definition would be Annibale Carracci’s well-­known formulation of the perfetta deformità, already quoted. association with sin (Sünde); but the German Sintflut actually derives from the old high German sinvluot/Germanic sin-­, meaning “always, everywhere, and flood,” according to the Grimms’ dictionary. The Grimms note that, as early as the fifteenth ­century, “a general confusion of forms began, based partly on misunderstanding, partly on arbitrary formation or avoidance, which extended to both components of the word, above all through the reinterpretation of sin/sint-­ into sünd-­and the juxtaposition of -­flut (flood) and -­flusz (river).” Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 10 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991), s.v. “Sintflut.”

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Both the invention of portrait-­caricature and the introduction of the term caricatura (from the Italian caricare, “overload, exaggerate”) are attributed to the Bolognese painter. Similar anecdotes are reported about the second founder of the caricature, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), who, according to his son’s reports, also deformed portraits in jest, but “only in ­t hose places where in nature itself was somehow wrong, and without departing from resemblance to the model . . . ​a lthough one saw that he had noticeably altered and exaggerated a part of it.”52 The third “­father” of the caricature is the Roman painter and draftsman Pier Leone Ghezzi (1674–1755). His jocular distorted likenesses (Figure 37) w ­ ere “much appreciated by the enlightened connoisseurs who

FIGURE 37. ​The caricature: a disfigured portrait. Pier Leone Ghezzi, Caricature (about 1700), British Museum, London. Image credit: Ernst H. Gombrich, Meditationen über ein Steckenpferd. Von den Wurzeln und Grenzen der Kunst (Frankfurt, Germany: 1978), fig. 85.

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formed the international public in seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Italy.”53 The conventional origin story of the genre and the caricature’s canonization go hand in hand; already in the Encyclopédie, the caricature is identified as its own art form. The entry for “Caricature,” which is assigned to the rubric of peinture, principally refers to “figures grotesque” and, ­whether wholly or in part, “extrêmement disproportionnées”—­figures produced by a painter, sculptor, or engraver “pour s’amuser, & pour faire rire.”54 With this, the essential characteristics of the modern caricature are enumerated—­namely, resemblance and exaggeration and deformation and terseness or, more precisely, resemblance to a model, exaggeration of individual features of the person depicted, deformation of her or his outward appearance, and brevity of form. While resemblance and exaggeration refer to the subject and its characteristic features, the terseness of drawing is an aesthetic quality. In deformation, both sides of the image (model and likeness) fi­nally meet insofar as it refers to both the subject’s physiognomy and the artistic device expressed in the drawing’s lines and traits. Although resemblance (as a condition to recognize the depicted person) is requisite for both the caricature and portraiture, in the caricature resemblance is achieved not through imitation but through exaggeration, disfigurement, and deformation. The combination of economy of the drawing devices and the exaggerated deformation—or deformed exaggeration—is thus a specific feature of portraiture-­caricature, which always means exaggeration into the ugly or comic—­which is to say, into the grotesque. According to a definition passed on by Bernini, for example, the caricature seeks “resemblance in the ugly and ridicu­lous.”55 With reference to Benjamin’s theory on language and image, one can understand the caricature as an image of disfigured similitude.56 In light of the psychoanalytic analy­sis of the caricature outlined above, ­t hese descriptions make clear that the “graphical form of the joke” (to once more cite Ernst Kris’s fine definition) in fact operates by means similar to dream-­work: deformation, terseness, and exaggeration replace disfiguration [Entstellung], condensation [Verdichtung], and displacement [Verschiebung]. In the work of the caricaturist, the theory of “saving in expenditure” [Aufwandsersparnis] developed by Freud for the comic meets the means of drawing itself. Yet, unlike in the dream, in caricature it concerns a volitional act. From descriptions of the genre—­such as that of a bella deformità, or perfect ugliness—it is clear that the caricature is considered the result of a Defamatory Images  155

FIGURE 38. ​Caricature before the era of reproducibility. Anonymous graffito, Rufus est, Villa dei Misteri, Pompei. Image credit: Martin Langer, Antike Graffitizeichnungen: Motive, Gestaltung und Bedeutung (Wiesbaden, Germany: Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2001), app., fig. 13.

par­tic­u­lar kind of drawing. It is in this framework that Annibale Carracci, from whom unfortunately no pages have survived, was praised for the fact that he was able to create ritratti ridicoli of a person with a striking external feature with only “two lines.”57 Even if “two” ­here is not to be taken literally, one could condense the art of the caricature in the apparently paradoxical definition “exaggeration in two lines.” It is exactly the aspect of terseness that distinguishes the modern caricature from Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of grotesque physiognomies—­t he most famous are pen and ink drawings of “grotesque heads” (1494)58—­which 156  Defamatory Images

are sometimes considered the invention of or precursor to caricature. Several of his studies of defaced portraits exaggerate certain physiologic features and evoke the impression of cruel ugliness, but such features are not yet shortened and condensed to an individual characteristic or emblematic trait.59 What in early modern and modern times appears as visual terseness was, in ­earlier ages, due to the demands of ­simple techniques. Among the graffiti and inscriptions discovered on the walls of Roman ­houses during the excavation of Pompeii, t­ here are sketched likenesses whose disfigured profiles with enlarged noses look like early caricatures (Figure 38).60 Employing a drawing economy of abbreviation, the caricature tends ­toward the formulaic, graphic, and emblematic: the drawing [Zeichnung] as sign [Zeichen]. An apt description of the caricature can be found in Baudelaire’s essay “On the Essence of Laughter,” although, as he emphasizes, he did not wish to write a “treatise on caricature”: “The caricature is double: the drawing and the idea; the drawing is violent, the idea biting and veiled.” To this he adds: “tiresome complications of ele­ments for a s­imple mind, accustomed to grasp intuitively ­things as ­simple as itself.” 61 The modern caricature, as the idea of a person turned into an image or a scene, could thus be considered disegno par excellence (Chapter 1.4). Concerning the formulaic character, the caricature is also described as cipher [Chiffre] and as sign or stenograph of the form [Formzeichen or Formstenogramm].62 Due to the terseness of the re/pre­sen­ta­tion, drawing of the caricature enters the field of signs, coding, and symbolic meaning. Gombrich, too, describes the caricature as a chance “to keep a politician continuously in the public’s consciousness in diverse symbolic roles by using a cleverly abbreviated formula for the possibility of extending the equation into a virtuel fusion.” 63 The drawing of a caricature thus becomes a physiognomic formula that can be interpreted as a symbol or sign of a specific person’s role. This proximity to physiognomy is also true by the fact that the caricature figures and symbolizes the ­human form alike (Figures 39 and 40). Modifying Warburg’s concept of the pathos formula, one could describe the caricature as a character formula, since the caricature’s drawn formula serves to re/present that which is characteristic of a person—or situation or scene. In the title of one of William Hogarth’s engravings, Characters and Caricaturas (1743), this connection is condensed, even if his engravings no longer possess the characteristic pictorial brevity; they are, rather, situated at the genre’s threshold to art. Defamatory Images  157

FIGURE 39. ​The physiognomic formula for the embodied role. Proximity of caricature . . . ​Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Caricature of a Cardinal (about 1650), Bibliotheca Corsini, Rome. Image credit: Ernst H. Gombrich, Kunst und Illusion: Zur

Psychologie der bildlichen Darstellung (Berlin: Phaidon, 2004), 290.

8 . G R A P H I C A L H Y P E R B O L E A N D P O­L I T I­C A L S YM B O L S

Yet while the goal pursued by physiognomic knowledge is to decipher a person’s character or emotions—­and to this end the face is subdivided, mea­ sured, and coded (Chapter 2.9)—­t he caricature, with its line art, conversely produces physiognomic formulas that give the impression of specific ­human qualities, characteristics, attitudes, and temperaments. In this vein, Rodolphe Töpffer characterizes the art of producing lit­er­a­ture with ­simple lines as an experiment (Figure 41) in his 1845 Essai de physiognomie (Essay on physiognomy). He does not follow the path t­ oward imitation and insists on being “in­de­pen­dent of all studies on nature, models, or of noses, eyes, and 158  Defamatory Images

FIGURE 40. ​. . . ​a nd physiognomic images: the invention of facial expression of affects. Charles Le Brun, Laughter (1668), Louvre Museum, Paris. Image credit:

Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The Origins and Influence of Charles Le Brun’s “Conference su l’expression générale et particulière” (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 137.

FIGURE 41. ​Graphic hyperboles of physiognomic caricature. Rodolphe Töpffer, Essai de physiognomie (1845). Image credit: Rodolphe Töpffer, Essay zur Physiognomie (Siegen,

Germany: Machwerk-­Verlag, 1982), 7.

ears” in order to produce graphical signs by means of experimentation and comparison, which would be immediately and intuitively identified as expressions of certain emotions, states of disposition, or par­tic­u­lar character types.64 While his discussion of physiognomic indices (with a distinction between permanent and impermanent signs) adds nothing new to the register of physiognomic codes, his elaborations on the “technique of a ­simple line” and the graphical sign as an indicator of the expression of emotions are all the more in­ter­est­ing.65 Töpffer describes his line art as an abbreviated form or graphical hyperbole characterized by reduction, omission, gaps, and discontinuity; he compares the result to rhetorical figures and symbols.66 In modern po­liti­cal caricatures, physiognomic shorthand (in contrast to classical physiognomy) is no longer used as a sign of an individual character; it is, rather, used as a symbol of po­liti­cal meaning. An isolated physiognomic trait of a personality, role, or profession is condensed into a graphical hyperbole symbolizing a specific po­liti­cal meaning. In the art of the caricature, con­spic­u­ous individual traits in external appearances are disfigured to make it recognizable as po­liti­cal symbol (Figures 42 and 43). In terms of

FIGURE 42. ​Physiognomic abbreviations as symbol of po­l iti­c al caricature. Caricature of Hjalmar Schacht, president of the German Reichsbank, in 8 Uhr Abendblatt (June 13, 1932). Image credit: Gerhard Langemeyer et al., eds.,

Bild als Waffe: Mittel und Motive der Karikatur in fünf Jahrhunderten (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1984), 96.

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FIGURE 43. ​Disfigured to recognizability. Claus Arnold, Military (1983). Image credit: Gerhard Langemeyer et al., eds., Bild als Waffe: Mittel und Motive der Karikatur in fünf Jahrhunderten (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1984), 89.

image theory, the modern caricature operates at the threshold between physiognomy and symbol, between resemblance and repre­sen­ta­t ion: as a pictorial sign in an age of repre­sen­ta­tion whose methods work through resemblance’s incursion into the symbolic or, conversely, that a symbolic meaning emerges from resemblance. In the spirit of Foucault’s semiotic historiography of the modern episteme in The Order of ­Things, the caricature would represent an art form that, in the age of repre­sen­ta­t ion and in the world of conventional signs, works by means of ele­ments from the premodern system of resemblances. Yet, the caricature becomes a mere physiognomic ste­reo­t ype at the point where physical disfigurement no longer functions as a sign for something whose meaning transcends pure deformation—in other words, when exaggeration into ugliness is reduced to pure invective. In this re­spect, anti-­ Semitic contorted images are not caricatures but rather defamatory images that, like the Schmähbilder in religious wars, impugn the other in moral terms with a pictorial exposure of the body distorted into ugliness: deformation as defamation! But such predominance of physiognomic deformation is an intrinsic tendency in the modern caricature; it goes hand in hand with the loss of critical potential within the dialectics of the public sphere discussed e­ arlier (Chapter 5.1). Since the satiric pictorial re/pre­sen­ta­tion of individual persons in the “Berlin Republic” is, for example, often sparked by their individual habits, by peculiarities of their gestures, style, or self-­ presentation, the con­temporary caricature can be interpreted as a symptom of a significant loss of the po­liti­cal. The physiognomic caricature of politicians’ “quirks” thereby takes the place of po­liti­cal critique. During their heyday, po­liti­cal caricatures w ­ ere based on a subtle play with physiognomic signs meant to capture resemblance in the graphical hyperbole aimed at the po­liti­cal body of the regent. Disfigured for the sake of recognizability, the mass-­produced image of Louis Philippe I with the shape of a pear (which emerged during the years of the July Monarchy) did not fail its impact as attacking wit [Angriffswitz], to use Heinrich Heine’s paraphrase of the satire.67 In this case, the idiomatic translation between pictorial and linguistic rhe­torics proceeded in the opposite direction as it did in the medieval Schmähbilder. The image-­rhetorical topos of drawing was transformed into a “speaking name” of the king, who could subsequently never shake the sobriquet “pear-­king.” In his report on the famous trial against the author of this pictorial satire (the publisher of the magazines La Caricature and Le Charivari, 162  Defamatory Images

Charles Philipon), Heine exposed the way in which, in the art of the caricature, resemblance emerged from an experimental replication of the graphic formula, so that the regent’s dignitas is held up for ridicule (Figure 44). Heine’s account highlights the way in which the court’s aim of stopping the outrage posed by caricatures of the king only ended up spreading the malady:

FIGURE 44. ​The metamorphosis of the “pear king”: graphic experiment as attacking wit. Charles Philipon, The Pear Sketch (1831). Image credit: Gerhard

Langemeyer et al., eds., Bild als Waffe: Mittel und Motive der Karikatur in fünf Jahrhunderten (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1984), 195.

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Thus we lately saw how from one suit at law of this kind t­ here came another by which the King was still more compromised. I speak of Philipon, the publisher of a caricature-­journal, who defended himself as follows:— Should any man wish to find in any caricatured odd face a likeness with that of the King, he could do it as soon as he pleased in any figure, no ­matter how heterogeneous, so that at last nobody could be safe from indictment for lese-­majesty. To prove this, he then designed on a sheet of paper several caricatures, the first of which was a striking portrait of the King, the second was like it, but with less resemblance to royalty, and in this fashion the third suggested the second, and the fourth the third, but this last of all was a perfect picture of a pear, which, however, still preserved a slight, but all the more comical, likeness to the traits of the beloved monarch. As Phi­ lipon, despite this defense, was condemned by the jury, he published his speech in his journal, giving a facsimile of the caricatures which he had drawn in court. On account of this lithograph, which is now known as “The Pear,” the witty artist was again prosecuted, and the most delightful results are anticipated from the trial. (French Affairs, article I from 12/28/1831)68 Philipon’s pear-­caricatures of the Juste Milieu are prob­ably among the most famous examples of the genre. They are, in fact, the vanis­hing point in which the technique of the modern portrait-­caricature and the pictorial satirical work with the “king’s two bodies” merge in an ideal-­t ypical manner. 9 . C A R I C AT U R E A N D T H E P O L I T I C I A N ’S T W O B O D I E S

The story of the caricature’s success in Eu­rope is not, however, solely one of this combination of a physiognomic gaze and the art of drawing; it is also a product of secularization. The genre’s ascent is remarkably accompanied by the decline of theological and royal authorities. Although the idea of a doubled body is an image-­theoretical precondition for the pictorial satire, it only becomes a po­liti­cal caricature when, historically, the immortal body politics has become a po­liti­cal body in the sense of the modern concept of the po­liti­cal: a regent who must face a po­liti­cal public sphere. Caricatures of po­liti­cal authorities using the likeness of the personal body of a king, minister, or other regent can only emerge when the taboo against ignoble re/ 164  Defamatory Images

pre­sen­ta­tions of the royal body (as a “mortal god”) is weakened. In a caricature, the royal dummy is metamorphosed from a cult object, an effigie, into an empty, clothed puppet that is thrown over the body of the king like a coat that has been stretched too large—as demonstrated by the ars combinatoriae of William Thackeray’s pictorial satire of Louis XIV: Rex—­ Ludovicus—­Ludovicus Rex (1840, Figure  45). The doubled body of the regent, which arose from medieval po­liti­cal theology, leads a postabsolutist afterlife in po­liti­cal pictorial satire, ­under whose auspices the caricatures of bourgeois politicians still act. And with the emergence of parliamentary and party systems, the vendetta-­like character of the early pictorial satire returns. In party conflict, the representative of the opposing po­liti­cal camp becomes the favored object of skewed re/pre­sen­ta­tions. In the historiography of the modern caricature, a significant shift of national sites in which each of the in­ter­est­ing developments in the genre occurred can be observed. Speaking schematically, this history pre­sents itself in a sequence that runs analogously to the trajectory of Eu­ro­pean capital cities (Rome, London, Paris, Berlin) in urban historiography: namely, the genre’s introduction in seventeenth-­century Italy, its politicization in ­England during the eigh­teenth c­ entury, the s­ addle period of caricature in

FIGURE 45. ​The two bodies of caricature. William Thackeray, Louis XIV: Rex—­Ludovicus—­Ludovicus Rex (1840). Image credit: Frontispiece of The Paris Sketch Book By Mr. Titmarsh. http://­w ww​.­g utenberg​.­org​/­fi les​/­42890​/­42890​-­h​/­i mages​/­i ll​-­p260​_­lg​.­jpg (accessed March 14, 2014).

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France in the first half of the nineteenth c­ entury, and in Germany at the turn of the twentieth c­ entury. It was the En­g lish aristocracy who, in the ­middle of the eigh­teenth c­ entury, discovered the possibilities of using the new genre of Caricatura-­portraits as a means of “po­liti­cal polemics,” as Gombrich argues, against the background of the genre’s history and “the meeting of the symbolic print with the new art of caricature” at that time.69 The politicization of the caricature was, however, also an effect of the weakened monarchy and the growing power of parliaments, which are themselves composed of rival camps. In general, the caricature’s ­saddle period in the nineteenth c­ entury is explainable by the possibilities engendered by the technical developments of lithography and the printing press, which turned newspapers into a mass medium. Since the literacy of the masses could not keep up with this development, picture prints and picture magazines enjoyed a par­t ic­u ­lar popularity: La Caricature and Le Charivari in France, Punch in E ­ ngland, and Kladderadatsch and Fliegende Blätter in Germany. Eduard Fuchs, collector of caricatures who was convinced that all “objective art” emanated from the genre, regarded mass art as a precondition for the genre: “Caricature, he says, is a mass art. ­There cannot be any caricature without mass distribution of its products. Mass distribution means cheap distribution,” as Benjamin writes in his essay on Fuchs.70 But the tremendous rise of pictorial satire is inconceivable without prominent celebrities, ­people elevated out of everyday life, whose personal image embodied t­ hose institutions against which criticism, aggression, and mockery ­were directed. In France, the genre’s c­ areer was initiated by the French Revolution. The pictorial satires produced prior to the regicide are symptomatic for this connection. In 1791, two years before Louis XVI’s execution, a pamphlet titled “The Dinner of the Modern Gargantua and His ­Family” was circulated in which the monarch’s greed is dramatically displayed and “The gluttonous ­g iant Gargantua alias Louis XVI devours a ­whole pig, Marie Antoinette drinks the blood of an executed man and asks if she may bathe in it.”71 This emphasis on the domestic sphere indicates a tendency ­toward the privatization of the figure of the king. ­Here, the king’s personal body becomes so dominant that it is in danger of becoming in­de­pen­dent of the po­liti­cal body. Only when the monarchy’s dignitas is considered forfeit can his personal body, now detached from the embodiment of the nation, be delivered to the guillotine—­even if, in the act of regicide enacted on the body of the 166  Defamatory Images

monarch, the monarchy itself is also given to the executioner’s axe (Chapter 4.5). From this tension within the king’s doubled body, both a mortal god and a creature, Benjamin derived the dynamic of a state of emergency of affects, by which the sovereign transforms into a tyrant and fi­nally becomes a martyr.72 In caricatures aimed at the ancien régime, this dynamic found image-­political expression: the caricature of the king’s domestic body announces this body’s handover to the guillotine. The fact that the epoch of the postrevolutionary monarchy, especially that of the bourgeois monarchy, was the heyday of caricature in France is an indication of the tremendous boost the caricature received from the erosion of the sacred aura of the king’s two-­body repre­sen­ta­tion. During this period, pictorial satire—­a long with artists like Daumier and J. J. Grandville—­ evolved into a popu­lar medium. As a citizen, Louis Philippe had moved so close to his subjects that the image of his body is given over to satire. As king embodying the body politic, however, the image of his body pre­sents itself as a target for the outrage and criticism directed at po­liti­cal conditions. From Heine, the chronicler of French controversy over caricatures during the lead up to the March revolutions of 1848, the readership of the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände (Morning paper for Educated Classes) was able to learn that in Paris “the number of such mocking prints and deforming pictures [Zerrbilder] becomes greater ­every day, and we see everywhere on the walls of h ­ ouses im­mense pears. Never yet was a prince so ridiculed in his own capital as Louis Philippe (‘French Paint­ers,’ Appendix 1833).”73 The previous year, in a correspondence article from March 25, 1832, Heine had explained Louis Philippe’s ascension to being the most beloved object for caricature with the decline of revolutionary hopes that had been embodied in his person. The July sun had “rayed his head as with an aureole” and surrounded him with much splendor, yet “the glory from his head has passed away, and all discontent see in it is but a pear.”74 With this image of vanished glory, Heine thematized the decay of that sacred aura the postrevolutionary sovereigns Napoleon and Louis Philippe had inherited from their pre­de­ces­sors in the absolute monarchy, at the same time claiming, however, to embody the hope and promises of a new regime as representatives of the ­people. The paradox of the caricature in modernity discussed at the outset thus arises from a paradoxical constellation. While only the decay of the monarchy’s theological justification and the concomitant loss of reverence and exaltation (the decay of dignitas that shines on the mortal body of the Defamatory Images  167

regent as well) make it pos­si­ble to place his person, as representative of the system, in the center of pictorial satire, the caricature’s image-­rhetoric only functions with a doubled body insofar as the po­liti­cal body is the ­actual target of the images of disfigured physiognomy. As an observer versed in the theory of history and images, Heine reflected on the reverse side of this type of criticism: in the case where a public figure’s image is lampooned for the sake of po­liti­cal critique, and if, in the image economy of the caricature’s two bodies, defamation, which had potentially been attached to the genre since its early days, gains the upper hand. Since the caricature basically draws its pictorial rhe­toric from physiognomic signs, it always tends ­toward insult and degradation when the po­liti­cal symbolism withdraws ­behind the image of the distorted body, when it dis­ appears in it, or when it is no longer recognizable. In modernity and on the backstage of the growing gap between the physical and po­liti­cal body, physiognomy often takes pre­ce­dence again. Heine’s concern about the popularity of the genre is directed precisely at ­t hose cases that affect “the person of the prince himself.” He continues in assessing ­t hese images: “Such pictures are in a way pardonable when, without intending merely to offend the personality, they only censure the deception by which the ­people have been duped. Then the effect is without limit.”75 No mere insult to the person, but a denunciation of the delusions of the p ­ eople: with it Heine frames the classical program of caricature as a weapon of criticism for a popu­lar public sphere composed of t­ hose deprived of means and power, which produced the genre’s heyday in the nineteenth ­century. In pointed contrast to the caricature’s comparison to an executio in effigie, Heine considers the po­liti­cal caricature as an alternative to the desire to kill the regent who rules against his subjects’ interests: Although wit may belong to the lowest of the psychic faculties, we are still of the belief that it has its good uses. . . . ​The attacking wit [Angriffswitz], termed by you satire, is of good use in this bad, worthless age. No more religion retains the power to curb the lusts of your petty, mundane rulers; . . . ​and ­there is naught to protect you from the cockiness of wealth and power,—­but death and satire.76 Heine hence anticipates ­here a psychoanalytic interpretation that Freud ­later develops for the caricature in analogy to the joke: it is the degradation of the person positioned above the joke-­teller, by means of a redirection into 168  Defamatory Images

the comic.77 Called an attacking wit, Heine concretizes the same image-­ function for the po­liti­cal sphere and derives it from the secularization of sovereign power. When, in the same context, Ernst Kris speaks of comedy’s half-­act and calls the redirection into the comic a “reproduction,” the heyday of the caricature in the nineteenth ­century can be understood as the synergy of the caricature’s psychical economy—­which redirects its aggressive fantasies to the image—­a nd the technical reproducibility of images made pos­si­ble by the printing pro­cesses of then-­new mass media.

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6 C U LT I M A G E S : I C O N O C L A S T I C C O N T R O V E R S Y, T H E D E S I R E FOR IMAGES, AND THE DIALEC TIC O F S E C U L A R I Z AT I O N

Images play a central role in the international escalation of vio­lence we see ­today: scenes from the “war on terror” captured and reproduced in photo­ graphs and shots taken of scenes of terrorist attacks claimed as a “just war” by the actors. ­These images of vio­lence circulate globally in a mediated form and generate further vio­lence, especially in places of acute military conflict. Images’ involvement in the spread and proliferation of bellicose politics follows a dynamic in which the development of media technologies and religious cultures mutually foster each other, producing a new kind of emergent po­liti­cal theology of images. The age of technical reproducibility of art has thus been displaced by the era of digital production and global circulation of images and, fi­nally, by their uncontrolled and “wild” dissemination, while, however, religions have (re)gained a significant, if sometimes shrill, voice in the formation and staging of cultural and po­liti­cal conflicts. ­Because of this, the pictures of acute vio­lence circulated daily generate—­often b ­ ehind the backs of ­t hose involved—an almost biblical vio­lence. By contributing to the unleashing of affects in a precarious mixture of social, religious, and po­liti­cal motivations, ­t hese images participate in the en masse production of agitation and aggression and fuel both individual readiness to commit terroristic vio­lence and the ac­cep­tance of increasing interventionist military actions.

1. I M AG E S O F V I O­L E N C E I N T H E C U LT U R A L E XC H A N G E O F I M AG E S

When images of military operations are disseminated through international news channels and networks, not a few spectators perceive the dead shown in the photo­graphs as martyrs—be it in the (internet) coffee h ­ ouses in Baghdad, Ramallah, Beirut, Kabul, and other sites in the near and far east or be it at the screens of Eu­ro­pean youth. In the pro­cess, new potential suicide bombers are created who—if they act—­are then in turn revered as martyrs. While images have always been impor­tant mediums in the genealogical chain of martyrdom (which is or­ga­nized per se by imitation according to its princi­ple of imitatio), the religious economy of reproduction is t­ oday accelerated and reinforced medially by the global circulation of tele­vi­sion, network, and cell phone images.1 The digitization that triggers unlimited “circulation and dissemination” plays a crucial role2 in the relation between the “war of images”3 and the “war on terror,” as W. J. T. Mitchell repeatedly argues. Images of po­liti­cal vio­lence produce uncontrollable feedback effects; they have become mediums in the cycle of vio­lence: images that produce potential suicide bombers and other self-­proclaimed “warriors for justice” that in turn shape debates in national and international law about military operations in crisis zones. ­Until now, images have presumably only had a comparable effect in the real world when they ­were part of cult rituals or ­were directly involved in religious conflicts that sparked a strug­g le on/with images [Bilderstreit] (Chapter 5.6). Although media theorists and pedagogues argue about ­whether video games simulating war and violent videos and films magnify young ­peoples’ disposition ­toward vio­lence or if it is a way of discharging aggression, the correlation between image and vio­lence in con­temporary politics is undeniable. The images produced and disseminated with advanced technologies induce tremendous excitement—be they images of clashes between the Israeli army and Hamas in Gaza; photo­graphs of terrorist attacks in ­England, Moscow, or Baghdad; photos of heavi­ly armed soldiers or pictures of victims of a deployment of German or U.S. American soldiers in Af­ghan­i­stan; images of the dispersal of demonstrations of the Muslim Brotherhood by the Egyptian military; or cell phone pictures from bombed-­out locations in Syria. Such images burst the rhetorical pattern of elucidation and uncovering [Entlarvung] Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization  171

characteristic for the info-­media from the age of analog images. In addition, the entry of cell phone or Twitter photos into the communication channels ­causes a proliferation and anonymization of the circulating images—­with thoroughly double-­edged effects. Such pictures that allow hardly imaginable uncensored visual “insight” into events occurring in distant and hard-­to-­ reach places, which make dispatches from the re­sis­tance or under­ground pos­si­ble, at the same time produce literally obscure information: technically blurred and uncertain in origin. However, Eu­ro­pean or American journalists’ photo­graphs from war zones often unleash meanings in other religious and image cultures that the photog­raphers could not know of. On almost ­every side of the current war of images, pictures are circulated that revive well-­known pathos formulas from the iconographic history of victims and martyrs. Passion and crucifixions, self-­sacrifice, ritual killing, and the exhibition of victims (or, more precise, their remains)—­t hese visual topoi have such a presence in the mass media dissemination of images that they can no longer be explained within the framework of Dialectic of Enlightenment—­namely, by the thesis that the Enlightenment (in this case, the news pictures) at a certain point flips again into my­thol­ogy.4 The precarious interplay between images, religions, and vio­lence rather falls u ­ nder the auspices of the dialectic of secularization and the historical noncontemporaneity in image perception: between a secularized understanding of images and a mode of perception in which the images acquire a completely dif­fer­ent presence. The effect of such nonsimultaneity becomes even more complicated when plural exchanges of images are at stake: not only between antagonistic cultural camps but also between private photography and the public, and between an informative, a testamentary, and a cult status of images. For example, when the photo­graphs of the tortured, humiliated bodies of Arab prisoners in Abu Ghraib, “shot” by U.S. soldiers for their private photo ­albums, become enlarged reproductions in the streets of Baghdad as an anti-­American “beacon” or, conversely, when hostage videos made by kidnappers in Af­ghan­i­stan or Iraq become “arguments” on CNN or the BBC for reinforced mea­sures directed against terrorism, t­ hese images bring about unintended and unforeseen effects in the other place, in another politico-­religious image culture.5 Visually generated affects are ­shaped not only by the events depicted but also by the vari­ous iconographic frameworks into which the images enter. A comparison of the iconographic associations linked to images of 9/11 in TV and print media (a study of intericonicity, according to Clément Chéroux) 172  Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization

reveals significant differences between the United States and France.6 In the United States, the attack on the twin towers was immediately construed as a “second Pearl Harbor” (in the News-­Gazette’s cover on 9/11/2001, for example). Thus, the photo of three soldiers hoisting the American flag on the rubble at Ground Zero on the day of the attack was instantly and easily overlaid by the image of three U.S. Marines hoisting an American flag on the Japa­nese island Iwo Jima in February 1945, a scene that is disseminated as a postage stamp and burned into the cultural memory of Americans. In contrast, several commentators in the French press discovered a “similarity between the clouds of smoke that r­ ose above Manhattan a­ fter the collapse of the towers and mushroom clouds over Hiroshima or Nagasaki.”7 Distinct concepts of the image—­ranging between the poles of informational images and cult images, between likeness and icon—­reach beyond culturally mediated iconographic memory into a more fundamental understanding of the image. The checkered history of past pictorial practices and the theological controversies over images continue to have an effect on the general understanding and perception of images—in this re­spect, the religious conflicts of the past, waged as wars of/with images, experience a late echo. This dimension cannot be understood, however, by means of a typology of image concepts typical for certain religions—by juxtaposing, for example, both an Islam hostile to images and the prohibition of images in Judaism with an image-­friendly Chris­tian­ity and an Eastern Church addicted to iconography. The prohibition of images has long since been presented in a more differentiated light, and not only through readings of scripture and the relativization of an absolute prohibition through biblical hermeneutics—­t he Hebrew word pæsæl in the commandment “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” (Exodus 20:4a and Deuteronomy 5:8a) does not refer to images in a comprehensive sense but rather to the production of sculptures from wood or stone intended for worship8—by proving the very existence of a pictorial tradition in Jewish9 and Islamic cultures, which reach far back into history. 2 . A N -­I CO N I S M A N D T H E U N C A N N Y A S P E C T S O F S E C U L A R I Z AT I O N

As regards Judaism, the notion of a dogmatic prohibition of images has been largely replaced by a de facto an-­iconism.10 This is seen (alongside the mono­ the­istic polemic levied against pagan, anthropomorphic idols) in the fact Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization  173

that the nomadic existence of the Jewish p ­ eople was incompatible with a pictorial culture and figurative image of God, so that the Jewish ­people’s history of exile was accompanied by a “progressive an-­iconicization” of the ritual.11 This development corresponds to significant caesuras in ancient Israelite history. The beginnings of a “deuteronomistic iconoclasm” are thus considered part of a fundamental transformation of the religion between the sixth and fifth centuries, pre-­Christ: “Centralization of worship in Jerusalem (Deuteronomy 12) and the suppression of image worship (Deuteronomy 4:16–18, 23, 25; 7:25–26).”12 The dispersion of cultic sites ­a fter the destruction of Samaria (capital of the kingdom) was no longer compatible with Yahweh’s uniqueness; just as ­little could he be divided up and dispersed: “God could not be refracted over dif­fer­ent places.” Hence “the Book of the Law” took the place of the image in exile, it is for this reason that Karel van der Toorn assumes that the image and the book serve an analogous function.13 He interprets the second t­ emple built in Jerusalem a­ fter the Babylonian exile—­w ith an empty room, “the Holy of Holies,” in its interior—as already being the constructed embodiment of an an-­iconism. B ­ ecause this progressive an-­iconicization was accompanied by a valorization of the book, Alex Stock writes of concomitant iconicization of the Torah: “The interpretation of the sanctuary of the shrine as the ark of the covenant containing the tablets of laws initiates a kind of iconicization of the book.”14 In Islam, however, the prohibition of images has been relativized and ­limited to certain aspects and issues that have been controversial throughout its history and debated over and over again, and to which theological authorities have responded in diverse ways.15 Although an-­iconism was “in line with the orthodox Islamic position that had crystallized by the ninth ­century with regard to art,”16 enormously rich artistic production was already attested to in medieval Islam, ranging from ornamental to figurative fashioning. In essence, the Islamic an-­iconisms emerged from a critique of the (Christian) cult of images, since in Islam images are considered impure and created images to be illicit rivals to divine Creation. A true prohibition on images is only directed at images that are objects of religious cult (which is thought to more likely affect pictures hanging on the wall than, for example, ­t hose positioned on the floor, such as figurative scenes on carpets).17 Above all, the prohibition is directed at likenesses of living beings, ­whether ­human or animal. The m ­ atter of figurative re/pre­sen­ta­tions is, however, in dispute; figurative images developed for the most part in a profane visual 174  Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization

culture and are ­today widespread. Nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century modernization brought an enormous explosion in visual culture dominated by reproducible pictures, an explosion that also reached into Islamic and Jewish cultures.18 The scale of t­ oday’s global circulation of images is, however, far greater, leading to the concomitant secularization and profanation of images run across religions, and resulting in ever more frequently hybridized image practices and effects. In this way, the often uncanny effects of the global image exchange are not due to a prohibition on images but rather ­because images—­just like language—­can produce unexpected and unintended effects in the dialectic of secularization. “This country is a volcano. . . . ​­People talk h ­ ere of many t­ hings that led to our ruin, and more than ever of the Arabs. But t­ here is another danger, much more uncanny than the Arabic p ­ eople”—­Gershom Scholem stressed this almost a c­ entury ago in an essay that remained unpublished at that time. Written three years ­after his emigration to Palestine and dedicated to Franz Rosenzweig, Scholem dated his text examining the Hebrew language both “26/12/1926” and “7. Tevet 5687,” thus inscribing it si­mul­ta­neously in the secular and the Jewish calendar.19 Scholem is reflecting on an uncanny dynamic within an originally sacred language that has been secularized for profane use (modern Hebrew, Ivrit). This uncanniness, however, also applies to images, and the latency of biblical vio­lence he observed for language is also immanent to images in profane context. Emerging predominantly from cult and ritual, their profane use is “threatened” by the unintended eruption of inherently religious meanings. Scholem casts this in the image of an abyss: That sacred language, which is implanted into our ­children, is it not an abyss that must open up one day? . . . ​If we, a generation of transition, revive the language of the ancient books in them, that it may reveal itself anew on them, s­ hall not the religious power of that language break out against its speakers one day? . . . ​Sometimes we are seized with fear when, amidst the thoughtless discourse of the speaker, a religious term suddenly makes us shudder, though it may even have been meant to console.20 It is clear that he is not concerned solely with the relative semantics of words from biblical Hebrew when Scholem turns to the “force of the holy,” which Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization  175

emerged from the “spectral disgrace of our language.” For him, this phenomenon represents a disillusionment with the Zionist phantasm—­namely, the idea of being able to erect a purely secular Jewish culture on the Holy Land as its foundation: “­Because ­t hose who endeavored to revive the Hebrew language did not truly believe in the Judgement to which they are thereby summoning us.”21 A similar effect occurs with images. Whereas it had been thought that images’ reproducibility led to their complete secularization (or disenchantment), the religious vio­lence of past image worlds and the cult value of images originating in the history of religious and image wars erupt again from pictures disseminated in the news channels. The profanation of images through the history of media and technology and their metamorphosis into repre­sen­ta­tional and information media pushed images’ cultic, numinous, or magical characteristics into obscurity—­ this despite the fact that the images’ cult value leads a vibrant afterlife in the idol culture of mass media pop art. Western tele­v i­sion viewers are often astonished in the face of image practices such as flag burning and the burning of effigies (as symbols of a hated power), which appear archaic to them and associated with black magic. Or they are amazed by the synthesis of sophisticated media techniques and religious-­fundamental rhe­toric in pronouncements by “Al-­Qaeda” or the “Islamic State”—­such irritations can only be explained by the fact that the iconology of sacrifice and martyrdom,22 widespread in their own modern Western image cult, is no longer realized as the survival and continuing impact of a religiously ­shaped image-­ world. One only has to think of the citations of Christian passions that surface in Eu­ro­pean cinema and Hollywood (from Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves to Sam Raimi’s Spider-­Man) or in the spectacles of monumental stagings at pop concerts (Madonna, for example). The ritual or religious origins of such a visual language no longer seem to be apparent to their audience; its Christian signature has become largely unrecognizable. 3 . O N T H E C U LT VA LU E O F I M AG E S ( B E N J A M I N )

This phenomenon touches on the relation between the cult value [Kultwert] and the exhibition value [Ausstellungswert] of images, a distinction Walter Benjamin introduces in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Contrary to the prevalent and remarkably stable interpretation of this essay, which reduces Benjamin’s argument to the loss of aura 176  Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization

resulting from modern technologies for the reproduction of images and artworks,23 Benjamin proposes something much more fundamental: a concept of art history that proceeds from the premise that art emerges from cult—­because the oldest works of art “originated in the ser­v ice of rituals—­ first magical, then religious.”24 On this basis, he conceives of art history as “an interaction between two polarities within the artwork itself,” a relation regarded as a kind of contradiction and tension between cult value and exhibition value. The course of art’s history is by no means portrayed as a linear development (from cult to art, for example, or from the aura to reproducibility); instead, he rather sees it in “the changing shifts of emphasis from one pole of the artwork to the other.”25 Benjamin is not concerned with a directed historical development, not with a history of the decay of the cultic. Even if the historical course is determined by the transition from a mode of reception that places an accent on cult value to one that accents exhibition value, “a certain oscillation between t­ hese two polar modes of reception can be demonstrated for each work of art.” To illustrate this, however, he does not in fact refer to a case in which the loss of cult value can be observed but rather to a painting for which exhibition value was foregrounded during its production, and to which cult value was subsequently added.26 In­de­pen­dent of ­whether historical scholarship on Raphael has possibly amended the assumptions made regarding this specific example, what is impor­tant h ­ ere is the under­lying perspective and terminology of the proposal Benjamin makes for the theory of art history. Benjamin’s understanding of cult value is defined by the fact that being-­there [vorhanden zu sein] but not being-­viewed is solely impor­tant for the respective “construct” [Gebilde].* He illuminates this with recourse to examples from three dif­fer­ent cultural epochs: Stone Age cave paintings, * ​Benjamin, “Work of Art: Third Version,” 107. It is difficult to translate Gebilde, which refers to all genres of art; Gebilde refers to the result of ­humans’ formative capacity and may indicate an artifact, object, shape, or a form. What is impor­tant in Benjamin’s use of the word is the fact that the Gebilde is a man-­made construct; it belongs to the register of Bild/bilden/Bildung (Chapter 1.4). On the difference between Gebilde and Geschöpf (creation), see Benjamin’s critique of the meta­phors used to denote art objects or artifacts (produced by h ­ umans) as “creation,” which are encountered primarily in the context of the “religion of art.” On this, see Sigrid Weigel, Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy, trans. Chadwick T. Smith (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013), 92ff.

Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization  177

statues of gods accessible only by high priests within the cella (the innermost chamber of ancient Greek and Roman ­temples), and certain images of the Madonna that stay covered almost year-­round. In the revised version of the essay, he adds the example of “certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals” that are “not vis­i­ble to the viewer at ground level.”27 The concept of the auratic, however, is introduced as a descendant of the artwork’s ritual function when Benjamin asserts that “the artwork’s auratic mode of existence is never entirely severed from its ritual function,” adding, “in other words: the unique value of the ‘au­then­tic’ [echte] work of art always has its basis in ritual ”28—­a nd in this re­spect an in­ter­est­ing modification takes place, since the first version still read that it was based in theology. The correction, which shifts the aura’s origin from theology to ritual, is in line with Benjamin’s preferred interest in cultural practices over the history of dogmas. The shift also touches upon a methodological difference symptomatic to the image-­t heoretical approach to that specific ele­ment of images that extends beyond the mode of depiction. While a theological explanation points to the icono-­logy of theological writings and asks about the role of images in the context of a theo-­logy (Theo-­logie = doctrine of or discourse on God or the divine), religious-­historical considerations are rather concerned with the meaning of images in cult or ritual understood as cultural practices—­that is, with images’ place in religious culture. And the cultic attitude p ­ eople take ­toward images does not necessarily follow the image-­ theological doctrine concerning their function and significance. Benjamin thus defines the aura through the manner in which artifacts appear from the viewer’s perspective; it is owed to the viewer’s gaze and attitude. Cult and ritual, however, concern the emergence and production of artifacts. The capacity to be exhibited (constitutive for the exhibition value) is not simply a contrast to the cult value; Benjamin rather describes it as an antipol, when he writes that with “the emancipation of specific artistic practices from the ser­vice of ritual, the opportunities for exhibiting their products increase.”29 The attributes of singularity, uniqueness, and duration, which are bound to the aura, arise from the cultic origin of artistic constructs and proj­ect into the mode of existence of exhibited, vis­i­ble constructs. The aura pertains to the afterlife of cult value a­ fter images’ separation from traditional ritual(istic) contexts—in other words, the aura concerns the afterlife of cult value in the age of art. In this regard, Benjamin describes the “primary quality of the cult image” as “unapproachability”30—­Unnahbarkeit, the literal impossibility of 178  Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization

achieving closeness [Nähe], which corresponds to the dialectics of distance and closeness in his famous definition of the aura as “appearance of a distance, however close the ­t hing that calls it forth.”31 Within the horizon of research into the religious history of images, however, the association between cult and concealment must be historically ­limited or partially relativized in the case of Christian cult images. One mostly encounters concealed holy images in the context of medieval mysticism, whose line of thinking ­favors a person’s inner i­ magined images, while vis­i­ble images, in contrast, are thought to be “only” a veil over the a­ ctual imaginative visio.32 Furthermore, material images in Christian sanctuaries are generally intended to be seen, even if not to be exhibited. It was indeed pos­si­ble that the cult value of paintings displayed in the church was superimposed by their exhibition, as in the case of Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross (ca. 1430), which in the church Onze-­L ieve-­Vrouw-­van-­ Ginderbuiten in Leuven, Belgium, also took over the representative function for the commissioning guild. Nevertheless, exhibitability forms an antipode to the cult value of Christian images, and this initiates their potential transfer into the sphere of art (Chapter 6.7). Benjamin anticipated a perspective common to con­temporary image studies by using the poles of cult and art as the structuring par­ameters for his “Work of Art” essay. Due to the attention it pays to the cultic prehistory of the arts—to Image Before the Era of Art (Hans Belting)33—­recent scholarship has set into motion an inquiry into the origins and historically, culturally, and medially diverse formations of the “image.” From this perspective, the concept of the “artwork” has been l­ imited in historical regard. Reflected on from the viewpoint of “the end of art history” (Georges Didi-­Huberman),34 from which standpoint the historical genesis of the “history of art” is legible as the genesis of both the discipline of the arts and of the arts themselves (their artworks and artists), the concept of the artwork now remains reserved for ­those images that originate in the “age of the arts.” On behalf of conceptual distinction, the question concerning the image is ­today strictly distinguished from that of the artwork; the former comprises a wider theoretical and historical horizon in order to also examine images existing before and beyond the arts.35 Benjamin also anticipated this restriction in the concept of art, since he speaks of constructs [Gebilde], when he discusses their cultic origins and extrapolates their “artistic” function from their exhibitability; this function, however, would ­later be recognized as Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization  179

incidental.36 Leveraging the distinction between “being-­t here” and “been viewed,” Benjamin’s reflections touch upon a question central to con­ temporary image studies—­namely, the question of presence. As already mentioned (Chapter 4), this question is associated with ­t hose meanings of images that transcend the function of signification, of mere depiction, or repre­sen­ta­tion. In the wake of this interest, cult images from the history of religion and investigations into the theology of the image, which preceded the emergence of paintings as mere artwork, have become lynchpins of image studies. The operation undertaken in Benjamin’s theory that is of par­tic­u­lar importance to current image studies is his conception of the image’s history as a dialectic of secularization:37 To the extent that the cult value of a painting is secularized, the impressions of its fundamental uniqueness becomes less distinct. In the viewer’s imagination, the uniqueness of the phenomena holding sway in the cult image is more and more displaced by the empirical uniqueness of the artist or of his formative achievement.38 It is therefore uniqueness (in the cultic context) and not the original (with regard to the artwork) that is of the utmost importance for the concept of aura. Benjamin’s approach makes it pos­si­ble to address the repression of images’ cultic context, as well as the afterlife and return of ritual ele­ments in secular and profane images. Just as the potential for exhibition and the artistic function of images accompany their separation from cult or ritual, exhibition can turn them once again into a ritual—­into a “secularized ritual,” which Benjamin sees, for example, in the “most profane forms of the ser­ vice of beauty” in art.39 The concept of reproducibility, which dominates the essay’s reception, is, in fact for Benjamin an indirect aspect of exhibtability; reproducibility is a quality that accelerates and amplifies the capacity for exhibition, and with it the growth of images out of ritual and its primary sense of being-­t here. In the same way that the construct’s auratic mode of existence is introduced as an effect of its cultic origin, reproducibility thus becomes relevant as a historical f­ actor in exhibitability: “The scope for exhibiting a work of art has increased so enormously with the vari­ous methods of technologically reproducing it that . . . ​a quantitative shift between the two poles of the artwork has led to a qualitative transformation in its nature.” 40 Photography steps 180  Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization

in at precisely this turning point. With photography, the “exhibition value begins to drive back cult value on all fronts,” a fact that was lamented in the nineteenth-­century debates on the relationship between photography and painting indicating a loss of painting’s “artistic value.” Cult value does not completely dis­appear with photography, however; in this new medium, Benjamin rediscovers cult value in the “­human countenance”—­t hat is, the photographic portrait, which he describes as the last refuge for the “cult value of the image.” 41 Since modern cult images must be viewed, their cultic ele­ment must be sought elsewhere—in the par­tic­u ­lar interplay of being-­ there and being or having been viewed, of presence and exhibition. Yet Benjamin characterizes images’ outgrowth from ritual as an ambivalent pro­cess (the withdrawal of transmissibility and witnessing, as well as having gained space for action); he does not address the return of cultic forms in modernity in a one-­sided manner. In The Arcades Proj­ect, he examines the survival of cultic ele­ments in metropolitan culture, in commodity culture in par­tic­u­lar, and finds secularized rituals in the habitualized be­hav­ ior patterns in modernity. The intense cultic character of community rituals found in social movements like Saint Simonianism is another example of this. In his work on Baudelaire, which addresses cultic forms of memory such as Eingedenken (remembrance),42 he interprets Baudelaire’s and Proust’s concept of correspondences as a sort of experience “which includes ritual ele­ments.” 43 Conversely, he is interested in the pro­cess of taking the modern cult into the ser­vice of politics. In the epilogue to the third version of the “Work of Art” essay, which was written in the face of growing fascistic cultural activity, Benjamin thematizes the “violation of an apparatus” in which it is forced into the “production of ritual values” by the “Führer cult.” 44 In this case, the cult value of (filmic) images is deployed as means for the end of the Führer cult. Given that one of the central planks of Benjamin’s “Critique of Vio­lence” is the fact that vio­lence can be used as a means to an end, Benjamin formulates h ­ ere a rudimentary critique of image-­violence.45 4 . C U LT I M AG E S A N D I KO N S : O R I G I N S I N T H E H I S TO R Y O F R E L I G I O N

In current critical image studies, images that are well-­k nown, continually reproduced, and repeatedly cited are often described as icons, though the use of this term does not refer e­ ither to Peirce’s semiotic icon (“icons; which Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization  181

serve to convey ideas of the t­hings they represent simply by imitating them”)46 or to the genre of images known as ikons such as the holy images of the Eastern Orthodox Church, or simply to the broad semantics of image (following the Greek eikon).* When someone like Chéroux, for example, discusses the collapsing twin towers as icons (in the study of the visual politics of 9/11 referenced above), or when images of the brain or visual repre­ sen­ta­tions of the helix structure of the DNA are called icons of science, then they are discussed as examples for a modern cult of images. ­People are often also labeled “icons”: like when Jackie Kennedy is called a “style icon” or the Nobel Peace Prize laureate from Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi, is called an “icon of democracy,” or when an exhibition in Trier, Germany, for the 130th anniversary of Karl Marx’s death opened with the title Ikone Karl Marx: Kultbilder und Bilderkult (Iconic Karl Marx: Cult images and image cult). One objection to such wordings would be that this popu­lar use of “icon” has nothing to do with the “­actual,” traditional sense of ikons. Yet ­there are connections, ­because the circulation of images of popu­lar personalities corresponds to a significant aspect of the historical genre of ikons that originated in orthodox image theology: portraits in which the material image itself can be revered as much as the figure it depicts—­saintly images and images of the saints at the same time. Religious ikons exert their par­tic­u­lar fascination on the basis of this double sacralization. Alex Stock, theologian of images, observes a peculiar bidirectional effect in play when viewing portrait-­like ikons in the Eastern Orthodox Church: On the one hand, it draws the viewer into itself, into the prototypical ground of the image; through the image, memory and yearning are drawn from and to a distant primal image (Urbild). On the other hand, the material image itself is the place of presence for this primal image; it situates the viewer and demands from him proskynesis on site, the sensuous act of veneration: greeting and kiss, incense and lights. By si­mul­ ta­neously filling the observer with longing and awe, by drawing him into the image, and poising him before it, the image manifests its peculiarly numinous power.47 * ​The medieval religious concept of the image is written as ikon in order to distinguish it from the modern term icon for the image (Chapter 3.1).

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One’s attitude and posture t­oward an ikon thus represent a gesture of the adoration and submission intrinsically due a sovereign. This is what the term proskýnēsis from Old-­Testament Greek indicates: a gestured kiss, indicated with a fin­ger pointed in the direction of the revered person; in the case of ikons, this role is assumed by a likeness. When ­today someone is called an icon, the attitude of adoration is no longer expressed with a salutation, kiss, incense, or light but rather through other, profane forms of veneration—in the case of images, for example, through enlargement, reproduction, and mass distribution. The “idolized” person in turn is granted his or her halo from the storm of the media’s flashbulbs. In this way, they become idols (from the Greek eidolon), a term whose connotation oscillates between that of a false god and a cult figure, a Janus face typical of modern cult objects. But what, then, is the relationship between icons/ikons and cult images or image cults? In terms of the history of religion, the ikon is a genre of image in its own right, which can be understood as the epitome of a cult image. Whereas the term “was traditionally used to designate two-­dimensional, mostly devotional images,” recent scholarship has pointed to the fact that “in ancient and medieval Greek, the term εἰκών was semantically very rich, comparable to the word ‘image.’ ” 48 Within the religious practices of the (Eastern) Christian Church, the visual dimension was part of multisensual per­for­ mance, in which, as Bissera V. Pentcheva argues in her study The Sensual Icon, the cult image plays just one part.49 The rise of the ikon as the Christian cult image par excellence was forced by the revaluation of images that followed the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the seventh and eighth centuries (namely, the temporary prohibition of ikons and the valorization of image practices ­after the prohibition’s revocation, as well as the destruction of the iconoclastic writings by the Second Council of Nicaea in 787). The ikon was the central subject ­matter of the image theology in which the question of the Holy was argued as a question of images. Not only does the ikon stand in the center of the image cult, but the issues surrounding the cult image also condense within it. The historical iconoclastic controversy that theologians and historians interpret as a quarrel over the position of the Holy in society,50 a conflict that ended in the schism between the Eastern and Western Churches, resulted in the revaluation of the ikon in the state of res sacrae. Other sacred objects at issue included the body and blood of Christ, the crucifix, relics, vessels for worship, and the books of scripture. Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization  183

While ikons share the subjects of their imagery (divine and sacred figures like Christ, Mary, angels, and saints) with other cult images, in the case of ikons, a sacral quality accrues to the carrier of the image, the image itself. In contrast to this kind of image cult of ikons, cult images in the Western Church are valued in re­spect to their subject ­matter and are hierarchized according to the depicted figures—­that is, along the graduated scale of their divinity or holiness. “Reverence follows the reference, not the potency of the image.”51 Thus, in the first Lateran Council a­ fter the iconoclastic controversy, which took place in 863 ­under Pope Nicholas I in Rome, the Western Church, which had been u ­ ntil then critical of images, granted a kind of worship to images: colere, however, was distinguished from higher forms—­both from the stronger form of veneration (venerari) and the highest, adoration (adorare). A multilevel hierarchy prevailed in the Western Church and can be said to remain valid for the Roman Catholic Church to this day: “The highest form is ‘adoration.’ . . . ​It applies only to God. The saints and images merit ‘veneration.’ . . . ​In between lies ‘ Hyperduléia,’ which appertains solely to the M ­ other of God as the ‘Hyperhagia’ (that which stands ‘above’ the saints).”52 Current image theory explains the par­tic­u­lar, numinous power of ikonic portraits (which differs from veneration of the figures depicted) with the Eastern Church’s image-­doctrine, in this way interpreting it as theological attribution. According to Byzantine tenet, it appears as if the ikon is, as Belting says, a “self-­revelation of God.”53 Image theology, in contrast, accounts for this same effect as the result of the fascination that is produced by images; the images of the Eastern Church are, according to Stock, objects to draw one’s gaze: “The precondition for this power of fascination lies in the fact that they are portraits . . . ​focused on the anthropomorphic form, its face, its gaze.” While the idea of the eikon is a key concept for Byzantine theology, the cult image is distilled in the sacred countenance, which becomes the face of the sacred person and the face of the Holy itself at the same time, the “face of the unseeable.”54 The ikons appear, on one hand, “as if” they ­were an ­actual counterpart; yet, on the other hand, the portrayed figure’s status as a holy person produces distance between it and the viewer. If in practice, cult images are often associated with the idea of a “real presence of the sacred figure in the image,” then this specific attribution, strictly speaking, applies only to ikons.55 From an image-­historical perspective, however, ikons may be understood as a type of panel image from late antiquity, 184  Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization

which follows a threefold succession: “the divine image [Götterbild], the imperial image [Kaiserbild], and portraits of the dead [Totenporträt].”56 The ikon is thus involved in all of the difficulties and complications surrounding the Christian cult image, which remains controversial for a long time. Yet how are other images of sacred figures and other cult images to be distinguished from ikons? In the case of the ancient gods, the fact can be seen most clearly that not ­every veneration of gods’ images is accompanied by a tendency to valorize the images themselves. While in Babylonian religion, the anthropomorphized statues of gods in the t­emples (which the p ­ eople only saw on religious feast days) w ­ ere regarded as embodiments of the divine,57 in ancient Greece the idols ­were not considered as acheiropoieta—­t hat is, images of nonhuman origin (Chapter 3.4). Greek idols “are not equated with the gods and venerated as such. . . . ​In the theater, the gods could appear, yet every­ one knows that they w ­ ere sitting in a theater!”58 The ritual veneration of the Holy in antiquity, however, was spatially conceived: a sanctuary, a room, was situated in the most inner space of the Greek t­ emple “in which God dwells as an image. The ­actual space of the ­temple is thus the room that embraces the enclosed presence of God removed from sight, and at the same time keeps itself open to the appearing and encompassing phýsis permeated by God.”59 Insofar as being-­t here is the sole purpose of this visual presence of God, which is withdrawn from view, and insofar as the image of God and the act of seeing this image are separated, Benjamin’s cult value prevails ­here absolutely. In the spatial structure of ancient cult, the skene (originally a “tent” and the origin of “scene”) splits itself: into the “saintly scenario” as a tiered cultic site, on one hand, and into the public spectacle of tragedy, on the other.60 Within the frame of this spatial ritual order in antiquity, the ancient statues of individual gods presenting themselves to the gaze have to be explic­itly distinguished from cult images: “the figurine is a means of venerating the Gods, while the cult image, however, is for direct ritual veneration.” 61 The Christian religion, too, possesses a medium serving to embody the idea of the divine, albeit in a completely dif­fer­ent version. The divine takes on a radically dif­fer­ent significance in the context of Chris­tian­ ity, ­because a god’s figure is no longer depicted in artifacts—­Christ, rather, appears as the embodiment of God incarnate: as instrumentum animatum, a living instrument. According to the doctrine of the Church ­Fathers, Christ “with regard to his h ­ uman nature, that is, the incarnate Christ, was Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization  185

the instrument of the Godhead, . . . ​t hat is, the triune Deity as well as his own divine nature—­humanitas instrumentum divinitatis.” 62 The incarnation of the divine log­os in the form of the Son of God is both an imaging and an embodiment at once, whereby the body of Christ becomes the primal image [Urbild] of the Christian cult image. The vehemence with which the image became a contested topic in Christian cultures is only understandable when starting from this idea of an “original image” of the divine. A true or genuine image of this ur-­image is only conceivable if it arises from its physical traces, as in the case of the vera icon (Chapter 2.7). In this re­spect, the manner in which the shroud—­whose traces bear witness to the (past) presence of the Son of God incarnate—­generates an iconic image resembling his body constitutes the primal scene of the Christian cult image. The idea of the real presence of Christ in an image arises ­here. This primal scene becomes particularly clear in the Mandylion of the so-­called Abgar image of Edessa, which is regarded as a portrait of Christ made by himself, a kind of self-­portrait.63 Even ­t hose ikons that depict the imprint of Christ’s face on this cloth, yet bear no trace of it themselves, profit from the sacred radiance emanating from this relic. They are thus often also treated as acheiropoieta—­images not made by ­human hands. The “true image” that develops from physical traces is only surpassed in gravity by the dogma surrounding the Eucharist, which is to say, by the idea of a real presence of Christ in the Host of the Last Supper—­t he Eucharist understood not as an image but rather as the body of Christ itself. In this an-­iconic cult object, the skandalon also inscribed into the Christian cult image becomes manifest. That which has been taken to its extreme in the concept of “transubstantiation” (literally, the substances’ transformation: of bread and wine into flesh and blood) concerns the Christian cult image in general—­namely, the transfer of the sacred between flesh and image, between the repre­sen­ta­tion and the ­bearer of the image. In the ritual practices themselves, the demarcations between such distinctions become porous, yet for a theory of images, they are essential. As an object of cult, images tend to elude conceptual and theoretical access—­a reason for the oft-­ observed misunderstandings between, on one hand, image-­theoretical studies inspired by philosophy or psychoanalysis, and, on the other, investigations in medieval art history, which proceed from the theological conceptions of the images of the time. 186  Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization

5 . O N T H E C H R I S T I A N D E S I R E F O R I M AG E S ( H E G E L A N D B E YO N D )

The idea of Christ’s presence in the Host is at the heart of an issue surrounding images in Chris­tian­ity: the dogma of transubstantiation. Carlo Ginzburg considers this par­t ic­u ­lar significance of the Host as a kind of meta-­presence [Überpräsenz]: “All other evocations or manifestations of the sacred—­such as relics and images—­are dim and feeble by comparison, at least in theory. (In practice, this was not how it turned out.)” B ­ ecause of this, he says that, ­after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 (which codified the doctrine of transubstantiation as dogma), the fear of images began to weaken. He considers this type of taming of images a precondition for the rise of art: “The return to illusionism in sculpture and painting was one of the results of this historical turning point. Without this disenchantment of the world of images we would have neither Arnolfo di Cambio nor Nicola Pisano nor Giotto.” 64 The discipline of art history links the same date to a proliferation of images, specifically with an “impressive increase in the production of panel paintings in diverse forms,” 65 and in addition a sweeping transformation of the concept of image. This is discussed u ­ nder the title of an “invention of the image,” referring to the image in the narrow sense of the word—­t hat is, to the genesis of the panel painting, in which a spatially conceived scene or historia can be seen. In this visual genre, the beginning of the (Western Eu­ro­pean) painting announces itself as art.66 In this way, the dogma of transubstantiation appears like an image-­historical watershed that divides the age of art from the preceding epoch of cult. ­These dif­fer­ent explanations for the interrelation between the theory of the Host and the genesis of art are hardly reconcilable. Ginzburg clearly assumes that relocating the notion of the real presence from the ikon to the Host ­frees images from worship and creates a freer painting, as it ­were—­similar to their emancipation from the bosom of the cultus in Benjamin. In contrast, Michael Philipp interprets the increased physical presence of Christ in images as a consequence of the cult of the Eucharist. The doctrine of transubstantiation is linked to the idea that Christ is “­really and truly physically pre­sent” in the cele­bration of the Eucharist. Subsequently, the Elevatio, the raising and vis­i­ble pre­sen­ta­t ion of the transformed Host, was established. . . . ​Thus Christ was thought not only Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization  187

to be pre­sent in the Mass, but also sensibly perceivable when displayed to the eyes of the congregation. Focus on physical presence is also apparent in pictorial repre­sen­ta­tions of Christ, in which the shift (occurring from the m ­ iddle of the 13th ­century) from Christ as s­ ilent sufferer to the painfully tormented emphasized the humanity of the Son of God.67 What the eyes of the congregation can see as the presence of Christ is, however, not an image of his body but rather an artifact that is said to be the body. In this re­spect, the idea of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist brings a significant gap into play: a gap between the perceptible and the sense; between seeing and religious certainty; between the vis­i­ble, an-­iconic t­ hing and the meaning ascribed to it—it is the body of Christ, however, that remains invisible. In this light, it seems more likely that a desire for images arises precisely from this gap, one in which bodily presence becomes conceivable and perceptible by the senses. The proliferation of images would thereby be an answer to a prob­lem that first arises in the Host—­because, theoretically speaking, the Host is in fact a symbol, a ­t hing with a fixed meaning, qua convention. With the dogma of Christ’s physical presence in the form of the Host, this symbol is inscribed with a radical break similar to the one Jacques Lacan identified between the signifier (the material or sensually perceivable phonetic picture or script) and the signified (which is the associated concept).68 This abyss can be bridged with the princi­ple of corporeal resemblance of the pictorial depiction in painting. The complications posed by Christ’s presence in the Eucharist provide a lynchpin for Hegel’s consideration of the philosophy of history. As early as “The Spirit of Chris­tian­ity and Its Fate” (1800), he had reflected upon the irresolvable “duality” of the Host at the Eucharist: “­There are always two ­t hings ­t here, the faith and the ­t hing, the devotion and the seeing or tasting. . . . ​­There is no unification for the two.” 69 ­Later, in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel refers to a foundational lack in the “nature of the Christian religion itself” and its precarious conception of worldliness—­ manifest in the Host.70 ­Because Chris­tian­ity, according to Hegel, does not regard the divine nature as the beyond of some sort but rather specifically “in the unity with ­human nature in the pre­sent moment,” while at the same time this presence of the divine is defined exclusively as a “spiritual presence.” This complicated relationship between the beyond and presence in 188  Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization

this world may explain the ongoing efforts of the church to find pos­si­ble forms of expression to provide for the presence of Christ within the worldly realm, although it is in temporal terms “a past one—­i.e. one existing only in the mind.” For Hegel, the doctrine of transubstantiation stands at the center of t­ hese efforts with the Host as its “principal form”: “Christ appears as this ­here [Dieses] in a sensual presence as the Host, consecrated by the Priest. . . . ​But the most prominent feature is, that the way in which Deity is manifested, is assured as this ­here, that the Host, this ­thing, is set up to be adored as God.”* ­Because “the need of this presence is infinite,” the outward sensual presence of God once attributed to the Host has set in motion an unending multiplicity of the external due to the unquenchable drive for a concrete presence on site: The Host, the supreme manifestation, is to be found indeed in innumerable churches; Christ is therein transubstantiated to a pre­sent and par­ tic­u­lar entity; but this itself is merely of a general character; it is not his ultimate presence as particularized in space. That presence has passed away, as regards time; but as spatial and as concrete in space it has a mundane permanence [erhaltenes Diesseits] in this par­tic­u ­lar spot, this par­ tic­u ­lar village, ­etc. It is then this mundane existence [Diesseits], which Christiandom desiderates, which it still has to attain.71 Thus Hegel interprets the cult of the Eucharist as an abundance, which nonetheless implies a deficiency and need that afflicts the Christendom and “drove it out of itself.”72 Hegel’s “out of itself” has to be understood entirely concretely, in the geographic sense as well. From the insatiable drive to gain the presence of God in the ­here and now [Diesseits], Hegel motivates nothing less than the Crusades themselves: as the endeavor to conquer the holy places and bring Christ’s tomb into the Church’s possession. When Christendom, however, thought of itself in “possession of its highest good,”73 it necessarily came away empty-­handed, ­because the tomb was empty—in this way manifesting the deficiency one more time. And yet, it is * ​Hegel, Philosophy of History, 408 (translation modified). This translation was modified ­because Hegel explic­itly did not use a concept to denominate the phenomenon of Christ’s appearance in front of the congregation but rather uses the word dieses in order to emphasize its indeterminable character. We translate dieses with “this ­here.”

Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization  189

the belief in the resurrection itself that necessarily thwarts any possession of the “highest good.” As Hegel writes, “of Christ himself no corporeal relics could be obtained, for he was arisen,” and at this point cites the Bible: first the Acts of the Apostles—­“Thou wouldst not suffer thy Holy One to see corruption”—­and then the Gospel of Luke—­“At the sepulchre the Christian world received a second time the response given to the disciples when they sought the body of the Lord ­t here: ‘Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not ­here, but is risen.’ ”74 In the history of Christian devotional practices, the lack of relics of Christ (which is a consequence of the missing mortal remains of Christ’s body) is compensated for by other relics: objects that testify to the Crucifixion and entombment, chiefly individual thorns from Christ’s crown, scraps of his garments, slivers of the cross, and the tools used in the Crucifixion. In a mediated way, t­ hese objects attest to the death of the si­mul­ta­neously mortal and divine body of Christ. From an image-­theoretical perspective, ­these relics take on the difficult task of referencing an absence through secondary traces: “Unlike saintly reliquaries, the relics of Christ must make visually tangible a more-­than-­holy, namely doubled-­natured body.”75 But apparently even such relics could not satisfy the yearning for material-­visual evidence of the gospel’s accounts and ­were therefore replaced and supplemented by images. Whereas the Greek colossus occupies the site of an ancient cenotaph and, in its significance as a religious statue, anticipates the moment of real presence and the connection to the beyond (Chapter 4.2), the cenotaph of Christ (the scene of an empty tomb) revolves around a singular tomb and the absence of the one corpse; it is the reverse side of the concept of a resurrection in the h ­ ere and now. Christ’s dual corporeal nature (as both incarnation and primal image [Urbild] of the divine) takes the place of ancient idols and in d ­ oing so establishes the link between this world and the hereafter, just as the colossus had. The death of Christ and disappearance of his corpse leave b ­ ehind an empty space that cannot, as opposed to the colossus, be filled by a double. Instead, an unending production of tangible and pictorial evidentia is set in motion, a supplementary economy suited to the specific character of the Christian image: endless repetition of the scenes of incarnation, passion, and empty tomb, which are put in front of h ­ uman eyes. Out of the disappointment of ­those faced with the empty tomb, Hegel develops a theory of negative experience within the horizon of his dialectical 190  Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization

philosophy of history, in which the Christian aporias become manifest—­ namely, a kind of negativity from which something new can be generated. The tomb is the place where “all the vanity of the sensuous perishes” and thereby becomes a “point of retroversion.”76 He concludes that, as a consequence, the recognition that the presence that men sought finds its existence not in an external ­t hing but in the “subjective consciousness alone,” only in the “person’s spiritual being of one’s own [geistiges Fürchsichsein der Person].” This means that man must “look in himself for this ­here (Dieses), which is of a divine nature.”77 Hegel thereby draws his princi­ple of a spiritual subjectivity from a genuine Christian experience of negativity, which drives Chris­tian­ity of the modern era no longer “out of itself” but ­toward a spiritual “being-­w ith-­itself [Bei-­sich-­Sein].” When Hegel marks this turning point as a “point of reversal [Umkehr]” and thus refers to a biblical idea (namely, reversal in the sense of conversion), then it becomes recognizable that Christian doctrine’s conversion into a philosophy of the spirit underlies his philosophy of history.78 Yet Hegel’s subtle analy­sis of a lack inscribed into the Christian religion— as it is manifest in the prob­lem of the Host and in Christ’s empty tomb—­ may also lead to a very dif­fer­ent conclusion: that it is the genesis of a specific Christian desire for images, an unending and insatiable thirst motivated by this primal scene. Along this line, the visual repre­sen­ta­tion of Christ and the repertoire of Christological iconography can be interpreted as a screen memory rich in imagery or as screen images (Chapter 1.2) with which the abyss between ­t hing and corporeal presence of Christ is covered over—as well as the absence of the physical remains as testimonies for the physical existence of God’s son in h ­ uman form as a consequence of the narrative of Christ’s resurrection. The resurrection of the figure of Christ in an image can be understood as a substitute—­and as permanent reassurance, if not compensation—­for the nonsensible, an-­iconic presence of the divine and the never-­to-­be-­obtained evidence of the incarnation. Therefore, it is more likely that the presence-­construction of the theory of transubstantiation did not so much weaken the fear of images as it produced and strengthened the potentially insatiable desire for images. The subsequent proliferation of images was accompanied by a revolutionary transformation in the under­lying understanding of images: which is, in fact, the invention of the image. Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization  191

6 . S K E N E : T H E I N V E N T I O N O F T H E I M AG E

This radical change in the nature of images, which affects the threshold between cult image and painting as art, has been widely studied and interpreted in very diverse ways. Belting regards Italian panel painting to be “heir to ikons” and argues that medieval altarpieces in Eu­rope owe their existence to “the encounter with eastern ikons.”79 His study The Image and Its Public in the ­Middle Ages (1981) addresses this encounter in the case of medieval images of Christ’s passion and traces multiform transitions from ikon to devotional image or to the composite image in the altarpiece. ­These new images emerged in the thirteenth ­century u ­ nder specific conditions: historical interventions like the occupation of Constantinople during the Crusades and the pope’s decree of iconolatry, in addition to the well-­documented social upheavals of the time (the emergence of urban republics and a social culture s­ haped by Chris­tian­ity). The Western Church’s orientation t­ oward iconolatry is often considered a defense against competition from eastern imports: “The new pictorial genre, which initiated a new kind of pictorial experience, was no doubt borrowed from eastern panels that streamed into the West in ­great numbers ­after the conquest of Constantinople in 1204.”80 ­These “new images” in the West distinguish themselves from the ikons of the Eastern Church in that they allow the viewer to assume a posture t­ oward the image that is dif­fer­ent from the awe or proskynesis that ­were the norm in the presence of ikons (Chapter 6.3); indeed, they require another attitude, ­because: “Images offered a sharing in what was depicted through the fascination of visual presence. They thereby acquired a new or intensified real­ ity.”81 While the ikon demands hieratic distance and rigidity, the new image in the West inaugurated the exact opposite, “the emotive, approachable image of the Virgin,” which belonged to the ­f uture.82 This new affective quality is a product of the viewer’s proximity to the image, as was experienced in the religious practice of devotion. In this light, one may consider the devotional picture (which leads a shadowy existence in the history of art) as a transitional image between cult and art. In Benjamin’s terms, this image is on the way ­toward emancipation from cult value but is not yet dominated by exhibition value. The devotional picture is less intended to be seen than it is to be looked at as a kind of superhuman counterpart without the cult image’s unapproachability—­panel images, sculptural figures, and groups of figures made mostly of wood are also considered 192  Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization

so-­called devotional images. A dwindling aloofness (particularly in the figure of Mary) corresponds to a shift in the “conceptualization of Mary,” observed by scholars in medieval studies: she draws closer to h ­ umans and transforms herself from the unapproachable ­Mother of God into an object of compassion.83 This is quite similar to Christ’s suffering in con­temporary images of the passion, which, unlike older crucifixes, offer an “invitation to ­ ehind the “invention of the imcompassion.”84 Similarly, in the arguments b age” the posture of emotional sympathy with the figures in an image is motivated with stronger emphasis on the ­human nature of the crucified and his transformation from a figure in ­silent suffering into one of being painfully tormented: “The thorough depiction of his vulnerability and injuries in the Stations of the Cross w ­ ere immediate and expressive; they w ­ ere not intended to instruct, but rather to induce compassionate communion.”85 This quality of greater corporality is a part of an entire series of aspects to the new mode of repre­sen­ta­tion from which the “image” that is at the core of Eu­ro­pean art history emerges. According to Philipp, ­t hese attributes include five formal differences: (1) the abandonment of the gold background, which is replaced by the construction of an interior space on the panel; (2) a spatial configuration with the effect of depth, replacing prior flatness; (3) the fact that the aureole is no longer fully painted but rather only implied; (4) the depiction of figures’ realistic physical presence rather than emblematic reduction; and, fi­nally, (5) the pre­sen­ta­tion of a detailed narrative with a greater number of figures in varying, stronger movements.86 ­These formal distinctions, which evolved between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, are vividly presented and discussed in Philipp’s comparison of the painting styles in the versions of the Flagellation of Christ by Guido da Siena (ca. 1270/80) and by Luca Signorelli (1508). The panel images, which Belting’s study refers to as already being the “new images” that result from an encounter with the ikons, apparently constitute the historical starting point for the revolutionary changes in the understanding of images that have been sketched out ­here. In the context of a devotional culture in which images are a part of the sanctuary—in most cases, a church space—­the form of the panel image thus forms the historical precondition for unfolding the two-­dimensional image on whose surface a fictional space can be designed. This pre­sents itself as the stage for a scene in motion, opening a second space of visual imagination to the viewer that is separate from that in which he or she lives. It is populated by characters with whom the viewer Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization  193

can also enter into an affective relationship dif­fer­ent from awe and devotion. Just as in the theater! In this way, a version of the classical skene ­here returns as a scene for dramatic theater, thus regaining the scenic dimension—­the sanctuary, the space of cult (Chapter 6.3)—­t hat was repressed in a very concrete sense by their counterpart at the genesis of Christian images.87 One example is the Church ­Fathers’ well-­k nown decree directed against Roman theater.88 In this light, it is no coincidence that the earliest passion plays are handed down from the same time period in which the new images emerged. The new performative pictorial space of panel images corresponds to folk theater, in which the same scenes represented in the images are embodied in the passion plays by living bodies. The path from flatness to spatiality makes pos­ si­ble not only the development of central perspective so decisive for the history of Eu­ro­pean art but also the construction of scenes in motion in which outward movements appear as visual expression of inner emotional movements—­and with ­t hese scenes, the rediscovery of the pathos formula from classical culture. With enthusiasm, Ivan Nagel invoked the dramatic quality of the images at the beginning of the history of Eu­ro­pean art. His book Painting and Drama (Gemälde und Drama, 2009) starts with a polemic against the frequent characterization of ­t hese images as “narrative scenes” in art history. According to Nagel, they would be more correctly referred to as “narratives become drama,” a “drama-­on-­t he-­stage-­set of painting.” What he discovers in this scenic moment is precisely an elective affinity between the theater and painting. With a theater director’s eye, he sees in painting a “presentist flash” or the “awakening” of an occurrence that had before led a quasi-­deceased existence in chronicle and narration: as something that has been, that onetime existed, but has long-­since absconded: “The persons on the stage and in the field of vision compel their chronicles to be transformed into scenes through the power of ghostly revival. The act of necromancy responds to their cry for flesh and clothes from the ghosts’ realm.”89 Illuminated, as it ­were, by a theatrical spotlight, the history of the invention of images appears in a dif­fer­ent light. Nagel emphasizes that the images around 1300 that introduced storia or history into the image space conquered “the West’s sacred art” and introduced a dif­fer­ent kind of temporality and repre­ sen­ta­t ion in contrast to narrative: “as the past changes into the pre­sent, the chronicle concentrates in the dialog, the narrative turns into drama.”90 194  Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization

Nagel, however, draws this characterization not from painting directly but rather on the detour through Dante’s Divine Comedy, from the three reliefs in the tenth Song of Purgatory. It is the scene in the first circle of Purgatory in which a rock wall of white marble suddenly rises up in front of Dante and Virgil. The wall bears three carvings: a scene of the Annunciation whose angel stands “so truly (verace)” before the eyes of the two wanderers in the afterlife “that it did not seem a ­silent image” (verse 37– 39);91 a repre­sen­ta­t ion of the Ark of the Covenant drawn by bulls in front of David’s palace; and, fi­nally, a scene depicting Emperor Trajan in conversation with a grieving ­mother who lost her son in the war and now demands revenge (vendetta) from the Emperor. For Nagel, this last scene pre­sents perhaps the most striking dialogue that “arose in the one and a half millennia between Seneca and Marlowe.”92 When Dante asserts that ­t hese three images come from God, they become, for Nagel, descriptions of a new understanding of images: “The chiseled account from the past is only completed as a resonating scene of the pre­sent.” And the fact that the reliefs begin to speak, as Dante affirms, becomes for Nagel the model of a kind of “vis­i­ble speech” or audible sight. He takes this formulation from Dante’s verses, which characterize the images created by God as “new to us,” a never-­before-­seen kind of “vis­i­ble speech [visibile parlare]” (verses 94–96).93 Nagel comments: “A remarkable figure of thought: the image remains mute—to the ear. But the eye hears.”94 A correspondence to the images in Dante can be found in painting, in “the most sophisticated art of his time: Giotto’s painting,” as exemplified in the Arena Chapel (Cappella degli Scrovegni) in Padua (1304–1306). In this way, the image theory of a theater director discovers in the scene a site for a fascinating interplay between painting and drama, between image and dialogic text: “Dante’s poetry demands a new painting; Giotto’s painting creates a f­ uture theater (neither constructed by a master builder nor played on by any actor for a long time).” The rediscovery of the ancient skene, counterplace to the sanctuary, thus appears to be the precondition for the afterlife [Nachleben] of ancient forms in Re­nais­sance painting, which Aby Warburg studies as “pathos formulas” of excited gestures [erregte Gebärden] and accessories in motion [bewegtes Beiwerk]. In his writings, too, the appearance of pictorial pathos formulas from ancient times in Re­nais­sance painting occurs on the detour through the dramatic appropriation of classical figures. In his essay on Albrecht Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization  195

Dürer, Warburg highlights that Poliziano’s earliest Italian drama, his Orfeo, “speaking in the manner of the Ovidian” (performed in 1471), which “directly dramatically embodied the suffering of Orpheus,” was “powerfully delivered in the melody of his own Italian” and that this per­for­mance arose sensuously before the eyes of the same Re­nais­sance society in Mantua that also saw the Death of Orpheus in a copper engraving from Andrea Mantegna’s circle. It was this interplay between drama and image that created the possibility for the episode from the Dionysian legend to be presented as “passionate and understanding empathic experience.”95 This per­for­mance played out on the doubled, dramatic-­pictorial stage, preformed the speaking image as well. In works such as Giovanni Bellini’s Pietà (around 1465) from the Brera in Milan, for example, is a painting that stands as proof of a “Copernican turn” in the history of painted images.96 This painting describes itself as a weeping image and invites the viewer to feel compassion. It marks the vanis­hing point of the revolutionary pro­cesses in the fifteenth ­century: Motivated by a specific Christian desire for images unfolding within the register of Christian iconography, t­ hese pro­cesses instigated the removal of images from the cult space (the sanctuary) and prompted the idea of a separate, distinct, and potentially in­de­pen­dent image space. The secularization of images is based in a concomitant differentiation of image spaces. A renewed mixing or even confusion between ­t hese distinct spaces can lead to unexpected and uncanny effects. 7 . V I S I B I L I T Y: S PAC E O F C U LT A N D I M AG E S PAC E

In one of the few engagements with Benjamin’s discussion of Raphael’s Madonna in his “Work of Art” essay, Daniel Arasse rejects the terms cult value and exhibition value, claiming that both concepts are ill-­suited to the issues inherent to Christian imagery. ­Here, a return to Benjamin’s thesis is warranted: in terms of the cult value of images, being-­t here is more impor­tant for them than being seen (which he introduces in the context of the ritualistic origins of the artifacts). This thesis actually reaches far beyond Christian culture and is not to be understood as a general statement about Christian cult images. Arasse, however, is less concerned with a relativization within religious history than he is with “visibility,” which is for him the key concept for understanding Christian imagery. He links visibility to Benjamin’s concept of exhibition value, rendering the opposition between 196  Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization

cult and exhibition values untenable by focusing the “culte d’exposition” that Arasse sees at work in the Roman version of Christian pictorial practices.97 He thus collapses cult and exhibition into each other in the Christian image, considering visibility a precondition for sacred art’s effect and the work displayed on the altar as characteristic of Christian cults and rites.98 His theme of visibilité thus involves two dif­fer­ent aspects: a cultural practice (the display of images on the altar in the church or sanctuary) and an image-­ theological prob­lem (the visualization of the divine in the image). Arasse discovers a respective synthesis of cult and exhibition in the Sistine Madonna. In both its theological content and its cultic purpose, this image resists a polarity between its cult and exhibition values.99 The painting itself remains in the cultic realm, while the motif of the visual motion of the virgin with child as a pictorial expression for the figure of revelatio at the same time thematizes the entrance of the divine into the realm of visibility. Yet Arasse misreads Benjamin’s argument b ­ ecause he assumes that for him the pictorial theme of revelatio is the criterion for the “historical pro­ cess” in the reception of artworks—­for the transition from “cultic in-­ visibility” to the “visibility of the exhibition.” Benjamin, however, was in fact interested in the interaction between both poles in one image, and Raphael’s painting is for him a clear example of the transfer in the opposite direction: not from cult to exhibition (and certainly not from an invisibilité culturelle to a visibilité d’exposition) but rather from exhibition in the context of a representative staging to a sanctuary (where the image is presented to believers to look at).100 Moreover, the notion that being-­there is more significant to a construct’s cult value than it is to be seen in no way means that it is invisible. For Benjamin, images’ oscillation between cult and exhibition is mostly tied to a change in setting and is less a question of visibility. Apart from this misreading, however, Arasse’s contribution is in­ter­est­ ing from an image-­t heoretical perspective, insofar as he illuminates “visibility” at the intersection of vari­ous prob­lems that repeatedly intersect and layer over one another in image-­based strug­gles. His visibilité is legible as a symptom of complex image-­theoretical controversies in that it captures two aspects: both the imaging of the divine and the cultic pre­sen­ta­tion of images in the sanctuary. The bivalent semantics in the concept of visibility—­ pictorial visualization (pictorial motif) and the image’s being-­v iewed (reception)—­points to the genuinely Christian signature of the corresponding Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization  197

concept of the image. If images are generally defined as the making-­v isible or the iconic materialization of something not vis­i­ble (sometimes of the unsayable), this idea is derived from an originary image-­theological assumption: theologically speaking, the incarnation, the becoming-­flesh of God, and image-­theoretically speaking, the pictorial embodiment of a transcendent idea. Insofar as the visual image appears in this genealogy as the successor of Christ’s double nature (the ­human body of Christ, which is also the primal image for divinity), the prob­lem posed by unconfirmable evidence of this double nature is inscribed in the mode of visualization. From its initial function of making the divine vis­i­ble, the image becomes the medium for the visibility of that which is inaccessible in general—be it of transcendence, inner life, the soul, the numinous, the truth, or even neural and biochemical pro­cesses in vivo that cannot be seen with the naked eye. As a cultural practice for engagement with images, making an image available to the eye of the viewer, however, goes back to the viewing of images in ritual, which in the Christian context means their placement in the sanctuary, be it for adoration, veneration, or devotion. ­These practices are related to dif­fer­ent modes of seeing and specific attitudes ­toward the image. Proceeding from the difference between viewing during devotional prayer (in which the image appears as a kind of counterpart) and seeing an image as an artifact exhibited and displayed, an almost infinite spectrum of pos­si­ble attitudes unfolds: contemplative viewing, immersion in the image, reverence or devotion, compassionate sympathy or pity, aesthetic perception, admiration, assessing gaze, possessive gaze, voy­eur­is­tic gaze, or the gaze of a connoisseur or of an expert, ­etc. “Visibility” is thus the symptom of diverse charged relationships between imaging (of something a-­v isible) and the ways in which the image is viewed. Both aspects coincide in the primal scene of Christian cult, the display of sacred images in the church space. In Arasse’s essay, Raphael’s Madonna epitomizes this. In the last part of his essay, he develops an interpretation of oscillation in this painting, which actually (if contrary to his own remarks) closely parallels Benjamin’s reading. With the lovely title “L’ange spectateur,” this section concentrates on the two angels at the bottom of the painting whose bodies (only vis­i­ble as busts) are turned t­ oward the viewer standing outside of the painting’s space, while their gaze is focused on the sacred event above them inside the image space. In his multilevel reading of ­t hese figures, 198  Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization

