Tintoretto’s Difference: Deleuze, Diagrammatics, and Art History 9781350083073, 9781350083097, 9781350083066

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyrights
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
Preface
Prologue
1 Tintoretto: A Problem for Art History?
Tradition and contextualism
Representational thought
Theory, philosophy
Towards Deleuze
Deleuze and art history
The diagram
2 Tintoretto and His Time?
Christ among the Doctors
Annibale’s hesitation
Aretino’s U-turn
Miracle of the Slave
Historia
The stage-method
Painting and theatre
Tintoretto. From theatre to drama
Genealogy of the stage-method in Tintoretto’s works
Ridolfi’s motto
Art history’s recycling of Ridolfi’s motto
Deleuze’s Tintoretto
3 Diagrammatic Constructivism
Thought as difference
Deleuze’s diagram and Kant’s schema
Kant’s constructivism
Peirce’s diagram. An empiricist’s constructivism
Pure icons
Diagrammatic subversion of iconography in Tintoretto’s works
Tintoretto’s ghostly figures
The genetic method: Maimon and Deleuze
Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism
Tintoretto’s constructivism. Stage-method as diagram
4 Diagrammatic Aesthetic
Deleuze after Kant: Sensation and genesis
Genetic method in the third critique
Material aesthetic and the work of art
Aesthetic paradigm
Diagrammatic aesthetic
Diagrammatic art
Tintoretto’s material constructivism
Constructivism beyond Venetian empiricism
Tintoretto’s imagination
Boschini’s experience
The Scuola Grande di San Rocco
5 Diagrammatic Time
The time of difference
Anachronism in contemporary art history
Constructivism, time, and art
Deleuze’s syntheses of time
The third synthesis of time and Nietzsche’s eternal return
The diagram, genealogy, and history
Tintoretto’s time
Tintoretto’s return in the 2011 Venice Biennale
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Tintoretto’s Difference Deleuze, Diagrammatics, and Art History

Jacopo Tintoretto, Self-Portrait, c. 1588, oil on canvas, 63 × 52 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Tintoretto’s Difference Deleuze, Diagrammatics, and Art History Kamini Vellodi

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Kamini Vellodi, 2019 Kamini Vellodi has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the list of figures constitutes an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Creation of the Animals – detail (Birds) by Tintoretto (Robusti, Jacopo 1518–1594) © Photo Scala, Florence All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-8307-3 PB: 978-1-3501-7046-9 ePDF: 978-1-3500-8306-6 eBook: 978-1-3500-8308-0 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For my Mother

Contents

List of figures

x

Preface

xiv

Prologue

xvii

1

2

Tintoretto: A Problem for Art History?

1

Tradition and contextualism

1

Representational thought

5

Theory, philosophy

7

Towards Deleuze

9

Deleuze and art history

13

The diagram

15

Tintoretto and His Time?

19

Christ among the Doctors

24

Annibale’s hesitation

25

Aretino’s U-turn

26

Miracle of the Slave

26

Historia

27

The stage-method

30

Painting and theatre

41

Tintoretto. From theatre to drama

47

Genealogy of the stage-method in Tintoretto’s works

48

Ridolfi’s motto

58

viii

3

4

5

Contents

Art history’s recycling of Ridolfi’s motto

59

Deleuze’s Tintoretto

60

Diagrammatic Constructivism

65

Thought as difference

68

Deleuze’s diagram and Kant’s schema

70

Kant’s constructivism

71

Peirce’s diagram. An empiricist’s constructivism

72

Pure icons

75

Diagrammatic subversion of iconography in Tintoretto’s works

76

Tintoretto’s ghostly figures

82

The genetic method: Maimon and Deleuze

86

Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism

88

Tintoretto’s constructivism. Stage-method as diagram

90

Diagrammatic Aesthetic

93

Deleuze after Kant: Sensation and genesis

94

Genetic method in the third critique

96

Material aesthetic and the work of art

99

Aesthetic paradigm

100

Diagrammatic aesthetic

102

Diagrammatic art

102

Tintoretto’s material constructivism

104

Constructivism beyond Venetian empiricism

106

Tintoretto’s imagination

110

Boschini’s experience

112

The Scuola Grande di San Rocco

116

Diagrammatic Time

129

The time of difference

129

Anachronism in contemporary art history

136

Constructivism, time, and art

140

Deleuze’s syntheses of time

145

The third synthesis of time and Nietzsche’s eternal return

147

Contents

ix

The diagram, genealogy, and history

150

Tintoretto’s time

152

Tintoretto’s return in the 2011 Venice Biennale

158

Conclusion

163

Notes

167

Bibliography

201

Index

211

List of figures

Jacopo Tintoretto, Self-Portrait, c. 1588, oil on canvas, 63 × 52 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris ii Figure 1

Jacopo Tintoretto, Christ among the Doctors, 1541/2, oil on canvas, 197 × 319 cm. Museo del Duomo, Milan. Photo: Museo del Duomo, Milan xviii

Figure 2

Jacopo Tintoretto, Last Supper, 1547, oil on canvas, 157 × 443 cm. San Marcuola, Venice. Photo: SCALA xviii

Figure 3

Jacopo Tintoretto, Saint George and the Dragon, 1555/8, oil on canvas, 158 × 100 cm. National Gallery London. Photo: SCALA xix

Figure 4

Jacopo Tintoretto, Miracle of the Slave, 1548, oil on canvas, 416 × 544 cm. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: SCALA 3

Figure 5

Jacopo Tintoretto, Holy Family with Saint Jerome and the Procurator Girolamo Marcello, 1537, oil on canvas, 148 × 193 cm. Private Collection, Lucerne. Photo: Christies Images/Bridgeman Images 20

Figure 6

Jacopo Tintoretto, Sacra Conversazione. Virgin and Child with the Infant Baptist and Saint Joseph, Elizabeth, Zacharias, Catherine and Francis, 1540, oil on canvas, 171 × 243 cm. Private collection. Photo: Fondazione Zeri 20

Figure 7

Jacopo Tintoretto, Christ Washing the Feet of His Disciples, 1547, oil on canvas, 210 × 533 cm. Madrid, Prado. Photo: SCALA 21

Figure 8

Jacopo Tintoretto, Paradise, 1588/92, oil on canvas, 700 × 2200 cm. Sala del Maggiore Consiglio, Palazzo Ducale, Venice. Photo: SCALA 22

Figure 9

Jacopo Tintoretto, Creation of the Animals, 1551–2, oil on canvas, 151 × 258 cm. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice 23

Figure 10

Jacopo Tintoretto, Creation of the Animals (detail), 1551–2, oil on canvas, 151 × 258 cm. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice 23

Figure 11

Titian, Miracle of the Newborn Child, 1511, fresco, 340 × 355 cm. Scuola del Santo, Padua. Photo: SCALA 30

Figure 12

Jacopo Tintoretto, Venus and Vulcan, 1550–1, pen and brush, black ink, and white lead on blue paper, 20 × 27 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Kupferstichkabinett). Photo: SCALA 31

List of figures

xi

Figure 13

Jacopo Tintoretto, Mary Reading in a Landscape, 1582/7, oil on canvas, 425 × 209 cm. Sala Terrena, Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 33

Figure 14

Jacopo Tintoretto, Mary Reading in a Landscape with Palm, 1582/7, oil on canvas, 425 × 211 cm. Sala Terrena, Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 33

Figure 15

Jacopo Tintoretto, Annunciation, 1583–7, oil on canvas, 422 × 545 cm. Sala Terrena, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 34

Figure 16

Jacopo Tintoretto, Worship of the Golden Calf, 1560/2, oil on canvas, 1450 × 590 cm. Madonna dell’Orto, Venice. Photo: SCALA 35

Figure 17

Jacopo Tintoretto, Last Judgement, 1560/2, oil on canvas, 1450 × 590 cm. Madonna dell’Orto, Venice. Photo: SCALA 36

Figure 18

Jacopo Tintoretto, Martyrdom of Saint Paul, 1556, oil on canvas, 430 × 240 cm. Madonna dell’Orto, Venice. Photo: SCALA 37

Figure 19

Jacopo Tintoretto, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1577, oil on canvas, 282 × 165 cm. San Trovaso, Venice. Photo: SCALA 38

Figure 20

Jacopo Tintoretto, Saint Roch in Prison Visited by an Angel, 1567, oil on canvas, 300 × 670 cm. Church San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 38

Figure 21

Jacopo Tintoretto, Saint Mark Rescuing a Saracen from a Shipwreck, 1562–6, oil on canvas, 398 × 337 cm. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: SCALA 39

Figure 22

Jacopo Tintoretto, Descent into Limbo, 1568, oil on canvas, 342 × 373 cm. San Cassiano, Venice. Photo: SCALA 40

Figure 23

Jacopo Tintoretto, Elijah Fed by the Angel, 1577–8, oil on canvas, 370 × 265 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 40

Figure 24

Jacopo Tintoretto, Vision of Ezekiel, 1577–8, oil on canvas, 370 × 265 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 41

Figure 25

Jacopo Tintoretto, Brazen Serpent, 1575–7, oil on canvas, 840 × 520 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 42

Figure 26

Jacopo Tintoretto, Finding of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–6, oil on canvas, 405 × 405 cm. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Photo: SCALA 43

Figure 27

Jacopo Tintoretto, Feast at Cana, 1561, oil on canvas, 435 × 535 cm. Chiesa di Santa Maria della Salute, Venice. Photo: SCALA 44

Figure 28

Jacopo Tintoretto, Saint Demetrius and a Donor from the Ghisi Family, 1544–7, oil on canvas, 188 × 88 cm. Chiesa de San Felice, Venice. Photo: SCALA 45

Figure 29

Sebastiano Serlio. Scena Tragica, 1584, (engraving). Bibliotheque de L’Arsenal, Paris. Photo: Bridgeman Images 46

xii

List of figures

Figure 30

Jacopo Tintoretto, Rescue of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–6, oil on canvas, 398 × 315 cm. Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: SCALA 49

Figure 31

Jacopo Tintoretto, Rescue of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–6, oil on canvas, 398 × 315 cm (untrimmed). Photo: Warburg Institute 50

Figure 32

Jacopo Tintoretto, Moses Striking the Rock, 1576/7, oil on canvas, 550 × 520 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 51

Figure 33

Jacopo Tintoretto, Agony in the Garden, 1543–4, oil on canvas, 145 × 177 cm. Private Collection. Photo: Agnews Gallery, London 52

Figure 34

Jacopo Tintoretto, Resurrection of Christ, 1543–4, oil on canvas, 85 × 77 cm. Private Collection. Photo: Agnew’s Gallery, London/Bridgeman Images. 52

Figure 35

Jacopo Tintoretto, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, 1544/5, oil on canvas, 122 × 217 cm. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice 53

Figure 36

Jacopo Tintoretto, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, 1546, oil on canvas, 119 × 168 cm. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome. Photo: SCALA 54

Figure 37

Jacopo Tintoretto, Miracle of Saint Augustine, 1549, oil on canvas, 255 × 175 cm. Museo Civico, Vicenza. Photo: SCALA 55

Figure 38

Jacopo Tintoretto, Susanna and the Elders, 1550, oil on canvas, 167 × 238 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: SCALA 56

Figure 39

Jacopo Tintoretto, Last Supper, 1556/8, oil on canvas, 221 × 413 cm. Chapel of the Sacrament, San Trovaso, Venice. Photo: SCALA 78

Figure 40

Jacopo Tintoretto, Last Supper, 1591/2, oil on canvas, 365 × 568 cm. San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. Photo: SCALA 78

Figure 41

Jacopo Tintoretto, Adoration of the Shepherds, 1578/81, oil on canvas, 538 × 465 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 79

Figure 42

Jacopo Tintoretto, Annunciation, 1581/2, oil on canvas, 422 × 545 cm. Sala Terrena, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 79

Figure 43

Jacopo Tintoretto, Gathering of Manna, 1591/2, oil on canvas, 377 × 576 cm, San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. Photo: SCALA 82

Figure 44

Jacopo Tintoretto, Baptism of Christ, 1578/80, oil on canvas, 538 × 465 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 84

Figure 45

Jacopo Tintoretto, Baptism of Christ (detail), 1578/80, oil on canvas, 538 × 465 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 85

Figure 46

Jacopo Tintoretto, Rescue of the Body of Saint Mark (detail), 1562–6, oil on canvas, 398 × 315 cm. Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: SCALA 85

List of figures

xiii

Figure 47

Jacopo Tintoretto, Massacre of the Innocents, 1582/7, oil on canvas, 422 × 580 cm. Sala Terrena, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 106

Figure 48

Jacopo Tintoretto, Agony in the Garden, 1578/81, oil on canvas, 538 × 465 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 115

Figure 49

Jacopo Tintoretto, Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 117

Figure 50

Jacopo Tintoretto, Flight into Egypt, 1582/7, oil on canvas, 422 × 580 cm. Sala Terrena, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 118

Figure 51

Jacopo Tintoretto, Apotheosis of Saint Roch, 1564, oil on canvas, 240 × 360 cm. Sala dell’Albergo, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 119

Figure 52

Jacopo Tintoretto, Crucifixion, 1565, oil on canvas, 536 × 1224 cm. Sala dell’Albergo, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 120

Figure 53

Jacopo Tintoretto, Gathering of Manna, 1576/7, oil on canvas, 550 × 520 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 121

Figure 54

Jacopo Tintoretto, Jacob’s Ladder, 1577/8, oil on canvas, 660 × 265 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 123

Figure 55

Jacopo Tintoretto, Pillar of Fire, 1577/8, oil on canvas, 370 × 265 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 124

Figure 56

Sala Terrena. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 125

Figure 57

Sala Terrena. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice 126

Figure 58

Jacopo Tintoretto, Fragment of a Panel with Apples, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown, Sala dell’Albergo, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Kamini Vellodi 132

Figure 59

Jacopo Tintoretto, Deposition of Christ, 1594, oil on canvas, 288 × 166 cm. San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. Photo: SCALA 155

Jacopo Tintoretto, Creation of the Animals (detail), 1551/2, oil on canvas, 151 × 258 cm. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice 210

Preface

T

he purpose of this book is to give an account of artistic difference. By this I do not mean an artist’s difference from something else – from another practice, from another artist, from another work.

Neither do I mean the artist’s representation of difference – the representation of the minority, the excluded, or the Other. Rather, I mean difference as something internal to what the work of art does, a power of change that constitutes what is singular and irreducible of a work – that element which continues to affect us when the contingencies of historical circumstance are long past. How are we to think this difference? Led by art historical conventions, we are no doubt accustomed to addressing artistic practice through the terms of an artist’s name, an oeuvre, a movement, a style, a period, or a historical epoch. Even attention to artistic processes and preparatory methods – ever-changing, often nebulous – is often approached through identifying frameworks. This tendency – arguably more a symptom of our disciplinary modes of representation, habits of communication, and structures of thinking than what the work of art occasions – reduces works to what can be represented of them, and undermines perhaps what is the most important question of art historical study: Why do we study past works of art today? I approach these questions as a specific problem posed by the work of a specific painter, the sixteenth-century artist Jacopo Tintoretto. This book began with the experience of Tintoretto’s works. It began with the experience of the act of painting and the experience of art history as embedded in this act. Tintoretto’s work seemed peculiarly inconsistent, often unappealing and abrasive, difficult to categorize, and altogether excessive. But I do not address Tintoretto’s difference simply in order to know this artist better or make sense of the confrontation his works occasion. Rather, I invest the problem of difference as it takes expression in his works as the occasion for a critical examination of certain presumptions of art historical study, and the articulation of an alternative possibility for thinking. The excesses of the past and of its persistence as source, the difference of art within art history – these motivate and guide this exploration. In staging this investigation, I turn to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, a philosophy that aims to think difference positively, in itself, and foregrounds art within this ambition. I focus on Deleuze’s compelling concept of the diagram – a map, or a shaping of difference, an agency that preserves

Preface

xv

difference whilst constructing new reality. It was Deleuze’s development of the concept in his study of the painter Francis Bacon that first attracted me as a way of articulating the tensions between art’s work and art history. Further exploration of the concept as it is articulated across Deleuze and Guattari’s works revealed to me its potential not just for the thought of painting, but for thinking the dynamics between art and art history through the lens of philosophy. By extending the concept of the diagram beyond Deleuze and Guattari’s own use of it to address problems of experience, thought, history, semiotics, aesthetics and time, I provide an analysis of the problems Tintoretto’s works present and the challenges and invitations these pose for a philosophical art history. Much of this work was conceived and begun whilst I was a PhD student at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, and I am grateful to friends and colleagues who supported the early stages of my project, especially Matthew Charles and Barnaby Hutchins. I owe an especial debt of gratitude to my PhD supervisor, Éric Alliez, for his philosophical insight, creativity, and understanding, and for inspiring me to think. The work would not be what it is without his example. I am also sincerely grateful to my co-supervisor, Peter Osborne, from whose knowledge, critique, and analysis I have learnt a great deal and benefitted enormously. My heartfelt thanks to Aron Vinegar for his constant encouragement and always perspicacious suggestions. I am very grateful to Howard Caygill for supporting the book to come to fruition. Maria Loh offered helpful suggestions in the PhD stage of the book. Vlad Ionescu was a huge support in the final stages of the writing, and I thank him for his generosity in reading the manuscript, and for his insightful observations that have helped strengthen the work. My warmest thanks go to Richard Fairclough for all his help and brilliance with the book cover design, for which I am deeply grateful. Thanks also to Daniel Smith for his belief in my work since my student days, and to Andrew Benjamin for his continued encouragement of the project. My sincere thanks to John Hyman, for his philosophical insights, and the many stimulating debates that have helped me clarify my own thinking. I owe a debt of gratitude to Thomas Callegaro, the secretary, and all the staff at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco for their generous support of this project and help with the images. Rembrandt Duits at the Warburg Institute has patiently helped me locate many an obscure image. Thanks also to Valentina Bandelloni at SCALA. The staff at the British Library helped to make the process of researching and writing the book so memorable. Thanks to my editor at Bloomsbury, Liza Thompson, who has given me the creative and intellectual freedom in the writing of this book, and to the rest of the Bloomsbury team, especially Frankie Mace, who have made the publication process so enjoyable. Financial help in the book’s publication was generously provided by the University of Edinburgh, and I thank my colleagues at Edinburgh College of Art for their support of my work. Earlier versions of sections of this work have been published elsewhere, in different forms. Elements of Chapter  3 appeared in ‘Diagrammatic Thought. Two Forms of Constructivism in C.S. Peirce and Gilles Deleuze’, Parrhesia, Number 19, 2014, 79–95.

xvi

Preface

Elements of Chapters 2 and 5 were worked through in ‘Tintoretto’s Time’, Art History, Volume 38, Issue 3, 414–33, June 2015, and I thank the journals for their permission to re-publish this material. My deepest thanks are for my family, especially my brother Nikhil whose insights have always guided my own, my grandmother for her affirmative spirit, and my father, who has gently supported my intellectual formation over the years. There are no words to express what I owe my mother, who has been an endless source of strength and wisdom, who has accompanied every stage of this journey, and who shares in all my achievements.

Prologue

Tintoretto was too good an artist for his times’ uses, he still clamours for a proper role, seeking affirmation, four centuries later.1

M

y encounter with the paintings of Jacopo Tintoretto at the 2007 Prado retrospective of his work confounded my understanding and expectations of the art of his time. The reservoirs

of historical common sense and knowledge, however fragmentary, with which one is accustomed to approaching works of art from the past seemed inadequate here, confronted by occurrences of painting so seemingly at odds with the traditions of their own time – the period of the midto-late 1500s in Venice. Rather than any retrospective transport, there appeared to be something fundamentally uncontainable about these strange paintings, expanding from their walls and bursting beyond the perimeters of their rooms, their force overwhelming the measured spaces of the museum, their rebelliousness dislocating the systems of meaning which the curation was trying to impose. What was it about these works that challenged? Early paintings such as Christ among the Doctors, 1541/2 (Figure 1), announced a provocative experimentation with perspective, figuration, and compositional sense – here, Christ is a minute, barely visible, figure at the end of a steep recessional pathway framed by the hulking figures of the scribes. In works such as the Last Supper, 1547 (Figure 2), the violently swaying figures of the Apostles around the table impart an extreme dynamism that displaces the classical order and dramatizes the religious historia. Other familiar historia such as Saint George and the Dragon, 1555/6 (Figure 3), are similarly confused by a tumultuous, surging motion that wrests figures from their expected relationships. Here, the escaping princess leaps towards us through the plane, whilst the Saint and the dragon are left in the distance, a small crescent formation on the receding hills. Tintoretto gives us puppets and masks in place of human pathos; construction and artifice in place of naturalism; violence and extremities in place of clarity and order; dissonance and restlessness in place of the serenity of form. An overriding preoccupation with force seems to be the prevailing impulse, over communicative function. These were paintings that were difficult to ignore, even if they could incite dislike. I found myself turning to the scholarship in order to fathom what seemed to me to be an incoherent reaction. But

xviii

Prologue

Figure 1 Jacopo Tintoretto, Christ among the Doctors, 1541/2, oil on canvas, 197 × 319 cm. Museo del Duomo, Milan. Photo: Museo del Duomo, Milan.

Figure 2 Jacopo Tintoretto, Last Supper, 1547, oil on canvas, 157 × 443 cm. San Marcuola, Venice. Photo: SCALA.

accounts of Tintoretto’s idiosyncrasies, of his difference, are scarce. Although he is an established fixture in the sizeable literature on Venetian Renaissance painting and acknowledged as one of the three major representatives of sixteenth-century Venetian painting (together with Titian and Paolo Veronese), his position has been described as ‘somewhat ambiguous and insecure’.2 It has been claimed that ‘the small number of publications on Tintoretto is out of all proportion to his importance’ and

Prologue

xix

Figure 3 Jacopo Tintoretto, Saint George and the Dragon, 1555/8, oil on canvas, 158 × 100 cm. National Gallery London. Photo: SCALA.

that his oeuvre ‘continues to be misunderstood’.3 Indeed, following a sharp surge of interest in the early twentieth century, art history’s engagement with this most singular painter fell away and has never quite returned.4 Even his great installation at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, one of the most magnificent and certainly the largest cycle of religious paintings ever produced by a single artist, has been relatively neglected.5 Why?

1 Tintoretto: A Problem for Art History?

How else can one write, but of those things which one doesn’t know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other.1

B

eside the numerous pictorial innovations through which one could intimate Tintoretto’s provocation, and beyond the strange and unfamiliar look of these works, was the sense of

something for which the language of art history fell short. There was an obscure need to address, if not necessarily to correct, what scholars have characterized as Tintoretto’s ambiguity. To this end I was intrigued by the kinds of problems the subversion of tradition might pose to reception and to thinking, and in what ways it could account for the registers of imperceptibility that I was encountering in the scholarship. Was ‘ambiguity’ a feature of the work, or was there something within art history’s methods, assumptions, and ambitions that fostered it?

Tradition and contextualism To begin, it seemed that one had to attend to the disciplinary preoccupations with the category of tradition and the method of contextualism – that is, the attention to the historical context of an artist’s production as determining factors in that production.2 In Tintoretto’s case, one does not need to look far to find evidence of this preoccupation. In the survey of contemporary scholarship published to accompany the 2007 Prado retrospective, the inscription of the work within artistic tradition – be it a tradition of genre, period style, or iconography – dominates.3 Tom Nichols’ Tintoretto: Tradition and

2

Tintoretto’s Difference

Identity, 1999, – the first full-length study to be published in English since Eric Newton’s Tintoretto in 1952 – situates even the most idiosyncratic aspects of Tintoretto’s practice within the category of tradition, the historical contexts of his practice, and the construction of the artist’s identity. Here, tradition emerges as a category of analogy by which difference can be identified, and the unknown brought back to the known. But why must enquiry begin with what is known? It is arguable that the insistence to contextualize Tintoretto, to read him as a representative of his time and place, no matter how obscure, imprecise, and fluid this sense of context, has more to do with the pervasive inclinations and internal developments of the discipline of art history than with the peculiar nature of his works and what they invite or compel.4 The desire to ‘securely moor’ the work of art within its historical context is, I would contend, a testament to the ongoing legacy of the social art history of the 1960s and 1970s to which Michael Baxandall’s inordinately influential concept of the ‘period eye’ – which advocated the reconstruction of the ‘mental and visual equipment’ that informed the production and reception of a work in its historical time and place – was foundational.5 With all his difference, Tintoretto is still subject to such mooring. Under the banner of contextualism, the question of experience emerges as somewhat impoverished, a state reflective of a given set of lived conditions. But what happens when a patron is shocked or disappointed by what he encounters, or when no one knows what to say about a particular work? When Tintoretto’s contemporary, the notorious satirist and man of letters Pietro Aretino, abruptly changes his assessment of Tintoretto from laudatory to sceptical, are we obliged to grasp this apparent capriciousness through an understanding of circumstance? When Tintoretto’s ‘breakthrough’ work, the Miracle of the Slave, 1548 (Figure 4), divides the opinions of those with purportedly the same ‘mental and visual equipment’ how are we to understand this? What do we say of a work that confounds the established ‘cognitive apparatus’ and terminological frames of a particular spacetime? How might we approach works that continue to confound successive generations? How do we apprehend such difference? Contextualism cannot adequately attend to such questions, or cannot do so other than negatively, since it returns difference to the identifying terms of circumstance. Here, I am inclined to concur with Georges Didi-Huberman when he remarks that ‘contextualist historiography … has been incapable of theorizing relationships of difference with any cogency or conviction’.6 The flaw in the contextualist approach, he continues, is its assumption that a period considered through its own eyes is coherent, that a time is identical with itself.7 Rather, all periods are heterogeneous, marked by anachronisms, and differentiated by the currents and forces that course through them. As Henri Focillon once remarked, two artists may have lived and worked at the same chronological moment but nevertheless have belonged to irreconcilable artistic realities. Such is surely the case with the elderly Titian and the young Tintoretto. To say they lived at the same time, in the same historical circumstances, and participated in the same cognitive apparatus is to grossly undermine their irreducible differences,

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differences that accounted for the fertility and vibrancy of the artistic production that followed in their respective wakes.8 For Hubert Damisch the inadequacy of contextualism lies in its failure to grasp the crucial question of why we look to a particular work now. He argues that ‘there is absolutely no way to look at a work through the “period eye” as Baxandall would have us do. The issue is that we, in our own time, look at works of the quattrocento, and the question is, why is it that a historical work of art interests us, given that we should only be compelled by works of our own time which belong to the same context as we do?’9 The historian’s task, Damisch thinks, is not to restore the putative identity of the past, but to affirm its difference for us in the present, that difference by which we are drawn to it in the first place. Whilst the meaning and scope of context may have changed over the course of discipline’s history, its methodological and conceptual stakes arguably remain consistent – namely, the foregrounding of the work of art as a piece of history whose difference is relativized against the intelligible background

Figure 4 Jacopo Tintoretto, Miracle of the Slave, 1548, oil on canvas, 416 × 544 cm. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: SCALA.

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of circumstance.10 Some scholars applaud the triumph of this approach for its reinforcement of our awareness of the position of images in history, and concomitantly, of our awareness of the distance separating us from the circumstances of their creation. Historical reconstruction, the reimaging of those dimensions of experience that surrounded a work of art and that comprised its ‘fullest significance’, is essential to an understanding of the work, such scholars claim.11 We are brought to mind here of the ‘cognitive distance’ that Erwin Panofsky, grounding his approach on the Renaissance’s self-conception of its difference from the classical past, famously declared to be a necessary feature of the modern idea of history and of all rational scholarly work. Distance, he claimed, enables the scholar to build up ‘comprehensive and consistent concepts of bygone periods’. 12 Founded on the apprehension and affirmation of such distance, contextualism would appear to find itself on firm territory then, re-invoking and upholding established and hallowed precedents of disciplinary practice. But what does such disciplinary propriety have to do with Tintoretto’s work? Historical reconstruction reimages past dimensions of experience within the broad spectrum of history – but what of the experience of a work in the present? Is this something that eludes the understanding and significance of which contextualists speak? It seemed to me that Tintoretto’s works invited another type of beginning, one that could affirm the aporetic experience of their difference – where we take the aporia to designate, after Aristotle’s formulation, a knot which one does not know but to which the difficulty of our thinking points: the obscure impulse to inquiry.13 And indeed, Tintoretto’s works offer many signs of such invitation. The lack of consensus regarding his position with respect to historical time and place is just one of them. Some scholars have aligned Tintoretto with the Central Italian traditions of painting and the Mannerism of Michelangelo and Giulio Romano, in this way detaching him from the context of Venetian painting traditions.14 Others have seen him as the quintessential representative of the Venetian school. For numerous scholars, Tintoretto is the true disciple of Titian, and ‘fully representative of a Golden Age of Venetian Painting’.15 An artist who may never have left his native city and who produced nearly all his work, certainly his most important work, within its churches, Scuola, and palaces, for many Tintoretto is utterly intertwined with Venice itself – with its aesthetic, its sensibility, its history, its intellectual climate, and of course its artistic traditions. Tintoretto’s modest life, his devotion to the Venetian scuole and Venetian patrons, his prolific output for the religious, civic, and private buildings of the city (in addition to his paintings for the interiors of these buildings, Tintoretto painted many frescoes for the exteriors of domestic buildings – as such, in the sixteenth century, he would have been extremely visible), his standing as a citizen, and even his choice to be buried simply in his parish church – the modest Madonna dell’ Orto, where an unadorned tombstone sits in an undecorated chapel alongside the startling exuberance of some of his greatest works – are for them testament to the inextricability of his Venetian identity and his artistic practice.

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But it is not only the question of whether Tintoretto is more or less Venetian that is debated. Scholars also seem unable to agree on the time or period to which he belongs, or upon his status with respect to a particular epoch. For some he marks the end of an era, the end of the Venetian golden age,16 the end of the Renaissance,17 and even the end of painting.18 Whilst for others, he marks the dawn of a new age, ‘the representation of a new generation’,19 the birth of later sixteenth-century art,20 the age of the baroque,21 and even the dawn of the modern – ‘a modern artist, clothed in the garb of Classic Art’.22 Such inconsistency is more than a squabble over chronologies. It is irreducible too to the question of the ‘changing fortunes’ of the artist through different epochs, for we encounter divergent and contradictory views within the same epoch, the same year, and even the same scholar. How then might we attend to it?

Representational thought It is precisely in his character as ‘a slippery figure that resisted easy categorization’23 that Tintoretto’s problematic function for a certain kind of art history – or perhaps more precisely, for a certain kind of thought – may be said to reside. Indeed, the issues I have been raising are arguably not specific to art history but concern the problem of thinking as such and the limits of a kind of thinking that art history, but not only art history, assumes. One might argue that Tintoretto’s difference is imperceptible to a representational image of thought – a thought that recognizes itself and its object in advance of its operation, which seeks to identify its objects, and which is carried out for the sake of furthering the knowledge of that which it thinks.24 Context and tradition are just two vectors of such representational thinking – their modes and their objects recognized in advance of the act of inquiry, their terms serving to bring difference under the limits of identity. What matters is not only that such tropes inscribe the historian’s investigation in facts, in the putative ‘past as it was’, and in the myth of objectivity. It is instead that such tropes uphold a representational mode of thinking. It is not that context and tradition are in themselves redundant notions, but rather that by being treated as designations cast over art history’s field of objects in advance of its inquiry to endow its plural analyses with resemblance from within to constitute a common and recognized territory, they limit the thought of art, subjecting that which is most obscure, deviant, and idiosyncratic to the levelling mechanisms of representation.25 In fact, it seems that the question of how art history thinks is rarely directly addressed. Four decades ago, Svetlana Alpers remarked that ‘it is characteristic of art history that we teach our graduate students the methods, the “how to do it” of the discipline (how to date, attribute, track down a commission, analyse style and iconography) rather than the nature of our thinking’, and it is arguable that her

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diagnosis still holds currency.26 Whilst Alpers did not elaborate on what she meant by ‘the nature of our thinking’ – going on to equate it, in a way that I think is misleading, with ‘the intellectual history of our discipline’ – her remark points to an important distinction between method and thought; between thought uncritically conducted through method and thought as critical reflection upon its own nature. This preoccupation with method has been associated with a retreat from reflections on the nature of the artwork. Some have felt that concerns with aesthetics and the ontology of art are at odds with more typically art historical concerns with material and historical specificities.27 The former, they claim, put to work universal, ahistorical, and generic categories, whilst the latter focuses on the ‘specificities’ of art in particular contexts. Betraying more outdated views, others have feared that an admission of aesthetics and philosophy of art would compromise art history’s proper and objective study of artworks by admitting ‘personal taste’28 – a fear arguably traceable to the discipline’s self-identification as ‘the historically rigorous or scientific study of art in the Germanic tradition of Kunstwissenschaft’.29 It is in this vein that James Elkins distinguishes between art history as ‘concerned with what is “irreducibly visual or ungeneralizably singular about artworks”, and aesthetics as that which “abstracts” or “generalizes” these singularities’. But such a claim seems to overlook the fact that art history can identify itself with the study of historical particulars whilst nevertheless relying on the generic structures of method to do so.30 This tension between the aesthetic and the historical appears in recent assessments of Tintoretto. Those who argue for Tintoretto as a ‘painter’s painter’, a painter concerned above all with the visual, formal, and material qualities of his medium, are criticized for ‘de-historicising’ his art.31 On the other hand those who claim that it is precisely the work’s pictorial qualities that make it more than a historical datum, in so far as these qualities continue to affect us today, nevertheless frame these ‘affective structures’ within ‘historical and cultural data’, thus re-contextualizing the very thing that survives. Is there no medium between a de-historicizing formalism and a contextualizing historicism? The history of art history reminds us that there is. As we know, many of the founding fathers of art history understood aesthetics and philosophical investigations into the nature of art to be an integral part of historical inquiry, and would no doubt find the dichotomies just outlined quite foreign to the practice of art history. In his 1764 The History of Classical Art, Johann Winckelmann stated that his aim was not the ‘mere narration of events in chronological order’, the discussion of the external circumstances framing the work, or the biographical accounts that characterized his predecessor’s accounts of art. Rather, he wished to construct ‘an edifice of knowledge’ and to extract ‘the very nature of art … from the work themselves’.32 A century later, Heinrich WÖlfflin argued that historical study should recuperate ‘the greater theme of “art” from its exile into the philosophy of art,

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and that ‘the natural thing would be for every art-historical monograph to contain some aesthetics as well’.33 This, for Wölfflin, is a philosophical enterprise: aesthetics involves the investigation into the ‘value and essence of a work of art’, as well as the search for ‘new concepts’ to be injected into history. Alois Riegl felt that art historical value was both historical, in considering the object as an objective and stable record of its time, and aesthetic, as a record of art, dependent on the Kunstwollen of the time. Wilhelm Worringer argued for a new ‘non-classical’ and ‘inorganic’ aesthetics that could overcome the old antipathy between ‘classical’, ‘dogmatic’ aesthetics and art historical attention to material particularities.34 Both Max Dvořák and Hans Tietze presented a philosophy of spirit alongside an attention to historical facts, and Panofsky’s call, which he shared with his colleague Edgar Wind, for a ‘theoretical art history’, and which manifested as a concern with the a priori conditions of art historical investigation – those frames of reference by which artistic practices as ‘network of phenomena’ or ‘artistic problems’ can be made intelligible – are well known.35 Such approaches are bound to a critical examination of the implicit postulates of the discipline, which is to say a critique of the nature of art history itself. It is such fertile intertwining of history and aesthetics at the disciplinary foundations of a rigorous and critical art history that is obscured by contextualizing preoccupations.36 Returning to a moment within the discipline of art history when aesthetics was folded into historical investigation, and where art history explicitly acknowledged its philosophical content, we are reminded that it is from an aesthetic point of view that we can address art in its distinction, as a sensible affair rather than a circumstance of historical fact. It seems to me that the shock of the experience of Tintoretto does not lie within the purview of historical fact; rather, it is a problem concerning the registration of the sensible. Addressing the latter requires more than the positivist (by which I mean naively empirical) study of either pictorial qualities or historical circumstances. An evaluative, critical, and diagnostic approach is called for, one oriented towards the ontological and affective excess over given data. The most interesting art history has always been philosophical, and always involved aesthetics. So why the suspicion voiced by some art historians against philosophy and philosophical aesthetics?37

Theory, philosophy It would seem that ‘theory’ has a lot to answer for. In fact, it seems that what some art historians may be suspicious of is in fact theory, and theory understood in a certain way. The quotidian notion of theory (already quite far from the Greek theoria, meaning disengaged contemplation), as a set of general principles on which the practice of an activity is based, seems harder to shake off than we, writing after theory’s so-called golden age in the late twentieth century, might have imagined. The

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understanding of theory and practice as distinct realms persists despite the challenges levelled to it by the post-Hegelian, and Marxist, conception of praxis as ‘practice informed by theory’ as well as ‘theory informed by practice’ – a designation that was intended to unite theory with the strongest sense of practical activity.38 It was precisely this expanded sense of theory within which many of the pioneering intellectual figures of the 1960s and 1970s – Louis Althusser, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice MerleauPonty, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, Julia Kristeva – were working. Foucault’s view of theory as an instrument that ‘does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice’, but which is practice, might be taken as symptomatic of this new intellectual attitude.39 But within the academic humanities today, and especially since the 1980s, it would seem that this intellectual history of theory is too often forgotten. Subjected to changes in the academy and integrated into a way of thinking where it is retained as something both familiar and consumable and yet still external to a particular discourse, theory has become a meta-discipline of sorts, often approached and invested as method – a tendency itself reinforced by the intensifying agenda of ‘research’.40 Within the professionalization and institutionalization of the humanities between the 1980s and 1990s, and the so-called Americanization of French theory, theory became a ‘new faith’, and a compulsory part of any serious curriculum.41 What Yve-Alain Bois called the abuse of theory was ‘based on the illusion that one could ingest swiftly, without previous homework, a mass of difficult and often contradictory texts’.42 To ‘do theory’ was to be au fait with a potpourri of fashionable theorists, and have the skill to mix and match in what John Rajchman has called a ‘quotational patchwork’.43 It is perhaps not surprising that such an illusion of assimilation and possession was followed by disenchantment, a disenchantment that still persists, and of the kind that James Elkins understandably voices.44 One would have reason to be disenchanted with such an apparatus, and the insidious power relations it supports. But this does not mean we need to be disenchanted with theory. As Terry Eagleton has remarked, ‘If theory means a reasonably systematic reflection on our guiding assumptions, it remains as indispensable as ever.’45 Baudrillard saw the value of theory slightly differently, but no less as a critical tool, in its preservation of the enigma of the object, and affirmation of an excess incompatible with the impoverished real. Here the role of theory is not one of analysis or reflection, but defiance.46 Within the field of art history, Keith Moxey’s 1974 book The Practice of Theory did much to re-inscribe post-structuralist theory at the heart of art historical investigation with its claim that theory was essential to the writing of history not least for permitting a grasp of the ideological positions of the historian. What links these voices together is not the canvasing of a particular theoretical ‘position’, and certainly not a conception of theory as a meta-function, but the endorsement of a particular attitude of thinking – as problematizing, critical, and critically reflective upon its own nature. Reminding ourselves of the practical regime of theory affirmed by those figures of the 1960s and 1970s, alongside the philosophical element within the history of art history, has important

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disciplinary functions in the present. It is perhaps instructive to art historians, and to the thinking about art works, to reengage with the intellectual projects within which theory and its concepts were presented as immanent to practice and as tools for critique. One might argue that it is time to circumvent the fate that has befallen theory within the institutionalized frameworks of disciplinary study and renew the project of a pragmatism of the concept. Indeed, and as the critical art historians at the foundations of the discipline were already showing us, is this not one of the putative goals of art historical thought – to produce thought, concepts, ideas, that are immanent to the object/ material of its experience, rather than applied? Art history has always embraced its own empiricism – not just as a foregrounding of experience whereby art historical work begins with the encounter with the actual object, but an embracing of how experience can produce concepts adequate to that experience. The practice of art history could be theoretical, then, without applying theory, and certainly without applying a theory that does not itself ask to be applied. Thus, it is not a question of turning to philosophy or theory as disciplinary regimes that exist in their distinction to art history. It is rather a matter of renewing the philosophical element of art history, that element pertaining to the question of thought. This is a project that involves art history’s own disciplinary history even if only to traverse it.

Towards Deleuze Theory is itself a practice, no less than its object is. It is not more abstract than its object. It  is  a  conceptual practice, and it must be judged in terms of the other practices with which it interacts.47

It is with such problems in mind that I turn to Gilles Deleuze. Whilst Deleuze is generally associated with the generation of intellectuals attuned to the new ways in which the relations between theory and practice were being lived, both he and Félix Guattari retained an idiosyncratic relation to this lineage.48 Thus, we find the authors of A Thousand Plateaus arguing that the relations between theory and practice are not those of the totalization that commonly goes under the name of praxis. Rather, they see these relations as ‘much more fragmentary and partial’.49 In the first place, a theory is always local, related to a limited domain. Secondly, as soon as a theory takes effect in this local domain, it encounters obstacles which force the theory to migrate to another domain. As such, praxis is newly understood ‘as a network of relays from one theoretical point to another’.50 In consequence, theory is far from a general set of principles to be applied, akin to a methodology that can be superimposed onto thinking – something that would only affirm the superiority of theory over practice whilst retaining their distinction. (In fact, in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze explicitly disavows method as such, as a rational enterprise that operates through presuppositions.51) There is rather an ongoing

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passage between theory and practice that unhinges both and prevents either from settling into any ‘form of interiority’, whilst at the same time avoiding any synthesis. No privilege is given to theory as an operation of analysis, description, or reflection upon a state of affairs. Theory does not work to clarify, render intelligible, ground, or impart new sense to a practice. Instead, its operations must be understood as reciprocal to the actions of practice upon it, and through this reciprocity grasped as rupture, displacement, critique, and affirmation. As such, one could not legitimately use Deleuze’s ‘theoretical’ work to explain Tintoretto’s practice (or indeed, vice versa). A different kind of engagement must be staged. Deleuze’s reimaging of theory relates to his remarks, running through his work, about a ‘practical philosophy’, a philosophy that concerns itself with the practice of concepts. Such a notion of philosophy is cast in the afterlight of Martin Heidegger’s view of thinking ‘in the grand style’, thinking as ‘action in its most powerful – though most silent form … [where] the actual distinction between ‘mere theory’ and useful praxis makes no sense’.52 Throughout Deleuze’s writings, it is this notion of practical philosophy, and not theory as a grand system, that is put to work. Philosophy has nothing to do with general principles. It is instead a practice of concepts that ‘must be judged in the light of other practices with which it interferes’.53 One of these practices is art. But art, as Deleuze and Guattari claim in their final text What Is Philosophy?, is itself a practice of thought. Art thinks not through concepts, but through sensations. As such the question raised by the encounter with art is not to think ‘about’ art, and employ philosophical theories and concepts to this end, but rather to address the way art thinks, to consider the kind of thinking at stake in its work, and the demands this makes upon those who encounter it. A further question emerges: If art history too is understood as a practice of thought, how are we to grasp the movement of thought between art, philosophy, and art history? To practice a philosophical art history along lines sketched by Deleuze’s philosophy would be to do something other than appeal to theory or philosophy as a system external to art history and with a supposedly privileged access to concepts. A philosophical art history would be philosophical not in its application to the ready-made concepts produced by philosophy, but insofar as it itself thinks. Every act of thought implicates philosophy when it involves the creative use, reuse, and misuse of concepts. Every act of thought functions as a practical philosophy when it involves concepts in such a way that is immanent to experience – when concepts relate to real circumstances rather than ideal essences.54 Philosophy is not thinking about thinking – it is being forced to think by the encounter with what has not yet been thought. This forcing retroactively exposes the presuppositions and habits that prevent us from thinking. In place of any cognitive distance then, thought is understood here to bear a fundamental proximity to its material, not simply to the actual art works, images, and artefacts that are given to the historian to investigate, but to the material in its difference. This point needs emphasis. A practical philosophy or theoretical practice is for Deleuze a philosophy of difference, which is to say a philosophy attentive to that excessive element of experience that

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defies representation and the structures – linguistic, semiotic, and cognitive – that support thought’s recognition of itself and its objects. This is not a question of imparting to difference metaphysical priority, and transcendent value. Neither is it concerned with externalizing difference and invoking a ‘difference to’ or ‘difference from’. Alongside other notable ‘philosophies of difference’ in late-twentiethcentury French thought, we can address the singularity of Deleuze’s thought in its orientation to a non-dialectical conception of difference, a conception of difference in itself that deviates from the (Hegelian) sense of dialectic as contradiction resolved through the work of the negative. Beyond philosophy’s perimeters, we are indeed still all too used to grasping difference through the primacy of identity, and casting difference as external to the terms that differ. Surprised by a painting by Tintoretto, we measure the difference we perceive to Venetian painting, to Michelangelo, to other paintings made by the artist, even, perhaps, to our own preconceptions. These terms supply the ground for our representation. But what if we were to remain with difference? This is not a straightforward proposition. Even Georges Didi-Huberman, who has done so much to make the thinking of art’s difference central to a critical re-examination of the discipline, may be said to be guilty of the foreclosure of difference in a ground. In attending to the excess of Fra Angelico’s images to the epistemological exigencies of visibility and legibility within which, he argues, the scholarly discipline of art history remains embedded, DidiHuberman understands this difference dialectically, even if this dialectical movement ultimately resists synthesis. The image’s figural or visual difference is dialectically opposed to the epistemological exigencies of visibility and the legible. The liberations effected by the visual figure are always grounded upon an original legibility, and the corresponding task for art history is ‘to think not-knowledge when it unravels the nets of knowledge. To proceed dialectically.’55 Such a practice of art history is unable to think difference positively, and in itself. Against the tendency to think the not-known in relation to the known that haunts even the most refined scholarly innovations, Deleuze’s philosophy attacks and expels the negative with unrestrained force. For ‘difference implies the negative and allows itself to lead to contradiction only to the extent that its subordination to the identical is maintained’.56 Each time we assess Tintoretto by the way he deviated from a norm, or augmented a given trope, each time his difference is considered as contradicting a state of affairs or as presenting a strangeness whose nature is perceived through what is not strange, we subordinate his difference to the identical. But what would it mean to think difference positively? There is something inadequate in thinking of Tintoretto’s difference as an isolated outsider. Sartre’s scintillating reading of the artist – which Deleuze, himself author of a few cursory remarks on Tintoretto, must surely have known about – as a lone, embattled figure ‘disliked by everyone’ and exposing ‘an age that refuses to recognise itself ’ in its condition of uneasiness, feels outdated in its existentialist rhetoric, and strikes me more as a vehicle for Sartre’s reflections on the relations between

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politics and aesthetics and the artistic condition of ‘commitment’ than of the singularity of Tintoretto’s problem.57 Tintoretto was never forgotten or ignored or cast aside, as Sartre would have us believe. He was in fact highly visible in his time, integrated in his artistic and social milieu and recognized (even if begrudgingly) by his contemporaries as one of the city’s great painters. It is this kind of disregard for historical facts that justifiably feeds art history’s suspicion of theory. Critique must be a more nuanced operation, one that perhaps treats facts as symptoms rather than overlooking them altogether. The conundrum and the intrigue of Tintoretto’s situation is that together with the recognition he received there was a fundamental misrecognition, a misrecognition all the more difficult to categorize for that. This is the compelling problem: that alongside his visibility, Tintoretto was enigmatic from a perspective framed by the normative values of his time. That is, his difference is not simply a difference to an existing state of affairs. It is rather an internal difference, the nebulous reality of a practice that insists as a singular type of problem – not as something to be solved by the philosopher or the historian, but a posing that places a new type of demand on thought. A philosophical theory is nothing more than an elaborately developed question, and nothing else: by itself and in itself, it is not the resolution to a problem, but the elaboration, to the very end, of the necessary implications of a formulated question.58

Deleuze offers a conception of thought as a movement that begins with a problem, where a problem is not a provisional and subjective moment in the elaboration of knowledge nor that which demands solution but rather a posing that ontologically precedes, and exceeds, the dialectic of identity and negation.59 A problem persists beyond actual solutions and is not posed to be answered. Here, Deleuze’s intuitions recall Derrida’s critique of the form of the question. The work of philosophy is other, Derrida claims – to transform the question, to destroy it in its question form.60 Deleuze’s intimations also recall Foucault’s remark that ‘we must think problematically rather than question and answer dialectically’,61 where this thinking problematically invites something other than identifying or defining a problem. How long Tintoretto took to paint a particular work, what pigments he used, who commissioned it and why, what is being represented in the historia – none of these are problems. They are questions that can be answered, and whose answers are presupposed by the form of the question. It is the case that we ask the questions we know we can answer. Recognizing the form of the question gives hope that an answer is possible. Exposed by the everyday and banal act of asking questions is the indolence of a thinking that proceeds through the forms by which it recognizes itself. In contrast, what Deleuze calls for is registration of the way a problem becomes a problem, the way it continues to be a problem long after and beyond our attempts to solve it, and to provoke thought long after it has provoked us.62 Tintoretto’s practice is problematic. There is a sense in which it will always be so. In this regard William Osler’s remark on Tintoretto’s concern with ‘more extended problems than had been solved in painting’63 is unexpectedly apposite. Even more pertinent is Newton’s comment that the ‘key to his

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art’ is to be found in ‘the kind of problems he tried to solve, and the spirit in which he solved them. They were problems that, in the mid-sixteenth century, belonged to the future, problems that neither Michelangelo nor Titian could have understood’.64 If a representational image of thought is one that recognizes itself in the act of thinking, then the model of question and answer may be understood as representational in its complicity with recognition: I only ask questions that can be answered, I only ask questions whose answers are precluded in the form of the question, I formulate the question as a tracing of an answer I already know or am able to predict. The question/answer model is representational too in its epistemological orientation – I wish to know the answer to the question: why does Tintoretto paint fi gures in the way that he does? In turn, the hierarchy of art and the ‘knowing’ discipline of art history are upheld: art poses the questions that scholarship solves. But how does one write about problems? How does one write problems without converting them into potentially representable phenomena? Are we brought here to a disciplinary blind spot?

Deleuze and art history One might wonder why art history has been so reluctant to take up Deleuze’s philosophy. Whilst the discipline has long been engaged with twentieth-century continental philosophy, with Benjamin, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and perhaps most of all Derrida all receiving not insignificant levels of attention, it is striking how little engagement there has been with Deleuze.65 And we find this reluctance reciprocated: exploration of the problems of art history from within Deleuze scholarship is almost non-existent; the questions of historicity, historical study, and the thought of art’s history falls away from examinations of ‘Deleuze and Art’ in favour of engagements with questions of the ontology of art, and – reflecting Deleuze and Guattari’s own proclivities – a consistent privileging of late-nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century art practice.66 Why this two-way blindness? One reason might be Deleuze’s apparent disdain for history, his view that history acts only as the set of ‘negative conditions’ for a creation that escapes it.67 Deleuze does not explicitly develop a philosophy of history and rarely engages with the question of history except to critique it in the name of the more, in his view, powerful and profound movement of becoming.68 Another reason might be the relative paucity within Deleuze’s works of any sustained engagement with art history, and the dispersed nature of his comments on the visual arts. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation is the only sustained text on a visual artist, and whilst it certainly offers suggestive potentials for methods and concepts of art history, these are never developed – indeed, that is not the book’s ambition (it is, rather, how Bacon’s paintings express a ‘logic of sensation’). Lastly, it can sometimes feel unclear as to what ‘art’ actually designates in Deleuze’s work. It is attended to both as a material

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thing and a concept, in its actuality as works and as the process of creation, and even as the character of thought itself. At this point the valency of Deleuze’s work for art history might feel a little tenuous. Finally, there is the fact that Deleuze never engaged in the preoccupations with text and reading that took hold of many of his contemporaries – including Derrida and Barthes – preoccupations that have been cited as a reason for their uptake by art history.69 The question of ‘reading’ a picture never surfaces in Deleuze’s work. Instead, he constructs a semiotics built on a theory of non-linguistic signs, and it is this expanded semiotics that he puts to work with respect to visual artworks. Whilst one might presume that this refusal to privilege language, text, and reading makes Deleuze’s work even more relevant to disciplinary preoccupations with the image and the visual work of art, it is in fact – and in part because of the significant impact of literary studies on art history in the 1980s – more likely a reason for his relative absence within the discipline. In any case, a study of the potentials of Deleuze’s thought for art history seems overdue. But by pointing out this lacuna I am not advocating its correction by way of an appeal to Deleuze. As already indicated, one of the most compelling aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy is its orientation towards theoretical contamination, even of itself – a contamination that obstructs the dynamics of appeal and application through the continual restlessness of the system. This resistance is, or arguably ought to be, precisely its draw. The fact that Deleuze constantly questions the supremacy of philosophy as a practice of thought, and even calls for his own concepts to be reworked and ‘played on a new stage’ (a  notion that recalls the etymology of theoria (contemplation) from the Greek theorein (to contemplate, or look at), which in an intriguing coincidence was, according to some sources, once used frequently to denote the ‘looking at’ the stage of a theatron (theatre))70 is what makes his work relevant to anyone intrigued by the way art’s work commands a thinking beyond prescribed methodologies and frameworks, including Deleuze’s own. What his philosophy offers is an approach to thinking that can be harnessed and put to work on horizons and for problems far beyond the platforms upon which he himself operates. In this way, my attention to Deleuze is not essentially different from my attention to Tintoretto. Indeed, my use of Deleuze’s philosophy proceeds from his assertion that philosophy neither simply aids reflection (‘no one needs philosophy to reflect on anything’) nor furthers communication (‘which only works under the sway of opinions in order to create “consensus” and not concepts’). It positions itself against the notion that philosophical concepts may be used to stage a reflection on art that art is unable to achieve itself.71 Instead, the work of art will provide the occasion and the model for thought as creation.72 Thus the view still held by some that philosophy is concerned solely with ideas, and does not consider works of art as ‘equal’ material to philosophical texts but merely as ‘the object of philosophical reflection’73 is firmly overturned. This critique is staged through a reworking of the relation between empiricism and the concept, a relation that, T.J. Clark was right to point out, does not feature in the positivist orientation of art

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history. For Deleuze, experience is the source of concepts, but the notion of ‘source’ undergoes a radical revision. Only in the encounter with something exceptional are we impelled to think. Deleuze will thus develop a notion of a ‘transcendental’ or ‘superior’ empiricism, an empiricism that partakes in a creation of concepts ‘along a moving horizon’.74 In this regard, he retains the precepts of one of his most esteemed teachers, Henri Bergson, who once wrote that ‘an empiricism worthy of the name … would measure out for the object a concept appropriate to only that object, a concept of which one could barely say that it was still a concept because it would apply only to that thing’.75 As a type of empiricism that involves both the experience of that which is imperceptible within quotidian experience and the production of concepts immanent to experience, Deleuze’s philosophy of transcendental empiricism offers a compelling means of addressing the empiricism of art history, and the function of art – as sensible being – for thought. To be distinguished then from any notion of an application of philosophical concepts to the domain of art history or art, an investment of Deleuze’s philosophy can thus have nothing to do either with the ‘importation’ of concepts that T.J. Clark, writing in the late 1980s, claimed was required for art history to renew its methods, or with the more general appeal to theory upheld by a logic of consumption and institutional sanction that has haunted disciplinary relations for decades.76 When Deleuze speaks of philosophy as a ‘toolbox that has to be used’ and ‘that has to work’, these are tools that modulate in contact with the material to which they are held up, ready to be deformed beyond recognition. Concepts ‘don’t turn up ready-made, they don’t pre-exist: you have to invent, create concepts, and this involves just as much creation and invention as you find in art and science’. In fact, ‘nothing positive is done, nothing at all, in the domains of either criticism or history, when we are content to brandish read-made old concepts like skeletons intended to intimidate any creation’.77 Against the communication of the concept which upholds concept as product, a marketable form upon which disciplines thrive, we need an undisciplined ‘pedagogy of the concept’.78 A radical materialism and pragmatism of the concept whereby the concept is immanent to its problematic, sensible, non-conceptual field of use replaces the essentialism that would accompany any ‘application’.