Arasse initially sets himself apart from a purely iconographic interpretation, one that would view the curtain hanging in the upper corners of the painting as the border between the fictive space of repre­sen­ta­tion and the real space. Raphael rejected such tricks, Arasse argues. The two angels at the bottom edge are more significant to him than the curtain, which he—­following his teacher Louis Marin—­labels the neutral zone of the image, the “zone neutre de l’image”: a margin where the “repre­sen­ta­tion’s construction” deletes or naturalizes itself in order to establish the “autonomy of the artwork.”101 In this way, the construction of repre­sen­ta­tion’s “glorious autonomy” asserts itself, as Arasse writes referring to Marin’s remarks in “Présentation et représentation dans le discours classique” (1985).102 In its pictorial staging of repre­sen­ta­tion, Arasse considers Raphael’s work truly modern. However, in terms of the image’s theological content—­“the Christian relevatio of the vis­i­ble God”—he describes the angels found at the foot of the virgin (also in other paintings, by Mantegna, for example), as threshold figures. They surface ­here not as the guardians of the a-­v isible, as they do in their biblical role as cherubs (Exodus 25: 17–22), but rather as witnesses of a “mis en visibilité” that exceeds them.103 In this way, Arasse interprets the painting’s lower margin as the edge of repre­sen­ta­tion itself, which does nothing but initiate the activity of seeing—­and this gaze is reflexive. Deploying another quote from Marin, he says that this margin reflects the distinction between the “Là” (­t here) of the (image) world and the “Ici” (­here) of the viewer. It is con­spic­u­ous that Arasse’s description of the way in which the picture’s construction triggers a certain mode of viewing, one that connects us with the re/presented supermundane scene, sounds similar to how Jean-­ Pierre Vernant describes the purpose of the prehistorical colossus situated above a cenotaph: to make contact between “ici-­bas” (down ­here) and “au-­delà” (up t­ here) (Chapter 4.2). The correspondence between t­ hese descriptions illuminates once again the way in which images inherit and replace the position of mediators to the outerworldly realm in archaic cultic practices. Yet, during its long cultural history, a s­ imple double for a missing corpse has unfolded into an artifact that is also a complex and sophisticated constellation that mediates between the physical space we occupy as spectators and the painting, which imag(in)es a mise-­en-­scène of another space—­t he appearance of figures from up ­t here. In Raphael’s Madonna, for example, the two l­ ittle angels sitting at the bottom of the picture frame this artificial mediation. Yet they are not only figures on the threshold between Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization  199

the interior and exterior of the image space but also threshold figures between art and cult or religion. In ­these threshold figures, Arasse discovers the place of an oscillation between the dif­fer­ent points of view occupied by the religious and artistic gazes: “a ‘religious’ gaze directed at the object of cult and an ‘artistic’ gaze directed at the work of art.”104 Arasse rejects interpreting the relation between the two gazes as a polarity, since at the time of Raphael the aspects of virtus and sanctitas coincided when artists created a religious work. Nonetheless, his reading of the threshold beings pre­sents a paradigmatic transitional constellation between cult object and artwork, in which the corresponding pictorial spaces separate—­a scene historically located with Raphael, that is, during the cinquecento. The invention of the image first created a fictive pictorial space separated from the space of the viewer—­often this was the sanctuary. The “glorious autonomy” of the artwork owes itself to this structuring. As beings who occupy the margin of the image and direct their gaze back into the painting’s space while at the same time turning their bodies to the viewer (that is to say, as threshold beings), the angels are not only “implied viewers” in the image—­they are also transitional figures between cult and art.105 At the same time, they embody a reversal in the concept of the image: the shift between a posture ignorant of the distinction between cultic space and image space (­because image and participant in the ritual find themselves in the same sanctuary) and the space in front of the image, from which the gaze of the viewer is directed into the pictorial space, which is constructed as another space dif­fer­ent from his own. It is often overlooked that this division in image spaces is accompanied by a reversal in the direction of perception b ­ ecause the interior pictorial is perceived as laterally reversed from the position in front of the picture.106 In the case of the angels in Raphael’s Madonna, inhabitants of the image’s margin and threshold beings, the counterstriving movement of body and gaze point to a transitional situation in which the differentiation of the image spaces coincides with a literal change of perspective. The angels in Raphael’s painting are, however, not the only “witnesses to a visualization”—­t he innumerable depictions of angels point to the question of pictorial embodiments of supersensible or transcendental meanings and noncorporeal ideas or concepts in general. Fundamentally, images of angels are the products of a doubled pro­cess of imaging—­first as a figure in which the idea of the heavenly sphere takes 200  Cult Images in the Dialectic of Secularization

shape as a personification, though this embodiment is only secondarily presented in pictorial form. The images of angels thus bear witness to the pro­ cess by which ideas of immaterial phenomena make appearance as images, while their figuration in ephemeral, hovering beings si­mul­ta­neously refers to the nonearthly sphere from which they originate and in which they dwell. If the figure of the angel in the biblical tradition appears both at the origin and the end of the double nature of the Christian body—on one hand, at the scene of the incarnation of the (divine) word as the herald of bodiless procreation and, on the other hand, at the scene of Christ’s empty tomb as herald of the absent physical remains of the dead Christ—­t hen the figure of the angel occupies the threshold at which the image of the divine, like that of any other immaterial concept, emerges and dis­appears. In this way, they are the figurations of traceless images par excellence.

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7 A N G E L S : I M A G E S O F M A K I N G -­ APPEARANCE BETWEEN RELIGION, A R T, A N D S C I E N C E

The artwork as appearance is most closely resembled by the apparition, the heavenly vision. Artworks stand in accord with it as it rises above ­human beings, beyond their intention and the world of ­t hings. —­Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory When curators and art restorers use x-­rays on works of art to determine their age, material layers, and production methods, the innermost of the image is turned outward. In the x-­ray photography taken of a heavy terracotta sculpture of an angel, the image miraculously regains something of the floating and transparent nature that originally constitutes the bodiless being of angels. The rays of shadow in the photo­graph provide a view into the hidden part of the image while, at the same time, giving the impression that the figure is wafting away from its encapsulation in a stony image (Figure 46). This x-­ray image can be understood as a reflection image of the complex relationship between angelology, the image-­ question, and science—­ reflecting in the double sense: contemplation triggered by physical reflection.1 The twofold enterprise of making a celestial sphere (one inaccessible to the naked eye) available in the vis­i­ble, material world is condensed in this image: in the first step made vis­i­ble as an image and in the second by means of scientific-­technical methods. Though the angels are themselves bodiless and have nonhuman forms, they have entered the ­human image world to testify of another world: as heavenly messengers or mediators between

FIGURE 46. ​Imaging and screening: alternative practices in the access to angels and the a-­v isible. X-­r ay image (2002) of Antonio Begarelli’s angel sculpture, terracotta (­a fter 1534), Bode Museum Berlin. Image credit: Bundesanstalt

für Materialforschung und -­prüfung, Berlin, https://­w ww​.­bmm​-­c harite​.­de​/­ausstellungen​ /­r ueckschau​/­z willingsbilder​-­roentgenfotografien​-­von​-­skulpturen​-­103​.­html.

inaccessible knowledge and the vis­i­ble world of bodies. As the innumerable images of angels, which have populated the Eu­ro­pean world of ideas and images since early Chris­t ian­ity, lost their mystical aura and theological power of persuasion, the “exact sciences” began to wrest away their secret knowledge through empirical methods. However, why is it, of all ­things, the angel (as well as heaven and hell) that became the object of the sciences’ pursuit of testing their methods and models of explanation, expanding the limits of the accessible and explainable world, and unearthing the laws of nature—­even though the sciences had just proved that ­these “beings” do not belong to nature? Among the abundance of aspects in the countless discourses on angels (whose history, one of fascination, continues even ­today in philosophy and cultural science), and from the multiplicity of meanings attributed to angels—as messengers and medias,2 as in-­between or hybrid beings,3 as the civil servants of a heavenly government4—­a grammatology of images directs its interest to one aspect especially: angels as figure and symptom of the image-­question. In the following, the vari­ous ways this question has been given shape or been mastered w ­ ill be addressed. 1. T H E A N G E L A S F I G U R E O F T H E I M AG E -­Q U E S T I O N : B E T W E E N E P H E M E R A L P H E N O M E N O N A N D F I X E D I M AG E

In the esoteric text “Agesilaus Santander,” written in August 1933 in Ibiza, Walter Benjamin expresses the worry that he had withdrawn the New Angel, “improperly long from his hymn”—­namely, during the time when he had fixed him as an image on the wall: The Kaballah relates that, at e­ very moment God creates a w ­ hole host of angels, whose only task before they dissolve in the nothingness is to sing for a moment the praise of God before His throne. The new angel presented himself as such an angel before naming himself. I only worry that I had withdrawn him improperly long from his hymn.5 The slightly differing first version of the account states that the angel “had been interrupted” during its song of praise. Th ­ ese words form in nuce a dialectic of that pro­cess in which an ephemeral phenomenon is captured in/as an image while precisely b ­ ecause of this, it is alienated from its proper 204  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

meaning or purpose—­a ll the while, it remains the material image’s role to refer to that other, ephemeral sphere. By appearing as an embodied form in a visual image, the angel—­here introduced as the figure of appearance and disappearance “in a flash”—is no longer an angel. The paradox that Heinrich Heine had already established for ­those earthly relatives of angels is even more pronounced ­here: “The motionless transfixed butterfly is a butterfly no longer.” ­There are ­people, however, who “believe they can observe a butterfly quite accurately when they have stuck it on a paper with a pin”; but this is “as foolish as it is cruel.” 6 If the example of the pinned butterfly epitomizes the fixation of living traces in an image, the angel concerns the other pole of the grammatological image-­question—­the embodiment and fixation of a genuinely bodiless and traceless idea in an image. The primal scenes of such imaging mostly emerge from cultic or religio-­historical contexts. Benjamin’s account emphasizes precisely this origin by the fact that he removed the angel from its celestial task, thus arresting the cult in the image. This kind of fixing-­in-­place is evident in the picture pinned to the wall. Against the backdrop of such a dialectic, every­thing depends on w ­ hether its analy­sis produces ossification or a moment of recognizability in the “dialectic at a standstill.” Benjamin’s condensed text thus addresses a skandalon of countless dif­ fer­ent portrayals of angels without which the history of art and culture is unthinkable. The pictorial re/pre­sen­ta­tion of super­natural beings (who have neither form nor body) was the subject of a controversial (theological) debate about images of angels that continued for hundreds of years, one that foregrounds the vulgarity of giving a h ­ uman form to nonhuman beings. At the same time, however, much more was at stake—­namely, the tension between the bodily, material re/pre­sen­ta­tion of the angel and its immaterial nature. According to Glenn Peers, this is precisely the “compelling and attractive quality of their images.”7 It is exactly this tension characteristic for angels that distinguishes them from other Christian images. Peers’s Subtle Bodies is one of the few works among the almost impossible to overlook abundance of books about angels that addresses the issue of re/pre­sen­ta­tion that they spark in addressing it in epistemological terms—­referring to the example of the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy.8 Benjamin’s account, the passage cited above, is part of a self-­reflection in which the figure of the Angelus Novus functions as a kind of imaginary Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  205

Other, a sort of alter ego whose appearance comes about due to a change in the secret proper name. Without reconsidering h ­ ere the entire autobio9 graphical background, the pseudo-­ autobiographical text on a “secret name”10 and the occasion of the address (to a beloved),11 what is of interest in this context are his thoughts on the tension between angelology and image theory. The catalyst for the scene is the moment in which the name is said aloud and thereby “much of his image falls away.” With this, Benjamin alludes to the mimetic character of the name (in contrast to the word as a part of language as a signifying system) and to the name’s proximity to the image. The angel arises from this unveiling of the name (this enigmatic scene is only comprehensible through an anagram of Agesilaus Santander: “Angelus Santanas,” from which the “Angelus” emerges): “In the room I occupied in Berlin, even before he emerged fully armored and accoutered from my name, he had fixed his image to the wall: New Angel.” In light of Benjamin’s l­ater writings, the text is recognizable as an autobiographically colored monad for the t­ heses “On the Concept of History,” written seven years ­later. The ephemeral character, which in “Agesilaus Santander” applies to angels emerging and vanis­hing in a flash, then belongs to the “true image of the past” characterized as a nonmaterialized image or as a memory image: “The true image of the past flits by. The past can be captured only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again.”12 By adopting the paradox that an image that appears and immediately dis­appears gets secured, the “image of the past” in Benjamin’s theory of history becomes the successor of the angelic image.13 In that its appearance is marked as a moment of recognizability, this image occupies a central position in Benjamin’s epistemology. And more importantly, Benjamin primarily derived his epistemology from an engagement with the image of an angel as a constellation of appearing [In-­Erscheinung-­Treten]. As reflection images, images of angels are assistants, as it ­were, to the elaboration of a specific epistemology in Benjamin. Yet this position is also significant for their importance in the relationship between image theory and epistemology in general. Images of angels do not so much concern the making-­visible of the a-­visible; they rather provide the possibility to discuss the ways in which the tidings from a transcendental sphere find their way in the h ­ ere and now of worldly experience—or the ways in which a knowledge of that which is inaccessible to the ­human eye makes appearance in the h ­ uman world of concepts and ideas. Angels are not only witnesses to a mise en visibilité (Daniel Arasse, Chapter 6.6); as 206  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

mediums and witnesses to a mise en apparition, they are also and exactly reflection images of the operations of imaging. It is well known that Paul Klee’s watercolor drawing Angelus Novus (1920, Figure  47), which Benjamin acquired in 1921, a year a­ fter his wife Dora gave him Klee’s watercolor Die Vorführung des Wunders (Pre­sen­ta­ tion of the Miracle, 1916), hides ­behind Benjamin’s New Angel. That Klee’s Angelus Novus watercolor has become one of the most famous and most

FIGURE 47. ​Withdrawn from cult: the angel, fixed in the standstill of the image. Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1920), Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Image credit: Johann

Konrad Eberlein, “Angelus Novus”: Paul Klees Bild und Walter Benjamins Deutung (Freiburg, Germany: Rombach, 2006), 18.

Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  207

frequently reproduced images of an angel in modernity is due in large part to Benjamin’s “angel of history” in the thesis “On the Concept of History.” In this text, the impression left by the drawing culminated a­ fter a latency of almost two de­cades in the formulation of his famous thought-­image.14 The figure of Klee’s drawing circulates throughout as an embodiment or repre­sen­ta­tion of the “angel of history,” if not as an illustration of a catastrophic-­messianic understanding of history. In this short cir­cuit, Klee’s image and Benjamin’s text meet the fate shared by many icons of modernity, whose popularity only increases as they depart further and further from their origin and are thus severed from its meaning and epistemic context. Benjamin’s text in fact introduces Klee’s drawing—he emphasizes the figure’s wide-­open eyes, staring gaze, and open mouth—as a counterimage to the refrain taken from a stanza of Gershom Scholem’s poem “Gruß vom Angelus” (“Greetings from Angelus,” 1921), who puts his own ideas into the angel’s mouth: “My wing is ready for flight / I would like to turn back / If I stayed everliving time / I’d still have ­little luck.”15 It is only from the contrast between Scholem’s talkative and Klee’s traumatized, mute angel that Benjamin generates his thought-­image the “angel of history,” who turns his face t­ oward the past while the storm of pro­gress drives him backward into the f­ uture. In ­these counterimages of angels—­Scholem’s poem and Klee’s drawing—­ two dif­fer­ent iconographies meet, which point to utterly dif­fer­ent signatures and are historically remote from one and other. The archaic-­looking Angelus Novus’s wide-­open eyes draw Klee’s figure into the realm of the earliest re/pre­sen­ta­t ions of Christian angels, in whose iconography a pagan image-­world survived. One of the oldest known repre­sen­ta­tions of the Archangel Michael on a Coptic panel from sixth-­century Egypt is influenced by the tradition of mummified likenesses.16 Peers emphasizes the large, staring eyes, which produce an effect of timeless abstraction; the figure looking at the viewer frontally only betrays its immobility in its hand, which is raised in blessing (Figure 48).17 The reference of Klee’s depiction to portrayals of angels from late antiquity is also recognizable in this gesture. Appearing as a “lyrical I,” the angel in Scholem’s stanza rather originates from a pro­cess of the increasing humanization of angels, as a result of which t­hese originally unearthly beings made themselves at home in bourgeois life. Once angels acquired h ­ uman traits already in medieval times, they then in the Re­nais­sance started to appear 208  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

FIGURE 48. ​“The angel of history must look like this” (Walter Benjamin). Egyptian panel painting of the archangel (sixth c­ entury), Cabinet des Médailles, Paris. Image credit: Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005), 109.

FIGURE 49. ​The angel as personification of melancholia. Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, ­e tching (1514), Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Image credit: Erwin Panofsky, Das Leben und die Kunst Albrecht Dürers (Munich: Rogner & Bernhard, 1977), 209.

as beings who share in the ­human world of emotions—­a nd ­human affect finds its echo in their figuration. As a result, they increasingly became doppelgängers or mirror images of ­human emotions and sensitivities. This is particularly evident in ­t hose angels who take part in scenes of lamentation, and more so in angelic personifications of melancholy: from Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514, Figure  49), up to Édouard Manet’s painting The Dead Christ with Angels (1864, Figure  50). With Scholem’s verses, the angels arrived in the world of subjective modes of expression in poetry. 210  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

FIGURE 50. ​Pathosformula of compassion: the angel’s entry into the world of ­ uman emotions. Édouard Manet, The Dead Christ with Angels, oil on canvas h (1864), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image credit: Hans Körner, Edouard Manet, Dandy, Flaneur, Maler (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1996), 84.

2 . T H E T E N S I O N B E T W E E N T H E A N G E L’S I M AG E A N D I T S I N CO R P O R E A L I T Y

Etymologically, angels are descended from the Greek angeloi—­they are messengers, personified mediums for a transcendent knowledge that communicates to mortal or earthly creatures through them. In the Western tradition and Christian iconography, angels are given the task of making the spheres of the a-­visible, hidden, transcendental, or divine accessible and imaginable to the world of the vis­i­ble, physical, material, terrestrial, or ­human. In other Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  211

words, they bring the beyond to the ­here and now. They are regarded as heralds of a mystery and as mediums of a celestial truth, and hence they are all along objects of both fascination and controversy.18 The very concrete conception and figuration of such beings is a marker of both a culture’s par­tic­ u­lar understanding of the beyond and of the questions with which the living are occupied. While the figures in Egyptian sepulchre guarding the dead and the entrance to the netherworld, for example, are representative of a culture whose main concern was a safe transition into the realm of the dead, another meaning of beyond is significant to mono­t he­istic religions that focus on an invisible, incorporeal figure of God. ­Here, the angels dwell at the origin of revelation, occupying, as already mentioned, the emergence and the disappearance of embodiment of the Christian divine in the image of Christ’s incarnate ­human nature: as herald of the Incarnation and as guardians of the entrance of Christ’s empty tomb who proclaim the sublation of the embodied image in the “Holy Spirit” (Chapter 6.4). In this way, the angels can represent the sphere of the intellectual and the spiritual, or, in Cartesian terms, the res cogitans.19 Thus they oppose the res extensa, and yet they appear in the world of bodies as proclaimers of the supersensible, insofar as the angel’s body stood repeatedly in the cross line of theological and philosophical debates. The almost paradoxical figuration is condensed in the image of the angel of the Annunciation: although being the herald of the Incarnation, the “becoming-­flesh of the Word,” its own body is of doubtful corporality. Equally in need of explanation was the question of to which place in Creation the angels are assigned, and just as uncertain is the origin and age of the angels. With the angels’ becoming-­image in a h ­ uman form, additionally iconographic questions emerge, ones that arise not least from the fact that t­here is not a sole picture of the h ­ uman creature—­questions of re/pre­sen­ta­t ion due to the differences in h ­ umans’ physical appearance (sex, age, ethnicity) as well as their cultural habitat. The first early Christian angels appear as wingless ­human figures, usually in ­simple robes with a tunic, pallium, and sandals. The attribute of wings (attested to since the fourth to sixth ­century) is interpreted as the introduction of a sign of distinction in relation to pictorial re/pre­sen­ta­tions of the Son of God; such images of the winged angel cite pagan iconography.20 They are reminiscent of personifications like Nike or Victoria (Figure  51) or Hermes’s winged shoes and Minerva’s winged helm from Greek and Roman my­t hol­ogy. In iconographic terms, the images of winged Christian angels 212  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

FIGURE 51. ​Nike: iconographic precursor of the angel’s image. Nike on a terracotta lecythus, Greek (about 490 BC), Metropolitan Museum, New York. Image credit: Sigrid Weigel.

thus appear to be direct successors of t­ hese winged ancient Greek figures. Such a direct transfer from pagan to Christian iconography can be studied particularly well in a pictographic formula often found on sarcophagi: the medallion or clipeus (“round shield”) picture of the dead held in the hands of two figures laterally floating on the left and right side of the medallion. Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  213

With reference to a child’s sarcophagus from Sarigüzel, Turkey (a Roman marble sarcophagus from the late fourth ­century, Figure 52), Peers highlights that the two horizontal hovering angels holding a wreath between them is a citation from pagan iconography where a medallion or inscribed tablet can be found instead of a wreath.21 The model of this hovering angel need not always be an ancient personification of victory, however—­a fact evinced in a Roman clipeus sarcophagus dating from the end of the second ­century, on which the winged figures holding the likeness of the dead in their midst are recognizable as cupids (Figure 53). This same image formula can also be found on the Barberini diptych from the sixth ­century (an ivory carving from Byzantium), whose central panel depicts a winged female Nike in a chiton posed next to the armored, triumphant Emperor, while in the frieze above them two horizontal angels in tunics and pallia hover holding a medallion between them with an en face portrayal of Christ (Figure 54).22 This image proves to be a particularly telling constellation, showing Christian figures literally occupying a seat in the ­middle of a world of pagan imagery. The transfer of winged figures from pagan to Christian imagery occurs, however, with a significant gender change. Most ancient personifications are feminine, whereas the early Christian angels are mostly male, with female angelic figures only (re)appearing on paintings of the Re­nais­sance.23 While the angels in the image ­were given an anthropomorphic form, their bodies became a m ­ atter of dispute for theologians and phi­los­o­phers. Augustine, who derived the opposition between civitas caelestis and civitas terrena from an ­earlier division among the angels into light and dark, assumed, for one, that the angels had ethereal bodies.24 By contrast, the first systematic angelology, Dionysius the Areopagite’s Peri tes ouranias hierarchias/De coelesti hierarchia (On the Celestial Hierarchy, ca. 500), defined the angel as a purely intellectual phenomenon, as nous (Greek for “mind”). His elaborate system of a nine-­tiered hierarchy of types of angels nevertheless constructs a kind of divine government whose heavenly order would become the model for the church. The fourth Lateran Council in 1215 ruled on the dispute over the ambiguous body of the angel, pronouncing that God “created both creations out of nothing, the intellectual-­spiritual [geistige] and the corporeal, namely the angels and the world,” and then created ­humans.25 In this way, the sphere of angels is defined as an intellectual creation, which is coequal to the earthly world—­a kind of parallel world. Following this line of thinking, Thomas Aquinas, who henceforth bore the sobriquet Doctor 214  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

FIGURE 52. ​Winged angels on an early Christian child sarcophagus. Sarigüzel sarcophagus (late fourth c­ entury), Istanbul Archaeological Museum. Image credit: Glenn Peers, Subtle Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 25.

FIGURE 53. ​Winged cupids: prefiguration of angels. Roman clipeus sarcophagus (late second c­ entury), Metropolitan Museum, New York. Image credit: Sigrid Weigel.

FIGURE 54. ​The image of Christ in the center of a Roman scene. Barberini diptych (sixth c­ entury), Louvre Museum, Paris. Image credit: Glenn Peers, Subtle

Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 27.

Angelicus, developed a consideration on angels that became canonical for Chris­t ian­ity and remained valid for a long time. His Summa Theologica (1265–1273) first elaborates thoughts on the immaterial world in reference to angels, then considerations on the world of bodies, and, eventually, on ­humans construed as a combination of both. Angels thus constitute a central figure in the construction of a dualistic conception of Creation, which would become an impor­tant point of reference for po­liti­cal theology—up to modernity and the pre­sent day. Already Ernst Kantorowicz’s study of medieval po­liti­cal theology and the sovereignty of Eu­ro­pean monarchies—­the doctrine of “the king’s two bodies” (the mortal and po­liti­cal bodies) derived from the Christian teaching of Christ’s two natures (Chapter 4.5)—­drew attention to the medieval idea of the character angelicus, with which the king was characterized: “The body politic of kingship appears as a likeness of the ‘holy spirits and angels,’ ­because it represents, like the angels, the Immutable within time.”26 Kantorowicz was concerned with the analogy between the angels and the po­liti­cal, immortal body of the king ­because both are displaced “from tempus to aevum, from Time to Sempiternity, at any rate, to some continuum of time without end.”27 While Kantorowicz addressed the angelic character of kingship, Giorgio Agamben’s most recent version of a po­liti­cal theology is conversely more interested in the royal, kingly nature of the angel. He begins by taking recourse to Erik Peterson’s The Angels and the Liturgy (Das Buch von den Engeln, 1955), which is dedicated to cultic aspects, elaborating the idea of the “holy church” being a unification of ­human religious communities and the angels and saints in heaven.28 Admittedly, in his Mono­the­ism as a Po­liti­cal Prob­lem (Mono­the­ismus als politisches Prob­lem?, 1935), Peterson casts po­liti­ cal theology in doubt, against what Carl Schmitt fiercely polemicized, rejecting it as the “myth of the closure of any po­liti­cal theology.”29 Yet, Agamben, in The Kingdom and the Glory (2007), still claims to have discovered the foundation of a po­liti­cal “kingdom” precisely in the doxology that was so impor­tant to Peterson: the liturgical doctrine of God’s “glory.”30 Agamben’s version of po­liti­cal theology thus creates a kind of governmentality that is vouchsafed by heaven, one in which the angels again appear as heaven’s civil servants. Thomas Aquinas’s angelology from the first part of the Summa Theologica titled “God and Creation” plays a significant role for this proj­ect; excerpts from it are attached to the German prerelease of the chapter on angels from Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory.31 It is significant which 216  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

sections of the Thomic arguments on angels are incorporated: “Of the Government of Th ­ ings in General” (Question 103), “Of Hierarchy” (106, 107, 108), “The Mission of the Angels” (112), “The Relations of the Saints t­oward the Damned” (94). By contrast, all of the sections addressing the peculiar nature of the angel are absent. While t­ hese passages would seem to be irrelevant for po­liti­cal theology, they are all the more impor­tant for the image-­question, which not insignificantly sparks off on the shaping of angels.32 The fiftieth through seventy-­fourth of the Questions in the Summa Theologica concern the world of angels, entities referred to h ­ ere as threshold beings and described as immaterial, intellectual beings without a body (incorperei)—­a mere substanceless form. The specific mode of knowledge belonging to ­t hese merely intellectual beings (namely, intellectus et mens) is that of similarity, not of abstraction. This evolves not discursively but rather in the form of beholding immediacy. Angels are the part of creation nearest to and most like God (assimilatione ad Deum, Question 50). According to Aquinas, the angels perceive God as a mirror image of their own angelic nature. In re­spect of their incorporeality, it is in­ter­est­ing how the angels’ precarious relation to the locus—­philosophically speaking, the res extensa—is discussed (Question 52). In the course of the Questions, which are presented in the rhetorical form of objections to existing points of view, the relation of the angels to the locus is compared with that of a cause to a ­t hing: in as much as the locus is defined as something that presupposes a quantitatively determinable position (locus est quantitas positionem habens), and that to be at a locus means to be mea­sur­able and contained within its bound­aries (esse in loco est mensurari loco et contineri a loco), the angels, due to their lack of substance and body, cannot be in a place in the usual way but can be in a dif­fer­ent way. Since Aquinas states that angels exist in the place ­toward which their force is directed, their mode of being is considerably dif­fer­ent from that of h ­ uman bodies. The commentary in Joseph Bernhart’s edition of Aquinas summarizes that angelic beings are “in a place, but not placed [geortet] like a dimensional body.”33 The difference can perhaps be best understood as the difference between the spatial character of a place (the place of solid bodies in the world, which is thus mea­sur­able) and being-­in-­place in the sense of presence, whose conception transcends the spatial-­corporeal pre­sent. In contrast to the conception of the “real presence” of cult images, this is a nonsensible presence that precedes the image and must yet still become an image. Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  217

According to this angelology, angels thus assume the task of mirroring something unrepresentable within the realm of resemblance and giving it presence. In this re­spect, they are pictures of making-­an-­appearance [In-­ Erscheinung-­Treten] or figures that re/present the moment of appearance. In Benjamin’s terms, they can be understood as images of “nonsensible” or “nonresembling resemblance” [unsinnliche or unähnliche Ähnlichkeit] that make, as it w ­ ere, reflections of that which always remains prior to the image to appear—­t hat beyond re/pre­sen­ta­tion of which has never been seen.34 One could also speak of an archi-­resemblance in Jacques Rancière’s sense: “Archi-­resemblance is the originary likeness, one that does not provide the replica of real­ity, but rather testifies immediately to the elsewhere whence it derives.”35 Images of angels, who traditionally occupy the threshold between this world and the hereafter, thus also embody a central prob­lem with visibility, one that touches on the core of the conception of the image in painting. Since painting is the location in which threshold beings appear as nonplaced, often literally floating bodies, ­t hese figures are at the same time mediums for a reflection of painting in painting. Depictions of angels in painting (i.e., images of angels) would thus be images of the image, and within t­ hese images the prob­lems with the image, and contexts within which the concept of the image exits, in painting (and not only ­t here) can be discussed. 3 . T H E A N G E L’S G R O U N D : T H R E S H O L D B E T W E E N S PAC E A N D P L AC E

Several aspects of the image-­question that ­were ignited by the figure of the angel are condensed in paintings that represent the scene of Annuziatio; theological and pictorial questions that touch upon the scenario of “making-­ an-­appearance” [In-­Erscheinung-­Treten] are connected ­here: the Annunciation, embodiment, figuration, and Incarnation. For this reason, this pictorial motif is particularly in­ter­est­ing for a grammatology of images. The pictorial aspect specific to making-­an-­appearance involves the work of figuration, a topic with which the most famous students of Louis Marin (Daniel Arasse and Georges Didi-­Huberman) w ­ ere intensively engaged. Following up on Marin’s considerations on the ambivalence of figurabilité (which he derived from the Incarnation),36 while also taking reference to his philosophy of repre­sen­ta­tion in painting, one that accentuates the complex 218  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

relationship and tension between the “transparency of what is represented” and the opacity of presentation37—­that is, precisely the slash between re-­and pre­sen­ta­tion operating within the act of re/pre­sen­ta­t ion [Darstellung]. In the works of both Arasse and Didi-­Huberman, paintings of the Annunciation play a prominent role. In Fra Angelico (1990), Didi-­Huberman examines The Annunciation paintings by Fra Angelico (Figure 55), Agnolo Gaddi, Andrea del Castagno, and other paint­ers of the trecento and quattrocento as paradigmatic re/pre­ sen­ta­tions at the threshold to figuration—­t hat is, painting operating in the tension between dissemblance and figuration, as is alluded to in the subtitle of the book. He is concerned with the “figurative paradox,” that the figure (of incarnation personified in the angel and Mary) ­shall incorporate the unfigurable. Referring to Erich Auerbach’s concept of the figura,38 Didi-­Huberman emphasizes the “absolutely operational and differential character of this concept.” From this perspective, angels in painting become the “figure of the figure” ­because, as intermediate beings, their character clearly corresponds to the way in which Didi-­Huberman describes the figure: The figure is always between two ­t hings, two universes, two temporalities, two modes of signification. It is between appearance and truth: at one point, it is opposed to the ­thing itself and to veritas, at another it signifies “an even greater truth,” a truth concerning “the fullness of time.” It is between the sensible form (schèma) and its contrary, the ideal form (eidos)—­even between the form and the formless.39 Didi-­Huberman finds this in-­between in the literal ground of images of the Annunciation and of the Virgin Mary. In the marmo finto, for instance, the painted artificial marble that fills the lower part of frescos found beneath the pictorial scene (Figure 56): colored surfaces that upon closer inspection appear as materiality or color itself, surfaces in which the material becomes recognizable as the princi­ple of nonresemblant figuration. According to Didi-­Huberman, this purely paint­erly materiality assumes a kind of meaning in painting similar to the “anagogic” in the multiple senses of allegorical scriptural interpretation. It points to something beyond the world of bodies. He gives this surface a name borrowed from Proust: pan de peinture. “It is only the painting in potentia, the very symptom of painting—­the materiality of painting.” 40 Such surfaces become Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  219

FIGURE 55. ​The angel of Annunciation: image of figuration in painting. Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, tempera (about 1440), Cathedral San Giovanni Valdarno. Image credit: Georges Didi-­Huberman, Fra Angelico: Unähnlichkeit und Figuration (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1995), 217.

significant as a-­mimetic or an-­iconic parts of the image; they precede the iconic and at the same time form a counterpart to it. “­These multicolored zones of Fra Angelico’s paintings function less as iconic signs than as the operators of a conversion of the gaze: confronted with ­t hese colored zones, we do not discern a g­ reat deal; if t­ here is meaning, it is veiled, plurivocal, 220  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

FIGURE 56. ​Uniconic images at/as the ground of figuration. Fra Angelico, marmi finti beneath the fresco Madonna of the Shadows (1438–1440), San Marco Monastery, Florence. Image credit: Georges Didi-­Huberman, Fra Angelico: Unähnlichkeit und Figuration (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1995), 35.

and not to be found in any manual of iconography.” 41 ­These “zones” are meaningful, yet without any specific meaning. Yet Didi-­Huberman’s readings of ­t hese images uncover such zones not only under­neath the iconic image but also in the painting itself. They appear at the place of the Annunciation—­namely, at the floor beneath the figures’ feet, at the ground of the bodies, at the very place where the angel does appear, yet without being placed; it is a kind of heterotopia, re/presented by some paint­ers as an image of “floating.” In this way, paintings of the Annunciation are interpreted as a “practice of the threshold”; they touch the boundary of the image.42 In ­t hese paintings, the foregrounding of the spatial threshold is particularly noticeable—as the threshold of the Incarnation, the transition from the “divine word” to “becoming-­flesh” is transformed Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  221

into an image. Didi-­Huberman interprets the con­spic­u­ous spatial division in images of the Annuziatio as a “denaturalization” of the threshold “in order to suggest, in the kind of dissemblance produced, something of the ‘miracle of the threshold’ at work in the mystery of the Incarnation.” 43 This threshold can be described as the place where a mystery breaks into iconographic repre­sen­ta­tion. Thus it is comparable to that “something beyond the poet [that] interrupts the language of poetry,” as Benjamin articulates it in his reading of Goethe’s Elective Affinities: an interruption of a mystery into the language of poetry, or a caesura, as Friedrich Hölderlin understood it as a “counter-­rhythmic interruption” in the register of the tragedy.44 This configuration in frescos or panel paintings can be regarded as an attempt to represent the image-­space as a place of a mystery or of an incredible occurrence that differs radically in qualitative terms from the viewer’s own space (Chapter 6.5 and 6.6). The pictorial space changed, however, in Annunciation paintings from the second half of the quattrocento and of the cinquecento—­these paintings create depth perspectivally in an architectural space with fore-­, middle-­, and backgrounds (as in Domenico Veneziano, Piero della Francesca, Carlo Crivelli, Piero del Pollaiuolo, Filippino Lippi, and Titian, among o ­ thers). H ­ ere, multilayered architectural spaces and geometrically constructed floors replace the colored zones at the ground of the scene, through which colored juxtaposition is replaced by an architectonic conception of space. Against the backdrop of Thomas Aquinas’s discussions of the relationship between mea­sur­able space and that other place of the angels, the transformation of the angels’ ground in painting signals the shift from an unfigurated zone into geometric space—an increasing assimilation of the scene of Annuziatio into the spatial conception of the outside world (Figure 57). In this way, the threshold between the unfigurable and the mimetic image tends to be leveled. And ­after the angels in images have received a body, they would now also become localized in space. Thus, the mode of reference to the a-­v isible shifts to the moment of appearance or incarnation captured within the pictorial scene, which is to say, to iconography itself. According to Arasse, the image-­space is figurated as closed and open at the same time through the use of columns, alcoves, win­ dows, doors, and gardens. Often, a win­dow, door, or gate appears at the center of the picture; in Christian iconography, the gate traditionally symbolizes Mary’s purity “her virgin purity, which is open to God and closed to ­humans, yet at the same time Christ as well, her son who declared to be the 222  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

FIGURE 57. ​Localization of the angel’s ground in space. Sandro Botticelli, Cestello Annunciation, tempera on wood (1489), Uffizi, Florence. Image credit:

Andreas Schumacher, ed., Botticelli: Bildnis, Mythos, Andacht (Frankfurt, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 51.

gateway to heaven.” 45 Locks, latches, and other details suggest that the site of the Annunciation pre­sents a setting where something from beyond breaks into the world of physical bodies. This aspect is referenced by t­ hose details that Marin understands as “sign-­figures” or “markers of invisibility.” 46 Arasse dedicates several works to t­ hese details,47 and in a study of the par­ tic­u ­lar “relationship between the theme of annunciation and the construction of perspective that exists in the painting of the Quattrocento,” he highlights two dif­fer­ent ways in which the paint­ers, by means of details, emphasize that their images show something “that is impossible to represent: the incarnation at the center of the annunciation.” 48 On one hand, t­ here are slight deviations in a perfectly perspectival space, which he interprets as moments of concealment within a geometrically constituted spatial depth and as a play with the proportionality of perspective; Piero della Francesca’s Annunciation in Perugia (1470) serves as a prime example of this. On the Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  223

other hand, t­ here are apparently misplaced t­ hings, like the cucumber at the bottom of Crivelli’s The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius in London (1486, Figure 58) or the snail at the bottom of Francesco del Cossa’s Annunciation (1469) ­housed in Dresden. Arasse interprets t­ hese details as pointers to the limits of perspectival repre­sen­ta­tion and to the impossibility of “representing the divine amidst the vis­i­ble.” 49 In such artistic and elaborate composition of the tension between transcendence and immanence in the image, God is literally in the details, and in a much more direct way than Aby Warburg ever dreamed.50 Based on his observations of the detail as an iconographic means to reflect perspectival conceptions of space in an image, Arasse posed an objection to Erwin Panofsky’s argument on perspective as a “symbolic form.” According to Panofsky, central perspective’s rational stereogram—as an ele­ ment of the implementation of abstract thought—­engenders a fundamental shift in the meaning of infinity. B ­ ecause in the closed, yet infinitely extended spaces of paintings in central perspective, the notion of an actually realized infinity arises—­“an infinity not only prefigured in God, but indeed also embodied in empirical real­ity”—­space becomes a “quantitas continua,” and in this way the conception of the universe gets detheologized.51 According to Arasse, the scenes of Annunciation Panofsky analyzes show “on the contrary, that divine infinity is inadequate to the space as it is introduced in regular perspective.” The disproportions in the paintings made it clear that the perspectival structure symbolized not infinity but rather commensurability, whereas “the infinity of God is incommensurate.” In this context, he highlights the fact that Piero della Francesca used the term commensuratio for perspective.52 The ­matter is even more complicated than it appears in the way the opposite arguments are formulated. Since the motif of the Annunciation involves the sacred mystery’s breach into the domestic space of the virgin, and this breach concerns not only the angels’ message but also the pictorial figuration of this essentially noncorporeal being, the question ­whether this unearthly creature is assimilated into the world of physical bodies and becomes commensurate to the re/presented earthly world depends on how it is figured. If the hortus conclusus iconographically symbolizes Mary’s purity and perfection—­“the locus of incarnation chosen by God”53—­t hen the angel’s appearance only metamorphoses this space (represented in an image) into a place: into the location of the incarnation—in other words, turns 224  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

FIGURE 58. ​Geometrization of the space of Annunciation with entrance door to the mystery. Carlo Crivelli, The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius (1486). Image credit: Editors of Phaidon Press, Annunciation (London: Phaidon Press, 2000), 109.

the space into a showplace in the literal sense, into a site of looking/beholding [Schauplatz]. If the perspective produces a closed pictorial space, this closed image-­space coincides with the closed space of the scene. By making the image-­space commensurable with operations of calculation (by approximating it to the real space of the physical world), geometric perspective smooths over the caesura between place and space, leveling the difference between presence and repre­sen­ta­tion. It is only a­ fter and on the basis of such an iconographic development that the pictorial means analyzed by Arasse become necessary and relevant—in order to generate a kind of disruption and to hold open a site for interruption [Einbruchstelle] through which the inconceivable [Unermessliche]* enters mea­sur­able space. The technique of geometric perspective or central perspective produces an image-­space, as quantitas continua, that corresponds to the earthly concept of the locus from the Thomasian Summa (locus est quantitas positionem habens); the angels’ other place is qualitatively distinguished from this, a fact signaled in the image with the “marks of the invisible” (Marin). When the inconceivable and invisible (for which the angels are figures) are now increasingly assimilated into the continuum of mea­sur­able pictorial space, taking steps to actually mea­sure it is not far b ­ ehind. Mea­sure­ment of the angels then follows mea­ sur­ing pictorial space. 4 . M E A­S U R­I N G T H E A N G E L S : CO M PA R AT I V E A N ATO M Y

In the nineteenth c­ entury, angels in fact had a remarkable presence in the emerging natu­ral sciences. Some proponents of the burgeoning fields set about to incorporate the heavenly figures into their system to apply empirical methods to their analy­sis. Carl Gustav Carus’s essay, Von der Bedeutung der besondern Bildung des Auges auf manchen alten Gemälden (“On the meaning of the par­tic­u ­lar formation of the eye in some old paintings,” 1925),54 is, for example, dedicated to Fra Angelico’s fresco Coronation of the Virgin (Figures 59–61). He seizes on a remark August Wilhelm Schlegel made about a peculiarity he had observed: that the eyes of the figures in this fresco ­were “always soulful” and yet “not always drawn correctly”; the iris appears shortened and “on profile heads with a wider curvature than it * ​In German, the Unermessliche, that which is inconceivable, stems from ermessen, “to conceive,” whereas vermessen means “to mea­sure.”