The diagram It is with these sentiments in mind that I turn to Deleuze’s concept of the diagram. This concept is used as a guiding tool for my explorations of Tintoretto’s work, motivated by its dual orientation to, on the one hand art, aesthetics and painting, and on the other to the constructivist ontology associated with Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, an outlook that offers notions of experience, thought, and temporality through which a Deleuzian critique of history, and art history, may be put to work.79

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The diagram is one of the more intriguing concepts in Deleuze’s philosophy. It is key to Deleuze’s philosophy of constructivism. Whilst it is an explicit feature only in the work with and after the onset of the collaboration with Guattari in the 1970s – informed by the latter’s own development of diagrammatics in his articulation of an ‘asignifying semiotics’ as a pragmatic critique of the structuralist Signifier,80 the constructivist ontology that informs its articulation is arguably already at work in Deleuze’s early writings – in his studies of Foucault, and in Difference and Repetition, with respect to the idea that thought constructs its own object through a synthesis of difference.81 Deleuze presents the diagram as the agent of construction, the function through which the construction of difference takes place. We know diagrams as maps. The later Deleuze, interested in cartography, geo-philosophy, and the ‘nomadic’ movement of creation, assumes this spatializing connotation. But diagrams are not actual maps that can be seen and held, picked, and folded up. Diagrams have no form and substance of their own. Rather, they are purely operational, their function being to construct new reality. As such, diagrammatics involves a transcendental element, an element beyond given reality. Deleuze understands diagrams as maps of sensation rather than maps of form – that is, as maps that make something new of sensations. So, in Francis Bacon, he analyses Bacon’s paintings as involuntary mappings of matter and sensation, by which the painter conjures forces into relations and produces new figures. This constructive process involves a preliminary destruction – in the case of painting, the destruction of pre-existing pictorial ‘clichés’ that haunt painting before it begins. Remarks made in an interview on A Thousand Plateaus give further indication of how Deleuze and Guattari distinguish their notion of a diagram from quotidian definitions: What we call a ‘map’ or sometimes a ‘diagram’ is a set of various interacting lines (thus the lines in a hand are a map). There are of course many different kinds of lines, both in art and in a society or a person. Some lines represent something, others are abstract. Some lines have various segments, others don’t. Some weave through a space, others go in a certain direction. Some lines, no matter whether or not they’re abstract, trace an outline, others don’t. The most beautiful ones do. We think lines are the basic components of things and events. So, everything has its geography, its cartography, its diagram.82

From these remarks it is clear that Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the diagram diverges from the commonsensical notion of the diagram as a map with visible form, and that it involves much more than the question of painting and the question of art. Even though diagrams can eventually assume visible forms (as they do in the paintings of Francis Bacon), in their operation and ontological status they are what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘pure matter-function’, ‘with no form or substance of [their] own’83, and whose lines traverse different, intertwined registers of experience – the social, the linguistic, the aesthetic, and the psychic. In this way, the diagram’s etymological roots – from the French diagramme, from the Latin diagramma, from the Greek diagramma, meaning ‘geometric

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figure, that which is marked out by lines’; from diagraphein ‘mark out by lines, delineate’, from (dia-) ‘across’ and (graphein) ‘write, mark, draw’ – are recast. Deleuze and Guattari’s reinvention of the diagram takes us beyond its graphic and visual associations to focus on the productivity of the interval – it is what is across writing, something nebulous and as yet unformed, that constitutes the matter of the diagram. Whilst the key philosophical figures for Deleuze’s development of a constructivist philosophy are Kant, who provides its critical horizon, and Nietzsche, who guides its critical impulse, the concept of the diagram itself is borrowed from others: C. S. Peirce (who defined it as a type of sign, an ‘icon of intelligible relations’),84 Foucault (who defined it as a map of forces, or power relations), and even Francis Bacon himself (who, speaking of the process of painting, characterized it as an immanent map of pictorial form). Deleuze first mentions the diagram in ‘Ecrivain non: un nouveau cartographe’, 1975, a short essay on Foucault.85 The most sustained attention to the concept is found in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Francis Bacon (1981), and Foucault (1986). In all these texts, the diagram is presented as an agent of ‘construction’ that involves a destruction of existing ‘givens’ and the production of the ‘new’. The diagram functions as a map that does not represent what already exists, but ‘constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality’.86 In A Thousand Plateaus it is defined as a map of what is ‘blocked’ or ‘over-coded’ in a regime of signs, that permits ‘original interactions’ across continuums of matter. Neither a determining infrastructure nor a determining transcendental idea, the diagram is an immanent map that ‘plays a piloting role’. It does not stand outside history, but is instead always ‘prior to’ history. In Francis Bacon, the diagram is ‘the operative set of asignifying and non-representative lines and zones, line-strokes and color-patches’ that catastrophizes the visual givens of painting and permits the emergence of new ‘possibilities of fact’ in the form of a ‘figure’. In his celebrated interviews with David Sylvester, Bacon himself spoke of making a graph (diagramme in French) by chaotically, and accidentally, slashing the painting with rags and brushes; this graph would ‘unlock areas of sensation’, acting as the means to break with latent figuration and create new form.87 In Foucault, Deleuze describes the diagram, after Foucault’s own use of the term, as the ‘map of relations between forces’, a synthesizer ‘which makes power-relations function’, which produces thought as something that ‘must happen to thought’ and which ‘makes history’ by destroying previous realities and constructing points of emergence.88 Understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s cartographic philosophy, and the way in which the diagram functions as the agent of construction, thus requires us to explore the interrelation between the three registers of diagrammatics in their work – semiotics, aesthetics, and temporality. My focusing of the Deleuzian philosophy through the concept of the diagram assumes a somewhat experimental character. Against any representational exposition, I invest diagrammatics as the vector for a reframing of Deleuze’s philosophy to attend to problems posed by Tintoretto’s practice. Respecting Deleuze’s ethos of philosophy as creative rather than re-productive, reflective, or communicative,

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I set out a reconstruction of the diagram beyond Deleuze’s explicit pronouncements, a playing of the concept of the diagram on the ‘new stage’ set by Tintoretto. With this aim in mind, it is tempting to say of the diagram what Foucault once said of discontinuity – that it is both an instrument and an object of study.89 That is, the diagram is both a characteristic of what Tintoretto does (our object), and what we do in our experience of Tintoretto’s work (our instrument), offering one way in which the thinker of art and the work of art might be brought into a productive proximity. In what follows I will explore this double-sided play of the concept of the diagram through the three interlocking registers of constructivism, aesthetics, and time.

2 Tintoretto and His Time?

V

isionary, opportunist, magpie, genius, compulsive worker, tireless innovator, even ‘peppercorn’ – the bewildering range of labels attached to Tintoretto is testimony to the difficulty in classifying

him or in defining his importance. Reputedly self-taught, Tintoretto – born ‘Jacopo Robusti’ in 1519 to Giovanni Battista Robusti, a dyer (tintore) of silk cloth – does not clearly belong to any school or movement.1 Time and again, we are reminded of the confused reactions to his work by his contemporaries, who praised his inventiveness but were critical of his lack of conformity to pictorial taste, as expressed through his speed (prestezza), impetuosity, and the unfinished (non-finito) character of his paintings.2 His spirited, fiercely independent personality no doubt did not help win over the sceptics in a climate that encouraged tradition and continuity in the arts. A sharp contrast to the noble, learned, and international ideal of the painter embodied by his worldly contemporary Titian, Tintoretto was to all accounts, impulsive, uncouth, impudent, tactless, poorly dressed, mercenary, and quick witted to the point of being brusque.3 Such defiance and abrasiveness also characterize Tintoretto’s works from its earliest expressions. A group of Sacra Conversazione of the late 1530s introduces to us the distinctive preoccupations that would continue to motivate his work. The Holy Family with Saint Jerome and the Procurator Girolamo Marcello, 1537 (Figure 5), a painting which ‘unmistakeably herald[s] a new artist’,4 presents to us a familiar subject rendered strange by eccentric cropping, powerful figures, unexpected rhythms, and the vigour of a precocious brush. In a sealed, curtained space devoid of natural light and as though lit by lamp, the Christ Child perches precariously on the lap of a detached, almost archaic Madonna – Bellini-esque, but far less human – whilst a muscular Saint Jerome looms across the right half of the painting. The elimination of incidental background detail intensifies the scene’s wayward sense of motion. Three years later, in another Sacra Conversazione (Figure 6), one of ‘almost insolent sureness’ by an artist just twenty years old, the Christ Child splays out diagonally, puppet-like on the lap of another diffident mother. Clustered tightly around this uncomfortable couple a group of saintly onlookers lean inwards as though born on invisible waves. Their rippling, voluminous garments and

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Figure 5 Jacopo Tintoretto, Holy Family with Saint Jerome and the Procurator Girolamo Marcello, 1537, oil on canvas, 148 × 193 cm. Private Collection, Lucerne. Photo: Christies Images/Bridgeman Images.

Figure 6 Jacopo Tintoretto, Sacra Conversazione. Virgin and Child with the Infant Baptist and Saint Joseph, Elizabeth, Zacharias, Catherine and Francis, 1540, oil on canvas, 171 × 243 cm. Private collection. Photo: Fondazione Zeri.

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the rhythmic dance between the haloes ringing their five holy heads produce a rocking motion at odds with the calm one might expect from this pastoral scene of worship. This logic of forces, speeds, and thresholds, of unnatural and irrational spatiality and artificial, almost inhuman figuration, is the abiding motivation of Tintoretto’s works. Theophile Gautier remarked that ‘Tintoretto fully justifies his name of Robusti; he could not have been more forceful’.5 And John Ruskin, one of the painter’s staunchest advocates, felt that Tintoretto ‘rejoices’ in force.6 Swooning, collapsing, swaying, his figures often seem to have been hit by the force of the event they are witness to or partaking in. This is a restless world where action has been dramatized both through compositional innovations and through the use of an unnatural, intensified light that casts subjects into an ambiguous twilight. A drama, at odds with the pictorial theatrics of his time, unleashes itself in the stage-like spaces and aerial figuration of the works of the 1550s – the set of works for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, and the grand laterali like Christ Washing the Feet of his Disciples, 1547–9 (Figure 7), or the numerous variations on the Last Supper that Tintoretto painted throughout his life (it was one of the subjects that most preoccupied him) – and in the uncontained and wild frenzies of arabesques and dramatic lighting of the works of the 1570s and 1580s, most notably of all the great cycles of works for the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, the monumental paintings for the altar of his parish church of the Madonna dell’Orto, the moving group of works in San Giorgio Maggiore (the last that Tintoretto painted) and the monumental Paradise, 1588–92 in the Ducal Palace, which was for many years the largest painting in the world (Figure 8). Though clearly a workshop piece (earlier sketches by Tintoretto reveal the evident difference in quality), the composition is characteristically Tintoretto’s. The rhythmic eddies of the early Sacra Conversazione have here become swirling vortices. From the nervous epicentre of the Madonna and Child radiates a series of concentric circles, each teeming with a dense collection of saints, apostles, martyrs, disciples, evangelists,

Figure 7 Jacopo Tintoretto, Christ Washing the Feet of His Disciples, 1547, oil on canvas, 210 × 533 cm. Madrid, Prado. Photo: SCALA.

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Figure 8 Jacopo Tintoretto, Paradise, 1588/92, oil on canvas, 700 × 2200 cm. Sala del Maggiore Consiglio, Palazzo Ducale, Venice. Photo: SCALA.

and angels, toppling over each other in a massed confusion of vertiginous rings and tonal patches in a space without measure or depth. With new dramatic intent, Tintoretto radically augments the extant preoccupations of Venetian painting – the representation of Christian stories, the myths of Venice, the observation of nature, and the depiction of the human figure. The intimacy, lyric poetics, and stillness typical of early-sixteenthcentury paintings by Cima da Conegliano, Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Carpaccio, Palma Il Giovanne, and the young Titian are displaced by agitation, power, and supra-human feeling. The palette has darkened, and the sense of scale is unprecedented: Tintoretto’s paintings are generally massive, made for the large public spaces of churches and confraternities rather than for private devotion or pleasure. Their aesthetic reflects this awareness of site: painted to be seen from distances and from unusual angles, these works are remarkable architectonic events of installation that incorporate the dynamics of experience into their compositional planning and execution. Nevertheless, Tintoretto’s innovations indicate concerns beyond particular site-specific demands. His preoccupation with drama seems to be not simply a response to the given conditions of painting in his time, and its motivation is hard to decipher. Conflicting realities are synthesized without harmonious resolution, their discord integral to the dramatic effect. Reality and fantasy, the Pagan and the Christian, epic majesty and irreverence, the sanctimonious and the comic, combine in his work in unexpected and often humorous relations. In a playful Creation of the Animals, 1551–2 (Figure 9), as God creates the world, we find two little rabbits engaging in conversation, watched by an eager lizard (Figure 10).

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Figure 9 Jacopo Tintoretto, Creation of the Animals, 1551–2, oil on canvas, 151 × 258 cm. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice.

Figure 10 Jacopo Tintoretto, Creation of the Animals (detail), 1551–2, oil on canvas, 151 × 258 cm. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice.

This is a world of ambitious spatial constructions expressing a logic of diagonals, arcs, and curves, impossibly recessional spaces, and extreme proportions which often lose all sense of ground. In the late works, the religious element approaches a supra-sensible and cosmic register unprecedented in Venetian painting. Landscapes are enervated, muscular clouds are fringed with sublime light, and mysterious tonalities dominated by chiaroscuro conjure crepuscular realms. All this is matched by a delight in the material, and a fast and free hand – Tintoretto’s works present some of the most astonishing and unrivalled examples of abbreviated painting in the history of art.

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The praise that eluded Tintoretto during his lifetime would only arrive a century later, in the effusive writings of the unconventional Venetian writer Marco Boschini, who celebrated Tintoretto for his painterly qualities (pittoresco), and for his ‘great thoughts’.7 Since then, Tintoretto’s work has continued to generate violent reactions and divide art historians and critics: winning praise from the romantics, castigated by the neo-classicists, and finding favour again in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when he was reinterpreted as a pioneer of modern expressionism and impressionism. Yet whilst characterizations of the experimental and unorthodox nature of Tintoretto’s work have never been in short supply, these characterizations are often accompanied by a recuperation of his unorthodoxy within the very structures from which he is said to be differing. Take for instance the assessment made by Norbert Huse of Christ among the Doctors, 1542 (Figure 1), as a work which ‘no handbook on art could find satisfactory’8 – a remark that suggests a deviancy from the norms that such a handbook, with the arguable purpose of serving as a guide to knowledge, aims to present us with.

Christ among the Doctors With its bewildering space, artificial palette and lighting, and enthusiastic display of disproportion, there is an almost comical subordination of the historia. Statuesque, violently twisted foreground figures dominate, whilst in contrast Christ is a minute, almost unnoticeable figure at the very end of an acutely receding pathway. A most disorientating effect is produced through this exaggerated setup, the stifling interiority of the space, and the bizarre figures that populate it. Is it not strange then that Huse attempts to make sense of this painted oddity by revealing its allegiance to ‘the successful Venetian painting of the time’? For him, Christ among the Doctors ‘attempts to surpass all the successful Venetian painting of the time by quotation: Bonifazio in the Virgin, Paris Bordone in the centrepiece, Pordenone in the two old men at the front, and finally, at the very front on the right, even Michelangelo’s prophets on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel’.9 It is not the quality of this surpassing that Huse focuses on, but the territory that is surpassed. So it is hardly surprising that he is forced to admit that, when measured against these standards, ‘most of [the painting] is not successful’. The ‘incorrect’ ‘size relationships, the ‘unexplained changes of scale’, and ‘the lack of differentiation’ in the ‘accompanying groups’ are unintelligible held against the norms those artists present us with. Whilst intimating the inadequacy of existing criteria of evaluation, Huse nevertheless persists in attempting to evaluate Tintoretto by these very criteria. This is not an uncommon approach in the art historical scholarship. The tension revealed by this example of interpretation is just one symptom of the inadequacy of discursive structures and values of intelligibility when confronted by difference. Wanting to show Tintoretto’s atypicality, art historians have often paid recourse to ‘the background of a wider general trend’.10 As such, many of the innovations that he introduces into painting are under-considered or overlooked by an art history that seeks to place him, and keep him, in his time.

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Is it possible to attend to Tintoretto’s difference outside such inevitably generalizing frames? Attention to his reception by his contemporaries might offer a fitting springboard from which to embark upon an answer. For whilst Tintoretto was recognized in his own time as one of Venice’s leading painters, his works were considered enigmatic from the perspective of the recognized values of the time. It is in the fault lines of this reception that we can thus begin to perceive the challenges his works present.

Annibale’s hesitation I have seen Tintoretto sometimes equal to Titian, sometimes inferior to Tintoretto.11

Carracci’s remark has been taken to represent the inconsistency of Tintoretto’s artistic production and the ambivalence it generated even amongst his supporters, which included the Bolognese painter himself. It is a strange remark. That Tintoretto is ‘sometimes equal to Titian’ suggests that Titian is his superior. One might expect Carracci to go on to say ‘and sometimes inferior to Titian’. That would consolidate the hierarchy and close the matter. But we are instead told that Tintoretto is ‘sometimes inferior to Tintoretto’. What is meant by this? Is Carracci suggesting that Tintoretto is at his best Titian’s equal, at his norm Titian’s inferior, and at his worst inferior to his own standard – in which case Tintoretto is simply inconsistent, but generally inferior to Titian? Or might Carracci’s remark suggest that there are two criteria here, one supplied by Titian and another supplied by Tintoretto? That to be ‘inferior to Tintoretto’ is incomparable to being the ‘equal of Titian’? Carracci perhaps could be pointing to a branching of criteria, of Tintoretto’s from the norm supplied by Titian. If this were the case, might the sense of this remark be that this is an artist for whom existing criteria are not quite adequate? This poses an intriguing question. What might it mean, especially in an era when artistic models were so important, to set one’s own standard? Carracci was not alone in this assessment of Tintoretto’s inconsistency, and his, at times, baffling independence. Even today, scholars note ‘the rich variety and unpredictability from commission to commission’, the ‘switches in style, manner and technique’, and ‘unusually plastic or protean’ style.12 Tintoretto’s works are highly variable, and he seemed to have been in a great hurry to paint as much as possible. In his own time, Tintoretto’s deviancy from extant norms was explained by contemporaries in terms of his ‘eccentric’ personality and his lack of conventional training.13 Often it seems as though his supporters felt the need to justify their support, by couching their praise in the recognized terminology of the day and ascribing to his work acceptable qualities.14 Of his critics, some, notably Giorgio Vasari, were compelled to acknowledge his importance, but did not or could not expand their critical resources

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to this end – with the consequence that Tintoretto remains in Vasari’s writings a perplexing outsider. More hardened voices, such as the artist Federico Zuccaro, saw Tintoretto as expressly undermining the values of painting of the age, and singularly responsible for upsetting the realm of painting.

Aretino’s U-turn The first critical assessment of Tintoretto’s work is found in a letter to the artist in February 1545 by the notorious satirist, composer of erotic poetry, and man of letters, Pietro Aretino. The writer thanks the artist for the two ceiling paintings (Apollo and Marsyas and Argus and Mercury) he had given to him. He praises Tintoretto for his ‘beautiful, lively and effortless’ figures, his speedy execution, and for his ‘total understanding’ of the composition prior to execution that allows the figures to emerge ‘almost as of their own accord’. He praises the ‘soul or spirit’ animating the work, which gives it a quality beyond mere ‘industry of hand’ and he forecasts a bright future for the artist.15 These terms of evaluation are in accord with contemporary criteria of evaluation. In a second letter dated April 1548, addressing Tintoretto’s controversial painting of that year, the Miracle of the Slave (Figure 4), Aretino is again full of praise for his ‘superlative’ art. He applauds the drawing of the figure of the slave, its ‘lifelike’ colours and rounded lines, and the realism of ‘the faces, airs and expressions of the crowd’ such that ‘the spectacle seems rather real than simulated’. However, this time Aretino cautions Tintoretto on his speed of execution.16

Miracle of the Slave Let us pause to consider this ground-breaking painting, the work that forcefully announces Tintoretto’s arrival onto the artistic scene. A dramatic intensification of action, painted as though unfolding in real time, the work shows the moment when Saint Mark intervenes to stop the persecution of a slave. Through a sparkling blue sky, the astonishing figure of the Saint cloaked in fluttering vermilion drapes, hurtles to the ground. The onlooking crowd is suspended in forced disbelief, shocked into positions that would be impossible to hold. Perched on the precipice of the next, this is painting as extreme suspension. A muscular female figure, her back to us, her left knee precariously placed on the ledge of the column base, twists her neck as she strains to view the action. A bald bearded man, sitting high above the crowd, stretches out his arm as if about to leap off his seat. Rather than the narrative content of the historia – the story of the Slave and his faith – it is the miraculous moment that is the real ‘subject’ at work. The arrested time of the miracle halts the sense of temporal passage, displacing the narration of the story with the intensity of drama.17

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A new approach to composition is at work here. It assumes the form of staging, complete with elastic actors, a stage, an off-stage (which includes the ceiling from which the aerial figure, almost like a deus ex machina, must be suspended, and the wings through which the marginal figures creep into the scene), an illusionistic backdrop, the framing devices of the column on the left and the architectural structure on the right, theatrical spot-lighting, and the prop-like objects such as the torturer’s tools. The artificial spatiality with its contracted appearance and disproportionate recession reminds us that this is no natural set-up. A composition based on serpentines – the epicentre of the action runs in a serpentine line from the violently foreshortened figure of the Saint through the figure of the turbaned torturer to the naked foreshortened figure of the slave – breaks the normative lateral axis, producing a destabilization that emanates from the work’s centre. Grouped in tense, animated postures, and straining to get a better view, the crowd spills out beyond the picture frame. They are actors, rhetorically intensifying the miraculous event, but not through any individual expression. Their faces are masks, betraying no personal register. Instead, it is through bodies contorted and twisted, grouped into a heaving, impersonal mass, that expression takes effect. It is curious how none of the figures look at each other or register one another’s presence. Even the mother and infant on the far left lean away from each other with arched spines. The triumvirate of Saint, Slave, and torturer – the affective fulcrum of the scene – is also oddly disconnected, in part perhaps because their faces are cast in shadow. In fact, the entire scene, whilst affecting, is strangely lacking in pathos. There is here an acute lack of the humanity to which the project of the historia, as the depiction of ‘significant’ human actions, was meant to be tied. For Leon Battista Alberti, as he writes in his famous 1435 treatise De Pictura, it was naturalism that aided the performing and teaching of the historia. But here it is the contrary effect, which Alberti deplored, of things being scattered loosely and confusedly, ‘with the result that their “historia” does not appear to be doing anything but merely to be in a turmoil’ that Tintoretto confronts us with.18

Historia The centrality of the requirements of narrative in Renaissance painting has long been acknowledged. Historia, ‘the absolute and indeed the ultimate work of painting’ as eulogized by Alberti, remained in the Cinquecento the name given to the depiction of the great deeds of great men.19 Whilst historically the term referred to the telling of things done and seen, after Alberti it came to designate the form of narrative painting in general. Prior to Alberti, in the Middle Ages pictures had been classified as historia on the basis of their biblical subject matter. Alberti expands the category of historical subjects to include classical themes.

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In classical Latin, historia refers to both res gestae (‘things done’) and narrations of the event. Alberti retains this duality of sense whilst focusing the question of telling history on painting’s method of rendering visible. For him, the construction of a historia was grounded in a technical system of composition that provided a structure whose elements could correspond to the elements of a text. It was a structure made up of a tripartite process of composition: surfaces making up members, members making up bodies, bodies making the historia, assuming an arrangement that could permit a ‘reading’.20 The bodies that constituted the human actions of the historia should, Alberti advises, ‘move among themselves in a definite harmony with the matter that is being transacted’.21 The inheritance of the Aristotelian understanding of the representation of human action being the highest form of art is here accompanied by Aristotelian hylomorphism: subject matter should correspond to form. The artifice of drama must be at all costs avoided. For conformity to the ‘factuality’ of the historia, painters should imitate the movement of bodies in nature, and not the hysterical and unnatural movements of actors that exaggerated reality. In the sixteenth century historia was also related to the notion of invenzione, which the sixteenthcentury Venetian writer Ludovico Dolce called ‘the fable or history which the artist chooses’, and which another important mid-sixteenth-century Venetian writer, Paolo Pino, called ‘the finding of poetry or history’.22 This association of history with fable and poetry – an association begun by Petrarch – suggests values other than truthfulness: history was an artistic construction. In a gesture that reveals the impact of classical antiquity – according to which, if we take Cicero’s word, historia was the greatest work of rhetoric23 – history was considered an art and not a science, and as such open to embellishment. But even if correspondence to an actual event was unnecessary, paintings still needed to communicate their stories. To this end, Alberti superimposes the categories of classical rhetoric onto painting, in the process classifying painting as an art that needed to convince rather than document.24 In Venice, however, and in contrast to contemporary developments in Florence, the tradition of narrative painting retained the sense of documenting and chronicling. The assimilation of Florentine humanism into the visual arts began only at the turn of the sixteenth century, in the paintings of Giorgione and Titian. But the great narrative paintings of the late fifteenth century, such as those by Jacopo Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio, were little influenced by theories of humanist rhetoric and were still aligned with a medieval conception of history as chronicle, so much so that they would be called upon by later chroniclers to authenticate the truth of their written histories. As one commentator has remarked, such painting ‘was more than an evocation of the past, or a vehicle for inciting religious devotion through the representation of a miraculous event. It was, in fact, a piece of testimony with a status equivalent to a public document or written history.’25 In these paintings, factual value mattered more than rhetorical flourish.

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Things have changed radically by the time we reach Tintoretto. He seems to have had little interest either in documentary truth or in sustaining narratives that could be easily read. This was something that annoyed Jacob Burckhardt, who felt that the second generation of Venetian Renaissance painters, and Tintoretto in particular, trivialized the historical event by denying primacy to its dramatic core and obscuring narrative legibility through their setting of the action. Indeed, there is perhaps no painter of this generation who shows this obscuration of legibility more forcefully and insistently than Tintoretto. And yet looked at a certain way Tintoretto seems the most pious of painters. Whilst he painted subjects from history and mythology, and maintained an impressive output of portraits, it was for his depiction of the biblical and Christian legends for which he is perhaps most renowned.26 Tintoretto is widely held to be the most prolific painter of religious images in sixteenth-century Venice, and religious subjects constitute the vast majority of his work.27 His paintings proliferated across the religious institutions of Venice, making him far more widely visible in sacred settings than his contemporaries, and this remains the case today since so few of his works have left their original locations. The artist’s dedication of his practice to the religious life of his native city seems indubitable. By all accounts, he himself was a deeply pious man and maintained lifelong alliances with the churches and confraternities of Venice, the most well known of which was his relationship with the Scuola Grande di San Rocco.28 Nevertheless, as Burckhardt intimated, Tintoretto’s treatment of religious themes was in the most part unconventional, indicating an experimentalism free from representational custom and propriety. Often, the choice of religious and mythological subjects seems to be a pretext for the staging of spectacular dramas – hence the apparent obsession with the event of revelation and other miraculous occurrences. One notes, for instance, the almost complete lack of the inherently meditative and quiet Sacra Conversazione form that is a constant presence in the works of Giovanni Bellini, Cima, Giorgione, and Titian. Tintoretto’s own early interpretations of the Sacra Conversazione were already little dramas, where charged, invisible forces are more important than the figures themselves. The formal norms of the tableau composition – the flow of the narrative line parallel to the plane, the setting of the story in the foreground – are upset by Tintoretto’s exaggerated, deep recessions. It was such independence that worried his contemporaries and continued to cause bewilderment. The Miracle of the Slave exposes this motivation towards dramatizing an event and overwhelming religious storytelling, whether as rhetorical narrative or chronicle. So it is surprising that the work that was initially returned to the painter as unsuitable (the confratelli were divided over whether or not to accept a canvas that could be viewed as an affront to Venetian tradition, a deliberate challenge to the tableau conventions that had governed mural decoration of the Scuole), and which would so fiercely divide the critics, is considered by Aretino in quite normative terms. These are terms he also applies

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Figure 11 Titian, Miracle of the Newborn Child, 1511, fresco, 340 × 355 cm. Scuola del Santo, Padua. Photo: SCALA.

to that paragon of Venetian painting, Titian, from whose work Tintoretto’s own so evidently departs. A brief look to Titian’s stolid Miracle of the Newborn Child, 1511 (Figure 11), the artist’s best-known painting of a miracle, indicates just how radical is this departure. Here, a group stands on level ground in a neat row from left to right, their heads all marking a uniform line. The miraculous infant is an object to be gazed upon serenely, but hardly incites extreme response. Even the child’s mother seems unmoved.

The stage-method He also had a quite different mode of working from others and with his new inventions was always exceeding, so to speak, strangeness itself.29

The Miracle of the Slave suggests a new idea of composition. And indeed, we find Tintoretto devising a method unprecedented in its time. Ridolfi tells us of it: He also practised by making little models of wax and clay, dressing them up with bits of stuff and studying carefully the contours of the limbs with the folds of the draperies. Some (fi gures) he also set up in little houses and in perspective scenes made of wood and cardboard, and by contriving little lamps in the windows he introduced therein lights and shadows. He also hung some models by threads to the roof beams to study the effect they made when seen from below, to get the foreshortening of figures for ceilings. By such methods he composed strange inventions.30

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The importance of this invention, this ‘stage-method’, can hardly be overstated. It is, I argue, the practical source of the drama in Tintoretto’s works, and of their unorthodox effects, from their contorted and deformed figures to their irrational spatiality and lighting, to their box-like settings detached from nature. Artificial maquettes displace the human body as model.31 Suspended from the ceiling, they give rise to the curious aerial figures that recur with such frequency through Tintoretto’s works. The ‘little houses’ could be manipulated and viewed from multiple points of view, permitting a new sense of space assembled from a hyper-complex construction of planes, serpentine formations, and extremized settings. The sketch for Venus and Vulcan (Figure 12) indicates this practice of staging, with its egg-headed figures, box-like interior complete with little cut-out windows, and unusual angles. An endless combination and recombination of compositional relations is made possible. Newton asks us to imagine how ‘by a slight shift in angle of the containing box, a slight raising or lowering of the lamp that provided him with a substitute for the light of day, a new window cut here, an existing one blocked up there, the same simple interior could be made to offer an infinite number of different effects, each with its own set of dramatic possibilities’.32 In the seventeenth century Boschini had already noted such potentials, remarking that when Tintoretto tested his compositions it was necessary to move not one figure but many others around it, and that it was the stage-method that permitted this constant adjustment. Perhaps it was this inherent dynamism of process that led Hans Tietze to make the evocative observation, in the early twentieth century this time, that ‘Tintoretto’s figures do not stand on a firm stage, but on the rolling deck of a ship in rough sea’.33 Through the minute and ongoing adjustments that it would have permitted – from the intensity and direction of lighting, to the number of ‘windows’ cut into the box, to the postures of the figures – the stage-method confronted painting with a multiplicity of effects. This included the possibility of

Figure 12 Jacopo Tintoretto, Venus and Vulcan, 1550–1, pen and brush, black ink, and white lead on blue paper, 20 × 27 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Kupferstichkabinett). Photo: SCALA.

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light as a free element, free to produce a pattern unrelated to the structural pattern of the objects it illuminates. This treatment of light, one of the most distinctive characteristics of Tintoretto’s works, is most apparent in his later works where light haphazardly breaks into the composition at unexpected points and from unpredictable angles. Often, Tintoretto conjures different kinds of lighting within the same painting – man-made, natural, and celestial sources are juxtaposed with apparently little concern for the historia. Note for instance the disjunction between the silvery metallic light on the large tree and the fiery orange hues of the horizon in the atmospheric Mary Reading in a Landscape with Palm, 1582/7 (Figure 14). Functioning as a construction that forces a rupture with nature as model, whilst at the same time problematizing the very notion of model insofar as it is replayed in the act of painting rather than transferred, the stage-method expresses the artificial principle of Tintoretto’s works at their very source. The use of wax maquettes is strongly apparent in Tintoretto’s extraordinary figure studies, with their egg-shaped puppet heads and their cursive or angular poses.34 Pliable wax could be shaped into impossible postures, permitting the inhuman capacities, excessive speeds and elasticities of a machinic body, movable in every limb and movable in every direction. Their puppet-like quality is transmitted into the paintings, giving the distinct impression of an art not concerned with individual persona. The generic faces of Tintoretto’s figures rarely express emotion. Expression is instead concentrated in the body – bodies which, always in action, are buffeted by forces from within and without. The numerous figures in flight that populate Tintoretto’s works, dancing and catapulting through the air, are undoubtedly amongst the most striking products of this experimentation with maquettes. These figures truly fly; unlike comparable aerial figures in sixteenth-century works (such as Giulio Romano’s famous frescoes in Mantua’s Palazzo del Te, which many scholars feel Tintoretto must have seen) they do not rely on the supports of clouds or wind Gods. Sometimes collecting in dense clusters – the angels in the San Rocco Annunciation, 1581–2 (Figure 15), clustered in a somewhat phallic-looking formation, and the two extraordinary paintings that face each other in the altar of Madonna dell’Orto: the Worship of the Golden Calf, 1560–2 (Figure 16), and the Last Judgement, 1560–2 (Figure 17) — and sometimes painted singly, like the Saint Mark of the Miracle of the Slave (Figure 4) that hurtles like a lone cannonball, they impart to Tintoretto’s works qualities of freneticism and weightlessness. The small angel in The Martyrdom of Saint Paul, 1552 (Figure 18), sweeps through dramatically parted clouds towards the kneeling Paul. Twenty years later, a much larger and more muscular angel bursts through the plane to save Anthony in The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1577 (Figure 19). In Saint Roch in Prison Visited by an Angel, 1567, the eponymous martyr is visited by a magnificent angel, hurtling laterally in glowing, diaphanous blue robes (Figure 20). In Saint Mark Rescuing a Saracen from a Shipwreck, 1562–6 (Figure 21), the eponymous saint scoops into the

Tintoretto and His Time?

Figure 13 Jacopo Tintoretto, Mary Reading in a Landscape, 1582/7, oil on canvas, 425 × 209 cm. Sala Terrena, Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

Figure 14 Jacopo Tintoretto, Mary Reading in a Landscape with Palm, 1582/7, oil on canvas, 425 × 211 cm. Sala Terrena, Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

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Figure 15 Jacopo Tintoretto, Annunciation, 1583–7, oil on canvas, 422 × 545 cm. Sala Terrena, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

frame from the top right-hand corner, a curled knot of billowing draperies. In the Descent into Limbo, 1568 (Figure 22), two flying figures – Christ entering from the left, and an angel departing from the right – create a powerful undulating rhythm that makes the painting feel like a snapshot of a longer moment. The works in San Rocco, particularly those in the Sala Superiore, are testament to an all-over aerial acrobatics, where the sense of ground or horizon is obscured in a cascade of figures that defy natural laws of gravity and quite often seem to be falling out of their frames. In Elijah Fed by the Angel, 1577–8, the Angel dives headlong into the sleeping Elijah, nearly crashing into him (Figure 23). In the Vision of Ezekiel, 1577–8 (Figure 24), two groundless figures are held in powerful compositional tension by their aerial contortions, geometrically supported by the radiating circles of light that make up God’s halo and provide the figures with their armature. In the Brazen Serpent, 1575–7 (Figure 25), the entire composition is supra-terrestrial. We no longer know what is ground and what is sky as contorted figures floating in a stepped space are pushed flat to the plane as though pinned to glass. Scholars have acknowledged the importance of the stage-method to Tintoretto’s innovations. Newton remarks that paintings such as the Finding of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–6 (Figure 26), and the Feast at Cana, 1561 (Figure 27), ‘could hardly have been envisaged … without such an artificial aid’.35 In the former, a collection of disconnected figures are distributed in the foreground of a gloomy, sealed, interior space that recedes diagonally in a series of dramatically lit arches to a tiny darkened panel. Into this little square panel has been cut a thin opening within which two figures crouch against brilliant illumination. We can well imagine Tintoretto at work with his miniature cardboard box, slitting pieces with a paperknife, holding a bright torch from one side

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Figure 16 Jacopo Tintoretto, Worship of the Golden Calf, 1560/2, oil on canvas, 1450 × 590 cm. Madonna dell’Orto, Venice. Photo: SCALA.

and observing the effects from the other. The Feast at Cana is another intriguing stage-picture. It too works on a strong diagonal axis and is also set in a room that is little more than the interior of a box, with windows as cut-out square holes through which strong light streams to cast exaggerated shadows across the festive proceedings. A sharp receding perspective created by the lines of the room and the elongated dining table emphasize the artificiality of the constructed space.

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Figure 17 Jacopo Tintoretto, Last Judgement, 1560/2, oil on canvas, 1450 × 590 cm. Madonna dell’Orto, Venice. Photo: SCALA.

But whilst the stage-method is in fact well known within the scholarship, its radical nature is often made intelligible through an appeal to the historical state of affairs: on the one hand, the established practice of using maquettes, and on the other, the contemporary interrelations in Venice between painting and the theatre.36 There was indeed a long studio tradition of using small models. The practice of using maquettes and artificial illumination was certainly not unknown to Tintoretto’s contemporaries – Veronese, Bassano,

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Figure 18 Jacopo Tintoretto, Martyrdom of Saint Paul, 1556, oil on canvas, 430 × 240 cm. Madonna dell’Orto, Venice. Photo: SCALA.

Palma il Giovane, and Titian all experimented with this practice.37 However, the construction of a staged assemblage that we find in Tintoretto has no known precedent.38 Tintoretto invests the use of models and the construction of an apparatus like a toy theatre not only as a means of studying the figure from various angles and in various postures, but to conjure entire scenes of unnatural, constructed effects. This artificial conceit runs counter to the residual naturalism in the paintings of his contemporaries. Even today, where the signs of puppetry in Tintoretto’s work are a little too evident, scholars can seem uncomfortable. With its extremely wooden figure of the Saint, the otherwise unremarkable Saint Demetrius and a Donor from the Ghisi Family, 1544–7 (Figure 28), has been dismissed as wrongly attributed to an artist whose works are marked by an ‘understanding of the human figure and the mastery of disegno’.39 Faced by a peculiar and unexpected artifice, we are returned to the more reassuring terms of a naturalist convention, even though such artificial puppetry is consistent with Tintoretto’s working methods.

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Figure 19 Jacopo Tintoretto, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1577, oil on canvas, 282 × 165 cm. San Trovaso, Venice. Photo: SCALA.

Figure 20 Jacopo Tintoretto, Saint Roch in Prison Visited by an Angel, 1567, oil on canvas, 300 × 670 cm. Church San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

Tintoretto and His Time?

Figure 21 Jacopo Tintoretto, Saint Mark Rescuing a Saracen from a Shipwreck, 1562–6, oil on canvas, 398 × 337 cm. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: SCALA.

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Figure 22 Jacopo Tintoretto, Descent into Limbo, 1568, oil on canvas, 342 × 373 cm. San Cassiano, Venice. Photo: SCALA.

Figure 23 Jacopo Tintoretto, Elijah Fed by the Angel, 1577–8, oil on canvas, 370 × 265 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

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Figure 24 Jacopo Tintoretto, Vision of Ezekiel, 1577–8, oil on canvas, 370 × 265 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

Painting and theatre That there was an intimate relation between theatre and painting in the fifteenth and sixteenth century has long been acknowledged. Some have argued that the two forms were bound together through the shared Renaissance desire for the construction of a unified spatial setting that revealed a humanist debt to the classical ideal of dramatic unity expressed in sixteenth-century commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics.40 Across both theatre and painting, architecture was customarily invested as the setting for significant human action, the historia. This relation between painting and theatre was reciprocal: innovations in the art of theatre borrowed from innovations in painting, namely, the pictorial mastery of perspective, whilst painting enthusiastically imported theatrical devices and elements such as scenography, stage-sets, and theatrical lighting. It was natural that the philosophical concept of perspective that was so closely related to questions of man’s relation to a unified, harmonious, and coherent cosmos would diffuse across the different forms of art in practice and in training. Numerous well-known painters – painters as well established as Mantegna and Raphael – were known to have painted backdrops for contemporary theatre productions, and the majority of Italian stage designers would have been trained in painting.41 This intermingling of the two arts was

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Figure 25 Jacopo Tintoretto, Brazen Serpent, 1575–7, oil on canvas, 840 × 520 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

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Figure 26 Jacopo Tintoretto, Finding of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–6, oil on canvas, 405 × 405 cm. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Photo: SCALA.

encouraged by contemporary writers such as Vasari, who commended and advocated the new stage effects produced by early-sixteenth-century painters. In its illusionistic ambitions, the Italian ‘perspective stage’, disclosed by a front curtain, a centralized, single-point perspective scheme and changeable painted scenery, was indebted to painting, many of whose innovations had predated it by at least half a century.42 Up to the seventeenth century, this perspective stage involved actual solid construction that typically including a proscenium arch, two rows

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Figure 27 Jacopo Tintoretto, Feast at Cana, 1561, oil on canvas, 435 × 535 cm. Chiesa di Santa Maria della Salute, Venice. Photo: SCALA.

of wings leading to a back shutter, an upward-sloping floor with a modulated pavement that emphasized the recession, a downward sloping sky, and receding lines of houses. Only in the seventeenth century was this construction substituted by scene painting on flat surfaces, a shift that reflected the baroque turn from the solid forms of the Renaissance to aerial perspective and illusionistic spectacle.43 Tintoretto’s choice to construct actual staged boxes thus places him at an intriguing junction between two conventions: the theatrics of actual construction and the fully fledged illusionism of a theatrical painting. In Venice, the highly influential theatre designs of Sebastiano Serlio published in 1545 in his second book On Perspective, the first account of perspective scene designs ever to be published, made representations of theatrical backdrop readily available to painters.44 This folio of woodcuts of schematic outline drawings showed complex Renaissance perspective – diagrams of archways, columns, buildings in intricate relationships, culminating in the three celebrated designs of stage-sets for comedy, tragedy, and satiric plays, replaying the ancient Roman distinction as set out by Vitruvius (Figure 29). These designs could be easily transferred into paintings.

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Figure 28 Jacopo Tintoretto, Saint Demetrius and a Donor from the Ghisi Family, 1544–7, oil on canvas, 188 × 88 cm. Chiesa de San Felice, Venice. Photo: SCALA.

Serlio’s designs were founded on the principles of, first, an exact relation between audience and actor/setting, with the eye-point precisely opposite the vanishing point at the centre of the picture; second, the space of the stage-picture unified by one picture plane and one frame; and third, space composed of a succession of planes parallel to the picture plane – a device that allowed for duplication and series and the insertion of devices such as cloud machines between sections. In fact, Serlio

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himself describes a wooden stage he designed for a theatre in Vicenza in 1539 in terms that resonate with Ridolfi’s description of Tintoretto’s stage-method: ‘Diverse lighting is to come from doors and windows; the heavens are to be adorned with a planet moved by a black thread drawn softly by a stage hand and lighting and thunder are to be counterfeited by ingenious devices.’45 Even prior to Serlio’s arrival, theatricality had been an important part of Venetian painting. In the great narrative cycles of Vittore Carpaccio, Gentile Bellini and Jacopo Bellini in the Scuola, we typically find complex architectural settings serving as backdrops for the narrative line of figures that remains close to the plane. In this tableau tradition where we are often presented by spectacles and pageantry unfolding across the plane like a frieze, a tradition upheld in Tintoretto’s own time by Veronese, the theatrical illusionism of space is used to enhance the narrative flow of time. Infact, the compositions of these late-fifteenth-century to early-sixteenth-century cycles could often be called ‘processional’. The work of Veronese is a good example of how this tradition of telling a story by integrating theatrical devices is updated. In such works as the famous 1562 Feast at Cana, Veronese shows himself to be a master of illusionism, and illusionistic, classicizing perspective heavily indebted to Serlio.46 The move from medieval processional art to Renaissance theatre has been described as a move from the art of narrative time whose model was the frieze, to the art of spatial unity whereby each scene is a complete illusionistic image of reality.47 Painting too expresses this move – in Venice it shifts from the processional narratives of Carpaccio and the Bellini to the closed illusionistic scenes of late-sixteenthcentury painters such as Veronese. For Serlio, perspective was a mimetic device – and he urged the artist to make the scene as convincing as possible.48 Vasari too commended his designs for this reason, remarking that his temples, loggias, and cornices all ‘appear to be what they represent’.49 But such a

Figure 29 Sebastiano Serlio. Scena Tragica, 1584 (engraving). Bibliotheque de L’Arsenal, Paris. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

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description seems inadequate in Tintoretto’s case. The motivation has changed. Whilst Tintoretto indeed moves away from the frieze-like narratives of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini, he does not uncritically uphold a classical unified illusionism. From his earliest paintings onwards – such as Christ among the Doctors (Figure 1) – he presents a different ambition. The disruption and undermining of illusion becomes especially clearer in the later works, in their collapse and fragmentation of multiple planes, in their asymmetry and their sense of continuity beyond the frame, in their frequent use of two-point perspective that provided divergent and disjunctive movements and tensions within the narrative structure, characteristics that are developed to profound effect at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Although Serlio’s woodcuts themselves are classical in their unification, symmetry, centring, and closure – they are to be viewed from a central position – they signal a possibility for drama, and a dramatic painting, that extends beyond them. It is this potential of the dramatic beyond the form of theatre or a theatrical painting that Tintoretto takes up.

Tintoretto. From theatre to drama But while intensely dramatic, Tintoretto was never theatrical.50

Tintoretto seems to have been fully integrated into the contemporary milieu of rich artistic exchanges between painting and theatre. Through his relations with contemporary dramatists and writers, including Pietro Aretino, and the poligrafi – the group of writers (including Andrea Calmo and Anton Doni), editors and publishers closely associated with the Venetian printing presses and the theatre, he was actively engaged in the theatre as a designer of costumes and sets for comedies performed by the Compagne della Calza. Ridolfi describes these designs as ‘always extraordinary, marvellously unique and exciting wonder’.51 The fascinating presence in his paintings of theatrical devices such as flying figures and objects that look like props or stage scenery is thus hardly surprising. Note for example the almost grainless wooden crucifix in Saint Andrea and Girolamo, or the transparent globe upon which the figure of God rides in Moses Striking the Rock, 1576–7 (Figure 32). A particularly striking example is the peculiar curtain in the left-hand corner of the Rescue of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–6 (Figure 30). A photograph of this painting before it was apparently trimmed in the nineteenth century shows that the original composition gave even more importance to the curtain, with two men tugging it between them, rather than it being dragged from ‘off-stage’ as the current state of the painting suggests (Figure 31). But can the drama of Tintoretto’s works be understood simply through the historical context of relations between theatre and painting? Unlike some of his Venetian contemporaries, Tintoretto does more than borrow elements from theatre design. What constitutes the drama of his work is something more pervasive than this

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insertion of theatrical devices and props. Neither is it theatre as pictorial illusionism that interests him – surely if that was all he was concerned with, he would not need to go to the trouble of making little boxes and models. Tintoretto appears to be interested in conveying something beyond illusion, beyond representation, and beyond mimesis. With staging, he does not start directly with the picture surface and the framed canvas, or with paint, paper, or pencil: he begins with a box. Whilst other artists are making drawings of sets and copies of Serlio’s sketches, Tintoretto sets out to recreate the sensations of theatrical space. It would seem that it is not only the look of the set with which he is concerned, but drama as an experience that involves senses beyond sight, and a performative quality that traverses the theatrical staging of illusory worlds.52 The use of a box is crucial. It indicates that Tintoretto wishes to bring the sensation of real space into the world of painting, rather than rely on shared mimetic strategies developed by the forms of theatre and painting. If theatricality in Veronese’s works appears as a borrowing of theatrical devices to enhance the pictorial illusion of the real and painting’s narrative effect, Tintoretto’s drama, displaced from the terrain of the canvas and replaced into real space, introduces artifice into the very genesis of painting as something that happens outside painting. The inauguration of painting with such construction signals a trans-pictorial potential, as process is dramatized outside the immediacies of the material substance of paint. Drama becomes an expression and experience of forces beyond the visible appearances of art forms. It is in this way that Tintoretto’s practice augments the conventions of relations between painting and theatre in his time.

Genealogy of the stage-method in Tintoretto’s works Tintoretto’s earliest works onwards indicate his new compositional methods. Christ among the Doctors (Figure 1) is contained within a sealed and acutely receding space. Rows of pillars invoke stage wings as though made of cardboard concertinas. Susanna and the Elders, 1543–4 is an intriguing anticipation of Serlio’s designs, with its acutely centralized one-point perspective, sharply emphasized by an ornamental trellis. A fascinating Agony in the Garden, 1543–4, painted in the same period also reveals Tintoretto’s interest in creating deeply, unnaturally recessional settings (Figure 33). A strange alcove stuffed with an odd ghostly crowd of figures plays the role of the trellis in Susanna – but here, is cast off-centre and rendered in miniaturized scale. In a Resurrection of Christ, 1543–4 (Figure 34) Christ emerges from a box that, in its squat square shape and ungainly and unadorned character, is more a prop than a tomb. In short, in the works up to 1545, there are countless instances of elastic figures, artificial interior spaces, experimental perspective, and dramatic effects of scale and lighting – all indications of a method, or at least a sensibility inclined towards staging well before the publication of Serlio’s Libra.

Tintoretto and His Time?

Figure 30 Jacopo Tintoretto, Rescue of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–6, oil on canvas, 398 × 315 cm. Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: SCALA.

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Figure 31 Jacopo Tintoretto, Rescue of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–6, oil on canvas, 398 × 315 cm (untrimmed). Photo: Warburg Institute.

We see a marked shift in Tintoretto’s treatment of space after 1545, which may coincide with the publication of Serlio’s Libra.53 It seems that Tintoretto lost no time in assimilating Serlio’s designs. Works dated from 1545 already show the incorporation of the trademark tiled floors, stately loggias, obelisks and arches of Serlio’s Tragic scene, and the paintings of this period more clearly approximate a stage upon which the action is set. In Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, 1545 (Figure 35), Tintoretto has transplanted without modification Serlio’s tiled floor and the classical pediment that centres the vanishing point. Painted on an elongated, lateral format (an indication of Tintoretto’s early training as a painter of cassone panels – a training that he will continue to make use of in his later investment of laterali formats54), the space is divided by architectural features such as pillars, colonnades and stairwells whose rational integrity is undermined by an insistent use of diagonals and arcs that forge restless rhythms. Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, 1546 (Figure 36), signals an even stronger shift into new territory. Here the action is all happening up stage, framed within a precisely drawn architectural support. A diligently drawn tiled floor connects the two and leads the eye to an open seascape vista beyond. An X-ray of the painting reveals the importance of the underlying architectonic: the architecture has clearly been painted first, over which the figures are sketchily painted. Just a couple of years later, Tintoretto makes yet another remarkable leap with his impressive Christ Washing the Feet of his Disciples, 1547–9 (Figure 7), a large work of striking tonal clarity and mysterious vistas, laid out on an elongated format. The story is set upon a stage, tiled as usual

Tintoretto and His Time?

Figure 32 Jacopo Tintoretto, Moses Striking the Rock, 1576/7, oil on canvas, 550 × 520 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

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Figure 33 Jacopo Tintoretto, Agony in the Garden, 1543–4, oil on canvas, 145 × 177 cm. Private Collection. Photo: Agnews Gallery, London.

Figure 34 Jacopo Tintoretto, Resurrection of Christ, 1543–4, oil on canvas, 85 × 77 cm. Private Collection. Photo: Agnew’s Gallery, London/Bridgeman Images.

and framed by a Serlian tragic backdrop, which is rendered mysteriously spectral through loose brushstrokes.55 In a deviation from Serlio’s centrality, the vanishing point is set to the far left of centre, producing a long diagonal from the kneeling Christ in the right foreground, to the loggia that is accentuated by the diagonally placed table. Some scholars have noted that the scene itself is

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Figure 35 Jacopo Tintoretto, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, 1544/5, oil on canvas, 122 × 217 cm. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice.

remarkable for the lack of explicit drama – the apparent casualness of the figures, splayed in various informal attitudes and postures, each going about his business apparently oblivious of the others, and seemingly occupied with very little. The juxtaposition of this humble atmosphere with the idealism of the backdrop is incongruous, almost absurd – as one commentator has put it, it is ‘unlike any location in which the biblical event might reasonably be imagined as having taken place’.56 But, and as is already indicated by the works prior to 1545, Tintoretto’s attitude to space extends beyond the possibilities offered by Serlio’s design. Across his work we find many complex and irrational spaces and effects that bear little resemblance to Serlio’s formal schemas. These become more typical of the works from the 1550s onwards when the impact of Serlio’s publications is perhaps diminishing and being re-assimilated into Tintoretto’s idiosyncratic vision. In the dazzling Miracle of Saint Augustine, 1549 (Figure 37), almost all references to the Serlian stageset have vanished. The scene is set outside in the open air. Soft mounds and clouds have replaced classical architecture. An ethereal, silvery light has replaced the intense artificial lighting of the Miracle of the Slave (Figure 4). A Susanna and the Elders, 1550 (Figure 38), is far from the version painted seven years earlier. Gone are all traces of architecture – we are instead in the depths of a shady wooded glen. In the far-right corner, through the tangle of foliage, one of the Elders peers into the scene from a cut-out ‘window’, reminding us that even this apparently natural setting might have been conceived with the aid of a box.

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Figure 36 Jacopo Tintoretto, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, 1546, oil on canvas, 119 × 168 cm. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome. Photo: SCALA.