226  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

FIGURE 59. ​The personnel of Christian iconography as object of comparative anatomy. Fra Angelico, Coronation of the Virgin (1430), Louvre Museum, Paris.

Image credit: http://­i mages​.­z eno​.­org ​/­Kunstwerke​/­I​/ ­big ​/ ­k ml1106a ​.­jpg (accessed March 12, 2014).

should reasonably have.”55 By using the poetic German name for the iris and pupil, Augenstern (literally, “eye’s star”), Schlegel’s discussion of anatomic features of unearthly creatures still hints to their celestial origin. Carus claims that he, too, had noticed that the artist had “to the noblest spiritual organs of the visage . . . ​on the heads of his angels, Mary, and Christ imprinted a type, which in many re­spects seems alien to the eye one is accusAngels: Images of Making-Appearance  227

FIGURES 60–61. ​Reproductions of the painting as mea­sur­able image space. Wilhelm Ternite, Drawings a­ fter Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin (1817).

Image credit: August Wilhelm Schlegel, Mariä Krönung und die Wunder des heiligen Dominicus (Paris: 1817), fig. 1 and 2.

tomed to seeing on ­human f­aces.”56 As the angels in medieval angelology entered the corporeal world as literal foreign bodies, their foreign body was now shrunk down to the iris, the Augenstern—­t heir unearthly character is no longer due to their similarity to the stars but rather due to the star of their eyes. 228  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

FIGURES 60–61. ​(continued)

The puzzling fact that the ­faces gained a “peculiar, supramundane spiritual expression” by virtue of the scaled-­down iris needed an explanation.57 Carus tries to resolve it with methods familiar to him: he seeks guidance from comparative anatomy, a topic about which he wrote a three-­volume compendium (Grundzüge der vergleichenden Anatomie und Physiologie, 1828). This method acquired a significant role for the history of sciences’ move from natu­ral history Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  229

(based on the ­table of species and the ­great chain of being) to the theory of evolution (with its coupling of classification and evolutionary schemas) and the ­family tree of species. Carus’s comparative anatomy of the eyes also pre­sents itself as a hierarchy of species in the form of a ­table for which he selected a diversity of animal species and supplemented them with some stages of ­human ontogenesis. The benchmark for this comparison is the correlation between the mea­sured dia­meter of the w ­ hole eye and the dia­meter of the iris (calculated for each species). In his t­able presenting the results of his calculation, the descending line of the iris’s size corresponds to the ascending line of animal species (pike, crocodile, golden ea­gle, chamois) and h ­ uman ontogenesis (fetus, newborn, twenty-­year-­old, sixty-­year-­old). In short: the higher the species, the smaller the iris. Adding his findings of the mea­sure­ment of the figures in Fra Angelico’s painting, Carus is now able to extend his line of ascending species a bit further: to ­those higher beings who are distinguished by an even smaller iris.58 As a result, he states that “in the ordinary ­human eye,” the eye-­to-­iris ratio is “around 1 9/10:1 or 1 54/57:1,” while “in Christ’s eye in Fiesole, this ratio is 2 12/17:1, and in the angel’s eye 2 1/9:1.”59 This deviation from the normal, which was associated with the impression of a “supermundane spiritual expression,” is thereby verified through thorough calculation. Moreover, the observation of a deviation is checked, calculated, and proven with hard sciences’ methodologies, resulting in the definition of a morphological characteristic as the indicator of lower or higher organ­ization of species in phylogenesis. By means of a comparative anatomy of eyes, the “supermundane spiritual natures” from Christian iconography (the angels, Mary, and Christ) gained a position in the ­great chain of being; and in this way the heavenly ladder transforms into the upper part of the scala naturae.60 The integration of the holy figures of Christian art into the ascending ladder of earthly creatures (from the pike to the angel’s image) in Carus’s ­table can also be interpreted as a permeation of the idea of Creation into physiology and biology. Augustine’s statement in the Confessions, that the Creator “assigned a proper place . . . ​to all [his] divine works” and hence also to all creations “from the angels down to a worm,” returns in Carus’s ladder extending into the heavens.61 As a result, angels’ migration into the sciences not only leads to the celestial creatures being expelled from their higher spheres and brought down to earth but also allows the sciences to ascend to the higher spheres. Thus, the profanation of the figures in Fra Angelico’s image in Carus’s text is accompanied by a pro­cess of sacralization; the latter concerns the artists’ 230  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

knowledge valuated as the preconscious of the sciences, from which they first wrest the veil of mist. For Carus answers the question of how artists like Fra Angelico, who did not yet have available the knowledge of comparative anatomy, could already use their means to depict the celestial spiritual natures with the concept of genius and its prerogative “to conceive in advance through a sure vision It, which is still veiled in a thick fog to the contemporaries.” 62 In this way, he grants the artist a privileged knowledge. Although grounded in the “inner divine nature of man,” only the genius is able to deal with “the still-­hidden . . . ​as with what is obvious [einem Offenbaren].” 63 Due to the equivocation of offenbar, the En­glish obvious, and Offenbarung in the religious sense of revelation, the artist’s “conceiving vision” comes close to revelation in Carus’s argument. In contrast, the task of transforming the artist’s secret, dormant knowledge into positive knowledge through the use of empirical methods falls to the scientists; they must transform the artist’s intuition of the Offenbare into verified knowledge: as mea­sured, proven Offenbares. In this way, scientific knowledge completes what the artist grasped intuitively by virtue of genius, allowing the scientist to step into genius’s line of succession and adopt its proximity to revelation. Yet at the same time, his knowledge surpasses genius with “exact” methods. In the course of profaning the “celestial” signature in the eyes of angels, Mary, and Christ, a glow of revealed knowledge illuminates the work of the scientist. Yet, what is forgotten in the angels’ transfer from painting into science is the caesura of the image—­i.e., the fact that comparative anatomy takes its mea­ sure from completely dif­fer­ent physiognomies: from vari­ous physical bodies, on one hand, and from images, on the other. To make m ­ atters worse, Schlegel and Carus did not use the painting but made reference to graphical reproductions of Fra Angelico’s image in which the painted scene is reproduced in lines, thus reducing the image to its contours (Chapter 1). Mea­ sure­ment is indifferent to such differences—to it, a physical eye is equivalent to a pictorial eye, and a reproduction to the painted original likewise. 5 . F R O M CO M PA R AT I V E A N ATO M Y TO A CO S M O LO G Y O F A N G E L S

The unintended comedy of Carus’s model, in which Christian iconography’s cast of characters suddenly finds itself in a line with the pike and crocodile, may explain why The Comparative Anatomy of Angels (Vergleichende Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  231

Anatomie der Engel, 1825) by Gustav Theodor Fechner, which was published in the same year, was often read as satire. It is not clear ­whether Fechner knew of Carus’s text, but the affinity is remarkable. Although comparative studies of the organ­ization of lower creatures would have, according to Fechner in the foreword, expanded the knowledge on h ­ umans, it still lacks observations on the organ­ization of higher creatures for the same purpose. And given the absence of a name for t­ hese higher beings in the Linnaean system, one was compelled to use the popu­lar name “angel.” 64 He begins with a polemic against ­human vanity; yet the ­human form (with its “many nooks, protruding nobs, outgrowths, holes, cavities, ­etc.”) is by no means a mea­sure of beauty and thus not suitable as a model for angels.65 As a contrast, he refers to the ­spherical form, in which beauty and harmony are linked to the resting state of physical bodies; therefore the sphere represents the telos of evolution. His primary interest in comparative anatomy is the perspective of the “proceeding direction ­toward complete formation” and its perfection in the “highest creatures, namely the angels who embody the ideal shape to him.” 66 Fechner’s text develops detailed descriptions and arguments for a synthesis of physical and neurological bodies in angels; but more in­ter­est­ing are his ideas on their language. ­Because angels communicate with light instead of sound, they occupy the pinnacle of sensory evolution in the ladder of beings—­leaping into another noncorporeal, esoteric mode of existence. As a result, the angels find themselves again in one of their ancestral homes, the cosmos—­only now they are regarded as “living planets.” Fechner’s description of the angels, which he pre­sents as an incontrovertible truth for which “Newton himself would not have denied his reverence,” is an amalgamation of mythical, aesthetic, and natural-­scientific ideas and arguments. The sense of the angel-­planets is “the feeling of a general gravitation or gravity,” 67 and their dance consists of atoms’ vibrations and the repre­sen­ta­tion of sound figures: “This is the true harmony of the sphere, the wonderful eyes, of the angels.” 68 And sunlight is described as “angels’ wedding torch.” 69 One can read the entire text as an exercise in the narration of the laws of physics and astronomy, masking their concepts with mythical tradition or, conversely, translating angelology into the nomenclature of the natu­ral sciences. But Fechner was quite serious in his quest for synthesis, harmony, and beauty, which resulted in an esoteric proj­ect. He expounded upon his programmatic intent three de­cades ­later in the subtitle of his book Zend-­Avesta 232  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

(1854): Oder Über die Dinge des Himmels und des Jenseits. Vom Standpunkt der Naturbetrachtung (“On objects of the heaven/sky * and beyond, from the standpoint of the consideration of nature”). By applying methods from the natu­ral sciences (chiefly, induction and analogy), the “highest realities, God, the Beyond, the higher beings above us” could be deduced from the relationships between the experiences of the spiritual and the physical.70 In the chapter “On Angels and Higher Beings in General,” angels surface again as animated planets. Only the stars, according to Fechner, can be the angels of heaven, “­because ­there are no other inhabitants of the sky.”71 Fechner ­here makes an even more direct link between biblical language and astronomy—as when he links the seven angels in the Revelation to John 8:2 to the seven planets.72 In this way he interprets the Christian narration as a kind of prefigured knowledge of natu­ral history and the “myth of angels” as an “anthropomorphic allegory for the true teaching of angels.”73 According to Fechner, painting and the princi­ple of resemblance to h ­ uman beings in the images of angels are responsible for the fact that the angelic form of the celestial bodies has for so long been misunderstood. In order to correct this, he claims to reverse the relationship so that the bodies of the angels “become a superhuman archetype for man instead of a replica of a h ­ uman.”74 Yet what might have induced a recognized physician and physicist to develop an angelic cosmology that reconciles the Christian worldview with that of the natu­ral sciences? As the founder of psychophysics, Fechner is rather famous as a representative of empirical-­experimental research into the interaction between psyche and body. Extending the laws of nature to heaven and the beyond results, however, in a speculative system that blends concepts from astronomy, physics, and the Christian tradition. Fechner’s parergon of esoteric writings, which lead a sort of parallel life to his scientific works, are indeed symptomatic for the ways in which science deals with the objective bound­aries of positive knowledge. In this context, esotericism can be interpreted as an attitude and “solution” wherein the sciences eschew addressing the epistemic limits of their methods by means of an epistemological self-­reflection but rather exclude the a­ ctual gaps, open questions, or remaining mysteries of the universe from rigorous science and instead respond to repressed uncertainty with mystical conceptions.

* ​In German, Himmel means both “heaven” and “sky.”

Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  233

The desire to dissolve the limits of positive knowledge of the cosmos thus not coincidentally touches upon the angels, as they occupy the threshold, as it ­were, between the known, vis­i­ble world and the a-­v isible, unreachable one. And so ancient figures and older theological notions return in Fechner’s angel cosmology and his ensoulment and animation of the planets—­ the idea from Thomasian angelology, for example, that angels exert a direct influence on movements in the sky, a theory in which the doctrine of angels was already “coupled with the astronomical worldview,” as Wilhelm Dilthey states.75 His s­ pherical, ensouled angel-­planets resemble the medieval compromise-­formation between astronomy and theology. In referencing the angelic form of the stars, Fechner cites, w ­ hether knowingly or unwittingly, an astronomical iconography from the seventeenth ­century that at the time was in­ven­ted against scientific descriptions of the cosmos. 6 . PAG A N CO N S T E L L AT I O N S , A N G E L S , A N D A S T R O L A B E S : T H E F I G H T F O R T H E I M AG E R I G H T AT T H E S K Y

With angels becoming an object of empirical physiological methods in the nineteenth ­century, their emigration out of heaven seemed fi­nally to be sealed. The electrical equipment of the cities with which darkness dis­ appeared and the starry sky became partially unrecognizable did the rest—­along with the stars, the images that populate the firmament also vanished. In the pro­cess, the images of the stars’ constellations became mere signs (sky drawings)—­t he older German name Himmelszeichen (“heaven’s sign”) was used before the constellations ­were called Sternbilder (“images of stars”). Benjamin, for whom the dawn played a vital role in the development of his theory of images, wrote in the notes for the Arcades Proj­ect: On Baudelaire’s “Crépuscule du soir”: the big city knows no true eve­ning twilight. In any case, the artificial lighting does away with all transition to night. The same state of affairs is responsible for the fact that the stars recede from the sky over the metropolis. Least of all their emergence is noticed. Kant’s transcription of the sublime through “the moral law within me and the starry heavens above me” could never have been conceived in t­ hese terms by an inhabitant of the big city.76 How would Benjamin, who detected such drastic changes in the sky a ­century ago, comment on the night sky of t­ oday, in which the luminous 234  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

points of innumerable airplanes and satellites have assumed sovereignty? Presumably, he would react in a similar manner as Hannah Arendt, who, when the first artificial satellites w ­ ere sent into orbit in 1957, was amazed that ­t here was no sense of the uncanny in the general reaction to the so-­ called Sputnik event to the fact “that our own apparatuses and devices now shine down upon us from the starry heavens above us.”77 In the meantime, we seem to have become accustomed to the fact that mixed in among the illuminated points and trails that our eyes think of as stars are countless satellites, most of which are deployed for surveillance. The artist Trevor Paglen draws attention to this fact with his photo­graphs of the sky.78 Yet the fact that heaven was populated by angels—­and that heaven is the home of t­ hese ethereal, unearthly noncorporeal beings—­was in e­ arlier times as ­little self-­evident as it was enduring. Whereas in modern times science and technology ended the angels’ rule over the celestial realm, the angels owed their previous conquest of the heavenly vault at the threshold to the ­Middle Ages only to the repression of the ancient images of the constellations accompanying the Christianization of the Roman world. The title of the famous poem from the third ­century BCE by the Greek author Aratus, Phaenomena (which was one of the most influential works of astronomy in antiquity), can be read as an indication that the pictorial constellations preceded angels as the figure for the image-­question: constellations as primal images of that which shows itself, images of making-­an-­appearance (from the Gr. φαινόμενον, fainómenon, Engl. “appearance”). ­L ater, images of angels inherited ­these phenomena, but with a clear shift in the image-­ question. If the problematic embodiment and iconicization of the immaterial is manifest in images of angels, in contrast the pictorial constellations [Sternbilder] are not images of stars but rather images in which vis­i­ble configurations in the sky (the planets and fixed-­star constellations) are superimposed and represented as a pictorial cosmos. They pose the question of how ­these celestial phenomena are to be understood and interpreted. Angels thus inherit the ancient constellations primarily in re­spect of their position in a theologically grounded strug­gle on the celestial image world that takes the form of a strug­gle for supremacy in the sky. Traditional astrological knowledge became a stumbling block for Christian theology ­because the images of the constellations ­were directly linked to ancient my­thol­ogy. While the polytheistic pantheon occupied its place in the firmament with the names of the planets Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  235

and Saturn—­and thus literally ruled the sky—­astrology coupled the twelve star signs of the zodiac, in which the seasonally changing fixed-­star constellations are represented as images, also with Greek my­thol­ogy. In this way the “Greek poets’ myth-­building fantasy continues to have an effect in astrology,” as Franz Boll shows in his study Sternglaube und Sterndeutung (“Belief in the stars and their interpretation,” 1918). According to Boll, a presupposition required for a systematic astrology is a stable, “fixed worldview,” and “this worldview is essentially Greek.”79 ­These images ­were unsuitable for the Christian Church ­because days and hours w ­ ere calculated by means of the stars, and thus also the calendar of the liturgical year and the monks’ proper prayer times. As Dieter Blume claims, astronomy was “more than suspect” to early Christians; Augustine and Hieronymus would have expressly warned against it. ­Because of the conflict between Christian computistics (cyclical calculation of the annual calendar) and classical knowledge of the planets and stars, t­ here has been a centuries-­long “neglect of astronomical knowledge.”80 In their intensive studies on Sternenglaube und Sternenkunde (Astrology and astronomy) in the context of the afterlife of ancient images in the early modern period, Warburg and Fritz Saxl ­were above all interested in the spatial-­temporal “wandering streets” of images of the planets through cultures and the reciprocal relationship between astronomy and astrology, between science and magic knowledge.81 Blume’s studies, however, are dedicated to the breaks in the transmission of the pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion of the constellations through cultural history. Based on t­ hese studies, the conviction of the Warburg Circle that “in the m ­ iddle ages” the Christian Church ­adopted “the pagan teachings in their Arabized form” and preserved them ­u ntil the Re­nais­sance period (as Saxl and Bing propose in their accompanying essay to the exhibition of a Warburgian Sternbildersammlung at the Hamburg Planetarium in 1930–1931) has to be replaced by a more complicated image of the transmission.82 Warburg was himself interested in astrology above all as an archive of a cultural pictorial memory in which image and number, myth and logic, hold sway as “double power,” thus representing a field of controversy on the “spiritual orientation” of Eu­ro­pean culture. But the side regiment [Nebenregiment] of pagan cosmology “tacitly tolerated by the Christian church” that Warburg diagnosed in early modern times as a complex interplay with Christian superstition in his studies on Heidnisch-­antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten (“Pagan-­classical prophecy in word and image in the time 236  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

of Luther,” 1920) seems more likely to be the result of a centuries-­long strug­gle for supremacy in the stars.83 ­Here, it is not images and numbers that are fighting for supremacy in the stars but differing image-­worlds. The opposition of pagan and Christian figures in the pictorial pre­sen­ta­ tion of the heavenly bodies turns out to be like a side stage to the Byzantine iconoclastic conflicts. The dissociation of Chris­tian­ity from classical astronomical knowledge, whose gods ­were projected onto the sky, also took place in, on, and with the image. Since the sixth c­ entury, attempts at “a fundamental redefinition of the starry sky in the spirit of Chris­t ian­ity” have been made, in the course of which t­here has been a fundamental replacement of images.84 The cross, for example, took the place of Jupiter in order to replace the ancient (in Christian diction, “heathen”) personifications with Christian symbols. Gregory of Tours’s astronomical work from 580, De cursu stellarum ratio, provides an example of the ways in which ancient images ­were rejected to such a degree that the drawings of t­hese new constellations fixed “only the abstract configuration of the stars” instead of pictorially recognizable objects (Figure  62). This tendency ­toward deimaging [Entbildlichung] continued into the subsequent centuries, as images ­either dis­appeared entirely from astronomical treatises or the pictorial constellations ­were replaced by diagrams. In this regard, Blume speaks of a reduction to “figures bereft of meaning.”85 With re­spect to image theory, though, diagrams are not entirely without meaning; they are only devoid of that doubled meaning suited to allegorical repre­sen­ta­t ions whose personification (of the constellations or also of a concept, of virtue, or the like) always shows two images at the same time. While allegorical paintings often remain enigmatic, when the second, encrypted meaning is unavailable to the viewer, the two images of the pictorial constellations from antiquity—­ namely, the configuration of the stars and the personification—­are equally impor­tant. They can more likely be described as doubled images or puzzle-­ pictures in which the primary and secondary images oscillate: attentive viewing of the position of the individual stars allows the constellation to emerge, while the view of the entire image reveals the mimetic figure (Figure 63) The eschewal of personification—­a kind of iconoclastic purification of knowledge of the stars—leads not to figures emptied of meaning but rather to an an-­iconic image or to a geometric or diagrammatic figuration (Chapter 1.5). Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  237

FIGURE 62. ​Iconoclasm at the firmament as a defense against pagan constellations. Gregory of Tours, De cursu stellarum ratio (about 580), script eighth c­ entury. Image credit: The Warburg Institute Iconographic Database, http://­w ww​.­atlascoelestis​.­com​ /­Warburg%20Institute%20base​.­htm (accessed March 14, 2014).

FIGURE 63. ​The stellar figure as dual image: constellation and personification. Constellation of Hercules from The Leiden Aratea (­a fter 825). Image credit: Aratea

(Originalgetreue Nachbildung der Bilderhandschrift aus der Bibliuothek der Rijksuniversität Leiden, Sign. MS Voss Lat. Q. 79, Bd. 1) Faksimile, Luzern 1987, fig. 2.

In this regard, it is no coincidence that the rise of angels took place exactly in t­ hose centuries in which the Christian sky was purified of the classical images of the constellations, thereby creating a heavenly image vacuum. Since, in antiquity, the planets w ­ ere considered divine living beings, and the movements in the skies w ­ ere attributed to animated heavenly bodies, images of the angels ­were perfectly suited to occupy the now-­empty space. While the first early Christian images of angels stand, as demonstrated above, within the pagan iconography’s succession, the subsequent appearance of angels in images, writings, and systematic studies of angelology (ever since the angelology of pseudo-­Dionysius) let them advance to counterimages and Christian substitutes in the starry sky emptied of images: the angel is thus the supplement to the Christian skepticism of the ancient image world. Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  239

In terms of image theory, images of angels are always already counterimages to the pictorial constellations. While images of the planets and constellations serve to turn that which is visually perceived into icons, images of the angels are intended to make appearance to something a-­v isible; the former are therefore secondary pictorializations of visual phenomena, while the angels represent the prob­lems of primary imaging, an archi-­resemblance, and its subsequent iconization. The image-­problematic turns out to be much more complicated in this Christian variant of heavenly, literally celestial beings since angels’ noncorporeal nature in fact eludes mimetic re/pre­sen­ta­ tion. Perhaps this is the reason why images of angels did not in the long run succeed in repressing the ancient images of the stars’ constellations. ­After the iconoclastic conflicts subsided (Chapter 6.3), the pictorial richness of classical astronomy was rediscovered. The so-­called Aratea produced at the beginning of the ninth ­century in Leiden, Netherlands (a richly illustrated translation of Aratus’s Phaenomena by Germanicus commissioned by Louis the Pious), can be considered a breakthrough. The images are copies of originals from late antiquity: “the miniatures address the reader in the style of ancient illusionist paintings in front of a dark blue night sky.”86 Only at this point, and even more so through the translation of Arabic sources, could astronomy develop into a field of study in which the knowledge of images merges prosperously with the written tradition. The contemplation of the starry sky, although populated by ancient pictures of animate heavenly bodies, could now also be understood as admiration for God’s Creation—­t he same position taken by the Arabic writings of Abu Ma’shar (848, translated in the twelfth ­century) as regards the planets:87 “The pictorial constellations thereby become witnesses to another world that is inaccessible to h ­ umans, whose vis­i­ble wanderings could, however, be followed in the night sky. Their existence was to be validated with one’s own eyes in the framework of God’s creation.”88 Interpreting constellations as witnesses of an inaccessible world produces an affinity of stars and angels. The observation of the stars’ movements, however, also makes “divine Creation” accessible to the sciences, and this accessibility to the inaccessible si­mul­ta­neously initiates a pro­cess of the profanation of the heavens. In this re­spect, the ­earlier widespread idea that the planets are animated bodies or entities furnished with “mind-­souls” represents a kind of medieval compromise-­formation between scientific and theological views—­one that soon proved fragile.89 The instruments used for 240  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

astronomical research into the movements of the heavens themselves still bear signs of this compromise-­formation. Images of angels surface, for example, on astrolabes from the M ­ iddle Ages, as if they w ­ ere agents of Christian iconography, tasked with watching over the calculation and mea­sure­ment of the planets’ movements in the sky by means of coordinates and technical instruments. Th ­ ese are a fine example of the double power observed by Warburg—in this case, of scientific knowledge and the messengers from a Christian heaven rather than the powers of myth and mathe­matics. On an astrolabe made in 1462 for the Greek Cardinal of Constantinople, Basilius Bessarion, by the well-­k nown astronomer and mathematician Regiomontanus (also known as Johannes of Monteregio), the angel occupies the entire upper portion of the reverse side of the disc, as if he is positioned to watch the ­whole system (Figure 64). The figure’s dominance led historian of science David King to interpret this angel’s fin­ger as a hidden message.90 Yet when King deciphers this message as a secret key—­adding another interpretation to the countless decryptions of Piero della Francesca’s enigmatic painting The Flagellation of Christ—­t his obsession demonstrates the intense power of suggestion exerted by the survival of biblical legends in the mathematically based sciences, which clearly continues to this day. 7 . T H E A N G E L’S E X I L E I N A R T, A N D M E A­S U R­I N G T H E U N D E R W O R L D

The incompatibilities that lay dormant in compromise-­formations made between theology and science ­were revealed at the latest by the Copernican revolution. Both pagan and Christian images of constellations lost their home in the heliocentric system outlined in Copernicus’s work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (“On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres,” 1543) ­because in this system, the sky’s form as an arched vault (as it appears to the perspective of the h ­ uman eye on the Earth)91 lost its standing as a scientifically valid image of the cosmos; whereas this approach only survived in paintings of the firmament, particularly in baroque repre­sen­ta­tions of the heavens. The new knowledge of the planetary system was rather supported by a mode of re/pre­sen­ta­tion oriented ­toward a model of the globe projected onto a two-­dimensional surface—as seen in Dürer’s famous Sternkarte (Star Chart, 1515), one of the first ever such printed star charts, acknowledged as the sum of mathe­matics and artistry.92 This chart is the result of an Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  241

FIGURE 64. ​The angel as a guardian of the scientification of celestial knowledge. Regiomontanus, Astrolabe for Cardinal Basilius Bessarion (1462). Image credit: David A. King, Astrolabes and Angels, Epigrams and Enigmas: From Regiomontanus’ Acrostic for Cardinal Bessarion to Pietro Della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ (Stuttgart, Germany: Steiner, 2007), 33.

imagination whose standpoint is, in real­ity, impossible for the h ­ uman eye, since the heavens are depicted from a virtual viewpoint outside of the planetary system—­w ith which this kind of cultural technique of the imaginary replaces the gaze of the divine eye even as it inherits it.93 In the ­battle for pictorial supremacy in the firmament, the angels ­were called upon once more and put into ser­v ice in theology’s counteroffensive against the Copernican revolution, which was interpreted in theological circles as an assault on the edifice of the Christian heavens. In the pro­cess, the sky was reoccupied by Christian personnel. This time, however, the angels ­were positioned not against the ancient gods but against science. A ­ fter the pope had placed Copernicus’s 1616 work on the index, the proj­ect of creating Christianized star charts arose, particularly in Augsburg, a center for the production of precise maps of the constellations, charts that represented an ideal synthesis of ancient iconography and astronomical computational art. To this end, the stars’ constellations w ­ ere given Christian meanings and replaced by a Christian iconography.94 Julius von Schlosser completed this proj­ect with his star chart Coelum stellatum christianum (1627), in which the pictorialization of the celestial figures was dominated by images of angels: not only with the newly introduced constellations for archangels like Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael (Figure 65) but also with angels that appear bearing symbols from biblical stories (such as the Petrine crown or the Nativity) and as figures accompanying characters from Christian theological tradition such as in Matthew. For one last time, perhaps, the angels h ­ ere rule the entire cosmos—at least in the image. The Copernican revolution, according to Hans Blumenberg, plunged “post-­Copernican” man into a “perspectival impatience and unrest in the temporal form of the infinite passing through his possibilities.”95 Yet the image controversy gained a kind of appeasement through the separation of science and art: between the dome of the sky surviving in art and the scientific worldview. Precisely ­because of this, the heavenly scene of art could continue to serve as a seat of celestial personnel: the sky in painting became, as it w ­ ere, an asylum for angels in exile.96 The strong emphasis placed on the artificial character of the perspectival mode of re/pre­sen­ta­tion is apparent in the survival of figures from the Christian cosmos in art’s post-­ Copernican heavens. Claiming neither theological nor scientific truth, t­ hese images reflect that they are an effect of ­human perspective—of an illusion that can only be imitated with the help of advanced techniques in painting. Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  243

FIGURE 65. ​Christianized stellar constellations as means in the image controversy against the Copernican revolution. Archangel Raphael as stellar constellation from Julius von Schlosser’s Coelum stellatum christianum (1627). Image credit: Linda Hall

Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology, http://­l hldigital​.­lindahall​.­org​/­cdm​/­ref​ /­collection​/­astro​_ ­atlas​/­id​/­1142 (accessed March 14, 2014).

Since, according to Blumenberg, it was never a ­matter of establishing for the Copernican world a body of knowledge opposed to the theological worldview but rather about explaining the illusionary semblance: The greatness of the Copernican achievement lies not in the destruction of an illusion and the substitution of truth for semblance, but rather in the explanation of this semblance, the demonstration of the mechanicity of its emergence—­and thus the analy­sis of the way in which we can comprehend our projections in the world and repeal them. Ever since Copernicus, mankind has begun to learn how to cope with the images it has created, to incessantly penetrate into the realm of its taken-­for­grantedness.97 Attributing phenomena in the heavens to the movements of the Earth does not, as Copernicus had remarked, concern knowledge of the highest and supreme but rather of the nearest and achievable: “the constellations of 244  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

the earth with re­spect to the stars”—­t hat is, the ­human position vis-­à-­v is the sky.98 While the Copernican revolution thus explained how, from the earth-­ dwellers perspective, the heavens looks like a vaulted sky arching over the Earth, paint­ers mimic that scenography by projecting an image of the skies onto the architectonic ceiling of the room, as if it ­were the firmament. For this purpose, the space and the floating bodies are perspectivally distorted to such “breathtaking foreshortened extremities” that the scene of heavenly figures is recognizable as an effect of the sight from the only pos­si­ble viewpoint for the ­human eye (at least at that time).99 In this way, the theological worldview was presented as an image and showcased for both pleas­ur­able contemplation and critical reflection si­mul­ta­neously, without this scene necessarily coming into conflict with religious traditions—­the Copernican perspective on the heavens became a medium of illusion and reflection at the same time. By making use of Copernican insights and their own techniques of perspective to portray the Christian worldview as an image in their colorfully frescoed skies, the baroque paint­ers became mediums for negotiations between theology and science. Depending on the respective interpretation or (dis-)position, their works could be considered (partially allegorical) re/pre­sen­ta­tions of biblical legends or as the re/pre­sen­ta­tion of re/pre­sen­ta­tion.100 The professional artists of imitation, experienced producers of a colorful heavenly occurrence recognizable as an artifact, thus became agents of a dialectic of secularization. Against the backdrop of escalating contradictions between biblical narratives and scientific knowledge, paint­ers developed a subtle, ambiguous way to ­handle conflicting registers of knowledge. Their methods are diametrically opposed to the “solution” offered by Galileo Galilei in his mea­sur­ing of hell in the Divina Commedia (1307/1321) in two lectures he gave in 1587 at the age of twenty-­t hree to the Florentine acad­emy. ­These lectures emerged in the “climate of intensified debate over Dante’s Divina Comedia” as part of a series of reactions and acad­emy lectures triggered by the publication of a fundamental critique of Dante’s text. According to Horst Bredekamp, Galileo’s texts ­were part of a culture “that was on the verge of tackling the mathematization of the world. ­There could be no better place to start with than hell.”101 Blumenberg, who saw a kind of epistemological self-­ limitation in Galileo’s fixation on visual evidence and his “faith in the telescope as the medium of definitive Copernican evidence,”102 considered t­ hese Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  245

lectures “Galilei’s pseudo-­scientific folly of youth.” He assumes that the fallacious investment in mathematical scholarship would have “hardly escaped” Galileo. Yet in ­t hese lectures he also sees an early indication of “Galilei’s true life’s achievement, whose program is articulated within the first few words as a transfer of mathe­matics, hitherto predominantly in the ser­v ice of astronomy, to a terrestrial, or, more precisely, subterranean region of the world.”103 This kind of testing of math in the field of poetic imagination led, however, to the dissociation of aesthetics and science. In­ de­pen­dently of the question of how seriously Galileo took his idea to mea­ sure the poetic hell, his text is noteworthy for the image-­question for two reasons: first, b ­ ecause methods and laws from the knowledge of supermundane phenomena w ­ ere transferred to a subterranean space, and, second, ­because figures taken from religious history’s personnel became objects of scientific methods via a detour through art—­similar to the fate of the angels in the nineteenth c­ entury (Chapter 7.4, 7.5). In his two talks, Galileo not only undertook to reconcile the poetic description of Dante’s journey through the underworld with the doctrines of geometry, but in research into and description of Hell’s location and form he also intended to mathematically concretize and substantiate Dante’s journey through the underworld with the aid of detailed calculations.104 Noteworthy is the comparative evaluation Galileo starts with: in contrast to the “admirable” [mirabile] knowledge about the size of the stars and the position of the Earth and seas ascertained through sustained examination, Dante’s work is much more “wonderful” [più maravigliosa]. The occasion for Galileo’s talk was a defense of the calculations of Dante’s hell, first made by the Florentine mathematician and architect Antonio Manetti, Filippo Brunelleschi’s famous biographer. Continuing this proj­ect, Galileo ascertains both Hell’s conical shape and its location: the base of the cone is a circle on the Earth’s surface with Jerusalem at its center, while the apex of the cone coincides with the center of the planet. He then identifies the geographic location of the entrance to hell where Dante and Virgil began their journey on a night of a full moon in 1300: it lies between Naples and Cumae. In addition to the size of Hell, its individual levels, circles, and shafts, he also calculates Lucifer’s size, whose body protrudes halfway up from the lowest point of hell in Dante’s work. Galileo’s calculations are based on individual verses from the Commedia, which refer to knowledge passed down from Archimedes, geometrical theories, and proportions of the ­human body in Dürer. 246  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

The goal of his talk is to use verifiable calculations in order to “prove” the “wonderful” poet’s description of Hell, whose thoughts Manetti “has investigated with marvelous invention [maravigliosa invenzione],” and thus convert into evidence that which is wonderful in poetry. In this way, Galileo’s lecture introduced a constellation for the relationship between art and science, one that was to become structuring for modernity: while, on the one hand, the “most wonderful” poetic description is estimated more highly than the “admirable” scientific observations of nature, it is the empirical methods of the sciences, on the other hand, that are to attest to the evidence of what made its appearance in poetry and art before. In this way, a quantifying knowledge is positioned above the arts—at the same time, however, its objects presuppose a terrain that can only be entered by imagination. As preknowledge, poetic and artistic images are preceded, inherited, and devalued by empirical knowledge. It is no accident that the concept of quantifying evidence was generated via a rhe­toric of the miraculous. 8 . T H E “ M I R AC U LO U S” A S A T R A N S I T I O N A L P H E N O M E N O N

Due to the wondrous localization and mea­sure­ment of the topography of the Christian underworld by means of mathematical calculation, imaginary ideas, whose precarious spatial and physical status had been the subject ­matter of sprawling discussions for Thomas Aquinas, now assumed an unproblematic place within the world of physical bodies. A c­ entury ­later, the category of the miraculous became a point of contention in debates about the status and appearance of the heavenly figures. In contrast to the skies of baroque art, which can leave ambiguous w ­ hether they re/ present imitations of real or true figures or allegorical personifications, ­t hings get more precarious when language and discourse come into play. ­Because ­here the phenomena of appearances—­whether ­t hose recounted in the Christian tradition or t­ hose of painting—­need to be named or at least brought into conceptual language. In this re­spect, it is not surprising that discourse on the miraculous, on illusion and imagination, is an exemplary scene for controversies over the portrayal of spirits and other a-­v isible, extra-­earthly phenomena. ­Here, too, it was often angels who, as the embodiment of the miraculous, became a skandalon for enlightened or secular thinking. Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  247

As occurrences from the Bible increasingly got in contradiction with knowledge of natu­ral laws, it was above all miracles that became a stumbling block to reading the scripture as an account of true or historical events, and therefore triggering the field of Bible criticism. Benedict de Spinoza, for example, repudiated the notion that divine omnipotence is attested to by miracles in the sixth chapter of his Tractatus Theologico-­politicus (“Theological Po­liti­cal Treatise,” 1670), “Of Miracles”: nothing occurs in nature contrary to the “immutable order” of nature, since “the universal laws of nature are merely God’s decrees and follow from the necessity and perfection of the divine nature.”105 ­Because biblical tales of miracles do not contradict this view, Spinoza explains them by contingent circumstances. ­These are, for example, due to historical conditions, to the subjective opinions of the prophets, or to the intention to influence the masses: “For many ­things are reported in Scripture as real, and w ­ ere actually believed to be real, though they w ­ ere nothing but apparitions and imaginary ­t hings.” He continues: “All ­t hese ­were undoubtedly only visions, adapted to the beliefs of t­ hose who passed them on to us as they appeared to them, namely as ­actual events.”106 Another method used by Spinoza to relativize the pretention of the biblical text to rate as positive, historical truth is hermeneutic dissolution of pictorial speech: Fi­nally, for understanding miracles as they ­really happened one must know the phrases and figures of speech of the Hebrews. Anyone who does not pay sufficient attention to this ­w ill find numerous miracles in the Bible which its authors never intended to be understood as such, and therefore w ­ ill be completely ignorant not only of the events and the miracles as they r­ eally occurred but also of the mentality of the authors of the sacred books.107 In Spinoza’s biblical philology, imagination thus becomes a negatively connotated category, with which the discrepancy between accounts of miracles and natu­ral laws is to be explained and resolved. He talks, for example, of images that ­were not ­actual but rather depended merely on the prophets’ “vivid power of imagination.” While Spinoza opposed imagination to real­ity and introduced meta­ phorical language as a distinguishing characteristic between intended and misunderstood meanings, the poetic category of the “miraculous” opened up a field of inquiry in eighteenth-­century aesthetics. In this discourse, “un248  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

natural” or “super­natural” phenomena ­were considered to be nonetheless probable [wahrscheinliche] creations, an argument by which poetic creation replaces divine Creation. Johann Jakob Bodmer’s defense of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost (1667) in his Critische Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie und dessen Verbindung mit dem Wahrscheinlichen (“Critical treatise on the miraculous in poetry and its connection to the probable,” 1740), which became a founding text of the new aesthetic of the miraculous, builds its argument using angels as its test case. The occasion for Bodmer’s “protective brief” of the En­glish poet w ­ ere critiques made by Voltaire and ­others who particularly took umbrage by Milton’s account of the war in heaven and the fantastical figuration of angelic bodies, dismissing them as products of mere imagination, which are unacceptable to sensible perception of the reader. The bodies of the angels ­were once again at the center of the controversy in which the right to re/present celestial, a-­v isible, or spiritual beings was debated. This time, however, it was conducted in the field of aesthetic theory. In Bodmer’s theory of the miraculous, angels become the personification of the poetic princi­ple as such. They stand in for a specific act of poetic creation that sublates the contradiction between religious tradition and a connection to real­ity and si­mul­ ta­neously inherits religion. On one hand, Bodmer relies on the tradition, yet on the other, he argues strongly for the probable [das Wahrscheinliche] as the proper sense of poetry, as opposed to truth as the defining category of history. In this re­spect, he apparently cannot renounce the authority of the “holy scribes”: “Famous teachers and the world-­w ise w ­ ere of the opinion that angels have in a sense an or­ga­nized body that functions according to its mechanical laws, and executes the ­free decisions of the spirit that inhabits them without breaking their own laws.”108 Yet, according to Bodmer, poetry did not need legitimation from the church ­fathers and the “example of noble pre­de­ces­sors” like Dante and Torquato Tasso, who also communicated the “invisible and non-­corporeal angels . . . ​by means of the body.” The incomplete nature of the missives of the “holy scribes” leave the poet the task of supplementing their stories with the pos­si­ble and thus completing the “science” of the angels and the “invisible and immortal spirits.”109 From fragmentary characters of religious traditions, Bodmer deduces that poetry is the knowledge of the pos­si­ble. “Poetic creation” is therefore established as a supplement to Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  249

the scriptures in the very sense of Derrida’s “supplementary economy”: as its continuation [Fortschreibung], addition [Ergänzung], completion [Vollendung], and substitution [Ersatz].110 It thereby both replaces and inherits the biblical concept of “Creation.” At its center stand the angels as “spiritual beings” the poet “dresses in a body” in order to pre­sent them to sensual perception and to bring them from the state of possibility into the state of real­ity: “This kind of creation is the prior task of poetry.”111 As products of the imagination, poetic images ­here do not stand in opposition to real­ity; rather, they represent a heterogeneous sphere. Thus the meta­phorical language of poetry is not regarded as improper but rather appreciated for its role in re/presenting a-­v isible or spiritual phenomena.112 Angels thereby once again appear as embodiments of the image-­question, only that h ­ ere poetic, linguistic images are at issue: a kind of archi-­resemblance or nonsensible resemblance in the field of language—­reminiscent of the broad cultural-­historical arc in Benjamin’s “Doctrine of the Similar,” which departs from the stars’ constellations and leads to language as the “most perfect archive of non-­ sensuous similarity.”113 In the eighteenth-­century aesthetic debate over angels’ bodies, the prob­ lems wrestled with throughout the six-­hundred-­year history of an angelology u ­ nder theological auspices seem to reappear once again—­yet now being contemplated from the reverse side, from the perspective of the world of material bodies. As Re­ nais­ sance painting had responded to the image-­ question (as condensed in the form and body of the angel) with individual unfigured ele­ments or details that counteracted iconicization in an image (Chapter 7.3), the image-­question of the angelic body in the secularization era concerns poetry as such: as the site for the probable, with which it positions itself beyond theology and history. ­Here the miraculous also comes into its own. From the “mere appearances” in Spinoza’s problematization, the miracle has now become, in the aesthetics of the miraculous, a figure of making-­appearance. It is therefore “no won­der” that a large portion of Bodmer’s treatise on the miraculous and probable concerns the nature of angels. The fact that aesthetics (as knowledge of the pos­si­ble and probable) is separated from historiography and natu­ral history is remarkable with re­spect to the relationship between art and science. Other­w ise t­ here comes about 250  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

an analogy to the scala naturae of con­temporary natu­ral history, b ­ ecause the demarcation between h ­ umans and other species, to celestial beings as well as animals, is levied, the boundary being replaced by graduated differences. Th ­ ere would thus be h ­ umans who are close to the animals, as well as “men who, in a ­human body, seem to be elevated above ­human nature” and behave themselves like “higher natures compared to earthly ­humans”—­much like the angels.114 In this way, the concept of poetic creation already instigates the cross-­fade of the stairway to heaven through the stepladder of nature, which ­will make a claim on the status of empirical method in Carus’s proj­ect of angel mea­sure­ment: comparative anatomy of angels would become a wondrous science within the rise of natu­ral history to exact sciences.115 While angels’ bodies increasingly became a skandalon for enlightened knowledge, it was the arts (painting and poetry) that provided a home for ­t hese dubious bodies, for this medium of transcendence. Yet, in their images, the arts preserve knowledge of the precarious imaging of the a-­v isible or immaterial. Not as a personification of the a-­v isible but rather as figures that act at the threshold—­images of angels thus embody a memory that can be problematic or even dangerous to the positivistic worldview. In this regard, Fechner did not need to perceive the myths of angels as a disturbance but rather the images of angels in paintings. 9 . T H E A N G E L S’ W E I G H T: AT T H E T H R E S H O L D F R O M C A LC U L AT E D TO M E M O R Y I M AG E S