Over the next several years Tintoretto’s works grow increasingly ambitious, with compositions often populated by vast swarms of figures and set in complex, stepped spaces. In the many Deposition scenes – in three years Tintoretto paints seven – swaying and swooning figures cluster in rhythmic eddies. Drama is now conveyed less by a theatrical architectural setting than by the treatment of figures and light, and the general attention to space. Towards the end of the 1550s the paintings grow darker and tonal contrasts become exaggerated. A new sense of light, more spectral, more mystical, emerges. So even a painting like the Feast at Cana, 1561 (Figure 27), clearly a stage-method picture in its setting within a box-like, recessional interior, is rendered strange by a heightened play of shadow. By the early 1560s we can be in no doubt that we have moved away from the earthbound and human world of Serlio’s stages to a world altogether more mysterious and aerial. The early signs of this shift are palpable in such paintings as the Finding of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–6 (Figure 26), and the Rescue of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–6 (Figure 30), where the architecture has become ghostly, as

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Figure 37 Jacopo Tintoretto, Miracle of Saint Augustine, 1549, oil on canvas, 255 × 175 cm. Museo Civico, Vicenza. Photo: SCALA.

55

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Figure 38 Jacopo Tintoretto, Susanna and the Elders, 1550, oil on canvas, 167 × 238 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: SCALA.

though inhabited by spirits. In both paintings, the presence of fleeting white marks streaked across the canvas, unhinged from any particular form, enhance this strange feeling of the supernatural. And in both, the precisely drawn architecture seals us into a set. The archways in the Rescue are blocked – we cannot see vistas beyond. The space in the Finding is even more oppressively closed. These are interiors without exteriors, withdrawn from any sense of the world outside the room. In the Worship of the Golden Calf, 1562–3 (Figure 16), and the Last Judgement, 1562–3 (Figure  17), powerful figural clusters create episodic pockets of space that are linked decoratively by various axes but not connected within a single, continuous space.57 The supreme testament of this new sense of drama, a cosmic drama unprecedented in Venetian painting, is the magisterial cycles of paintings at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Across two halls and three rooms of the largest Scuola in Venice, Tintoretto transforms painting into an allover environment. To enter into the Sala Superiore is to be confronted by an artistic ambition and conception for which nothing in the history of Venetian painting to that point has prepared us. The

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cycle is an eruption of stupendous proportions and scope that presents painting as a confrontation that rivals architectural space. For beyond the radical innovations of individual paintings – their experiments in space, tone, colour, and composition, their seething dynamisms and tremendous force – what we are presented with is the sense of painting as an extended installation, spilling beyond the limits of individual frames, creating effects that challenge their environment. One might say that such interrelation between painting and environment, which sees Tintoretto take on the tradition of great pictorial cycles and bend it to new aesthetic and conceptual concerns, is the culmination of possibilities unleashed by the stage-method, with its pragmatic integration of real, threedimensional space into the space of painting. Indeed, commentators have remarked that Tintoretto’s use of Serlio’s Scena Tragica was not to be interpreted primarily in terms of narrative content, because ‘establishing the setting in accordance with the correct genre (townspeople’s houses for comedy, palaces and temples for tragedy) was of little concern to the painter’, but more as ‘a practical means to design the spatial shell necessary for demarcating and lighting the stage’.58 It is this pragmatic attitude, a concern with the real conditions for producing certain effects, that characterizes Tintoretto’s singular use of staging. In the seventeenth century, the writer, cartographer and printmaker, Marco Boschini noted that Tintoretto’s stage-method was a device by which the painter integrated site-specific considerations into his paintings. When Tintoretto received a commission for a public space, Boschini remarked, he would visit the location to get a sense of the environmental conditions – light and shadow, architectural features, scale – to which the work would eventually be subject. Tintoretto may even have worked with models of the sites – church naves, chapels – for which the paintings were intended. Josef Grabski has meticulously demonstrated how Tintoretto integrated the real architectural features of the Sala Terrena – the chequered floor, the pillars of the interior, the biforate windows – into the paintings housed in that room.59 At San Rocco, one sees that site-specificity does not just mean a produced harmony between painting and architecture. Painting does not simply blend into its surrounds. Rather, painting challenges architectural supremacy and forces engagement through this contest. With their origin in the stage-method, Tintoretto’s works produce the very opposite of the in situ harmony of painting with its environment – what Grabski has called an ideal harmony that anticipated baroque concinnitas, or what Rosand has called ‘structural decorum’, ‘the proper adaptation of a mural composing to the room for which it is conceived’.60 In fact, the works in San Rocco abound in perspective manipulations that, as Sydney Freedberg has commented, are not ‘objectively’ required and which instead serve to ‘reshape experience’.61 Tintoretto’s stage-method acts as an unprecedented challenge to the traditions of painting process and method. Attempts to contextualize it within contemporary interrelations between painting and theatre meet with resistance. It is also difficult to contextualize within another vector of intelligibility to which we will now turn.

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Ridolfi’s motto Of all the features in the Tintoretto scholarship, one of the most ingrained is the linking of his work to the acknowledged doyens of the Florentine and Venetian traditions of painting, Michelangelo and Titian. The articulation of this connection is directly traceable to sixteenth-century testimonies. The Florentine writer Raffaello Borghini is the first to articulate it, stating in 1584 that Tintoretto ‘himself confesses that he recognizes as master, in matters of design, none other than [Michelangelo]; but as far as the use of colour is concerned he declares that he has imitated nature, and also particularly Titian’.62 The Apulian humanist Muzio Sforza recycles these terms of appraisal in 1590, describing Tintoretto as ‘drawing as well as Michelangelo with colouring like Titian’s all aglow’.63 This reading of Tintoretto was most famously proposed by the Venetian writer and painter Carlo Ridolfi in his 1642 biography of Tintoretto, the first full-length biography of the artist.64 The text quickly became a key reference for all subsequent writing on Tintoretto, and continues to be so on a number of points ranging from the amusing anecdote Ridolfi gives of Tintoretto’s brief apprenticeship to Titian that ended in an expulsion supposedly brought about by the older master’s jealousy, an anecdote, Eric Newton pointed out in 1924, that ‘no writer on Tintoretto omits to mention’,65 to the cataloguing of Tintoretto’s works, many of which are otherwise undocumented and have since disappeared.66 This reliance persists, despite the text’s highly dubious accuracy; as Lepschy remarks, it has ‘fixed the main outlines of Tintoretto’s image for posterity’.67 Ridolfi tells us that as a response to having been cast out of Titian’s studio the young Tintoretto, ‘instead of letting himself be carried away by anger’, ‘pondered how he might become a painter by studying from Titian’s works and from the reliefs of Michel Angelo, the acclaimed father of draughtsmanship. … So as not to depart from his proposed task he wrote the rules of work on the walls of a room of his, thus: “The Drawing of Michel Angelo and the colouring of Titian”.’68 That Ridolfi’s remark had already been anticipated by Borghini sixty years earlier suggests that Ridolfi had himself inherited the idea. The notion of an ideal synthesis between Michelangelo’s disegno and Titian’s colorito was in fact pronounced as early as 1548 by Paolo Pino, who wrote that ‘if Titian and Michelangelo were a single person, if the drawing of Michelangelo were added to the colour of Titian, then we would have the supreme god of painting’.69 Although Pino himself does not propose Tintoretto as this particular artist, his formulation of this ideal casts a different light on Borghini’s and Ridolfi’s assessment of Tintoretto in precisely the same terms. That is, it may be supposed that they were borrowing Pino’s formulation, and turning to an established discourse, in order to elevate even further the status of an artist they already considered worthy of accolade. More than the fact, that will never be ascertained, of whether or not Tintoretto did pen such a motto on his wall, what is of interest is that two parallel contemporary ideals of painting were used

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in order to define and contextualize his position as a leading artist. Perhaps Ridolfi could see that Tintoretto did not fit into the image of painting cast by his Venetian predecessors. And since, as Newton tells us, ‘the sixteenth century had no conception of the untutored genius who gropes his way to a means of expression by a process of trial and error’,70 the formulation of the motto was arguably a means of replacing a somewhat deviant artist within conventions of practice, affirming his contemporary value and downplaying his place as an outsider who did not learn in the traditional manner.71 It re-inscribes the artist within the continuity of artistic traditions. Since Michelangelo and Titian are living embodiments of painting ideals that shape the contemporary’s view and valuation of itself, in formulating his motto Ridolfi presents Tintoretto as a veritably current artist, in touch with the times and relevant to a future of painting projected on the grounds of what painting has already achieved. That Ridolfi should want to present Tintoretto in this way is not surprising, since it is in making a case for Tintoretto’s contemporary relevance that he best champions him. However, it is indubitably a different case for subsequent scholarship up to the present day.

Art history’s recycling of Ridolfi’s motto It is astonishing how often Ridolfi’s motto, arguably made in order to render Tintoretto’s ‘strangeness’ palatable and to qualify him as a master within his own time, has been treated as fact.72 To this day, it is these historical terms of tradition that are almost always used to frame the analysis of the artist, rather than, for example, the intriguing innovation of the stage-method. Why does inquiry begin with the long-established terms of a discourse whose ‘fit’ with its object was dubious even from the start? Why does it begin this way, rather than with an artist’s idiosyncrasies?73 It is remarkable that it is the work that was considered Tintoretto’s ‘breakthrough’ piece – the Miracle of the Slave (Figure 4) – which is most often considered in the established terms of the motto.74 Even were we to remain on the level of visual ‘evidence’, to frame an analysis of this painting through the terms of Michelangelo’s disegno and Titian’s colorito seems untenable. Faced by this extreme world of dynamism, artifice, and force, of drama, puppetry, and masks, of a vertigo that confounds what we see, we are led to suspect that the thought of scholarship has distanced itself from experience. Such reiteration exposes scholarship at its most static. What was originally a contemporary valuation, marked by the blindness that haunts all times to the new emerging within them, is converted into historical fact. Even if this fact is subsequently contested, it is invested as the ground for analysis. In turn, art history becomes an enterprise of representing discourse, a history of reception that distances itself from its real object, Tintoretto’s works. And what is exposed is the inertia of disciplinary methods to transform themselves in the encounter with difference. Perhaps the ambiguity

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surrounding Tintoretto with which I began this book is not due to a paucity of fact, but symptomatic of an imperceptibility of the material. Might the stage-method be that which is imperceptible to an image of thought informed by historical signifiers such as disegno and colorito? This is what Newton seemed to intimate when he wrote the following: [Tintoretto] is neither a good Michelangelist nor a great colorist. He is a new kind of artist, the first to discover how to look at and below the surface at the same time. The key to his art is not to be found in his motto, which looks back into the past, but in the kind of problems he tried to solve and the spirit in which he solved them. They were problems that, in the mid-sixteenth century, belonged to the future, problems that neither Michelangelo nor Titian could have understood.75

Indeed, Newton goes on to discuss Tintoretto’s stage-method as the artist’s own distinctive method for attending to his problems, which ‘were neither Titian nor Michelangelo’s problems’ and which in fact remain unsolved in his work. This returns us to the question of difference as that which exceeds historical perception and the scholarly knowledge grounded on contextualizing intelligibility. For the thought of Tintoretto’s difference experienced as excess to what we think we know of him, we now turn to Deleuze. Deleuze’s philosophy supplies a conception of ‘pure’ difference directed by the ambition ‘to think difference in itself independently of the forms of representation which reduce it to the Same’.76 It is a philosophy that thinks difference in its definitively productive or constructive potential, an operation to which the work of art assumes a privileged place. It is on the concept of the diagram – whose description by Deleuze as the construction of a real ‘yet to come’ indicates a futural dimension that contrasts with the backward glance of contextualism – upon which my account and investment of the Deleuzian philosophy will pivot. As a preliminary to this, I will briefly set out the instances of Deleuze’s own remarks on Tintoretto.

Deleuze’s Tintoretto Deleuze himself mentions Tintoretto several times in several texts, albeit rather fleetingly and with little elaboration. We encounter Tintoretto first in Anti-Oedipus (1972) as a quintessential Venetian painter and a proto-modernist who, through his compositional and technical innovations, undoes what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘codes’ of painting.77 Deleuze and Guattari are intrigued by the case of Renaissance Venetian painting for its challenge of an aesthetic that is characterized by ‘goals, schools and periods’. It is through this latter ‘major’ or most visible and established aesthetic of a historical epoch that art is, they argue, enslaved to the State. The State imposes codes on artistic production that bind it to transcendent aims, but works of art are, Deleuze and Guattari argue, able to escape this imposition through experimentation and innovation.

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However this is not always the case. And Deleuze and Guattari argue that when the Venetian State is at its height practising a successful nascent form of commodity capitalism, Venetian painting is regressive. From the Sack of Constantinople in 1204 to the late fourteenth century, the city grew considerably in wealth, financed by its colonial empire in the Aegean and the expansion of trade in the Eastern Mediterranean. At this prosperous time, Deleuze and Guattari argue, painting ‘moulds itself to a Byzantine code’.78 We find the application of colours and lines subordinated to the compositional hierarchy of a ‘vertical order’ – the vertical hierarchy of early Christian iconography in accordance with divine supremacy. So, the power of the State takes expression in the aesthetic code of Byzantine painting. But as the state starts to decline, following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, something ‘breaks out’ in painting and, what would appear to be another world opens up, an other art where the lines are deterritorialised, the colours are decoded and now only refer to the relations they entertain among themselves and with one another. A horizontal or transverse organisation of the canvas is born, with lines of escape or breakthrough.79

Deleuze and Guattari claim that Tintoretto’s works present us with such emancipation. In the Creation of the Animals (Figure 9), they write, Tintoretto paints the creation of the world like a race with God himself as a participant, moving along with the birds and animals in a sideways direction. The transversal organization of painting rejects the vertical, hierarchical organization of Byzantine painting. God is amongst the birds and animals of his creation and part of the momentous passage that grips them. Such laterality of painting that allows for a snapshot of motion and the sense that this is a slice of a continuous reality (we note that the action continues on both the left- and the right-hand edges of the panel; a flying bird is cut to the left, and the unicorn and cow are cut on the right) is a continuous feature of Tintoretto’s works. Deleuze and Guattari’s remarks on Venetian painting might well strike the reader as generic and inaccurate. What exactly is meant by a ‘Byzantine code’ is never made clear. The formulation seems to overlook the great variations within Byzantine painting, its heterogeneity and all its many transitional forms, between schools, regions, and epochs. Furthermore, it is simply not the case that all painting in Venice up to the mid-fifteenth century followed a Byzantine aesthetic. For instance, the international Gothic style was already in evidence in the work of fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury painters such as Paolo Veneziano and Lorenzo Veneziano.80 Neither is it accurate to say that this code, even if it existed, was restrictive. Byzantine art, particularly through its techniques of tesserae mosaic, involved the liberation of coloured material from form. The Byzantine masterpieces in San Marco with which Tintoretto was familiar (like many sixteenth-century painters, he contributed designs for the mosaics, and the effect of mosaic makes its way into several of his works, including The Presentation of the Virgin in Madonna dell’Orto where the curved stairwell glitters with decorative gold tesserae) – the scintillating mosaics that line the interior of the Basilica, and

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the magisterial Pala d’Oro – reveal a physical and material splendour that overwhelms formal and hierarchic composition, the ‘code’ Deleuze and Guattari hint at in Anti-Oedipus.81 In fact, Deleuze himself indicates his awareness of Byzantine luminism and modulation of colour in Francis Bacon, obscuring what the image of Byzantium stands for in their work. Finally, it is untenable to claim that the decline of the State corresponded to a liberation from Byzantium. On the contrary, the decline of the State saw a partial revival of interest in Byzantine culture that has been attributed to a feeling of historical pathos over the city’s identity and a wish to remind citizens of its past grandeur.82 All this makes us want to take Deleuze and Guattari’s notes on Venetian painting, and Tintoretto, with more than a pinch of salt. But Deleuze and Guattari would be the first to admit of a liberal addition of salt to their ‘studies’ of history. Their attitude to history is not that of the ‘objective’ and fact-oriented historian. Rather, it is from the perspective of a critical diagnosis of the present that the appeal to history is made. Venetian Renaissance painting is approached not for how it actually was in its time, but in part as a reminder of possibilities betrayed by modern twentieth-century painting – including the liberation of process and material from form. ‘Modern painting’ – and Deleuze gives Jackson Pollock as one example – risks fetishizing process and making it into a new goal, rechannelling its liberating potential into a code. The example of Tintoretto, and other pre-twentieth-century artists, reminds us of the critical and constructive function of process before its liberation becomes a trope in itself. Deleuze mentions Tintoretto for a second time, several years later, in Francis Bacon. Analysing the way Bacon paints figures, Deleuze turns to the history of figurative painting. Within this history, Deleuze identifies a group of artists that, he argues, liberated the figure from the demands of representation, showing how painting has never really been concerned with representation and that representational tendencies mask more profound dynamics.83 Tintoretto is one of them. Like Giotto, El Greco, and Michelangelo, Tintoretto exposes the ‘ascetic’ core of Christian painting, a ‘pictorial atheism’ that exists insofar as God cannot be represented. Christian painting realizes that ‘with God – but also with Christ, the Virgin and even Hell – lines, colours and movements are freed from the demands of representation, and figures in themselves no longer have to do with anything but “sensations” – celestial, infernal, or terrestrial sensations’. In effect, figures are submitted to a ‘fundamental deformation’. Thus, in the Creation of the Animals (Figure 9), ‘God is like a referee firing the gun at the start of a handicapped race, in which the birds and the fish leave first, while the dog, the rabbits, the cow, and the unicorn await their turn.’84 Tintoretto reappears for a third time in Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 1988, now as a baroque painter understood through the philosophy of the seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. Deleuze singles out the painter’s use of dark grounds, through which ‘painting is transformed’, and ‘things jump out of the background, colors spring from the common base that attests to their obscure nature, figures are defined by their covering more than their contour’.85

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Tintoretto gives expression to the baroque’s ‘new regime of light’, a fitful chiaroscuro where difference pulsates in infinite grounds, displacing the closed rationalism of classical illumination. Tintoretto is also baroque in his compositional separation of painting into two levels. The two floors of the world of the damned and that of the saved in his Last Judgement (Figure  17) is an expression of what Deleuze calls the ‘baroque house’, with its upper level, the metaphysical, dealing with souls, and the lower, physical, dealing with bodies: The lower level shows bodies tormented by their own weight, their souls stumbling, bending and falling into the meanders of matter; the upper half acts like a powerful magnet that attracts them, makes them ride astride the yellow folds of light, folds of fire bringing their bodies alive, dizzying them, but with a ‘dizziness from on high’: thus are the two halves of the Last Judgment.86

Finally, the painter is referred to one last time in What Is Philosophy? as the artist whose work reminds us that ‘painting’s eternal task is to paint forces’.87 These passing remarks on Tintoretto are never developed or synthesized by Deleuze. In order to grasp a sense of them I now embark on an analysis of Deleuze’s philosophy. I do so not simply to understand what Deleuze feels about Tintoretto. This is not a book on Deleuze’s Tintoretto, or even a book about Deleuze. It is a book about what Deleuze’s philosophy might offer to intuitions of Tintoretto already felt, and reciprocally, what Tintoretto’s practice, in its difference, might expose or pose to Deleuze’s philosophy. Deleuze’s brief remarks about Tintoretto, whilst revealing, do not supply my own starting point or shape my analysis – and I have recounted them here only to acknowledge a coincidence that cannot be altogether irrelevant. The fact that Deleuze himself finds Tintoretto intriguing merely affirms the intuition of an affinity between this artistic practice and this philosophical system. It may end up that what is written in this book bears similarities to what a book on Deleuze’s Tintoretto might look like. But such an outcome would, again, be testament only to an affinity, discovered but not projected, between the work of this artist and the work of this philosopher.

3 Diagrammatic Constructivism

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f Tintoretto’s difference is not simply a difference from his time, how might it be grasped otherwise? In posing this question, I turn more closely to the philosophy of constructivism and the concept

of the diagram articulated by Deleuze and Guattari, with the intimation that difference is not just an empirical feature of historical objects that can be empirically registered, but the material of a construction that demands another mode of engagement. What is offered by the notions of ‘construction’ and ‘constructivism’? Deleuze and Guattari’s remark that the diagram ‘constructs a real that is yet to come’1 indicates what is at stake – that reality is constructed and not given. Their theory of diagrammatics can be positioned within a history of constructivism in philosophy which maintains that we know only what we construct, that all that we come to know is our own mental construction. Such epistemological constructivism was famously given articulation by Kant, who argued that all knowledge of objects is possible only insofar as those objects are products of a mental construction. In the history of philosophy, it has been customary to pit constructivism against realism, which at its extreme holds that the determination of the real is independent of our thought processes. But constructivism does not necessarily deny that reality is possible beyond thought, rather, it more often upholds that the indefinite and inchoate matter of experience is shaped through our interaction with it. For Deleuze and Guattari, constructed reality is the product of such shaping – a shaping that takes place through a diagram. This appears to implicate the question of knowing: ‘you will know nothing through concepts unless you have first created them’, they write.2 But everything depends on the manner of this creation, this construction. Deleuze and Guattari argue that constructivism has two aspects: ‘the creation of concepts and the laying out of a plane’.3 The notion of the plane is introduced to problematize the grounding function of a subject. Constructivism is not the activity of a subject. Rather, it ‘requires every creation to be a construction on a plane that gives it an autonomous existence’,4 autonomy, that is, from the determination of a subject. As such, knowing is a construction that does not rely on any priors. It ‘begins’ with difference.

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A reconciliation of construction with empiricism, together with a wish to critically examine the status of the constructing ‘subject’, characterizes Deleuze’s philosophy from its earliest formulations. For him, constructivism is less a question of the mind bringing order and meaning to inchoate experience than the idea that the thinking and feeling subject is itself constituted in the encounter with this flux of the sensible. The philosophy of David Hume plays a major role in this articulation. In a passage in Empiricism and Subjectivity, 1953 where Deleuze is attending to the problem of the subject in Hume’s philosophy and attempting to analyse how a subject is formed from experience, he remarks that the problem is as follows: how can a subject transcending the given be constituted in the given? Undoubtedly, the subject itself is given. Undoubtedly, that which transcends the given is also given, in another way and in another sense. This subject who invents and believes is constituted inside the given in such a way that it makes the given itself a synthesis and a system. This is what we must explain. In this formulation of the problem, we discover the absolute essence of empiricism. We could say that philosophy in general has always sought a plane of analysis in order to undertake and conduct the examination of the structures of consciousness (critique), and to justify the totality of experience. Initially, it is a difference in plan that opposes critical philosophies. We embark upon a transcendental critique when, having situated ourselves on a methodologically reduced plane that provides an essential certainty – a certainty of essence – we ask: how can there be a given, how can something be given to a subject, and how can the subject give something to itself? Here, the critical requirement is that of a constructivist logic which finds its model in mathematics. The critique is empirical when, having situated ourselves in a purely immanent point of view, which makes possible a description whose rule is found in determinable hypotheses and whose model is found in physics, we ask: how is the subject constituted in the given? The construction of the given makes room for the constitution of the subject. The given is no longer given to a subject; rather the subject constitutes itself in the given. Hume’s merit lies in the singling out of this empirical problem in its pure state and its separation from the transcendental and the psychological.5

I quote this long paragraph in full because it gives us a sense of the early Deleuze’s relation to philosophical construction. Deleuze brings attention to Hume’s distinction from Kant’s transcendental critique which takes as its model the constructivist logic of mathematics. Hume instead stages an empirical critique in which construction presents as a reciprocal process of producing the subject and the ‘given’, where the latter is understood as ‘the flux of the sensible, a collection of impressions and images, or a set of perceptions … the totality of that which appears, being which equals appearance’.6 Such immanent construction constitutes for Deleuze the essence of empiricism. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari characterize constructivism as a fundamental task of philosophy. But when they speak of diagrammatic construction as the construction of reality they are not speaking exclusively about philosophy, but about the reality of thought. Reality, which includes the reality of thought as well as the reality of sensation, is itself constructive, even if what

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is constructed differs across disciplinary terrains. This idea was already present in Difference and Repetition: ‘A philosophical concept can never be confused with a scientific function or an artistic construction but finds itself in affinity with these.’7 And in Francis Bacon we encounter painting as thought, as Deleuze describes how Bacon constructs a new reality of the figure through his diagrams. Art, it seems, can be as constructivist as philosophy. And this, of course, is a claim familiar to us from the history of art. The notion that art is constructivist, that it involves a kind of production through the assembling of something out of parts, acquires particular pertinence after the early-twentieth-century integration of the found object and the ‘everyday’ into artistic production, and the invention of new methods of assemblage such as cubist composition, collage, montage, assemblage, and reliefs. Constructive tendencies were rendered explicit by the Russian constructivists – both in its formalist (Naum Gabo) and in its radically political, Soviet varieties (Vladimir Tatlin).8 Such practices of constructivism presented an analogy with architecture, engineering, and mathematics, a foregrounding of the perspective of materials, genesis, and forces and the question of ‘agitating’ new life rather than the production of forms as vehicles of description or decoration.9 The survival of constructivist attitudes in sculpture of the 1950s and 1960s and the re-emergence since the 1960s of constructivism in architectural theory and practice brings an added dimension to this trajectory, into which Deleuze, with his philosophical architectonics, has sometimes been situated.10 If understood as a principle that involves the building up of an object through a combination of parts (whether this be an actual, material object or the object of thought), a definition with which Deleuze and Guattari seem to concur with when they write that ‘the plane is constructed piece by piece’,11 constructivism confronts certain romanticized notions of artistic production. Ideas of an ineffable ‘spirit’ guiding matter and the incommunicable power of genius are displaced by a pragmatic and explicit exposure of working as a conjunction of elements already given. The artist as mechanic displaces the artist as alchemist. In some ways, the notion of assembling elements seems to return us to classical theories of composition – Alberti’s grounding of pictorial composition on the firm basis of the mathematical construction of the whole out of independent parts, for example. However, construction in its avant-garde forms supplements this classical analogy with mathematics with a new extraction and reworking of the materials of ‘life’. That is, the new element introduced by the Russian avant-gardes, and rethought by practices of the 1960s and 1970s, is the social dimension. With this history in mind, it does perhaps seem that Deleuze and Guattari offer a somewhat circumscribed notion of construction, and the problem of artistic construction. They claim that what constitutes art is more than the experience of materials and objects that are already given in everyday experience – whether these are found, or already inscribed as specifically ‘artistic’. Artists are constructivist in their construction of ‘new reality’. But for Deleuze and Guattari, this new reality does not simply pertain to the new conjunction of given materials, but rather to the construction

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of sensations and the way in which this may in turn expand the sensibility and force thought. As such, two senses of construction are implicated by what Deleuze and Guattari call constructivism: the construction that is the work of art and the construction entailed in the experience of that work. However, whilst Deleuze and Guattari consistently invoke the rhetoric of the construction of the real and art’s role in this, there is little indication or analysis of how this artistic construction actually happens or might happen. Deleuze’s analysis of Francis Bacon focuses on the painter’s construction of new pictorial reality, but we are made to believe that for Deleuze and Guattari the problem of construction signals much more than this. In fact, it is striking that Deleuze and Guattari make almost no mention of early-twentieth-century constructivism, especially when they explicitly link artistic processes of constructing sensations from material to possibilities of social transformation, as they do in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. In these texts, and in contrast to Deleuze’s analysis of Francis Bacon’s pictorial construction, constructivism is explicitly announced as involving the ‘construction of new social arrangements’. However, in the analysis of particular artworks, precise accounts of what this transformation involves is often absent.12 As such, their constructivism seems to align itself less with the question of social constructivism and more with a species of formalism posed in terms of the destruction of representation and its replacement with the ‘autonomous’ configuration of material elements in new relations. The fact that their case studies are usually taken from the modernist canon (Woolfe, Van Gogh, Giacometti, Cézanne, Bacon, among others) rather than the historical avant-gardes is arguably symptomatic of this. Bacon’s relation to his own time, or to any future time, as a reality outside the aesthetic form of painting, is never seriously considered. In What Is Philosophy? works of art are compositions rather than constructions, whilst construction is presented as a question of philosophical thought. In this text, more attention is paid to the way construction overthrows representation and the representational image of thought that had been Deleuze’s preoccupation since Difference and Repetition, than to the way construction in and through artworks produces new reality and the historical and social register of this production. There therefore seems to be a host of questions raised by the problem of constructivism in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. These require attention if we are to grasp the sense and conceptual reach of the diagram and its importance for the analysis of Tintoretto’s work. Let us begin with the ways in which thought may understood to be a constructivist enterprise.

Thought as difference A thought comes when it wants, not when I want.13 Men think rarely, and more often under the impulse of a shock than in the excitement of a taste for thinking.14

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Is thinking a patchwork of discrete sections, each already cut-out and lined like the squares of a quilt, or might it be more like the unrolling and rolling of a continuous reel of material without break or hierarchy? Is thinking the putting together of pieces already possessed and given, or is it a more obscure process of permeation and infusion of elements? The image of thought as patchwork coincides with the everyday idea of construction as a synthesis of discrete parts. But Deleuze shows that thinking is not necessarily patching, and construction involves another possibility. To him, construction can be the rolling and unrolling of swathes of material, a thinking without stiches, seams, and patches. Such thought, Deleuze tells us, has no particular image of itself, or to be more precise, no fixed image. Even the image of a roll of material is confining, since such an image imprisons what is mobile under a static form. Construction is a thought ‘without image’, or rather, without a fixed image assumed in advance. Thought as construction is nothing more than its own genesis; it bears no reference to any pre-existent system, represents nothing and assumes no form. It proceeds solely through differences and dissimilarities from which certain images arise but to whose outlines it remains irreducible. The problem of a thought with or without an image – which concerns us insofar as we are interested in how the experience of Tintoretto’s works might challenge the representation of his practice and compel thought – is central to Deleuze’s early philosophy. Its most thorough explication is in the chapter ‘The Image of Thought’ in Difference and Repetition, and it continues to be important throughout Deleuze’s work, assuming pivotal place in Deleuze and Guattari’s final work, What Is Philosophy?. In this late text the ‘image of thought’ is characterized as the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, which allows one to find one’s bearings in thought.15 No thought can proceed without such bearings but when they are assumed uncritically and become presupposed as doxa (opinion) then the image itself blocks thought and becomes dogmatic. The model of the dogmatic image of thought is recognition, which Deleuze defines as the harmonious exercise of all the faculties upon a supposed same object. Recognition is produced when the same object may be seen, touched, remembered, imagined, or conceived. Presupposed here is both the identity of the object and the identity of the Self – the critique is of Cartesianism and Kantianism – for Kant as for Descartes it is the identity of the Self which grounds the harmony of all the faculties and their agreement on the form of a supposed same object. For Deleuze, Kant’s philosophy is the formidable representative of a thought with image, a thought that fully assumes its own form, recognizes itself in the act of thinking, and subjects thinking to a grounding. The image of thought that Kant projects is the very image of patchwork, a piecing together of elements of the intelligible with elements of the sensible. In contrast, the constructive thought that Deleuze argues for stages itself as the interweaving of indistinguishable elements that cannot even be properly termed ‘elements’ since their internal coordinates are always changing.16

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Deleuze extricates thought from Kant’s conception of cognition (Erkenntnis) as the representation of an object by the consciousness to itself.17 Representation, Kant argues, requires the synthesis of the concepts of the understanding with the intuitions of sensibility.18 Thought (Denken), on the other hand, Kant claims, is not representational and is not regulated by reason. It consists only in the unification of representations in a consciousness.19 Whereas in order to cognize an object, ‘I must be able to prove its possibility, either from its actuality as attested by my experience, or a priori by means of reason’, in contrast ‘I can think whatever I please as long as I do not contradict myself.’20 I can think about an idea – the cosmos, for instance – that I have no possibility of ever experiencing or which is not available to me as an a priori concept. But I cannot cognize such an idea since cognition requires either the possibility of the experience of this reality or its demonstration a priori through my reason. This distinction between thought and cognition has clear significance for Deleuze. Insofar as it is liberated from the determining role that binds cognition it becomes possible to conceive of thought as moving freely in the element of the pure sensible. For Deleuze, thought is not grounded in the subject who represents the sensible to itself; it is a groundless movement. The sensible is constitutive and genetic, not contributory and represented as the appearance of an object. This confrontation between Deleuze and Kant concerns the architectonics of thinking. It concerns two different ideas of construction. Deleuze’s conception of thought remains, as Kant’s is, synthetic. However, the notion of synthesis will be radically altered. Whereas for Kant, synthesis involves the combination of discrete elements through distinct regions of the mind, for Deleuze synthesis involves the bringing together of heterogeneous elements that are not clearly distinguishable from each other, and in a process that does not compartmentalize the activities of the faculties.21 In place of the Kantian regulation that establishes the limits of thinking as cognition, Deleuze presents a productive synthesis of thought impelled by experiences that confront, contradict, and disturb – and to which no image is adequate. Whereas for Kant, thinking is the moulding of different regions, not unlike the slotting in place of the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, for Deleuze thinking occurs precisely when the pieces of a puzzle do not fit the places carved out for them, when experience demands a radical rearrangement of the entire game.

Deleuze’s diagram and Kant’s schema The synthesizer, with its operation of consistency, has taken the place of the ground in a priori synthetic judgment: … philosophy is no longer synthetic judgment; it is like a thought synthesizer functioning to make thought travel.22

For Kant, the synthesis of cognition takes place in several stages, the most famously contested of which is the synthesis that he calls schematism. The ‘secret art’ of schematism is the process by which

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the logical content of a priori concepts can be made applicable to objects given to us as appearances through the sensibility.23 Without this application, concepts would have no objective reality or signification. The schema, then, is the ‘third thing’ that stands between the concept on the one hand and the appearance on the other, making possible the application of the former to the latter.24 It is pure, that is, it has no empirical component. It is transcendental, but is nevertheless intellectual on the one hand and sensible on the other. The schema is always the product of the imagination, but it is distinguished from an image which is also a product of the imagination.25 Whereas images are individual, empirical intuitions, schemas meld individual intuitions with universal concepts – that is, they are synthetic. If I draw five dots in succession I produce an image of the number 5. But if I think of the concept of number 5 then the schema of the concept presents more possibilities than five dots on a paper: it produces a universal deduction which allows the presentation of a multitude that would be impossible to survey. This is more clearly indicated by a larger number: for instance, I could schematize the concept of the number 1000 but I could never arrive at this number through surveying 1000 dots at once.26 The concept 1000 signifies a rule (i.e. the schema) that allows the imagination to trace the shape of 1000 in a general way without being limited to any particular individual image of 1000. In this way we might say that the schema traces possibility. Kant’s use of the notion of schema retains the original meaning of the term schema as ‘to give form to’ or ‘plan’.27 Deleuze’s diagram also produces form. In Francis Bacon a form that Deleuze called the ‘Figure’ emerges from Bacon’s diagram. But whereas the schema synthesizes two heterogeneous forms – the form of the concept with the form of the sensible as appearance – diagrammatic synthesis modulates overlapping and heterogeneous elements. The diagram is a synthesizer of difference, a modulator that permits ‘original interactions’ of relations of forces across ‘continuums of matter’ (which Deleuze and Guattari also call ‘material’).28 Whereas the schema synthesizes concepts that are ‘too big’ for the intuitions supplied by sensibility, the diagram is inherent (or ‘immanent’) to the real. Whereas the schema regulates cognition and constructs possibility, the diagram ‘does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality’.29 Such distinctions bring us back to the notions of constructivism with which we opened this chapter. Is thought a construction that consolidates how things appear or a construction of a reality that we never knew or imagined possible?

Kant’s constructivism In some ways, the very notion of constructivism in Deleuze’s work might be seen to have its source in Kant’s philosophy. This is because, as it is for Deleuze, constructivism for Kant is a creative enterprise

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whereby thought produces its own object. Through construction, Kant argues – as will Deleuze – that thought escapes from dogmatism.30 What Kant calls constructivism in the ‘Transcendental doctrine of Method’ in the Critique of  Pure Reason concerns the construction of concepts through the a priori intuition that is possible only in mathematics. This is distinguished from schematism as a synthesis of a posteriori intuitions and a priori concepts. Since it can create its own object, mathematical constructivism might seem to offer a model for Deleuze who claims that ‘you will know nothing through concepts unless you have first created them – that is, constructed them in an intuition specific to them. … Constructivism requires every creation to be a construction on a plane that gives it an autonomous existence’.31 Kant confines construction to the realm of mathematics. Mathematical and philosophical cognition are qualitatively different because of their methods.32 Philosophy is regulative or discursive; it cannot construct concepts, but only use them. Whilst mathematical cognition is cognition through the construction of concepts, philosophical cognition is cognition from concepts that are already constructed. Whereas the geometer can construct a triangle to discover its concept (that the sum of its three angles equals two right angles), the philosopher can only work with the schema of the triangle that signifies a rule given by the concept of a triangle which he can then apply. The schema provides the rule for the movement from the particular to the universal. But mathematical construction has no need for such rules since it exhibits the universal in the particular immediately.33 Deleuze will retain the notion of constructivism as a construction of concepts, but this construction will be replaced within the real, which is to say it is not purely an activity of the mind. This is where the diagram comes in. Overcoming distinctions between a priori and a posteriori, Deleuze and Guattari conceive of the diagram as functioning on a plane that, whilst transcendental, is operative within real experience. Distinguished in this way from the Kantian schema, their concept of the diagram is also distinguished from the conception of diagrammatic construction developed in the philosophy of Peirce, which supplies Deleuze and Guattari with one of their most important sources.

Peirce’s diagram. An empiricist’s constructivism In fact, it is through Peirce’s philosophy of the diagram that the sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s constructivism can perhaps best be grasped. 34 Peirce classifies the diagram as a type of sign, specifically an icon of relations. An icon is a sign which signifies its object ‘by its own quality’, in contrast to the index, which requires the physical existence of its object, and the symbol, which depends on conventions between interpreters.35 Peirce characterizes the diagram as

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a hypoicon – an icon whose iconicity lies in its materiality rather than its relation to its object. He gives painting as an example – its hypoiconic character is produced through its material properties of colours, tones, and lines. The diagram is a specific type of hypoicon that ‘represents the relations … of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their parts’.36 It forms if we construct an icon of a hypothetical state of things and observe it. It may either be a visual form, such as a graph, or ‘purely mental’, existing only in the imagination. The diagrams that most interest Peirce seem to be mathematical formulae and graphs. But in whatever form it takes, the diagram is a tool that allows us to consider the hypothesis in a relational manner and adjust it in an ongoing process of interpretation, allowing the discovery of new relations that would have been difficult to detect by observing the premise alone. Diagrammatics invites an observation not of what is before the diagrammer’s eyes, but, Peirce says, of what ought to be seen. He thinks this is comparable to how artists see objects.37 In this way, diagrams ‘put before us moving images of thought’38 that reveal ‘unexpected truths, truths other than those which suffice to determine its construction’.39 As such, when one makes experiments upon diagrams, one must keep a lookout for ‘unintended and unexpected changes’.40 Through such ‘experimental observation’ of the diagram we may find relations not already established by the hypothesis. Here, Peirce invokes an established trope, for throughout history men have used diagrams to aid thought processes. By reducing information to outlines, diagrams simplify. In visual form, these outlines can be grasped quickly, and patterns can be discerned that a mass of information and data would have obscured. By clearly exhibiting the shape and relations of its parts, diagrams provide a general scheme of an object, and in this way, they function as a useful pedagogical device and a means of reasoning. Peirce described this appeal well, defining the diagram as type of sign which, through the suppression of ‘a great quantity of details’, allows the mind ‘more easily to think of the important features’. Diagrams are the means by which ‘any course of thought can be represented with exactitude’.41 Thus the man who masters diagrams refines his thinking. But Deleuze and Guattari remove the diagram from all frameworks of representation, interpretation, formalism, and abstraction. They are interested solely in the constructive nature of the diagram, its ability to produce new relations. For them, ‘communication and interpretation are what always serve to reproduce and produce signifier’, thus blocking production.42 The Peircian question ‘What does it mean?’ is replaced by that of ‘How does it function?’. Deleuze and Guattari loosen the diagram from Peirce’s system, which cannot function without its theory of interpretation, and his characterization of the diagram as an icon. Claiming that Peirce’s triad of icon, index, and symbol remain bound to the signifier – ‘through contiguity for the index, similitude for the icon and conventional rule for the symbol’ – they recharacterize the diagram as no longer a sub-category of the icon, but bearing a ‘distinct role’,43 that is, to map ‘what is blocked’ in a regime of signs and produce new reality from this

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material. In fact, the diagram works simultaneously in two directions. It transforms compositions of order into components of passage and produces new form from the chaos of passage. This divergence between Deleuze and Guattari and Peirce returns us to Kant in intriguing ways. In fact, Peirce identifies with Kant’s conception of mathematics as a science that proceeds by constructing diagrams.44 For Peirce, it is through diagrams that Kant integrates a ‘logic of relations’ into thought, and Peirce argues that such relational reasoning should be the basis of all reasoning.45 This is in fact contrary to what Kant argues. As we have seen for Kant the crucial aspect of mathematics is its a priori construction of concepts, and not its construction of what Peirce means by diagrams. There is no room within Kant’s conception of construction for what Peirce calls diagrams. Whilst Kant tells us that a figure such as a drawn triangle is the means by which a concept attains ‘significance’ or ‘objective validity’, this is not an essential aspect of mathematical construction. Peirce, however, believes that the production of significance is a sensible and empirical affair, and that signs, as the vehicles of significance, are sensible presentations of a logic of relations. Diagrams are a sub-category of signs, visual schemas ‘composed of dots, lines etc., in which logical relations are signified by spatial relations’.46 Moreover, Peirce, a committed empiricist (even though one with idealizing tendencies), does not believe that the a priori construction of concepts that characterizes Kant’s constructivism is even possible. As such, what Peirce understands as diagrams could not be visual representations of an a priori construction, in the way that Kant understands figures. Rather, diagrams represent the formal set of relations in an empirically given hypothesis, where the hypothesis is a ‘conception of a system of relations’47 that aids the process of deduction. Diagrams can either be ‘corollarial’ or ‘theorematic’. A corollarial diagram extracts the truth of a hypothesis from observation, and as such is nothing more than a representation. With a theorematic diagram one undertakes an experiment and through observation discovers new relations.48 This notion of discovery will inform Deleuze and Guattari’s development of the concept. We have obviously moved away from Kant’s transcendentalism. ‘All necessary reasoning whatsoever proceeds by constructions’, Peirce claims, where the necessary character of this reasoning ‘is due simply to the circumstance that the subject of this observation and experiment is a diagram of our own creation, the conditions of whose being we know all about’.49 The very fact that Peirce suggests we can deduce necessary consequences through an empirical experimentation with diagrams again underscores his distance from Kant, for whom nothing necessary can be deduced empirically. Accordingly, the distinction Peirce makes between philosophy and mathematics is a question of degree, and not as it is for Kant, a difference in kind. Neither what Peirce calls the ‘pure hypotheses’ of mathematics nor the ‘common sense’ of philosophical reasoning abide by the Kantian transcendental laws of universal and pure reason.50 This would seem to return us to the very conundrum that Kant set out to overcome – the conflict between the empirical and contingent limits of reason and its pure and necessary limits.

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But if Peirce is so critical of the Kantian a priori, why then does he compare his conception of the diagram to Kant’s schema? He writes: The Diagram remains in the field of perception or ‘imagination’ and so the Iconic Diagram and its initial Symbolic interpretant taken together constitute what we shall not too much wrench Kant’s term in calling a schema, which is on the one side an object capable of being observed, while on the other side it is a general.51

The basis for the comparison seems to be that both the diagram and the schema connect the general with the particular. But again, Peirce’s ‘general’ is not, as the general is for Kant, transcendental a priori. It is empirical. As such, the Peircian diagram more closely approximates what Kant calls the image, since both belong to what Kant would call the ‘empirical faculty of productive imagination’.52 Peirce himself indicates as much, remarking that his own critique of transcendental philosophy would permit a kind of collapse of ‘schema’ with ‘image’. He writes: Kant says that no image, and consequently we may add, no collection of images, is adequate to representing what a schema represents. If that be that case, I should like to know how a schema is not as general as a concept. If I ask him, all he seems to answer is that it is the product of a different ‘faculty’.53

Peirce is objecting to Kant’s claim that a sensible particular (an image) cannot match up to an a priori general (a schema or a concept). But then, the question is how do generals and particulars meet? How are sensible particulars brought under concepts? Peirce’s solution is to put everything onto the side of the empirical. Deleuze will propose a different solution. He will jettison both the ideal constructivism of Kant and Peirce’s empirical construction to rework diagrammatics within a ‘transcendental empiricism’ that will nevertheless retain the pragmatic orientation to real experience that characterized Peirce’s own endeavour.

Pure icons Peirce defines the diagram as an icon of relations, but Deleuze and Guattari reject the iconic character of the diagram. By their own admission, they take the term ‘sign’ in an entirely different sense to Peirce. Whereas for Peirce signs are referential  – they stand ‘to somebody for something in some respect or capacity’54 – for Deleuze and Guattari signs occasion thought. This is why they reject the iconic characterization of the diagram as subjected to a pre-existing law of resemblance. Given his rejection of the iconic character of the diagram, why does Deleuze compare the diagram to a ‘pure icon’? In Francis Bacon, he points out that whilst Peirce first defined icons by similitude he also acknowledged that pure icons range far beyond similitude and consisted of diagrams.55 To

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grasp the implications of Peirce’s remark it is helpful to recall that for him the icon signifies through its ‘internal qualities’ and not only through the law of resemblance.56 That is, an icon resembles an object by virtue of characteristics which belong to it in itself as a sensible object, characteristics that it would possess even if there were no object in nature that it resembled, and even if it were never interpreted as a sign.57 At its extremity then, what Peirce calls a pure icon is a sign freed from interpretation. What he calls ‘firstness’ – pure material quality or feeling – does not refer to anything (where referral involves ‘secondness’), nor is it grounded by an interpretant (which would involve ‘thirdness’).58 However, as all three levels – firstness, secondness, and thirdness – are required for any signification, a pure icon is only ‘a fragment of a more complete sign’. At best, Peirce writes, we can call a pure icon a non-communicative sign, lacking purpose and unable to convey any positive or factual information.59 Such a sign cannot, at least as far as Peirce is concerned, produce thought, since ‘thought which cannot be cognized does not exist’, and cognition requires communicative signs.60 In characterizing the diagram as a pure icon, and giving this type of sign value, Deleuze challenges Peirce’s claims. He assigns new importance to material quality as a genetic and constructive element of thought. It is precisely the relations between material traits, free of inscription in interpretative schema, that procure new thought. In his view, qualities of firstness – a colour like red, a value like brightness, a power like decisiveness, a quality like hardness – become determinate through their relations with other qualities. So firstness is not only non-referential, but it is also relational.61 In fact for Peirce, whilst the pure icon may not be significant, communicable, or cogent, it can nevertheless be experienced. Thus, in contemplating a painting, there is a moment when we lose the consciousness that it is not the thing, the distinction of the real and the copy disappears, and it is for the moment a pure dream – not any particular existence, and yet not general. At that moment, we are contemplating an icon.62

In the throes of experience, the referential and communicative character of the sign is obscured, and painting can give rise to this experience of the semiotically indiscernible. Peirce adds that it is possible that we may experience diagrams as pure icons – since in the midst of our reasonings we may forget their abstraction – even though this experience has no function in interpretation. For Deleuze and Guattari however such experience of diagrams is not simply a ‘forgetting’ or a slip in reasoning that has no value. Rather, it is constitutive of the very act of thinking itself: a thinking without ground or reference.

Diagrammatic subversion of iconography in Tintoretto’s works What might Tintoretto’s paintings bring to bear upon such conceptual tensions between the representational icon and the constructive diagram?

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Let us begin with a detour from Peirce’s icon to the art historical method of iconography. It should be stipulated from the outset that Peirce’s notion of the icon bears no essential relation to the notion of the icon in its religious and art historical sense as a pictorial representation of persons or events. Neither does Peirce’s icon have anything directly to do with iconography as a method. As we have seen, Peirce’s icons do not bear any essential relation to art, pictures, or even to the visible. In making the following detour, then, I am not attempting to conflate two distinct systems of iconicity. Rather I will attend to the challenge diagrammatics, as it operates in Tintoretto’s works, raises to certain art historical methods and traditions. I have already noted some of the ways in which Tintoretto confronted the historia. In his time, the communicative function of the historia was premised both on the gestures of the figures (which was tied to the humanist value of instruction (docere), one of the primary functions (utilitas) of history63) and on the compositional structure.64 The notion that a painting could be read was bound to the rules and process of composition precisely because a historical story was deemed to be composed in such a way – with clear formal delineations and a propriety in arrangement – that it could be broken down into its various discrete visual components and deciphered.65 Tintoretto consistently distorts the conventional iconography of hallowed biblical themes, challenging our reading of them. In the variations on the Last Supper (Figures 2, 39, and 40) the angle of the table becomes increasingly oblique and prominent until in the San Giorgio Maggiore version (Figure 40), painted in the year of Tintoretto’s death, the table is a silvery diagonal slit and no longer the stabilizing object around which the Holy event takes place. The peculiar Adoration of the Shepherds, 1578–81 (Figure 41) is split into two levels. The Holy Family crouch in the upper rafters of a dilapidated haybarn whilst below the Magi gather with their offerings. The Annunciation, 1581–82 (Figure 42), is staged in a peculiarly ramshackle space of an artisan’s workshop, amidst bits of splintered wood and half-built walls. A little Christ sits at the far background of Christ among the Doctors (Figure 1) where he can barely be seen. Through his preoccupation with dramatic effects, Tintoretto consistently undermines the legibility of the historia. According to one commentator, the outrage over the Miracle of the Slave (Figure 4) was due to its inadequate depiction of human expressions: Saint Mark is ‘a marvelous, divine object, no more. He might almost as well be a flash of colored light’.66 In the Miracle of Saint Augustine (Figure 37), the Saint, wrapped in spiralling gossamer drapes, bursts through a thunderous cloud, shooting celestial rays as he appears to a crowd of crippled pilgrims. The sharp contrast between the lower half of the composition, filled with the clearly delineated and the naturalistically coloured bodies of these pilgrims, and the upper register of the silvery sky, the Cloud-borne Saint, the moonscape populated by vague and shrunken figures, and the façade of a church hovering spectrally in the far background, destabilizes the coherency of the historia. The pilgrims do not cohere as a group sharing an experience. Their extreme muscularity seems peculiar given that they are unwell. According to

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Figure 39 Jacopo Tintoretto, Last Supper, 1556/8, oil on canvas, 221 × 413 cm. Chapel of the Sacrament, San Trovaso, Venice. Photo: SCALA.

Figure 40 Jacopo Tintoretto, Last Supper, 1591/2, oil on canvas, 365 × 568 cm. San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. Photo: SCALA.

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Figure 41 Jacopo Tintoretto, Adoration of the Shepherds, 1578/81, oil on canvas, 538 × 465 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

Figure 42 Jacopo Tintoretto, Annunciation, 1581/2, oil on canvas, 422 × 545 cm. Sala Terrena, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

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one scholar this extreme muscularity signifies suffering and powerlessness in this world on the way to a better world.67 But we find Tintoretto employing extreme musculature across his paintings, even for figures that are supposedly empowered (which is, of course, what we would expect). That is, it would seem that the trait of musculature, applied to different kinds of figure, is detached from its meaning. How are we to ‘read’ this? Might one say that muscularity, unhinged from its referential status, operates as a pure icon, evading the referential register in its motile materiality? What is being undermined here is the communicative function of painting as a set of signs predicated and upheld by the way it can be read. What is being confronted is the operation of iconography. The reading of images endorsed by the method of iconography – derived from the Greek εἰκών (image) and γραφειν (to write) and meaning ‘the descriptive and classificatory study of images with the aim of understanding the direct or indirect meaning of the subject matter’68 – was born of  the  realization of the inherent textuality of paintings within the Renaissance humanist tradition.  W. J. T Mitchell may have been right to declare that it is a particularly modern disciplinary shift to understand images as a kind of language, displacing the classical notion of images as a transparent window upon the world with an acknowledgement of the opacity and complexity of visual signs.69 But we must return to the history of painting for the source of this equivocation, remembering that during the Renaissance, Alberti’s theory of painting as an open window was itself complicated by erudite theories of symbolism. Alberti’s window was never understood simply as transparent. The notion of the image as sign was formally heralded by Cesare Ripa’s Iconology (1593), a text that was principally concerned with formulating a classification of images that signified something beyond their visible form, and which served as a visual dictionary for artists for several generations, centuries even. Umberto Eco has suggested that treatises on imprese and emblems, of which Ripa’s remains the best-known, dealt with concepts belonging to a ‘general theory of signs’70 that was testament to a widespread fascination with signs that stretched far beyond rhetoric, embracing the symbiosis of systems spanning from neo-Platonism to cosmology. It is that transdisciplinary breadth that Deleuze and Guattari too, in their own idiosyncratic way, wish to restore to a theory of semiotics in the late twentieth century. The relation of the textual to the symbolic nature of Renaissance images was central to Panofsky’s conception of iconography, which he defined as ‘that branch of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form’.71 Panofsky felt that most art historians were concerned with their objects not in so far as they exist materially, but in so far as they have a meaning. Meaning, rather than visual evidence, was the real project of art history. He extended iconography to a three-tiered system that could account for the impact of the cultural ‘psyche’ on artistic meanings72 and came to name this extended method ‘iconology’, assuming Ripa’s original nomination. Panofsky had conceived iconography as a tool

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specifically for analysing works and images that were specifically situated within or influenced by the tradition of Ut Pictura Poesis, Horace’s famous analogy between painting and poetry, one of the implications of which was that painting could be read, as poetry could be seen. That is, Panofsky had limited the application of iconology to periods that witnessed the triumph of emblematic and allegorical thought, and which privileged literary painting in which the human body and its gestures are the primary bearers of meaning. This focus has sometimes been forgotten. Since the 1960s iconology has been incorporated into methodological, non-period-specific debates on the problem of visual art as a linguistic sign and the project of constructing a general theory of pictorial signs. The three levels of the iconological system are defined by Panofsky as the pre-iconographic, the iconographic, and the iconological. The pre-iconographic pertains to the description of the sensible qualities of the artwork/image that are manifested in artistic ‘motifs’. The iconographic analysis of ‘secondary or conventional meanings’ manifested through themes, concepts, stories, and allegories can be discovered through decoding literary sources. This presumes prior knowledge of such sources. Finally, the iconological interpretation pertains to the meaning of a work as it is reflective of its cultural conditions.73 According to this tripartite model, the narrative intelligibility that grounds the convention of the representation of historia could be said to predicate itself on a correspondence between form (as pre-iconographic level) and content (as iconographic inscription). What is commonly referred to as ‘subject-matter’ is the way the textual code of the story imprints itself on the visual register. In their obscuring of the subject matter and resistance to narrative intelligibility, Tintoretto’s works seem to reject such inscription. We see how the Gathering of Manna, 1591–2 (Figure 43), does not adhere to the text. The text tells of the distress of the Jewish people at the lack of food and water, but Tintoretto sets the camp next to an inviting stream. Is such liberty ‘unreadable’? The literary or textual comprises only one aspect of Panofsky’s system. In fact, what he calls the pre-iconographic indicates a register of the pictorial sign beyond textual referents. It was Hubert Damisch who pointed to the potential value of this pre-iconographic register for an expansion of the scope of iconography beyond the logic and authority of the text.74 In so doing, Damisch made a link between Panofsky and Peirce, arguing that Peirce’s semiotics can offer iconography an expansion of its approach. In particular he mentions Peirce’s category of the hypoicon, as a sign function that bypasses the order of representation, by which one can speak of the ‘coloured articulation’ in painting as a material quality ‘irreducible to the norms of communication’.75 The young Panofsky discovered Peirce during his years in the United States, and this discovery seems to have played a role in Panofsky’s development of his tripartite method.76 What Panofsky calls the pre-iconographic seems to correspond to what Peirce calls the pure icon – the form without referent, that communicates nothing. What Panofsky calls the iconographic seems to correspond to what Peirce calls the (ordinary) icon. And what Panofsky calls the iconological level seems to

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Figure 43 Jacopo Tintoretto, Gathering of Manna, 1591/2, oil on canvas, 377 × 576 cm, San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. Photo: SCALA.

correspond, loosely, to Peirce’s interpretative level of thirdness. Both thinkers oppose any hermetic form of semiotics, and both are invested in the realm of conventional meanings, distinguished from the class of primary or natural meanings – where conventional meanings require decoding or interpretation, and natural meanings involve only responses to forms. Neither Panofsky nor Peirce argues that the level of the pre-iconographic/pure icon bears value in itself. But for Deleuze and Guattari, as for Damisch, it is precisely this non-communicative register of the material and sensible sign that is productive, and it is at this very juncture that the diagram is introduced.77

Tintoretto’s ghostly figures One of the most captivating expressions of the material excess to semiotic coding in Tintoretto’s works are the articulations of golden-white brushstrokes that skim across his compositions. Brilliant little highlights, quickly painted, resist integration into their recessional spaces and congeal into curious clusters of disproportionately small and abbreviated ‘ghostly’ figures. Defiantly ‘unfinished’, these figures would no doubt have created consternation in their sixteenth-century viewers.78 Whilst often

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assembled in groups they do not obviously play the role of the onlooking crowd to the historia, and their electrical frisson prevents them from blending into the background. Even if assembled into vast standing crowds, they are less human witnesses than conveyors of invisible forces. Hovering between the celestial register of the heavens and the material register of the earth, they act as conduits between thresholds of meaning, destabilizing the historia from within. In the San Rocco Baptism of Christ, 1578–80 (Figures 44 and 45) and the Rescue of the Body of Saint Mark (Figures 30 and 46), these scintillating groups are positioned on land and yet are decidedly not of the earth. Enfolding the cosmic in the earthly they put the painted world into turbid motion. Perhaps the most arresting example is to be found in the Baptism of Christ. This bizarre, convulsive crowd begins in the upper left-hand side of the painting and proceeds in a serpentine diagonal downwards through its centre and behind the darkened mass of the right-hand side of the composition, giving the sense of endless continuity. Pulsing strokes dart in eccentric movements, producing their own furious pattern, an informal extravagance that contrasts almost schizophrenically to the formal logic of the foreground where the baptism of the historia taking place. Such schism is encountered again in the Rescue of the Body of Saint Mark (Figure 46). Tiny semitransparent figures are fleeing towards the arched corridors. The entire painting is enervated by this extraordinary group. Painted in fluid white strokes, they are the epitome of pure flight, and show Tintoretto’s brilliant handling of the brush at its most striking. They are almost comical: some wear European hats, some wear turbans, some have just covered their head with veils, some are draped, others are naked, a couple have tripped up on the stairs, one is astride a galloping horse. Again, this group contrasts starkly to the rather static central subject group – a tightly knit, sombre cluster made up of Saint Mark, a group of men, and, somewhat peculiarly, a huge camel. Not only are the fleeing figures painted in a completely different style to this subject group; they are also moving, hurriedly, in the opposite direction. It appears that they are running from the storm that is gathering overhead in a sky darkened and streaked by lightening. They are signs of this imminent storm, their abbreviation expressing the passage of time in a way that the congealed, finely modelled narrative group is unable to. Yet their manic intensity seems disproportionate to what is depicted. As so often, Tintoretto seems to have gone beyond what the narrative demands. Another intriguing example of this excess, and asignification, is the pyre that is placed right at the very centre of the painting, just behind the head of one of the men carrying Saint Mark. A bundle of twigs, not yet alight, it floats oddly, casting no shadow, disproportionate in size, and apparently disconnected from everything. It is a strange hole in the middle of the painting, supplying a compositional axis whilst contributing to the disruption to legibility. The signs of the gathering storm embodied by the fleeing figures also manifest in the spectral architectural facades that shiver with the white schematic lines that play across their surfaces. The wisps of cloud on the top of the right-hand building morph into outlines of translucent angels who in turn meet the running figures. In this connection to the celestial, the figures assume an ambiguous

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position, as extensions of this unearthly event, material conduits of the cosmic forces of what is more than a natural phenomenon.

Figure 44 Jacopo Tintoretto, Baptism of Christ, 1578/80, oil on canvas, 538 × 465 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

Diagrammatic Constructivism

Figure 45 Jacopo Tintoretto, Baptism of Christ (detail), 1578/80, oil on canvas, 538 × 465 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

Figure 46 Jacopo Tintoretto, Rescue of the Body of Saint Mark (detail), 1562–6, oil on canvas, 398 × 315 cm. Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: SCALA.

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The story of the Rescue of the Body of Saint Mark tells of the moving of the body of the patron Saint from Alexandria to Venice in the ninth century by merchants. This transport of the relics was a significant episode in the myth of Venice, signalling the displacement of Saint Theodore as the patron saint by Saint Mark, and the city’s growing independence from Byzantium. The cult of Saint Mark assumed heightened importance in the early sixteenth century when the power of Venice was under threat. Tintoretto’s representation of the subject in this painting, as well as the other three works in the cycle, would therefore have been particularly important.79 The legend tells that just as the pagans were going to burn the body on a bonfire – our peculiar floating bundle in the centre of the painting – a thunderstorm intervened allowing the Venetian merchants to make off with the body. So, the storm is in fact part of the story; it is pivotal to it. And yet, Tintoretto paints the two elements of the story in such a way as to seem disconnected, as though two disjunct, almost competing, registers of painting – the narrative that is represented and the storm that affects. It is as though painting is internally fractured by a force that the story cannot quite contain. Architecture, figure, and storm morph into a ghostly, diagrammatic assemblage that acts as a counter-event to the historia of the title, disrupting the intelligibility of the historia with unnamed sensations. Here we have an example of the way painting functions as the release of what Peirce called ‘firstness’ from the regime of signs that is the historia, rupturing through the action of its material the imprint of the textual upon the image and the dominion of representation. The Rescue exposes two regimes of signs: the representational regime of the historia and the genetic, material regime of the ghostly figures. One might say that there is a new thought of the Rescue, a thought engendered through the material genesis of new signs.

The genetic method: Maimon and Deleuze At this point I return to Deleuze, and to the philosophical question of genesis. The ‘genetic method’ developed by the eighteenth-century Lithuanian-born philosopher Solomon Maimon in his Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (published in 1790, the year before Kant’s Critique of Judgment) plays a fundamental role in Deleuze’s development of a transcendental empiricism. Kantian ‘conditioning’, the examination of the conditions of possibility of the experience of objects in general as far as their form is concerned, is replaced by a theory of the differential genesis of thought. According to Maimon, thought begins with the ‘differentials’ of sensation. Sensation is not just a component of thought, but its material constituent.80 The theory of differentials is Maimon’s solution to what he perceives to be the problem of Kant’s schematism. We have seen that Peirce too had challenged this fundamental element of Kant’s philosophy. Questioning the validity of the a priori, Peirce remained an empiricist. In contrast, Maimon

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ascribes to the Kantian imperative of the transcendental but seeks to articulate a transcendental philosophy that can account for the genesis of real experience. Maimon identifies two problems with Kant’s schematism. The first is the problem of the heterogeneity of concepts and intuitions, which cannot account for the application of the former to the latter. The second is the problem of reality as more than possibility, that reality can be more than what is made possible by the understanding. In a way what Maimon was criticizing was Kant’s assumption of an image of thought that concealed the process by which this image was produced. Maimon claimed that Kant neglected the demands of a genetic method. He concedes that Kant attempts to avoid the difficulty of the heterogeneity of the forms that are being synthesized (concepts and intuitions) by positing that space and time supply the homogeneous ground for this schematism between two heterogeneous faculties. However, he argues that this does not solve the question of application, of how a priori concepts can be applied to empirical intuitions. That is, it does not solve the question of the objective validity of schematism – how schematic rules are not just logically legitimate but actually legitimate.81 In this regard, Maimon invokes Hume’s claim that the form of causality is neither already belonging to our thought in general nor grounded in experience itself, but derived from an association of repeated perceptions.82 He goes on to propose a middle ground between Kant’s idealism and Hume’s empiricism by considering the sensibility as an extension of the understanding that is expanded to encompass both concepts and objects of intuition. What arises is an infinite understanding that produces out of itself ‘all possible kinds of connections and relations of things (the ideas)’.83 Our own human understanding cannot achieve this infinite potential, and although similar, is limited. Whilst Hume had indicated the existence of special cases where ideas that are closely associated make the imagination (the productive faculty) smoothly transit from one idea to the other – for instance, the connection between the idea of sinking and the idea of suffocating – all ideas nevertheless have their source in sensible data.84 Maimon questions this. For him, ‘the understanding does not subject something given a posteriori to its a priori rules; rather it lets it arise in accordance with these rules’.85 This idea of a real continuum between the sensibility and the understanding is based in a theory of differentials. Maimon’s theory of differentials is itself indebted to Kant’s theory of intensive magnitudes. For Kant, intensive magnitudes constitute the ‘real’ in appearances. They apply both to the sensation ‘in itself ’ and to the ‘degree of influence on sense’.86 The heterogeneity of cognitive elements is thus moderated by gradation. Every sensation, Kant argues, is capable of a continuous gradation, such that between reality and negation of reality there is a continuum of many possible intermediate sensations. Properties such as colour or heat or the white paint brusquely scuffed on a canvas, material forces such as weight or impenetrability, all exist in a continuum of degrees by which they are apprehended by the senses. But Kant considers this reality of appearances from the perspective of a science of what is universal and necessary in all appearance. Thus, what is important is the form of the sensible, by which what

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is apprehended by the senses can be cognized in the schematism. Matter is subordinate to form, intensity is subordinate to extensity, and reality is subordinate to possibility. Maimon reverses these hierarchies. For him, ‘differential’ refers on the one hand to an infinitesimally small unit of sensation, and on the other to the rule of their combination. It pertains both to pure sensation in its passage and to the way in which sensations are combined. This combination takes the place of a determination of difference between sensible qualities. Maimon thus conceives differentiation as immanent and processual: the understanding ‘cannot think an object as having already arisen [entstanden] but only as arising [entstehend], i.e. as flowing [fliessend]’.87 Thought is rethought in terms of difference, passage, and process. In place of the heterogeneity of concepts and intuitions, there are differentials of sensation on a continuum between them. In place of the heterogeneity of the faculties of the sensibility and understanding, there is an infinite understanding that encompasses both and produces out of itself ‘all possible kinds of relations’. The reciprocal synthesis of differential relations becomes the source both of real objects and of the transcendent exercise within sensibility.88 This genetic perspective in turn rids us of the presuppositions that haunts the dogmatic and representational image of thought, of which Kant’s model of the schematism is – in the views of both Deleuze and Maimon – a supreme representative. The theory of differentials casts a new light on the idea of construction. Maimon sees construction as continuous and intensive, and restores to sensation a pivotal role within it. The only way of constructing a concept completely, he argues, is through an empirical construction to infinity such that the construction approaches ever closer to its concept: ‘Only when this is fully accomplished do we get a real object a priori, which otherwise is impossible.’89 At the same time, the ‘I’ is constructed, since the ‘I’ is also approached continuously, through the determination of an object. Maimon’s claim is that construction is neither transcendentally ideal (Kant) nor empirical (Peirce) but transcendentally empirical. Deleuze takes up the critique of schematism in terms very similar to those Maimon had used and reprises his questions. How can the schema ensure the harmony of the faculties? How can it account for reality? Like Maimon, Deleuze contends that Kant neglected the demands of a genetic method, both with respect to the subjective and the objective: objectively, by relying on ‘facts’ and seeking only their conditions, and subjectively by appealing to faculties already ready-made. These objections supply some of the impetus for his formulation of a transcendental empiricism.

Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism Deleuze develops Maimon’s genetic method. But he does not just posit this genetic account of thought as a new image of thought. Rather, he argues for its exceptionality. To begin, he argues that sensation is not just given, but constitutes an imperceptible reality of intensities or difference. It is

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only in exceptional circumstances that we are confronted with this reality, the circumstances when we encounter something that cannot be recognized and which can only be sensed. When faced by something that can only be sensed, the sensibility, no longer able to communicate with the other faculties in a common sense, is forced to expand. What Deleuze calls an object of recognition can be experienced not only through the sensibility but through other faculties as well. It may be recalled, imagined, or conceived, as well as sensed, and therefore presupposes the exercise of the senses and the other faculties in a common sense. But an encounter with difference entails a transcendental and disjunctive exercise of the faculties, because when faced with an object which can only be sensed, sensibility finds itself before its own limit and raises itself to a transcendent exercise. This exercise reciprocally determines a new sensible object and an expanded sensing subjectivity. New thought, in the form of ‘ideas’ or ‘problems’, arises from an inner disjunction in thinking. Something, some event or act, must expose us to this reality of that which can only be sensed. For Deleuze, it is the work of art as being of sensation that can assume this function. With his ghostly figures quivering over the surfaces of his paintings, Tintoretto exposes to us the pulsating sensations harboured in the material of white paint, a zone of indiscernibility produced through the reality of a scintillating material. Faced by an image that is neither an inchoate collection of brushstrokes nor the figure of a man, I am startled. I might not know what I am seeing, but I sense excess and am forced out of the natural stupor by which I customarily approach objects I think I know about. We have here the outline of what Deleuze calls a ‘transcendental’ or ‘superior’ empiricism, a philosophy that retains the transcendental character of Kantianism whilst seeking a renewed conception of the role of experience in thinking. Rather than investigating the transcendental conditions of possible experience, transcendental empiricism sets out to expose the conditions of real experience. Whereas ordinary empiricism begins with given sense-data, transcendental empiricism considers the coming into being both of sense-data and of our own sensibility, attending to how our capacity to experience the world arises in the encounter with the exceptional. Like Maimon, Deleuze attributes the differential activity of thought to the ‘idea’ or ‘problem’ (the terms are used interchangeably in Difference and Repetition: ‘ideas are essentially problematic or problematizing’ and ‘problems are ideas’90). Problem-ideas have ‘a very special relationship to pure thought’ since they are ‘those instances which go from sensibility to thought and from thought to sensibility’.91 One might say that they are conduits of difference, for difference is internal to a problemidea even though it may be external to the concept which represents an object. Thus in place of the regulation of thought through the schematism of general concepts and particular intuitions, there is a genesis of thought through the synthesis of dynamic ideas.

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To dramatize ideas is to manifest differential relations in a dynamic space-time. Dramatization brings movement into thought, recalling Hume’s conception of the mind as a theatre where perceptions ‘make their appearance, pass, re-pass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations’.92 Ideas are not generalities, they are not always present, lying in wait to be used; having an idea is a rare occurrence, an occurrence of misrecognition.93 We find here the post-Kantian character of the Deleuzian articulation of diagrammatic construction. Working in matter, the diagram reciprocally constructs a new reality of thought and a new reality of sensible objects. No longer a question of the part by part assembling of a thing, diagrammatics involves the continuous bringing into relation of the fluid and motile elements of a passage. This elaboration permits us to newly grasp the sense of the diagram as the ‘height of abstraction, but also the moment at which abstraction becomes real’, ‘a thought synthesiser to make thought travel’.94

Tintoretto’s constructivism. Stage-method as diagram Having outlined several philosophies of construction – Kant’s transcendental construction, Peirce’s empirical construction, Maimon’s differential construction, and Deleuze’s transcendentally empirical construction – I have shown that what Deleuze and Guattari designate as diagrammatic construction exposes an inquiry into the nature of thought, how thought is produced from sensation or signs that refer to nothing but their signalling material, and how in its genesis thought can escape the history of its inherited images. This is a questioning that for them has much to do with painting – not painting as a mode of thinking distinct from philosophy, but painting as the model of thought. As Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition, ‘The theory of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction’,95 where this abstraction is not the abstraction of ‘non-objective’ visual art (since abstract works can be as representational as figurative works), but rather the abstraction of genesis itself. The diagram marks the moment when ‘abstraction becomes real’, the moment when the abstraction of material traits is made into new reality. Painting thinks diagrammatically when it breaks through established traditions and values and forges new relations within the matter with which it works. It would be difficult to characterize painting as schematic or constructivist in the sense to which Kant gives these terms since values of painting such as disegno, historia, and colorito are not transcendental a priori. These are values that are instead constructed in an experimental process of ‘testing’ against empirical reality – both the empirical reality of the materials of paint and the empirical reality of an observable ‘nature’. The sensible does not just contribute to the thought of the painter as something he represents in accordance with principles already given; rather, it is constitutive of that very thought. So, whilst a particular historia might be given to the painter before he begins his work,

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and the concept of historia of course is itself given, the singular painted historia is produced through an ongoing engagement with the empirical materials of paint. Perhaps, then, the situation that painting confronts us with is more aligned with Peirce’s notion of diagrammatic construction. Might the historia be thought of as a ‘hypothesis’ that can be diagrammatically represented as a visual and formal set of relations to be experimented upon to discover new relations? Such a notion might be appropriate for the work of many visual artists, from the early innovators of linear perspective to twentieth-century painters of the grid.96 But Tintoretto does not simply represent a given historia as a formal schema of relations and parts. By way of contrast, Serlio’s schema of the tragic scene might indeed be understood as a visual outline of formal elements that presents their most ‘essential’ features. But as we have seen, Tintoretto does not just experiment upon this schema to rationally extract new aesthetic possibilities. Rather, through his stage-method he creates a new, competing reality of painting that harnesses forces in an unpredictable and at times irrational way. The stage-method is the site of a violence to what is given of painting in Tintoretto’s time. It is an aberration that projects a reality that cannot be framed within existing terms. Does the stage-method function as Tintoretto’s diagram? The manipulation of a little box makes many things possible. It permits the detachment of relations of illumination, proportion, mass, and angle from the objects to which they refer, such that light and space become free elements unbound from the demands of the historia. In turn, one encounters across Tintoretto’s paintings a continual reworking of a set of variations and relations – from the intensity and direction of lighting, the posture, proportions and poses of figures, and viewpoint(s). One finds an aesthetic of relations, where combinations of different viewpoints and effects seem to take precedence over the presence of particular objects. Furthermore, this domain of relations exceeds what can be seen and said of painting in Tintoretto’s time, the mode of recognition by which his contemporaries registered painting. It is in this sense, a sense that implicates thought in its futurity, that one can say that the diagram is a map of a real ‘yet to come’. Tintoretto’s stage-method also permits a detachment from ‘nature’ as a given, empirically observable reality. When I speak of the unreal or artificial character of his work, I do not refer to a character that has nothing to do with what is in fact experienced. Many of the architectural backgrounds of Tintoretto’s paintings such as the Rescue of the Body of Saint Mark and the Christ Washing the Feet of His Disciples are populated by the buildings of Venice, buildings Tintoretto would have actually experienced, the familiar sights of his everyday life. From this material of experience Tintoretto constructs a new reality, one that is continuous with the reality of everyday experience but which intensifies it, giving expression to what is imperceptible within it. Rendered spectral, the facades of Saint Mark’s square become mysterious and unreal. Even the cosmic inventions of San Rocco, having renounced any recognizable signs of Venice, reveal little traits of ‘everyday’ reality – an artisan’s shed, a little puppy dog wagging his tail, a scullery kitchen full of freshly washed dishes. These features of ‘real

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experience’ are not just copied or recreated through the laws of analogy that bind art to an empirically observable nature but are instead put through a constructive operation that makes them other than how they are given in ordinary experience. Returning to the San Rocco Baptism of Christ (Figure 44): the historia – the story and the visible signs that allow us to recognize and read it – is generally understood. One expects to see Christ in the waters of Jordan, being baptized by Saint John the Baptist. And Tintoretto does indeed provide this motif, with the beautifully drawn figures of Christ and Saint John Baptist and the semi-nude, swarthy figures of the half-shaded pilgrims in the foreground. But there is much that is unexpected, most of all the ghostly crowd of figures melding together and stretching into the distance through the wiry workings of a whitened brush (Figure 45). Struggling to read them, must we only sense them? They have been interpreted as a group of pilgrims waiting for their baptism, and a group of onlookers witnessing the Holy event. But their dazzling abbreviation, localized to them alone, is perplexing. It suggests a supernatural quality that would not be customarily associated with earthly pilgrims. As the figures swoon, twist, and tremble, matter is shown to bear the forces of weight, movement, and density. Matter shows itself to be shot through with forces that traverse the intelligible registration of the story, overspilling the boundaries of particular concepts associated with the historia. The ideas of poverty, faith, and humility presented through the iconographical motifs are overwhelmed by a modulation of sensation that bears nameless ideas. Tintoretto’s idea to paint ghostly figures sets itself apart from prior concepts of figuration available to him. In this, he is thinking rather than recognizing. Thinking stages itself as an irreverence towards how thought already conducts itself. Perhaps it is symptomatic that, whilst he criticized his poor judgement, Vasari thought Tintoretto’s ‘the most extraordinary brain that the art of painting had ever seen’.97 Even his critics acknowledged that Tintoretto was a thinker – it is just that he didn’t seem to think as others did. Tintoretto’s diagrammatic stage-method synthesizes asignifying material traits which disrupt the sign-regime of the historia. Operating in the space between given and historically over-coded terms – painting and theatre, disegno and colorito – it does not reconcile them but instead produces from the gap that separates them something new, a new reality not only of what painting can convey, but a new trans-pictorial reality of painting itself. Beyond the immediacies of the material substance of paint, a little stage-box operates as the genetic method of Tintoretto’s thought.

4 Diagrammatic Aesthetic

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he encounter with Tintoretto’s works has occasioned a critical reconstruction of a seminal debate in post-Kantian philosophy: the question of whether works of art conform to a representational

relation between the mind and the realm of objects (Kant), or whether they necessitate a confrontation with sensations that forces thought anew (Deleuze). The value of this question for art history rests on the potential displacement of an image of thought whereby the given categories, methods, and concepts of thinking are applied to objects whose propriety for that thinking has already been determined, with a foregrounding of the differential, material, and sensory genesis of works of art, the encounter with which impels thought to extend its capacities. In the previous chapter I demonstrated how Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the diagram operates within a philosophy of constructivism that concerns the genesis of thought, the constitutive role of sensation in this genesis, and the function of the work of art in this process. What I propose to call a ‘diagrammatic aesthetic’ brings together the constructivist conception of the diagram with a theory of sensibility pertaining to the work of art. It allows us to address a question at the heart of our concern with Tintoretto: that of the contribution of Tintoretto’s works, as sensible expressions of difference, to the thought of these works – both Tintoretto’s own and the thought of the scholar, practitioner, or writer. A diagrammatic aesthetic concerns both the theory of how sensation contributes to thought and the nature of the work of art that incites such contribution. Deleuze is explicit on the conjunction of these two elements – the theory of sensibility and its role in thought on the one hand and the theory of artworks as beings or ‘blocs’ of sensations on the other.1 For him, one task of aesthetics is to unite these two registers which he feels have been kept separate in the history of philosophy. As such, Deleuze’s reading of Kant’s first Critique and the third Critique is interwoven, and this is why in the presentation of this reading we can move without conflict between the registers of epistemology and the ontology of art. In Chapter 3, I explored how the diagram functions as a synthesizer of the sensible and the intelligible in such a way as to reveal their inherent interaction, their indistinction. I considered how Deleuze’s diagram and Kant’s schema both synthesize sensations to generate thought, and how,

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whereas the schema submit sensation (or more precisely, what is intuited of sensible appearances as form) to cognitive structures, the diagram operates ‘directly’ in the sensible. For Deleuze, the sensible is the source of thought, different from the concept not in kind but in degree: thought involves a continual passage from sensations to concepts.2 Deleuze is an empiricist, but he does not believe that thought is sourced in quotidian experience. Sensation is not simply ‘the subjective aspect of perception’ that corresponds to the sense-data of our empirical world.3 Rather, sensation traverses the quotidian bounds of sense-data and bears a power by which it initiates thought. Sensation may thus be said to possess two components: an ‘extensive’ component that corresponds to its qualitative character as discrete sense-data by which objects are perceived and known, and an ‘intensive’ component that is imperceptible under quotidian circumstances and comprises that which passes between sense-data. For instance, extensively, a particular colour may be perceived to have the quality of red, and this is what gives its character as data. But intensively this red is comprised of infinite variations, of differential degrees of redness in continuous movement that approximate red, but also blue, or yellow. In this regard, one can say that red is not identifiable with itself but is rather internally fractured, constituted of minute differences in a continuous passage, a flow of little sensations. As these differences are ordinarily concealed by qualities, and as we habitually incline to recognize the object of our experience, they go undetected. It is precisely the registration of this ‘intense world of differences’4 that Deleuze takes as the task of thought. It is in the differential passage from one sensation to another that we find the conditions under which something new is produced. Deleuze’s philosophy is oriented towards the articulation and practice of these conditions, which includes what art does. The work of art shows that sensation has its own logic. Within this logic, diagrams play a key role. Deleuze claims that diagrams are maps of sensation rather than maps with form. Diagrams, he argues, have no part of themselves transcendent to the matter upon which they act. In this way, it would seem they are highly unstable, dissolving as they emerge, shifting and mutating as they produce. Diagrams cannot be fixed without changing in nature. As such they demand to be considered from the point of view of their genetic function, that is, the way they stir up matter and produce new relations between material traits. As maps of sensation, one might say that the diagram possesses an irreducibly aesthetic character. To grasp the sense of this diagrammatic aesthetic I return to Deleuze’s reading of Kant.

Deleuze after Kant: Sensation and genesis The two senses of the aesthetic in Kant’s philosophy are the transcendental aesthetic of the first Critique, which is a theory of the contribution of the sensible to cognition, and the critique of aesthetic judgement in the third Critique.

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Deleuze’s critique of Kant’s transcendental idealism, and his development of transcendental empiricism and constructivism, is in part staged through an investment of the third Critique. It is in this complex text, a text that he feels encompasses a great ‘diversity of points of view’, that Deleuze finds the method of genesis that he believes is absent from Kant’s theory of cognition in the first Critique.5 It is strange that aesthetics (as the science of the sensible) could be founded on what can be represented in the sensible. True, the inverse procedure is not much better, consisting of the attempt to withdraw the pure sensible from representation and determine it as that which remains once representation is removed (a contradictory flux, for example, or a rhapsody of sensations). Empiricism truly becomes transcendental, and aesthetics an apodictic discipline, only when we apprehend directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference, potential difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity. It is in difference that movement is produced as an ‘effect’, that phenomena flash their meaning like signs. The intense world of differences, in which we find the reason behind qualities and the being of the sensible, is precisely the object of a superior empiricism.6

Deleuze is here indicating his criticism of the transcendental aesthetic of the first Critique as a science of the sensible founded on what can represented of the sensible – what Kant termed ‘a science of all principles of a priori sensibility’.7 Deleuze argues that with its attention to the a priori relation of a representation to an object, Kant’s transcendental aesthetic designates a theory of the sensible that captures only what of experience conforms to the possibility designated by transcendental conditions. It is as such that the conditions of possible experience are ‘too general’ or ‘too large’ for real experience. By ‘real’, Deleuze refers to reality independent from the existing structures of the mind, a reality not reducible to what can be represented of it. What Kant calls ‘objective reality’ concerns objects as they are given to the mind; as such, objective reality is fused with subjective reality.8 Deleuze’s objection that Kant neglects the ‘real’ would be nonsensical to Kant since to him the sensible, divided into form and matter (as sensation), contributes to cognition only in its form as appearance – a contribution that is determined by the demands of the understanding.9 Deleuze objects to this isolation of the structures of the mind from sensation. He argues that the matter of sensation possesses a reality that is not determinable by the way in which the faculties are structured and regulated. There is an excess of reality to cognition and its laws, he claims, an excess of the matter of sensation to the a priori forms of sensibility. If sensation has its own logic, it is not a logic found in the framework of the transcendental a priori. Deleuze also levels criticism at ‘the determination of the sensible as that which remains once representation is removed’. This can either refer to the domain of empirical sensations or to what remains of sensation when it is ‘bracketed’ from representational structures of the mind.

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The former – the object of ordinary empiricism – cannot account for the way the sensible produces thought; it cannot account for how two heterogeneous domains (perceptions and concepts) meet. The latter – the phenomenological reduction inaugurated by Edmund Husserl – effectively reinstates consciousness as another form of transcendence (for ‘bracketed’ out, consciousness transcends the quotidian lived world of objects). But Deleuze wants to hold firm to the real matter of sensation as a constituent of thought, to the empirical conditions of a thinking that nevertheless harbours a transcendental component. With this in mind, he turns to what he understands as instances of the transcendental genesis of thought occasioned by aesthetic judgements.

Genetic method in the third critique Kant elucidates how aesthetic judgements arise without prior conceptual determination. This departs from the claims of the first two Critiques, according to which the mental faculties were brought into agreement always through the determination of one faculty. So, in the schematization of the first Critique the imagination is determined by the understanding and brought under its concepts.10 But such submission is not necessary, Deleuze argues, for thought to be produced. And left to itself, he claims, the imagination ‘would do something else entirely than schematise’. This freedom and new purpose is what is exposed in the critique of aesthetic judgements. In aesthetic judgements, the imagination ‘displays its deepest freedom in reflecting the form of the object’.11 Why do aesthetic judgements permit this freedom of the mind? Because they do not contribute to determinate cognition – that is, to a representation through concepts. Instead, they give testimony to a strange coherency of the mind where the faculties enter ‘relationships which are free and unregulated, where each goes to its own limit and nevertheless shows the possibility of some sort of harmony with the others’.12 With no determinate concepts binding the faculties to particular rules of cognition, there is instead, as Maimon’s genetic method had in its own terms proposed, an immanent genesis of rules. Deleuze even suggests that the third Critique is in fact an answer to Maimon’s objections to Kant’s neglect of a genetic method (as Deleuze points out, Maimon’s Transcendental Philosophy, 1790, was written after Kant’s first Critique and predated the third Critique).13 In exposing the genesis of the free agreement of the faculties, the genesis of thought and its transcendental conditions is revealed. Aesthetics thus becomes the model for a transcendental empiricism. Nevertheless, Kant qualifies the freedom of the faculties in aesthetic judgements. The imagination, despite its freedom from rules, ‘is nevertheless represented as purposive for the presentation of the given concept’. We are obliged, Kant argues, to consider the imagination in its purpose for our understanding, for without this the imagination would produce ‘nothing but nonsense’.14 It is this

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formal purposiveness of the imagination that allows Kant to make claims for the universality of judgements of taste. If there were no laws governing judgement a priori, the claim of universality would have no foundation. Nature supplies this formal purposiveness that regulates the free agreement of the faculties. And the internal agreement of faculties between themselves implies this external agreement between nature and these faculties; it is in the interests of reason that there is such an external agreement.15 Even if the imagination is held in check by the laws of nature, it is liberated from the dominion of the understanding and reason whilst at the same time providing them with material for their own expansion. Its freedom signals to these two faculties that each can become capable of free play on its own. Whence the ‘education’ proffered by the imagination, an idea which Deleuze affirms when he describes aesthetics as an ‘apodictic discipline’.16 The two instances in the third Critique upon which Deleuze draws for their apodictic value are the judgement of the sublime and the artistic production of aesthetic ideas. Both expose a transcendental and supra-sensible genesis of thought. Judgements of the sublime are judgements of nature and analysed from the perspective of the ‘observer’. The aesthetic idea is a feature of artistic practice, analysed from the perspective of the artist-genius who creates. Deleuze’s attention to both aspects of genesis signals the later constructivist ontology of art that he will develop with Guattari, which will seek to bring together the experience of the art work with the experience of its creation, and conjoin art and nature in a philosophy that overcomes their dichotomy whilst refraining from post-Kantian romantic idealism.17 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes that rather than being concerned with what happens before and after Kant [which amounts to the same thing], we should be concerned with a precise moment within Kantianism, a furtive and explosive moment which is not even continued by Kant, must less by post-Kantianism. This is the moment where he introduces a kind of disequilibrium, a fissure or crack in the pure Self of the ‘I think’, a moment where ‘we enter into that schizophrenia in principle which characterises the highest power of thought and opens Being directly on to difference’.18

For Deleuze, this fracture marks the constructive moment of a transcendental genesis, and it is with this sense of a destructive production – that anticipates the characterization of the diagram as catastrophizing givens and constructing a real to come – that we turn to Deleuze’s analysis of the sublime and the aesthetic idea. In effect, the schematic imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason is still under the logical common sense; the reflective imagination of judgments of beauty is still under the aesthetic common sense. Yet with the sublime … the imagination is forced or constrained to confront its own limit, its phantasteon, its maximum which is equally the unimaginable, the unformed or the deformed in nature. Moreover, it transmits the

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supra-sensible as foundation of both nature and the faculty of thought: thought and imagination here enter into an essential discordance, a reciprocal violence which conditions a new type of accord. As a result, in the case of the sublime, the recognition model and the form of common sense are found wanting in favour of a quite different conception of thought.19

What matters for Deleuze is the way the sublime initiates a discordant accord of thought and a subsequent expansion of mental powers. Faced by the extreme magnitude that occasions a negative presentation of form – the wild and stormy ocean, shapeless mountain masses towering above one another, the starry heavens – the imagination undergoes violence. Unable to reflect form as it does in judgements of taste, it is pushed to the point of its own inadequacy and the faculty of reason takes over the business of representing the object. Thus, the formlessness of the sensible world awakens in reason its conception of a supra-sensible source. Although the imagination cannot capture what it is confronted by, reason can reason to itself why that is, and in this way, we discover a capacity for resistance against nature’s apparent dominion over us. As such, the negative moment is followed by a positive, as ‘the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital powers’ is followed by an ‘all the more powerful outpouring of them’.20 Both reason and the imagination are made ‘aware’ of their limits – one positively and one negatively. In Deleuze’s words, the two faculties discover the principle of their genesis in a suprasensible, or transcendental, ‘point of concentration’. This is not felt as harmonious agreement, as with the harmonious free play of imagination and understanding in aesthetic judgements of taste, but an agreement resulting from discord – what Kant had called ‘agitation’.21 In Deleuze’s words, this discord is a disjunctive synthesis, for each faculty ‘communicates to the other only the violence which confronts it with its own difference and its divergence from the others’.22 Discordant accord becomes ‘the object of a genuine genesis’. Thus, the sublime has ‘value as a model’– a model that artistic production assumes.23 Transcendental genesis is also found in the artist-genius’ production of ‘aesthetic ideas’. Here too, the image of thought as representation is displaced by a quite different conception of thought, one grasped from the perspective of production. But in place of the sublime’s occasioning of negative presentation, genius presents us positively with a ‘second nature’ through the production of ideas. Kant calls genius ‘the talent that gives the rule to art’, ‘the subjective disposition by which nature provides art with rules’, ‘the animating principle in the mind’ that gives rise, transcendentally, to these rules.24 The question no longer concerns the impact on the faculties occasioned by the experience of beautiful forms, or sublime formlessness, but the operation in the mind accompanying the production of art. Whereas ideas of reason are concepts without intuitions, aesthetic ideas are intuitions without concepts. What the poet conjures of hell cannot be brought under a concept of hell that already exists. Instead, what he produces gives rise to an animation of the mind that opens it to ‘an immeasurable field of related representations’,25 adding to a concept much that is ‘unnameable’ and freeing the imagination

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from the constraints of the understanding. This feeling of expansion animates the cognitive faculties, giving life to concepts and ‘spirit’ (Geist) to the work. In striving towards something lying beyond the bounds of experience, the aesthetic idea makes concepts sensible ‘with a completeness that goes beyond anything of which there is an example in nature’.26 What is produced is a nature other than the nature given to us; a second nature and a thought beyond thought’s natural exercise. The aesthetic idea ‘makes us think’.27 Although Kant indicates the element of the supra-sensible in both the judgements of the sublime and the production of aesthetic ideas, the problem of genesis is ultimately concealed by his preoccupation with the outcome of a conciliatory judgement. Both art and nature furnish the transcendental genetic conditions of thought at the site of a disjunction of the faculties. But whilst Kant recuperates this disjunction into a theory of taste, Deleuze and Guattari affirm it as a materialist and constructivist ontology of art.28

Material aesthetic and the work of art Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of art conjoins a theory of a transcendental power of the sensible with a theory of art as a construction in sensible matter. When matter (matiére) is put in contact with forces and attended to from this perspective rather than the perspective of form, Deleuze and Guattari understand it as ‘material’ (materiaux). In their words, material is a ‘molecularized matter’. The form– matter coupling is replaced by a material–force relation. Kant, on the other hand (in both the first and the third Critiques), submits matter to form and submits sensation to its form as the sensible. Furthermore, in the third Critique aesthetics is famously separated from direct considerations of the nature of the artwork as object. What is essential to art, Kant argues, is that it occasions a free play between the faculties and not that it restrict our response to the perceptual form of its products. Like Kant, Deleuze and Guattari are not interested in producing a theory of art in terms of a set of formal or even material features. They too affirm an aesthetics beyond art. It is as a bloc of sensations that art’s function is to be experienced and grasped. Sensation is not only a characteristic of art. Instead art is the name given to the activity of producing something from the excesses of sensation. So, whilst Deleuze and Guattari’s work is replete with references to actual works of art, what is in fact being signalled in these accounts is art as the reality of sensation rather than an ontologically distinct object of experience. Kant claims that it is only art with the reflecting power of judgement and not mere sensation as its content that bears upon aesthetic judgement.29 Deleuze and Guattari too are more concerned with the experiential impact of art than with the properties of the work of art ‘in-itself ’. But for them such art is precisely an art of ‘mere sensation’ and does not instigate reflection to produce universals. Sensation bears an active, contributory function in thinking, in a radically disjunctive production of thought.

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In this way, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of an aesthetic art reconciles the two senses of aesthetic in Kant’s philosophy: the theory of the sensible in the first Critique and the theory of aesthetic judgement in the third Critique. In its constructive function art plays a role in the genesis of thought at the limits of nature and of the subject. In its presentation of what can be sensed but not brought under determinate concepts, it shocks us into thinking. It might be deduced, not least from the way in which Deleuze himself often uses the generic nomination ‘art’, that this conjunction of thinking and art’s work can, in theory, be instigated by any artwork. But this investigation has been concerned with reality and not possibility. I am concerned solely with the reality of a singular experience of a work and a particular set of works: the real experience of Tintoretto and not hypothetical possible experiences of other artists. Insofar as for Deleuze sensation is not a theoretical abstraction but a material reality, the sensations produced by Tintoretto’s works are incomparable to those of other works, and the analogy that permits the application of generic method to a host of particular cases is insupportable. Indeed, any such application would return us to the (Kantian) situation of a general schema being too ‘large’ for its real cases – a model of transcendence that, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Deleuze strongly challenges. It is possible that other artists besides Tintoretto may too invite, condition, or allow diagrammatic analysis, but that is a methodological speculation with which, at least in this book, I am not concerned.

Aesthetic paradigm Guattari’s formulation of an ‘aesthetic paradigm’, that runs through Capitalism and Schizophrenia and What Is Philosophy?, reinforces the link between aesthetics and diagrammatics. Two notable characteristics of an aesthetic paradigm are, first, that aesthetics is irreducible to artworks and second, that aesthetics is a transformational regime that produces new reality, where this new reality includes new subjectivity. In Chaosmosis, Guattari claims that the aesthetic power of feeling, although equal in principle with the other powers of thinking philosophically, knowing scientifically, acting politically, seems on the verge of occupying a privileged position within … our era.30

And that the incessant clash of the movement of art against established boundaries (already there in the Renaissance, but above all in the modern era), its propensity to renew its materials of expression and the ontological texture of the percepts and affects it promotes brings about if not a direct contamination of other domains then at

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the least a highlighting and a re-evaluation of the creative dimensions that traverse all of them. Patently, art does not have a monopoly on creation, but it takes its capacity to invent mutant coordinates to extremes.31

We find here a notion of aesthetics replaced in connection with creative practices that cross the social field, traversing the economic, the social, the religious, the political, and constituting new kinds of subjects bound in relations of alliance to form ‘transversal collective identities’. Drawing upon the example of primitive and archaic societies, Guattari proposes the notion of an aesthetic paradigm as a mixture of different expressive and practical modes in a heterogeneous, ‘globally aestheticized’ space. In fact, he adds, this aesthetic paradigm might perhaps be more accurately called a ‘proto-aesthetic regime’, to emphasise that we are not referring to institutionalised art, and to its works manifested in the social field, or even to works as the exclusive products of human activity (art, he argues, is ‘not the privilege of human beings’ – birds, for instance, with their created songs, are artists too32) but ‘to a dimension of creation in a nascent state, perpetually in advance of itself ’.33 The aesthetic paradigm attends to the ‘force for seizing creative potentiality before it is applied to works, philosophical concepts, scientific functions and mental and social objects’.34 And this is what is constituted by aesthetic art: the engendering of creative dimensions that traverse different domains and disciplinary boundaries, a processually transformative, de-disciplining, diagrammatic effect. Both the theory of artistic production and theory of the artist are radicalized. In the afterlight of Kant’s remarks that genius awakens powers of creation in those who experience its productions, Deleuze and Guattari write that ‘the genius is someone who knows how to make the whole world a becoming’.35 The transcendental genesis of ideas is not considered to be the exclusive prerogative of an artist-genius, but a possible feature of a collective experience of creation. That is, thinking is forced in the encounter with works of art, and those who experience may, ‘if they have the strength for it’ (which is to say, if they are capable of being shocked), become artists through this experience.36 A  sense of communitarianism born of aesthetic experience displaces the privileged place of the artist as someone producing works we cannot understand, but which agree with our taste. At the same time, the production/reception dualism is overturned, since to receive is also to produce. It is not simply then that Deleuze and Guattari see art and aesthetic from the perspective of production/ creation rather than reception, but that the one who experiences repeats the constructive creative act. This is a liberating concept of genius that frees us from the understandings of the concept that tie genius to the character of a ‘great’ individual. Even though they repeatedly invoke the ‘masters’ of the art historical canon, Deleuze and Guattari have no desire to reinforce this canon, whence their focus on the qualities of experience incited by a work that are already beyond the artist, transhistorical, impersonal, and anonymous. It is in this regard that they write, ‘From the moment there is genius, there is something that belongs to no school, no period, something that achieves a breakthrough.’37

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Diagrammatic aesthetic Having introduced the framework that informs Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the aesthetic and their philosophy of art, we must ask ourselves what the particular notion of the diagram might offer. It might be suggested that the diagram foregrounds certain notable features of Deleuze and Guattari’s aesthetics: its constructivism, its materialism, its emphasis on production and the perspective of the creator, its character as transformational, and its inextricability from thought; that a diagrammatic aesthetic conjoins a theory of sensibility, a theory of art and a theory of thought within the parameters of a transcendental empiricism. Its implications for a history of art stem from its affirmation of the sensible as an imperceptible reality from which the new can be generated, and its affirmation of the shock element of the sensible as the occasion for the thought of works of art. The diagram maps a ‘real yet to come’ by capturing and bringing into relation traits that do not yet mean anything, that signal their matter alone and capture ‘what is most alive’ in sensation.38 At once a map of sensation, a map of difference, and a map of relations, it reminds us of the nature of aesthetics as transformational, a dimension by which things become other than they are. Even though forms (including the forms of particular artworks) may emerge from the diagram, the diagrammatic operation concerns an operation in and of the sensible that traverses specific works of art or sensible objects and therefore always bears a relation to invisibility and imperceptibility as a generative zone.39 To experience a diagrammatic work of art is to experience the formless interval between terms, the interstice as the dimension of excess and potential; it is not simply a question of inciting an experience of process rather than product, but of inviting an experience of discord made consistent.

Diagrammatic art Whilst diagrammatics designates an operation that traverses particular works of art, and art as an institutionalized and historicized reality, such that what counts as ‘art’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s work is a shifting nomination pertaining to the productive field of sensible events, Deleuze and Guattari do note specific features of artworks that render them diagrammatic. Thus, we are told that Bacon erects a ‘material framework’ to support the chromatic modulations of paint. In What Is Philosophy?, this framework is called a ‘house’, which is defined as an ‘interlocking of differently oriented frames’ that transposes the work to a milieu of construction ‘between architecture, sculpture and painting’.40 Whereas the modulations of paint correspond to a flux of sensations, the material framework designates the constructive element of painting. This house/framework is of course nothing like a

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picture of a house, or any particular schematic form. It does not even designate actual geometric planes. Rather it is a ‘composite system’ made up of a number of traits: the wall that cuts off, the window that captures or selects, the roof that envelops. Imparting to sensation the power to stand on its own, the house/framework makes sensation a ‘bloc’. These functions create a new kind of space which Deleuze calls, borrowing the terms of the art historian Alois Riegl, a ‘haptic’ space distinct from the ‘tactile-optical’ space of representation. Constructed through the immanent scaffolding of colour that may be produced, for example, through the juxtaposition of pure tones, a haptic space invites a proximate looking in contact with the palpable reality of the object.41 The experience of an excessive presence disorganizes the senses and disorientates vision, producing a haptic sense, a feeling of intense proximity, that corresponds to the haptic space it registers. We are here reminded of the transcendental genesis of the faculties in the encounter with the pure being of the sensible: the haptic is the name given to the new reality produced by painting’s capture of difference. In Francis Bacon, Deleuze refers to Paul Cézanne’s definition of the ‘motif ’ as a synthesis of sensation and geometry as a prelude to his own articulation of the diagram as a synthesis of geometry (as frame/house) with colour (as sensation).42 Bacon’s frameworks – his planes and sections of arcs and ellipses – prevent colour from remaining in a chaotic and disorganized state, from ‘scrambling’ the entire painting. This is the situation that Bacon identifies, and critiques, in abstract expressionism.43 In certain works by Pollock, with their ‘all-over’ treatment of paint, sensation remains confused and ‘sloppy’.44 On its own sensation lacks duration and clarity; it passes. On the other hand, pure geometry lacks reality; it is abstract. It is the diagram that conjoins them, making sensation into constructions that last.45 This returns us to the terms of Kant’s schematism and Deleuze’s critique. The question of how painting can produce something from its matter is a reframing of the question of how thought can emerge from the flux of sensations. Deleuze had argued that the a priori structure of the Kantian categories is too abstract, too ‘large’ for the real. Similarly, pure geometry, such as a perspective drawing laid out in painting prior to the application of colour, is transcendent to the matter of paint. A formal schema, it pre-exists material reality. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari are explicit on this point, characterizing as ‘transcendental’ a mode of composition whereby the mechanisms of perspective produce a structure upon which sensation is ‘projected’.46 Brought to mind here are Serlio’s designs for the tragic scena, outlines projected onto a blank canvas ready for the working of colour and texture – schemas that Tintoretto does not just translate. Just as transcendental empiricism had been a ‘third way’ between Kant’s transcendental idealism and ordinary empiricism, in his study of Bacon, Deleuze articulates a third way between the two extremes of pictorial transcendence and pictorial empiricism: the diagrammatic (pictorial

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transcendental empiricism). The diagram marks the point at which the abstraction becomes real.47 In What Is Philosophy?, whilst Deleuze and Guattari do not explicitly refer to the diagram, they do speak of an ‘aesthetic composition’, in which the material passes into sensation – in contrast to the technical composition whereby sensation is projected onto the material. They give as an example the process of ‘thickening’ the background, of painting on darkened grounds, ‘colour alongside colour’. Here painting rejects transcendence (the transcendence invited by the white canvas, and its demand for projection) and discovers its materialism. The thickening of the background also imparts a kind of framework, acting as an immanent scaffolding of planes. Such a description seems perfectly applicable to mid-sixteenth-century Venetian painting, with its direct composition in colour and use of dark grounds. In fact, Tintoretto is the first painter to systematically use dark grounds.48 This is a fact that does not escape Deleuze, who notes that Tintoretto’s innovation transforms painting, allowing things to ‘jump out’ of the background, and colours to ‘spring from the common base that attests to their obscure nature’.49 In addition to the sensory regime of colour and the finite architectonic of planes, Deleuze and Guattari claim that painting produces a third element. This element of the ‘cosmic’ emerges when the house is ‘de-framed’ and opened onto an infinite field of forces. Painting’s construction of houses that seals its material within finite planes and frames only traps sensation within bordered zones. Instead, they argue, houses must act as conduits for ‘celestial’ sensations that pass through them such that the work of art becomes the vector of a supra-sensible genesis of thought and things. Through art, sensation must become supra-sensory, whence the importance of houses having ‘open windows’: ‘The painter’s action never stays within the frame’;50 through de-framing, the painter leaves the milieus and the earth behind and becomes a ‘cosmic artisan’.51

Tintoretto’s material constructivism Given the preoccupation with colour and the materiality of paint in Venetian painting from the late fifteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century, it is perhaps not surprising that Deleuze and Guattari invest Venetian painting in Anti-Oedipus as an exemplar of how art can present itself as a body of sensation through colouring material. But Tintoretto is not just another Venetian painter. I have shown how the constructivism of his stage-method sets him apart from his contemporaries. In thinking his art alongside Deleuze’s philosophy, it is therefore not simply a question of the latter bringing new intelligibility to Tintoretto’s work, but rather of Tintoretto’s works imparting to Deleuze’s philosophy of art a specificity that the generic denomination of ‘Venetian painting’ cannot.

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Tintoretto begins the process of painting not with the composition of colours on canvas, or a drawn plan or sketch, but with the construction of little houses, boxes with stages lit from all sides. These little houses are ‘open’ – Tintoretto cuts into them holes through which light from oil lamps is shone to affect the spaces within. The finite territories of the houses are opened onto an infinite field of forces, the potentially endless variations of light that continuously augment their interiors. In this way, the stage-method is an expression of the sensation–house–cosmos triumvirate of Deleuze and Guattari’s trans-pictorial constructivist ontology of art. Colour is made constructive through the immanent framework of a house, and this framework is exposed to the forces of an outside source. Real construction becomes part of the genesis of painting, configuring painting as an expanded field of the sensible. This constructivist logic can be seen already in the youthful Christ among the Doctors (Figure 1). Here, the hulking expanses of coloured garments are held by the diagonal arcs of their folds. This is especially notable in the two enormous foreground figures of elderly doctors, one crouching over an oversized book, the pulsating amaranthine crimson of his garments coiled around the S-shape curve of his limbs, the other twisted, the shining gold of his vestments supported by a rhythmic framework  of arcs. The framework emerges immanently, as a plastic architectonic forged through the application of the paint and the movement of colour. But the room is firmly sealed. There are no openings, no signs of a house with cut-out windows. The same principle of a plastic architectonic animates the Miracle of the Slave (Figure 4). Here, the house is more rational, approximating the form of a classic Serlio-esque theatre stage upon which the action happens. Whilst the house is open to a vista, glimpsed through a shimmering pergola, this outside reality is still part of Serlio’s classical plan. Only the figure of Saint Mark indicates a cosmic reality beyond the painted scene. After the 1550s however, the pictorial space of Tintoretto’s paintings abandons Serlio’s formalism and  the closure of a stage-set, and we witness a more pervasive embracing of the cosmic. Through strange partitions composition is opened to the intervention of celestial forces and the sense of the infinite. We typically find pools of space that are not logically connected, and which are generated through free figural groupings and a lack of any continuous ground plan. In the San Rocco Massacre of the Innocents, 1582–7 (Figure 47), our eye is drawn to a most peculiar opening in the far background. Neither door nor window, it opens onto an intensely illuminated vista of stepped hills, fleeing figures and spectral architecture. Obscured by a strange mass which looks like a landslide spilling into the room, this opening functions as a two-way conduit between inside and outside. A cut-out, irrational little ‘window’, it de-territorializes the scene imparting to it an unearthly but unidentifiable register that enhances the agitation of the scene. The forces of a spectral world spill into the room, collapsing the boundaries of the space and hence the boundaries of the historia, elevating the composition to a cosmic plane.