A ­century ­after angels ­were rescued by the theory of probability, this concept was also put u ­ nder scrutiny of empirical methods. Since poetic language largely escapes such procedures, empirical access to the image-­question took place at another site, that of visual images. In 1882 at the Museum for Applied Arts in Vienna, the physiologist Sigmund Exner (­later director of the Physiological Institute of Vienna University) held a lecture on the physiology of flying and hovering in the visual arts. In it, he recounts his attempts to verify by means of exact methods the probability of flying and hovering figures in paintings. The point of departure for Exner, like Carus, was the observation that, despite a deviation from an imitation of nature, something in the artworks is familiar to us, something that the artist could Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  251

FIGURES 66–68. ​Measurement and calculation of flying bodies in art. Image credit: Sigmund Exner, Die Physiologie des Fliegens und Schwebens in den bildenden Künsten (Vienna: 1882), 17, 18, 33.

never have seen in real­ity. The first step of his systematic discussion is to address how (from an anatomical perspective) a h ­ uman being would have to look in order to fly—­t hat is, to have wings. His calculations (the weight of the necessary flight muscles in proportion to that of the rest of the body) led him to the hardly surprising conclusion: “It would be a monster” (Figures 66–68).116 In the second step, Exner discusses floating or hovering figures as an alternative to the impossible flying bodies. Yet, the physical requirements of ­these bodies’ weightlessness seem to contradict, he claims, the pictorial motifs: “I mention angels and saints, who visibly strive to carry an object thought to be heavy (a cross, for example) through the air.”117 Just as ­little do the muscle movements, folds and wrinkles, or hair on the bodies represented in the paintings correspond to weightlessness. Eventually, Exner finds a solution to the prob­lem in the distinction between the mechanical and the artistic: the “flying ­human figures in the mechanical sense” have “never [been] artistically depicted.” “What has been artistically depicted is always only figures freed of their normal h ­ uman weight, although they need not 252  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

FIGURES 66–68. ​(continued)

to be completely weightless.”118 As proof, Exner pre­sents calculations he made with schematic outlines of the floating figures in the paintings. In this way he intended to computationally determine precisely which speed “the position given to them by Raphael was physically justified.”119 Exner’s study Die Physiologie des Fliegens und Schwebens in den bildenden Künsten (“The physiology of flying and hovering in the visual arts”) fits into an entire series of his studies on the flight of birds, including laboratory experiments on the mechanics of flying bodies in which he simulated flying motions with a model. In ­doing so, he stepped into a history of studies of and experiments in flight that has continued since da Vinci’s famous Codice sul volo degli uccelli (“Codex on the Flight of Birds”). Since Exner’s calculations of weight and speed based on the outlines do not lead to a satisfying result, his examinations take a dif­fer­ent tack. Based on the discovery that the images of flying bodies in art depict improbable states of flight and hovering, and are thus not occupied with flight “in the mechanical sense,” the author proposes a typology that distinguishes between paint­ers according to the degree to which their figures appear to be weightless. Yet even this method does not lead to a satisfactory result, b ­ ecause his attempts to calculate the (im-)probable and miraculous—­which Bodmer establishes as the object of aesthetic knowledge—­necessarily run up against a limit set by a quality distinct to images that escapes quantitative methods. B ­ ecause the painted bodies are fundamentally dif­fer­ent from physical bodies, they are not calculable. In the course of Exner’s talk, fi­nally an entirely dif­fer­ent perspective intervenes into the experiments based in physical-­mechanical reasoning when he makes recourse to the psychological effect of artistic re/pre­sen­ta­tions. By no longer evaluating the plausibility of the images of floating figures according to a metric based on the exact imitation of physiological pro­cesses and rather discussing it from the perspective of perception (of both the painter and the viewer), the image now comes into play as a memory image. If paintings had so far been reduced to objects for empirical research, they now regain their proper status as image. With the introduction of memory as a medium in which the production and viewing of art meet, Exner then proceeds to develop an interpretation in which he transformed the outline drawing, which initially served as a schema for him, into a picture of movement that corresponds to an image of memory or a certain mood. What is at issue ­here is the figure’s psychical plausibility to the viewer, in which his 254  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

or her own memory images or associations are evoked by looking at the images. With this, the object shifts its epistemic place; it wanders, as it w ­ ere, from the laboratory to the archive of cultural memory, in which the images are per se at home. In this context, Exner not only introduces the terms Erinnerungsbild (image of recollection) and Gedächtnisbild (memory image), he also speaks of a Gedächtnisschatz (trea­sure of memory) associated with artistic taste. In addition to the hovering figures (the cherub, Christ ascending from the tomb, or the Creator God and All-­father in Michelangelo’s frescos in the Sistine Chapel), other figures now attract Exner’s attention as a result of this altered investigative perspective: nymphs. “Such figures are the painted realization of our ideal of the dance, whose beauty increases to the degree that the dancer lets us forget the necessity of the supporting ground.”120 Addressing nymphs, Exner completely lost sight of calculating physiological plausibility. He is concerned now with the nymphs’ feet and way of walking—­a proj­ect that aligns his nymph with the figure of Sigmund Freud’s Gradiva (Figure  69) and Aby Warburg’s Ninfa (Figure  70). Exner associates the nymph with the desire to float above the ground: the nymph as a pathos formula of the wish to overcome gravity. In this way, the proj­ect of mathematically examining the (im-)probability of floating bodies in the visual arts turns into the insight that such pictorial bodies can be regarded as wish-­images, to be freed from the shackles of the physical body. ­These figures’ gait, which one can understand in Warburg’s terms as expressive gestures [Ausdrucksgebärde] of movement, recalls the angels’ ground in the paintings from the trecento and quattrocento discussed above (Chapter  7.3). From a psychoanalytic perspective, it expresses the ­human desire to leave their localization in this earthly world b ­ ehind. While in e­ arlier times this wish was embodied by the inhabitants of the celestial spheres (by the mythical or biblical personnel from religious systems), a­ fter the disempowerment of the gods and their messengers, their images become f­ ree and open to reflections upon aspects of existence beyond the physical in ways other than t­ hose predetermined by theology. In this, the images of angels have done their duty; yet the image-­question they re/present is by no means settled. On the contrary! By being the object of calculation, images are robbed of that dimension with which they refer within the physical-­material world to something that eludes positive knowledge. Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  255

FIGURE 69. ​Sigmund Freud’s nymph . . . ​Gradiva, copy ­a fter a Greek original (fourth c­ entury BC), Chiaramonti Museum, Rome. Image credit: https://­de​.­w ikipedia​

.­org​/­w iki​/­Gradiva#​/­media​/­Datei:Gradiva​-­p1030638​.­jpg.

FIGURE 70. ​. . . ​a nd Aby Warburg’s nymph. . . . ​Domenico Ghirlandaio, Birth of Saint John the Baptist (1488), Cappella Tornabuoni, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Italy. Image credit: Werner Hofmann, Die Moderne im Rückspiegel (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988), 90.

FIGURE 71. ​. . . ​as s­ isters of the angel. Bartolomeo della Gatta, Annunciation (about 1470/1480), Museo Diocesano d’Arte Sacra, Volterra, Italy. Image credit: Editors of Phaidon Press, Annunciation (London: Phaidon Press, 2000), 98.

10 . A N G E L S A S S YM P TO M O F T H E I M AG E -­Q U E S T I O N I N T H E C U LT U R A L A N D N AT U­R A L S C I E N C E S

Apparently, the proj­ect to calculate, mea­sure, and locate the angels first needed to be brought to the epistemological limits of its empirical procedures in order to rediscover the images of painting in their role as memory image and the pictorial memory as a repertoire of pathos formulas of movement. For this reason, the development of Kulturwissenschaft (cultural science) could only have emerged from a traverse of the methods of natu­ral sciences: at the very point where the quantitative dispositif of knowledge fails in regard to images, a shift in perspective emerges in which pictorial figures are interrogated in a new way. The figure of the dancing nymph, as well as the study of the phenomena of movement, the transformation of pictorial motifs into memory images, and, not least, the meaning Exner attributes to the posture of the body and its lively movements, to the draping of fabric and the hair, regarded as unconscious memory images—­a ll of ­t hese ele­ments place his lecture on hovering figures in the visual arts into the prehistory of Warburg’s cultural-­ scientific proj­ect, the prehistory of the concept of the “pathos formula,” in par­t ic­u ­lar. Exner’s attempt to elucidate pictorial phenomena through empirical methods did not, in fact, escape Warburg’s attention. In his library, ­there is a copy of Exner’s lecture with the annotation “Strassbg. Nov. 89” and numerous other handwritten marks.121 Exner, who was also one of Freud’s teachers, must therefore be considered a significant source of inspiration for the young Warburg. In Exner, he not only encountered the rhe­toric of the “trea­sure of memory,” or the outline drawings of moving bodies and their interpretation as memory images, but also the relationship between angels and nymphs. In this re­spect, the angels should actually belong in Warburg’s series of nymphs: as floating nymphs (Figure 71). They constitute a missing link, as it w ­ ere, in the afterlife of antiquity in the Re­nais­sance and modernity that stands at the center of Warburg’s cultural science. Yet angels play only a marginal role in his proj­ect. At least, they are, despite their enormous presence in Re­nais­sance painting, not among the figures who claimed greater attention in Warburg’s work, as the figures from Christian iconography in general do not stand at the center of his proj­ect. The exception would be t­ hose transformations of ancient figures (such as t­ hose he examined in “Sphaera barbarica”) with Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  259

which he develops, for example, the concept of “energetic inversion,” the metamorphosis of violent pagan figures into Christian characters of inverse moral-­psychical value, a pro­cess he also interprets as “Christian spiritualization.”122 Nevertheless, his interest in the survival of pagan figures in the Eu­ro­pean image world is directed less at Nike/Victoria and their transformation into the image of the angels than it is to the Dionysian maenads and the revival of their wild gestures in vari­ous figures of Re­nais­sance art. When, in Warburg’s studies, individual angels nonetheless appear en passant, they are associated e­ ither with the maenads or with the planets. They appear in the figurations that are characteristic for the afterlife of antiquity in his program: model [Vorbild], transformation [Umformung] (or inversion), and restraint [Bändigung]. In his dissertation on Botticelli, for example, he discusses a relief by Agostino di Duccio depicting a scene from the life of Saint Sigismund (ca. 1460) as an example of Re­nais­sance artists’ search for models for motifs of movement in the “sculptural works of antiquity.” According to Warburg, a maenad was the model for the angels on the relief.123 When he discusses the imitation of classical pathos formulas in figures from the biblical personnel or the Acts of the Saints, he is particularly interested in the historical transformation of affects. A prominent example for this is again a relief by Agostino di Duccio from the re/pre­sen­ta­tion of San Bernardino’s miracles on the facade of the Oratory of San Bernardino in Perugia, Italy. In the image of the ­mother’s pathos formula of motions, who thankfully walks home with her reawakened child, Warburg discovers “the pathos in the classical child-­murderer” Medea.124 On Plate 47 of the Mnemosyne Atlas, the figure of the angel (from the motif Tobias and the Angel) surfaces ­under the heading Ninfa als Schutzengel und Kopfjägerin (Ninfa as guardian angel and headhunter) in a similar way—as counterpart to Judith (with the head of Holofernes).125 Both of ­t hese examples are antagonistic transformations of classical nymphs. Warburg discusses the angel’s relation to the planetary gods also in re­ spect to his pathos formula; in this case, the scenario is conceived of in terms of the opposition between wildness and restraint. The cupola of the burial chapel for Agostino Chigi in the Chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome designed by Raphael is an artwork that he repeatedly refers to throughout vari­ous texts. Each of the seven classical planetary gods depicted in the cassettes (the eighth is dedicated to the sky of fixed stars) is accompanied by an angel—­a configuration whose function Warburg interprets as the 260  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

prevention of the “wild unfolding of pagan vigor” (in the essay on the migration of planetary images from north to south, 1913)126 or as restraint of their “pagan temperament” through the Christian angels (in his essay on Luther, 1920).127 He regards the concurrency of astrology with figures from the Christian personnel in the cupola’s iconographic program as a reconciliation between antiquity and Christendom—­a “conciliation between God the ­Father and the Capitoline Jupiter”—­a lthough at the same time observing Chris­tian­ity’s adoption of ancient personifications into its ser­vice: “God the ­Father, through the seven angels accompanying each of the planets, enlists the demons of destiny to the ser­vice of Christian Providence.”128 In Warburg’s writings, the angels only appear as figures of Christian affect modulation, with which ancient pathos is restrained and transformed. Yet he does not discuss them as figures of pictorialization or as a symptom of the image-­question. This may be explained by the fact that Warburg’s image atlas of the Eu­ ro­pean pictorial memory Mnemosyne, which focuses on the migration of symbols and pathos formulas, is based primarily on reproductions in which the color and material of the images stand back ­behind patterns of expressive gestures [erregte Gebärden] and accessories in motion [bewegtes Beiwerk]. In photographic reproductions of the many engravings and drawings contained in his image atlas, only outlines can be recognized. While the montage-­like, experimental character of the panels is often considered to be close the artistic pro­cess in scholarship on Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, the use of black-­a nd-­white photo­g raphs and outline-­like reproductions has received ­little attention,129 and just as ­little has been paid to the fact that Warburg repeatedly described the images in the Mnemosyne Atlas as “pictorial material” [Bildmaterial] for the “illustration” of his theory of expressive gestures.130 The stimulation and challenge of Warburg’s work for con­temporary image studies concerns less the clarification of image-­ theoretical questions, as they are discussed within a grammatology of images, than the analy­sis of the psychical-­intellectual capacity of symbolic and pictorial attitudes in dif­fer­ent cultural practices, which he interprets as possibilities and modes of dealing with the tensions between myth and logic, image and number, magic and mathe­matics, ­etc. By reducing images to schema and outlines, however, his atlas takes a not-­unproblematic position near to the approaches taken by the natu­ral sciences vis-­à-­v is the visual arts previously discussed. The deletion of the Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  261

genuinely paint­erly aspects of material and color is in fact a prerequisite for tackling the proj­ect of mea­sur­ing angels in the first place. Preceding this proj­ect historically was a revaluation of the outline drawings and copper engraving reproductions in relation to the original paintings, about which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe agreed with the romantics—­regardless of all his other contrasts to their concepts of art. Thus, Goethe saw in the outlines a solution to the difficulties inherent to image description and gladly put engravings in his texts: “It would be highly desirable, therefore, that for the time being the proprietors should give us a precise outline of the pictures mentioned, which would enable anyone who is not fortunate enough to see the paintings themselves be able to test and judge what we have so far said.”131 His desire to deliver the imagination from the confusion caused by language with the help of outlines is expressed in the text Kunst und Alterthum an Rhein und Main (“Art and antiquity on the Rhine and the Main,” 1816), dedicated to the Boisserée collection.132 It is remarkable that this desire is illustrated with, of all t­ hings, a copy of a vera icon painting. The outlines, schematic reproductions of the painting, could not be further from the traces to which the “original” (the painting by the Veronica master) points us—­even though they ­were already repressed and replaced by pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion in the original as well. In this case, the outlines of the copy disregard and skip over transitions between three ­orders of images: trace, iconography, and reproduction. In this re­spect, it is no coincidence that Goethe develops the idea for working with outlines in the very text that disengages images from any religious context in order to make them accessible to historical consideration. The revaluation of the image reproduction qua outline—as opposed to a description through language—­takes place h ­ ere in the context of a double secularization. First, the images w ­ ere only available to collectors a­ fter the secularization of church property as a result of the Principal Decree of the Imperial Deputation of 1803 [Reichsdeputationshauptschluss], which released them from a religious context and made it pos­si­ble to pre­sent them in galleries or museums. And second, at this new place they w ­ ere first available to a critical gaze and a systematic contemplation, which led to pictorial motifs (which for the most part are derived from the history of religion) being pushed into the background by aspects of formal analy­sis, such as the composition of a parallel organ­ization of images—at least in Goethe’s case. At the same moment, the interest in and attention for the materiality of the images is 262  Angels: Images of Making-Appearance

repressed and dominated by their sign character, by the outlines of the motifs or re/presented objects. Similarly, “the bare outline” seemed “much simpler and more comfortable” to August Wilhelm Schlegel. In his case, however, this idea is based on an entirely opposite motivation: he believed images in this way to be closer to poetry.133 Following such an apologia for outlines and contours, angels also turned into mere schemas. As ciphers, they are integrated into the arabesque and thereby sublated, as, for example, in Philipp Otto Runge’s ­etchings of Tageszeiten (Times of the day, 1805). Since the individual figures in ­t hese ­etchings appear without place or space—­just as in copperplate reproductions and outlines—­the difference between place and being-­placed [Ort and Verortung] (Chapter 7.2) is erased along with the colors and materiality of the paintings: the precarious status of the angel in the image lost in mere contours. The epoch of outlines thus turns out to be the end of the age of ­t hose thresholds that confront us as the figure of the image-­question itself. The secularization of images has transformed t­ hese figures into pictorial signs that direct one’s gaze to something ­else. While the romantic view is directed to the most popu­lar motifs of romanticism’s art-­religion, as, for example, the putti at the bottom margin of the Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (Chapter 7.6), the anatomically accurate look is directed to celestial creations’ peculiar eyes, as in Carus’s comparative anatomy of eyes in reproductions of Fra Angelico’s fresco The Coronation of the Virgin. The angels’ estrangement from their heavenly home and from painting was thus also the condition of possibility for their incorporation into the scala naturae. For nineteenth-­century physiology, angels evidently represent bodies with which one attempted to penetrate into zones of the unknown and the a-­v isible. The attempt to mea­sure angels is a symptom of the sciences’ penetration into t­ hose spheres empirically unavailable, the interpretation of which previously belonged to the traditional field of religion. Integrating angels into comparative anatomy signals the disappearance and forgetting of the image-­question—­a nd thus the consciousness of the problematic posed by the moment and act of making-­an-­appearance, by imaging of something that is no image itself. If the image of the angel stands in for knowledge of the fact that re/pre­sen­ta­tion and pictorialization are highly complex imaging pro­cesses that are for the most part hidden in the imaging techniques responsible for the advancement of the sciences, then the knowledge of the problematic inherent to imaging gets lost si­mul­ta­neously with the sublations of the image in outline. Angels: Images of Making-Appearance  263

8 PERSPECTIVES OF THE G R A M M AT O L O G Y O F I M A G E S B E YO N D V I S U A L C U LT U R E

The critical grammatology of images developed in the preceding chapters is not only valid for visual culture. By extending the imperative to “think the trace before the existent”—­which Derrida formulated for writing—to images, the perspective in effect si­mul­ta­neously goes beyond images. Or more precisely, it goes beyond the field of material images. The question of the relationship between trace and image, which is at the center of the theory of images proposed ­here, can also shed light on the question of nonvisual images in historical theory and philosophy: e.g., images of memory, history, and thought, as well as the notation of musical sound figures in the context of musicology. The following conclusion to the study therefore discusses perspectives that go beyond the fields examined in the book. 1. T H E R E L AT I O N O F T R AC E A N D I M AG E

By reversing the direction of the concept of trace from its prevailing understanding as something left ­behind to t­ hose traces that precede the existing, sensually perceptible image, a grammatology of images also alters the understanding of the image and its relation to the trace. The traditional notion of a trace as something left ­behind presupposes a world of physical bodies; it appears as an imprint made by the figure’s or object’s shape, or as a vis­i­ble indication of an action or movement. Thinking the preceding trace, by contrast, appeals to phenomena from the domains of the immaterial and

invisible, the ephemeral and intelligible, the incomprehensible and intangible. While the former refers to similarity and to the depictive or repre­ sen­ta­tional function of images, the perspective of preceding traces makes the relationship between trace and image appear fragile, if not questionable. The interplay tends to turn into a ­counterplay. The relationship between trace and image thus differs noticeably depending on w ­ hether it pertains to images of something existing or vis­i­ble, something absent, per se intangible, or even completely inexistent, or ­whether the image re/presents qualitative meanings such as the status or characteristics of a person. Thus, traces and imprints left ­behind can generate images relatively seamlessly, as shown in the chapter on indexical images (Chapter 3), while images that re/present something not sensually perceptible can only emerge from a change of register between completely heterogeneous areas—­that is, as a figuration of the an-­iconic. This prob­lem is condensed in the constellation of the vera icon, in whose primal scene traces or residues are meant to testify to the truth and authenticity of the image and, by way of this testimonial function, to bridge the abyss between the image and the absent. When the intent is to create images of what is per se intangible, such as feelings, traces of the sort conveyed by the vera icon are replaced by indicators. Yet although their meaning is based on interpretation, scientific convention, and coding, the indicators live on as cryptotraces in empirical research, as was discussed in the chapter on the face as object of emotion research (Chapter 2). If, however, we are dealing with images of something not just absent but inexistent, which can be attested to by neither left ­behind nor preceding traces—­ namely, images without traces—­t hen the corresponding ideas can only ever appear as images if pictorial re/pre­sen­ta­tion first confers presence upon them. Such re/pre­sen­ta­tions are images ex ovo, generated solely out of the sphere of the imagination, as was shown in the case of the angel (Chapter 7). While in this case the image embodies a transcendent idea, the effigiēs serves as a double in the ser­vice of transforming the physical existence into a super­ natural one or of changing a person’s status, be this through a consecratio or, conversely, an executio (Chapter 4). The attribution of a higher status such as divinity, dignitas, or honor, as well as its destruction, is carried out by the pictorial substitute, ­whether this be a body-­like effigiēs or the portrait of a person, as in the case of the pittura infamante and the caricature (Chapter 4 and 5). This image-­theoretical counterpart to the two-­body concept of po­liti­ cal theology opens up the perspective of a po­liti­cal theology of images. Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture  265

2 . ­TO WA R D A P O­L I T I­C A L T H E O LO G Y O F I M AG E S I N T H E D I G I TA L E R A

This concerns, above all, the current fundamentalist strug­gles for and with images, fought as a war between “sacred images” and the “untouchable freedom of speech.” Meanwhile, in the field of natu­ral science and empirical research, the question of the vera icon—­t he “true image”—is increasingly determined by digital imaging techniques, by virtual images and algorithmic rationality. Two opposite tendencies can thus be observed in the escalating strug­g les between polarized ideological camps. On the one hand, traditional analog image-­political practices such as cartoons and caricatures continue to be used. On the other hand, the dispute over the interpretation of current issues such as migration, climate policy, h ­ uman rights, postcolonialism, terrorism, e­ tc., on social media—­itself determined by the pursuit of “followers”—is conducted by means of technical images whose authenticity is less and less capable of being verified. The current visual culture of digitally pro­cessed or generated and media-­ distributed images is often characterized as an epoch flooded by images. But digital media and social networks only function as a world of images ­because the figures and scenarios on the screen’s surface (in German Bildschirm, literally “picture screen”) appear like mimetic pictures representing something from the real world. The insight into the ambiguity of a new era produced by the way “in which the new is permeated with the old” that Benjamin explores in his Arcades Proj­ect perfectly applies to digital media as well: namely, that the images in the consciousness of the collective coincide with the form of the new means of production, which in the beginning is still dominated by that of the old one.1 In the internet’s image-­world, t­ hese are composite products of new information technology and traditional aesthetics and iconography.2 The images produced by new imaging techniques have recently been interpreted as “veritable ‘an-­icons’ ” ­because they are no longer “images-­of-­something,” according to Andrea Pinotti.3 However, ­t hese images represent a digital posticonic variant of the an-­iconic, characterized by a phantom-­like similarity—an “as-if” similarity—­but not by the archi-­ resemblance of the traces that precede the imaging (Introduction). While the traces in the vera icon paradigm of Christian painting, which are supposed to testify to the authenticity of the re/pre­sen­ta­tion, tend to dis­appear into the 266  Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture

inaccessible, ­today the same could be said for the origin of data, although ­here it concerns a technically produced arcane space.4 Algorithms or artificial neural networks, inscrutable to their users, generate inauthentic or simulated images. The data of falsa icon replace the traces of vera icon. It is precisely the combination of computer science and pictures that promotes the production and distribution of fake news. Although the forgery of images has a long history in the era of handmade artifacts, already the age of technical reproducibility of analog images has opened up completely new possibilities. Yet, the latest developments in artificial intelligence have brought techniques to the fore that make image and fiction, repre­sen­ta­tion and virtual object entirely indistinguishable. Fake news gets produced, for example, by imputing false statements to politicians or other celebrities and suggesting their authenticity by transferring foreign facial expressions to videos of their moving ­faces using expression transfer (or automated face synthesis) techniques. The likeness of the politician’s body that appears on the screen is used to evince the authenticity of the video. H ­ ere the portrait of the mortal person no longer functions as effigiēs of an institution or as a double of the immortal kingdom; ­here the image of the politician serves as a matrix for a virtual double or a digital phantom. The virtual dummy takes the place of the king’s dummy. The idea of the double body from the po­liti­cal theology of sovereignty already functions, as we have seen, as an image-­t heoretical precondition for the modern po­liti­cal caricature (Chapter  5.9). With the entry of the two-­body concept into the world of digitally generated images, however, it leads to an exponentiation of the effects produced by the inversion of a repre­sen­ta­t ion of dignitas into the dishonoring of the representative. At the same time, this brings about a refictionalization of image politics. It is no coincidence that their features recall the image politics of premodern denominational strug­g les in the age before the individualized portrait, when the pamphlets against Luther and the pope mixed the belief in miracles with the war of images (Chapter 5.6). In his Po­liti­cal Theology, Carl Schmitt compares the significance of the state of exception for jurisprudence with the miracle in theology.5 If now in social media digital technology has taken the place of miracle and fiction, then we are dealing with a new po­liti­cal theology of images, which strengthens the belief in false images. Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture  267

3 . T H E Q U E S T I O N O F T H E “ T R U E I M AG E ” O F H I S TO R Y

The increased attention to images has also led to a significant revaluation of images in historiography. As Francis Haskell shows, pictures and art-­ historical objects have been used as historical sources for a long time.6 The necessity of a methodical and critical reappraisal of this practice has only recently given rise to the plea for an iconology of historical science.7 This turn to images was initiated by the profiling of a visual history that emerged from an urgent critical investigation of the enormous archive of photo­graphs that are regularly used by modern and con­temporary history as documents.8 Peter Burke’s book Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (2001) intends to go beyond such approaches when he compares the viewpoint of the painter with that of the historian. He discusses the witnessing gesture of paint­ers within their painting, referring the classic example of the famous formula “Jan van Eyck fuit hic” in The Arnolfini Wedding (1434), “as if the painter had acted as a witness to the c­ ouple’s marriage.” H ­ ere, Burke refers to Ernst Gombrich’s observation of the “eyewitness princi­ple” of painting, “in other words the rule which artists in some cultures have followed, from the ancient Greeks onwards, to represent what—­a nd only what—an eyewitness could have seen from a par­tic­u ­lar point at a par­tic­u­ lar moment.”9 The attestation of the depiction by eyewitnessing—­instead of traces, as in the vera icon model—­reflects the perspectival relativity of the image (i.e., the fact that its temporal and spatial limitation depends on the position and point of view of the witness). Burke therefore pleads for a “criticism of visual evidence” that examines the images for their evidential value. However, since this question of the testimony of images for purposes of historiography leads to a reciprocal referential system of testimony, evidence, and witness, the historical significance of images themselves must ultimately be relativized in the familiar hermeneutical sense. Images are valuable testimonies not ­because they provide a direct insight into the social world but b ­ ecause they open up access to the world view of dif­fer­ent historical epochs.10 In Walter Benjamin’s t­ heses On the Concept of History, however, the question of the true image of history leads not only to the refusal of a transtemporal image of history that is itself historically bound but also to a radical questioning of any stable, persisting image of history in general. He refuses 268  Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture

not only specific images as contingent views of the past but also the idea of a universally valid image of history itself. The fundamental critique of the concept of “history” as such, which is based on the idea of “its progression passing through a homogeneous and empty time,” has radical consequences for the image as well.11 “The true image of the past flits by,” thesis V begins, in order to immediately affirm the ephemeral character of this image: “Only as an image that flashes briefly at the moment of its recognizability, never to be seen again, can the past be seized.”12 Through the paradoxical formulation of capturing something that is never to be seen again, the true image of the past is determined to be fundamentally intangible, yet its epistemic character lies precisely in this ephemerality. This thesis corresponds with the motto for Convolute N of the Arcades Proj­ect, the notes on epistemology and criticism of pro­gress, which also contain further explanations of the image of the past. ­Here, the moment of recognizability is defined as the pre­sent, for “in the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge is only available in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows.”13 Thus, the flash-­like nature of knowledge and the ephemeral character of the picture are interconnected. Benjamin emphasizes the subsequent position of the text, which ­here takes the role of recording something that cannot be captured in the moment of its appearance—­just as the vera icon captures the traces of the preceding in the iconic image. Lightning and image thus explain and substitute each other; they are alternately used to re/present a specific epistemology. The flash-­like (­mental) image, a sudden, ephemeral appearance, becomes the mode of cognition beyond the linear time of historiography and narrative. Benjamin’s specific image-­based epistemology is constructed around such images in which a ­whole context becomes discernible in the moment of lucid presence of mind. ­Because of the ephemeral mode of the images that flash at the moment of recognition, Benjamin’s epistemology can be understood as a temporal equivalent to the constellation that is at the center of a grammatology of images. In it, the appearing image of an uncapturable past takes the place of the traces preceding the iconic images, while the text in turn takes the place of the enduring image. Just as the traces precede the material image, the intelligible image that appears at the moment of recognizability precedes the text.14 Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture  269

4 . T H E M U S I C A L W R I T I N G B E T W E E N T R AC E A N D S O U N D

­Music is a completely dif­fer­ent field in which perspectives of the image theory proposed ­here transcend visual culture.15 The specific questions pertaining to ­music, its notation, tradition, and per­for­mance arise from the par­tic­u­lar conditions of an ephemeral acoustic art, as the instruments and vocals sound and fade away, never to be heard again—­unless they are recorded by means of technical media. Before the age of technical reproducibility, the task of recording m ­ usic fell solely to musical notation (in German Notenschrift, literally “script of notes”), the medium of communication between composers and performing musicians, as well as the memory of ­music history. Musical notation has a particularly complex structure since it enfolds multiple translations and transformations. In addition, it is subject to significant historical and cultural changes, which correspond to the diversity of compositional styles and musical genres. While in compositional work imaginary sounds—­the musical idea, the so-­called sound images in the head or the inner ear—­get transformed into the lasting medium of notation, the performing musicians and singers translate this notation into audible sounds and tones, into an acoustical event. Beyond the functions of survival and communication, musical notation occupies a creative role in the composition or invention of a piece of m ­ usic, insofar as the work of notation coincides with the pro­cess of giving form to musical ideas and still-­i maginary sound images. Hence, one cannot assume that a complete yet an-­acoustic musical piece exists in the composer’s head before the work of notation. In the course of the emergence of ­free forms of notation in the new and experimental ­music of the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, where scores are often presented as graphic images or drawings, the intrinsic aesthetic character of musical writing was given its own autonomous status; at first addressed by the composers themselves. In this context, the concept of a “musical graphic” was introduced in the 1960s.16 Since then, a clear change in discourse has taken place in ­music theory and musicology: from the theorem of ­music’s resemblance to language that was programmatically formulated by Theodor W. Adorno and s­ haped the debates on “new ­music” since the 1950s to the question of a theory of musical writing.17 With this shift of the theoretical horizon, questions of notation and research on dif­fer­ent systems of notation have come to the fore that, on occasion, even treat musical writing [musikalische Schrift] and notation as synonyms. 270  Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture

The historical changes in musical notation are more pronounced than in the system of culturally distinct textual writing, which ­a fter a gradual genesis form a relatively stable system in the modern age. The ongoing modifications of musical notation, however, are tied to distinct musical cultures, the usage of dif­fer­ent instruments, their par­tic­u ­lar pitch and configuration, the development of compositional techniques, and many other f­actors. In contrast to the writing of words, musical writing must also correspond to the numerical values of the ­music, such as tone length, tempo, ­etc. Thus, at the beginning of Eu­ro­pean m ­ usic history, t­ here was a combination of letters and signs of tone length from which a complex graphic script has developed over the centuries. While at first individual characters w ­ ere written above the text, the text eventually moved below the musical notation, a­ fter the introduction of the lines that form the matrix for the position of the notes. Conventional Eu­ro­pean bar notation as it developed over the course of history functions as a system of arbitrary signs for the diverse components of m ­ usic, such as tone pitch and length, mea­sure, interval, e­ tc. Like the diagram (Chapter 1.5), its “typography” consists of a graphic repre­sen­ta­tion of the relationship(s) between individual signs, each of which stands for a specific value. At the same time, it represents a progression in time, not unlike alphabetical script, which is read from left to right. In addition to this conventional Eu­ro­pean system, however, ­t here are also forms of notation that appear as pictorial script, especially mimetic-­gestural symbols, which refer to the performing practice of playing on certain instruments, such as fingering patterns for string instruments. The recent music-­t heoretical debate’s epistemological concern with liberating notation from the limits of a conventional sign system is at the same time directed against the idea that notation holds a solely ancillary function for recording sound ideas. In other words, it refuses to treat notation as merely subordinate in relation to the composer’s imaginary, seemingly completed sound ideas. The resulting goal of revaluating notation, which is analogous to Derrida’s criticism of writing’s secondary position in modern linguistics, explains why the pre­sent music-­theoretical discussion often refers to his theory of writing. This is not to say that it refer to Derrida’s explicit statements on the acoustic: in this the predicament is similar to that of image theory, for which Derrida’s explicit statements on the image in Of Grammatology proved less fruitful than his engagement with the preceding trace Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture  271

and his concept of différance, both of which provided suitable starting points for the image theory developed in this book (Chapter 1.1). Yet, this way of referring to Derrida’s theory of writing had to overcome the dominant reading of his book focusing primarily on his critique of the phonologocentrism of the occidental concept of language, the enormous impact of which had led to a long-­standing marginalization of the voice and the acoustic in cultural theory. For m ­ usic, the critical grammatological imperative of thinking the trace before the existent opens up the question of the an-­acoustic, of the traces that precede any sound and its relation to the formation of certain musical figures. On the one hand, this question pertains to notation—­i.e., the relationship between compositional work and writing down—­a nd on the other hand, it pertains to the relationship between notation and making ­music as a sound event. B ­ ecause of the nonsimultaneity of composing and performing, notation occupies a threshold position between the preceding pro­cess of composing and the subsequent audible event, which takes place in the dimension of time. Notation enables a tonal realization or interpretation at a ­later point in time, at a dif­fer­ent place, and by other ­people, which is to say that this notation is fundamentally based on difference. In light of this temporal, spatial, and personal difference, one could speak of a musical différance in analogy to Derrida’s concept of “postal différance” in his book The Postcard.18 In this re­spect, musical writing has always already had a grammatological character. Adorno, too, in his thesis on m ­ usic’s similarity to language, did not at all think of language as a sign system. Rather, his formulation was: “­Music is similar to language,” although it is “of a completely dif­fer­ent type than signifying language [meinende Sprache].” What ­music says is “determined by its appearing, and hidden at the same time.”19 It is thus a question of making-­an-­appearance of m ­ usic, similar to the perspective on images that is at the core of this book. In the case of m ­ usic, this making-appear can take dif­fer­ent forms: ­either the form of notation or live ­music, of graphic or acoustic figuration. One of the phenomena examined in this book with relevance for m ­ usic is the ambivalence of the line oscillating at the threshold between trace and schema (Chapter 1). In par­tic­u­lar, more recent scores that transcend the conventional system of notation and appear as musical graphics or drawings raise the question of their readability and performativity: w ­ hether they are 272  Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture

re/presenting a condensed image of a certain sound configuration, for example, or facilitations [Bahnungen] of a sound movement, or something ­else entirely. Some scores by con­temporary composers can be understood as repre­sen­ta­tions of a ­mental sound image, which, as it w ­ ere, skips the step of encoding and decoding in order to immediately pre­sent the signature of an imaginary musical entity on the sheet, often in the form of a condensed line configuration in which trace and image coincide. With Benjamin one could speak of a dialectical image, of a dialectic at a standstill, since ­here a virtual piece of ­music, acoustically realized as a tonal or vocal event in the dimension of time, is condensed into a kind of written image.20 The line as a medium between trace and image is represented ­here in a similar way to Karl Philipp Moritz’s Signatur des Schönen (Signature of beauty) inasmuch as the structure of the composer’s musical imagination is drawn on paper as a pictorial figuration without taking the detour of symbolic encoding (Chapter 1.4). In the individualized graphic notations, the lines on the paper occupy a threshold position between the an-­acoustic and sound. At the same time, they raise the question of how this kind of musical writing on paper can be transformed into a trace instituée and thus become manifest as audible per­for­mance, of entering into acoustic appearance. 5. POSTSCRIPT

The case studies of images in science, politics, religion, and art examined in this book as part of the elaboration of a grammatological theory of images are developed from the perspective and experience of Eu­ro­pean cultural history. This does not mean that the epistemological interest is ­limited to Eu­rope. However, the study of the image traditions and practices of non-­ European cultures must be left to t­hose scholars who are familiar with their histories and pre­sents. If the grammatology of images nonetheless opens up correspondences to image questions of other cultures, this is ­because its perspective of investigation is directed precisely at images before and beyond the concept of the image deployed in Eu­ro­pean art history—­ which coincides with panel painting as the model of Eu­ro­pean art history emerging in the early Re­nais­sance (Chapter 7)—­and also ­because, in contrast to the approach of visual culture, it is not l­imited to the sphere of the Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture  273

vis­i­ble. Such is the case, for example, in the considerations on the an-­iconic and the genesis of images from the cult; the relationship between double and effigiēs; the preconditions of certain image practices in the history of religion; the image politics in the clash of religions and cultures; the theoretical reflections on indexical images; on the line in relation to trace and image; and fi­nally, the difference between traces and data in the con­temporary digital world of images.