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Figure 47 Jacopo Tintoretto, Massacre of the Innocents, 1582/7, oil on canvas, 422 × 580 cm. Sala Terrena, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

Constructivism beyond Venetian empiricism The stage-method distances Tintoretto from the empiricism of his Venetian contemporaries. One might articulate the norm in Venetian painting of his time in terms of painting’s translation of the sense-data of the empirical world. But Tintoretto challenges such categorization. In the scholarship, Tintoretto has often been held as representative of a particularly ‘Venetian style’ of the mid-fifteenth to sixteenth century called Venezianita, whose principle characteristics included the privileging of colour over line, the application of coloured paint through loose ‘painterly’ brushstrokes, and a foregrounding of ‘sensual subject matter’.52 Whereas the Florentine tradition of disegno involved the preliminary linear planning of a composition followed by the application of colour, Giorgionesque colorito substituted for this predetermination and transference of form a direct composition in colour such that painting’s primary concern became colour, together with light and

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space. This new outlook and practice rendered the material process of painting itself the process of creation and imparted to painting a new spontaneity and vitality. Tonal painting of the early sixteenth century, as expressed by the work of Cima da Conegliano and Giovanni Bellini, upheld an inimitable sense of harmony, balance, and illusionism. Such harmonious overall tonality and continuity of tones was aided by the technique of applying thin glazes of colour in oil paint to create an optical depth of complex layers of opacity and transparency. These painters of the early sixteenth century – the first generation of Italian painters not trained in traditional tempera painting – seized upon the exciting new possibilities of oil. Naturalistic effects could be created through a processual construction directly on the support, a process that had been unthinkable to earlier artists who were limited to the inerasable medium of tempera. But whilst the early-sixteenthcentury Venetian painters (both Cima and Bellini included) worked to conceal evidence of the brush, Titian left visible his open or ‘broken’ brushwork. Daubs of paint applied assertively and left on the paint surface was an innovation bound to a move away from fine-weaved towards more coarsely grained canvas, and indicative of a new aesthetic. Tintoretto certainly participated in some of these practices, including ‘direct composition’ on canvas and open brushwork. But his paintings reveal a greater originality and versatility of technique than any of his contemporaries.53 He abandons the precise glazing of earlier sixteenth-century artists, and with it the illusionism it offers. His use of open brushwork also runs counter to the norm. Brushwork was usually left exposed when paintings were intended to be seen from a distance. Such distanced viewing would then unify what from close-up appeared fragmented.54 But Tintoretto leaves brushwork visible in all his works irrespective of their intended site or scale. Even in works which he knew would be seen in close proximity and in brightly lit spaces, brushstrokes are left apparent and, moreover, are often found conspicuously in the foreground. An example is the Miracle of the Slave (Figure 4). Tintoretto knew this painting would hang in the amply lit rectangular room of the Chapter Hall of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, where it could be viewed from up-close, and yet its entire surface is covered with exposed, broken brushwork. In fact throughout his works, material announces itself brazenly, in defiance of viewing conditions. Tintoretto’s use of extremely coarse weaves such as hemp (he was the first artist to employ this apparently unpromising material), flax, and thick twill, sometimes very unevenly woven, allows the breathless effects of bold brushwork to become even more prominent.55 This preoccupation with fleeting and abbreviated effects is paralleled in Tintoretto’s drawings, which were always executed in the suggestive materials of chalk or charcoal. An idiosyncratic relation to sensuous experience puts Tintoretto at odds with his contemporaries. As one commentator has noted, Tintoretto’s ‘habit of freeing his imagination through a preliminary, rapid bout of re-examining the point of view from which traditional subjects should be seen and the compositional setting in which they should appear, forced him, in the main, outside the sensuous, slow-moving, colour-based love of real appearances that was the hallmark of Venetian painting’.56

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The construction of the stage-method mediates the relation to the sensible world. A preoccupation with producing constructed effects displaces attention to visual observation. Looking is no longer direct. The manipulation of points of view and the juxtaposition of more than one point of view effect a departure from any direct capture or transfer of observed sensuous appearances. Through staging, painting departs from ‘the Titianesque entanglement with the immediacies of material substances’.57 One might argue that Titian’s paintwork embodies the sensual reality of the flesh of a live model, that even at its loosest and most unhinged it remains naturalistic, mimetic even, continuous with the empirical data given to the eye. In Titian’s works, one might say, a sensuous approach to visual data is paralleled by a sensuous approach to paint. But the disjunctive abbreviation of Tintoretto’s technique is testament to an altogether different world. His pictorial violence affirms the artifice of staging and construction, generating effects that invite close-looking whilst at the same time estranging the viewer. Vertigo and disorientation threaten natural participation. Artifice disrupts the enticement to a sensuous realm, deviating from a love of real appearances, and empirical sensuousness. Tintoretto’s use of chiaroscuro and dark grounds also fulfils an important role in this regard. His canvases teem with the dazzling hues common to Venetian painting of the time. In addition to the ubiquitous lead white, charcoal black and earth colours, we find azurite blue, realger oranges, orpiment yellow, natural ultramarine, verdigris, copper resinates, lead-tin yellow, vermilion, indigo, carmine, and red, pink, and yellow lakes. In works of the 1560s and 1570s Tintoretto brings these pigments into peculiar combinations, to create unusual colour effects of candy pinks and lemons, tangerine oranges, and metallic blues.58 By the time we reach the paintings of San Rocco, colour is in the service of the more profound dominion of light, and hues are bathed in mysterious shadow play. In the sixteenth century, Venetian painters benefitted from the vast and unusual range of colours available to them through the pigment trade and the cloth dying industry. As the son of a dyer, Tintoretto would have had privileged access to an enviable range of different dyestuffs. However, it is clear that colour does not assume the same value or function for him as it does for his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, such as Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, or Veronese. Ridolfi tells us that Tintoretto’s favourite colours were said to be black and white ‘because the one gave strength to the figures, by deepening the shadows, and the other provided the contrasts’.59 This preference is most palpable in the paintings of the 1660s and 1670s, where there is a marked emphasis on tonality over hue. Through extreme tonal contrasts, Tintoretto imparts a drama to his works that is far removed from the brilliant and saturated colour of his earlier work. Light is the predominant motivating force of Tintoretto’s painting and everything, colour included, is subject to it. In the paintings in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco the range of colour is very limited and instead it is the light that commands our attention – a strange unnatural twilight, a crepuscular

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shadow play split from vestiges of the sun. Here colour emerges as a product of relations of contrast and luminosity, and the properties of colour – its specific hues, its opacity, and its referential character – appear not to be as important as their function as effects. One might say that there is a foregrounding of colorito, the application of colour, over colore, the pure quality of colour: an emphasis on the process of colouring over the aesthetic properties of colour ‘in-itself ’. In fact, for sixteenth-century Venetian artists, the term colorito included both chiaroscuro and brushwork. Tonal contrast was regarded as part of the modulated world of colouring. But Tintoretto accentuated chiaroscuro beyond the standard in Venetian painting of his time, using it to generate the architectonic of his works. One could say that he treated black and white as colours, in the sense Deleuze indicates when he remarks that colourists ‘treat light and dark, black and white, as colors, and establish tonal relations between them’. In Tintoretto’s work, black and white are not treated as binaries, but as part of a modulating, relational system, ‘diffused throughout all the ranges of colour’.60 Tintoretto’s use of dark coloured grounds, in place of the purism and homogeneity of the white canvas, further contributes to this sense of a relational, differential system of infinite gradations. To prepare these grounds, he would use remains of paint scraped from his palettes and the studio floor, often mixed with soot, and then boil up the mixture. The inclusion of smalt (crushed glass) to his pigments would add further texture and explains the mottled and rough surfaces of so many of his paintings.61 Such dark grounds greatly accelerated the painting process. Hours of painstakingly preparing pristine gesso grounds were replaced by the rapid covering of a canvas with a single coat of oil paint. Dark grounds also enabled a flexibility of process, for Tintoretto could work immediately in both light and shade, just as he could on the blue paper which he often used for his drawings. Rather than a gradual and unidirectional build-up of coloured layers from light to dark through glazing, a mid-toned ground allowed a construction of tonality in two directions simultaneously – it permitted a non-linear approach to construction. In such cases we might say that painting proceeds through a construction of differential degrees, permitting a rapid assemblage of pictorial forms and fleeting effects sketched in lead white with a stiff brush. Writing in the neo-Kantian atmosphere of the second generation of the Vienna school, Hans Tietze remarked on such a sense of construction. He noted that the variety of colour in Tintoretto’s late pictures ‘does not spring from a wish to create an equivalent of the infinite wealth of nature’, for the planes and patches of colour are combined with one another ‘like elements of a mosaic’.62 Such constructivism also presents on the level of subject matter, in the transfiguration of everyday and commonplace objects. Tintoretto’s works abound in the inclusion of quotidian, often humble furnishings; everyday utensils, and decorative objects augmented by forces that render them unfamiliar. Animated by an irrational light and set in spaces that distort and compress, these humble objects are no longer the given features of everyday experience. Tattered wicker chairs, old shelves of

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plates, humble wooden benches, and old pitchers become mysterious objects of a construction. The many Last Suppers that Tintoretto painted are all set within the interiors of humble inns, but inns as we have never before seen them, glowing incandescent with a spectral light. There is here a curious merging of the apparently quotidian with the celestial, an opening of the house onto the cosmic. What emerges is a curious reality, neither prosaic nor exalted, neither naively materialist nor divine. This is a perplexing state of affairs to analyse. As such, we find one art historian (Jacob Burckhardt) lamenting the prosaic everyday-ness of Tintoretto’s settings of his religious historia, complaining the artist degraded the Last Supper to a ‘common banquet’, whilst we find another (Hans Tietze) praising a ‘liberation of spiritually exalted events from the empiricism of reality’.63 It seems to us that Tintoretto may be situated somewhere between these poles: neither empiricist nor idealist, but engaging painting in a construction by which the cosmic is conjoined with the empirical.

Tintoretto’s imagination The imagination of Tintoretto is too passionate and daring; it scathes and blinds like lightning. Tintoretto ‘cannot be satisfied with reproducing … what he sees around him … There must be scope for poetry in the conception’; Tintoretto grapples immediately with poetical ideas.64

In 1875, John Symonds praises Tintoretto in the romantic terms that were not uncommon for the time.65 A few years earlier, Ruskin had also celebrated Tintoretto’s imagination, expanding earlier notions of fantasia into a broader post-romantic conception of the ‘imagination penetrative’, a capacious inner faculty which ‘does not stop at outward images of any kind’.66 Such terms of appraisal were not exclusive to the late nineteenth century. In fact, they replayed a tenor of Tintoretto reception dating from Boschini in the seventeenth century to Max Dvořák in the twentieth century. Whilst Dvořák commented on Tintoretto’s struggle ‘to portray things not as they appear to the conventional mind, but as conceived by his imagination and intuition’,67 Boschini, in a series of texts that must surely count as some of the most vivid and experimental writing on art in the early modern period, described Tintoretto’s art as a ‘lightening flash’, a thunderbolt or an arrow of forces beyond the control of rational process. Something other than a romantic theory of art is signalled by Boschini’s remarks. Symonds himself acknowledges that Tintoretto does not sit completely comfortably within his idealization and the romantic image of the genius. He notes that many of Tintoretto’s pictures ‘are unworthy of his genius – hurriedly designed, rapidly dashed upon the canvas, studied by candlelight from artificial models’, and adds that ‘he was a gigantic improvisatore: that is the worst thing we can say of him’.68 This assessment recalls the terms of Vasari’s critique made more than two centuries earlier. Vasari had criticized Tintoretto’s lack of judgement and weakness of disegno – ‘the visual expression

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and clarification’ of the concetto – the artistic concept.69 But at the same time, Vasari had praised the ‘spirit’ and terribilità manifested in Tintoretto’s work, describing the artist as ‘the most extraordinary brain that the art of painting has ever produced’.70 How are we to understand this tension within Vasari’s evaluation? Disegno, Vasari writes, ‘proceeds from the intellect’ and ‘draws from many things a universal judgement’ (giudizio universale). This judgement, ‘which is similar to a form or idea of all the things of nature’, provides a standard against which the artist works, and is associated with proportion. Vasari associated the ‘idea’ with the concetto or pensiero71 – the image or form conceived in the artist’s mind and which preceded the artist’s actual working of his materials. Conception was prior to execution, which is also why theoretically it could be pleasing in itself even without material actualization (an idea going back to Pliny and reiterated by Alberti).72 For Vasari and Alberti, the idea was not a metaphysical entity, but intertwined with the observation of nature. In some ways, this position anticipates aspects of Kant’s aesthetic theory. Panofsky certainly seemed to think so: ‘This [the views of disegno held by Vasari and his contemporaries] was the first step toward recognizing that which today is called “genius”, for an Idea is produced by the human mind but, far from being subject and arbitrary [it]expresses the laws of nature.’73 To Panofsky, artists such as Alberti, Leonardo, and Dürer gave expression to this concurrence when they synthetized a ‘rich material’ gained through observation of nature, and approved by their judgement, into a theory of proportion: proportion makes the ‘perfection of the ‘natural’ by means of art’. But in his artifice, in his leaving finished of sketches, in his disproportion, in the immanent construction of his work where conception occurs in the process of making, and in his supposed lack of judgement, Tintoretto seems to be thinking otherwise. Might we say that he removes the process of painting’s thinking from the determination of the concetto and the implicit naturalism of the classical image of artistic thought upheld by Vasari? First of all, Tintoretto constructs painting immanently and thinks through his materials. Secondly, he transforms the historia beyond that which lies within the bounds of experience and beyond anything the painter could actually see. In Kantian terms, he constructs ‘another nature of the material the real one gives it’, but he does so not by perpetuating any naturalistic continuity between art and nature. With the ‘unnatural’ construction of the stage-method is Tintoretto thinking beyond nature? Vasari censured Tintoretto’s leaving ‘as finished works sketches still so rough that the brush strokes may be seen, done more by chance and vehemence than with judgement and design’.74 Judgement was the faculty that ‘enables us both to recognize proportion and analogy and to know when to depart from them’, a regulative law that permitted artistic freedom beyond the cold determination of rules (associated with misura (measure)).75 In leaving brushwork exposed, Tintoretto shows a lack of judgement, as far as Vasari is concerned. But in his Treatise on Technique (1550), Vasari in fact commends the act of sketching as the expression of spirit.76 He argues that spirit may manifest itself

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in the formlessness and imprecision of a ‘blotch’ of a sketch. Artists often ‘best express their ideas [concetto] with a few strokes in sketches, suddenly being born from inspiration [furore]’.77 This praise of the furor of sketches (bozze) is in contrast to the diligence that saps the skill (sapere) from art. But if the blotch expresses the laudable spirit of genius, why does Vasari criticize the ‘incompletion’ of Tintoretto’s painting that may be an expression of such spirit? First, because sketchiness is not decorous in all situations. What was acceptable in the ‘private’ domain of sketches was not necessarily acceptable in the public domain of painting. In public spaces, sketchiness could be permitted for works intended to be viewed from a distance, but it should not be evident. Second, Vasari believed that invenzione demanded ‘an innate propriety springing out of harmony and obedience’ between the forms conceived in the mind, an idea that again brings to mind Kant, and the thesis of the harmonious free play of the faculties.78 Tintoretto’s unfinished effects were inventive in the wrong way for Vasari. Whilst testament to his spirit, they revealed a lack of propriety and a disordered mind.

Boschini’s experience [Tintoretto] used the thunderbolt of his brush to pursue superiority over all the others, and absolute dominion.79

A hundred years after the publication of the Vite, this tension between an aesthetic of form and one of spirit, as posed by the works of Tintoretto, distinctly shifts towards the latter in the writings of Boschini. In the work of this Venetian mapmaker, whose first piece of writing was a ‘Map of Pictorial Navigation’, Carta del Navegar Pitoresco, 1660, we find a new kind of aesthetic theory that advocates imperfection over perfection, colour over design, artifice (artificio) over nature, and imagination over judgement, all informed and motivated by a deep love for and knowledge of the paintings of his native Venice, particularly those of the later sixteenth century – such as those by Titian, Veronese, Bassano, and of course, Tintoretto.80 Boschini is particularly fond of Tintoretto, ‘Il prodigo’ – the prodigal, the extravagant, the inexhaustible81 – a painter who fishes the depths with his talent so quickly do his thoughts run’.82 Boschini’s assessment affirms Vasari’s own, whilst reversing the terms. For instance, he praises a feature of Tintoretto’s work that Vasari had critiqued: deformation.83 Citing the foreshortened figure of the dead body on the floor in the Finding of the Body of Saint Mark (Figure 26), he states that ‘measurement and form no longer help. Rather it is with deformity that the eye must be deceived and through imperfection that perfection will appear … the painter uses form without form, even with form deformed [and finds] the true formation in fluid form’.84 The artificial construction of foreshortening goes beyond natural law and observation. Boschini is explicit on the positive value of a thought beyond judgement, including its disordering impact. In this way, as Vasari anticipates the Kantian framework of aesthetic theory, Boschini anticipates Deleuze and Guattari’s diagrammatic aesthetic.

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Boschini makes no effort to conceal his dislike of Vasari, likening him to ‘the stinging nettle in the garden of painting’, as odious as ‘festering lily-leaves’.85 So, it is no surprise that whilst he retains Vasari’s distinction of the art of painting into the three categories of disegno, colorito, and invenzione, he radically alters their sense and their hierarchy. Disegno is no longer self-sufficient, but must be accompanied by colour, which alone gives life to outline, ‘adds blood to the flesh’, and which ‘makes us aware of the differences among all things, as a result of the various hues’. Colour ‘artificially’ imparts naturalism to brushstrokes and allows for the ‘differentiation’ of parts. Neither is disegno the superior value. In his 1674 Ricche Minere della Pittura Veneziana (The Rich Mines of Venetian Painting), Boschini places invention (invenzione) – which he seems to use synonymously with imagination as ‘the treasure conserved in the jewel box of fantasy, power of the soul, that lifts up images and, guided by a fine understanding, consigns them to the governing hand that transmutes them into practice’ – above disegno in a new hierarchy of aesthetic values.86 Thus, we find an alternative evaluative framework to Vasari’s stern classicism, a new attention to matter, spirit, and the imagination, a new attention to ‘differences’ and acknowledgement of the artifice of pictorial construction. By invenzione Boschini does not refer to a purely mental activity but rather to the inextricable intertwining of invention with the material and empirical process of painting. He makes reference to the Venetian painter’s use of blots (spegazzioni), as well as detailing at length different kinds of brushwork – from the thick application of impasto, the open brushwork of macchia, to the harmonious blending of unione. He commends Tintoretto’s freedom of the brush as painterly blotches (pittoresco) or ‘fencing jabs’ of ‘energetic masses of pigment’. Spectral white highlights, ‘the most incorporeal element of the painter’s world’, play across surfaces in what Boschini called a ‘disdain of the brush’, and dance about under the eye. In a striking anticipation of the materialist theory of signs endorsed by Damisch and developed by Deleuze (as explored in Chapter 3), Boschini calls such exposed brushstrokes ‘signs’ (cenni) that replace the naturalistic correspondence to depicted objects with the unleashed effects of paint’s liberated matter.87 Clearly, for Boschini the actual procedures of painting practice are not simply illustrations of a theory of art but the source of that theory. He affirms the values Vasari critiques. Referring again to the Finding of the Body of Saint Mark (Figure 26) Boschini will write that ‘no one reaches these heights using judgement alone’.88 Art is above all an act of the imagination (fantasia), a definitive element of invenzione. Such tensions anticipate the tensions between Kant and Deleuze. Boschini counters Vasari’s classicism with an anti-classicism that bears striking analogies to Deleuze’s critique of Kant. That is, there is a movement away from a concern with judgement and taste (Vasari/Kant) and the classical values that support them (disegno, form) to a celebration of the empirical and material genesis of the work of art (Boschini/Deleuze) and art’s role in the freedom of the imagination from the determining activity of the mind (concetto/concepts).89 Deleuze replays Boschini’s view that art is not an activity

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of the understanding or a process aligned with the laws of nature (Vasari/Kant), but an artificial construction that affirms the differential character of art’s matter (e.g. through colour) and which in turn produces not a feeling of concordance with nature but an effect of overwhelming the senses. In fact, Boschini is constantly critical of those artists who remain ‘chained to nature’, and he applauds the anti-naturalism of Tintoretto’s works and the material nature of this quality. The sketching of figures in underpainting acted, Boschini remarks, as the first expressions of ‘concepts’ constructed ‘without reference to nature, or even to statues or reliefs’. 90 Only after their sketches were dry would the Venetian painters turn their attention to nature and statues, ‘but without letting themselves be completely bound by them’. A material production of concepts as the spontaneous and rapid genesis of brush strokes liberates itself from the determination of concepts through reference either to the given ideals of art history (the canon of sculpture) or to nature as an ideal source. Art’s thought unbinds itself from the weight of both extant historical and lived reality. Coming from a seventeenth-century writer, this is no romantic theory of imaginative genius but an account of the manual and material processes of thinking as indissociable from the practice of disegno and colorito. Boschini further indicates that previous patterns of thinking are inadequate faced by such occurrences of painting: of the ‘prodigious inventions’ in Veronese’s Feast at Cana he admits to feeling both ‘amazed’ and at the same time aware of the inadequacy of concepts.91 In Boschini’s Carta, Tintoretto’s works are evaluated not only for the way they are seen, but in terms of their disorientating and vertiginous effects on all the senses. Tintoretto’s works are said to shock even knowing onlookers like a flash of lightening (un lampo), a terrifying thunderbolt (un touno), or an intoxicating drug.92 In contrast to Titian who ‘using Truth drew a parallel between Nature and Painting’, Tintoretto lays ‘snares and trip-wires for the eye’ to trick ‘even the most piercing and lynx-like eye’, so that, ‘bedazzled, we cannot even rest our gaze on such swift movements’.93 Upon seeing Tintoretto’s paintings in the Palazzo Ducale, Boschini has the seventeenth-century Tuscan painter and architect Pietro da Cortona (himself an admirer of Tintoretto, and whose own works are replete with quotations from Tintoretto’s) raise his hand to cover his eyes, as one does before blinding light. Of the Agony in the Garden (Figure 48) he exclaims, ‘Oh what contre-jour which confounds the vision of those who gaze upon it’. In front of the Last Judgement (Figure 17), he cries, ‘I can actually hear the thrill of those heavenly trumpets that blast, that endless echoing, the uttering of those great words’.94 Upon seeing Saint Mark Rescuing a Saracen (Figure 21) he exclaims that ‘the terror makes me faint, and the piety liquefies my heart in such a manner that I lose heart and melt like wax and feel completely mad’.95 Not only does Boschini describe senses not ordinarily associated with painting to indicate how Tintoretto’s effects transgress the register of the visual, he furthermore indicates a disorientation of the senses, a fatigue that disrupts reason, forcing a new mode of experience.

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Figure 48 Jacopo Tintoretto, Agony in the Garden, 1578/81, oil on canvas, 538 × 465 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

Tintoretto’s work shows its artifice and overpowers the representation of nature with the artistic construction of ‘new laws’. The imagination is not submitted to the domination of reason but free to create its own rules. Isn’t this what Kant had called genius? But whereas Kant’s genius remained analogous in his power to nature and her laws – an analogy already integral to sixteenth-century art theory – Boschini’s genius affirms his superiority to nature, and gestures towards Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the artist as cosmic artisan. Boschini’s style of writing could not be further from Vasari’s academic and prudent tone. Eschewing not only the aesthetic norms by which painting was evaluated but also the style in which ‘criticism’ was conventionally written, Boschini embarks on eccentric, vivid eulogies of the paintings that affect him. Through exaggerated metaphors, hyperbolic flourishes, neologisms, and hypothetical quotes (oratio ficta) he presents a completely novel way of writing about painting, one that he apparently felt to be the only adequate response. Writing is pummelled, stretched, and contorted to capture the impact of painting on all the senses. He even describes the Carta as ‘a sketch of pure practice’ (un abozzo de pura patica). Writing is not interpreting, it is the keeping alive of the experience of aporia. We find here an instance of Deleuze and Guattari’s post-Kantian conception of the artist-genius as one who ignites the creative impulse in others. Through Tintoretto’s works, Boschini does not just receive – his experience is transformative and makes him in turn creative.

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Tintoretto’s innovations of painting as a material practice of thought, and the cosmic ambition of this, are most magisterially declared in his great cycles for Scuola Grande di San Rocco, the set of works which made Boschini feel as silly as a goose.

The Scuola Grande di San Rocco … monde inconnu, fantastique et pourtant reel.96

To enter the Scuola Grande di San Rocco is to enter a world of painting unlike any other. It is to be confronted by painting as a force, violent, and magisterial. The epic scale of the cycle – which spans two floors, and three separate rooms, and is constituted of sixty-four paintings in total – and its domination of the space announces an unprecedented power of painting to captivate, command, and disorientate. Tintoretto devoted over two decades of his life to the execution of this cycle, called by some ‘the Venetian Sistine’, and it marks the indubitable height of his achievement as an artist. Whilst linked by a common iconographical scheme, the three rooms of the Scuola – the Sala Terrena (ground floor), the Sala dell’Albergo (meeting room), and the Sala Superiore (the Upper Hall) each bear a distinct character. The walls of the Sala Terrena are covered with paintings focusing on the story of Christ’s incarnation and infancy. The Sala dell’Albergo, the first room that Tintoretto completed, shows the Passion cycle. The Sala Superiore combines scenes from the Old Testament on the ceiling and New Testament types on the walls around the theme of the Eucharist and the Baptism. The themes of charity, sacrifice, and redemption that run through the cycle are in keeping with the confraternities’ aims as supplying succour for the poor.97 The intensity of Tintoretto’s vision is at its most compelling and radical in the Sala Superiore (Figure  49) where innovations explored in earlier work reach a magisterial peak. The walls and the ceiling of this enormous room are entirely covered by his paintings. The overwhelming first impression is of a pictorial resplendence that compels movement rather than inviting reflection on forms. Dissonant contrasts and searing tonalities congeal into dancing pockets of light and shade. Clarity of narrative incident is overwhelmed by rhythmic arcs, curves, and diagonals, by clusters of heaving figures that fly, curl, twist, and reach, and by an utterly extraordinary light. Unreal, the light shifts from pearly opalescence to sulphurous yellow to rose-gold to bluish glazes of diamantine brilliance. It illuminates with a fierce, almost electrical charge, casting iridescent highlights and mysterious shadows of great depth. Sometimes emanating from within figures and their glowing garments, sometimes falling from without, this is a material light with palpable physical substance of its own and visibly constituted by the feverish sweeps of the painter’s brush. At times gathering into dense clots of illumination, at times diffusing into wide swathes of incandescence, it bears many

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Figure 49 Jacopo Tintoretto, Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

functions. It bathes objects, alters their nature, and serves to announce imminent occurrences. It designates the spiritual condition of individuals as well as the collective reality of a scene. It reflects, vitalizes, augments. We sometimes find different qualities of light within the same painting – in The Agony in the Garden (Figure 48), the burnished red-gold of the Angel’s halo contrasts sharply with the cool shades of the rest of the scene, producing a hot–cold effect that that belongs to no nature as we know it, unmoored from the lived specificities of time and place. It is a light that sometimes falls in haloes, rings, and ellipses, sometimes in bands and rays, sometimes as the tremulous outlines of thunderous clouds – the shimmering, ethereal sign of an eternal dusk. One of six Scuola Grande in Venice – charitable confraternities for works of religious devotion that provided protection and care for the under-privileged – the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, built in the 1540s, provided Tintoretto with the space to test his imaginative powers. In conversation with the Scuola Brothers, he implemented the basic idea of glorifying the welfare functions of the Confraternity through parallel passages in the Old and New Testaments.98 Whilst the iconography is complex and erudite, it seems that Tintoretto had much freedom in the conception and realization of his compositions, which build on compositional ideas explored in his earlier work and present copious idiosyncrasies. At the same time as he was painting the San Rocco cycle, Tintoretto was working on the paintings for the Palazzo Ducale, and when we compare the two sets of works, the artist’s evident

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investment in San Rocco is striking. Next to the exuberant invenzione here, the works in the Palazzo Ducale are conservative and leaden, many of them marred by workshop hands. But in San Rocco, both familiar historia such as the Adoration of the Shepherds (with the Virgin Mary seated above the rafters of a rustic hayloft) (Figure 41) and the Flight into Egypt (with Mary and Joseph bursting through the plane, and set against an enchanting supernatural landscape) (Figure 50) and rarely treated historia – the Old Testament stories of Moses, in particular – are realized with a startling vision and energy. The project needed gargantuan levels of perseverance. After an initial period of struggle – several members of the Confraternity board repeatedly expressed grave doubts about commissioning Tintoretto with this task, and indeed, the artist was still very much a controversial figure in the early 1560s – he was finally able to secure the commission to paint the entire Scuola. The story of how he secured it has become legendary. And as so often, Vasari played a key role in this storytelling. He tells us that Tintoretto won the competition to paint the first panel in the Scuola – the central ceiling panel in the Sala dell’Albergo – by somewhat devious means. The committee had invited four well-known artists – Veronese, Salviati, Zuccaro, and Tintoretto99 – to each supply a sketch for the panel as a design. The commission would, as was customary, go to the favoured sketch. But instead of complying, Tintoretto completed a finished panel – Apotheosis of Saint Roch, 1564 (Figure 51) – and had it installed directly in the ceiling the night before the submission of the sketches. On unveiling the panel the next day, he explained to his astonished jury that this was his way of designing, a way that did not deceive anyone. As further enticement, he offered to give the painting to the Scuola for free. The offer seemed to prove too good for the jury to resist, and they assented. We

Figure 50 Jacopo Tintoretto, Flight into Egypt, 1582/7, oil on canvas, 422 × 580 cm. Sala Terrena, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

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Figure 51 Jacopo Tintoretto, Apotheosis of Saint Roch, 1564, oil on canvas, 240 × 360 cm. Sala dell’Albergo, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

see here an artist working to his own rules and setting a standard beyond comparison, manipulating the institution from within and winning not through competition but through a brazen affirmation of his difference. Following this victory, Tintoretto convinced the panel to be allowed to paint the entire Sala dell’Albergo. He began in 1564, and in three years had filled the room with paintings based on the Passion of Christ – Christ Before Pilate, Ecce Homo, Ascent to Calvary, two Prophets, and the magnificent Crucifixion (Figure 52), which at over 12 metres wide and 5 metres tall remains one of the largest Crucifixion ever painted. It must certainly also rank as one of the most dramatic, a panorama replete with incidental detail and astonishing compositional devices and illuminated by a bright stage-light. The crucified Christ on the Cross marks the centre of the painting and offers the only still moment in a frenetic scene. The composition seethes with clusters of activity, vast crowds of onlookers, travellers, and other groups of individuals engaged in their own business apparently oblivious of the tragic event. Whilst the other compositions in the Sala dell’Albergo are more conservative than those in the other rooms – the Apotheosis of Saint Roch being (not surprisingly, given its apparent function as a bargaining chip) the most conservative painting in the cycle with its Titian-esque palette (much lighter in tone and chromatically richer than the other paintings) and its figure of God taken straight from Michelangelo’s God Separating the Earth and Water, 1512, in the Sistine chapel – as a group they show Tintoretto’s ambitions, and his powerful and idiosyncratic interpretation of the Christian stories. But Tintoretto was not satisfied with just one room. And in 1575 he persuaded the committee to be allowed to work on the ceiling paintings of the Sala Superiore, adjacent to the Sala dell’Albergo

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Figure 52 Jacopo Tintoretto, Crucifixion, 1565, oil on canvas, 536 × 1224 cm. Sala dell’Albergo, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

and more than ten times its size. Within the year, he had completed the remarkable Brazen Serpent, 1575/7 (Figure 25), a painting that bears down on us oppressively, its figures apparently falling towards us. Under a thunderous sky swarming with brooding angels, a massive pile of contorted figures (the disobedient Israelites) are set within a strange stepped space, a floating chunk of land. They writhe under the wrath of the venomous serpent – a minute figure on the top left of the painting, pinned to a cross as a symbol of the Redeemer and gestured towards by a very small Moses. It is a space that excludes us: We simultaneously look up at Moses and the serpent and down at the Israelites but cannot rationally connect these passages by standing in the same place. We are forced to move around to see it. This work, which links the Passion cycle to the Old and New Testament scenes, was swiftly followed by the other two great ceiling paintings also based on important episodes from the Book of John: Moses Striking the Rock (Figure 32) and the Gathering of Manna (Figure 53) both of which Tintoretto painted in return only for the cost of materials. Both are similarly characterized by uninhabitable stepped and disconnected spaces, terrible clouds parted to reveal celestial apparitions, clusters of foreshortened figures whose movements threaten the integrity of the plane, and extreme contrasts of scale and light. For ‘the great love I have of our venerable Scuola and for devotion to the glorious Saint Roch’,100 Tintoretto proposed in 1577 to deliver three paintings a year till the completion of the entire Scuola, including the Sala Terrena, for 100 ducats per year for the rest of his life. This offer was accepted, perhaps because it was very low by standards of the time.101 He completed the remaining ten oval ceiling panels (Old Testament scenes of sacrifice and redemption, the sacraments of Eucharist and

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Figure 53 Jacopo Tintoretto, Gathering of Manna, 1576/7, oil on canvas, 550 × 520 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

Baptism – including Vision of Ezekiel, Jacob’s Ladder, Sacrifice of Isaac, Jonah and the Whale (in which a most peculiar, moustachioed whale spouts water from enormous, machinic nostrils)), and Elijah Fed by the Angel together with all ten paintings for the Sala Superiore (Adoration of the Shepherds, Baptism of Christ, Resurrection, Agony in the Garden, Last Supper, Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, Resurrection of Lazarus, Ascension, Pool of Bethesda, and Temptation of Christ) in just four years, between 1577 and 1581. The astonishing energy of these canvases testifies to the ferocious speed of their execution. All are marked by intense movement, and by diagonals and curves that split the space into peculiar disconnected sections. Heaving clouds rent apart by celestial forces reveal skies of incandescent yellows, oranges, whites, and pinks. Ghostly crowds of unseeing onlookers, magically animated vegetation, and rippling drapery are the motifs of this world of discords and contrasts. Incongruous juxtapositions of biblical miracles alongside dilapidated interiors of rough masonry and broken woodwork, of wondrous Christian tales alongside humble scenes of Venetian artisan life, are recurring traits. The final room, the Sala Terrena, was completed between 1582 and 1587. Consisting of eight great paintings (Annunciation, Adoration of the Magi, Flight into Egypt, Massacre of the Innocents, Mary Reading in a Landscape, Mary Reading in a Landscape with Palm, Circumcision of Christ, and Assumption of the Virgin), they perhaps lack the spectacular impact of the paintings of the upper rooms, insofar as they are not set within a total installation, and there is evidence of workshop assistance. But a couple

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of works in this room are particularly notable: the turbulent Massacre of the Innocents (Figure 47); the nocturnal, almost sublime landscapes of the Flight to Egypt (Figure 50); and the two paintings of Mary, with their rosy skies, glittering foliage, and sparkling black waters (Figures 13 and 14). San Rocco marks the high point of Tintoretto’s constructivist inclinations. Here, constructivism is shown to be a feature not confined to a painting or even to painting as such, but an operation that concerns an aesthetic set of relations implicating an environment, an assemblage within which individual paintings are just vectors. We might say that the entire San Rocco cycle is one vast diagram. The whole is a map, comprised of relations that extend beyond specific paintings, of heterogenous elements that in themselves do not mean much – light, vectors of movement (arcs, ellipses, and diagonals) – but which are synthesized into new combinations. In the way that the paintings spill over into one another, the cycle departs radically from previous narrative cycles. By extending compositional elements such as tonal contrasts and figural groupings across paintings, relationships are produced that extend beyond individual pictures and link them decoratively on the ceiling.102 Individual paintings also operate diagrammatically. The broken passages of coloured paint that dance freely between forms, the irrational house-like disjunctive construction of planes at strange angles to each other, the opening (de-framing) of each painting to a cosmic plane that wrenches each out of its specific territory – through a tear in the sky, the upwards swirling motions of an ascending figure, or most of all through the pervasive light – are a feature of almost every work in the cycle. And yet it is what is happening between and beyond specific paintings that is even more intriguing and demands particular attention. De-framing becomes a trans-pictorial affair, traversing individual works. Often the paintings make more sense, produce new and unexpected sense, if seen in relation to their surrounding panels. This is also the case on an iconographic level: iconographic relations are produced through the grouping of individual paintings. The paintings in the cycle of Christ in the Sala Superiore work on a lateral sequence and with the Old Testament types on the ceiling above them but are also paired with their opposites on the facing wall. The three major ceiling paintings of the Sala Superiore – The Brazen Serpent, Moses Striking the Rock, and Gathering of Manna – are linked by the continuity of the theme of the opening of the Heavens and miraculous deliverance from famine, drought, and pestilence, typologically figuring Christ’s sacrifice and man’s salvation, as well as the Scuola’s theme of charity. This logic of relations also operates on a material level. Iconographic relations are paralleled and intensified by compositional relations. Interrelations between distinct paintings create a sensation of interconnection, of relations over spilling terms. The profoundly irrational space within the Brazen Serpent is replayed in the two oval panels to either side of it: Vision of Ezekiel (Figure 24) to its left and Jacob’s Ladder (Figure 54) to its right, and this resonance intensifies the dramatic impact. Repeated too is the pattern of oversized foreground figures at the bottom and the tumbling aerial figures at the top. The continuity between the panels is particularly notable in the way the curving pile of bodies in

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Figure 54 Jacopo Tintoretto, Jacob’s Ladder, 1577/8, oil on canvas, 660 × 265 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

the Brazen Serpent seeps into the winged angle in the vision on the left-hand side of Jacob’s Ladder. The framing semi-silhouetted clouds could be part of the same sky – the electrified foliage part of the same unearthly earth. Gathering of Manna also shares with its sister panels the presence of hulking figures at the base. The twisting figure in the bottom left-hand corner is repeated almost exactly in the figure of Moses in the Pillar of Fire (Figure 55) at the other end of the ceiling. In such instances – and there are many more we could cite – we see painting operating diagrammatically, producing relations of compositional traits between the discrete ‘terms’ of framed paintings. And what passes between these terms are sensations. The sensations created by one zone of material seep into another. Such diagrammatic operation is also in a certain sense against painting, since painting opens to the environmental and architectonic implications of its composition, producing what Roland Krischel aptly called ‘multimedia ‘environments’.103 It is not simply that painting meets architecture in its in situ condition, becoming architectonic in this placement or displacement of itself. Rather it is the way painting overpowers given environmental conditions, which include the architecture of the room and the architectural feature of the ceiling  – namely, the ornate, gilded frames in which the panels are set – that demands

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Figure 55 Jacopo Tintoretto, Pillar of Fire, 1577/8, oil on canvas, 370 × 265 cm. Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

attention. This inequality is in the first instance produced simply because of the great volume of canvases. Their sheer predominance means that, as one commentator put it, ‘one cannot speak of an integrated decorative relation between paintings and their setting. … Tintoretto’s approach to decoration remains essentially that of encrustation carried to extremes. The building is simply swamped by the paintings with which it is decorated.’104 Architecture is no longer just a feature within the composition; it is a characteristic of painting’s becoming, its ever-changing transformation. Pictorial scenography gives way to a cartographic opening of painting to its outside, to a staging of reality beyond the painted scene. Tintoretto had already experimented with such overpowering in earlier projects, such as the undertaking of the altar paintings for the Madonna dell’Orto. Here he completely transformed the space of the altar through the installation of his two enormous canvases of the Last Judgement and Worship of the Golden Calf, blocking windows to do so, and effectively producing a completely new form of decoration in Venetian churches where painting competes with its architectural conditions. It is this kind of imposition of artistic conception over given conditions that is maximized at San Rocco.

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Boschini observed that even though Tintoretto always made a point of visiting the space prior to painting in order to assess the environmental conditions within which the work would eventually be housed, for the sake of creating powerful effects he would take ‘a number of pictorial liberties’ and, ‘using the most ingenious devices’, make ‘new rules’.105 Perhaps it is not a coincidence that it is a cartographer who intimates the diagrammatic character of Tintoretto’s work and draws fresh attention to the stage-method as a way of mapping relations. It is through emphasizing original light conditions or by tilting the box and observing it from different angles that the stage-method could act as a simulation of given conditions, and intensification of the minute, imperceptible differences within these conditions, producing a heightened experience of what was supposedly familiar. The miniature diagram at work here is amplified in San Rocco. The Sala Superiore shows how this manifests as a total overpowering of given conditions for the sake of desired dramatic effects, with their new laws. This can also be seen in the Sala Terrena, the room into which we first enter (Figure 56). This room is divided into three naves by two rows of five columns with Corinthian capitals set on tall octagonal pedestals encrusted with polychrome marble. On the walls, special double-arched (biforate)

Figure 56 Sala Terrena. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

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windows separate Tintoretto’s paintings. The floor is chequered. Josef Grabski claims that from a certain point in the room this floor appears to continue into the painted floors, that the painted columns seem to fit between the real columns, and that there is a mirroring of the real source of light in the windows within the paintings. But the continuity of the real into the painted floor – for instance in the Annunciation which has a tiled floor in Mary’s bedchamber– is not done in a way that merely copies the floor. Tintoretto does not produce an identification that would make the compromise or obfuscate the distinction between art and life. Rather, the minute variations in the painted floor rhetorically draw attention to its difference from the real floor, making the viewer notice both more. The apparent continuity of painting with the architecture ultimately reinforces painting’s distinction from the real, its peculiar superiority. That the pillars in these painted stages ‘echo’ real pillars does not mean that their function is to dissolve the boundary between their ‘depicted’ content and our viewing space (Figure 57). In fact, Tintoretto subtly distinguishes his pillars from the actual pillars in the room – painting them with exposed brickwork, for instance. Yet other devices – the unreal conglomeration of bodies, the exaggerated unnatural poses of the bodies, the artificial lighting – serve to further underscore that painting is precisely not an extension of our space. Any formal resemblance to or continuity with the real is interrupted by an acceleration of informal elements, a quickening of the sensations conjured by painting. One must wonder at the impact the cycle would have had on the sixteenth-century viewer. It has been said that Tintoretto’s innovation of iconography brings the biblical episodes and themes closer to people, expressing a sensitivity to the ‘common man’, that Tintoretto demonstrates his respect for the functions of the Scuola by constantly reminding us of the themes of charity, poverty, humility, and sacrifice. Scholars have argued that Tintoretto achieves this appeal through iconography (the links between the themes of the Eucharist and the Baptism and the ideas of charity and redemption), the incorporation of the signs of poverty, and the representation of the masses through historia that show public miracles of Christ (for instance, the Miracle of the Loaves and the Fishes). One commentator claims that the Crucifixion ‘imposes its titanic presence by means of the simple formula of sentiment expressed in ways accessible to the popular mind’, that ‘it was easy for the anonymous mass of the

Figure 57 Sala Terrena. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

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poor … to recognize themselves in those crowds accompanying Jesus’.106 But to this, I would invite closer inspection of these crowds. They are hardly human; the figures populating them are frequently disconnected from each other, indistinct, lacking facial expressions, and unnaturally contorted; else they are massed into insubstantial, ghostly collectives. Is recognition really the mode of thinking expressed here? As we have explored, the historia in San Rocco do not strictly follow a given iconography. Instead traits are offered in unexpected combinations. Take for instance the so-called signs of ‘poverty’ in the Annunciation (the battered wicker chair), which are juxtaposed next to Mary’s opulent velvet-curtained bed. Together with the swarm of angels led by Gabriel, this combination of heterogeneous traits does not produce a representation of poverty but a sensation that makes us think of poverty whilst also thinking of other things. One might read the installation at San Rocco then not in terms of the representation of particular ideas but as the extraction of sensations from historia that give rise to new thoughts. The cycle at San Rocco works as a diagram, an effect that traverses individual paintings through a seepage of sensations across space, light, and architectural structure, creating a new reality of painting and initiating a thought of painting beyond the representation of the historia. But Deleuze and Guattari tell us that the diagram is a map of a real yet to come, that the reality it constructs is not yet present. How are we to assess this futurity?

5 Diagrammatic Time

The time of difference The new, with its power of beginning and beginning again, remains forever new.1

W

hen is Tintoretto’s difference?

If it is of the sixteenth-century moment when he paints may we still call it different today? If it remains different today, is it the same difference that presented itself in the sixteenth century? When we describe the features of the difference that those in Tintoretto’s own time noted – where this ‘time’ is inscribed within the historical frame of the date – it is with an element relativized to the coordinates of historical context with which we concern ourselves: Tintoretto’s difference from Titian, from Michelangelo, from the norms and established values that constitute his context and which are perceptible within them. But what if we think of difference not as that which was once and is no longer different, but as that which is still different? In this regard, one could say that the question as to whether the features of artistic practice in Tintoretto’s time are different to those of practices at later times is inadequately posed, risking as its two extreme solutions either the presentist anachronism that answers no or the stubborn historicism that answers yes. Difference is brought under terms of identification in both instances. In the former, the work is reduced to the luminous intelligibility of contemporary criteria. In the latter, we retain the intractable historical distance between then and now, and difference becomes a scholarly question led by the desire to master the facts of historical circumstance. But if difference is still different, which is to say if it retains its power to affect and produce, then does it not circumvent both the strictures of intelligibility as such, as well as the estrangement of supposed ‘distance’? Insufficient too, in the attempt to think difference, is the mapping of an artist’s ‘changing fortunes’, and the recognition that the sense of his innovations changes over time, for surely anything is permissible with this perspectivism. Given the passage of historical time and new modes of perception and given

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the methods that allow us to believe intelligibility is within our grasp, surely all phenomena can be rendered intelligible. But what does this demonstration – that different ages perceived Tintoretto differently – show, beyond the conclusion that different ages see and know differently? What are we told about the object that is putatively seen or known? More compelling than such diagnoses are the questions that implicate us as thinkers of the past – how and why Tintoretto’s difference is felt beyond his own historical circumstances, how difference continues to be received beyond the contingencies of historically specific perceptual schemas, how the ontological, semiotic, and experiential excess to the particularities of the date makes itself felt. What matters is not the fact that the stage-method, as something that eluded the perception of Tintoretto’s contemporaries, can be understood today. What matters is that this element of his practice continues to fascinate, provoke, and challenge. Chronology – in its twofold sense of time as the ordering of instances as dates in a homogeneous spectrum and the measurement of objects in this time2 – has its limits for such thinking. For chronology inscribes events in their place within the linear sequence of dates, whereas what concerns us is precisely the challenge to such inscription. Writing of Tintoretto in the early twentieth century, Hans Tietze intuited these limits. Whilst Tintoretto’s art ‘had its share – in conformity with its chronological position  – in the formation of mannerism and early Baroque’, ‘such stylistic denominations are abstractions from the currents which flowed through the period in many directions’, currents which do not always obey chronological sense.3 Tietze’s contemporary, Arnold Hauser, had a similar intuition, remarking that ‘chronology, conclusive though it is in relation to tangible facts, is not always conclusive in the history of ideas’. Artistic development often anticipates ideas that have not yet been formulated but are ‘in the air’. Thus, in tracing the history of ideas, ‘we are confronted just as often with correlations as with causal connections’.4 Both Tietze and Hauser intimated that the work of art produces or exposes temporal relations beyond chronological sense and measure. Put in other words, the time of art is not measurable and does not simply consist in placing artefacts within linear series. That art’s work is irreducible to chronology is by no means a new idea. The work of art survives. In its material persistence, it outlives its own time, which is to say the historical time of its chronological placement. Here, ‘historical time’ is understood as a particular construction of chronological time.5 If history is understood as the knowledge or representation of past actions and events, then historical time is understood as the marking of past actions and events. Presupposed here is the idea that the past is fundamentally other to the present, both insofar as it has already occurred and insofar as it is different to the present in its material conditions. Chronology is this form of time that distinguishes past and present, and as such there is an implicit bind between chronology and history. Understood as the chronological time of actual actions or events, or tangible facts – historical time involves constructions of chronological time that assume spatial denominations such as periods, cycles, epochs, and schools.

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The fact that we can today experience artworks that were made centuries ago already complicates how we attend to the time of art. In this sense, as has so often been remarked, art history is singular amongst the practices of history in attending to objects that often materially survive their past. The recent interest within the discipline of art history in the notion of anachronism – from the middle Greek anachronismos, meaning ‘against time’ (ana – backwards, or against, and khronos – time) – may be seen as expressing renewed affirmation of this fact.6 This turn belies an acknowledgement that contextualizing approaches cannot exhaust the treatment of artistic practices, that the sense of a work of art cannot be fully deduced from an understanding of the circumstances linked to the date in which it was made. Dealing with the mythical ‘past as it was’ and assigning dates to artworks is limited, surely, when the work of art persists materially and when it is subject to material changes over the course of this persistence. Discolouration, reworking, restoration, overpainting, cut-ups, vandalism – the many types of alteration that can accompany the life of a work – show how problematic the identification of an artwork with a date can be. When practices effect afterlives in times other than their own, and affect practices far removed from their particular historical context, we are similarly obliged, some art historians argue, to consider that the work exists in a ‘plurality’ of times.7 Across ostensibly unbridgeable spans of time the work of art is a bridge, a plastic conduit of deferral and return. Even that much maligned term, influence, speaks of temporal effects that disturb the primacy of historical contextualization and chronological sense. In addressing Tintoretto’s influence on artists such as El Greco, Carracci, Rubens, Delacroix and Cézanne, clearly it is not the dating of Tintoretto’s works to the mid-1550s that matters, but rather the ways in which his works bear effects beyond that date. What use is reminding ourselves of the conditions of Tintoretto’s practice in the mid-1500s – of workshop conditions, patronage, training, iconographical schemes – when what an artist such as Cézanne, for whom Tintoretto was ‘the greatest of the Venetians’,8 takes from his ‘elder’ are not these facts but the visual, material, technical, and physical characteristics of the work? On a fragment of a decorative frieze of three loosely painted apples that had once formed part of a ceiling of one of the rooms in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco (Figure 58), Newton remarks that ‘removed from its context, no one would guess that it had been painted by a sixteenth-century Venetian’.9 What survives, as Newton intimates, are not historical conditions and the signified contents of dates – they pass, and yet are what the historian feels must be recovered. What survives is the work in the insistent and transhistorical power of its material reality. And this is the radical, often unregistered, implication of influence – that it enfolds an expanded feeling of time within the cold and inert borders of the date. We are obliged to think the time of the work of art in ways beyond chronological determination since – not least through its ‘influences’ and its own material persistence – the work is never simply ‘past’, at least if by this term what is meant is that which has already actually happened.

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Figure 58 Jacopo Tintoretto, Fragment of a Panel with Apples, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown, Sala dell’Albergo, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice. Photo: Kamini Vellodi.

It is potentially fruitful to situate Deleuze’s thoughts on the temporality of the work of art within the recent disciplinary interest in the anachronistic time of art. For in many ways, what Deleuze’s work offers is a radicalization of certain lines of thought that have long been and continue to be familiar within art historical discourses on time. These include the thought of the work’s material persistence beyond its date, and the time of the experience of the work. But for Deleuze, survival (a term he does not use himself but to which he alludes through other terms such as ‘persistence’ and ‘duration’) concerns the survival of material and not simply the survival of forms. The pulsating colours of drapery or the iridescent vegetation of a verdant landscape persist through differentiation, changing in our experience of them beyond and beneath the apparent eternity of outlined forms. Of Tintoretto’s Baptism of Christ (Figure 44) one might say that the motif of Christ being baptized remains the same through time. But can the same be said about the whitish pigments of Christ’s drapery whose material flux produce ever-changing

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sensations? For Deleuze, survival is not simply of the endurance of material that we can actually see and experience, but concerns sensations that continue to differ. Things do not just persist, unchanging; they recur, differently each time. If works of art survive, it is not just that they are there before us waiting to be experienced. Survival does not mean the actual presence of the past, the actuality of objects in museums, churches, and other sites that allows us to touch and see now what was made a long time ago. As Aby Warburg made us realize more than 100 years ago, survival is something much more obscure, and includes within it the deviances, interruptions, and displacements brought about by the mysterious dynamics of the image itself. Survival is constituted of aberrations that disrupt the linearity of the development of art forms and the chronological notion of time with new sense that is more a question of materiality than form.10 For Deleuze too, there is nothing self-evidently significant in the fact that I can experience today something that was made years ago. The time of art involves something more profound and more nebulous than the fact that it still exists; namely, the return again and again of the past in its creation of  sensations that engage thought differently each time they are encountered.11 It is not simply the fact that I can still see Tintoretto’s works today – a banal declaration of evidence – that matters. What matters is that the sensations instilled by the work force me to think differently through their provocation and their ever-changing nature, such that I am unable to represent to myself what I experience in the present. How can I think the same way about a work if what I am made to feel is different? It is a simple point, but so often overlooked, poorly posed, or badly answered. Perhaps it was such an experience to which Picasso was referring when he wrote that ‘to me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all’.12 To this intuition we might add the following: that the work’s ‘living in the present’ augments the past and the future such that they are no longer knowable by the designations of ‘before’ and ‘after’, ‘what was’ and ‘what might, or could be’ – designations which Picasso rightly feels have little to do with the act of creation. Is this the attitude we also encounter in Tintoretto’s preparation of painting? In his substitution of the completed panel of the Apotheosis of Saint Roch (Figure 51) for the preliminary sketch that was requested of him and his competitors, does he not undermine the sense of painting as linear progression of stages and replace it with an (apparent) ‘all at once’ genesis? Raised by this perspective of artistic production are such questions as these: Is time a scale for measurement or a marker of immeasurable sensations that are never ‘over’? Can creation and genesis be grasped through the same sense of time by which we designate the identity of things or do we need another sense of time through which we register the impact of genesis upon us? The question of what survives of the past beyond chronological inscription and historical context is one element of Deleuze’s philosophy of time and his critique of history. A remark he makes about Nietzsche sets the tone of this critique: ‘Nietzsche’s distinction between the creation of new values

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and the recognition of established values should not be understood in a historically relative manner, as though the established values were new in their time and the new values simply needed time to become established.’ Rather, ‘the new, with its power of beginning and beginning again, remains forever new, just as the established was always established from the outset, even if a certain amount of empirical time was necessary for this to be recognised’.13 The identification of values or features that ‘need time to become established’ might be compared to the historian’s approach of mapping ‘changing fortunes’. Here history is seen to ‘catch up’ with what was new, and what can in turn be retrospectively deemed ‘early’. The revival of interest in Tintoretto’s works at the turn of the twentieth century is a notable example of this – how a new way of seeing brings ‘belated’ recognition. Through the lens of modern painting, Tintoretto’s patchy brushwork liberated from outline, modulated colour, distortion, and deformation can be recognized. In their liberated technique, Tintoretto’s paintings could be seen to ‘anticipate’ many of the tendencies of modern painting. But this anticipation is itself retrospectively perceived through a retrojection of the values of the present. Tintoretto appears, quoted, in many of the works of early-twentieth-century painters – including Manet, Maurice Denis, Emile Bernard, Degas, and Cézanne.14 What was once imperceptible is rendered perceptible through a new set of criteria. In this regard, one might argue that it needed the emergence of modern forms of painting, including the innovations of impressionism and expressionism, for Dvořák to qualify Tintoretto as ‘the first modern’, for Gustave Soulier to write that Tintoretto is ‘the most authentic and complete precursor of our modern painters’, and for Eugene Benson ‘to appreciate the reach and originality of [Tintoretto’s] genius – to see that its very tumultuous and supple expression was the sign of something grander and deeper than the old ideals of art’.15 Benson celebrates aesthetic values he identifies with his own time (the late nineteenth century), and not the sixteenth century. Newton does the same: referring to Tintoretto’s fragment of apples (figure 58) as an example of his abbreviated brushwork, he remarks that our eyes ‘accustomed to the heightened colour-key of impressionist and post-impressionist art  … can accept a fragment of loosely painted apples’, but that to the eyes of the mid-sixteenth century ‘it must have seemed painfully disjointed in colour’.16 J. H. Holborn goes further in his presentist anachronism when he writes, in 1903, that what we call impressionism was ‘mistaken’ for haste by Tintoretto’s contemporaries.17 Such evaluation can of course work in the other direction, such that what was once new is rendered traditional through historical distance and the changing conditions of perception. It is in this latter vein that Ilchmans and Echols write: ‘Although Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese may today seem the ultimate Old Master artists, like any aesthetic current Renaissance painting was once contemporary art: experimental, bold, even shocking’.18 That is, it is under our new conditions of perception that we perceive the conservatism and traditionalism of the art of the past. So, whereas the first group (the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century critics) see Tintoretto as once ‘old’ and now, under modern conditions of art production, ‘bold’, the

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second group (the contextualist historians) see him as once ‘bold’ and now ‘old’. Either way, whether as retrojection or estrangement, the movement of history and the perception of new analogies it brings in its wake levels extremities of value. It is precisely against such relativism that Deleuze stresses that the difference between established and new values is not one of degree but one of kind, such that ‘the new, with its power of beginning and beginning again, remains forever new, just as the established was always established from the outset’. Again, it is not simply that material persists and can be recognized whilst the facts of historical circumstance fade away. Neither is it to say that the new work of art, through a new recognition, retroactively modifies all the works that preceded it. The point is that what persists is experienced differently, again and again, continually refusing recognition and demanding another model of thought. Works of art, in their difference, continue to be experienced as such and this is why they return – not because a new artistic practice suddenly makes them recognizable. It may be that the present has an awareness of the past that the past itself could not possess, that what Cézanne could see of Tintoretto is different to what Aretino was able to. But what returns of the past is not defined simply through what a new present can see and say of it, as though predetermined by a new perceptual framework. Rather, the recurrence of difference demands a model of thought beyond the recourse to recognition as such. Deleuze underscores a qualitative distinction between the established and the new (as difference), the element that passes with time and the element that commands time. The value of the established was always established, even when perceived as different or new, and it will always remain so. But difference is never more or less different, it is not a relative quantity or quality. It is rather eternally, unchangeably different, the pure form of change. This is why, in the case of Tintoretto, it is not simply a question of arriving at a time, coming to a new date, when we can finally recognize his work such that we can continue to think as we have always done – that is, through recognition. Rather, what is new of his work ‘calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model’ which ‘strips thought of its “innateness” and treats it every time as something which has not always existed, but begins, forced and under constraint’.19 Thought is forced as an event that dislodges established images of thought along with the homogeneity and continuity of empirical time and it is art’s insistence as a recurring body of sensations that poses this obligation. Let us recall at this point Aretino’s observation of the ‘astonishing’ foreshortened figure in the Miracle of the Slave (Figure 4), which he thinks reveals a mastery of disegno. Here the value of disegno is an established one, and as such what Tintoretto does with it, even though it ‘astonishes’ Aretino, is recognizable to him. Indeed, that is why Aretino is able to comment upon it. But in Deleuze’s Nietzschean terms, the new returns to escape even the present’s recognition of itself.20 As such, Aretino would not have been able to recognize what is new in Tintoretto’s work. At the most he would only

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have been able to obscurely register its presence as something that defies capture through established terms, including existing art theoretical vocabulary. Tintoretto alters the sense of disegno, but however much he radicalizes it, disegno as a value remains established. In contrast, what differs in Tintoretto’s practice as a new value cannot be named as a term that connects him to what was known and established in his time. I have argued that this new value is the value of staging born of the stage-method. No vocabulary exists for what Tintoretto does with this. None of his contemporaries can directly register it. The first acknowledgement comes from Ridolfi, and he is writing several decades after Tintoretto’s death. Whilst the stage-method may be dimly felt by Tintoretto’s contemporaries as the cause of his difference – the obscure reason for his ‘excessive’ and ill-judged prestezza and non-finito – in his own time this difference can only be sensed through the mediations of established terms (such as, precisely, prestezza and non-finito). And when the stage-method is finally acknowledged by Ridolfi it is grasped as one element of a general conciliation of previously irreconcilable traditions: a synthesis of the established terms of disegno and colorito. Consequently, it is replaced within a context of normative art theory and appreciation. This in turn allows Tintoretto to be re-inscribed within the continuous history of traditions, where tradition is not simply a unitary and homogenous designation but also the synthesis of plural and even conflicting practices. We must wait a 100 years for someone (Boschini) to perceive the stage-method as the source of Tintoretto’s difference. Does Boschini recognize Tintoretto’s staging? Not exactly. To him, Tintoretto’s practice is still extraordinary and remarkable, intoxicating and confounding. Boschini does not simply seek to make Tintoretto intelligible and show how history has caught up with what was once new. Rather, through his hyper-creative writing he affirms the creativity of Tintoretto’s work and its value as an ‘inexhaustible’ source.21 We see in this example how the stage-method – which Boschini makes a point of emphasizing – does not simply one day become recognizable and acquire the representation it lacked in its own historical time. Rather, it makes Tintoretto’s practice return with urgency. It is through Boschini’s affirmation of Tintoretto, through the creative return of Tintoretto’s work in the work of this writer, that we apprehend staging as a new rather than established value, with the power to incite production.

Anachronism in contemporary art history Before turning more closely to Deleuze’s philosophy of time, it is useful to elaborate on some of the principle features and motivations of the recent disciplinary interest in anachronism within art history.22 This interest builds upon an established preoccupation of the discipline, for it has long been

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acknowledged that the conception of the nature of time and its change is a vital aspect of the art historian’s study. It seems evident that some sense of time is presupposed prior to inquiry. As Eugene Kleinbauer wrote in 1971, in order to ascribe meaning, and to understand and know the work, ‘it is first necessary to arrange and classify works in accord with chronological units, or time’.23 Such temporal designation was, he noted, inseparable from geographical sectors or place: ‘Meaningful historical inquiry’ requires both categories, for to identify a picture as sixteenth century has little value without provenance, since one made in sixteenth-century Rome obviously differs markedly from one executed in Cologne. Panofsky clarified such intuitions in his important 1927 paper ‘Reflections on Historical Time’: ‘Each instance of historical time is dependent upon a specific historical space’ and the conception of both space and time provides a ‘unity of meaning’.24 For both Kleinbauer and Panofsky, time and space are intertwined historical designations, assumed a priori to the field of objects, and vital to the historian’s investigation. However, across the work of many seminal figures in the history of art history – Alois Riegl, George Kubler, Henri Focillon, Arnold Hauser, and Aby Warburg, to recent figures including Damisch, Didi-Huberman, Daniel Arasse, and Alexander Nagel – we encounter the idea that time is not an a priori designation, and that the time of art is irreducible to the space-time coordinates of a particular historical context.25 Against the view of art as a piece of history, cemented in and witness to a particular space-time that ‘pre-exists’ it, anachronistic analyses embrace the idea of art’s work as more than just this. They attend to the temporality of art as something effected through the multiplications, ruptures, and displacements brought about by the work itself. As indicated by the preceding reflections, the question of this excess of art to its historicity calls for concepts of time that can nuance the opposition between historical time (as a marker of changes in time) and the eternal (as unchanging). It is within this interstice that Deleuze’s thoughts on time and the time of art can be positioned. When he approvingly remarks that Nietzsche projected his work in a dimension that was neither history nor eternal, we can get a sense of the ‘philosophical’ time that he advocates. Philosophical time as the time of thought – rather than any notion of time over which philosophy has privileged access – is pitted against any sense of time as the time of measuring or registering objects in chronology. Time is not an empirical designation and is not a ‘feature’ of objects. Rather, it is a characteristic of thought itself, and the experience of thinking. Thought does not obey the dictates of chronology – not only insofar as one cannot reduce a thought to the date at which it emerged but also because thought, in its complex layering of memory, habit, the forces of the unconscious and involuntary occurrences, confuses the distinction of discrete successive instances.26 When Deleuze and Guattari argue in What Is Philosophy? that the concept of time as succession needs to be displaced by a ‘stratigraphic’ time of coexistence and superimposition, they are again evoking this sense of the time of thought beyond what history can account for. What is superimposed,

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they argue, are the ideas of thinkers, the ideas that traverse their philosophical systems and coexist. The argument here is that all great ideas are motivated by the same impulse: the capture of what has not yet been thought.27 This articulation in turn gives rise to a new sense of the history of philosophy as an evaluation not only of the ‘historical novelty’ of philosophical concepts, but also of ‘the power of their becoming’.28 Assuming the perspective of thought and its genesis we have, in place of the ordering of instances on a line of time, a pervasive sense of time in which past, present, and future are no longer distinct instances. Insofar as art too is a practice of thought, the time of art is also pitted against the form of chronology.29 Works do not come into being all at once, but through processes of delay, deferral, and rupture. The immeasurable process of gestation that involves conception and execution in their indiscernibility is non-linear, a simultaneous integration of ideas, half-thoughts, and accidents of thought. Within the discipline of art history however, anachronism tends to refer precisely to the displacement or disordering of chronological sense rather than the critique of chronology itself. And perhaps this is not surprising, as it is likely that most art historians would admit to thinking about their object as historical rather than an event of thought. In this regard, the disciplinary invocations of anachronism reveal a debt to the historiographic roots of the term and the intertwining of anachronism and chronology in the history of the study of history.30 Anachronism remains bound to chronology. Its deformations and distortions, whether provoked by works of art or methodological decisions of the historian, are of an original chronology. That is, anachronism presents us with a new idea of possibilities inherent within the concept of time as chronological (ordered, linear, sequential time) through a new ordering of relations in chronological time. Art’s time emerges here as something still derivative, and arguably based on assumptions that are more to do with conventions of historical study than with the nature of art. Anachronism has been used to refer on the one hand to the method employed by the art historian and his relation to the work he studies, and on the other hand to a quality exhibited or produced by the work of art/image as an object. This variation in approach is one reason for the confusion over the term – for the question of time poses itself at once as the time of art (the sense of time produced by the work of art itself), the time of art history (the sense of time implicated by the historical experience and interpretation of the work of art or of the work insofar as it is acknowledged to be historical), and the time of art historiography (the sense of time at stake in the writing of art history, including the methods employed to analyse and write). Clearly it is difficult to isolate any one of these from the others. As method, anachronism might involve what some have called presentism – the superimposition of the historian’s present way of thinking onto the past, in the way that the late-nineteenth-century/ early-twentieth-century critics superimposed the terms of impressionist and expressionist painting onto their reading of Tintoretto. Many have felt such superimposition to be an unavoidable

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characteristic of historical inquiry, arguing that historians cannot think outside their historically informed perceptual frames – a claim that recalls Goethe’s famous remark that what one calls the spirit of an age is ‘really no more than the spirit of the worthy historian in which the age is reflected’.31 Hauser defended such anachronism as ‘indispensable’ to historical interpretation, arguing that the past, itself ‘inapprehensible and formless’, only takes on meaning and form ‘when related to a certain present’. In fact, Hauser continues, following the claims made by the nineteenth-century historian Johann Droysen, the object of our historical experience is not the past itself but what still survives of the past for us.32 Others, more critical, have felt that anachronistic superimposition is avoidable and is to be avoided when it involves the use of specific terms. For example, when Arasse argues that using realism before Courbet is anachronistic since realism is a term that only emerges with Courbet’s work, his argument seems to be that this anachronism can and should be averted.33 The deliberate imposition of our own mental equipment (outillage) onto other eras was most famously denounced by Lucian Febvre as ‘the worst of all sins’ a historian could commit, an error not only of methodology or epistemology but of ethics since it failed to respect the specificity of the period in question.34 This was developed in another way by Louis Althusser when he critiqued the ‘ideological construct’ of historical time as an ‘objective’ continuum that pretends to be abstracted from the historian’s subjectivity.35 In addition to a characterization of the method or attitude of the historian, anachronism has also been attended to as a feature or quality attributed to the work of art or image itself. In its visual citations and references, the work juxtaposes historically distinct styles. It can ‘reverse’ or ‘multiply’ times, and distort chronological sense through unexpected combinations of forms.36 Some have understood this as a period-specific phenomenon, distinctive of the Renaissance with its new consciousness of the past as both part of and different to its present, and characteristic too of works in the late twentieth century that exhibit a ‘postmodern’ consciousness of recycling and quotation.37 Others have attended to anachronism as a trans-periodizing operation to do with the very nature of these works/images themselves, traversing period-specific concerns. Notable in this regard is Warburg’s conception of the survival (Nachleben)38 of Pathosformeln (emotive formula, most famously of accessory garments in motion), gestures from the repertoire of antiquity. Whilst it is a phenomenon he associates with the culture of images in the Renaissance, survival is a type of persistence with implications beyond the Renaissance, challenging the classification of history into epochs and periods with ‘discontinuities and destructions, forced or forgotten connections’.39 For Didi-Huberman, Warburg’s conception of survival reminds us that no image (and it is specifically images rather than historically situated works of art to which Didi-Huberman refers) is ever perfectly coincident with its own time. The image resists identification with the discrete terms of a date insofar as it differs from itself through the disjunction of its own coming into presence. A patch of coloured pigment in

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a fresco by Fra Angelico in the Convent of San Marco in Florence differs from itself through the palpitating presencing of its material. The challenge of difference here makes itself felt. What survives of the image is not the similar. It is not the ‘same’ antiquity that returns in the Renaissance, and the task of anachronism is not simply to extract what Nagel and Wood had called ‘hidden sameness’ between artefacts, images, and motifs, an enterprise that only perpetuates the character of art history as a practice of representational thought attuned to analogies. Rather, survival pertains to that fecund element in what is past. The notion of survival challenges not only the form of historical time as succession, but also the form of thought that contextualism implies – thought as a representational, rational, and epistemological exercise.40 According to Didi-Huberman, in Warburg’s work we find an acknowledgement of the opacity of the past as the source for present thought and experience, a restitution of the problem of difference that reminds us of the inadequacies of contextualism and the necessity of models of time than can displace the authority of chronology (although whether Warburg himself was successful in articulating an alternative model of time or whether this was even his ambition, is debatable). Contextualism attempts to preserve the ‘otherness’ of a work/artistic production by understanding it as an empirical difference from our present and our ‘mental equipment’. This overlooks the sense in which the work is always already other than itself. Before and beyond its identity as an empirical attribute, difference is first and foremost an ontological question to do with nature of the work. It demands a different kind of registration to factual assertion, and a concept of time that can displace the authority of chronology. What is at stake is not simply a choice between chronology and anachronism, since a choice between these two alternatives does not in itself critique the presumptions of historical study. Survivals, leaps, crises, and discontinuities do not essentially displace the form of chronology – in fact they remain bound to it for their effects. In this sense, it is arguable that neither Warburg nor Didi-Huberman, or other art historians invoking and developing a theory of anachronism, go far enough. What is required is a new concept of time. At this point I return to Deleuze.

Constructivism, time, and art Deleuze’s philosophy of time is intertwined with a critique of history, a critique that can be understood within the post-structuralist rejection of grand narratives, historical continuities, and theories of causalities, in favour of a philosophy of the event that affirms the radical discontinuities and differences of things in their production. This philosophy involves an idiosyncratic reprisal of a line of inquiry from Kant to Husserl to Nietzsche to Bergson, that involves the thinking of time not simply as a property of objects but as a condition of the subject – not the stable and foundational subject of the Cartesian cogito, but a subject decentred and traversed by forces imposed upon it through experience. Whilst the acknowledgement of time as a quality of feeling within the inner life of the historian has

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often been a feature of the study of art history, Deleuze brings to this an attention to time that displaces the dominion of chronology. Furthermore, he argues that it is art that can expose to us time ‘in its pure state’ stripped of its empirical contents. As such Deleuze’s philosophy of time hinges between a critique of history and an ontology of art. It is interwoven with the ontology of constructivism. Constructivism does not take place ‘in’ time but makes time ‘in itself ’ present. Thus whilst it is customary to think of the diagram as spatial, Deleuze also characterizes it as temporal – Bacon’s diagram, for instance, makes time sensible through his use of colour. ‘There is a great force of time in Bacon, time itself is being painted’, through, on the one hand, the chromatic treatment of bodies, the chromatic variations of broken tones, and on the other hand the monochromatic treatment of colour fields. The internal variations of the colour field that depend on relations of proximity produce a ‘successive perception’, and the colour fields produce a sense of the eternity of time, the ‘eternity of the passage in itself ’.41 That is, painting enacts a differential, material production of time that exposes the pure form of time. A disjunctive synthesis of difference exposes time as a reality that does not ‘hinge’ together our experiences but is an unhinged effect of experience. Deleuze’s most cogent articulation of a philosophy of time is found in his articulation of ‘three syntheses of time’ in Difference and Repetition – his powerful, post-Bergsonian, post-Nietzschean rejoinder to Kant. Indeed, Deleuze writes, ‘All of the creations and novelties that Kantianism will bring to philosophy turn on a certain problem of time and an entirely new conception of time’ that announces ‘a modern consciousness of time in opposition to a classical or ancient consciousness of time’.42 This ‘new concept’, which is ‘modern’ in its new acknowledgement of the relation between time and the subject, involves the reversal of the classical subordination of time to movement. For both Plato and Aristotle, time is a ‘number of movement’ constituted by the celestial revolution of planets passing through certain cardinal points. It is the uniform and regular movement of these physical bodies that allows us to count time. Plato tells us that time is ‘a moving likeness of eternity’,43 an ‘eternal likeness’ which moves according to number, whilst Aristotle declares that time is the measure of change/movement, and that without change or movement time does not exist.44 Kant reverses these intuitions. In the ‘Transcendental aesthetic’ of the first Critique he begins his inquiry into the nature of time by asking whether it is a container within which things happen, or a relation or property of things. In so doing he reiterates the two dominant philosophical conceptions of time in the mid-eighteenth century. The first is Isaac Newton’s view of time as a self-subsisting entity existing independently of the objects that occupy them. The other is Leibniz’s understanding of space and time as systems of relations inherent in things. In contrast to both these conceptions, Kant argues that time and space are neither independent of objects nor of subjects, but the forms – Kant calls them the ‘forms of intuition’ – by which objects are given to subjects.45 Put in other words, time and space are the conditions of all experience. So, time is no longer simply a ‘measure’ of

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movement. Together with space, it is a pure form by which the changeable contents of experience can be apprehended. Kant calls time the form of inner sense. Time does not belong to a shape or to a position but determines the relation of representations in our inner state. In this regard it is distinguished from space. Whereas space is limited to our intuitions of an object (our ‘outer intuitions’) and is as such called the ‘form of outer sense’, time is the immediate condition of inner intuition’, of ‘internally intuiting ourselves’.46 Thus all cognition is grounded in the a priori form of time, since time is the form through which the subject represents his thought to himself. The inner sense of time grounds all actualities of temporal experience. We would not be able to perceive simultaneity (the representation of several things existing at one and the same time) or succession (in different times) without an a priori sense of time that grants unity to the diversity of temporal instances.47 Just as anachronism is premised on chronological sequence (i.e. an originary chronological order must precede its disordering), chronological sequence is premised on the form of time itself.48 All relations of time are grounded on the pure form of time: different times are parts of one and the same time. As such, the pure form of time must be infinite (since all determinate magnitudes of time are possible only through limitations of a single time) and continuous (since between any two times, there is always another smaller interval of time). Extrapolating from this one might argue that to say that an artwork encompasses multiple or plural times makes no sense insofar as all these times are sections of a single, homogeneous, form of time. Here we find ourselves in a rather different situation to the art historical thinking of time. First of all is the separation of time from space. In contrast to Kant’s position, we find that one of the most salient features of the conception of time within art history is its conflation with space. As we have seen, Kleinbauer, Panofsky, and many others after them deemed such conflation necessary since from the perspective of historical intelligibility, temporal coordinates without corresponding spatial coordinates make no sense. Even if historians do not explicitly ascribe to this position, the use of spatial metaphors to describe what art does to time – folding, bending, juxtaposing, distancing, anchoring, even ‘in’ and ‘out’ of time, to take just a few examples – alerts us to this confusion of two forms that Kant strictly separated.49 More than two centuries later, Bergson drew attention to the problems of this conflation, and its often insidious presence within the thought of objects: for ‘we could not introduce order into terms – before and after, or even “at the same time” without first distinguishing them and then comparing the places they occupy’.50 By this logic, chronology itself is a spatialized time. Although the date in itself might not refer to a particular place, it is nevertheless spatialized insofar as it is cardinal (discrete and countable as number – returning us to the Greek conception of cardo as the measure or ‘hinge’ of the movement of celestial bodies) and ordinal (implying an ordering of time).51 For instance, when we ask ourselves whether 1510 is before or after us in time, we are in fact thinking of the date as simultaneous,

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and next to, our current date. Anachronism may alter the ordinal character of dates – the order in which they appear – but insofar as the question of dating is preserved, the cardinal character of dates, as discrete numbers that measure movement, is retained. Why is this important? What does it matter if historians conflate time and space, even when they claim to primarily be addressing time? It matters because it shows what kind of time the historian is invested in and into which he is inquiring. The conflation of time with space is a symptom of the fact that what is of concern is time (together with space) as a measure of an empirical object (an artefact, a work of art, an image, a document, etc.). The confusion of time and space in art history is a symptom of the historian’s concern with what Panofsky called ‘intelligible frames of reference’. The lure of the object, and the assumption that objects and images have reality ‘in themselves’ beyond our experience of them, is difficult to suspend or question. So too, it seems, is the assumption that time and space are frameworks of intelligibility. As such, the implications for art historical study of Kant’s separation of time from space, and his conception of time as the form of inner sense, are perhaps not immediately obvious, at least not for the modes of investigation to which it is accustomed. The problem is that it is not at all clear that works of art or images are concerned with intelligible frames of reference, or that such frames are adequate for accounting for what they do, including their experiential effect on the subject. This is what concerns us: that the extra-chronic time of works of art (the temporal dimension beyond chronology, rather than simply the anachronic disruption of chronology) implicates the time of art history, demanding that the historian work with concepts of time adequate to what works of art/images do. And perhaps this is one reason for Deleuze’s interest in works of art rather than art history, for his concern with what unintelligibility and difference mean for the concept of time, how art ‘renders time sensible’ as something ‘beyond all measure and cadence’ and conditions an experience of time in its pure form.52 This is something he develops in Francis Bacon when he speaks of how Bacon’s chronochromatic construction of time through colour modulation and monochromatic expression of the eternity of time in the flat fields of colour come together in a diagram.53 We recall that a diagram synthesizes sensation and geometry, the modulation of colour with the framework. The diagram is the spatializing and temporalizing function that conjoins these two key elements of Bacon’s work. As such we can speak of a ‘diagrammatic time’ that encompasses both the chronochromatism of modulation and the monochromatism of the fields; the diagrammatic time of painting expresses both the passage of difference and the pure form of time. Deleuze extends Kant’s intuitions on the notion of time, but will take those intuitions in a new, anti-Kantian, direction, arguing that time splits the subject, foreclosing the unity of a subject that supposedly grounds experience. Deleuze’s conception of time in terms of three syntheses seems to replay Kant’s own articulation, in the Critique of Pure Reason, of three syntheses grounded on the pure form of time as their a priori condition. Kant defines these as, first, the synthesis of apprehension in intuition which

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brings into relation intuitions according to time; second, the synthesis of reproduction in the imagination, which ensures continuity over time at the level of given representations; and third, the synthesis of recognition as concept which ensures the continuity of the experience of the subject.54 These three syntheses make possible the unity of consciousness through time but they also presuppose a unified subject who has intuitions, who represents and who recognizes. Deleuze displaces this model with a conception of three syntheses that are not the activities of a subject but processes of ‘un-grounding’ that in turn constitute subjects and objects.55 Deleuze furthermore claims that this un-grounding is present in Kant’s model and claims to expose a ‘fractured I’ at the heart of the Kantian apparatus. Once again it is Maimon’s theory of differentials that offers Deleuze a way of demonstrating what Deleuze thinks is a slippage in Kant’s conception of the relation between time and the subject. For Maimon, time is no longer a pure, a priori form that conditions all syntheses of the sensible. Rather, time is derived as a relation between differences in sense representations.56 Whilst Maimon follows Kant in defining time as the form of internal intuitions and space as the form of external objects, he argues that time lacks reality and is meaningless without its objects. As explored in Chapter 3 this critique of Kant’s transcendental idealism for its neglect of real objects motivates Maimon’s conception of a theory of differentials – the infinitesimally small units of sensation that possess only intensive magnitudes, and the rule of their combination. It is reality rather than mere possibility with which a transcendental philosophy should be concerned, Maimon thinks. So, although he agrees with Kant that space and time have subjective reality, he believes that they must also have an objective ground. In fact, space and time are real, he contends, only with respect to the perception of objects of diverse experience. Here, Maimon recounts the Kantian claim that space and time as the forms of appearances have extensive magnitude, but that the ‘real’ in space and time, pertaining to the matter of appearances, or sensation, has intensive magnitudes or degrees. But he goes a step further by conceiving of a transcendental objective ground, comprised of the differentials of sensation, from which both time and space are derived. This ground constitutes ‘the real existing in itself, independently of our way of representing it’, and provides the continuity between subject and object. Rather than time as an a priori, transcendental form of possible experience, time is completely filled with reality (a reality that Maimon also calls ‘matter’).57 For Deleuze too, time possesses full reality. The intensive magnitudes of sensation inhabit what Deleuze calls ‘a pure line’ ranging from a particular intensity to zero. This means that it is possible to have intuitions of sensations of varying intensities, including intuitions that are almost empty, of an infinitesimally small degree of sensation close to zero. Again, as I explored in Chapter 3, Maimon had paved the way for this conception through his own notion of the ‘emptying out’ of consciousness that leaves in its wake the minimal intuition of ‘imperceptible’ degrees of sensation. Deleuze’s conception of the ‘transcendental field’ – the pure a-subjective, pre-reflective, impersonal stream of consciousness

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without a self58 – is informed by these intimations. At the liminal point at which we have ‘empty (or nearly empty) intuitions, Deleuze argues, all that is left is time as ‘a pure and empty form’59 – that is, time as an empty form that no longer depends on movement, but is the pure form of everything that changes and moves. Kant conceives of time as the form through which experience is determined by the cogito. As such, Deleuze argues, time marks the ‘difference’ between my thought and my experience. This difference impacts my experience of myself too. For I too appear to myself, as any other object in experience. Deleuze emphasizes this point. He argues that one consequence of Kant’s conception of time is that I can only experience myself as a passive, receptive, and phenomenal subject appearing and changing within time.60 When I think of myself, I find that what is presented of me – the phenomenal appearance of myself – is separated from my thought of this self, through time. There is thus, Deleuze claims, a ‘paradox’ of the inner sense, whereby representation fractures the subject. Kant conceals this fracture through the active synthetic identity brought about by the understanding. It is only in the third Critique that Kant registers the potentially disjunctive nature of thought under the impact of the unknowable. Strained in the face of inestimable magnitude (in judgements of the sublime), the imagination is forced to comprehend in one moment that which is usually apprehended as successive instances, whilst the imagination and reason are united in a disjunctive synthesis, and time is experienced as a pure form.61 Deleuze’s transcendental philosophy affirms this disjunctive genesis, tying it to a new conception of the subject, a new philosophy of art, and a new philosophy of time developed through a reading of Hume, Bergson, and Nietzsche. It is the latter to which I now turn.

Deleuze’s syntheses of time For it is not we who know, but rather a certain state of mind in us that knows.62

In place of the Kantian synthesis in time, Deleuze conceives of time as the product of three syntheses. The first articulates a notion of foundational time extracted from Hume’s notion of habit. The second articulates, through Bergson, the time of the past that acts as a ground of all time. The third draws upon Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return to articulate the being of difference as the production of the future. These syntheses of time express three instances of repetition, from which time is produced as an effect.63 I begin with Hume, who like Maimon had argued that space and time are ‘inconceivable when not filled with something real and existent’64 and for whom time too is not simply an attribute of the subject but constitutive of the subject. Hume’s conception of habit is used by Deleuze, with

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considerable inventive freedom, to formulate what he calls the first synthesis of time. This ‘time of the living present’ is produced through what Deleuze calls the ‘contraction’ of distinct perceptions – by which he means a conjunction, a pulling together of distinct cases to bind them.65 Deleuze’s use of a term with physiological overtones is intended, as contraction takes place, he argues, on a muscular level. It is a synthesis that takes place in the body, and not the mind. The mechanical activity of the contraction of repeated instances binds distinct perceptions together, retaining one whilst another appears. Thus a ‘past’ is produced by retention of preceding instants, and a ‘future’ is produced by this contraction opening onto further instances and continuing to appropriate succeeding elements. Contraction thus produces a ‘rule’ of association by which we pass from past to future, from the particular to the general, in a continuous synthesis. As Hume argues, our expectation that the sun will rise tomorrow is founded upon our experience that it has done so today and yesterday. We see that here the elements of the past and the future are only ever dimensions of the living present that binds them. The foundation of time is thus relational and it is difference that is constitutive of time. Habit belongs neither to memory nor to the understanding. It is ‘not a matter of reflection’ nor actively carried out by a consciousness, but something that happens to what Deleuze calls a ‘sensing subjectivity’66 prior to all memory, understanding, and reflection. For Deleuze, habit is a function common across organisms, a synthesis of nervous excitations operating at a ‘cellular’ level.67 This ‘habit-contraction’ constitutes the first layer of the self.68 We see that such a notion of time as constitutive of the subject renounces Kant’s grounding of time in a subject. The self is no longer defined as the capacity to experience sensations but in terms of fundamental contractions that constitute it. Deleuze argues that there must be another time into which this living present can pass, for the present cannot pass simply because a new present appears. No present would ever pass were it not past ‘at the same time’ as it is present. As such, Deleuze contends, the living present finds a ground in a second synthesis of time – which he calls, after Bergson, the time of the ‘pure past’.69 The pure past has its own being contemporary and coexistent with the present. Unless we are the most resolute contextualists, and perhaps not even then, we do not go about saying that ‘it was the fact that Tintoretto was different’. One is more likely to say that ‘it is the fact that Tintoretto was different’. Supposed by this formulation is that Tintoretto’s difference is present at the same time as it is past; the being of the past insists. Along these lines, Deleuze claims that the pure past is neither a former present nor a current present, neither simply ‘before’ the present nor the after-image of any particular present. Instead it grounds the passing of all presents. As such, it coexists not just with a ‘single’ present instance but with each and every new present with respect to which it is past. It preserves itself while the present passes, virtually containing all possible presents in different states of relaxation and expansion, as the reservoir and ground of the whole of time.70 We apprehend this time of the pure past through memory – specifically involuntary or ‘pure’ memory.71

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In Marcel Proust’s The Search of Lost Time we find a famous expression of the mechanism by which memory accesses the pure past. To Deleuze, Proust goes beyond Bergson by showing how time in itself, as the pure past, can be lived (whereas Bergson treats the pure past as something unliveable). Triggered by a bite of a Madeleine cake, involuntary memory makes the reality of the narrator’s hometown Combray reappear, not as it once was but as a new reality.72 Memory differentiates the past. Its workings conflate perceptions with imagination, such that what emerges as Combray is not identical or reducible to what the narrator actually experienced in his childhood. Memory creates. Thus whereas voluntary memory reconstitutes actual presents as they had empirically succeeded each other, involuntary memory reconstitutes a past that appears out of sequence, in fragmentary and partobscured guise.73 The past returns, in Proust’s words, as ‘a morsel of time in the pure state’ (un peu de temps a d’état pur) that transcends all empirical dimensions of time.74 And the Madeleine – a little work of art – does not simply commemorate something that once happened but confides to the future the persistent sensations of a never actualized event.75 It is in this sense that ‘the Search is oriented to the future, not to the past’.76 The mechanism of Proustian remembrance is re-invoked in Deleuze’s analysis of Francis Bacon’s paintings. Whereas voluntary memory is ‘content to illustrate or narrate the past’ and is one of the means by which the representational procedures of figuration is put to work, involuntary memory couples past and present sensations in the figure – Bacon’s painted ‘equivalents’ to Proust’s Combray.77 This coupling takes place through the diagram, which synthesizes the involuntary, accidental traits of Bacon’s rags and brushes, making a Figure emerge from the chaos of sensations.78 For both Proust and Bacon, the recovery of the past implicates the future, a ‘real yet to come’.

The third synthesis of time and Nietzsche’s eternal return It is with a third synthesis of time that Deleuze discovers a thought of the future that involves the making of something new from repetition.79 Whilst the first two syntheses of time problematize both  the Kantian model of time as an a priori, transcendental form, and the notion of time as chronological passage, they retain time as something relative, grounding, and circular. In the first synthesis, the anticipated future is grounded on a past contraction, and both the past and the future are relative to the succession of presents. The second synthesis retains the grounding of time in the pure past, whilst the past remains relative to the passing presents that it grounds such that time moves in a circle of various degrees of contraction and expansion.80 But how can anything new emerge from these states of affairs? What is new must emerge from a break in the form of circularity. The first two syntheses already indicated such a fissure, since between them the present – split between its actual form as one of many

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passing instances and its form as part of the virtual past – does not meet itself. By itself the pure past, passively insisting, cannot make the present pass. And whilst habit-contraction does make the present pass, it does so passively, and the present here is continuous with the succession of instants. An active synthesis is needed to at once displace the present by its ‘successor’ whilst bringing something new into being from the virtual past. Something, some act, must split the present from itself. What is this thing, or act? Deleuze addresses the third synthesis through Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return. One of the first things Nietzsche expresses about the eternal return in his mysterious late text Thus Spoke Zarathustra (written between 1883 and 1885) is that it is not cyclical. Zarathustra, the teacher of the eternal return, has his first realization of its nature in his conversation with a dwarf. The dwarf asserts the doctrine that time is a circle. Zarathustra retorts that the eternal return occurs on a straight line in two opposing directions, that eternity stretches out in two directions from the present moment.81 To the animals who tell him that the eternal return is the return of the same, he argues that the eternal return cannot be circular insofar as the thought of the eternal recurrence of all things, including the greatest man and the smallest, is intolerable.82 The thought of eternal recurrence is unbearable with respect to the notions of ‘it was’ and the ‘once and for all’. It is bearable only under the conditions of affirmation, only if one wills what has happened to happen once more and innumerable times more.83 When the will redeems chance in this way the feeling of the past as burden may be broken.84 When the will does not just fatalistically reconcile itself with time but produces something higher than reconciliation, which Nietzsche calls the will to power, it can redeem things from their servitude to purpose. Zarathustra intimates that the eternal return is the selection of joy over woe, for only joy ‘wanteth itself, it wanteth eternity, it wanteth recurrence, it wanteth everything eternally like itself ’.85 Through the eternal return, Deleuze argues, the circle of the same is displaced by ‘a much more tortuous, more nebulous circle’, an eccentric and decentred circle that signals only the return of the different, the dissimilar, the excessive. It is a circle ‘at the end’ of the straight line86– since not everything returns, but only the extreme and excessive forms, whose movement of return produces a sense of an unhinged time ‘out of joint’. The eternal return carries out a selection, uncovering the superior form of everything that is, whilst the average forms, all those that can be denied and which bear the negative, are expelled. What emerges is superior to the dialectics of reconciliation.87 The future conjured by return excludes the self. Time fractures the subject with the force of the event that wills itself. Here we find the basis for Deleuze’s claim of a ‘profound Nietzscheanism’ at the heart of Kant’s conception of the relation between time and the subject. What Nietzsche adds to the Kantian philosophy is that this sense of time is something actively produced through the force

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of events – which is to say the encounter with what can only be sensed, the pure, differential being of sensation. Here a relation between the eternal return and the diagrammatic presents itself. Both involve a synthesis of forces, both are activities of genesis that produce the new, both involve the destruction of what is over-coded and redundant, both break through the banal repetition of identical forms with the creative return of dissimilarity and excess. In Francis Bacon, Deleuze refers to the diagram as temporal in its unlocking of sensation and in its functioning as a vector by which the history of art is made to return through artistic practice.88 Bacon’s painting gives material expression to the antiKantian move that Deleuze theorizes: that there is no a priori time for painting. Painting does not happen ‘in’ time. Rather, it creates a sense of time through its exposure of sensation. Time is produced through the modulation of forces, or through an internal power of repetition89, and emerges as a pure form – where the latter, the sense of the eternal, is neither transcendental a priori (since it has a material basis), nor contingent upon the flux of experience. Thus diagrammatic time implicates the relation between artistic and historical time. Through the diagrams they create, every painter makes the history of painting return anew. What is excessive of past practices returns in diagrammatic time. Bacon makes Egypt, Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Cézanne return anew through the way he extracts the excessive, asignifying traits within that lineage, his affirmation of the artistic problems that survive their particular solutions as works. For Deleuze, such recurrence is not simply a feature of the works – it also characterizes the experience of the work, the nature of our encounter with such excessive, counter-historical blocs of sensation. Thus, diagrammatics offers a singular way to address the current divergence within theories of anachronism into, on the one hand, the historian’s method (subject) and, on the other hand, artistic strategies (object). In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that the notion of return critically targets the empirical treatment of history. In place of the historian’s search for the empirical correspondences between the present and the past, repetition becomes ‘the historical condition under which something new is effectively produced’.90 That is, repetition is no longer a fact of analogy between two cases – for instance the analogy between Tintoretto and Michelangelo’s use of disegno – but a movement that traverses what can be represented of history. When Deleuze writes that return affirms ‘creative disorder or inspired chaos which can only ever coincide with a historical moment but never be confused with it’91 he is speaking of the time of construction as something that exceeds the sense produced through historical inscription. And it is in this way that we have considered the stage-method as the excessive element of Tintoretto’s practice which coincides with the historical circumstances of his practice but whose sense is irreducible to the intelligibility that can be extracted from it.

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The diagram, genealogy, and history [The diagram] ‘never functions to represent a persisting world but produces a new kind of reality … . It is neither the subject of history, nor does it survey history. It makes history by unmaking preceding realities and significations, constituting hundreds of points of emergence or creativity, unexpected conjunctions or improbable continuums. It doubles history with a sense of continual becoming.’92

As a construction of a ‘real yet to come’ the diagram implicates the question of time not only since the yet to come is a future, but also because mapping stirs up the past such that it can be said to function as the a priori of history. Bacon’s diagrams not only produce new figures of painting; they also ‘recapitulate’ the history of painting, deforming it and making it return anew. It is through the notion of genealogy – the attention to history in its genesis – that Deleuze clarifies these relations between the diagram, history, and time.93 Deleuze associates diagrammatics with genealogy in his work on Foucault. A notion taken from Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals) and developed by Foucault (in his Discipline and Punish and his four-volume work The History of Sexuality), genealogy is a practice of history, a kind of ‘counterhistory’ that attends to the emergence of values and the determination of their hierarchy, in place of the narration of facts in linear, chronological time that supports a positivist history. Nietzsche understands genealogy as the investigation into the conditions of the genesis of values, and the value of values.94 For Foucault, genealogy seeks to expose neither the ‘visible’ facts, the ‘hidden’ essences nor origins behind historical phenomena, but the combinations of forces and the contingent, accidental and nonlinear occurrences that ‘constitute decisive breaks’.95 Deleuze understands genealogy as a search for the ‘differential element of values’ from which the value of values derives.96 For him, genealogy integrates the thinking of difference into a critical study of history, expanding the Kantian form of critique that Deleuze argues works only in the name of established values (reason, knowledge, morality, etc.) into a ‘total critique’ that attends to the genesis of values and the forces that constitute them. Genealogy is not simply a new method of doing history; it is a way of thinking history and the time of history. This follows Foucault’s characterization of genealogy as a type of thinking. In fact, Foucault describes his studies of history as ‘not the work of a “historian”, but rather “a philosophical exercise” whose object was “to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently”’.97 Genealogy is not just a new practice of history but a new practice of critique, a new practice of critical thought. The diagram plays a crucial role in this re-evaluation of history. The source of the connection between history, genealogy, thought, and the diagram is in Deleuze’s reference to Foucault’s wellknown description of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, which Bentham invented in the late eighteenth century as a type of institutional building that would permit the observation of all its occupants

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without them being able to know whether or not they were being watched. Foucault understands this model of disciplinary surveillance as a mechanism of power that extends beyond specific historical formations, a ‘diagram’ whose function is abstracted from any specifi c use, and which has multiple possible applications: ‘There are as many diagrams as there are social fields in history.’98 Deleuze regards this characterization of the diagram as a key moment in Foucault’s move from an archaeology of knowledge to a genealogy of power relations.99 Deleuze calls the panopticon diagram a ‘principal of distribution’ of power relations that traverse the forms of history, namely, the two non-corresponding forms of the visible and the utterable – in the case of the panopticon, these were the ‘prison’ as the form of visibility and ‘punishment’ as the form of utterability. For Deleuze, the diagram is an informal function (it is an agency, with no form of its own), which acts as the genetic differentiator of forces that ‘makes power relations function’.100 It is a ‘non-unifying, immanent cause’ (a cause which is realized, integrated, and distinguished in its effect), a map that is ‘coextensive with the whole social field’.101 Indeed, in exploring the contemporary reactions to Tintoretto’s work by Aretino, Vasari, and others, it was with a diagnosis of such non-correspondence between the utterable and the visible that this book opened. For Deleuze, it is in the interstice between the visible and the utterable that the diagram operates. And the stage-method, Tintoretto’s diagram, functions between what can be said and seen of his work in his time, a map of the imperceptible, coextensive with its social field whilst also pointing to the future. Deleuze orients questions of history and historiography to the question of thought. He ontologizes Foucault’s philosophical studies of history through the terms of his constructivist revision of Kant: ‘Diagrammatism’ will play a role similar to Kant’s schematism but in a completely different way: the receptive spontaneity of forces accounts for the receptivity of visible forms, the spontaneity of utterable statements and their correlation.102

Kantian schematic dualism is replaced by diagrammatic reciprocal determination, a synthesis which, as I argued in Chapter 3, concerns the genesis of thought. For Foucault, Deleuze writes, thinking is no longer ‘the innate exercise of a faculty, but must happen to thought’; it ‘does not depend on an interiority uniting the visible and the utterable but takes place under the intrusion of the outside that carves the interval’.103 There are resonances emerging here on the one hand between schematism, history, and archaeology and on the other hand between diagrammatics and genealogy. If archaeology attends to historical archives (comprised of the forms of the visible and the utterable), genealogy attends to diagrams that work in the mutable interstice of forces overspilling historical forms. If archaeology remains bound to chronological time, the diagram sketches ‘what we will become’ where this becoming stages itself in a dimension other than chronology.104 If genealogy is the thought and writing of history in its genesis, and diagrams are the genetic loci of history, then one might say that genealogy is a practice of diagrams, even that genealogy is a diagrammatic historiography. In fact,

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return, genealogy, and the diagrammatics are interconnected in their affirmation of difference, the excessive element of what is, hinging historiography and ontology around this central problem. Returning to the remarks with which I began this chapter, the most salient question raised by genealogy and diagrammatics is how the historian can now turn to a particular work, and how this turning can be at once a returning that uproots the work from its chronologically determined and inscribed position. This is a question posed by the work of art itself through its own conquest and exposure of time. Under ordinary conditions of recognition our faculties, aligned and synthesized in a common sense, work in accord with the form of time that permits our representation of things to ourselves. Under the auspices of representation, time as a pure form is concealed. Only in exceptional conditions, conditions that may be exposed in the confrontation with unrecognizable blocs of sensation forced by certain works of art, does time emerge in its pure form. The task then is not simply to articulate how painting expresses or represents time through the depiction of narrative, or through the anachronistic citations of different forms and motifs. Time is not only an attribute of art as object. Neither is it just an a priori form of measuring art, part of the historian’s methodological toolkit – as the time of dates usually functions – a measure into which works of art can be intelligibly placed. What Deleuze instead argues for is how, in the experience of certain works of art, we are alerted to a feeling of time that accompanies the genesis of thought, where this thought does not proceed in accordance with an established image of itself. This sense of time can be called diagrammatic insofar as it is produced through the constructive and synthetic operation of the diagram, that makes something of sensation, and conjoins the exposure of differential passage with the element of the unchanging. Can all works of art produce such an experience and sensation of time? Is art as such a being of sensation? Deleuze claims that every painter has had an experience of the diagrammatic,105 but the notions of genealogy and eternal return support a selective and discriminating ontology. Not all artworks are expressions of difference, and not all return.

Tintoretto’s time When we turn to the question of time in Tintoretto’s works what is it we are addressing? There is time as it manifests in the paintings, through their actual materiality, their formal motifs, and their compositional relations. There is the time of the stage-method – the time of painting’s genesis and production, which is a reality beyond the actual paintings themselves, concerning the workings of a little puppet box. There is the time of Tintoretto’s return in other practices. And lastly, there is the time of the historian’s investigation of Tintoretto’s works, time as it is implicated by and in this study. Tintoretto paints things that are happening. In his works, we do not find things that have already happened and which are being represented, but things as they are taking place. In Saint George and

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the Dragon (Figure 3) the princess is running towards us as George is in the throes of the fight. Saint Mark’s body is being found as the Saint is lowered from a balcony (Figure 26). In the Creation of the Animals (Figure 9), God is in flight, part of a creative movement that temporarily captures him in its flow. Events fracture the narration of successive sequences with their force, putting us in the middle of things. Through this preoccupation with the moment – the shock of a miracle, the suspension of a narrative, or the everyday occurrences of quotidian human events – time in Tintoretto’s works resists definition as the form through which things are depicted or narrated, or by which episodes are related in a seamless continuity. Rather, time emerges through disjunction and rupture. The Miracle of the Slave (Figure 4) is perhaps the clearest example of this. Alongside the crowd scene, the entry of Saint Mark is sharply disjointed. The figures of the crowd are suspended, the forward march of time has been abruptly halted. Saint Mark, however, is moving so fast that his orange cape flutters wildly. His speed contrasts with the crowds’ arrest: the two senses of time do not coherently meet. This disjunction is accentuated by the spatial placement of the figures. Saint Mark appears at a point above and in front of the crowd, apparently on a different plane. We have the time of the witness of the miracle and the time of the Saint’s appearance – but when is the time of the ‘rescue’? We are shown the flight of the Saint and the consequences of the rescue (the broken tools, the crowd’s surprise), but the rescue itself is not shown. It defies representation, and emerges only through disjunction, as something excessive, the virtual pivot around which the painting revolves but which itself cannot be shown. Time emerges as something produced through a failure of representation. Tintoretto’s ghostly figures often play a crucial role in such evasion. In the Rescue of the Body of Saint Mark (Figure 30) they are incongruent with the main episode of the historia. The latter, comprised of figures holding the body of the Saint, are congealed in a solid mass. But the ghostly figures are running frenetically, their material abbreviation conjuring nameless sensations, signalling an occurrence about to happen but currently invisible – the event of an imminent storm that is gathering overhead in a streaked sky. These two orders of figuration are disconnected, both through the style in which they are painted and compositionally, by the vast emptiness of the piazza that separates them. The event of the painting evades representation and emerges through a lacuna. We see that the body has been found and is about to be removed. But the rescue itself is not shown; we can only anticipate it through the sense of imminence conjured by the ghostly figures. Again, the feeling of time emerges through disjunction. The stage-method is the key to this disjunctive production of time. By working with a little box outside a canvas Tintoretto imparts to his compositions a heightened sense of speed, change, and occurrence. Insofar as painting begins with this staging, the time of Tintoretto’s paintings is not simply the disjunctive time signalled by the painted forms and compositional solutions on canvas. It also involves a genesis beyond the frame, which is irreducible to the actual forms of painting. In this sense the

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stage-method is always in excess to what comes of it. The source of Tintoretto’s pictorial actualizations, it is both before and after them, insisting as an excessive experiment with no end and no clear beginning. Already in the seventeenth century Boschini had described Tintoretto as il prodigo – the prodigal, the extravagant, the inexhaustible.106 Over 300 years later this sentiment is reiterated by the Italian writer and activist Piero Gobetti: ‘Tintoretto … cannot be understood except by looking into the future … . In moments of crisis and renewal people remember Tintoretto because his endeavours are inexhaustible.’107 As the source of endless compositional variations and proliferating effects, the stage-method might be said to act as the ‘immanent cause’ of this inexhaustibility intimated by two writers separated by over 300 years. It may be said to act as the virtual reservoir for all the forms that may be expressed in his paintings to come, a ‘pure matter-function’ which, detached from specific ends, insists and recurs through his works. From the perspective of this genetic method, we apprehend Tintoretto’s works less as a linear development of successive solutions than as coexisting and varying expressions of a consistent source. It is quite possible to detect in one of Tintoretto’s final paintings, the moving Deposition of Christ, 1594 (Figure 59), a lonely altarpiece painted for the Capella dei Morti in San Giorgio Maggiore where it still hangs, all the signs of a ‘late’ work – the melancholy mood, the feeling of the tragic expressed through an introverted piety, and interiorized vision. The confidence in the composition and its simplified vision indicate the work of an assured painter in his maturity; the subject suggests a pious artist reaching the end of his own life. But on another level, this ‘late’ work is utterly consistent with the early works. Many things here were already in the 1541–2 Christ among the Doctors (Figure 1): the outsized, swooning figures, the illogically stepped space, the sealed, stage-box room, the artificial lighting, the rhythms produced by diagonal and cursive lines (which in the Deposition manifest both through the skewed triangle of carmine highlights in the robes of Mary and two of the figures supporting Christ’s body, and through the strong diagonal between the body of Christ and Mary). The linear, chronological logic separating early from late is not as clear as we would like to imagine. Indeed, the great variation in the dates assigned to Tintoretto’s works by scholars is symptomatic of this difficulty. As one has commented, ‘It is not easy to follow a clear-cut and constant line of development in the art of this painter.’108 Instead, his oeuvre can be better grasped as a recurrent cycle of traits – flying figures, ghostly figures, hulking and contorted figures, spectral facades and stairwells, diagonal compositions, stormy skies, stage-like spaces, and lighting. Certainly, the historian is able to detect notable patterns amongst the works made in the last fifteen years of his life – the intense darkness of endless shadows, the spectral and electric lighting, the heightened, phantasmal chiaroscuro that cloaks forms in unreality. But ‘late’ is a designation we impose on to works to aid our representational thinking of them, and looking at these two paintings separated by more than forty years one apprehends the limitations of chronological sense. Painting’s thought defies the borders of the date.

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Figure 59 Jacopo Tintoretto, Deposition of Christ, 1594, oil on canvas, 288 × 166 cm. San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. Photo: SCALA.

I have spoken about time as it is manifested in Tintoretto’s paintings, and the time of the stagemethod. One can also speak of time in terms of the return of the stage-method in future practices where what returns is excess to the established values of Tintoretto’s historical time (those of historia, disegno and colorito, for instance). In Deleuze’s view, return attends to something beyond formal resemblances. Whereas resemblance is the mode through which things remain the same, return is that by which what is difference is made into the new. Tintoretto’s return is thus to be distinguished from the recycling of motifs, themes, and styles of his work by later artists – from Bassano to Delacroix to Cézanne to Max Beckmann – that reframes what was once different within a history of analogous forms. Return is also to be distinguished from the repetition of what was derivative and reactive. There may

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well be practices that are attracted by the way Tintoretto could copy Veronese, Titian or Michelangelo, how he could liberally populate his works with quotations, or how he mastered established values such as disegno or colorito. But for Deleuze, return does not pertain to such deliberated analogies. Rather it is the excesses of creative production, that which exceeds the structures of derivation and reaction, which returns to force future creation. Through his diagrams the artist is someone who inspires further creativity – whilst present in both, Tintoretto returns in Boschini’s writings but not in Vasari’s, the ‘historian’ who seeks to make him intelligible. Already new in Tintoretto’s own context, the stage-method remains new. It never becomes an established element of painting preparation. It never becomes systematized as an accepted technique or method. The artists who employ a similar method are few and far between – taken together they would hardly constitute a ‘history’. As such, the stage-method remains hidden, a somewhat secret element within art history. There is a counter-history, a genealogy, of the stage-method to be written that could account for its return in different guises. This might include such disparate figures as El Greco, Nicholas Poussin, Adam Elsheimer, Johannes Vermeer, Cézanne, Jan Svankmajer, and Christian Boltanski, all of whom have used stage-sets and puppets in different ways, including to expand and eventually destroy the boundaries of painting.109 It might touch on Dada and surreal practices of staging and constructed sets – the empty metaphysical spaces of Georges de Chirico and Paul Delvaux, or Joseph Cornell’s little boxes. It might explore the return of Tintoretto’s ghostly figures in the surrealist morphologies of Ernst, Dali, and Yves Tanguy, and consider why the first issue of Minotaure in 1933 chose to publish six reproductions of Tintoretto’s works.110 It might attend to the ways in which Tintoretto’s stage-method returns in the twentieth-century sense of painting as ‘environment’ that runs from Matisse to Daniel Buren, a painting beyond painting that competes with its architectural surrounds and overpowers it. Such a counter-history/genealogy of stage-method would need to be careful not to draw a new set of analogies or present the conjunctions of past and present as new moments of recognition. Rather, it would take difference as its ‘principle’, and attend to each case study for the singular way in which it actualized and misrecognized staging and the divergent results that emerged. Since the problem of the historia and the demands of iconography that dominated painting in Tintoretto’s time are of course displaced by new preoccupations, what we call the stage-method would not look the same, assume the same function, or mean the same thing across history – even if certain resemblances could be drawn as an after-effect of its operations. It is with from this outlook that one could re-evaluate the late-nineteenth-century and earlytwentieth-century appropriation of Tintoretto. Whereas this relation, as I have shown, has often been assessed through the lens of analogy – the analogies of an exposed brushwork, modulated colour, and distorted forms – such pictorialism was not what was most distinctively innovative in Tintoretto’s works. For Tintoretto shared these traits with many of his contemporaries: Titian, Bassano, Giorgione,

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and Veronese all painted in a way that would have appealed to early-twentieth-century painters keen to liberate a ‘pure’ painting and finding inspiration in, and analogies with, art of the past for this project. To think the return of Tintoretto in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, to think Tintoretto’s modernity implicates the reality of the stage-method. It involves the dramatization of the form of painting that declares its trans-pictorial potential rather than its essentialization as a specific medium. The stage-method signals the eruption and dissolution of painting, in place of the pictorial retreat of painting into itself through the ‘purifying’ affirmation of characteristics such as exposed brushwork and the materiality of paint. Consequently, a thought of Tintoretto’s return runs counter to the anachronism of pictorial modernism. Rather than a contribution to the teleological refinement of painting’s essence it concerns the ongoing dissolution and expansion of painting through forces that open it to its outside. Finally, I turn to the time of the historian’s investigation. Since the nineteenth century, Tintoretto has been a more or less constant presence within scholarship, an accepted object of art historical investigation. The art historian can ‘choose’ to study an artist already given to be studied as part of the discipline’s territory. In Kantian terms, Tintoretto is given as an object of possible experience under the a priori conditions of what constitutes art historical investigation. This situation arguably reflects the condition of the discipline more than the nature of the object. Such ‘indiscriminate’ scholarship of the past (indiscriminate because Tintoretto is an object in the same way as other artists are) is countered by the discrimination of return, construction, and affirmation as I have theorized them, after Deleuze. In accordance with the later, the investigation of the historian in the present poses itself as a critical activity, more a ‘history of the present’ (in Foucault’s memorable terms) than a history of what was. Accordingly, time emerges as not simply a methodological category or tool by which to analyse the art object but a quality of the historian’s experience, specifically a quality of the disjunctive and shock experience of the past in the present. In what I have called diagrammatic time, the time of Tintoretto’s works and the time of the experience of this work conjoin, integrating artistic production with the thought of that production, bringing together the work of the historian–writer with the work of the artist. Writing today, how are we implicated by a practice that conducted itself more than four centuries ago? The fact is that we can still see Tintoretto’s works. But it should be clear by now that ‘Tintoretto’s return’ gestures towards something other than this evidence of actual persistence. It also indicates something other than what can be recognized of his work through the perceptual frames of the present. If we are to grasp Tintoretto’s contemporaneity, it is from this perspective of the future and the vigour of a present critically transforming itself such that ‘today’ becomes something other than what is evidentially present. To explore how this might play itself out I conclude with a specific case of Tintoretto’s apparent return in the context of contemporary art practice. I stage this as one example of how a genealogy of the stage-method could articulate itself as a series of constructions from a critical present rather than simply a new history of contingent instances.