274  Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture

NOTES

I N T R O D U C T I O N : ­T O WA R D A G R A M M AT O LO G Y O F I M A G E S

1. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967), 69. 2. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 47. 3. As early as 1966, Wolfgang Brückner had observed that the “lit­er­a­ture on the prob­lem of the ‘image’ is legion” at a time when ­every discipline still approached the image from its own question. See Wolfgang Brückner, Bildnis und Brauch: Studien zur Bildfunktion der Effigies (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1966), 15. In the time since, the number of publications on the topic has increased enormously, due to the research on the theory and history of images that has developed beyond disciplinary bound­aries, so that each discipline contributes its knowledge within the framework of common research questions. 4. On the concept and techniques of rendering visible/visualization in recent research, see the corresponding section in Horst Bredekamp, Birgit Schneider, and Vera Dünkel, eds., Das technische Bild: Kompendium für eine Stilgeschichte wissenschaftlicher Bilder (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008), 132–35. On the conventional techniques of visualization, see David Gugerli and Barbara Orland, eds., Ganz normale Bilder: Historische Beiträge zur visuellen Herstellung von Selbstverständlichkeit (Zu­rich: Chronos, 2002). 5. Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger, “Sichtbar machen: Visualisierung in den Naturwissenschaften,” in Bildtheorien: Anthropologische und kulturelle Grundlagen des Visualistic Turn, ed. Klaus Sachs-­Hombach (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009), 127. See also Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger, “Objekt und Repräsentation,” in Mit dem Auge denken: Strategien zur Sichtbarmachung in wissenschaftlichen und virtuellen Welten, ed. Bettina Heintz and Jörg Huber (Zu­rich: Voldemeer, 2001), 55–61. 6. This is Walter Benjamin’s beautiful formulation for the effect of enlargement, which he develops using the example of photography. See Walter Benjamin, “­Little

History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 512 (translation modified). 7. In his reading of the frescoes of Fra Angelico, Didi-­Huberman connects the virtual character of the world on this side of représenter with the concept of virtus, as the potency or potentiality of “that which does not appear visibly.” Georges Didi-­ Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 18. 8. See Sigrid Weigel, “The Flash of Knowledge and the Temporality of Images: Walter Benjamin’s Image-­Based Epistemology and Its Preconditions in Visual Arts and Media History,” Critical Inquiry 41 (2015): 344–66. 9. On the heterogeneity of Warburg’s approaches, see Sigrid Weigel, “ ‘From Darwin via Filippino to Botticelli . . . ​a nd Back to the Nymph’: The Concept of Umfangsbestimmung, the Role of Energetics, and the Darwin-­Trace in Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaft,” in Warburg 150: Work–­Legacy–­Promise, ed. David Freedberg and Claudia Wedepohl (Chicago: De Gruyter, 2022). 10. Aby Warburg, “Ninfa Fiorentina,” in Werke in einem Band, 203. On Warburg’s proliferating nymph proj­ect, see Sigrid Weigel, “Warburg’s ‘Goddess in Exile’: The ‘Nymph’ Fragment between Letter and Taxonomy, Read with Heinrich Heine,” Critical Horizons 14, no. 3 (2013): 271–95. 11. Warburg, “Heidnisch-­a ntike Weissagung,” 485. In the En­glish edition, the translation is “laboratory of iconological science of civilization.” Warburg, “Pagan-­ Antique Prophecy,” 651. 12. Augustine, “Sermo 272,” in Sermons, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill, vol. III/7 of The Works of St. Augustine (New Rochelle, N.Y.: New City Press, 1993), 300–01. 13. Louis Marin, Food for Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 25. 14. For an instructive theoretical perspective on image studies based in the history of religions, see Peter  J. Bräunlein, “Bildakte,” in Religion im kulturellen Diskurs: Festschrift für Hans  G. Kippenberg zu seinem 65. Geburtstag / Religion in Cultural Discourse: Essays in Honor of Hans G. Kippenberg on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, ed. Brigitte Luchesi and Kocku von Stuckrad (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), 195–233; and Peter J. Bräunlein, “Ikonische Repräsentation von Religion,” in Europäische Religionsgeschichte: Ein mehrfacher Pluralismus, ed. Hans G. Kippenberg (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), 771–810. 15. On the question of visual and iconic evidence, see Christian Spies, Birgit Mersmann, and Gottfried Boehm, eds., Movens Bild: Zwischen Evidenz und Affekt (Paderborn, Germany: Fink, 2008), and the research group BildEvidenz: History and Aesthetics (http://­bildevidenz​.­de) at the Freie Universität Berlin (directors: Peter Geimer and Klaus Krüger). 276  Notes to pages 7–15

16. Georges Didi-­Huberman, Devant l’image: Question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1990). See also the En­g lish translation, Didi-­Huberman, Confronting Images. 17. According to Christopher S. Wood, the “manufactured image” is a “fixed,” still image, as it w ­ ere, which the artwork needs as a foil. He examines, in contrast, the historically preceding appearance of individual images in “a plurality of images.” Christopher  S. Wood, “Das Bild ist immer schon plural,” in Das Bild im Plural: Mehrteilige Bildformen zwischen Mittelalter und Gegenwart, ed. David Ganz and Felix Thürlemann (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 2010), 87–110. 18. See Ortrud Westheider and Michael Philipp, eds., Die Erfindung des Bildes: Frühe italienische Meister bis Botticelli (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2011); and Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the ­Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, trans. Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer (New Rochelle, N.Y.: A.D. Caratzas, 1990). 19. See Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art?, trans. Christopher S. Wood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). This debate w ­ ill not be discussed h ­ ere again; for a survey, see Johannes Grave, “Die Kunstgeschichte als Unruhestifter im Bilddiskurs: Zur Rolle der Fachgeschichte in Zeiten des Iconic Turn,” Kunstgeschichte, February 20, 2009, http://­w ww​.­kunstgeschichte​-­ejournal​.­net​/­discussion​ /­2009​/­grave. 20. Gottfried Boehm, “Die Bilderfrage,” in Was ist ein Bild?, ed. Gottfried Boehm (Munich: W. Fink, 2006), 325–43; and W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Repre­sen­ta­tion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 21. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 22. Aby Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’ ” in Werke in einem Band, 107. See also the En­glish edition, Aby Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” in Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 88–156. 23. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Penguin, 2014), 238. 24. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Proj­ect, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 13. 25. André Félibien, “Le Songe de Philomathe,” in Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes (London: David Mortier, 1705), 4:303–4. 26. For a survey, see Temenuga Trifonova, Image in French Philosophy (New York: Rodopi, 2007); Iris Därmann and Kathrin Busch, eds., Bildtheorien aus Frankreich: Ein Handbuch (Munich: Fink, 2011); and Emmanuel Alloa, ed., Bildtheorien aus Frankreich: Eine Anthologie (Munich: Fink, 2011). 27. Georges Bataille, Lascaux; or, The Birth of Art: Prehistoric Painting, trans. Austryn Wain­house (Lausanne, Switzerland: Skira, 1955). Notes to pages 8–11  277

28. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1966). 29. Concerning the relation of scripture and image in the Christian ­M iddle Ages, see Horst Wenzel, Hören und Sehen, Schrift und Bild: Kultur und Gedächtnis im Mittelalter (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1995); in the Kabbalah, see Marla Segol, Word and Image in Medieval Kabbalah: The Texts, Commentaries, and Diagrams of the Sefer Yetsirah (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 30. See Sybille Krämer, Eva Cancik-­K irschbaum, and Rainer Totzke, eds., Schriftbildlichkeit: Wahrnehmbarkeit, Materialität und Operarativität von Notationen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012); and Sigrid Weigel, “Bilder als Hauptakteure auf dem Schauplatz der Erkenntnis: Zur poeisis und episteme sprachlicher und visueller Bilder,” Interventionen 13 (2004): 191–212. 31. Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019), 24. Eiland translates entspringen as “originates.” 32. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-­Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 148–49. 33. Jacques Rancière, Le destin des images (Paris: La fabrique éditions, 2003), 10. The reason why the En­g lish translation changes Rancière’s archi-­ressemblance to “hyper-­resemblance” is inscrutable. See Jacques Rancière, The ­Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2019), 8. 34. Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” in Selected Writings, 2:697. 35. For this purpose, individual text witnesses are examined and collated (compared), their filiation (sequence) clarified, and fi­nally they are brought into the order of a stemma (­family tree). 36. Aby Warburg, “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara,” in Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 569. 1 . T H E T R A C E A N D T H E C U R R E N T R E VA L U AT I O N O F L I N E S

1. According to Kathrin Busch, “Jacques Derrida,” in Bildtheorien aus Frankreich: Ein Handbuch, ed. Iris Därmann and Kathrin Busch (Munich: Fink, 2011), 126. 2. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 42. 3. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 50–51. 4. Derrida, 47 (translation modified). 5. In the chapters on Rousseau and on masturbation as a “dangerous supplement that deceives nature,” this is compared with the image as a supposedly natu­ ral supplement of language: “And indeed it is a question of the imaginary. The supplement that ‘cheats’ maternal ‘nature’ operates as writing, and as writing it is dangerous to life. This danger is that of the image.” Derrida, 151. 278  Notes to pages 11–16

6. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 36. The same is true for the word peinture, which is likewise only discussed as the image of writing; see, for example, Derrida, Of Grammatology, 151. 7. Emmanuel Alloa, Das durchscheinende Bild: Konturen einer medialen Phä­ nomenologie (Zu­rich: Diaphanes, 2011), 197ff, 217. 8. Charles  S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1932), para. 243. 9. See Sybille Krämer, Werner Kogge, and Gernot Grube, Spur: Spurenlesen als Orientierungstechnik und Wissenskunst (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 2007); and Christopher S. Wood, “Source and Trace,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 63/64 (2013): 5–19. 10. Carlo Ginzburg, “Spie: Radici di un paradigma indiziarios,” in Crisi della ragione: Novi modelli nel rapporto tra sapere attività umane, ed. Aldo Gargani (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 59–101. See also the En­glish translation: “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 96–105. 11. Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 196–232. 12. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 62. 13. Derrida, 65. 14. Ernst H. Gombrich, “Moment and Movement in Art,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964): 293–306; see also Gottfried Boehm, “Bild und Zeit,” in Das Phänomen Zeit in Kunst und Wissenschaft, ed. Hannelore Paflik (Weinheim, Germany: VCH, 1987), 20; and Jack  M. Greenstein, “Mantegna, Leonardo and the Times of Painting,” Word & Image 15, no. 3 (1999): 217–42. 15. Georges Didi-­Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photo­graphs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 32. 16. Didi-­Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 35 (translation modified). 17. Didi-­Huberman, 2. 18. Sigmund Freud, “Proj­ ect for a Scientific Psy­ chol­ ogy,” in Pre-­Psycho-­ Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts (1886–1899), vol. 1 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), 300. 19. Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, vol. 6 of The Standard Edition (1960), 43. 20. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (First Part), vol. 4 of The Standard Edition (1953), 277. 21. Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 633. Notes to pages 16–22  279

22. Sigmund Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” in Totem and Taboo and Other Works, vol. 13 of The Standard Edition (1955), 224 (translation modified). The Standard Edition translates Spur, ­here translated as “trace,” as “indication.” Although Freud mentions Morelli’s method as a model, his own interpretation actually differs from it, ­because Morelli cata­logs ears, fin­gers, and feet as clues, whereas Freud deciphers the traces of the figure’s movements that are readable in the posture of the sculpture. For the epistemological role of detail in Freud, Warburg, and Benjamin, see Sigrid Weigel, Literatur als Voraussetzung der Kulturgeschichte: Schauplätze von Shakespeare bis Benjamin (Munich: Fink, 2004), 15–38; for more on Freud’s reading of traces in “Moses of Michelangelo,” see 23ff. 23. On the “dynamogram” as a graph of the symptom in Warburg, see Georges Didi-­Huberman, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms; Aby Warburg’s History of Art, trans. Harvey  L. Mendelsohn (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 108. 24. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Proj­ect, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 447 (translation modified). 25. Benjamin, Arcades Proj­ect, 4. 26. Benjamin, 13. 27. Benjamin, 4–5. 28. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 29. Benjamin, Arcades Proj­ect, 222. 30. See Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger, Michael Hagner, and Bettina Wahrig-­Schmidt, “Räume des Wissens: Repräsentation, Codierung, Spur,” in Räume des Wissens: Repräsentation, Codierung, Spur, ed. Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger, Michael Hagner, and Bettina Wahrig-­Schmidt (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), 9–10; and Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger, ­Toward a History of Epistemic Th ­ ings: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997). 31. In contrast to the higher modes of recognition: the pistis, the perception of the vis­i­ble world (he mentions animals, plants, and artifacts); the dianoia, the conceptual mind (geometric operations); and the highest mode of knowledge, the noesis, or insight through reason. Plato, Plato’s Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett, rev. by Albert A. Anderson (Millis, Mass.: Agora Publications, 2001), 509c–511a. 32. Ernst Cassirer, Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken (Leipzig, Germany: B.G. Teubner, 1922), 32, 46. 33. See also Marzia Faietti and Gerhard Wolf, eds., Linea I: Grafie di immagini tra Quattrocento e Cinquecento (Venice: Marsilio, 2008). 34. Gerhard Wolf, “Gestörte Kreise: Zum Wahrheitsanspruch des Bildes im Zeitalter des Disegno,” in Rheinberger, Hagner, and Wahrig-­Schmidt, Räume des Wissens, 52. 280  Notes to pages 23–25

35. Galileo Galilei, Sidereus nuncius: Nachricht von neuen Sternen, ed. Hans Blumenberg (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1980). 36. Werner Busch, “Die Möglichkeit der nicht-­ fi xierten Linie: Ein exemplarischer Abriß,” in Randgänge der Zeichnung, ed. Werner Busch, Oliver Jehle, and Carolin Meister (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), 123. On disegno, see Wolfgang Kemp’s detailed study on the history of the concept in “Disegno: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Begriffs zwischen 1547 und 1607,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 19 (1974): 219–40. 37. Paul Klee, Das bildnerische Denken, ed. Jürgen Spiller, vol. 1 of Form-­ und Gestaltungslehre (Basel, Germany: Schwabe, 1990), 103–50. 38. Kandinsky’s plea for a scientific consideration of painting in Point and Line to Plane means, above all, to examine the infinite variations of form that can unfold from the line on the page. Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, ed. Hilla Rebay, trans. Howard Dearstyne (New York: Dover Publications, 2012). 39. Catherine de Zegher, “A C ­ entury u ­ nder the Sign of Line: Drawing and Its Extension (1910–2010),” in On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth C ­ entury, ed. Cornelia H. Butler and Catherine de Zegher (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 21–124; see also Sabine Mainberger, Experiment Linie: Künste und ihre Wissenschaften um 1900 (Berlin: Kadmos, 2010). 40. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Drawing Desire,” in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 57–75. 41. See Gottfried Boehm, “Spur und Gespür: Zur Archäologie der Zeichnung,” in Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen: Die Macht des Zeichens (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2007), 141–57. 42. For example, see Soraya de Chadarevian, “Die Methode der Kurven,” in Die Experimentalisierung des Lebens: Experimentalsysteme in den biologischen Wissenschaften 1850/1950, ed. Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger and Michael Hagner (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), 28–49. 43. Étienne-­Jules Marey, La methode graphique dans les sciences experimentales et particulierement en physiologie et en medicine (Paris: Masson, 1878). 44. Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Drawing ­Things Together,” Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Pre­sent 6 (1986): 1–40. 45. For examples from the 1940s to the 1970s, see Nina Samuel, ed., The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); for digital strategies of visualization in numerous disciplines, see Bettina Heintz and Jörg Huber, eds., Objekt und Repräsentation (Zu­rich: Voldemeer, 2001). 46. Horst Bredekamp, “Die Erkenntniskraft der Linie bei Galilei, Hobbes und Hooke,” in Re-­Visionen: Zur Aktualität von Kunstgeschichte, ed. Barbara Hüttel, Richard Hüttel, and Jeanette Kohl (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002), 145–46. Notes to pages 25–27  281

47. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth ­Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 9; see also Joel Snyder, “Visualization and Visibility,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), 379–400. 48. Henning Schmidgen, Die Helmholtz-­Kurven: auf der Spur der verlorenen Zeit (Berlin: Merve, 2009). 49. Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1995), 144. 50. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael William Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 115. 51. Barbara Wittmann, “Zeichnen, im Dunkeln: Psychophysiologie einer Kulturtechnik um 1900,” in Busch, Jehle, and Meister, Randgänge der Zeichnung, 185. 52. Paul Klee, Tagebücher, 1898–1918, ed. Wolfgang Kersten (Stuttgart, Germany: Paul-­K lee-­Stiftung, 1988), 282. 53. Wittmann, “Zeichnen, im Dunkeln,” 185–86, 23. 54. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-­Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-­Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 45. 55. Moritz, “Die Signatur des Schönen,” 584. 56. Moritz, 584–85. 57. Moritz, 588. 58. Pliny the Elder, Natu­ral History, trans. John  F. Healey (New York: Penguin, 2004), 35.151. Refer also to the original Latin: De pictura satis superque. contexuisse his et plasticen conveniat. Plinius Secundus, Historia Naturalis, 35.151. 59. Robert Vischer, Über das optische Formgefühl: ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik (Leipzig, Germany: Credner, 1873), 2. For an En­glish translation, see Robert Vischer, “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics,” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Prob­lems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, Calif.: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 89–122. 60. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Das Symbol,” in Altes und Neues (Stuttgart, Germany: A. Bonz, 1889), 318–19 (emphasis added). 61. See Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 62. F. Vischer, “Das Symbol,” 307 (emphasis added). 63. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Georges Didi-­Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1992); Mitchell, 282  Notes to pages 27–36

What Do Pictures Want?; and Horst Bredekamp, Image Acts: A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency, trans. Elizabeth Clegg (Boston: De Gruyter, 2018). 64. Frank Fehrenbach, “Blick der Engel und lebendige Kraft,” in Leonardo da Vinci: Natur im Übergang. Beiträge zu Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik (Munich: Fink, 2002), 206 (emphasis added). 65. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 204 (emphasis added). 66. See David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no.  5 (May  2007): 197–203; and Lux and Weigel, Empathy. 67. M. Alessandra Umilta et al., “Abstract Art and Cortical Motor Activation: An EEG Study,” Frontiers in ­Human Neuroscience 6 (2012), https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­3389​ /­fnhum​.­2012​.­00311. For confirmation by a similar experiment, see Helena De Pree­ ster and Manos Tsakiris, “Living Lines: Can We Discriminate between Traces of Movement by Animate and Non-­a nimate Agents?,” in Bilder animierter Bewegung / Images of Animate Movement, ed. Sigrid Leyssen and Pirkko Rathgeber (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2013), 181–96. 68. “Dann durch solche weyß muss der innerlich verstand im eussern werck angzeigt warden.” Albrecht Dürer, Underweysung der Messung, mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt, in Linien, Ebenen und gantzen corporen (Nuremberg, Germany: Hieronymus Andreae, 1525), 2. See also Hannah Baader, “Horizont und Welle,” in Faietti and Wolf, Linea I, 211–25. 69. Werner Busch, “Erscheinung statt Erzählung,” in Das erzählende und das erzählte Bild, ed. Alexander Honold and Ralf Simon (Paderborn, Germany: Wilhelm Fink, 2010), 56. 70. Giorgio Vasari quoted in Kemp, “Disegno,” 226. 71. Benvenuto Cellini quoted in Kemp, “Disegno,” 88. 72. Federico Zuccaro quoted in Georges Didi-­Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 83. 73. See Martin Warnke’s beautiful title “Der Kopf in der Hand,” in Zauber der Medusa: europäische Manierismen, ed. Werner Hofmann (Vienna: Löcker, 1987), 55–61. 74. Henry van de Velde, “Die Linie,” in Die Neue Rundschau. XIXter Jahrgang der freien Bühne, ed. Oskar Bie, vol. 3 (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1908), 1,036. His anthropological approach is not without prob­lems, b ­ ecause his interpretation of the cultural-­ historical development of the line results in the idea that certain lines are characteristic of certain p ­ eoples and stages of development—­for example, when he writes of the “Roman line” or the “Japa­nese line.” Notes to pages 36–37  283

75. Horst Bredekamp, Galilei der Künstler: Der Mond, die Sonne, die Hand (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007). 76. Lorraine Daston, “Bilder der Wahrheit, Bilder der Objektivität,” Interventionen 14 (2005): 117–53. 77. “Peirce Online Manuscripts, Graphics, Marginalia, & Letters,” Harvard University’s Houghton Library, https://­arisbe​.­sitehost​.­iu​.­edu​/­digitized​.­H TM#houghton. 78. See Franz Engel, Moritz Queisner, and Tullio Viola, eds., Das bildnerische Denken: Charles S. Peirce (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012). 79. On the position of the “existential graphs” in science, see Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, chap. 6. Their instructive analy­sis of Peirce’s theory of graphs and diagrams and of his graphical thinking, which also discusses the incoherent aspects of his explanations, is a useful itinéraire through the labyrinth of Peirce’s rec­ords, especially volumes two and four of the Collected Papers, although my book approaches Peirce with dif­fer­ent questions. 80. “Joseph Brent informs us that the figure at the center of the labyrinth is not the Minotaur, but Peirce’s dog! However, since it seems to have cloven hooves and a Minotaur-­like tail, we conclude that Peirce’s sign is at least ambiguous.” Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 266n90. 81. Aby Warburg, “Symbolismus als Umfangsbestimmung,” in Werke in einem Band, ed. Martin Treml, Sigrid Weigel, and Perdita Ladwig (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 615–28; see also Sigrid Weigel, “ ‘From Darwin via Filippino to Botticelli . . . ​ and Back to the Nymph’: The Concept of Umfangsbestimmung, the Role of Energetics, and the Darwin-­Trace in Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaft,” in Warburg 150: Work–­ Legacy–­Promise, ed. David Freedberg and Claudia Wedepohl (Chicago: De Gruyter, 2022). 82. Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination, 141. 83. Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 4 (1933), para. 535. 84. See Horst Bredekamp et al., eds., Edgar Wind: Kunsthistoriker und Philo­ soph (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998). This is the aspect that has been approached by Edgar Wind. 85. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 2, para. 778. 86. Erwin Panofsky, Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie (Berlin: Teubner, 1960). 87. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 4, para. 530 (emphasis added). 2 . ­FA C E S : B E T W E E N T R A C E A N D I M A G E , E N C O D I N G A N D M E A­S U R E­M E N T

1. J. S. Winston et al., “Automatic and Intentional Brain Responses during Evaluation of Trustworthiness of F ­ aces,” Nature Neuroscience 5, no. 3 (2002): 277–83. This study is a review of a neurobiological model for social cognition based on activity 284  Notes to pages 38–44

in the superior temporal sulcus while performing a task involving social judgment. To accomplish this, assessments of the credibility of ­faces (comparable in implicit and explicit form) ­were correlated with interpretations of the emotional expressions of the f­ aces. 2. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), 77–78. Translation modified according to Alberti, Della pittura: Über die Malkunst, trans. Oskar Bätschmann and Sandra Gianfreda (Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002), part 2, para. 42. 3. In his hermeneutics of portrait painting, Boehm discusses signals of affect and expressive values but not expressions of emotions. Gottfried Boehm, Bildnis und Individuum: Über den Ursprung der Porträtmalerei in der italienischen Re­ nais­sance (Munich: Prestel-­Verlag, 1985). 4. Theodor Piderit, Mimik und Physiognomik (Detmold, Germany: Meyer, 1886). 5. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, “Über Physiognomik; wider die Physiognomen: Zu Beförderung der Menschenliebe und Menschenkenntnis,” in Schriften und Briefe, vol. 3 (Frankfurt, Germany: Insel-­Verlag, 1992), 256–95. 6. Sigmund Freud’s “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words” (1910) discusses opposite meanings of one and the same word. In Five Lectures on Psycho-­ Analysis, Leonardo Da Vinci and Other Works, vol. 11 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 153–62. 7. Giambattista della Porta’s De humana physiognomia (1586), for example, speaks of the difficulties of distinguishing between opposing qualities such as strength and boldness. See Moshe Barasch, Imago Hominis: Studies in the Language of Art (New York: IRSA, 1991), 16. 8. In this passage, Reynolds discusses the figure of a Bacchante who is leaning backward with her head tossed back in an expression of enthusiastic, raging joy. It was precisely this figure that Baccio Bandinelli, whom Reynolds calls the master of the Descent from the Cross, adapted in a drawing of the Virgin Mary in order to express raging pain and grief. Reynolds adds: “and he knew very well what was worth borrowing.” Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Edward Gilpin Johnson (Chicago: A.C. McClurg and Com­pany, 1891), 297–98. Moshe Barasch discusses a variant of this twofold meaning of expressive gestures when he writes of the ambivalence of the pathos formula of the tossed-­back head; see “The Tossed-­Back Head,” in Imago Hominis, 152–60. 9. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, ed. Joe Cain and Sharon Messenger (London: Penguin, 2009), 25. 10. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 191n17. Carlo Ginzburg takes this footnote as a starting point to examine Darwin’s reference to Reynolds; see “Le forbici di Warburg,” in Tre figure: Achille, Meleagro, Cristo, ed. Maria Luisa Catoni (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2013), 109–32. Notes to pages 45–46  285

11. Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt, 1999), 39–40. 12. Locating the soul in the head is an old tradition that was revived around 1800 by Soemmerring and Gall. Phrenology initiated a “change of perspective from the soul’s organ to the brain,” according to Michael Hagner; see “Das Genie und sein Gehirn,” in Jahrbuch 2001 des Collegium Helveticum der ETH Zürich, ed. Helga Nowotny, Martina Weiss, and Karin Hänni (Zu­rich: VDF Hochschulverlag, 2002), 189. In psychophysics around 1900, the brain likewise played a central role in the research of “emotions,” for example in Wilhelm Wundt. 13. Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 14. Positron emission tomography visualizes the metabolism in active regions of the brain by injecting emission-­active substances (e.g., radioactive glucose). 15. Functional magnetic resonance imaging. 16. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, in The Passions of the Soul and Other Late Philosophical Writings, trans. Michael Moriarty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 219. 17. Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 108. 18. Gerhard Roth, Das Gehirn und seine Wirklichkeit: Kognitive Neurobiologie und ihre philosophischen Konsequenzen (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1997), 197. 19. Roth, Das Gehirn und seine Wirklichkeit, 212. 20. Antonio  R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the ­Human Brain (New York: Putnam, 1994), 149. 21. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham, vol. 19 of Aristotle in 23 Volumes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934), 1105b.2ff, http://­data​ .­perseus​.­org ​/­citations​/­u rn:cts:greekLit:tlg0086​.­t lg010​.­perseus​-­eng1:1105b​.­20. In Aristotle, the opposition of plea­sure and unplea­sure provides the matrix for the function and modification of affects, whereas their specific profile is described by means of a classificatory series: “By the emotions, I mean desire, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, friendship, hatred, longing, jealousy, pity; and generally t­hose states of consciousness which are accompanied by plea­sure or pain.” 22. See Sigrid Weigel, “Pathos—­Passion—­Gefühl,” in Literatur als Voraussetzung der Kulturgeschichte: Schauplätze von Shakespeare bis Benjamin (Munich: Fink, 2004), 147–72; concerning the era of emotions, see 164ff. 23. Quoted in Frank Baasner, Der Begriff “sensibilité” im 18. Jahrhundert: Aufstieg und Niedergang eines Ideals (Heidelberg, Germany: C. Winter, 1988), 193. 24. Denis Diderot and Jean Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 15 (Paris: 1765), 38–52. 25. Sigmund Freud, “Proj­ ect for a Scientific Psy­ chol­ ogy,” in Pre-­Psycho-­ Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts (1886–1899), vol. 1 of Standard Edition (1966), 369. 286  Notes to pages 47–49

26. An increasing exchange between neuroscience and psychoanalysis has occurred since the founding of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society in 2000; see, for example, Sigrid Weigel and Gerhard Scharbert, eds., A Neuro-­ Psychoanalytical Dialogue for Bridging Freud and the Neurosciences (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2016). 27. See Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, eds., The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 28. Claus Pias, “Das digitale Bild gibt es nicht: Über das (Nicht-)Wissen der Bilder und die informatische Illusion,” Zeitenblicke 2, no.  1 (2003), http://­w ww​ .­zeitenblicke​.­historicum​.­net​/­2003​/­01​/­pias​/­index​.­html, para. 50. 29. See Ralf Adelmann et  al., Datenbilder: Zur digitalen Bildpraxis in den Naturwissenschaften (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, 2009). 30. For a critique from within (that is, from an expert who participated in the development of fMRI), see Nikos K. Logothetis, “What We Can Do and What We Cannot Do with FMRI,” Nature 453 (2008): 869–78, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1038​/­nature​ 06976. 31. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 11. 32. See, for example, Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, trans. Keith Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 33. See also Louis G. Tassinary and John T. Cacioppo, “Unobservable Facial Actions and Emotion,” Psychological Science 3, no. 1 (1992): 28–33. 34. Paul Ekman, Robert W. Levenson, and Wallace V. Friesen, “Autonomic Ner­ vous System Activity Distinguishes among Emotions,” Science 221, no. 4616 (1983): 1,208–10. 35. Itzhak Aharon et al., “Beautiful ­Faces Have Variable Reward Value: FMRI and Behavioral Evidence,” Neuron 32, no. 3 (2001): 537–51. This research team consisted of six scholars from dif­fer­ent institutions: the Neuroscience Center, Center for Biomedical Imaging, and Department of Psychiatry at Harvard University; and the Sloan School of Management at MIT. 36. Rosalind  W. Picard, “Affective Computing,” Technical Report #321 (MIT Media Laboratory Perceptual Computing Section, 1995), 1. Rosalind  W. Picard leads the Affective Computing Research Program at the MIT Media Lab; see also Rosalind W. Picard, Affective Computing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). 37. Picard, “Affective Computing,” 5. 38. Picard herself cofounded the com­pany Empatica, which builds health-­ monitoring wearables, and the enormously successful com­pany Affectiva, which produces a variety of emotion-­detection technologies. 39. For a more detailed analy­sis of the functioning and the technical and epistemic prerequisites of t­hese technologies, see Sigrid Weigel, “Der konventionelle Notes to pages 49–56  287

Code als buckliger Zwerg im Dienste der Emotion Recognition: Überlegungen zu einer Urgeschichte der digitalen Kultur,” Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie 6, no. 1 (2020): 47–80. 40. Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Clues (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-­Hall, 1975), 10. 41. Ekman and Friesen, Unmasking the Face, 13 (emphasis added). 42. Paul Ekman, Wallace  V. Friesen, and Phoebe Ellsworth, Emotion in the ­Human Face: Guidelines for Research and an Integration of Findings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 43. See photo­g raphs in Paul Ekman, “Universal and Cultural Differences in Facial Expression of Emotion,” in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (1971), ed. James K. Cole (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 207–83. 44. Ruth Leys, “How Did Fear Become a Scientific Object and What Kind of Object Is It?,” Repre­sen­ta­tions 110, no. 1 (2010): 76. 45. Ekman and Friesen, Unmasking the Face, 28. 46. Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and Joseph C. Hager, Facial Action Coding System: The Manual (Salt Lake City: Research Nexus, 2002), CD-­ROM, https://­ pdfcoffee​.­com​/­facs​-­paul​-­ekman​-­pdf​-­pdf​-­free​.­html. 47. Roland Barthes, “The Face of Garbo,” in Mythologies: The Complete Edition, in a New Translation, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 73. 48. Béla Balázs, Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory; “Vis­i­ble Man” and “The Spirit of Film,” ed. Erica Car­ter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 38, 39ff. In a section titled “Microphysiognomy,” Balázs discusses the effect of a close-­up: “Inside the face partial physiognomies come into view which betray qualities very dif­fer­ent from t­ hose that could be gleaned from the overall expression” (102). 49. Denis Diderot, The Paradox of the Actor, trans. Walter Pollock (Charleston, S.C.: CreateSpace In­de­pen­dent Publishing Platform, 2015). 50. Piderit, Mimik und Physiognomik, 19–22. 51. Tassinary and Cacioppo, “Unobservable Facial Actions and Emotion,” 28. 52. Tassinary and Cacioppo, 30 (emphasis added). 53. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 389. 54. Guillaume-­Benjamin Duchenne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine ou analyse électro-­physiologique de l’expression des passions (Paris: J. B. Baillière et fils, 1876), XI–­X II. 55. Piderit, Mimik und Physiognomik, 30–31. 56. Duchenne, Mécanisme, 1–4. 57. Charles Bell, “Essay III: Of the Muscles of the Face in Man and in Animals,” in Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting (London, 1806), 55–82. 288  Notes to pages 56–63

58. Duchenne, “Considérations générales,” in Mécanisme, 42–47. 59. Duchenne, Mécanisme, 42. 60. Georges Didi-­Huberman, “Near and Distant: The Face, Its Imprint, and Its Place of Appearance,” Kritische Berichte 40, no. 1 (2012): 58. 61. Heinrich Heine, “Florentine Nights,” in The Prose Writings of Heinrich Heine, ed. Havelock Ellis (London, 1887), 190. 62. Heine, “Florentine Nights,” 190 (translation modified). 63. See Hans Belting, “Face oder Trace? Zur Anthropologie der frühen Christus-­Porträts,” in Gesichter: Kulturgeschichtliche Szenen aus der Arbeit am Bildnis des Menschen, ed. Sigrid Weigel (Munich: Fink, 2013), 91–102. 64. Hans Belting, Das echte Bild: Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen (Munich: Beck, 2005), 57. For a detailed and rich history of dif­fer­ent traditions and types of Christ portraits, see Gerhard Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel: Traditionen des Christusbildes und die Bildkonzepte der Re­nais­sance (Munich: Fink, 2002). 65. Gerhard Wolf, “Gestörte Kreise: Zum Wahrheitsanspruch des Bildes im Zeitalter des Disegno,” in Räume des Wissens: Repräsentation, Codierung, Spur, ed. Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger, Michael Hagner, and Bettina Wahrig-­Schmidt (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), 57. 66. Georges Didi-­Huberman, La ressemblance par contact: Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2008), 82. 67. Georges Didi-­Huberman, “Face, proche, lointaine: L’empreinte du visage et le lieu pour apparaître,” in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Repre­sen­ta­tion, ed. Herbert L. Kessler and Gerhard Wolf (Bologna, Italy: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1998), 95–108. 68. For a general history of masks, see Richard Weihe, Die Paradoxie der Maske: Geschichte einer Form (Munich: W. Fink, 2004). 69. Moshe Barasch, “The Mask in Eu­ro­pean Art,” in Imago Hominis, 51. Barasch refers to a cata­log of theater masks from the second ­century, recorded in the Onomastikon of Iulius Polydeukes (Julius Pollux). 70. Françoise Frontisi-­Ducroux, “La mort en face,” Mètis: Anthropologie des mondes grecs anciens 1, no. 2 (1986), 204ff; see also Régis Debray, Vie et mort de l’image: Une histoire du regard en Occident (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). Literally cut off, this isolated frontal face reappears in the context of the French Revolution; Daniel Arasse describes ­t hese images as “guillotine portraits.” Arasse, The Guillotine and the Terror, trans. Christopher Miller (London: Penguin, 1989), 135. 71. Concerning the pictorial formulas of the tragic theatrical mask on Mantegna’s sample sheets for Alberti’s trattato, Barasch refers to Fritz Saxl, “Rinascimento dell’ antichità: Studien zu den Arbeiten A. Warburgs,” in Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft, vol. 43, ed. Karl Koetschau (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 220–72; see also Hans Belting, Giovanni Bellini, Pietà: Ikone und Bilderzählung in der venezianischen Malerei (Frankfurt, Germany: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 36ff. 72. Barasch, “The Tragic Face,” in Imago Hominis, 59–77. Notes to pages 63–72  289

73. Boehm, Bildnis und Individuum, 53ff. 74. Boehm, 9; see also Andreas Beyer, Das Porträt in der Malerei (Munich: Hirmer, 2002), 21. 75. Sigrid Weigel, ed., Gesichter, 7–8; and Sigrid Weigel, “Das Angesicht: Von verschwundenen, bewegten und mechanischen Gesichtern,” in Das Gesicht: Bilder, Medien, Formate, ed. Sigrid Weigel (Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein Verlag, 2017), 8–20. 76. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 392. 77. Sigrid Weigel, Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy, trans. Chadwick T. Smith (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013), 215ff. 78. See Roland Meyer, “Lichtbildbelehrung: Bilder im Grenzbereich; Die ePass-­ Fotomustertafeln der Bundesdruckerei,” in Bilder ohne Betrachter, ed. Horst Bredekamp, Bildwelten des Wissens vol. 4.2, (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007), 64–67. 79. Barasch, “The Frontal Icon,” in Imago Hominis, 20–35. For the frontal face, see also Meyer Schapiro, “Frontal and Profile as Symbolic Forms,” in Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (Paris: Mouton, 1973), 37–63. 80. Barasch, “Frontal Icon,” 32. 81. To name just a few titles from the scholarship on the history and prob­lem of physiognomic knowledge: Jean-­Jacques Courtine and Claudine Haroche, Histoire du visage: Exprimer et taire ses émotions: Du XVIe siècle au début du XIXe siècle (Paris: Payot et Rivages, 2007); Elisabeth Madlener, “Ein kabbalistischer Schauplatz: Die physiognomische Seelenerkundung,” in Wunderblock: eine Geschichte der modernen Seele, ed. Jean Clair, Cathrin Pichler, and Wolfgang Pircher (Vienna: Löcker, 1989), 159–79; Claudia Schmölders, Das Vorurteil im Leibe: Eine Einführung in die Physiognomik (Berlin: Akademie-­Verlag, 1995); Rüdiger Campe and Manfred Schneider, eds., Geschichten der Physiognomik: Text, Bild, Wissen (Freiburg, Germany: Rombach Verlag, 1996); Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-­Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Davide Stimilli, The Face of Immortality: Physiognomy and Criticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); and François Delaporte, Anatomie des passions (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2003). 82. On the tradition of diagrammatic images of the body, see Steffen Bogen, “Der Körper des Diagramms: Präsentationsfiguren, mnemonische Hände, vermessene Menschen,” in Bild und Körper im Mittelalter, ed. Kristin Marek et  al., 2nd ed. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2008), 61–81. 83. Piderit, Mimik und Physiognomik, 30–31. 84. Madlener, “Ein kabbalistischer Schauplatz,” 159. 85. For a newly edited text (based on a critical comparison of dif­fer­ent text witnesses) and a bilingual version, see Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun’s “Conférence Sur l’expression Générale et Particulière” (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994). 290  Notes to pages 72–77

86. Montagu, Expression of the Passions, 112. 87. Montagu, 127. 88. Stimilli, Face of Immortality, 1. 89. Beyer, Das Porträt in der Malerei. 90. Quoted in Madlener, “Ein kabbalistischer Schauplatz,” 159. 91. Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (Stuttgart, Germany: P. Reclam, 1984), 21. 92. Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, 12. 93. Lavater, 16–17. 94. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 2, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 727ff. 3. INDEXIC AL IMAGES: TR ACE, RESEMBL ANCE, AND CODE

1. Charles Sanders Peirce, “What Is a Sign?,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, 1893–1913, ed. Nathan Houser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 5. 2. On the imbalance of Peirce’s reception “in the sense of an either/or of ‘iconicity’/‘indexicality,’ ” see Jeanette Kohl, Martin Gaier, and Alberto Saviello, “Ähnlichkeit als Kategorie der Porträtgeschichte,” in Similitudo: Konzepte der Ähnlichkeit in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Jeanette Kohl, Martin Gaier, and Alberto Saviello (Paderborn, Germany: Fink, 2012), 16–17. 3. See Michael Franz, Von Gorgias bis Lukrez: Antike Ästhetik und Poetik als vergleichende Zeichentheorie (Berlin: Akademie, 1999). 4. Peirce, “What Is a Sign?,” 5. 5. Peirce, 5. 6. Charles S. Peirce, “Nomenclature and Divisions of Triadic Relations, as Far as They Are Determined,” in Essential Peirce, 2:291. 7. Peirce, “What Is a Sign?,” 6. 8. Peirce, “Nomenclature and Divisions of Triadic Relations,” 291. 9. Carlo Ginzburg, “Spie: Radici di un paradigma indiziarios,” in Crisi della ragione: Novi modelli nel rapporto tra sapere attivaità umane, ed. Aldo Gargani (Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1979). “Paradigma indizarios” is translated as “evidential paradigm”—­ see chap. 2fn10. 10. Horst Bredekamp, Image Acts: A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency, trans. Elizabeth Clegg (Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), 143. 11. Examples of positive and negative hand imprints are discussed in Gerhard Bosinksi, “Die Bilder der Altsteinzeit,” in Bildtheorien: Anthropologische und kulturelle Grundlagen des Visualistic Turn, ed. Klaus Sachs-­Hombach (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 2009), 45–46. Notes to pages 77–87  291

12. Georges Didi-­Huberman, La ressemblance par contact: Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2008). 13. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 299. 14. See also André Leroi-­Gourhan, The Art of Prehistoric Man in Western Eu­ rope, trans. Norbert Guterman (London: Thames & Hudson, 1967). 15. Didi-­Huberman, La ressemblance par contact, 56. 16. Georges Didi-­Huberman, “Le visage et la terre,” Artstudio 21 (1991): 15. 17. See Harriet I. Flower, Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 18. Julius von Schlosser, “History of Portraiture in Wax,” in Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the ­Human Figure, ed. Roberta Panzanelli, trans. James Michael Loughbride (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 184. See also Christa Belting-­Ihm, “Imagines maiorum,” in Indictio feriarum, ed. Ernst Dassmann, vol. 17 of Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum (Stuttgart, Germany: Anton Hiersemann, 1996), 995–1,016. 19. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Über die Ahnenbilder der alten Römer,” in Entwürfe und unvollendete Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker, vol. 15 of Sämtliche Schriften (Leipzig: 1900), 75. 20. Wolfgang Brückner, Bildnis und Brauch: Studien zur Bildfunktion der Effigies (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1966), 16. 21. Cennino Cennini, Il libro dell’arte (around 1400), quoted in Didi-­Huberman, La ressemblance par contact, 98. 22. Jeanette Kohl, “ ‘Vollkommen ähnlich’: Der Index als Grundlage des Re­nais­ sanceporträts,” in Kohl, Gaier, and Saviello, Similitudo, 187. 23. Katharina Sykora, Die Tode der Fotografie 1: Totenfotografie und ihr sozialer Gebrauch (Paderborn, Germany: Fink, 2009), 59, 62ff. 24. Bissera V. Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 4 (2006): 638. 25. Viktoria Schmidt-­ Linsenhoff, “Dibutadis: Die weibliche Kindheit der Zeichenkunst,” Kritische Berichte 24, no. 4 (1996): 7–20. 26. Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2011), 126ff. 27. See Andrea de Santis, “Götterbilder und Theorie des Bildes in der Antike,” in Handbuch der Bildtheologie, vol. 1, Bild-­Konflikte, ed. Reinhard Hoeps (Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2007), 60. 28. Victor  I. Stoichita evaluates Plato’s famous parable as a sadistic scene ­because the binding of the prisoners provides the precondition for their ignorance. Stoichița, A Short History of the Shadow, trans. Anne-­Marie Glasheen (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 21.