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Tintoretto’s return in the 2011 Venice Biennale This book opened with an experience of Tintoretto’s works in a museum retrospective – a type of exhibition that, as its name suggests, looks backwards, surmising the achievements and outputs of an artist from a position outside, and after, them. I bring this book to a close by turning to a very different exhibition experience – an instance of Tintoretto’s return within the perspective of the contemporary. Instead of framing Tintoretto’s works as something that has happened and can be represented holistically, we find here a presentation of Tintoretto as a fragmented part of an ongoing present. From an experience of ‘Tintoretto and his time’ we shift to the perspective of ‘Tintoretto and our time’. Why was Tintoretto selected as the ‘historical’ artist to open the 2011 Venice Biennale, one of the most significant events in the contemporary art world? Why not Titian or another ‘old master’? And why was a sixteenth-century painter even included at all in a context usually reserved for latetwentieth- and twenty-first-century art? The inclusion of three of Tintoretto’s paintings – The Last Supper from San Giorgio Maggiore (Figure 40), the Rescue of the Body of Saint Mark (Figure 30), and the Creation of the Animals (Figure 9) in an event that is generally taken as one of the most representative overviews of international contemporary art, and one which defines itself as a reflection on the state of current art and its possible future111 – marks an intriguing case of return. The curators argued that Tintoretto had been selected not as an Old Master but for his ‘contemporaneity’. The collision of this contemporary Tintoretto with other practices of contemporary art was staged within a presentation of ‘the plurality of current perspectives’.112 It was Tintoretto who was selected to confront the erstwhile ‘border zone’ erected by previous Biennales ‘between modernity and earlier history’, to question the division between ‘the Old Masters on the one side, Modern and contemporary art on the other’. Incorporating ‘something that is normally kept outside’ – an Old Master, Tintoretto – the curators sought to confront an ‘aversion to dealing with history’. But why is this confrontation important? Tintoretto was selected for his ‘unorthodox, experimental and anti-classical qualities’, his status ‘as an outsider in the history of art’ and the ‘visual and expressive directness’ of his works, which still possess ‘the power to engage a contemporary audience’.113 But why was he selected at all? The terms of this bridging between history and the modern/contemporary – notions that are, symptomatically, conflated in the curator’s self-assessment – assume the retrojection of the modern (and contemporary) features of painting onto Tintoretto that art historians since the turn of the twentieth century had themselves undertaken: the ‘extremely open form’ and ‘lack of finality’ that can now, after the innovations of modern painting, be appreciated. Tintoretto’s ‘contemporary relevance’ is apparently attributed here to these proto-modernist pictorial innovations that ostensibly have little

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to do with the contemporary art on display in the Biennale, much of which is multimedia sculpture and installation, and very little of which involves paint on canvas.114 But even if these similarities existed, such appeal to a modernist discourse of painting is regressive, since the historical and theoretical articulation of what constitutes the field of the contemporary, and the works themselves, have long departed from this territory – with the dissolution of painting by new forms of inter- and post-media being one of the most obvious indicators. Such disjunction between what is actually shown as contemporary and Tintoretto’s ‘symbolic’ contemporary may account for the symptomatic absence in the catalogue, or the exhibition itself, of any discussion of the relation between Tintoretto and contemporary artists. That is, the curators isolate the discussion of Tintoretto, and conduct it in the established terms of art historical discourse (composition, light, the materiality of paint, theatricality) – but not with respect to the very thing that demands address: his function for contemporary art. The few promising points of analysis – the comparison of Tintoretto’s spatiality with the recent visual culture of virtual reality, or Tintoretto’s ‘topical’ use of light which, the suggestion seems to be, acquires new sense in conjunction with the use of light by minimalist practices that separate object from environment in a ‘sacralization’ or ‘exaltation’ – are unfortunately not developed.115 The artist Monica Bonvicini’s explicit reference to the stairwell in Tintoretto’s Presentation of the Virgin, with her installation of several flights of illuminated stairs in front of a wide curtain, goes unremarked upon. And even the intriguing curatorial decision to juxtapose Tintoretto’s works alongside Maurizio Cattelan’s stuffed pigeons (the Italian artist placed 2000 stuffed pigeons in the rafters of the Biennale’s central pavilion, including in the room of Tintoretto’s works) is not mentioned. There is a missed opportunity here to reflect on intriguing relations of nature and artifice, satire and humour, the domestic, and the very nature of contrast itself, between these two apparently incongruous artists. The historical relativization that accompanies this anachronistic justification of Tintoretto’s pictorial innovations does not enhance the discussion. Showing that the features that were once criticized can now be valued – that the ‘vertiginous pull’ of Tintoretto’s converging lines ‘which in the past were often thought to be exaggeratedly mannered and eccentric’ are ‘alluring today’ – does not produce any theoretical justification of his contemporaneity. It only confirms to us the quality and conditions of our own historical perception, and as an evaluation it is not structurally different from the anachronistic discourses of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century art criticism, in their superimposition of values recognized in their time onto the phenomena of earlier times. That is, thinking as a form of recognition is upheld – the apprehension of difference concerns the morphing conditions of perception whose transformation permits new recognition at each stage.

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That the present may give new sense to the past is by no means a new idea. The question which needs attention is both more profound and more specific: why does Tintoretto return today, in distinction to other artists of his time, and how can this return produce a new sense of the contemporary with which he is juxtaposed? The claim that ‘if viewed from today’s perspective, art from another era can be brought back to life’ is in itself inadequate, since first, the work of art never ‘died’ – it was only our conditions of perception that obscured it – and second, the question of ‘life’, untheorized, means nothing more than the attention or visibility we now choose to bestow on the objects of our thought.116 Without investing the occasion of this juxtaposition for a new theorization of the contemporary that could reciprocally bring new sense to Tintoretto’s time, the inclusion of Tintoretto’s works in a contemporary setting can appear as little more than the tokenistic referencing of art history as an attempt to demonstrate that contemporary art discourses are more historically rooted and credible than their circulating globalized modes have us believe. How can the juxtaposition allow us to think both of Tintoretto as a force of unrecognizability or difference and of the contemporary as something other than the collection of works made and perceivable to us in our actual present? To this end, Tintoretto’s status as an ‘outsider’, not only to ‘the modern and the contemporary’ – a field which we should point out includes the entire history of art up to the twenty-first century – but to the norms of his own time, is crucial. It is not because Tintoretto is an ‘old master’ that he is selected (or should be selected), but because he in fact subverts this very accreditation. It is precisely the flight of his works from the normative values of the ‘master’, the wilful and ongoing focus on experimentation at the expense of the values that would have guaranteed his reception as an undisputed ‘master’ (in the way that, for instance, Titian, even with all of his own experimentation, nevertheless succeeded in procuring), and which rendered these aspects of his work unpalatable in his time, that makes him return outside of it with insistence. It is this excess that produces his recurring force, not simply the ‘open forms’ that have ‘created art history’ through their influence on succeeding generations of painters, but the very ontological and semiotic excess to the perceptible norms of his time and the particular visible forms of his work – the excess which I have attributed to his stage-method. To this extent, the curators are not wrong to link Tintoretto’s ‘contemporaneity’ to his ‘anti-classicism’ – but the nature of this anti-classicism must be precisely defined. I have argued that Tintoretto’s destruction of classical values is not simply a formalized reaction against them but the effect of an over-strong impulse, directed elsewhere, the effect of an affirmation that is too different. Hence before his numerous figure studies after Michelangelo we do not experience a negation that would remain in thrall to an original model as much as slavish imitation would. Rather, the ‘deformative’ effect can be credited to a ‘negation’ as overpowering, an effect of a more profound impulse to create, an impulse that necessarily entails destruction and whose field of expression is not Michelangelo’s world of the human body but the world of the stage. In this way, what Tintoretto does with his sources such as

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Michelangelo is strangely similar to Deleuze’s operations on Kant: a critique that goes beyond both reactionary negation and banal copying. According to Deleuze, return does not bring back a form or value already defined (for instance, the attribute of anti-classicism that is implicitly felt to remain the same – the claim that it is the same ‘vertiginous pull’ that was found difficult in Tintoretto’s own time which is now palatable). Rather, return erects a new value whose negation of tradition and classicism is an after-effect of its work. ‘Anti-classicism’ returns in a new guise, as an emerging ‘contemporaneity’ beyond the dualism of classical and anti-classical. A contemporary Tintoretto and the contemporary after-effects of Tintoretto are not things that can necessarily be identified with contemporary art. If we were remaining with analogies, we might most obviously talk about immersion, installation, and environmental art, the dramatization of spaces beyond the frame. We might develop the question of light effects or virtual spaces. We might even talk about the moving image or about the critical renewal of the project of painting after the photographic and the cinematographic. But it is not clear that such articulations are any less beholden to the form of resemblance and the thought of recognition upheld by the analogies of pictorial modernism. The contemporary too has attained its own classicism and its own repertoire of recognizable forms. This is why, again, an account of Tintoretto’s return, a genealogy of Tintoretto’s survival, would have to proceed with the question of how the stage-method is differently realized in each practice, and how it produces divergent effects, plural returns that refuse to be brought under a single nomination and refuse the recognition of what was once unrecognized.

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n this book I have staged an inquiry into difference as it is posed by the work of art, and the challenge such difference poses to the thought of the work of art. Difference has been understood

as that which makes the work of art singular and accounts for what is new of it; that element that eludes representation, where this evasion demarcates the site of a challenge. An inquiry into artistic difference concerns the seminal question of how we look at, think about, and study works of art. The tendency to think of works in terms of what they are and how they can be represented characterizes art history’s thought of it objects in its appeal to the frameworks of context, tradition, and fact. Whilst such approaches have their function, they arguably also perform an operation that undermines the innovations of artistic practices. It was with an account of such dynamics at the heart of art history’s disciplinary study of its objects that this book began. An inquiry into artistic difference furthermore concerns the no less fundamental question of why we continue to look at, think about, and study works of art. It was with an exploration of the concepts of time implicated by such questioning that this book concluded. What motivates the study of past works of art today, other than the demands of scholarship? The study of works of art in order to understand what they signified in their historical time and place is, clearly, only one aspect of art historical work. Another is the understanding of how our present conditions, including our own condition as a subject, is implicated by such study. Do we study works in order to identify them or insofar as they present as problems that still resist identification? Is it the habits of scholarly endeavour that drive our inquiry or the experiences of continuing to be affected? This book has attempted to explore such questions and attend to these distinctions. In so doing, it has not assumed the problem of difference as abstract, but as a problem singularly posed by a particular practice. It has not articulated and defended a metaphysics of difference but attended to difference as a reality posed by a set of actual works. Inviting both ambivalent and impassioned responses, the works of Jacopo Tintoretto commanded acknowledgement by his contemporaries. Working between the traditions of great artistic schools, between the fading of the Venetian Renaissance and the dawn of baroque preoccupations, Tintoretto makes something strange and new of this interstice. Conjoining tragic and epic visions of the biblical

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stories and classical mythology with the quotidian and the comic, he is an artist of contrasts who allows contrast to act, unreconciled, as the site of new constructed realities. The dramatization of painting constitutes the singularity of Tintoretto’s art. The imparting to the matter and form of painting heightened movement, vitality, and force transforms painting into a world of spectacular effects. This is achieved through a set of strategies that have led many to characterize this artist as the most experimental painter of his time: sharp, often dissonant, contrasts of tone and angle, an unreal lighting derived from multiple sources, acutely titled planes and plunging perspectives, foreshortened and contorted figures, irrational spaces, and abbreviated brushwork through which colour and light are integrated into the pulsating, energetic matter of paint. Moreover, and uniquely to Tintoretto, dramatization consists in the innovation of a new method of preparation through the construction of a little stage-box with mannequins. I have shown how this method resists re-contextualization – but beyond the question of whether or not it is ‘of its time’, it would be tempting to treat this feature of Tintoretto’s practice as a new fact to add to the accumulating reservoir of what we know about this artist. Indeed many scholars have already done so. I have instead treated it as the occasion for a critical inquiry into certain assumptions of art historical study. That the stage-method was not clearly of its historical time and defies intelligibility through the hegemonic art theoretical terms that Tintoretto’s contemporaries attempted to apply to his practice (such as disegno and colorito) or the normative terms of historical context (such as theatre and painting), calls for a thinking of artistic difference as an ongoing problem. That Tintoretto’s pictorial worlds might have baffled his contemporaries is interesting in signalling an imperceptible reality that recurs. Attending to such blind spots as continued provocations is the real task that faces us as writers. In this light, I have understood the project of writing a book about Tintoretto today not in terms of a contestation of established facts, addition of yet more, and multiplication of interpretations. Rather, I have taken the problem of Tintoretto’s difference as an occasion for disciplinary selfreflection, and engagement with a question rarely asked: What would it mean to affirm the work of art’s problematization of intelligibility as an ongoing affront? Called upon by such questioning is attention to the relation between art history and philosophy – how this relation is to be thought, how it manifests at the level of a study of an artistic oeuvre, and what these disciplinary forms and practices have to offer each other. To my mind, the most compelling questions concerning works of art, and the most interesting attempts at answers, emerge in the collision of these two fields. The question, for instance, of why we study a past practice today demands sensitivity to both ‘traditional’ art historical questions of context and circumstance and the philosophy of time. As many of the most insightful thinkers on art have intimated, one without the other will not suffice. A philosophy of art without a history of art risks abstract generalities about the nature and condition of art. A history of art without a philosophy of art risks uncritical description tethered to the facts of empirical reality. The task is to perpetually balance between these disciplines, to be what

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I would term a ‘philo-historian’ of art, a thinker of art that attends to the multifaceted myriad of problems raised by the work, without recourse to the supremacy of any particular discourse. I began this book by arguing that the tendency that characterizes art history’s representational thought of its objects in its appeal to the frameworks of context and fact undermines the difference of artistic practices. But the appeal – that can characterize philosophical thinking about art – to concepts and systems without requisite attention to historical content is no less undermining. The question of difference as it is posed by a work of art is not simply a metaphysical one, but a question posed by every work differently and as it is inscribed within a particular historical locus, embedded in the multiple registers and coordinates of a dynamic material reality. The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze has offered a horizon of concepts and an ethos of thinking through which to attend to the problem of difference as posed by Tintoretto’s works. Deleuze’s own early conception of thought as ‘dramatization’ rather than representation – as an intensive movement under the surface of concepts rather than the use of concepts already made, a mobilization of thought provoked by the force of the encounter – is only one of many coincidences between his philosophy and Tintoretto’s practice. Beyond the specific case of Tintoretto, the Deleuzian ambition to think difference ‘in itself ’, to release difference from the ‘night of the identical’1 and to affirm difference as the determination of new reality has compelling import for art historical reflections on concepts of time and history as well as the fundamental relation between concepts and experience. Deleuze’s conception of thought as a constructive passage from sensations to concepts and back again supports an articulation of a philo-history of art between art history and philosophy. Indeed, if concepts have no sense outside their real field of use then it is arguable that a philosophy of art has no sense outside art history as the study of the sensible reality of artworks. The implications of such transdisciplinary relations supply material for a (constructivist) art history after Deleuze. As Deleuze’s philosophy incorporates the thought of many others – and this book has been equally engaged with the thought of Peirce, Nietzsche, Maimon, Foucault, and Kant – to invoke it is to replay a history of problems that extend beyond the explicit boundaries of Deleuze’s writings. In this regard, my focus has been on the problem of constructivism and its value for a theory of aesthetics, a theory of time, and a theory of art history. It is at the conjunction of these registers that I have understood the diagram to operate: at once a map of sensations, a generative sign, and an a priori of ‘new reality’. It is possible to understand the important concept of the diagram as Deleuze’s contribution to the long history of the conception of the artist as a constructor who synthesizes what they experience with the elements of their thought. What Deleuze, with Guattari, adds to this history is a foregrounding of the constructive element of the diagram over the quotidian characterization of diagrams as representations. It is with this conception of synthesis in mind that I have analysed the stage-method as Tintoretto’s diagram, a map that breaks through the givens of painting in his time and forges new relations within

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his expanded field of materials to construct new realities of artistic practice. The concept of the diagram has furthermore invited attention to Tintoretto’s peculiar relation to the empirical world. What has often been acknowledged as the fusion in Tintoretto’s work of the celestial and supra-sensible with the material and the quotidian can be newly grasped as the meeting of a transcendental empiricism with a cosmic materialism, where the imperceptible and differential element of matter becomes the source of cosmic sensations. Much more than a mapping of visible form and a preparatory process immanent to the work of painting – as it remains for Deleuze’s Bacon – Tintoretto’s works reveal the diagram as a conceptual figure of construction operative across the interlocking registers of aesthetics, semiotics, temporality, and history. Beyond Tintoretto, the diagram invites new approaches to the thought of artworks, for it conjoins the work of the historian with the material with which he engages, characterizing both the object and the method of study. In this sense, it could be fruitful to situate the diagram alongside the potent ‘methodological’ concepts of Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image, or Aby Warburg’s dynamogram, concepts by which history and time can be figured, where this figuring includes the work of a defiguring that dislocates the continuum of history and instigates new proximity between the work of writing and the experience of history. An exploration of such conjunctions at the interstices of art history and philosophy might be one future line of inquiry of a philo-history of art that is immanent to the work of art or image. This study of Tintoretto has offered one possible instantiation of such a practice, which could also be understood as a philosophical practice of art history after Deleuze. A diagrammatic thought of art doubling as a constructivist historiography of art has proceeded as an engagement with difference as it is posed by Tintoretto’s works. In this way this book could be read on multiple registers – as a critical study of methods of art history and of the conceptions of time, experience, and aesthetics in the thought of art, and an account and practice of Deleuze’s philosophy of the diagram. It could also be read, simply, as a study of Tintoretto’s works not in his time, but for ours.

Notes

Prologue 1 Peter Schjeldahl, Let’s See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008), 119. 2 Tom Nichols, Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity (London: Reaktion, 1999), 13. A search of the British Library catalogue in March 2018 produces 262 results for ‘Tintoretto’ (112 in English) – and these results include other members of the Tintoretto family, namely, Domenico. Compare the number for Titian: 707 results (457 in English). 3 Miguel Falomir, in Tintoretto, ed. Falomir (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2007), 18. Frederick Illchman, ed., Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice (Ashgate: Lund Humphries, 2009), 11. 4 A short burst of popularity between 1890 and 1950 – Bernard Berenson’s 1897 study in Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, Erich von der Bercken and August L Mayer’s monograph in 1923, and monographs by Mary Pittaluga (1925), Von Der Bercken (1942), Coletti (1944), Tietze (1948), and Rodolfo Pallucchini (1950) – has, as Miguel Falomir points out in his introduction to the catalogue of the 2007 Prado exhibition, been followed by diminishing interest, Tintoretto, ed. Falomir, 18. Writing in 1931, Whitehouse remarks on the ‘neglect and indifference’ shown to Tintoretto’s Paradise in the Ducal Hall – a neglect of which the author knows ‘no parallel’. The Paradise of Tintoretto (London: Oxford, 1931), 10. 5 In March 2018, the British Library lists fewer than thirty studies on San Rocco, and only one in English – Edgar Barclay’s published in 1876: Notes on the Scuola di San Rocco at Venice and Its Decorations by Tintoretto (London: Spottiswoode & Co., 1876).

Chapter 1 1 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London, New York: Continuum, 2001), xxi. 2 My analysis of contextualism is not intended as a characterization of the discipline of art history in general. Clearly, contemporary art history has done much innovative methodological work beyond the limits of contextualism. My aim is to problematize the notion of thinking in art history, and as I see contextualism as a still prevalent feature of art historical study, an analysis of its operation is necessary. 3 Miguel Falomir, ed., Jacopo Tintoretto: Proceedings of the International Symposium (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2009).

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4 Donald Preziosi notes that professional art history is ‘routinely guided by the hypothesis that an artwork is reflective, emblematic, or generally representative of its original time, place and circumstances of production’, in The Art of Art History. A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7. See also Stephen Melville’s remark, in the same volume, on the ‘permanent worry about context within the project of art history’, 277. 5 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 40. Baxandall’s thesis was the following: that when there is conformity between the ‘interpretative skill’ demanded by a painting and the interpretative skill possessed by the beholder, the taste of an age and the sense of its period eye emerges. 6 Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Artistic Survival. Panofsky vs. Warburg and the Exorcism of Impure Time’, Common Knowledge 9, No. 2 (2003): 285. 7 Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 36. Didi-Huberman argues that, first, anachronism is an unavoidable feature of historical experience, and second that it is not something to be ‘absolutely banished’ but ‘something that must be negotiated, debated, and perhaps even turned to advantage’, 41–2. ‘When we read, for example, the already classic text by Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, we have the reassuring impression of a period finally considered through its own eyes. This is the “historian’s blow” at its most fully realized: we need only interpret Quattrocento paintings in accordance with sixteen categories proposed by “the best of the Quattrocento art critics”, Cristoforo Landino, to obtain an exact understanding of the painting of the period’. 40. But the meaning of these categories can change even within a period of forty years. Thus ‘the historian let himself be trapped by an anachronistic past when he thought only about escaping the trap of the anachronistic present’, 41. The historian tends to choose categories of the past to analyse the past (euchronism/euchronistic consonance) – the ‘mental tool kit’ of a particular time – because he places ‘truth on the side of the past’, 41. But this is a misplaced belief since a ‘tool kit’ is not fully formed, but plastic, and in perpetual transformation in its use. The euchronistic perspective of ‘an artist and his time’ also betrays, Didi-Huberman argues, a symptom of a suspicion of theory in factor of specifics of historical ‘data’ and methodological closure, as well as a lack of any critical engagement with the notions of ‘art’ or ‘critique’, 33, 35. 8 ‘A historical period, even a short one, exhibits a number of floors, or if you prefer it, of strata. History is not like the Hegelian “becoming”; it is not to be likened to a sort of river bearing along events and their residues, all at the same speed and in the same direction. What we call history consists precisely in the differences between currents. We must think of something like overlying geological strata, their varying slopes often broken by abrupt faults which permit us to discern at the very same place and time various geological ages, and in such a way that we envisage the various periods at one and the same time as past, present and future.’ quoted in Hauser, Philosophy of Art History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), 252. 9 Damisch’s full quote reads as follows: ‘The great question regarding history that never stops attracting me – since it has a relation to our contemporary situation – is, why do the works of the quattrocento still concern us? If a work of art truly depends on a specific historical context, as the social historians of art would have it, then in order to understand it we have to transport ourselves into the conditions that existed in a specific time and place. But all that makes no sense as far as I am concerned. There is absolutely no way to look at a work through the “period eye” as Baxandall would have us do. The issue is that we, in our own time, look at works of the quattrocento, and the question is, how is it that a historical work of art interests us, given that we should only be compelled by works of our own time which belong to the same context as we do?’ ‘A Conversation with Hubert Damisch’. Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss. October 85 (1998): 10. 10 Svetlana Alpers, ‘Is Art History?’, Daedalus 106, No. 3 (1977): 1–13. Alpers claims that whilst previously context focused on period style, today (in 1977) ‘it is the work itself, not a history or sequence of works, which is seen

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as a piece of history’. In Tintoretto’s case, a comparative shift might be from Bernard Berenson’s analysis of Tintoretto as a representative of humanist values more generally identified with the period (Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, 51) to a position such as Tom Nichols, who refrains from categorizations of period and instead considers the specifics of individual works and the specifics of the time and place of sixteenth-century Venice. 11 David Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1982), xiv. 12 An approach sourced in the Renaissance’s self-conception as difference from (and distant to) its classical past. The apprehension of an ‘intellectual distance between the present and the past’ was necessary for the modern idea of history, Panofsky argued. Quoted in Alpers, ‘Is Art History?’, 5. 13 ‘It is not possible to untie a knot which one does not know. But the difficulty of our thinking points to a knot in the object.’ Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 Volumes, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1984), 3:1, 995, (b25–30). 14 Cf. the work of Max Dvořák, Luigi Coletti, Rodolfo Pallucchini, Paola Rossi, and Sydney Freedberg. 15 Director’s Foreword to Rivals in Renaissance Venice, 8. In this regard, David Rosand’s emphasis on Tintoretto’s work as ‘a continuing development of that impulse initiated in Venetian painting by Giorgione in the first decade of the cinquecento’ has been influential. Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice, 148. The opening line of Nichols’ book – ‘Jacopo Tintoretto was born and died in Venice’ – sets the tone of his reading. Tintoretto, 13. Roland Krischel also emphasizes Tintoretto’s inextricability from his native city – ‘Unlike most of the other great Venetian Renaissance painters (for instance, Giorgione, Titian, Pordenone, Paris Bordone, Jacopo Bassano and Paolo Veronese), Tintoretto was a true native of Venice, born and bred there’. Tintoretto, 2000, 6. Many scholars have argued that Tintoretto’s lived experience of the city was a fundamental part of his artistic identity, and his aesthetic. Paul Hills discusses Tintoretto’s assimilation of the Venetian Gothic that would have been a constant feature of his day-to-day existence in the city, ‘Tintoretto and Venetian Gothic’ in Proceedings, ed. Falomir, 16. 16 This is Berenson’s view: ‘With Tintoretto ends the universal interest the Venetian school arouses.’ Bernard Berenson, The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance (London: GP Putnam and Sons, 1897), 60. See also The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1959, fifth impression edition), 27. Peter Humfrey states that Venetian art goes into ‘a rapid decline after 1590’ (the death of Tintoretto), Peter Humfrey, Painting in Renaissance Venice) (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1995), 266. Ilchman and Echols describe Tintoretto as ‘the last survivor of what was already coming to be recognized as a golden age of Venetian painting’. Frederick Ilchman (ed.), Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice (catalogue to the exhibition) (Ashgate, Lund Humphries, 2009), 227. See also Osler: ‘After [the death of Tintoretto] rapid and fatal signs of decline set in and the ‘old power’ [never again reappears in Venice]’ Tintoretto, 1879, 2. 17 Giorgio Vasari’s view. Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Gaston du C de Vere (London: David Campbell, 1996) Vol 2, 509–10. 18 The view taken by the seventeenth-century painter–theorist, Federico Zuccarro, quoted in Lepschy, Laura, Tintoretto Observed: A Documentary Survey of Critical Reactions from the 16th to the 20th centuries (Ravenna: Longo, 1983), 2–3. 19 Detlev Von Hadeln, ‘Early Works by Tintoretto – II’, The Burlington Magazine 41, No. 237 (December 1922): 278. 20 Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice. 21 Eric Newton, Tintoretto (London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1952). Peter Schjeldahl writes, ‘The Baroque, which took hold two decades later, with Caravaggio, can seem an edited ratification of tendencies already developed by Tintoretto.’ Let’s See, 121.

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22 Hans Tietze, Tintoretto: The Paintings and Drawings (London: Phaidon, 1948), 63. Other historians who have argued for Tintoretto’s modernity include Max Dvořák and Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art, 2 Vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965). More recently Maria Loh, ‘“Huomini della nostra età”: Tintoretto’s Preposterous Modernity’ in Proceedings, ed. Falomir 188–96. 23 Maria Loh, ‘New and Improved: Repetition and Originality in Italian Baroque practice and theory’, Art Bulletin 86, No. 3, (2004): 477–504. 24 Cf. Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, 2. The thought that assumes the form ‘everybody knows’ designates ‘the form of representation and the discourse of the representative’. He describes art history as ‘offering specific knowledge of the art object’. See Eugene Kleinbauer, ed., Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of Twentieth-century Writings on the Visual Arts (New York, London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 1: Art history ‘is an intellectual or scholarly investigation of specific works of art; it is a branch of knowledge or learning’. Donald Preziosi remarks that ‘disciplinary practice has rested upon a series of tropes that remain grounded in classical theories of signification and representation’ and that such protocols ‘have tended to be held in common by seemingly distinct schools of theory and methodology in art history’. However much they might contrast with each other in programmatic ways, iconographic analysis, Marxist social history, and (structuralist) visual semiotics, among others, have shared basic assumptions on how artworks mean and how they reflect social and historical processes. Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 16. Hans Belting points out that art history both studies and practices representation. The End of the History of Art (London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 58. 25 James Elkins has described the phenomena in different terms – the ‘sameness’ of writing, theory, and/or method that excludes ‘the grainy, recalcitrant detail of actual artworks’. Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts. Art History as Writing (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), xiii. 26 Alpers, ‘Is Art History?’, 9. That such a distinction still has currency is indicated by a claim recently made by Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville that contemporary art history has tended to reduce all forms of theoretical reflection on itself to matters of method, a reduction that they see as entirely related to the collusion of the discipline with institutional impositions in a climate of ‘research’. Writing Art History. Disciplinary Departures (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 3, 24. It is in this context that Francois Châtelet, anticipating the situation facing the humanities by a few decades, also speaks of ‘the imperialism of methodology’. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Mike Taormina (London: Semiotexte, 2004), 220. 27 Alpers, ‘Is Art History?’, 3. See Kleinbauer: Art history ‘is an intellectual or scholarly investigation of specific works of art; it is a branch of knowledge or learning’; ‘Art historians study both works of art and the historical evidence pertaining to them.’ Modern Perspectives in Western Art History, 1. 28 Cf. Kleinbauer: the ‘definitions of beauty, truth, significance, the nature of art, and the like’ concern aesthetics which aims ‘to evolve a (nonhistorical) theory of art’ but ‘do not concern art historians. In much of the Western world, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, art history today is by and large nonphilosophical.’ Eugene Kleinbauer and Thomas Slaven, Research Guide to the History of Western Art (Chicago: American Library Association, 1982), 6. For the opposing view cf. Didi-Huberman ‘there is no history of art without a philosophy of art and without a certain choice of aesthetic models’. The Surviving Image. Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 4. Van der Grinten voices a more traditional view when he states that ‘the cultivation of art-history today is impossible without active participation in the judgment of art, and even without a strong convention – whether one-sided or not – about what is good, bad, beautiful or ugly’. Evert Frans Van der Grinten, Enquiries into the History of Art-historical Writing: Studies of Art-historical Functions and Terms up to 1850 (Delft: Drukkerij Van der Drift, 1952), 5.

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29 The manifesto for the project of Kunstwissenschaft may be found in Hans Sedlmayr, Toward A Rigorous Study of Art (1931) in The Vienna School Reader, ed. C. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 131–80. 30 James Elkins, ed., Art History versus Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2006), 41. Elkins acknowledges that art historical methods too can be generalizing, in his earlier Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts, 42. 31 Cf. Benjamin Paul’s review of Paul Cassegrain’s recent monograph of Tintoretto. Renaissance Quarterly 65, No. 4 (2012): 1212. 32 Quoted in Belting, Art History after Modernism, 128. Winckelmann is not, however, free from charges of universalism. He reads the ‘serenity’ of classical antiquity as ‘the universal, dominant characteristic of Greek masterpieces’ quoted in Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 77. 33 Heinrich WÖlfflin, Classic Art. An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance, trans. P. Murray and L. Murray (Oxford: Phaidon, 1980), 288. WÖlfflin here presents the symptomatic confusion of ‘artistic questions’ with aesthetics that is posited by much formalist art history. WÖlfflin opens his preface to the first edition of his Classic Art, 1898, with the claim that ‘the reader no longer expects an art-historical book to give mere biographical anecdotes or a description of the circumstances of the times; he wants to be told something of those things which constitute the value and the essence of a work of art, and he reaches out eagerly for new concepts – for the old words will no longer serve – and once again, he is beginning to pay attention to aesthetics, which had been entirely shelved’. 34 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy. A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (Chicago: Elephant paperbacks, 1997), 122, 127. 35 Hans Tietze, Die Methode der Kunstgeschichte (Leipzig: Seemann, 1913) feels that the conflict between Gesetzwissenschaft (aesthetics) and Tatsachenwissenschaft (factual art history) is the source of most contemporary (i.e. contemporary to his time) methodological bewilderment. Quoted in Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, London: Cornell, 1984), 98–9. See especially Panofsky’s early theoretical essays, such as his 1925 ‘On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory. Towards the possibility of a fundamental System of Concepts for a Science of Art’, 43–71; Edgar Wind ‘On the Systematics of Artistic Problems’, trans. Fiona Elliott. Art in Translation 1, No. 2 (2009): 211–57. 36 Michael Podro defined a critical art history as one that goes beyond the ‘archaeological’ search for historical facts and studies ‘the concept of art’. Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), xviii–xxi. 37 Robert Zwijenberg and Claire Farago refer to the suspicion of philosophy amongst contemporary art historians – the sense that ‘anything goes’ when a work of art is approached ‘philosophically’. Compelling Visuality. The Image In and Out of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), vii. 38 Raymond Williams, Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana Press, 1988), 317–18. 39 Michel Foucault, ‘Intellectuals and Power’ in Language Counter-Memory Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 208. Jean-Michel Rabaté’s The Future of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) gives an excellent overview of the history of theory, diagnosis of its current state, and speculation on its future possibilities. 40 Jae Emerling’s Theory for Art History (London: Routledge, 2005) is an example of this assumption of theory’s exteriority to the discipline. 41 For Bill Readings and Stephen Melville, theory has been caught up in the contemporary logic of ‘disciplinary discreteness and professional performance’, falling short of the ‘radical transformation’ which it once appeared

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Notes to Page 8–9 to promise. Vision and Textuality (Houndmills: Palgrave, 1995), 24. For Bois, writing in 1993, ‘The obligation to be “theoretical” … is one of the most powerful pressures at work today … a catchword on American campuses.’ Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 1993), xii. The situation identified here is inseparable from the transformation of the university – or of what Bill Readings called the ‘university in ruins’ – the favouring of circulation over production, and information over labour. On the Americanization of French Theory, see especially Francois Cusset’s Preface to French Theory. How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States: theory is, he argues, ‘definable today as a strange breed of academic market rules, French (and more generally Continental) detachable concepts, campus-based identity politics and trendy pop culture.’ But ‘what has been forgotten, or left aside, within French theory in the process of its American domestication is nevertheless still there, at work in the text, hidden but still available’. Trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xi.

42 Bois paints a bleak picture where the ‘theoreticist’ gives in to theory, but then grows disenchanted when theory did not perform the expected miracles. Against this ‘overhasty consumption of theory’, Bois invites a different commitment to the realm of ideas, a more historical and less ‘fashionable’ one. Painting as Model, xiii. 43 Rajchman argues that with postmodernism, theory becomes ‘too heavy with its own self-importance – having lost the will or the ability to look with fresh eyes for what was real or singular or creative of new movement of possibilities … become so heavy that it lost even the desire to look for those real points that allow thought to move and recreate itself ’. Theory stops even trying to invent new concepts or raise new questions and becomes instead a set of ‘stock formulas to be thrown together in the computer at will without regard for origin or rigor in an ever more arbitrary and entangled quotational patchwork’. Rajchman even links this sterility to the predilection, that he discerns amongst the new art historians, towards contextualism – such that ‘there was little room for those forces of the outside, which don’t fit into contexts, which complicate, deform transform institutions and so … give theory the impetus to try out new questions’. Against such institutionalizing tendencies Rajchman argues that ‘theory is not a meta-discipline that supplies one ready-made the concepts for the critical analysis or formal appraisal of what we already know and see … . Lightness in theory … is a kind of experimentation not ordered by a given method.’ ‘The Lightness of Theory’ ArtForum International 32, No. 1 (1993): 389–92. 44 Elkins provides a sharp critique of the presence of theory in art history in his early article ‘Art History without Theory’, arguing that the identity of art history depends on its refusal of theory. However, the theory that he is taking aim at is exclusively Hegelian. Furthermore, he assumes a definition of theory as ‘the attempt to govern interpretations of particular texts by appealing to an account of interpretation in general’, a defi nition that many French ‘theorists’ would take issue with. Critical Inquiry 14, No. 2 (1988): 355. See Keith Moxey, The Practice of Theory, xi–xii for a critique of Elkins (although Elkin’s early essay is here taken only as a symptom of a wider trend): ‘Art historians have tended to treat the theoretical innovations of poststructuralism with unease and suspicion, considering many of them ahistorical and inimical to history’s status as a legitimate form of knowledge.’ Historians tend to believe that ‘historical interpretation has something to do with the truth’, so the movements of poststructuralism are unsurprisingly rejected, 1. Elkins alters his view of theory and philosophy for/in art history in later books, notably Our Beautiful, Dry and Distant Texts. Art History as Writing (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997) – where ‘theory’, on the one hand, denotes non-normative approaches to the objects of art history that (it is suggested) expand the discipline’s possibilities, in part through a transformation through its contact with new material, 7, 12. 45 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Penguin, 2004), 2. 46 Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Bernard and Caroline Schutze (New York: Semiotexte, 1988), 97–9. 47 Quoted in Cusset, French Theory, front matter.

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48 Michael Hardt points out Deleuze’s distinction from Althusserian ‘theoretical practice’. Whilst the later always concedes, Hardt argues ‘a priority to theory’, Deleuze gives us ‘a more practical conception of practice, autonomous of any “theoreticist tendency”, a “practical practice” that is oriented principally toward the ontological rather than the epistemological realm’. Deleuze. An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xiv, 105, 107. 49 Deleuze and Foucault, ‘Intellectuals and Power’ in Desert Islands, 206. 50 Ibid., 206, 208. 51 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 165. 52 Martin Heidegger, quoted in David Wittenberg, Philosophy, Revision, Critique: Rereading Practices in Heidegger, Nietzsche and Emerson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 171. 53 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeata (London, New York: Continuum, 1989), 268. 54 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations. 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 32. 55 Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, 16, 40. 56 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xix. 57 Sartre published two sections of a planned, but never-executed, work on Tintoretto: ‘Le Séquestré de Venise’, in Les Temps Modernes (1957) and ‘Saint-Georges et le Dragon’ in L’Arc (1966). Sartre first wrote about Tintoretto (as an example of a committed artist) in his 1947 What is Literature? In ‘Le Séquestré de Venise’, Tintoretto, the outcast champion of the bourgeoisie and social struggle is pitted against Titian, the favourite of the establishment. See Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 184–91. 58 Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity. An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York, Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1991), 100. 59 Deleuze, ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’ in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Mike Taormina (London: Semiotexte, 2004), 182. 60 ‘Were one to broach lessons on art or aesthetics by a question of this type (“What is art?” “What is the origin of art or of works of art?” “What is the meaning of art?” “What does art mean?” etc.), the form of the question would already provide an answer. Art would be predetermined or pre-comprehended in it.’ Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 20–1. 61 Foucault, Essential Works, 2:359. 62 There are also intimations here of Foucault’s description of his Discipline and Punish as a history of problems, not periods – that emphasizes not the problem itself, but on how it became a problem, and is the vector for describing a history of thought as distinct from a history of ideas. Foucault describes his books as ‘philosophical fragments put to work in a historical field of problems’, in ‘Questions of Method’, in Essential Works of Foucault. 1954-1984, 3, Power, ed. James D. Faubion, 224. See also, ‘Politics and Ethics. An Interview’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 388–90. On the function of the problem in art history, against ‘methodological selfsufficiency and closure’, see Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, 33. 63 Osler, Tintoretto, 7. 64 Newton, Tintoretto, 35.

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65 The impact of Deleuze’s work has been strongly felt in architectural studies, cinema studies, and visual culture, but not in mainstream academic art history. In Preziosi’s survey of the discipline, Heidegger, Derrida, Benjamin, and Foucault all feature – but there is no mention of Deleuze. Deleuze is absent too from Moxey’s survey of poststructuralist theory in The Practice of Theory. 66 Cf. Éric Alliez and Jean-Clet Martin, The Brain-Eye: New Histories of Modern Painting, trans by Robin MacKay (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), and La Pensée-Matisse: Portrait de l’artiste en hyperfauve, 2005; Stephen Zepke’s Art as Abstract Machine. Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 2011); Anne Sauvagnargues’ Deleuze et l’Art (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), and her Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).Whilst these works have all contributed much to the understanding of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of art, the question of art history is a secondary, subsidiary concern, if present at all. Simon O’Sullivan’s Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) characterizes itself as ‘exploring the conjunction Deleuze and Art’ which includes ‘the methodological field of art history in general’ and a ‘corrective to much recent art history that positions, and interprets, art as “signifier”’ – but there is little discussion of art history as a discipline, of specific art historical methods or of the history of art history. 153, 144. The recent edited collection of essays, Art History after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Sjoerd van Tuinen (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017) which includes my own ‘Tintoretto’s Michelangelo. An Artistic Diagram as the a priori of Art History’, is the only collection till now to explicitly explore relations between art history and Deleuze’s’ work. 67 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London: Verso, 2003), 111. 68 For a detailed analysis and defence of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘philosophy of history’ see Jay Lampert’s Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History (London: Continuum, 2011). 69 Stephen Melville, ‘The Temptation of New Perspectives’ in The Art of Art History, ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 275. 70 Willian Tydeman, The Medieval European Stage, 500-1550 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 35. 71 Deleuze, ‘Mediators’ in Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York, Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1995), 125. 72 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 56–69. 73 Mieke Bal rather reductively equates philosophy to ‘textuality and logical consistency; to language and rational thought’. Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 22. 74 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xx–xxi. 75 Bergson, quoted in Deleuze ‘Bergson 1859-1942’. Desert Islands, 25. 76 T.J. Clark, quoted in Jon Bird, ‘On Newness, Art and History. Reviewing BLOCK 1979-1985’ in The New Art History, ed. Al Rees (London: Camden Press, 1986), 34. Didi-Huberman claims that importation is unavoidable whenever art history’s appeal to theory is concerned. Confronting Images, 35. Yve-Alain Bois, on the other hand, warns against importation: ‘It is not, of course, theory that I find oppressive, but the indiscriminate appeal to theory as a set of ready-made tools to handle a question, as the miracle-solution, no matter the problem, in an “instrumentalism” that cannot be productive.’ Bois invokes Roland Barthes as an antidote to this approach. ‘From

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Barthes, one learns that ‘one does not “apply” a theory; that concepts must be forged from the object of one’s inquiry or imported according to that object’s specific exigency; and that the main theoretical act is to define this object, not the other way around’. Painting as Model, xii. 77 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 83. 78 Ibid., 12. 79 Secondary literature on Deleuze and Guattari’s diagram includes Jakub Zdebjik’s Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual organization (London: Bloomsbury, 2012); Janell Watson’s Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought: Writing Between Lacan and Deleuze (London: Continuum, 2011); Éric Alliez, La Pensée-Matisse (Paris: Le Passage, Adam Biro, 2005) and ‘Diagram 3000 [Words]’ Published in Conjunction with the Documenta 13 Exhibition. 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, and my own ‘Diagrammatic thought : Two forms of constructivism in C.S Peirce and Gilles Deleuze’. Parrhesia 19 (2014): 79–95. See also the collected papers in Noëlle Batt, Penser par le Diagramme. De Gilles Deleuze à Gilles Châtelet (PUV, Saint-Denis, 2005) and Joachim Daniel Dupuis, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari et Gilles Châtelet: De l’expérience diagrammatique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012). 80 In Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), Guattari states that the opposition between signifying semiologies and a signifying semiotics ‘remains highly schematic’, representing two polar ideals, 140. 81 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xv. Since Deleuze himself writes that all his subsequent work, including the work with Guattari, is connected to Difference and Repetition, the fact that no explicit mention of the diagram is made until the 1980s does not obviate the contextualization of the constructivism of the late work within the philosophical milieu of the early work. 82 Deleuze, Negotiations, 33. 83 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translation and foreword by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), 141–2. Matter ‘is a substance that is unformed either physically or semiotically’ and has ‘only degrees of intensity’, and ‘function has only “traits,” of content and of expression, between which it establishes a connection: it is no longer even possible to tell whether it is a particle or a sign’. The diagram is ‘independent of the forms and substances, expressions and contents it will distribute’. 84 ‘Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism’ in Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic, ed. James Hoopes (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1991), 252. 85 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Écrivain non: un nouveau cartographe’, Critique 343 (1975): 1207–77. Modified and reprinted as ‘A new Cartographer’ in Foucault, 1988. 86 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 141–2. 87 David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 56. ‘The marks are made, and you survey the thing like you would a sort of graph. And you see within the graph the possibilities of all types of fact being planted’; ‘Isn’t it that one wants a thing to be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation other than simply illustration of the object that you set out to do?’ 88 Deleuze, Foucault, 35-6 89 Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London, New York: Routledge), 10.

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Chapter 2 1 Carlo Ridolfi, Tintoretto’s first biographer, claimed that Titian threw the eight-year-old Tintoretto out of his studio when he saw the quality of his drawing. Many scholars believe Tintoretto probably trained in a workshop of Andrea Schiavone, Bonifacio de’ Pitati or Jacopo Bassano (Roland Krischel, Jacopo Tintoretto. 1519-1594 (Masters of Italian Art Series) (Cologne: Könemann, 2000), 13). Some claim that it was more likely that he trained with a Veneto-Cretan icon maker (Valcanover and Pignatti, Tintoretto, trans. Robert Erich Wolf (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), 11). Tom Nichols argues that whilst the early work bears analogy with the prominent painters in Venice before the 1530s, ‘no convincing teacher for Tintoretto has been found’ and ‘his manner is not closely or consistently tied to any one of these masters’. Nichols, Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity, 29. 2 See the assessments made by Pietro Aretino, Jacopo Sansovino, and Ludovico Dolce and Giorgio Vasari. Quoted in Anna Laura Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 16–24. 3 The correspondence between person and practice was noted by the sixteenth-century Venetian writer Cristorforo Sorte, who claimed that just as Tintoretto’s gestures, movement of his eyes, and speech were ‘pronto e presto’, his works too were set down with such boldness and velocity ‘that it is a marvel to see him work’. Quoted in David Summers, The Judgement of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 119. 4 Valcanover and Pignatti, Tintoretto, 16. 5 Quoted in Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 87. 6 John Ruskin, The Relation between Michael Angelo and Tintoret. Seventh of the Course of Lectures on Sculpture Delivered at Oxford (Keston: G. Allen, 1872), 31. 7 Quoted in Francesco Valcanover and Terisio Pignatti, Tintoretto, trans. Robert Erich Wolf (New York: Harry N Abrams), 10. 8 Norbert Huse and Wolfgang Wolters, The Art of Renaissance Venice, Architecture, Sculpture and Painting, 1460-1590, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 271. 9 Huse and Wolters, The Art of Renaissance Venice, 271. 10 Krischel, Tintoretto (Masters of Italian Art Series), 16. This echoes Detlev Von Hadeln’s view that Tintoretto’s art ‘apparently does not spring from the style of a definite master’ only means that the historian must seek ‘a clearer view of the general situation in the Venetian school at the time. Detlev Von Hadeln, ‘Some Early Works by Tintoretto I’, Burlington Magazine 41, No. 236 (November 1922), 206. There are of course exceptions to this tendency: Cf. David Carrier: ‘Tintoretto, always anti-classical, was a highly individual figure’, that none of his works ‘could be confused with the work of Titian or Paolo Veronese, let alone that of any other Italian artist’, and that ‘the accompanying paintings [to the exhibition Tintoretto at the Scuderie del Quirinal, Rome, 2012] by Jacopo Bassano, Giovanni Demio, Parmigianino, Lambert Sustris, Titian, Veronese – and sculptures by Alessandro Vittoria, splendid as they are, don’t really help in understanding his art’; Tintoretto ‘proceeded in a remarkably self-sufficient way’. David Carrier, ‘Lagoon prisoner’, Apollo (June 2012): 117. 11 Annibale Carracci, in G. P Bellori’s ‘Life of Annibale Carracci’, in Le vite dei pittori, Rome, 1672. Quoted in Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 26. 12 Jonathan Unglaub, Rivals in Renaissance Venice, 226. Tom Nichols, Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity. Revised and expanded 2nd edition (London: Reaktion, 2015), 307.

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13 Francesco Sansovino noted that Tintoretto’s lack of patience ‘might be the result of general enthusiasm, or of the love he bears his art, or indeed pure eccentricity’. Tutte le cose notabili che sono in Venetia, Venice 1556, quoted in Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 20. More recently, Giuseppe Delogo remarks on Tintoretto’s ‘exceptionally strong personality’ as the cause of his divergence from norms. The Golden Centuries of Venetian Painting (Nijmegen: Artline, 1989), 24. Tietze writes of ‘the conflict between Tintoretto’s personality and his place in history’ Tintoretto, 62. 14 Notably Carlo Ridolfi who claimed for Tintoretto the qualities which his critics extolled in other artists but found lacking in him. Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 34. 15 ‘Often one finds that haste and imperfection go together, so that it is an especial pleasure to find speed in execution accompanied by excellence’; ‘My son, now that your brush bears witness with the present works to the fame that future ones are bound to acquire for you’; ‘But in the progression of goodness, keenness of intelligence and industry of hand play no part; since it alone involves virtue not of hand or mind, but of the soul or spirit, which is not given to us by nature, but breathed into us by Christ’. Aretino, quoted in Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 16. 16 There is no man so little instructed in the virtue of design that he would not marvel at the relief of the figure who, quite naked on the ground, lies open to the cruelties of his martyrdom’. Ibid. ‘And blessings be upon your name, if you can temper haste to have done with patience in the doing. Though, gradually, time will take care of this; since time, and nothing else, is sufficient to brake the headlong course of carelessness, so prevalent in eager, heedless youth’. Ibid., 17. 17 Cf. Newton, Tintoretto: ‘Venetian design, before Tintoretto, was always governed by the requirements of illustration or narrative.’ Many of Tintoretto’s paintings remain ‘in the lively tradition of Venetian narrative’. But Tintoretto’s dramatization ‘minimized their narrative content’, 31–2, 148. 18 Leon Battisti Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 2:37. 19 Alberti, On Painting, 2:35. 20 Ibid., 2:33. 21 Ibid., 2:42. Jack Greenstein, Mantegna and Pictorial Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 39. 22 In Mark Roskill, Dolces’ Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (New York: New York University Press, 1968), 117. Greenstein, Mantegna, 47. 23 Cicero, De Legibus 1, 2, 5. Quoted in Greenstein, Mantegna, 22. 24 For an incisive account of this topic see Paul Kristeller ‘Rhetoric in Medieval and Renaissance Culture’, in Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays, ed. James Murphy (Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1990), 228–46. The best account of the genealogy of the notion of historia is Jack Greenstein. ‘“Historia” in LB Alberti’s On Painting and Mantegna’s Circumcision of Christ’. Xerox copy of PhD. University of Pennsylvania, 1984. Anna Arbor, Michigan, 1984. 25 Patricia F. Brown, Art and Life in Renaissance Venice (New York: Prentice Hall, 1988), 79. Another incisive account of the tradition of narrative painting in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice is Peter Humfrey, Painting in Renaissance Venice (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1995), 81–9. 26 On Tintoretto as ‘the Venetian specialist in sacred narratives’, see Marcia B, Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2011), 173. 27 Ilchman, ‘Tintoretto as a Painter of Religious Narrative’ in Tintoretto, ed. Falomir, 63.

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28 On Tintoretto’s personal piety see Newton, Tintoretto, 67, Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice, 61. 29 Joachim Von Sandrart, L’Academia Todesca, 1675–79, quoted in Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 54. 30 Ridolfi, Tintoretto, 3. 31 Osler notes that ‘the position and arrangement of his figures as he began to dwell upon his great conceptions, were such as to render the study from the living model a matter of great difficulty, and at times an impossibility’ (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1879), 25. 32 Newton, Tintoretto, 20. 33 Tietze, Tintoretto, 23. 34 Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 47; Newton, Tintoretto, 20. Robert Wald claims that these figurines were made not by Tintoretto himself but by a specialist in his studio. ‘Materials and Techniques of Painters in 16c Venice’, in Ilchman, ed. Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice. 78. 35 Newton, Tintoretto, 21. 36 Hall, Sacred Image, 180. See also Tom Nichols’ reading of the stage-method as reflecting Tintoretto’s interest in Sebastiano Serlio’s designs, as well as Tintoretto’s personal involvement with the Poligrafi, Tintoretto, 74–87. 37 Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice, 193. Rosand notes that such methods were common practice throughout most of Italy in the sixteenth century, especially where painters were engaged with decorating ceilings, vaults, and domes. Vasari recommends this practice, and according to Lomazzo, Titian ‘studied models made of wood, clay and wax, and from these extracted the postures, but with very short and obtuse distances so that the figures appear larger and more terrible, and the others further back are shorter, creating not merely a right angle, but one nearly obtuse’, quoted in Titian. Prince of Painters, ed. Susanna Biadene (Munich: Prestel, 1990), 256. 38 Other artists known to have used this method include Federico Barocci and El Greco. Julius Von Schlosser ‘Aus der Bildnerwerkstatt der Renaissance’ Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses XXXI (1913): 111ff. It does not seem to reappear again in any significant way till Nicolas Poussin. Seventeenthcentury writers including Joachim Von Sandrart, Le Blond de la Tour, and Giovanni Pietro Bellori all describe Poussin’s method of making small tableaus with wax models draped in fine cloth or wet cambric: Anthony Blunt, Poussin AW Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, National Gallery, Washington, 1958 (London: Phaidon; New York; Bollingen Series, 1967), 242–4. Lawrence Gowing reconstructed Poussin’s model – for an image of this see Blunt, Poussin, 243. Jan Blanc discusses a similar practice in the work of Vermeer and his contemporaries, ‘Works in Progress: Painting and Modelling in Seventeenth-Century Holland’ Art History. Special Issue: Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe. Volume 39, Issue 2, 234–53, April 2016. As Blanc remarks, Vermeer’s method of modelling figures in little sets offered new viewpoints and surprising effects of lighting and composition, producing an ‘infinitely rich’ and varied nature that does not ‘reveal the world as it is but rather as it could be’, 248. (I am grateful to Genevieve Warwick for this reference.) Blanc re-contextualizes this compositional innovation, identifying it as a common method used by Vermeer’s contemporaries. In contrast, I understand Tintoretto’s stage-method as the source of his difference. 39 Echols and Ilchman, ‘Towards A new Tintoretto Catalogue’ in Proceedings, ed. Falomir, 96. 40 Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice, 150. 41 Mantegna painted backdrops for Ariosto’s Cassaria in Ferrara 1508. Raphael did the backdrop for Ariosto’s Suppositi, 1519.