292  Notes to pages 87–91

29. Jacques Aumont, “ ‘Verklärte Nacht’: Der Himmel, der Schatten und der Film,” Zeitschrift für Medien-­und Kulturforschung 1, no. 1 (2010): 13, 15. 30. See Vera Dünkel, “Röntgenblick und Schattenbild: Zur Spezifik der frühen Röntgenbilder und ihren Deutungen um 1900,” in Das technische Bild: Kompendium für eine Stilgeschichte wissenschaftlicher Bilder, ed. Horst Bredekamp, Birgit Schneider, and Vera Dünkel (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008), 136–47. 31. Herbert Molderings, “Schattentheater der Technik,” Frank­furter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 25, 2005. Philippe Dubois considers photography to be a “theoretical dispositiv” whose indexical method is based on the dispositive of painting— that is, on the idea of its birth from a nonrememberable origin. Dubois, L’Acte photographique et autre éssais (Paris: Nathan, 1990), 23. 32. William Henry Fox Talbot, “Commentary to Plate XIII, ‘Queens College, Oxford, ­England,’ ” in The Pencil of Nature (New York, 1844). 33. Thirty years ­after Rosalind Krauss’s famous essay “Notes on the Index” in the journal October, a special issue of the journal differences undertook a “reexamination” of the concept of the index in the face of digital techniques that deprive images of their referential ground, with a par­tic­u­lar focus on the idea of “a trace of the real.” “Indexicality: Trace and Sign,” ed. Mary Ann Doane, special issue, differences 18, no. 1 (2007). 34. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 80–81. 35. Walter Benjamin, “­Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 515–16. 36. Christopher  S. Wood, “Theories of Reference,” Art Bulletin 78, no.  1 (1996): 22–25. 37. Belting, Anthropology of Images, 147. 38. See the article “Spur” in Bernd Stiegler, Bilder der Photographie: Ein ­Album photographischer Metaphern (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 2006), 217–19. 39. Beat Wyss, “Das indexikalische Bild; Hors-­ texte,” Fotogeschichte 76 (2000): 11. 40. Leibniz, Drôle de Pensée, quoted in Horst Bredekamp, Die Fenster der Monade: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ Theater der Natur und Kunst (Berlin: Akademie, 2004), 65. 41. See Georges Didi-­Huberman, Phasmes, trans. Christoph Hollender (Cologne, Germany: DuMont, 2001), 36. 42. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 55ff. 43. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Proj­ect, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 447 (translation modified).

Notes to pages 91–96  293

44. Georges Didi-­Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photo­graphs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane  B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), ­table of contents. 45. See Sigrid Weigel, “Tränen im Gesicht: Zur Ikonologie der Tränen in einer vergleichenden Kulturgeschichte von Trauergebärden,” in Gesichter: Kulturgeschichtliche Szenen aus der Arbeit am Bildnis des Menschen, ed. Sigrid Weigel (Munich: Fink, 2013), 103–26. 46. Steffen Bogen, “Schattenriss und Sonnenuhr: Überlegungen zu einer kunsthistorischen Diagrammatik,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 68 (2005): 157–58. 47. Steffen Bogen and Felix Thürlimann, “Jenseits der Opposition von Text und Bild: Überlegungen zu einer Theorie des Diagramms und des Diagrammatischen,” in Die Bildwelt der Diagramme Joachims von Fiore: Zur Medialität religiös-­ politischer Programme im Mittelalter, ed. Alexander Patschovsky (Ostfildern, Germany: Thorbecke, 2003), 2. 48. Michael Hagner, “Bilder der Kybernetik: Diagramme und Anthropologie, Schaltung und Nervensystem,” in Konstruierte Sichtbarkeiten: Wissenschafts-­und Technikbilder seit der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Martina Hessler (Munich: W. Fink, 2006), 385. 49. Hans-­Jörg Rheinberger, “Sichtbar machen: Visualisierung in den Naturwissenschaften,” in Bildtheorien: Anthropologische und kulturelle Grundlagen des Visualistic Turn, ed. Klaus Sachs-­Hombach (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 2009), 127–45. 50. Gottfried Boehm, “Die Wiederkehr der Bilder,” in Was ist ein Bild?, ed. Gottfried Boehm (Munich: W. Fink, 2006), 29ff. 51. Claus Pias, “Das digitale Bild gibt es nicht: Über das (Nicht-)Wissen der Bilder und die informatische Illusion,” Zeitenblicke 2, no.  1 (2003): http://­w ww​ .­zeitenblicke. historicum​.­net​/­2003​/­01​/­pias​/­index​.­html, para. 50. 52. Sigrid Weigel, “Der konventionelle Code als buckliger Zwerg im Dienste der Emotion Recognition: Überlegungen zu einer Urgeschichte der digitalen Kultur,” Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie 6, no. 1 (2020): 47–80. 53. Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You),” New Inquiry, December 8, 2016, https://­thenewinquiry​.­com​/­invisible​-­images​-­your​-­pictures​ -­are​-­looking​-­at​-­you​/­. 4 . E F F I G I Ē S : D O U B L E , R E P R E­S E N­TA­T I O N , A N D T H E S U P P L E M E N TA R Y E C O N O M Y O F T H E L I K E N E S S ( E B E N B I L D )

1. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 2 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991), s.v. “Bild.” 2. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Po­liti­cal Theology (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1997). 294  Notes to pages 96–102

3. Kristin Marek et  al., eds., Bild und Körper im Mittelalter, 2nd  ed. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2008). 4. Wolfgang Brückner, Bildnis und Brauch: Studien zur Bildfunktion der Effigies (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1966); Samuel Y. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Re­nais­sance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Matthias Lentz, Konflikt, Ehre, Ordnung: Untersuchungen zu den Schmähbriefen und Schandbildern des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Hannover, Germany: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2004). 5. See Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, vol. 17 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 217–52. 6. Freedberg, Power of Images; Georges Didi-­Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1992); W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Horst Bredekamp, Image Acts: A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency, trans. Elizabeth Clegg (Boston: De Gruyter, 2018). 7. According to Bredekamp, “the pictorial forms, along with context, determine ­whether an artwork has a representative or magical function.” Horst Bredekamp, Repräsentation und Bildmagie der Re­nais­sance als Formproblem (Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 1995), 66. 8. For example, Bernd Roeck, “Macht und Ohnmacht der Bilder: Die historische Perspektive,” in Macht und Ohnmacht der Bilder: Reformatorischer Bildersturm im Kontext der europäischen Geschichte, ed. Peter Blickle et  al. (Munich: Oldenbour, 2002), 33–64. 9. Brückner, Bildnis und Brauch, 223. 10. Hans Belting, “Aus dem Schatten des Todes: Bild und Körper in den Anfängen,” in Der Tod in den Weltkulturen und Weltreligionen, ed. Constantin von Barloewen (Frankfurt, Germany: Insel Verlag, 1996), 94. 11. “Painting contains a divine force which not only makes absent men pre­ sent, . . . ​but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive.” Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), 63. 12. Gottfried Boehm, “Repräsentation—­Präsentation—­Präsenz: Auf den Spuren des homo pictor,” in Homo Pictor, ed. Gottfried Boehm (Munich: De Gruyter, 2001), 3–13. 13. Jacques Derrida, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 14. James Ker, “Roman Repraesentatio,” American Journal of Philology 128, no. 3 (2007): 341–42, 347. Notes to pages 102–4  295

15. He refers to the 1727 edition of the Dictionnaire universel, which first appeared in 1690. 16. Carlo Ginzburg, “Représentation: Le mot, l’idée, la chose,” Annales 46, no. 6 (1991): 1,219–20. Since the published En­glish translation differs remarkably from the original, references h ­ ere are to the French edition. 17. Émile Benveniste, “Le sens du mot κολοσσός et les noms grecs de la statue,” Revue de philologie 3, no. 6 (1932): 118–35. 18. Martin Schulz, “Körper sehen—­ Körper haben? Fragen der bildlichen Repräsentation: Eine Einleitung,” in Quel corps?: Eine Frage der Repräsentation, ed. Hans Belting, Dietmar Kamper, and Martin Schulz (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002), 1–25. 19. Thomas Macho, “Steinerne Gäste: Vom Totenkult zum Theater,” in Quel corps?, 53–65. 20. Richard T. Neer, “Jean-­Pierre Vernant and the History of the Image,” Arethusa 43, no. 2 (2010): 183–84. 21. Jean-­Pierre Vernant, “The Repre­sen­ta­tion of the Invisible and the Psychological Category of the Double: The Kolossos,” in Myth and Thought among the Greeks, trans. Janet Lloyd (London: Routledge, 1983), 306. 22. Vernant, “Repre­sen­ta­tion of the Invisible,” 306. 23. Vernant, 305. 24. Vernant, 315 (translation modified). 25. Such foreignness is expressed in ethnographic descriptions when, from the viewpoint of a seemingly “enlightened” rhe­toric, the body-­like forms of memorial statues are conceived of as the “pretense of the physical presence of the dead.” For example, in Felix Speiser, Ethnographische Materialien aus den neuen Hebriden und den Banks-­Inseln (Berlin: Kraus, 1923), 390 (emphasis added). 26. Harriet I. Flower, Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 27. Polybius, The Histories, vol. 3, Books 5–8, trans. W. R. Paton, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), book 6, para. 53. 28. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Socie­ ties, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000). 29. Polybius, Histories, book 6, para. 53. 30. Goetz Lahusen, “Das römische Bildnisrecht,” Labeo: Rassegna di Diretto Romano 31 (1985): 321. 31. Brückner, Bildnis und Brauch, 245. 32. Quoted in Brückner, 306. 33. Adolf Reinle, Das stellvertretende Bildnis: Plastiken und Gemälde von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert (Zu­rich: Artemis, 1984). 34. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, 71ff. 35. Edgerton, 106ff. 296  Notes to pages 105–12

36. Brückner, Bildnis und Brauch, 218–19. 37. Lentz, Konflikt, Ehre, Ordnung, 35–68. 38. Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Vio­lence in the Late ­Middle Ages, trans. Pamela Selwyn (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 70. 39. Groebner, Defaced, 48. 40. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 315. 41. Simon Price, “From Noble Funerals to Divine Cult: The Consecration of the Roman Emperors,” in Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Socie­ties, ed. David Cannadine and Simon Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 56–105; and Flower, Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture. 42. See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Po­liti­cal Theology (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1997). For royal burials in France, see Ralph E. Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Re­nais­sance France (Geneva: E. Droz, 1960); and the discussion of historical research on this topic in Ginzburg, “Représentation.” 43. The controversial question of w ­ hether the En­glish and French royal burials derive from the Roman cult of images is less relevant in the context of image theory. 44. One of the few preserved effigiēs is the bust made of wood and plaster for the funeral of Henry VII in 1509. See Carol Galvin and Phillip Lindley, “Pietro Torrigiano’s Portrait Bust of King Henry VII,” Burlington Magazine 130 (1988): 892– 902; see also Brückner, Bildnis und Brauch, 86ff. 45. Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 436. 46. Kantorowicz, 426; and Giesey, Royal Funeral Ceremony in Re­nais­sance France, 10ff. 47. Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 420. 48. See Anthony Harvey and Richard Mortimer, The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 1994). 49. Ginzburg, “Répre­sen­ta­tion,” 1,222. 50. Dio, Roman History, vol. 75, 5.5, quoted in Ker, “Roman Repraesentatio,” 359. 51. Price, “From Noble Funerals to Divine Cult,” 97. 52. Ker, “Roman Repraesentatio,” 361. 53. Lahusen, “Das Römische Bildnisrecht,” 322. See also Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Über die Ahnenbilder der alten Römer,” in Entwürfe und unvollendete Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker, vol. 15 of Sämtliche Schriften (Leipzig: 1900), 82. 54. Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 421 (emphasis added). 55. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Vio­lence,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913– 1926, ed. Michael Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 242. Notes to pages 112–17  297

5 . D E FA M AT O R Y I M A G E S : D I S F I G U R AT I O N I N P H Y S I O G N O M Y A N D C A R I C AT U R E ’ S T W O B O D I E S

1. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), 77–78. 2. Werner Hofmann, Caricature from Leonardo to Picasso (New York: Crown Publishers, 1957), 53. 3. Gerhard Langemeyer et al., eds., Bild als Waffe: Mittel und Motive der Karikatur in fünf Jahrhunderten (Munich: Prestel-­Verlag, 1984). 4. See the research by Hansjörg Biener on po­liti­cal caricature and religion, which includes a quantitative content analy­sis: Biener, “Politische Karikaturen und Religion,” in Handbuch der Religionen, ed. Michael Klöcker and Udo Two­ ruschka, vol. 14 (Munich: Westarp Science Fachverlage, 2006). 5. For example, in Zbyněk A. Zeman, Das dritte Reich in der Karikatur (Munich: Heyne, 1984), 9. 6. Caracci, quoted in Zeman, Das dritte Reich in der Karikatur, 9. 7. The twelve cartoons w ­ ere published on September  9, 2005, in the Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-­Posten and reprinted on October  10  in the Egyptian newspaper Al Fajr. 8. Headline of an article by Christian Geyer in Frank­furter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 2, 2006. 9. As said by José Manuel Barroso, former president of the Eu­ro­pean Commission, in a debate in the Eu­ro­pean Parliament on February 15, 2006. See the article by Günter Rolff, “Klare Worte aus Straßburg: Der Karikaturenstreit aus EU-­Sicht,” Das Parlament, February 20, 2006. 10. The Austrian cartoonist Gerhard Haderer was accused of blasphemy ­because of this publication; church circles in Austria demanded a juridical intervention; and in Greece, a­ fter the confiscation of the book by the Orthodox Church, he was sentenced to six months imprisonment for blasphemy, then acquitted on appeal. The Vatican regularly issues complaints and demands bans on con­temporary artists and cartoonists for blasphemy. Such prosecutions of blasphemy, which have a long tradition in Eu­ro­pean countries, continue to the pre­s­ ent day. Ursula Baatz, for example, reminds us that, a­ fter the First World War, George Grosz was on trial for blasphemy ­because of his depiction of a crucified Christ with a gas mask. Baatz, “Religion ist nicht Privatsache,” in Bilderstreit 2006: Pressefreiheit? Blasphemie? Globale Politik?, ed. Ursula Baatz (Vienna: Picus, 2007), 17. 11. For example, through the demonstrative wearing of T-­shirts with the Muhammad cartoons, as occurred in a tele­v i­sion interview with the then-­reform minister of Italy, Lega Nord politician Roberto Calderoli. Calderoli resigned as a result but was nevertheless subsequently appointed to Berlusconi’s cabinet. 298  Notes to pages 118–21

12. United Nations H ­ uman Rights Committee, 102nd  session, “International Covenant on Civil and Po­liti­cal Rights,” General Comment No. 34, Article 19: “Freedom of Opinion and Expression,” CCPR/C/GC/34, September 12, 2011, p. 12, para. 48. 13. United Nations General Assembly, 21st session, “International Covenant on Civil and Po­liti­cal Rights,” December 16, 1966. 14. Concerning ­these prejuridical cultural conventions, see the concept of Grundordnung (“basic order”) developed in Zaal Andronikashvili and Sigrid Weigel, eds., Grundordnungen: Geographie, Religion und Gesetz (Berlin: Kadmos, 2013). 15. See part two, on portrait-­caricatures, in Langemeyer et al., Bild als Waffe, 91–201, 125. 16. On the concept of visual argumentation, see Horst Bredekamp and Pablo Schneider, eds., Visuelle Argumentationen: Die Mysterien der Repräsentation und die Berechenbarkeit der Welt (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006). 17. Langemeyer et al., Bild als Waffe, 95. 18. Ernst H. Gombrich, “The Cartoonist’s Armoury,” in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London: Phaidon Press, 1994), 141. 19. Heinrich Heine, Lutetia, trans. Charles Godfrey Leland, vol. 8 of The Works of Heinrich Heine (London: W. Heinemann, 1893), 156. 20. Ernst Kris, “The Psy­chol­ogy of Caricature,” in Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York: International Universities Press, 1952), 180. This text was first published as “Zur Psychologie der Karikatur” in Imago 20, no. 4 (1934), with the En­glish version first appearing in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis 17 (1936). Page numbers refer to the 1952 edition. On the historical and biographical context of Kris’s work on caricature, see Steffen Krüger, Das Unbehagen in der Karikatur: Kunst, Propaganda und persuasive Kommunikation im Theoriewerk Ernst Kris’ (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011). Kris and his disciple Gombrich collaborated during the 1930s on a proj­ect that analyzed caricature using a psychological approach to image studies. Ernst Kris and Ernst  H. Gombrich, “The Princi­ples of Caricature,” British Journal of Medical Psy­chol­ogy 17, no. 3–4 (1938): 319–42; and Ernst H. Gombrich and Ernst Kris, Caricature (Harmonds­worth, U.K.: Penguin, 1940). For more on the collaborative caricature proj­ect of Kris and Gombrich, see Louis Rose, Psy­chol­ogy, Art, and Antifascism: Ernst Kris, E. H. Gombrich, and the Politics of Caricature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016). 21. Kris, “Psy­chol­ogy of Caricature,” 183. 22. “Image act” refers to an action by means of an image, in contrast to the idea of the agency of an image. For the latter, see Horst Bredekamp, Image Acts: A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency, trans. Elizabeth Clegg (Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), 52–53. 23. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Das Symbol,” in Altes und Neues (Stuttgart, Germany: A. Bonz, 1889), 299, 296, 301. 24. Kris, “Psy­chol­ogy of Caricature,” 184. Notes to pages 121–34  299

25. Gerd Unverfehrt, “Karikatur—­Zur Geschichte eines Begriffs,” in Bild als Waffe, 348. 26. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, vol. 8 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1960), 200. 27. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 201. 28. Freud, 201. 29. Freud, 226–27. 30. Kris, “Psy­chol­ogy of Caricature,” 176. 31. Kris, 178. 32. Georg Simmel, “Über die Karikatur,” in Aufsätze und Abhandlungen, 1909– 1918, vol. 13 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 2000), 244. 33. Kris, “Psy­chol­ogy of Caricature,” 176. 34. Matthias Lentz, Konflikt, Ehre, Ordnung: Untersuchungen zu den Schmähbriefen und Schandbildern des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Hannover, Germany: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2004), 28ff. 35. Lentz, Konflikt, Ehre, Ordnung, 161. 36. Wolfgang Brückner, Bildnis und Brauch: Studien zur Bildfunktion der Effigies (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1966). 37. Lentz, Konflikt, Ehre, Ordnung, 161. 38. See Freud’s third chapter, on the dream as the fulfilment of a wish, in The Interpretation of Dreams (First Part), vol. 4 of Standard Edition (1953), 122ff. 39. Samuel Y. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Re­nais­sance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); and Brückner, Bildnis und Brauch. 40. Lentz, Konflikt, Ehre, Ordnung, 161. 41. Lentz, 161. 42. Brückner, Bildnis und Brauch, 222. 43. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1989). 44. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, 114ff. 45. Examples of illustrations can be found in Karl Simon, ed., Deutsche Flugschriften zur Reformation (1520–1525) (Stuttgart, Germany: Philipp Reclam, 1980); Gerhard Bott, Gerhard Ebeling, and Bernd Moeller, eds., Martin Luther: Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten (Frankfurt, Germany: Insel Verlag, 1983); and Deutsche Einblattholzschnitte von 1500 bis 1700 (Berlin: Directmedia Publishing, 2003), CD-­ROM. 46. Aby Warburg, “Pagan-­Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the Eu­ro­pean Re­nais­sance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 597–698. 300  Notes to pages 134–45

47. Sigrid Weigel, Flugschriftenliteratur 1848 in Berlin: Geschichte und Öffentlichkeit einer volkstümlichen Gattung (Stuttgart, Germany: Metzler, 1979). 48. Warburg, “Pagan-­A ntique Prophecy,” 635 (translation modified). 49. See Hans Belting, Das echte Bild: Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen (Munich: Beck, 2005), 201–3, fig. 77. 50. Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Der Leib des Papstes: Eine Theologie der Hinfälligkeit (Munich: Beck, 1997). 51. Gombrich, “Cartoonist’s Armoury,” 134. 52. According to the biography by his son Domenico Bernini (1713), quoted in Unverfehrt, “Karikatur,” 347. 53. Gombrich, “Cartoonist’s Armoury,” 135. 54. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 2 (Paris: 1751), s.v. “Caricature,” 684. 55. Quoted in Langemeyer et al., Bild als Waffe, 92. 56. See Sigrid Weigel, Body-­and Image-­Space: Re-­reading Walter Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 1996), xv–­x vii, 125–27, 154–57. 57. Quoted in Langemeyer et al., Bild als Waffe, 92. 58. See, for example, Frank Zöllner, Leonardo da Vinci: 1452–1519; Künstler und Wissenschaftler (Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2010), 72, illustration 122. 59. Ernst Gombrich, “Leonardo Da Vinci’s Method of Analy­sis and Permutation: The Grotesque Heads,” in The Heritage of Apelles: Studies in the Art of the Re­nais­sance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976), 57–79. Fabiana Cazzola-­ Senkpiel interprets da Vinci’s drawings as experiments on pathognomy in “Formen pathognomischen Experimentierens in Leonardo da Vincis Zeichnungen,” in Ars, visus, affectus: Visuelle Kulturen des Affektiven in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Anna Pawlak (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 203–14. 60. On ancient graffiti, see Vincent Hunink, ed., Glücklich ist dieser Ort! 1000 Graffiti aus Pompeji (Stuttgart, Germany: Reclam, 2011). 61. Charles Baudelaire, “The Essence of Laughter,” in Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 145. 62. Werner Hofmann, Die Karikatur von Leonardo bis Picasso (Hamburg, Germany: Philo & Philo Fine Arts, 2007), 56, 55, 212. 63. Gombrich, “Cartoonist’s Armoury,” 135. 64. Rodolphe Töpffer, Essay zur Physiognomie, trans. Wolfgang Drost and Dorothea Drost (Siegen, Germany: Machwerk-­Verlag, 1982), 9. 65. Töpffer, Essay zur Physiognomie, 11. 66. Töpffer, 7. 67. Heinrich Heine, “Die deutsche Literatur von Wolfgang Menzel,” in Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb, vol. 1 (Munich: Hanser, 1968), 448. Notes to pages 146–62  301

68. Heinrich Heine, French Affairs: Letters from Paris, trans. Charles Godfrey Leland, vol. 7 of Works of Heinrich Heine, 42–43. 69. Gombrich, “Cartoonist’s Armoury,” 135. 70. Walter Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael William Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 284. 71. Klaus Herding, “Die Rothschilds in der Karikatur,” in Jüdische Figuren in Film und Karikatur: Die Rothschilds und Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, ed. Cilly Kugelmann and Fritz Backhaus (Frankfurt, Germany: Jüdisches Museum, 1996), 16. 72. See the chapter “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” in Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019). 73. Heinrich Heine, The Salon: Letters on Art, M ­ usic, Popu­lar Life and Politics, trans. Charles Godfrey Leland, vol. 4 of Works of Heinrich Heine, 108–9 (translation modified). 74. Heine, French Affairs, 142 (translation modified). 75. Heine, 143 (translation modified). 76. Heinrich Heine, Scintillations from the Prose Works of Heinrich Heine, trans. Simon Adler Stern (New York: Holt & Williams, 1873), 124–25 (translation modified); see also the original German: Heine, “Die deutsche Literatur,” 448. 77. On Heine’s concept of wit in relation to Freud, see chapter seven in Klaus Briegleb, Bei den Wassern Babels: Heinrich Heine, jüdischer Schriftsteller in der Moderne (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997); on the correspondence between Heine und Freud, see Sigrid Weigel, ed., Heine und Freud: Die Enden der Literatur und die Anfänge der Kulturwissenschaft (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2010). 6 . C U LT I M A G E S : I C O N O C L A S T I C C O N T R O V E R S Y, T H E D E S I R E F O R I M A G E S , A N D T H E D I A L E C T I C O F S E C U L A R I Z AT I O N

1. Sigrid Weigel, “Schauplätze, Figuren, Umformungen: Zu Kontinuitäten und Unterscheidungen von Märtyrerkulturen,” in Märtyrer-­Porträts: Von Opfertod, Blutzeugen und heiligen Kriegern, ed. Sigrid Weigel (Paderborn, Germany: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007), 19ff. 2. W. J. T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 55. 3. W. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Pre­sent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 4. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997). 5. See W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Abu Ghraib Archive,” in Cloning Terror, 112–27. 302  Notes to pages 164–72

6. Clément Chéroux, Diplopie: Bildpolitik des 11. September (Konstanz, Germany: Konstanz University Press, 2011). For an approach to analyzing image-­to-­ image references that is analogous to the concept of intertextuality, see Guido Isekenmeier, ed., Interpiktorialität: Theorie und Geschichte der Bild-­Bild-­Bezüge (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, 2013). 7. Chéroux, Diplopie, 83. 8. Alex Stock, Poetische Dogmatik, Gotteslehre Band 3: Bilder (Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2007), 23. 9. And this phenomenon of a pictorial tradition in Judaism goes beyond the existence of illustrated editions of the Haggadah; see the instructive study on Jewish figural art by Katrin Kogman-­Appel, “Kulturaustausch und jüdische Kunst in der Spätantike und im Mittelalter,” Chilufim: Zeitschrift für jüdische Kulturgeschichte 4 (2008): 79–118. 10. See Karel van der Toorn, ed., The Image and the Book: Iconic Cults, Aniconism, and the Rise of Book Religion in Israel and the Ancient Near East (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 1997). 11. Christoph Dohmen, Das Bilderverbot: Seine Entstehung und seine Entwicklung im Alten Testament, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1987). 12. Karel van der Toorn, “The Iconic Book: Analogies between the Babylonian Cult of Images and the Veneration of the Torah,” in Image and the Book, 240. 13. Toorn, “Iconic Book,” 243. 14. Alex Stock, “Kultbild—­Bilderverbot,” in Szenen des Heiligen: Vortragsreihe in der Hamburger Kunsthalle, ed. Cai Werntgen (Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2011), 62. 15. Silvia Naef, Bilder und Bilderverbot im Islam: Vom Koran bis zum Karikaturenstreit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2007). 16. Margaret S. Graves, Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 61. 17. Graves, Arts of Allusion, 17. 18. Graves, 73–130; and Christiane J. Gruber and Sune Haugbolle, eds., Visual Culture in the Modern M ­ iddle East: Rhe­toric of the Image (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 19. Gershom Scholem, “On Our Language: A Confession,” trans. Ora Wiskind, History and Memory 2, no. 2 (1990): 97–99. 20. Scholem, “On Our Language,” 97 (translation modified). 21. Scholem, 97–98 (translation modified). 22. Several examples from vari­ous fields and times can be found in Weigel, Märtyrer-­Porträts. 23. A common reading, which understands the text as interpreting the loss of aura in modernity through the lens of cultural pessimism or ideology critique, is discredited by Benjamin’s text itself. Benjamin attributes ambiguous effects to the Notes to pages 173–77  303

loss of aura: on the one hand, the withdrawal of forming tradition [Tradierbarkeit] and of witnessing [Zeugenschaft], on the other, the emancipation from cult and an enormous gain in the pos­si­ble scope of action (Spielraum). Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael William Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 101–33; see also a third version of the essay in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael William Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 251–83. The version that had been published as the “second version,” in volume 1 of Gesammelte Schriften was revealed to in fact be a third, shortened version of the essay, consisting of just fifteen paragraphs and the famous afterword, which refers to the instrumentalization of film for the “cult of the Führer.” This became evident through the discovery of the de facto second version, written at the end of 1935 and the beginning of 1936 and consisting of nineteen paragraphs, like the first version, though considerably extended. This second version is published in volume 7 of Gesammelte Schriften and is considered to be the version that Benjamin wanted to publish. See the commentary in Selected Writings, 3:122. 24. Benjamin, “Work of Art: Second Version,” 105. 25. Benjamin, 106. 26. Benjamin follows the account of Herman Grimm, Das Leben Raphaels (Berlin: 1886). Raphael’s Sistine Madonna was commissioned by the curia on the occasion of the public viewing of Pope Julius II’s body, and only ­a fter t­ hese ceremonies was it displayed at the high altar of the Church of Blackfriars in Piacenza. Benjamin mistakenly names Pope Sixtus II, shown in the picture of the patron saint of the f­ amily Della Rovere, from which Pope Julius II descended. Benjamin, “Work of Art: Third Version,” 274n15. 27. Benjamin, “Work of Art: Second Version,” 106. 28. Benjamin, 105. 29. Benjamin, 106. 30. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 204. 31. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Proj­ect, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 447. 32. Klaus Krüger, Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren: Ästhetische Illusion in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit in Italien (Munich: W. Fink, 2001), 23ff. This book discusses examples of veiled paintings and paintings depicting the mantling of paintings—­for example, the scene of the so-­called picture miracle from the Livre des merveilles (1411–1412). Krüger, Das Bild als Schleier, 316, illustration 11. 304  Notes to pages 177–79

33. As according to the original title of Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990); translated by Edmund Jephcott as Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 34. Georges Didi-­Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). 35. Gottfried Boehm, ed., Was ist ein Bild? (Munich: W. Fink, 2006); and W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Repre­sen­ta­tion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 36. Benjamin, “Work of Art: Second Version,” 107. 37. Regarding Benjamin’s approach to secularization, see Weigel, Walter Benjamin, 3–29. 38. Benjamin, “Work of Art: Third Version,” 272. 39. Benjamin, “Work of Art: Second Version,” 105 (translation modified). 40. Benjamin, 106. 41. Benjamin, 108. 42. For a more detailed analyses of Eingedenken, see Stefano Marchesoni, Walter Benjamins Konzept des Eingedenkens: Über Genese und Semantik einer Denk­ figur (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2017). 43. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 197. 44. Benjamin, “Work of Art: Third Version,” 270. 45. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Vio­lence,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913– 1926, ed. Michael Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 242ff. On the relevance of Benjamin’s “Critique of Vio­ lence” to the pre­sent day, see Weigel, Walter Benjamin, chap. 3. 46. Charles Sanders Peirce, “What Is a Sign?,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, 1893–1913, ed. Nathan Houser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 5. 47. Stock, “Kultbild—­Bilderverbot,” 74–75. 48. Hans Belting, Ivan Foletti, and Martin F. Lešák, “The Movement and the Experience of ‘Iconic Presence’: An Introduction,” Convivium 6, no. 1 (2019): 12. 49. Bissera V. Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in By­ zantium (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010); and Bissera V. Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 4 (2006): 631–55. 50. According to Stock, “Kultbild—­Bilderverbot,” 68; and Peter Brown, “A  Dark-­Age Crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclastic Controversy,” En­glish Historical Review 88, no. 346 (1973): 5. 51. Stock, Poetische Dogmatik, 20. 52. Helmut Fischer, Die Ikone: Ursprung—­Sinn—­Gestalt (Freiburg, Germany: Herder, 1995), 106, quoted in Peter J. Bräunlein, “Ikonische Repräsentation von Notes to pages 179–84  305

Religion,” in Europäische Religionsgeschichte: Ein mehrfacher Pluralismus, ed. Hans  G. Kippenberg (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), 784. 53. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 10. 54. Stock, “Kultbild—­Bilderverbot,” 74ff. 55. Thomas Lentes, “Gebetbuch und Gebärde: Religiöses Ausdrucksverhalten in Gebetbüchern aus dem Dominikanerinnen-­K loster St.  Nikolaus in Undis zu Straßburg (1350–1550)” (PhD diss., University of Münster, 1996), 348. See also David Ganz and Thomas Lentes, eds., Ästhetik des Unsichtbaren: Bildtheorie und Bildgebrauch in der Vormoderne (Berlin: Reimer, 2004); and Bräunlein, “Ikonische Repräsentation von Religion,” 784. 56. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 26. 57. Toorn, “Iconic Book,” 235. ­Here he also describes the ritual that gave rise to the Acheiropoieton (an image not made by ­human hands) in Babylonian cult practice: the symbolic act of a ritual in which the craftsmen who made the statues undertook to purify their products of traces of their h ­ uman origin. This aimed to erase all traces of a mundane origin and to instead characterize the images as heaven’s creations. Toorn, 239. 58. Andrea de Santis, “Götterbilder und Theorie des Bildes in der Antike,” in Handbuch der Bildtheologie, vol. 1, Bild-­Konflikte, ed. Reinhard Hoeps (Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2007), 56. 59. Santis, “Götterbilder und Theorie des Bildes in der Antike,” 57. 60. Stock, “Kultbild—­Bilderverbot,” 57–58. 61. B. Gladigow et al., “Bilderkult,” in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Tübingen, Germany: Brill, 1998), 1,563. 62. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Po­liti­cal Theology (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1997), 442. 63. See Gerhard Wolf, Colette Dufour Bozzo, and Anna Rosa Calderoni Masetti, eds., Mandylion: Intorno al Sacro Volto, da Bisanzio a Genova (Milan, Italy: Skira, 2004), esp. the contribution of Lidov and Peers, 145–74. 64. Carlo Ginzburg, “Représentation: Le mot, l’idée, la chose,” Annales 46, no. 6 (1991): 1230. 65. Dieter Blume, “Bilder am Ort der Eucharistie: Die vielen Rollen des ­A ltarretabels,” in Die Erfindung des Bildes: Frühe italienische Meister bis Botticelli, ed. Ortrud Westheider and Michael Philipp (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2011), 35. 66. See Michael Philipp, “Vom Kultbild zum Abbild der Wirklichkeit: Zur Entwicklung der italienischen Malerei, 1250–1500,” in Die Erfindung des Bildes: Frühe italienische Meister bis Botticelli, ed. Ortrud Westheider and Michael Philipp (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2011), 18.

306  Notes to pages 184–87

67. Philipp, “Vom Kultbild zum Abbild der Wirklichkeit,” 18. 68. Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in En­glish, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 412–43. 69. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “The Spirit of Chris­tian­ity and Its Fate,” in Early Theological Writings, trans. Thomas  M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 252. 70. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001), 408. 71. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 409 (translation modified). 72. Hegel, 408. 73. Hegel, 411. 74. Hegel, 411. Hegel quotes Psalm 16:10; Acts 2:27–31 (emphasis added) and 13:35; and Luke 24:5–6. 75. Silke Tammen, “Bild, Reliquie und Ornament: Das Reliquiar des ungenähten Rocks aus dem Schatz von San Franceso in Assisi und die vielschichtige Visualität spätmittelalterlicher Christusreliquiare,” in Movens Bild: Zwischen Evidenz und Affekt, ed. Christian Spies, Birgit Mersmann, and Gottfried Boehm (Paderborn, Germany: Fink, 2008), 234. 76. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 392. 77. Hegel, 412 (translation modified). 78. On the ambiguity of the concept of conversion, see Sigrid Weigel, Literatur als Voraussetzung der Kulturgeschichte: Schauplätze von Shakespeare bis Benjamin (Munich: Fink, 2004), chap. 4. 79. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 21. 80. Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the M ­ iddle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, trans. Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer (New Rochelle, N.Y.: A.D. Caratzas, 1990), 132. 81. Belting, Image and Its Public in the ­Middle Ages, 133. 82. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 23. 83. Stephan Mossmann, “Kritik der Tradition: Bildlichkeit und Vorbildlichkeit in den deutschen Predigten Marquards von Lindau und die Umdeutung der mater dolorosa,” in Die Predigt im Mittelalter, ed. René Wetzel and Fabrice Flückiger (Zürich: Chronos, 2010), 311. 84. Belting, Image and Its Public, 145. Translation modified according to Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum im Mittelalter: Form und Funktion früher Bildtafeln der Passion (Berlin: Mann, 1981), 221. 85. Philipp, “Vom Kultbild zum Abbild der Wirklichkeit,” 18. 86. Philipp, 13. 87. See Santis, “Götterbilder und Theorie des Bildes in der Antike,” 57.

Notes to pages 188–94  307

88. As referenced in the sixth book of Augustine’s Confessions. See Sigrid Weigel, “Exemplum and Sacrifice, Blood Testimony and Written Testimony: Lucretia and Perpetua as Transitional Figures in the Cultural History of Martyrdom,” in Perpetua’s Passions: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis, ed. Jan N. Bremmer and Marco Formisano (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 180–200. 89. Ivan Nagel, Gemälde und Drama: Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 2009), 12, 50, 12–13. 90. Nagel, Gemälde und Drama, 53. 91. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, vol. 2, Purgatorio, trans. John D. Sinclair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 133. 92. Nagel, Gemälde und Drama, 55. 93. Dante, Divine Comedy, 2:135. 94. Nagel, Gemälde und Drama, 54. 95. Aby Warburg, “Dürer and Italian Antiquity,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the Eu­ro­pean Re­nais­sance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 555 (translation modified). On the development of the concept of “pathos formula,” with a detour on the discussion of theater and intermedia in Warburg’s work, see Sigrid Weigel, “Pathosformel und Oper: Die Bedeutung des Musiktheaters für Aby Warburgs Konzept der Pathosformel,” KulturPoetik 6, no. 2 (2006): 234–53. 96. See Hans Belting, Giovanni Bellini, Pietà: Ikone und Bilderzählung in der venezianischen Malerei (Frankfurt, Germany: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985). 97. Daniel Arasse, “L’ange spectateur: La Madone Sixtine et Walter Benjamin,” in Les visions de Raphael (Paris: Liana Levi, 2003), 120. 98. Arasse, “L’ange spectateur,” 119. 99. Arasse, 120. 100. Arasse, 120–21. 101. Arasse, 130. 102. Louis Marin, “Présentation et représentation dans le discours classique: les combles et les marges de la représentation picturale,” Le Discours psychanalytique 5, no. 4 (1985), 4. 103. Arasse, “L’ange spectateur,” 132. 104. Arasse, 133. 105. Analogous to the concept of the implied reader, developed by Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 106. See Weigel, “Die Richtung der Bilder: Vom Links und Rechts im Bilde,” in Literatur als Voraussetzung der Kulturgeschichte, 196–232. 308  Notes to pages 194–200

7 . A N G E L S : I M A G E S O F M A K I N G -­A P P E A R A N C E B E T W E E N R E L I G I O N , A R T, A N D S C I E N C E

1. The picture was part of the exhibition Twin-­Images: X-­ray Photography of Sculptures (Zwillingsbilder: Röntgenfotografien von Skulpturen), which took place in the Berlin Museum of Medical History of the Charité in 2011, curated by Uta Kornmeier: https://­www​.­zfl​-­berlin​.­org​/­zfl​-­in​-­bild​-­und​-­ton​-­detail​/­items​/­zwillingsbilder​ -­roentgenfotografien​-­von​-­skulpturen​.­html. 2. See especially the discussion of communication by means of media by the phi­los­o­pher who, with the series of his Hermes books and his idiosyncratic contributions to the history of science, sees himself as the author of a single ­great angelology: Michel Serres, La légende des anges (Paris: Flammarion, 1993). 3. Massimo Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, trans. Miguel E. Vatter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); and Andrei Pleșu, On Angels: Exposition for a Post-­Modern World, trans. Alistair Ian Blyth (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2012). 4. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011). 5. Walter Benjamin, “Agesilaus Santander: Second Version,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 714–15 (translation modified). 6. Heinrich Heine, “Florentine Nights,” in The Prose Writings of Heinrich Heine, ed. Havelock Ellis (London: 1887), 226. 7. Glenn Peers, Subtle Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 19. 8. Peers, who approaches the cultural conditions of seeing and understanding from the perspective of epistemology, considers the angels to be a difficult case: transparent images of amorphous creatures for “especially treacherous rapids, which the Byzantines attempted to stop up.” Peers, Subtle Bodies, 11. 9. On the autobiographical context concerning the esoteric meanings of additional “secret” names boys receive at bar mitzvahs, see Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of Amer­i­ca, 1981). 10. Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 79. 11. The text is addressed to a beloved w ­ oman, who Benjamin saw as a s­ ister of Angelus Novus and a “female counterpart.” Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vol. 4, 1931–1934, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1998). Concerning the anonymous addressing of the painter Anne Marie Blaupot ten Cate from the Netherlands, see ­Will van Gerwen, “Walter Benjamin Notes to pages 202–6  309

auf Ibiza: Biographische Hintergründe zu ‘Agesilaus Santander,’ ” in Global Benjamin: Internationaler Walter-­ Benjamin-­ Kongress 1992, ed. Klaus Garber and Ludger Rehm (Munich: W. Fink, 1999), 92–112. The text can also be read as part of Benjamin’s messianic theory of happiness; see Sigrid Weigel, “Angelus Novus,” in Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, ed. Dan Diner, vol. 1 (Stuttgart, Germany: J. B. Metzler, 2011). 12. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 390. 13. Sigrid Weigel, “The Flash of Knowledge and the Temporality of Images: Walter Benjamin’s Image-­Based Epistemology and Its Preconditions in Visual Arts and Media History,” Critical Inquiry 41 (2015): 344–66. 14. On the role of Angelus Novus in Benjamin’s writings and its position as the “third” in the friendship of Scholem and Benjamin, see Sigrid Weigel, Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy, trans. Chadwick T. Smith (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013), chap. 9. 15. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 392. 16. See the section titled “Funerary Portraits and Icons” in Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 88ff. 17. Peers, Subtle Bodies, 18. 18. The lit­er­a­ture on angels oscillates between theology, philosophy, and popu­lar, sometimes esoteric, contributions. Concerning the multitude and variety of the world of angels, see, for example, Frits Lugt, “Man and Angel: I,” Gazette Des Beaux-­ Arts 25 (January 1944): 265–82; Frits Lugt, “Man and Angel: II,” Gazette Des Beaux-­Arts 25 (June  1944): 321–346; Konrad Hofmann, “Angel,” in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, ed. Josef Höfer, Karl Rahner, and Michael Buchberger, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Freiburg, Germany: Verlag Herder, 1957), column 863–75; Alfons Rosenberg, Engel und Dämonen: Gestaltwandel eines Urbildes, 3rd ed. (Munich: Prestel, 1992); and Richard Webster, Encyclopedia of Angels (Woodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn, 2009). 19. See the dialogue between Descartes and Frans Burman in 1648. René Descartes, Descartes’ Conversation with Burman, trans. John Cottingham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 19. 20. Peers, Subtle Bodies, 25. 21. Peers, 25. 22. Peers, 26. 23. See Sigrid Schade, Monika Wagner, and Sigrid Weigel, eds., Allegorien und Geschlechterdifferenz (Cologne, Germany: Böhlau, 1994). 24. On the angels’ role in the context of the Creation of the world through the distinction of dark and light, see Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2009), book 11, para. 9, 317–18. 310  Notes to pages 206–14

25. Quoted in Hofmann, “Angel,” column 869. 26. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Po­liti­cal Theology (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1997), 8. 27. Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 84. 28. Erik Peterson, The Angels and the Liturgy: The Status and Significance of the Holy Angels in Worship, trans. Ronald Walls (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1964). 29. Carl Schmitt, Po­liti­cal Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Po­liti­cal Theology, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2014). 30. Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 144–46. 31. Giorgio Agamben, Die Beamten des Himmels: Über Engel, trans. Andreas Hiepko (Frankfurt, Germany: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2007). 32. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Questions on God, ed. Brian Leftow and Brian Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 33. Joseph Bernhart in Thomas von Aquin, Summe der Theologie, vol. 1, Gott und Schöpfung, ed. Joseph Bernhart, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart, Germany: Kröner, 1985), 224. 34. Walter Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 694–98. 35. Jacques Rancière, The ­Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2019), 8 (translation modified). 36. Louis Marin, “Le corps-­de-­pouvoir et l’Incarnation à Port-­Royal et dans Pascal ou de la figurabilité de l’absolu politique,” Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles 3/4 (1987): 175–97. 37. Louis Marin, On Repre­sen­ta­tion, trans. Cathy Porter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 380. 38. Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of Eu­ro­pean Lit­er­a­ ture, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11–76. 39. Georges Didi-­Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance & Figuration, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 59. 40. Didi-­Huberman, Fra Angelico, 9 (translation modified). 41. Didi-­Huberman, 56. 42. Didi-­Huberman, 133. 43. Didi-­Huberman, 140. 44. Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Michael Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 199ff. 45. Daniel Arasse, “Gott im Detail: Über einige italienische Verkündigungsszenen,” in “Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail”: Mikrostrukturen des Wissens, Notes to pages 214–23  311

ed. Wolfgang Schäffner, Sigrid Weigel, and Thomas H. Macho (Munich: Fink, 2003), 77. 46. Louis Marin, “Énoncer une mystérieuse figure,” La Part de l’œil 3 (1987): 117–34. On Annuziatio-­paintings, see Louis Marin, “Annonciations toscanes,” in Opacité de la peinture: Essais sur la représentation au Quattrocento (Paris: Usher, 1989). 47. See Daniel Arasse, Le détail: Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1992). 48. Arasse, “Gott im Detail,” 81. 49. Arasse, 90. 50. Schäffner, Weigel, and Macho, “Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail.” 51. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood, (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 66. 52. Arasse, “Gott im Detail,” 89. Piero della Francesca, for whom painting is based on three fundamental concepts—­ namely, disegno, commensuratio, and colorare—­w rote a ­whole treatise just on the second one in 1480 (first published in 1899). Piero della Francesca, De prospectiva pingendi (Strassburg, Germany: 1899). 53. Arasse, “Gott im Detail,” 75. 54. First published in Kunstblatt des Morgenblattes (1825) and reprinted in a slightly modified version in Mnemosyne (1848). Carl Gustav Carus, “Von der Bedeutung der besondern Bildung des Auges auf manchen alten Gemälden,” in Mnemosyne (Pforzheim, Germany: 1848), 18–26. The page numbers in the following text refer to the latter version. 55. August Wilhelm Schlegel’s text Mariä Krönung (1817) refers to 15 sheets with reproductions of W. Ternite’s drawings of Fra Angelico’s painting. Schlegel, Mariä Krönung und die Wunder des heiligen Dominicus (Paris: 1817). 56. Carus “Von der Bedeutung,” 19. 57. Carus, 20. 58. Carus, 22ff. 59. Carus, 24. 60. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The ­Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 61. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) (translation modified), 138. 62. Carus, “Von der Bedeutung,” 24. 63. Carus, 25f. 64. Gustav Theodor Fechner, Vergleichende Anatomie der Engel, ed. Martin Bertleff (Vienna: Age d’homme, 1980), 9. Although t­ here exists an En­glish translation of this text, published in the Journal of the London Institute of ’Pataphysics in 2010, we prefer to use our own translations of the original German; the page numbers of the following text refer to the German edition. 312  Notes to pages 223–32

65. Fechner, Vergleichende Anatomie der Engel, 11. 66. Fechner, 22. 67. Fechner, 37. 68. Fechner, 39. 69. Fechner, 41. 70. Gustav Theodor Fechner, Zend-­Avesta oder Über die Dinge des Himmels und des Jenseits: Vom Standpunkt der Naturbetrachtung, vol. 1 (Leipzig: 1854), xxxi. 71. Fechner, Zend-­Avesta, 235. 72. Fechner, 245. 73. Fechner, 236. 74. Fechner, 236, 249. 75. Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, 4th ed., vol. 1 of Gesammelte Schriften (Stuttgart, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1959), 307. 76. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Proj­ect, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 343 (translation modified). 77. Hannah Arendt, Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben, 2nd ed. (Munich: R. ­Piper, 1981), 7. This formulation, which hints ­toward Kant’s famous statement on the sublime, differs from the En­glish version: “Men, who now, when they looked up from the earth ­toward the skies, could behold ­t here a ­t hing of their own making.” Hannah Arendt, The H ­ uman Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1. 78. See Paglen’s exhibition Code Names in the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands) and in the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), 2013. 79. Franz Boll, Sternglaube und Sterndeutung: Die Geschichte und das Wesen der Astrologie (Leipzig, Germany: B. G. Teubner, 1918), 64, 53. 80. Dieter Blume, “Sternbilder und Himmelswesen: Zum Bildgebrauch des Mittelalters,” Bildwelten des Wissens 5, no. 2 (2007): 73. This article, on early Chris­tian­ ity and the early M ­ iddle Ages, is a kind of historical addendum to Blume’s comprehensive history of astrological images: Blume, Regenten des Himmels: Astrologische Bilder in Mittelalter und Re­nais­sance (Berlin: Akademie, 2000). 81. The exhibition that Warburg had in mind was realized ­after his death in 1930. See Aby Warburg, Bildersammlung zur Geschichte von Sternglaube und Sternkunde im Hamburger Planetarium (Hamburg, Germany: Doelling und Galitz, 1993). 82. Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing, “Die Bildersammlung zur Geschichte von Sternglaube und Sternkunde,” in Warburg, Bildersammlung zur Geschichte von Sternglaube und Sternkunde, 175. 83. Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the Eu­ro­pean Re­nais­sance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 598. Notes to pages 232–37  313

84. Blume, “Sternbilder und Himmelswesen,” 74. 85. Blume, 74. 86. Blume, 74. 87. Blume, Regenten des Himmels, 24. 88. Blume, “Sternbilder und Himmelswesen,” 84. 89. Blume, Regenten des Himmels, 24. 90. David A. King, Astrolabes and Angels, Epigrams and Enigmas: From Regiomontanus’ Acrostic for Cardinal Bessarion to Piero Della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ (Stuttgart, Germany: Steiner, 2007). 91. On this perception of the sky as a concave arched field, see Ernst H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psy­chol­ogy of Pictorial Repre­sen­ ta­tion (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 170. 92. Simon Schaffer, “Sky, Heaven and the Seat of Power,” in Making ­Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 121. 93. On the imaginary faculty as cultural technique, discussed in re­spect to the history of cartography and the topographical paradigm, see Sigrid Weigel, “Text und Topographie der Stadt,” in Literatur als Voraussetzung der Kulturgeschichte: Schauplätze von Shakespeare bis Benjamin (Munich: Fink, 2004), 256ff. 94. See Schaffer, “Sky, Heaven and the Seat of Power.” 95. Hans Blumenberg, “Das Fernrohr und die Ohnmacht der Wahrheit,” in Sidereus nuncius: Nachricht von neuen Sternen, by Galileo Galilei, ed. Hans Blumenberg (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1980), 18. 96. A reverse constellation to Heinrich Heine’s discussion of the afterlife of ancient pagan gods in northern my­t hol­ogy ­a fter Christianization can be found in his text “The Gods in Exile.” On the influence of Heine on Aby Warburg, see Sigrid Weigel, “Warburg’s ‘Goddess in Exile’: The ‘Nymph’ Fragment between Letter and Taxonomy, Read with Heinrich Heine,” Critical Horizons 14, no. 3 (2013): 271–95. 97. Hans Blumenberg, “Kopernikus im Selbstverständnis der Neuzeit,” in Abhandlungen der Geistes-­und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse 5, Jahrgang 1964, vol. 5 (Mainz, Germany: Verlag der Akademie, 1964), 354 (emphasis partially added). See also Blumenberg, Die kopernikanische Wende (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1966); and Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, trans. Robert  M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987). 98. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert  M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 362. 99. Benjamin, in re­spect to Baroque altar paintings, in “Karl Kraus,” in Selected Writings, 2:443. 100. It is exactly this ambiguity of the baroque allegory that Benjamin reflects upon in Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019). 314  Notes to pages 237–45

101. Horst Bredekamp, Galilei der Künstler: Der Mond, die Sonne, die Hand (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007), 69. 102. Blumenberg, “Das Fernrohr,” 22. Blumenberg rejects the interpretation of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius as a “model for rigorous methods,” instead interpreting it as “a unique case of the transformation of excitement into description, namely a proclamation of the new visibility,” which Galileo valuated as a tool nobody wanted to miss. Blumenberg, 78. 103. Hans Blumenberg in Galileo, Sidereus Nuncius, 231. 104. Galileo Galilei, Due lezioni all’Accademia fiorentina circa la figura, sito e grandezza dell’Inferno di Dante, ed. Riccardo Pratesi (Livorno, Italy: Sillabe, 2011). En­glish translation available online: “Two Lectures to the Florentine Acad­emy on the Shape, Location and Size of Dante’s Inferno by Galileo Galilei, 1588,” trans. Mark A. Peterson, https://­w ww​.­mtholyoke​.­edu​/­courses​/­mpeterso​/­galileo​/­inferno​ .­html#manetti. 105. Benedictus de Spinoza, Theological-­Political Treatise, ed. Jonathan Israel, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 83. 106. Spinoza, Theological-­Political Treatise, 93. 107. Spinoza, 93. 108. Johann Jakob Bodmer, Critische Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie (Stuttgart, Germany: Metzler, 1966), 34. 109. Bodmer, Critische Abhandlung, 17ff. 110. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); the supplement is at the center of the entire second part on Rousseau. 111. Bodmer, Critische Abhandlung, 29. 112. This is also evident from the footnotes of Bodmer’s translation of John Milton, Johann Miltons Episches Gedichte von dem Verlohrnen Paradiese, trans. Johann Jakob Bodmer (Stuttgart, Germany: Metzler, 1965). 113. Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” 697. 114. Bodmer, Critische Abhandlung, 9–10. 115. On the miracle in science, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Won­ ders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 2001). 116. Sigmund Exner, Die Physiologie des Fliegens und Schwebens in den bildenden Künsten (Vienna: 1882), 9. This text was republished in Exner, Über das Schweben der Raubvögel: Mit einem Einführungsvortrag über die Physiologie des Fliegens und Schwebens in den bildenden Künsten (Düsseldorf, Germany: VDM-­Verlag Müller, 2004). Page numbers refer to the e­ arlier version. 117. Exner, Die Physiologie des Fliegens, 10. 118. Exner, 16–17. 119. Exner, 18. Notes to pages 245–54  315

120. Exner, 25. 121. Together with a copy of Exner’s Entwurf zu einer physiologischen Erklärung der psychischen Erscheinungen, Theil 1 (Leipzig, 1894). On Warburg’s reading of Exner in the context of his engagement with methods from the natu­ral sciences, see Sigrid Weigel, “ ‘From Darwin via Filippino to Botticelli . . . ​a nd Back to the Nymph’: The Concept of Umfangsbestimmung, the Role of Energetics, and the Darwin-­Trace in Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaft,” in Warburg 150: Work–­Legacy–­ Promise, ed. David Freedberg and Claudia Wedepohl (Chicago: De Gruyter, 2022). 122. Aby Warburg, “Die Einwirkung der Sphaera barbarica auf die kosmischen Orientierungsversuche des Abendlandes,” in “Per Monstra ad Sphaeram”: Sternglaube und Bilddeutung; Vortrag in Gedenken an Franz Boll und andere Schriften, 1923 bis 1925, ed. Davide Stimilli and Claudia Wedepohl (Munich: Dölling und Galitz, 2008), 107. 123. Aby Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” in Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 97. 124. Aby Warburg, “Schicksalsmächte im Spiegel antikisierender Symbolik,” in “Per Monstra ad Sphaeram,” 48. 125. Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink, vol. 2.1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000), 86–87. 126. Aby Warburg, “Die Planetenbilder auf der Wanderung von Süd nach Nord und ihre Rückkehr nach Italien,” in Werke in einem Band, ed. Martin Treml, Sigrid Weigel, and Perdita Ladwig (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 356. 127. Aby Warburg, “Pagan-­Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther,” in Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 621. 128. Aby Warburg, “Manet’s Le Déjeuner Sur l’herbe: The Pre-­figurative Function of Elementary Pagan Divinities for the Evolution of the Modern Sentiment ­towards Nature,” trans. Dimitrios Latsis, Journal of Art Historiography 13 (December 1, 2015): 17 (translation modified). 129. See Monika Wagner, “Kunstgeschichte in Schwarz-­Weiß: Visuelle Argumente bei Panofsky und Warburg,” in Schwarz-­Weiß als Evidenz: “With Black and White You Can Keep More of a Distance,” ed. Monika Wagner and Helmut Lethen (Frankfurt, Germany: Campus Verlag, 2015), 122–44. 130. Aby Warburg, “Mnemosyne Einleitung,” in Werke in einem Band, 630. 131. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Kunst und Altertum [Art and Antiquity] I,” in Goethe on Art, trans. John Gage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 145 (translation modified). 132. On the Boisserée collection, see Petra Maisak, Goethe und die Sammlung Boisserée in Heidelberg (Marbach, Germany: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2000). 133. August Wilhelm Schlegel, “Über Zeichnungen zu Gedichten und John Flaxman’s Umrisse,” in Kritische Schriften: Zweiter Theil (Berlin, 1828), 265. 316  Notes to pages 255–63

8 . P E R S P E C T I V E S O F T H E G R A M M AT O LO G Y O F I M A G E S B E YO N D V I S U A L C U LT U R E

1. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Proj­ect, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 10, 4. 2. See, for example, Sigrid Weigel, “Der konventionelle Code als buckliger Zwerg im Dienste der Emotion Recognition: Überlegungen zu einer Urgeschichte der digitalen Kultur,” Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie 6, no. 1 (2020): 47–80. 3. Andrea Pinotti, “Self-­Negating Images: T ­ owards An-­Iconology,” Proceedings 1, no. 9 (2017): https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­3390​/­proceedings1090856. 4. See Timon Beyes and Claus Pias, “The Media Arcane,” Grey Room 75 (2019): 84–107. 5. Carl Schmitt, Po­liti­cal Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 36. 6. Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993). 7. Bernhard Jussen, “Plädoyer für eine Ikonologie der Geschichtswissenschaft: Zur bildlichen Formierung historischen Denken,” in Reinhart Koselleck und die politische Ikonologie: Perspektiven interdisziplinärer Bildforschung, ed. Hubert Locher and Adriana Markantonatos (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2013), 260–79. 8. Gerhard Paul, ed., Visual History: Ein Studienbuch (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006). 9. Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 14. 10. Burke, Eyewitnessing, 187. 11. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 395 (translation modified). 12. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 390, 392 (translation modified, emphasis added). 13. Benjamin, Arcades Proj­ect, 456 (translation modified). 14. More details in Sigrid Weigel, “The Flash of Knowledge and the Temporality of Images: Walter Benjamin’s Image-­Based Epistemology and Its Preconditions in Visual Arts and Media History,” Critical Inquiry 41 (2015): 344–66. The original version of this article is the final chapter in the German version of the pre­sent book: Weigel, Grammatologie der Bilder (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015). 15. The most vivid, in­ter­est­i ng, and challenging responses to the original publication of this book in 2015 came from musicology. I am especially grateful to Melanie Unseld (University of ­Music and Performing Arts Vienna) and Gesa Finke (Hanover University of M ­ usic, Drama, and Media) for the stimulating and Notes to pages 266–70  317

instructive workshop on ­free notations based on theoretical perspectives from Grammatology of Images. 16. Ernst Thomas, ed., Notation Neuer Musik, vol. 9 of Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik (Mainz, Germany: Schott, 1965). 17. For example, Carolin Ratzinger, Nikolaus Urbanek, and Sophie Zehetmayer, eds., Musik und Schrift: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf musikalische Notationen (Paderborn, Germany: Wilhelm Fink, 2020). 18. Jacques Derrida, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 19. Theodor W. Adorno, “Fragment über Musik und Sprache,” in Musikalische Schriften I–­III, vol. 16 of Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1997), 252. 20. Benjamin, Arcades Proj­ect, 462.

318  Notes to pages 270–73

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INDEX

Abu Ma’shar, 240 Adamson, Robert, x, 93 Adelmann, Ralf, 287 Adorno, Theodor, 202, 270, 272, 302, 318 Agamben, Giorgio, 216, 309, 311 Aharon, Itzhak, 54, 287 Alberti, Leon Battista, 45f., 104, 118, 285, 289, 295, 298 Alloa, Emmanuel, 17, 277, 279 Andronikashvili, Zaal, 299 Arasse, Daniel, 196–200, 206, 218f., 222–24, 226, 289, 308, 311, 312, 320 Archimedes, 246 Arendt, Hannah, 235, 313 Aristotle, 48, 55, 286 Arnold, Claus, xi, 161 Artaud, Antonin, 15 Audran, Jean, 78 Auerbach, Erich, 219, 311 Augustine, 6f., 214, 230, 236, 276, 308, 310, 312 Augustus, 109, 115 Aumont, Jacques, 91, 293 Baader, Hannah, 283 Baasner, Frank, 286 Baatz, Ursula, 298 Bachelard, Gaston, 9, 277 Bagliani, Agostino Paravicini, 301 Bailly-Maître-Grand, Patrick, 95 Balázs, Béla, 59, 288 Bandinelli, Baccio, 285 Barasch, Moshe, 71, 285, 289, 290 Barthes, Roland, 15, 43, 92, 288, 293 Bataille, Georges, 277 Baudelaire, Charles, 157, 181, 234, 283, 301 Begarelli, Antonio, xi, 203

Bell, Charles, 45, 63, 288 Bellini, Giovanni, 196, 289, 308 Belting, Hans, 66, 90, 148, 179, 184, 192f., 209, 277, 289, 292, 293, 295, 296, 301, 305, 306, 307, 308, 310 Belting-Ihm, Christa, 292 Benedict XVI (Pope), 152 Benjamin, Walter, 3f., 7, 9, 11f., 20, 22–24, 36, 61, 66, 72, 87, 93f., 96, 155, 166f., 176–81, 185, 187, 192, 196–98, 204–9, 218, 222, 234, 250, 266, 268f., 273, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 282, 283, 286, 288, 290, 293, 297, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 313, 314, 315, 317, 318 Benveniste, Émile, 105, 296 Bernini, Domenico, 301 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, xi, 154, 155, 158 Bergson, Henri, 125 Bernhart, Joseph, 217, 311 Bertillin, Alphonse, 73 Bessario, Basilius, 241 Beyer, Andreas, 290, 291 Beyes, Timon, 317 Biener, Hansjörg, 298 Bing, Gertrud, 236, 313 Bismarck, Otto von, 123, 126 Blaupot ten Cate, Anna Marie, 309 Blume, Dieter, 236f., 306, 313, 314 Blumenberg, Hans, 243–45, 281, 314, 315 Bodmer, Johann Jakob, 249f., 254, 315 Boehm, Gottfried, 8, 72, 99, 104, 276, 277, 279, 281, 285, 290, 294, 295, 305, 307 Bogen, Steffen, 97, 290, 294 Boll, Franz, 236, 313, 316 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 167 Bosinksi, Gerhard, 291 Bott, Gerhard, 300

Botticelli, Sandro, xii, 9, 223, 260, 277, 306, 316 Bräunlein, Peter, 276, 305, 306 Bredekamp, Horst, 245, 275, 281, 283, 284, 287, 290, 291, 293, 295, 299, 315 Brent, Joseph, 284 Breyde, Johann, x, 142 Briegleb, Klaus, 302 Brink, Claudia, 316 Brosamer, Hans, xi, 147 Brown, Peter, 305 Brückner, Wolfgang, 89, 110, 275, 292, 295, 296, 297, 300 Brunelleschi, Fillipo, 246 Buddha, 130 Buffon, George-Louis Leclerc, 61, 62 Burke, Peter, 268, 317 Burman, Frans, 310 Busch, Kathrin, 277, 278 Busch, Werner, 281, 283 Butades (u. Dibutades), ix, 10,19, 32, 34, 92 Cacciari, Massimo, 309 Cacioppo, John T., 287, 288 Calderoli, Roberto, 298 Cambio, Arnolfo di, 187 Campe, Rüdiger, 290 Cancik-Kirschbaum, Eva, 278 Cannadine, David, 297 Cardono, Gerolamo, x, 75, 76 Carlsen, Annette, x, 128 Carracci, Annibale, 120, 153, 156 Carus, Carl Gustav, 226f., 229–32, 251, 263, 312 Cassin, Barbara, 1 Cassius Dio, 115 Cassirer, Ernst, 25, 280 Cazzola-Senkpiel, Fabbiana, 301 Cellini, Benvenuto, 37, 283 Cennini, Cennino, 292 Certeau, Michel de, 24, 280 Chadarevian, Soraya de, 281 Charles II (King of England), 117 Chartier, Roger, 105 Chéroux, Clément, 172, 182, 303 Chigi, Agostino, 260 Clair, Jean, 51, 62, 76, 78, 80, 290 Clifford, William K., 41 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 241–44 Cossa, Francesco del, 224 Courtine, Jean-Jacques, 290 Cranach, Lucas, xi, 74, 146, 149, 150 Crivelli, Carlo, xii, 222, 225 D’Alembert, Jean Baptiste le Rond, 286, 301 Damasio, Antonio R., 46–48, 286 Dante Alighieri, 90f., 195, 245f., 249, 308, 315

348 Index

Därmann, Iris, 277, 278 Darwin, Charles, 7, 46, 53, 57, 276, 284, 285, 316 Daston, Lorraine, 284, 315 Daumier, Honoré, 131,167 Debray, Régis, 289 Delaporte, François, 290 De Preester, Helena, 283 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 3, 15–19, 24f., 29f., 92, 104, 114, 250, 264, 271f., 275, 278, 279, 282, 295, 297, 315, 318 Descartes, René, 46f., 77, 286, 310 Diderot, Denis, 59, 286, 288, 301 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 3, 19f., 37, 66, 69, 87f., 179, 218–22, 276, 277, 279, 280, 282, 283, 289, 292, 293, 294, 295, 305, 311 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 234, 313 Dionysius, 71 Dionysius Areopagite, 214 Doane, Mary Ann, 293 Dohmen, Christoph, 303 Drusus (Nero Claudius D.), 115 Dubois, Philippe, 293 Duccio, Agostino, 260 Duchenne de Bologne, Guillaume-Benjamin, ix, 53, 57, 61–65, 288, 289 Dufour, Colette, 306 Dünkel, Vera, 275, 287, 293 Dürer, Albrecht, xi, 283, 308 Ebeling, Gerhard, 300 Edgerton, Samuel Y., 111, 140f., 144, 295, 296, 300 Eisner, Lotte, 91 Ekman, Paul, 44, 52f., 55–59, 287, 288 Engel, Franz, 284 Ellsworth, Phoebe, 288 Euler, Leonhard, 38 Exner, Sigmund, xii, 251f., 254f., 259, 315, 316 Eyck, Jan van, x, 69, 70, 268 Faietti, Marizia, 280, 283 Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 232–34, 251, 312, 313 Fehrenbach, Frank, 283 Félibien, André, 10, 277 Finke, Gesa, 317 Fischer, Helmut, 305 Flower, Harriet I., 292, 296, 297 Flückiger, Fabrice, 307 Foletti, Ivan, 305 Fontana, Lucio, 36 Foucault, Michel, 11f., 162, 278 Fra Angelico, xii, 219–21, 226–31, 263, 276, 311, 312 Francesca, Piero della, 222–24, 241f., 312, 314 Francis (Pope), 152

Franz, Michael, 291 Freedberg, David, 276, 282, 283, 284, 295, 316 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 17–23, 28f., 49, 133–36, 155, 168, 255f., 259, 279, 280, 285, 286, 287, 295, 300, 302, 307 Friesen, Wallace V., 44, 52f., 56–58, 287, 288 Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise, 289 Füchsel, Franz, x, 127 Gaddi, Agnolo, 219 Gaier, Martin, 291, 292 Galilei, Galileo, 245f., 281, 284, 314, 315 Galison, Peter, 282, 286 Gallese, Vittorio, 36, 283 Galton, Francis, 95 Galvin, Carol, 297 Ganz, David, 277, 306 Garbo, Greta, 43, 288 Gatta, Bartolomeo della, xii, 258 Geimer, Peter, 276 Germanicus, 240 Gerwen, Will van, 309 Gerz, Jochen, x, 81, 82 Geyer, Christian, 298 Ghezzi, Pier Leone, xi, 154 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, xii, 257 Giesey, Ralph E., 297 Ginzburg, Carlo, 17, 86, 105, 115, 187, 279, 285, 291, 296, 297, 306 Giotto (di Bondone), 187, 195 Giulio, Anton, 94 Gladigow, Burkhard, 306 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 32, 222, 262, 316 Gombrich, Ernst H., 19, 131, 153f., 157f., 166, 268, 279, 299, 301, 302, 314 Grandville (Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard), 167 Grave, Johannes, 277 Graves, Margaret S., 303 Greenstein, Jack M., 279 Gregory of Tours, xii, 237, 238 Grimm, Herman, 304 Grimm, Jacob, 153, 294 Grimm, Wilhelm, 153, 294 Groebner, Valentin, 297 Gruber, Christiane J., 303 Grube, Gernot, 279 Gugerli, David, 275 Guillaume, Edmond, x, 125 Habermas, Jürgen, 300 Haderer, Gerhard, 121, 298 Hager, Joseph, C., 288 Hagner, Michael, 280, 281, 286, 289, 294 Hankins, Thomas L., 28, 282, 284

Hans von Berstatt, x, 74 Haroche, Claudine, 290 Hartley, Lucy, 290 Hartshorne, Charles, 279 Harvey, Anthony, 297 Haskell, Francis, 268, 317 Haugbolle, Sune, 303 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 79, 187–91, 291, 307 Heine, Heinrich, 66, 132, 162f., 167–69, 205, 276, 289, 299, 301, 302, 309, 314 Heintz, Bettina, 275, 281 Herding, Klaus, 302 Herodian, 115 Hildesheimer, Wolfgang, 84 Hill, David Octavius, x, 93 Hofmann, Konrad, 310, 311 Hofmann, Werner, 257, 283, 298, 301 Holoch, Robert, x, 126 Horkheimer, Max, 302 Huber, Ernst, 57 Huber, Jörg, 275, 281 Hunink, Vincent, 301 Husserl, Edmund, 17 Isekenmeier, Guido, 301 Iser, Wolfgang, 308 Jean Paul, 118 Jesus Christ, x, xi, 7, 8, 65–73, 108, 119, 121, 130, 152, 174, 183–85, 193, 198, 201, 210–16, 222, 227, 230, 231, 241, 242, 255, 289, 298, 314 Joachim II, Elector of Brandenburg, xi, 145 John (apostle), 71, 233 John the Baptist, xii, 257 Julius II (Pope), 304 Jussen, Bernhard, 317 Kahn, Fritz, ix, 51 Kamper, Dietmar, 296 Kandinsky, Wassily, 26, 281 Kant, Immanuel, 17, 234, 313 Kantorowicz, Ernst H., 102, 116, 216, 294, 297, 306, 311 Kassner, Rudolf, 118 Kemp, Wolfgang, 281, 283 Kennedy, Jacqueline, 182 Ker, James, 104, 115, 295, 297 King, David A., 241f., 314 Klee, Paul, xi, 26, 29, 72, 207f., 281, 282 Kogge, Werner, 279 Kogman-Appel, Katrin, 303 Kohl, Jeanette, 281, 291, 292 Kornmeier, Uta, 309 Krämer, Sybille, 278, 279

Index  349

Krauss, Rosalind, 293 Kris, Ernst, 132–36, 155, 169, 299, 300 Krüger, Klaus, 276, 304 Krüger, Steffen, 299 Lacan, Jacques, 188, 307 Lahusen, Goetz, 296, 297 Langemeyer, Gerhard, 125, 129, 150, 160f., 163, 298, 299, 301 Latour, Bruno, 281, 314 Lavater, Johann Caspar, x, 34, 45, 73, 79f., 92, 291 Le Brun, Charles, x, 45, 55, 77f., 159, 290 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 94, 293 Lentes, Thomas, 306 Lentz, Matthias, 142, 144f., 295, 297, 300 Leonardo da Vinci, x, 45, 112, 140, 144, 156, 254, 283, 301 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 292 Lešák, Martin F., 305 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 89, 292, 297 Levenson, Robert W., 287 Leys, Ruth, 57, 288 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 45, 285 Lindley, Phillip, 297 Lippi, Filippino, 222 Logothetis, Nikos K., 287 Louis XIV, 165, 166 Louis Philippe I, 162, 167 Louis the Pious, 240 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 312 Lugt, Frits, 310 Luke (apostle), 8, 190, 307 Luquet, Georges-Henri, 29 Lux, Vanessa, 35, 283 Macho, Thomas, 296, 312 Madlener, Elisabeth, 290, 291 Mgyar, Adam, 94 Mainberger, Sabine, 281 Maisak, Petra, 316 Manet, Edouard, xi, 210, 211 Manetti, Antonio, 246, 247, 315 Mantegna, Andrea, 72, 196, 199, 279, 289 Marchesoni, Stefano, 305 Marek, Kristin, 295 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 25, 26, 28, 94, 281 Marie Antoinette, 166 Marin, Louis, 6, 10, 199, 218, 223, 226, 276, 308, 311, 312 Marlowe, Christopher, 195 Mary, mother of Jesus, xii, 46, 71–73, 116, 178, 184, 192, 193, 196–200, 219–31, 263, 285, 304 Marx, Karl, 182 Masaccio (Tommaso di Ser Cassai), 308

350 Index

Masetti, Anna Rosa, 306 Mauss, Marcel, 109, 296 Meyer, Roland, 290 Michelangelo, 22, 23, 255, 280 Milton, John, 117, 249, 315 Mitchell, W. J. Thomas, 171, 277, 281, 282, 287, 295, 302, 305 Moeller, Bernd, 300 Molderings, Herbert, 293 Montagu, Jennifer, 159, 290, 291 Morelli, Giovanni (Ivan Lermolieff), 17, 86, 280 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 30–32, 34–35, 273, 282 Mortimer, Richard, 297 Mosès, Stéphane, 309 Mossmann, Stephan, 307 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 128–30 Muybridge, Eadweard, 28, 94 Nayef, Silvia, 303 Nagel, Ivan, 194f., 308 Neer, Richard T., 296 Neuenfels, Hans, 128–31 Newton, Isaac, 232 Nicholas I (Pope), 184 Oppershausen, Johann von, xi, 145 Orland, Barbara, 275 Paglen, Trevor, 99f., 235, 294, 313 Panofsky, Erwin, 210, 224, 284, 312, 316 Papapetros, Spyros, 282 Paravicini Bagliani, Agostino, 301 Park, Katherine, 315 Paul, Gerhard, 317 Peers, Glenn, 205, 208, 214f., 306, 309, 310 Peirce, Charles Sanders, ix, 17, 38f., 41f., 84–87, 97, 181, 279, 284, 291, 305 Pentcheva, Bissera V., 90, 183, 292, 305 Pertinax (Publius Helvius P.), 115 Peterson, Erik, 216, 311 Philipon, Charles, xi, 163, 164 Philipp, Michael, 187, 193, 277, 306, 307 Pias, Claus, 50, 287, 294, 317 Picard, Rosalind W., 55, 287 Picasso, Pablo, 298, 301 Piderit, Theodor, 45, 60, 62, 75, 285, 288, 290 Pinotti, Andrea, 266, 317 Pisano, Nicola, 187 Plamper, Jan, 287 Plato, 25, 91, 280, 292 Pleșu, Andrei, 309 Pliny the Elder, 19, 32, 90, 282 Plutchik, Robert, 57 Pollaiuola, Piero del, 222

Polybius, 109, 296 Polydeukes, Iulius (Pollux), 289 Porta, Giambattista della, 77, 285 Poussin, Nicholas, 10 Praetorius, Johann Heinrich, 79 Price, Simon, 297 Proust, Marcel, 181, 219 Pseudo-Dionysius, 239 Queisner, Moritz, 284 Raimi, Sam, 176 Rancière, Jacques, 11f., 218, 278, 311 Raphael, 72, 177, 196–200, 243, 254, 260, 263, 304, 308 Ratzinger, Carolin, 318 Regnault, Jean-Baptiste, 9, 32, 34 Regomontanus (Johannes von Monteregio), xii, 241, 242, 314 Reinle, Adolf, 296 Reynolds, Joshua, 46, 285 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, 3, 275, 280, 281, 289, 294 Roeck, Bernd, 295 Rolff, Günter, 298 Rose, Louis, 299 Rosenberg, Alfons, 310 Rosenzweig, Franz, 175 Rota, Martino, x, 128, 129 Roth, Gerhard, 48, 286 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 16, 278, 315 Runge, Philipp Otto, 263 Samuel, Nina, 111, 281 Sandrart, Joachim von, 9, 32, 33 Santis, Andrea de, 292, 306, 307 Sarto, Andrea del, x, 112, 141, 144 Saviello, Alberto, 291, 292 Saussure, Ferdinand, 16 Saxl, Fritz, 236, 289, 313 Schacht, Hjalmar, xi, 160 Schade, Sigrid, 310 Schaffer, Simon, 314 Schäffner, Wolfgang, 312 Schapiro, Meyer, 290 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 32, 226–28, 231, 263, 312, 316 Schlosser, Julius von, 89, 292 Schlosser, Julius, xii, 243–44 Schmidgen, Henning, 281 Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Viktoria, 292 Schmitt, Carl, 216, 267, 311, 317 Schmölders, Claudia, 290 Schneider, Birgit, 275, 287 Schneider, Manfred, 290

Schneider, Pablo, 299 Schoen, Eduard, xi, 148 Scholem, Gershom, 175, 208, 210, 303, 309, 310 Schulz, Martin, 296 Segol, Marla, 278 Septimius Severus (Lucius S. S. Pertinax), 115 Serres, Michel, 309 Signorelli, Luca, 133 Silverman, Robert J., 28, 282, 284 Simmel, Georg, 4, 136, 300 Simon, Karl, 300 Snyder, Joe, 282 Socrates, 318, 295 Speiser, Felix, 296 Spies, Christian, 276, 307 Spinoza, Benedictus de, 248, 250, 315 Stiegler, Bernd, 293 Stimilli, Davide, 78, 290, 291, 316 Stock, Alex, 174, 182, 184, 303, 305, 306 Stoichiță, Victor Ieronim, 292 Suu Kyi, Aung San, 182 Suvée, Joseph-Benoît, 32 Sykora, Katharina, 89, 292 Sylvester, James, 41 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 293 Tammen, Silke, 307 Tassinary, Louis G., 287, 288 Tasso, Torquato, 249 Ternite, Wilhelm, xii, 228, 312 Thackeray, William Makepeace, xi, 165 Thomas Aquinas, 214, 216–17, 222, 226, 234, 247, 311 Thomas, Ernst, 318 Thürlimann, Felix, 97, 294 Titian, 195 Toepffer, Rodolphe, xi, 158–60, 301 Toorn, Karel van der, 174, 303, 306 Toscani, Oliviero, x, 82, 83 Totzke, Rainer, 278 Trajan, 195 Trier, Lars von, 176 Trifonova, Temenuga, 277 Tsakiris, Manos, 283 Umilta, M. Alessandra, 283 Unseld, Melanie, 317 Unverfehrt, Gerd, 300, 303 Urbanek, Nikolaus, 318 Vasari, Giorgio, 37, 283 Velde, Henry van de, 37, 283 Veneziano, Domenico, 222 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 106–8, 199, 296 Viola, Tullio, 284

Index  351

Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 35, 133, 282, 299 Vischer, Robert, 35, 282 Voltaire, 249 Wagner, Monika, 310, 316 Wahrig-Schmidt, Bettina, 280 Warburg, Aby, 4f., 7, 9, 12, 23, 25, 37, 39, 42, 45, 146, 152, 157, 195f., 224, 236, 238, 241, 255, 257, 259–61, 267, 277, 278, 280, 284, 285, 289, 300, 301, 308, 313, 314, 316 Warnke, Martin, 283, 316 Wauer, Bernhart von, x, 142 Webster, Richard, 310 Weihe, Richard, 289 Wenzel, Horst, 278 Westergaard, Kurt, x, 124 Weyden, Rogier van der, 179

352 Index

Wind, Edgar, 284 Winston, J. S., 284 Wittmann, Barbara, 282 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 35 Wolf, Gerhard, 280, 289, 306 Wood, Christopher S., 277, 279, 293, 312 Worringer, Wilhelm, 35 Wundt, Wilhelm, 286 Wyss, Beat, 293 Yates, Frances A., 278 Zegher, Catherine de, 281 Zehetmayer, Sophie, 318 Zeman, Zbyněk A., 298 Zöllner, Frank, 301 Zuccaro, Federico, 37, 283

Sigrid Weigel is former director of Zentrum für Literatur-­und Kulturfor­ schung in Berlin and has taught at numerous universities in the United States and elsewhere around the world. She has published on lit­er­a­ture, philosophy, cultural history, image theory, memory, secularization, genealogy, and the cultural history of sciences across numerous books in German and En­g lish, including Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy (Stanford, 2013).

commonalities Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

Roberto Esposito, Terms of the Po­liti­cal: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics. Translated by Rhiannon Noel Welch. Introduction by Vanessa Lemm. Maurizio Ferraris, Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces. Translated by Richard Davies. Dimitris Vardoulakis, Sovereignty and Its Other: ­Toward the Dejustification of Vio­lence. Anne Emmanuelle Berger, The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender. Translated by Catherine Porter. James D. Lilley, Common ­Things: Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging in Atlantic Modernity. Jean-­Luc Nancy, Identity: Fragments, Frankness. Translated by François Raffoul. Miguel Vatter, Between Form and Event: Machiavelli’s Theory of Po­liti­cal Freedom. Miguel Vatter, The Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society. Maurizio Ferraris, Where Are You? An Ontology of the Cell Phone. Translated by Sarah De Sanctis. Irving Goh, The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion ­after the Subject. Kevin Attell, Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction.

J. Hillis Miller, Communities in Fiction. Remo Bodei, The Life of Th ­ ings, the Love of Th ­ ings. Translated by Murtha Baca. Gabriela Basterra, The Subject of Freedom: Kant, Levinas. Roberto Esposito, Categories of the Impo­liti­cal. Translated by Connal Parsley. Roberto Esposito, Two: The Machine of Po­liti­cal Theology and the Place of Thought. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Akiba Lerner, Redemptive Hope: From the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Obama. Adriana Cavarero and Angelo Scola, Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Po­liti­cal and Theological Dialogue. Translated by Margaret Adams Groesbeck and Adam Sitze. Massimo Cacciari, Eu­rope and Empire: On the Po­liti­cal Forms of Globalization. Edited by Alessandro Carrera, Translated by Massimo Verdicchio. Emanuele Coccia, Sensible Life: A Micro-­ontology of the Image. Translated by Scott Stuart, Introduction by Kevin Attell. Timothy C. Campbell, The Techne of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Forms of Life. Étienne Balibar, Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology. Translated by Steven Miller, Foreword by Emily Apter. Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. Terrion L. Williamson, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life. Jean-­Luc Nancy, The Disavowed Community. Translated by Philip Armstrong. Roberto Esposito, The Origin of the Po­liti­cal: Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil? Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Gareth Williams. Dimitris Vardoulakis, Stasis before the State: Nine ­Theses on Agonistic Democracy.

Nicholas Heron, Liturgical Power: Between Economic and Po­liti­cal Theology. Emanuele Coccia, Goods: Advertising, Urban Space, and the Moral Law of the Image. Translated by Marissa Gemma. James Edward Ford III, Thinking Through Crisis: Depression-­Era Black Lit­er­a­ture, Theory, and Politics. Étienne Balibar, On Universals: Constructing and Deconstructing Community. Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Naomi Waltham-­Smith, Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life. Sigrid Weigel, Grammatology of Images: A History of the A-­Visible. Translated by Chadwick Truscott Smith.