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42 George Kernodle, The Theatre in History (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1989), 2. 43 Kernodle, The Theatre in History, 4. Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice, 150, 158. 44 Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice, 190. Serlio published five books in total on architecture between 1537 and 1547. He had originally projected seven volumes. The first elucidated elements of geometry. Along with the second it was published in 1545. The third set out ichnography, orthography, and sciography of the edifices in Rome and was published in 1540. The fourth set out the five orders of architecture and was the first to be published in 1537. Book 5, on ‘accidents’, was published in 1547. For an excellent overview of the impact of Serlio’s designs on Venetian painting see Cecil Gould, ‘Sebastiano Serlio and Venetian Painting’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 25 No. 1/2 (1962): 56–64. 45 Serlio, The Book of Architecture. Introduction by A. E. Santaniello (New York: Arno press, 1980), 12. 46 For more on the distinctions between Veronese’s and Tintoretto’s ‘theatre’, and how Veronese retained ‘conventions perhaps even more professionally theatrical than those of Tintoretto’s work and certainly closer to the Vitruvian theater’, see Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice, 148–53. 47 Kernodle, The Theatre in History, 17, 75. 48 Serlio, The Book of Architecture, 11. 49 Ibid. 50 John Hale, Italian Renaissance Painting, 46. 51 Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice, 193. Roland Krischel narrates another example of Tintoretto’s embracing of ephemeral construction, related to stage-sets. In 1574, Tintoretto collaborated with Palladio and Veronese to make a nine-metre-high triumphal arch for the reception of King Henri III of France. The ‘prop’ was made in two weeks and dismantled straight after the festivities. ‘Tintoretto and the Sister Arts’ in Tintoretto, ed. Falomir, 125. 52 Rosand discusses the tradition of ‘religious drama’ (Sacra rappresentazione) in sixteenth-century Venice, and in particular the ‘emotional identification with Christ’s suffering’ and martyrdom in visual and verbal imagery. He cites Pietro Aretino’s Humanita di Christo (1534), a quasi-novel of the life and Passion of Christ and suggests that Tintoretto himself may have followed Aretino’s ‘dramatic suggestions’ in his Vita di Maria Vergine in his painting of the Presentation of the Virgin. But Aretino’s mechanisms are essentially ‘mimetic’. Painting in Cinquecento Venice, 195–7. 53 Krischel suggests that Tintoretto’s early works indicate that he may have had privileged access to Serlio’s manuscript before its publication. ‘Tintoretto and the Sister Arts’, 126. 54 Krischel remarks on the surprising level of ‘imaginative power’ Tintoretto invested in such ‘ephemeral ornamental painting’, 25. He specialized in a genre known as laterali which originally emerged as the long side panels set at either side of an altar, a common feature in Venetian churches of Renaissance, as altars became more and more elaborate tabernacles for the host. Christopher Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 264. It is worth noting that Tintoretto continues to use this format even when paintings are not intended to be set in the sides of the altar. 55 Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice, 150. 56 Echols, in Tintoretto, ed. Falomir, 237. For Tom Nichols, in contrast, these settings heightened ‘the significance of the historical narratives presented’. ‘The Cultural Dynamics of Representational Space in Venetian Renaissance

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Notes to Page 56–59 Painting’ in Mediterranean Urban Culture, 1400-1700, ed. Alexander Cowan (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 182.

57 Juergen Schulz, Venetian Painted Ceilings of the Renaissance (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 29. 58 Krischel, ‘Tintoretto and the Sister Arts’ in Tintoretto, ed. Falomir, 126. 59 Josef Grabski 1980, Artibus et Historiae I, 1, 115–31. 60 Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice, 160. 61 Freedberg has noted that the wall paintings in San Rocco which ‘do not objectively require perspective manipulations like those on the ceiling; but they are manipulated none the less’, Painting in Italy, 527–8. 62 Quoted in Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 27. 63 Ibid., 29. 64 The text on Tintoretto was first published in 1642 as the Vita di Giacopo Robvsti ditto il Tintoretto, célèbre pittore, cittadino venetiano and as a second expanded version in 1648 as the first biography in the second volume of Ridolfi’s biographies of Venetian Artists, Le maraviglie dell’arte. 65 Newton, Tintoretto, 11. 66 Cf. Echols and Ilchman, ‘Towards a new Tintoretto catalogue’ in Proceedings, ed. Falomir, 91. 67 Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 34. 68 Carlo Ridolfi, Tintoretto, trans. and ed. Detlev Von Hadeln (London: Courtauld Institute of Art, 1924), 2. 69 Quoted in Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 19. 70 Newton, Tintoretto, 12, 13, 15. 71 Marcia B. Hall seems to miss the point when he states that Ridolfi’s motto ‘already hints at divergence’ from the ‘neat categories we like to impose: central Italy, drawing; Venice, color’ since the synthesis merely retains these categories in a fused form. Hall, The Sacred Image in Art (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2011), 180. 72 Note Philip Cottrell: ‘In wishing to define a historically tenable account of Tintoretto’s professional origins, many scholars are still forced to rely on the rather vague comments made by Carlo Ridolfi in his life of Tintoretto of 1642.’ ‘Painters in Practice: Tintoretto, Bassano and the Studio of Bonafacio de’Pitati’ in Proceedings, ed. Falomir, 50. 73 Nichols, Tintoretto, 14. Ilchman and Echols, Rivals in Renaissance Venice, 112, 225. Detlev Von Hadeln, Early Works by Tintoretto – II, 287. 74 See for example Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice, 183, and ‘Tintoretto and Veronese: Style, Personality, Class’, in Proceedings, ed. Falomir, 73; Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500-1600, 523. Not all scholars recycle the motto and its evaluation uncritically. Cf. Tietze: ‘It is not very difficult to prove that [Ridolfi] and his contemporaries compressed into anecdotal form vague traditions and misunderstood utterances of Tintoretto’; it is ‘completely wrong to imagine Tintoretto as guided by this double star from the very beginning and to think that even in his youthful period he was striving to achieve a synthesis out of antagonistic elements’. Tietze, Tintoretto, 14. Valcanover and Pignatti state that whilst the motto might have served more than one of the

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younger generation in Venice in the 1540s and 1550s, ‘between 1539 and 1548 [Tintoretto] was avidly grasping at everything he could find a use for, without imposing limits on himself and standing under no other man’s banner. Whatever he produced was entirely original, an idiom that burgeoned under his hands with increasing sureness’. Francesco Valcanover and Terisio Pignatti, Tintoretto, trans. Robert Erich Wolf (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), 15. See also John Steer: ‘In this treatment of form and space Tintoretto seems to be trying to combine Roman and Venetian ideals in a new and daring synthesis, but in fact the final result has style all its own. Because of the detached brushstrokes the figures are not solid enough to create space sculpturally and the local colour is too bright to allow atmospheric perspective. As a result, there is a lack of reality about the space and an absence of substance in the forms. The final result is not so much about reality as about making a picture; but it is picture-making of the most brilliant kind.’ John Steer, A Concise History of Venetian Painting (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970), 154. 75 Newton, Tintoretto, 35. 76 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xix. 77 In his reading of Tintoretto as a liberated figure and a liberator of painting, Deleuze’s remarks recall Sartre’s analyses of the artist published in the 1960s, which had singled Tintoretto out above his Venetian contemporaries. See page 173, note 57. 78 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London; New York: Continuum, 1984), 369. 79 Ibid. 80 An infiltration, perhaps, from Venice’s conquest of mainland territories. Indeed, it is arguable that the international Gothic style, with its heraldic characteristics, was better suited than the Byzantine to the self-image of the Venetian republic with its love of ritual and ceremony. John Steer writes that from the early- to the midfifteenth century Venice ‘remained constantly open to outside influence and her painting followed the general development of Gothic art’. Venetian painting, 26. See also David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 54. 81 Paul Hills, Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, and Glass, 1250-1550 (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1999), 47. 82 The gilded mosaics in Bellini’s altarpieces, the revival of the Greek-cross plan for parish church, and the surge of new mosaic decoration in San Marco, all testify to this backward gaze. David Alan Brown, Sylvia Ferino Pagden, and Jaynie Anderson, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). 83 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, x. This echoes Sartre’s reading of a patch of yellow in Tintoretto’s Saint George and the Dragon not as signifying anything, but as ‘anguish and yellow sky at the same time’. Sensation is embodied in the material, bypassing readability. Quoted in Lepschy, 185. 84 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 10. 85 Ibid., 32. 86 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Athlone, 2003), 29, 75. 87 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 182. It is likely that Deleuze picked up this idea from Sartre who in his early essay on Saint George and the Dragon (published in Situations IV, in 1976 and 1981) characterizes the painting as displaying ‘inhuman forces’. Quoted in Jonathan Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 29.

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Chapter 3 1 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 142. 2 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 7. 3 Ibid., 35–6. 4 Ibid., 7. 5 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 86–7. 6 Ibid. Kant calls transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is possible a priori. The term ‘a priori’ means ‘independently of experience’, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B2. 7 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xvi. 8 This distinction is made by Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London, New York: Verso, 2013), 153. 9 Cf. Naum Gabo’s ‘Realist Manifesto’, quoted in Stephen Bann, ed., The Tradition of Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1990), 9. 10 Osborne has stressed the parallels between this shift in practices of art and/as architecture, and the philosophical critique of philosophical ‘foundationalism’, including that of Deleuze’s. Osborne, Anywhere or Not at all, 153. 11 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 508. 12 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, xxii. Osborne argues that in its placement of philosophy, art, architecture, and urbanism on a single ‘plane of immanence’, Deleuze’s constructivism ‘breaks with the socio-historical analysis to affirm simultaneously a new philosophy, a new architecture and a new conception of the work of art, at the level of thought alone’. As such it betrays some of the more radical implications of constructivism. Deleuze’s constructivism ‘re-enacts the ideology of the avant-garde at its most abstract, as the permanent invention of beginnings’. Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All, 153. 13 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003), § 17. 14 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 132. 15 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 37. 16 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 167. 17 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A320/B377. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5:217. 18 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A736/B764. An intuition is that thought which cognition relates to objects. Intuition is immediately related to its object and is singular; the concept is mediated and common to several things and is either empirical (arising from the sensibility) or pure (with its origin solely in the understanding). Sensibility is the capacity (a receptivity) to acquire representations as a result of the way in which we are affected by objects: ‘All thought, whether direct or indirect, must ultimately be related to intuitions, thus, in our case, to sensibility, since there is no other way in which objects can be given to us.’ A19/B33.

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19 Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 113. 20 Kant, Ibid., Bxxvi. 21 For Kant, synthesis is the originary act of all cognition, ‘the act of putting different representations together, and of grasping what is manifold in them in one [act of] knowledge’. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A77/B103. 22 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 343. 23 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B181. 24 Ibid., A138/B177. 25 As Michael L. Thompson notes, Kant’s use of the German Einbildungkraft rather than the Latin imaginatio indicates a shift from an image-centred theory of the imagination to a theory of the imagination as a formative power – the power of creating and building. Michael L. Thompson, Imagination in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2013), 11. 26 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A141/B180. 27 Kant retains the original separation between form and matter in the Greek schēma (form) from schēmatizein (to give form to), which relates to the notion of hylomorphism. The schēma is the form or plan that matter takes on. Schema originally meant ‘plan’ and morphed into the Latin figurae. Its many different senses include the outward form or structure perceptible to the senses, as geometrical and rhetorical figures, and internal plans/ blueprints. Aristotle, with reference to hylē-morphism, calls morphē the ‘schēma of ideas’ (to schēma tēs ideas). Cicero and Quintilian used schēma to variously designate ‘form’, ‘shape’, and ‘figure’. In his early Dissertation (1770), Kant makes reference to schēma twice. He first assumes the notion of schema as outline, against which he distinguishes representation as the ‘law inborn in the mind for co-ordinating with one another the sense arising from the presence of the object’; he then speaks of space as ‘a schema, issuing by a constant law from the nature of the mind, for the co-ordinating of all outer sense whatsoever’. ‘Dissertation on the form and principles of the sensible and intelligible world’, in Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation and Early Writings on Space, ed. John Handyside (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1928), 45, 61. This prefigures Kant’s idea in the first Critique that space is the ‘pure image’ (reines Bild) of all objects of outer sense and that time is the ‘pure image’ of all objects in general A142/B182. It is only in the first Critique that schema become the mediator between sense and understanding. 28 Deleuze and Guattari wrest the notion of matter from its submission to form. They critique classical hylomorphism, and instead conceive of matter as an extended flow of forces, which subtends form. Matter thus understood is newly defined as ‘matter-force’ or ‘material’. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 407–8. 29 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 142. 30 Kant defines dogmatism as ‘the presumption of getting on solely with pure cognition from (philosophical) concepts according to principles, which reason has been using for a long time without first inquiring in what way and by what right it has obtained them. Dogmatism is therefore the dogmatic procedure of pure reason, without an antecedent critique of its own capacity.’ Critique of Pure Reason, Bxxxvi. 31 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 7. 32 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A734/B762. 33 In On a Discovery According to Which Any New Critique of Pure Reason Has Been Made Superfluous by an Earlier One, (1790) – the same year as the a edition of the third Critique – Kant provides a footnote to clarify the meaning of construction of concepts in the first Critique: ‘In the most general sense one can call construction all exhibition of a concept through the (spontaneous) production of a corresponding intuition. If it occurs

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Notes to Page 72–74 through the mere imagination in accordance with an a priori concept, it is called pure construction. … If, however, it is practiced on some kind of material it could be called empirical construction. The first can also be called schematic, the second technical.’ The latter is ‘improperly named construction’ ‘because it belongs not to science but to art and takes place by means of instruments’ in The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, ed. Henry Allison (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 111.

34 I elaborate on the relations between Deleuze’s and Peirce’s conceptions of the diagrammatic in my ‘Diagrammatic Thought: Two forms of constructivism in C.S Peirce and Gilles Deleuze’, Parrhesia, No. 19 (2014): 79–95. 35 Winifried Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 121. 36 Peirce, ‘Sundry Logical Conceptions’ in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings (Bloomington, Indianapolis, 1998), 2:274. 37 Peirce, ‘Pragmatism and Pragmaticism’ in The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1931-1958) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), 5:42. 38 Martin Gardner, Logic Machines, Diagrams and Boolean Algebra (New York: Dover, 1968), 56. 39 Peirce, quoted in Don Roberts, The Existential Graphs of Charles S. Peirce, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1973), 124. 40 Peirce, ‘Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism’ in Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic, ed. James Hoopes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 250. 41 Peirce, ‘Prolegomena for an Apology for Pragmaticism’, 249. Thus ‘operations upon diagrams, whether external or imaginary take the place of the experiments upon the real things that one performs in chemical and physical research’, 250. 42 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 114. 43 Ibid., 531n.41. Peter Osborne argues that this is in fact a misreading since for Peirce ‘signification is a triadic relation requiring an interpretant, not a two-way signifier-signified one’. Philosophy in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2000), 49. 44 ‘Kant is entirely right in saying that, in drawing [necessary] consequences, the mathematician uses what, in geometry, is called a “construction”, or in general a diagram, or visual array of characters or lines.’ Peirce, ‘The Nature of Mathematics’ in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 138. 45 Although Peirce qualifies this, he criticizes Kant’s neglect of the ‘logic of relations’ in his regarding the ‘absolutely simple conceptions’ that concern philosophy as ‘luminous and clear’ ‘such as Being, Quality, Relation, Agency, Freedom etc.’ ‘The Nature of Meaning’, Essential Peirce, 2: 219. The Nature of Mathematics, 139; On Peirce’s diagrammatic thinking see James Feibleman, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce. Interpreted as a System (Cambridge, MA, London, England: MIT Press, 1970), 108–9, 135–43. 46 Peirce, ‘The Simplest Mathematics’ in Collected Papers, 4:233. 47 Peirce, ‘On the Logic of Quantity’ in Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Writings, ed. Matthew E. Moore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 46. 48 Peirce, ‘Division of Signs’ in Collected Papers, 2:267; ‘Logic of History’ in Collected Papers, 7:204. 49 Peirce, ‘The Nature of Mathematics’ in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 138.

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50 Kant ‘drew too hard a line between the operations of observation and of ratiocination’. ‘Lessons from the History of Philosophy’ in Collected Papers, I.35. It is possible that Peirce is borrowing the term pragmatic – as distinct from practical – from Kant himself. Kant refers to the ‘pragmatic laws of free conduct for reaching the ends recommended to us by the senses’ in distinction to ‘pure practical laws … whose end is given by reason completely a priori, and which do not command under empirical conditions but absolutely’. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, CPR A800/B828. Arguing that the term pragmatism has been subject to much re-definition and derivations, Peirce decides to coin the term ‘pragmaticism’ to capture the original definition. He defines pragmatism/pragmaticism as follows: ‘Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.’ ‘The Essentials of Pragmatism’ in Philosophical Writings, ed. Justus Buchler, 259. 51 Peirce, ‘New Elements of Mathematics’ in Collected Papers, 4:318. 52 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A141. 53 Peirce, ‘Consequences of Common-Sensism’ in Collected Papers, 5:531. 54 Peirce, ‘Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs’, in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Buchler, 99. 55 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 116. 56 Peirce, ‘Proposed work in Logic’ in Collected Papers, 2:92. 57 Peirce, ‘A Sketch of Logical Critics’ in Essential Peirce, 2:460–1; ‘Graphs, Diagrams, Logical Algebra’ in Collected Papers, 4:447. 58 Peirce, Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence Between Charles S. Peirce and Lady Victoria Welby, ed. Charles S. Hardwick (Bloomington etc.: Indiana University Press, 1977), 24–5. Peirce defines ‘feeling’ as follows: ‘an instant of that sort of element of consciousness which is all that it is positively, in itself, regardless of anything else’; ‘There is no resemblance at all in feeling, since feeling is what it is, positively and regardless of anything else, while the resemblance of anything lies in the comparison of that thing with something else.’ ‘The Categories in Detail’, Collected Papers 1:306. 59 Peirce, ‘Graphs, Diagrams, Logical Algebra’ in Collected Papers, 4:447. 60 Peirce, ‘Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man’ in Peirce on Signs, ed. Hoopes, 49. 61 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 109. 62 Peirce, ‘The Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation’ in Essential Peirce, 1:226. 63 Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 483. 64 Cf. Preziosi, The Art of Art History, 9: ‘The most pervasive theory of the art object in art history as well as in conventional aesthetic philosophies was its conception as the medium of communication or expression.’ 65 Damisch argues that to read a picture means to introduce into its analysis the authority of the text from which the picture is supposed to derive its arrangement through a kind of figurative and/or symbolical application in which each pictorial element correspond to a linguistic term. Hubert Damisch, ‘Semiotics and Iconography’ in The Art of Art History, 234–41. 66 Cecil Gould, ‘The Cinquecento at Venice: Two Crises’, Apollo 116 (1972): 381. 67 Elaine Banks, quoted in Tintoretto, ed. Falomir, 245.

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68 Jan Bialostocki, ‘Iconography and Iconology’ in the Encyclopaedia of World Art (New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill, 1959–68), Vol. VII, 770. 69 Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 8. Ernst Gombrich too was right to predict, as early as 1960, that art history would be increasingly supplemented by a concern with ‘the linguistics of the visual image’. As if to prove this prediction true, in 1968 Umberto Eco set out to show that pictorial signs could be as conventional as verbal signs. For a detailed assessment of the development of ‘pictorial semiotics’ see Göran Sonesson, Pictorial Concepts: Inquiries into the Semiotic Heritage and Its Relevance to the Interpretation of the Visual World (Lund Sweden; Bromley Kent England: Lund University Press, 1989). 70 Umberto Eco, ‘Proposal for a History of Semiotics’ in Semiotics Unfolding, ed. Tasso Borbé (Berlin: Mouton, 1983), 79. 71 Panofsky, ‘Iconology and Iconography. An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art’ in The Art of Art History, 220. 72 By ‘psyche’, Panofsky is referring to ‘the psychological processes that lie at the base of the stylistic phenomena’ – as distinct from Wölfllin’s psychology of perception. ‘What Is Baroque?’, in Three Essays on Style, ed. Irving Lavin (Cambridge, MA; London, England: MIT Press, 1995), 51. 73 Panofsky, ‘Introductory’ in Studies in Iconology. Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 16. The Cinquecento saw a development and proliferation of impresa – symbolic devices/ designs composed of an image plus a motto. This was a new, and increasingly popular, form of artistic expression that aimed at the ‘purest form of the concetto’ and which had the effect of raising visual imagery to the same level of signification as the verbal. Impresa consolidated the new function of the visual image as a bearer of an idea, rather than the simple visual resemblance of a perceived object in nature. See also Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, 41. 74 Hubert Damisch develops this counter-reading of iconography in his ‘Six Notes in the Margin of Meyer Schapiro’s “Words and Pictures”’. Social Research: An International Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Spring 1978), 15–35, and his ‘Semiotics and iconography’ (1975) in The Art of Art History, ed. Preziosi, 234–41. In both papers, Damisch is building on Schapiro’s pioneering Word and Pictures. On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (The Hague: Mouton, 1973) and his essay ‘Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs’, Semiotica I (1969): 223–42. In their essay ‘Semiotics and Art History’, Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson argue that semiotics provides the basis for a transdisciplinary theory that can avoid the bias towards language. Preziosi refers to the ‘inextricable’ grounding of art history in a logocentric paradigm. Rethinking Art History, 16. Damisch, Louis Marin and Georges Didi-Huberman have all explored the potential of indexicality to account for the ‘material’ disruptions to Renaissance images. 75 Damisch, Semiotics and Iconography, 242. 76 Panofsky, History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline, 37. 77 It is in this regard that in his Cinema books Deleuze relates firstness to genesis, adding to the Peircian triad of firstness, secondness, and thirdness the somewhat curious sounding category of ‘Zeroness’, which pertains to the field of forces. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 30. 78 Jill Dunkerton, ‘Tintoretto’s Painting Technique’ in Tintoretto, ed. Falomir, 155. 79 The other three paintings are Miracle of the Slave, Saint Mark Rescuing a Saracen, and Finding of the Body of Saint Mark.

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80 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A20/B34. It is to Leibniz’s grounding of both understanding and sensibility on the theory of differentials that Maimon looks to. Essay in Transcendental Philosophy, trans. Nick Midgely (London: Continuum, 2010), 21. 81 Maimon, ‘Letter to Kant 7 April 1789’ in Essay, Appendix 1, 229. For Kant, the given that is presented in experience is necessarily subject to the same principles as those which govern, a priori, our representations. As Deleuze also points out, the necessity of the correspondence of objective with subjective actuality is given by the fact that the same principles hold for both (Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1984), 12–13) – for example the experience of causality is made possible and necessary by the a priori law of causality. 82 Essay, 42–3. 83 Ibid., 38. 84 David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1.3.8.13. 85 Essay, 48. 86 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B208–B218. In contrast, an extensive magnitude is ‘that in which the representation of the parts makes possible the representation of the whole’, and this can only apply to the pure forms of a priori intuition, space, and time. 87 Essay, 22. 88 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 173. 89 Ibid., 246. 90 Ibid., 168. 91 Ibid., 141, 194. 92 Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 1:4:vi. 93 Deleuze, ‘What Is the Creative Act?’, in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, ed. David Lapoujade. trans. by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (London: Semiotexte, 2006), 312. 94 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 145–6; 343. 95 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 276. 96 Cf. Margaret Iversen’s analysis of Masaccio’s Trinity in ‘Saussure versus Peirce: Models for A Semiotics of Visual Art’ in The New Art History, ed. Al Rees (London: Camden Press, 1986), Fredrick Stjernfelt Diagrammatology. An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology and Semiotics (Netherlands: Springer, 2007). For analysis of the presence of the diagram in twentieth-century art, see Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Hesse’s Endgame: Facing the Diagram’ in Eva Hesse Drawing, ed. Catherine de Zegher, Drawing Center (New York, NY), Menil Collection (Houston, TX), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA), Walker Art Center 2007. 52, n.1, and ‘Painting as Diagram. Five Notes on Frank Stella’s Early Painting. 1958-1959’, October Winter 2013, No. 143, 126–44. 120, 129. For an analysis of contrasting accounts of the diagram in aesthetics and art theory see my ‘Diagram: Deleuze’s augmentation of a topical notion’, Word and Image 34, No. 4 (2018). 97 For Vasari on Tintoretto, see Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 22.

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Chapter 4 1 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 285. 2 ‘On the path which leads to that which is to be thought, all begins with sensibility’. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 144. 3 According to the Oxford Companion of Philosophy, sense-data are ‘subjective entities (allegedly) having the properties the perceived external object … appears to have … . Our knowledge of sense-data is supposed to provide a foundation for all empirical knowledge’. Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 822. 4 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 57. 5 Deleuze, ‘The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Esthetics’ in Desert Islands, 56. 6 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 56–7. 7 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A21/B35. 8 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A155/156 B14/195 A109. Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:351. 9 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A20–21/B34–35. ‘Whatever in an appearance corresponds to sensation I call it matter; but whatever in an appearance brings about the fact that the manifold of the appearance can be ordered in certain relations I call the form of appearance. Now, that in which alone sensations can be ordered and put into a certain form cannot itself be sensation again. Therefore, although the matter of all appearances is given to us only a posteriori, the form of all appearance must altogether lie ready for the sensations a priori in the mind; and hence that form must be capable of being examined apart from all sensation. Thus, in the presentation of a body I separate ‘extension and shape’ from ‘impenetrability, hardness, colour’. Finally, a Sensus Communis a common sense is produced only by leaving out of one’s representational state ‘everything that is matter, i.e. sensation, and attending solely to the formal peculiarities of his representation or his representational state’, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:293–4. 10 Judgement is the ‘faculty for thinking of the particular as contained under the universal’. Whereas a determining judgement is one where we are given a universal (a rule, a principle, a concept) under which to subsume a particular, a reflecting judgement is one where we are given a particular and must seek to find a universal. Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:179. 11 Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, 49. 12 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:317 13 Deleuze, ‘Idea of Genesis’ in Desert Islands, 61. 14 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:318. 15 Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:352. For even though aesthetic pleasure is ‘disinterested’ (i.e. it bears no interest in the existence of the objects that occasion it), we nevertheless feel a rational purpose when the productions of nature agree with our disinterested pleasure. Kant calls this agreement symbolism. 16 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 56–7. 17 Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger, trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton, NJ, Chichester: Princeton University Press, 2000), 49.

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18 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 58. 19 Ibid., 320–1, n. 10. 20 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:262, 5:245. 21 Ibid., 5:274. 22 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 146. 23 Deleuze, ‘Idea of Genesis’ in Desert Islands, 63. 24 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:307. 25 Ibid., 5:315. Kant gives the following example: ‘Jupiter’s eagle, with the lightning in its claws, is an attribute of the powerful kind of heaven’. The eagle supplements the rational idea of God and allows our imagination to add much that is unnameable to the concept. 26 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:314. 27 Deleuze, ‘Idea of Genesis’ in Desert Islands, 67. 28 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 50. 29 Ibid., 5:306. 30 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 101. 31 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 106. 32 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 316. We may here contrast Kant’s claim that art, as distinguished from nature, ‘is always understood a work of human beings’. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:303. 33 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 102. 34 Ibid., 112. 35 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 200. 36 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 164. 37 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 370. 38 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 82. 39 Ibid., 159. As Deleuze writes, the diagram produces possibilities that go beyond the actual figures which Bacon extracts from his diagrams. George Kubler also refers to a potential diagrammatic art history that maps ‘all the natural resources of art’ and which ‘would radically affect our conception of the history of art. Instead of our occupying an expanding universe of forms … we would be seen to inhabit a finite world of limited possibility, still largely unexplored, yet still open to adventure and discovery’. Shape of Time, 114–15. 40 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 186–7. 41 Riegl had used the term haptic (haptisch) to designate the tactile (tactsinn) form of Egyptian bas-relief and the close-looking (Nahsicht) it incited (as opposed to the distanced, optical looking of Hellenistic and Roman art). For Deleuze, a ‘new Egypt’ arises in Bacon’s art. He constructs a haptic space through modulation of colour, the juxtaposition of pure tones (relations of value), a ‘continuous creation of space’. Francis Bacon, 133–4, 49–52.

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42 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 112. Deleuze is referring specifically to an ‘analogical’ geometry – a geometry of relations, rather than a digital analogy of forms, 116–17. 43 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 109. 44 Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, 94. 45 Mention must be made here of Deleuze’s debt to, and critique of, Merleau-Ponty’s (and to a lesser extent Henri Maldiney’s) phenomenology of painting. For Deleuze, the being of sensation is not the flesh (the name given by Merleau-Ponty to the unity or reversibility of feeling and felt), but ‘the compound of non-human forces of the cosmos, of the non-human becomings of man … . The flesh is only the developing solution [le revelateur] that disappears in that which it develops.’ ‘Art begins not with the flesh but with the house.’ What Is Philosophy?, 183, 186. For Deleuze, the flesh institutes an Urdoxa, an ‘original opinion’, a fourth common sense, whereby the world and the body are exchanged as correlates in an ‘ideal coincidence’. Sensation is not, he claims, restitutive, such that all the elements of art are ‘entwined branches of the same Being’, or ‘things and my body are made of the same stuff ’ (‘Eye and Mind’, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Philosophy and Painting, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 124, 125, 148). Rather, sensation is a deranging power. Deleuze’s position is shaped by Jean-Francois Lyotard’s critique of phenomenology in Discours, Figure. (see, in particular, Lyotard’s description of the ‘matrix’ in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, which Lyotard called the ‘silent infrastructure in the life of the flesh’, ‘the frame in which the given gives itself ’. Discourse, Figure, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 16–17. Deleuze’s development of the notion of rhythm is also an important aspect of this critique. Whereas for Maldiney, rhythm is ‘the sense of form in formation, in perpetual transformation in the return of the same’, for Deleuze rhythm is a ‘vital power’ beyond the lived and beyond the organism, that ‘exceeds every domain and traverses them all’, Maldiney, Regard Parole, Espace; Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 44. Maldiney is referring to Emile Benveniste’s analysis of rhythm in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Elizabeth Mary Meek (Miami, University of Miami Press, 1971), 281–9. Benveniste distinguishes rhythm as form, as opposed to schema. Whereas schema means ‘fixed form, realized and composed like an object, rhythmos … designates form in the instant that it is assumed to be that which is moving, mobile, fluid’. Quoted in Elaine Escoubas, ‘Henri Maldiney’, Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics, ed. Hans Rainer Sepp and Lester Embree (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London, New York: Springer, 2010). 46 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 192. 47 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 145–6. 48 The innovation is often associated with Titian, but as Jill Dunkerton argues, Titian’s coloured grounds where probably tinted gesso, and they were not always applied to the entire canvas. The true coloured, oil-based, grounds were the invention of Tintoretto. ‘Developments in Colour and Texture in Venetian Painting in the Early 16th Century’ in New Interpretations of Venetian Renaissance Painting, ed. Frances Ames-Lewis (London: Birkbeck, 1994), 71. 49 Deleuze, The Fold, 31–2. 50 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 188. 51 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 345. 52 Directors Foreword to Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese. Rivals in Renaissance Venice 8. Brown, Art and Life in Renaissance Venice, 15. 53 Lorenzo Lazzarini and Joyce Plester, ‘Preliminary Observations on the Technique and Materials of Tintoretto’, 25. See also Arie Wallert and Carlo Van Oosterhaut, From Tempera to Oil Paint: Changes in Venetian Painting, 1460-1560. Rijksmuseum Foundation, 1998.

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54 Philip L. Sohm, Pittoresco: Marco Boschini, His Critics, and Their Critiques of Painterly Brushwork in Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 43–53. 55 Lazzarini and Plester, Preliminary Observations, 12–13. 56 John Hale, Italian Renaissance Painting from Masaccio to Titian (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 46. 57 Tom Nichols, ‘False Gods. Tintoretto’s Mythologies as Anti-poesie’, in Proceedings, ed. Echols, 39. Rebecca Zorach also comments on the empiricism of colorito – ‘an immediate engagement with the matter of the visible world’, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 137. Tietze has also remarked on the merely ‘descriptive’ quality of Titian’s self-portraits next to Tintoretto’s self-portrait as an artist of ‘visionary strength’, in his Louvre self-portrait. Tintoretto, 12–13. 58 Bearing in mind of course the alteration in paint appearance over time. Chemical analysis of pigments by techniques of X-radiographs and infrared photography has transformed the knowledge of the original pigments Tintoretto would have used. 59 Quoted in Tintoretto, ed. Falomir, 391. 60 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 118. 61 Lazzarini and Plester, ‘Preliminary Observations’, 24. Also Joyce Plesters, ‘Tintoretto’s Paintings in the National Gallery. II: Materials and Techniques’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin 4 (1980): 35–9. 62 Tietze, Tintoretto 18. 63 Ibid., 21, 62. 64 John Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1875–86), 370, 375. 65 Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 79–97. 66 For Ruskin, ‘Tintoretto’s commitment to this inward spiritual dimension inevitably put him at odds with the sensual Renaissance world’, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. Cook and Alex Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903–12), 250–1. See also, Nicolas Penny, ‘John Ruskin and Tintoretto’, Apollo (April 1974) 99 (1974): 268–73. 67 Max Dvořák, The History of Art as the History of Ideas, trans. John Hardy and Paul Kegan (London: Routledge, 1984), 103. 68 Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy, 379. 69 Summers, The Judgement of Sense, 120. 70 For Vasari on Tintoretto, see Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 22. 71 Summers, The Judgment of Sense, 210. 72 Cf. Alberti, On Painting: ‘A beautiful invention is pleasing per se, lone, even without painting.’ III, 53. Summers, The Judgment of Sense, 10. 73 Panofsky, Idea. A Concept in Art Theory, trans. J. S. Peake (New York: Icon, 1968), 65–7. 74 Quoted in Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 22. 75 Vasari’s famous description of disegno begins: ‘Because disegno, the father of out three arts of architecture, sculpture and painting, proceeding from the intellect, derives from many things a universal judgment, like a form or idea of all things in nature …’. Robert Williams, Art, Theory and Culture in Sixteenth-century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 45. Vasari recalls Michelangelo’s famous

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Notes to Page 111–114 opposition of the ‘compass of judgment’ to the traditional arithmetic and geometric rules of perspective and proportion. Klein and Zerner, Form and Meaning Essays on Renaissance and Modern Art, transl. Madeleine Jay and Leon Wieseltier (New York: Viking Press, 1979), 103. Judgement imparts a ‘grace surpassing measure’. Vasari quoted in Williams, 44. The new ideal of grace has arisen in the sixteenth century from the perceived need to coordinate artistic conception with execution, the intellectual with the manual, in the context of the high Renaissance and Mannerist challenge to naturalism.

76 Vasari on Technique, trans. Louisa S. Maclehose, ed. G. Baldwin Brown (New York: Dover Publications, 1960), 212. 77 Marco Boschini, La Carta Del Navegar Pitoresco (Venice: Per li Baba, 1660). Quoted in Sohm, Pittoresco, 45. 78 Vasari, On Technique, 210. 79 Quoted in Echols, ‘Tintoretto the Painter’ in Tintoretto, ed. Falomir, 25. 80 Of particular interest is Boschini’s displacement of naturalism with artifice. Artifice ‘is the exemplar of nature, its mirror, its model and imitator’. Quoted in Sohm, Pittoresco, 208. 81 Quoted in Echols, ‘Tintoretto the Painter’, in Tintoretto, ed. Falomir, 26. 82 Quoted in Sohm, Pittoresco, 102. 83 On Vasari’s critique of deformation, see Summers, Judgement of Sense, 175. 84 Quoted in Robert Engass and Jonathan Brown, Sources and Documents in the History of Art; Italy and Spain 1600-1750 (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1970), 52. 85 Quoted in Sohm, Pittoresco, 98. 86 Engass and Brown, Sources and Documents in the History of Art; Italy and Spain, 51–4. 87 Quoted in Sohm, Pittoresco, 7, 13–14, 141–2, 153. 88 Quoted in Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 42. 89 Sohm claims that ‘almost everyone who wrote about art before Boschini would consider understanding (sapia, hence sapiena) to be the product of cogitation, with the intellect, rather than the senses, as the dominant faculty’. Pittoresco, 112. 90 Quoted in Engass and Brown, Sources and Documents in the History of Art; Italy and Spain, 53. 91 ‘You are that universal painter who pleases and amazes the whole universe. I regret only that I lack the invention to invent concepts that are sufficient for such merits.’ Ibid., 55. 92 Loh, ‘Huomini della nostra eta: Tintoretto’s Preposterous Modernity’, 193. 93 Quoted in Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 47. 94 Quoted in Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 44. Roland Krischel also comments on this multi-sensory quality of Tintoretto’s works: referring to the painter’s early The Conversion of Saul, he argues that Tintoretto ‘is not content to depict only the visual aspects of the miracle, such as the light and the storm, but also seeks to paint the acoustic phenomena described in the Acts of the Apostles. The angry divine question, “Why persecutes thou me?”, seems to fill the whole picture. The rider on the left puts both hands to his head, which is ringing with the noise, and the skin of the drum has cracked as the instrument has fallen to the ground.’ Krischel links this depiction of the acoustic to Tintoretto’s interest and ability in music. Tintoretto, 11. 95 Quoted in Loh, ‘Tintoretto’s Preposterous Modernity’, 193–4.

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96 Hippolyte Taine, Voyage to Italy, 1869, quoted in Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art, 2 Volumes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 221. 97 For further analysis of the iconography of San Rocco see Nichols, Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity, 180. 98 A concordance that reflected Catholic Reformist exegetical literature of religious orders such as the Capuchins. Valcanover and Pignatti, Tintoretto, 45–6; Nichols, Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity, 193. 99 As recounted by Vasari. Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 24. Ridolfi lists Andrea Schiavone in addition, Tintoretto, 12. 100 Quoted in Nichols, Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity, 175. There is no reason to doubt this dedication. Tintoretto had already considered the Saint Roch motif as early as 1549. Tietze, Tintoretto, 45. 101 Titian was receiving 400 ducats per annum from the king of Spain alone (i.e. not mentioning his other, numerous major patrons). Similar-sized paintings for other Scuole Grande in Venice typically cost over 100 ducats each in the sixteenth century, whilst patrons could expect to wait a year for their completion. Tintoretto offered his paintings at as little as a third of the standard price. Nichols, Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity, 176. 102 Schulz, Venetian Painted Ceilings of the Renaissance, 33. 103 Krischel, ‘Tintoretto and the Sister Arts’ in Tintoretto, ed. Falomir, 134. 104 Steer, Venetian Painting, 155–7. 105 Boschini, quoted in Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 47. 106 Valcanover and Pignatti, Tintoretto, 40.

Chapter 5 1 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 136. 2 Also understood as ‘clock time’ – the form of time that can be numbered on a clock by making it a discontinuous succession of points on a line. Elliott Jacques, The Form of Time (New York: Crane Russak & Co, 1982), 15. 3 Tietze, Tintoretto, 27. 4 Hauser, Mannerism, 74. 5 For an excellent survey of the concept of historical time see Prashant Kidambi, ‘Time, Temporality, History’ in Research Methods for History, ed. Lucy Faire and Simon Gunn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 220–37. Heidegger articulates a qualitative concept of historical time, as distinct from the concept of time in physics. Whereas the latter makes measurement possible and has meaning only as a homogeneous ordering of points, historical time considers the way cultural production of the past continues to affect the present, or the interest the latter has in the former, which is not measurable. This time has a completely original meaning in history, as a sense of ‘qualitative otherness’ between past and present. ‘From our standpoint, the past not only no longer is; it also was something other than what we and our present-day context of life are.’ Thus, the concept of time in history has ‘none of the homogeneity characterizing the concept of time in the natural sciences’. Historical time is qualitative, the ‘congealing of life within history’. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Concept of

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Notes to Page 131–136 Time in the Science of History’, trans. Harry S. Taylor and Hans W. Uffelmann, Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology 9, No 1 (January 1978).

6 The past couple of decades has seen a spate of new publications on problems of time. To cite just a few: Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg, Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art In and Out of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image. 7 This is Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’s argument in Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010). See particularly their Chapter 1. 8 Cézanne, The Letters of Paul Cézanne, ed. Alex Danchev (London: Thames and Hudson, 2013), 347. See also Joachim Gasquet, Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne. A Memoir with Conversations, trans. Christopher Pemberton (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), 178. 9 Newton, Tintoretto, 117. 10 Kurt W. Foster, ‘Introduction’ in Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty, 1999), 27, 35, 50–1. Foster stresses analogies between Warburg’s thought and other nineteenth-century art historians, including Alois Riegl and Gottfried Semper, both of whom integrated notions of dissolution and fragment into their conception of history. On Warburg’s interest in the matter of images, the ‘materiality of survivals’ and the ‘interlacing of the human spirit with the material domain’, see Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image, 198, 224. 11 We are also brought to mind here of one of the more singular aspects of T. S. Eliot’s remarks on tradition – that an artist’s difference from his predecessors is not simply something that can be isolated as though it had nothing to do with history, but that ‘the most individual parts’ of an artist’s work ‘may be those in which … his ancestors assert their immortality most vigorously’. The chronology-defying assertion of that ‘vigorous’ element of the past, and how it impacts our experience, is what Deleuze also emphasizes. Eliot, ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ in The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays (New York: Dover, 1998), 27–43. 12 Quoted in Charles Harrison and Paul J. Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900-2000 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), 211–2. 13 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 136. 14 For an overview of this ‘modern’ reception see Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 134–6. 15 Soulier quoted in ibid., 130–33; Eugene Benson, Art and Nature in Italy (Boston: Benson Brothers, 1882), 74. 16 Newton, Tintoretto, 117. 17 Holborn, Tintoretto, 16–19, 21–3. See also John Steer’s remarks that Tintoretto’s works were more about ‘making a picture’ than conveying reality – remarks that reveal an outlook informed by modernist developments, Venetian Painting, 153–4. 18 Director’s Foreword to Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese. Rivals in Renaissance Venice, 8. 19 Deleuze, Dialogues II, trans. Eliot Ross Albert (London: Continuum, 1992), 136. 20 Deleuze, ‘On the Will to Power and the Eternal Return’, Desert Islands, 126–7. 21 Quoted in Echols, ‘Tintoretto the Painter’ in Tintoretto, ed. Falomir, 26. 22 This interest has been traced to the symposium on Temps des disciplines at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (March 1992). See also Nicole Loraux’s influential ‘Éloge de l’anachronisme en

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histoire’ Espaces Temps 87 (1). Persée – Portail des revues scientifiques en SHS: 127–39. The writings of Georges Didi-Huberman have brought anachronism to the foreground of disciplinary debates via the work of Aby Warburg. 23 Kleinbauer, Modern Perspectives, 15. 24 Panofsky, ‘Reflections on Historical Time’, Critical Inquiry 30, No. 4 (2004): 695. 25 For Kubler, for instance, the ‘discovery of the manifold shapes of time’ is part of the historian’s task. Shape of Time, 11. See Gombrich’s characterization of Aby Warburg’s reading of Rembrandt in terms of the artist’s resistance to the ‘spirit of the age’. Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), 314. 26 Further development of Deleuze’s philosophy of time would of course need to take into account his work on the stoic conceptions of Aion and Chronos, in his The Logic of Sense, which I can only mention here. In accordance with Chronos ‘only the present exists in time. Past, present, and future are not three dimensions of time; only the present fills time, whereas past and future are two dimensions relative to the present in time.’ ‘In accordance with Aion, only the past and future inhere or subsist in time. Instead of a present which absorbs the past and future, a future and past divide the present at every instant and subdivide it ad infinitum into past and future, in both directions at once.’ The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London, New York: Continuum, 2004), 186, 188. 27 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 59. 28 Ibid., 32. 29 Ibid., 208. 30 For an incisive account of this see Margarita de Grazia, ‘Anachronism’ in Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, ed. Brian Cummings and James Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). The use of anachronism was first credited to Joseph Scaliger (De Emendatio Temporum, 1583) and the term emerged in the vernacular only in the early seventeenth century within studies of historiography. The coinage of anachronism and the assignation of its (originally) negative value can be explained by the development of chronology into a modern scholarly discipline, the rise of historical method, and the dissociation of chronology from narration and rhetoric. That anachronism is the historian’s problem is consolidated by the time Vico calls it a deep definitional and historical error in his New Science (1744). It is when chronos becomes chronology (ordering of dates) and affiliated to historical time (signalled by the etymological shift from the ancient Greek anachronismos ‘against time’ to the sixteenth Italian anacronismo, meaning a ‘chronological misplacement’) that anachronism in turn becomes disordering of dates, and associated with error with respect to the historical object. It is arguably in the afterlight of this disciplinary territorialization of the term that art history is still working. 31 Goethe, quoted in Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 313. Claire Farago, ‘Response: Time Out of Joint’, The Art Bulletin 87, No. 3 (2005), 424–9. Farago and Zwijenberg talk about the inevitable use of anachronism in all historical interpretation in their book Compelling Visuality. 32 See also Arnold Hauser: ‘Application to the past of the logical categorical and visual forms of the present is indispensable to any historical interpretation’, The Philosophy of Art History, 240, 243, 244. 33 Daniel Arasse, Histoire de peintures, préface des Bernard Comment, Cathérine Bédard (Gallimard: Paris, 2004), 220. 34 Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 5–6.

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35 On Althusser see Prashant Kidambi, ‘Time, Temporality, History’ in Research Methods for History, ed. Simon Gunn and Lucy Fair, 228. Claire Farago points out that recent art historical practices of anachronism have not acknowledged the culturally and historically specific nature of chronology as a Western, European construct, and overlook the critique of chronology (of hegemonic chronological narratives of modern nation-states) undertaken by early-twentieth-century thinkers including Bloch, Febvre, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, in so doing depoliticizing the question of anachronism. Instead, anachronism needs to be resituated in the context of these debates, where ‘critiques of existing models of historical time were explored in relation to the historian’s subjectivity’. Farago, Time Out of Joint, 424. 36 Mieke Bal understood this reversal in terms of a ‘preposterous history’ – an attention to ‘the past today’ in terms of a ‘reversal’, which puts what came chronologically first (‘pre’) as an after-effect behind (‘post’) its later recycling. Bal, Quoting Caravaggio, 6–7. Bal notes that the term ‘preposterous history’ is coined after Patricia Parker’s ‘Preposterous Events’, 1992. 37 Cf. Nagel and Wood’s Anachronic Renaissance, and Mieke Bal’s Quoting Carravaggio. 38 Perhaps Paul Hills’ study of the survival of the Venetian Gothic in Tintoretto’s art – particularly the reappearance of gothic ‘ogee’ rhythms in ‘a creative process that lay below the threshold of conscious intent’ (‘Tintoretto and Venetian Gothic’ in Proceedings, ed. Falomir, 15), and grounded in Tintoretto’s lived experience of Venice, is more faithful to the Warburgian sense of survival. However, whilst Hills speaks of influence in terms of an active ‘rephrasing’ he frames this within ‘a sixteenth-century idiom’, thereby re-contextualizing survival. 39 Foster, in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 27, 44. See also Warburg in the same volume, 319. 40 ‘It is a split within consciousness, a logical error, or a nonsensical aspect of an argument, that opens a breach in the current state of some historically produced factor, allowing its survivals to appear.’ Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image, 31. Even though he may understand the survival of Pathosformeln as unconscious, it is not clear that Warburg understands the historian’s mode of inquiry as unconscious. His work consistently affirms the importance of archives and facts, and he describes his own work as ‘the reconstruction of the background of an age’. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 249. 41 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 111–12. 42 Deleuze, ‘Synthesis and Time’, Cours Vincennes, 14 March 1978. https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66 43 Plato, Timaeus 37D, ed. Peter Kalkavage (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2001). 44 Aristotle, Physics Book IV, in Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Barnes. 45 Kant, ‘Introduction’ to Critique of Pure Reason, 7; A39–42/B56–58. 46 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A33–36/B49–53. 47 Ibid., B46 This is proven, Kant claims, by the fact that if one strips everything away from appearances one would always be left with time (and space), B254. 48 In Kant’s terms, the idea of simultaneous different times is nonsensical, just as is the idea of successive spaces. Ibid., B47. 49 Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 14. 50 ‘In a word, we set them side by side, and if we introduce an order in what is successive, the reason is that succession is converted into simultaneity and projected into space. The idea of a certain order in time implies the representation of space’. Bergson, ‘The Idea of Duration’ in Key Writings, 60–1.

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51 Cardinal: Middle English, comes from the Latin cardinālis, meaning ‘principal, chief, essential’, from cardo, meaning ‘hinge’. Ordinal: Middle English from late Latin ōrdinālis, meaning ‘relating to order in a series’, from Latin ōrdō, ōrdin. 52 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 64. 53 Ibid., 148. 54 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A108. 55 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 167. 56 Maimon, Essay, 14. 57 Ibid., 89, 97–8. 58 Deleuze, ‘Immanence a Life’ in Two Regimes of Madness, 385. 59 Compare the phenomenological recuperation of the transcendental field as a field of pure presence such that ‘time is not a line, but a network of intentionalities’. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 416–17. 60 Deleuze, ‘On Four Poetic Formulas’ in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London, New York: Verso, 1998), 29. 61 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:259. 62 Heinrich Von Kleist, ‘On the Gradual Formulation of Thoughts while Speaking’ (1805) in Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist, trans. Peter Wortsman, (New York: Archipelago, 2010), 62. 63 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 56–7. ‘Re-petition opposes re-presentation: the prefix changes its meaning, since in the one case difference is said only in relation to the identical, while in the other it is the univocal which is said of the different. Repetition is the formless being of all differences, the formless power of the ground which carries every object to that extreme “form” in which representation comes undone.’ 64 Treatise 1.2.4.1 – 2. The simple and indivisible elements of space and time are always filled with matter; it is ‘impossible to conceive either a vacuum and extension without matter, or a time, when there was no succession or change in any real existence’. 65 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 70–3. Treatise 1.2.3.6. 66 Ibid., 74–5; ‘Subjectivity is determined as an effect.’ Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 26. Thus, the sense of time as a living present is present in lower as well as higher organisms. 67 Philip Turetzky, Time (London: Routledge, 1998), 212–13. 68 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 96–7. 69 Ibid., 79–82. The necessity for the present to pass is both ontological and organic. A perpetual present is not ‘physically possible’ because of organic ‘fatigue’. Ontologically, the ‘paradox of the present’ is ‘to constitute time while passing in the time constituted’. 70 Deleuze integrates his interpretation of the pure past into his reading of other key Bergsonian concepts – including the virtual and duration. In Empiricism and Subjectivity he points out the ‘smooth’ passage from Hume to Bergson, that ‘it is not necessary to force [Hume’s] texts in order to find in habit-anticipation most of the characteristics of the Bergsonian durée or memory’, 92–3. Deleuze refers to a passage in Bergson’s Time and Free Will that recalls the Humean notion that repetition changes nothing in the external states of affairs but introduces difference internally. The succession of instances is contracted into an ‘internal

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Notes to Page 146–149 qualitative impression’, a feeling that Bergson famously calls duration (durée). In contrast to the succession of perceptions or instants that occurs within chronological clock time, duration is an inner, immeasurable feeling of time made up of moments inside one another and coexisting. This concept is pivotal to Deleuze’s own non-chronological and non-metrical theory of time. For Bergson, ‘Kant’s great mistake’ ‘was to take time as a homogenous medium’, divisible into parts or quanta. Instead, duration is time in its heterogeneous, ever-changing condition, comprised of unique moments that will never be repeated, and qualitatively different from perception. In Deleuze’s view, duration is ‘indistinguishable from the nature of difference’, Difference and Repetition, 331, n. 14.

71 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. M. L. Andison (Totowa: Littlefield, Adams & co 1965), 93, 95–6; Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 82. Whereas Hume associates habit with the imagination, Bergson associates recollection, and not habit, with the imagination. Bergson condemns associationists (which on this point we take to include Hume) for understanding (recollection) memory and habit to differ only in degree, for seeing the past as a tracing of the present it once was and the anticipated future as resembling the past (Treatise 1.3.12.9) and directing memory only to the necessities of present action. For Bergson’s critique of associationism see Matter and Memory, 134–5; 164–5. 72 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 84–5. 73 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 83, 151. 74 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 39–40. 75 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 176. 76 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 4. 77 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 67–88. 78 Ibid., 100. 79 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 6. 80 Ibid., 88. 81 Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1997), 154. 82 Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 211–12. 83 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams and Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), §341, 273–4. 84 Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 139. 85 Ibid., 312–14. On eternal return as selection, see also Nietzsche, Will to Power, 1058. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Athlone, 1983), 68–71. 86 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 298. 87 Ibid., 54–5. In the case of habit, repetition produces a law through which a general future is anticipated on the basis of particular past instances, a future that resembles the past. In the case of memory, particular presents are extracted from a general past. In habit, an anticipated future resembles the contracted past, and in memory, the future is only a dimension of the same past. 88 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 112.

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89 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 293–4 90 Ibid., 90. 91 Ibid., 54. 92 Deleuze, Foucault, 35. 93 I consider these questions at length in my text ‘Tintoretto’s Michelangelo. An Artistic Diagram as the a priori of Art History’ in Art History after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Sjoerd van Tuinen (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017). 94 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 5. 95 Foucault, ‘Return to History’ in Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, Vol I Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology, 428. 96 Deleuze associates this with Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power. For Deleuze, the will to power is a ‘genetic and plastic principle’ that ‘gives an account of the sense and value of beliefs, interpretations and evaluations’. Nietzsche and Philosophy, 53. 97 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1992), 9. 98 Deleuze, Foucault, 34. 99 Foucault defines archaeology as a pure description of the facts, or ‘positivities’ of discourse that make up knowledge (savoir). ‘On the Archaeology of Knowledge’ in Michel Foucault, Essential Works Volume 2, 306–7, 309; Archaeology of Knowledge, 170, 210. 100 Foucault, quoted in Deleuze, Foucault, 36. 101 Ibid., 37. 102 Deleuze, ‘Michel Foucault’s Main Concepts’ in Two Regimes of Madness, 251. This overlaps with Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the sign in A Thousand Plateaus. They draw on the conception of the sign by Louis Hjelmslev as made up of the binary forms of content and expression in ‘reciprocal presupposition’ but with no resemblance or correspondence. Louis Hjelmslev, Prologomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison, Milwaukee and London: University Wisconsin Press, 1969). 103 Deleuze, ‘Michel Foucault’s Main Concepts’, 253; Deleuze and Guattari mark their differences with Foucault, returning to themes raised in Anti-Oedipus. They see assemblages as assemblages ‘1. Not of power but of desire (desire is always assembled), and power seems to be a stratified dimension of the assemblage 2. The diagram and the abstract machine have lines of flight that are primary, which are not phenomena of resistance or counterattack in an assemblage, but cutting edges of creation and deterritorialisation’. A Thousand Plateaus, 530, n. 39. 104 Deleuze, ‘What Is a Dispositif?’ in Two Regimes of Madness; Arnold Davidson, ‘Introduction’ to Foucault, ‘Society Must be Defended’: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (London: Allen Lane, 2003), xv. 105 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 102 106 Quoted in Echols ‘Tintoretto the Painter’ in Tintoretto, ed. Falomir, 26. 107 Quoted in Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed, 149.

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108 Anna Pallucchini, Tintoretto, 8. 109 I reflect on the return of Tintoretto’s stage-method in the works of Adam Elsheimer in my article ‘Tintoretto’s Time’, Art History, 38, No. 3 (June 2015): 414–33. 110 For Krischel, ‘Works by Ellsworth Kelly, Bob Thompson, Martial Raysee, Ulrike Rosenback, Ron O’Donnell, and many others are evidence of the continuing fascination that Tintoretto’s paintings have had for artists of the 20th century’. Tintoretto, 2000, 133. 111 ‘La Biennale provides an arena of negotiation to ascertain what future role should be assumed by culture and art in a globalized world’. Bice Curiger, ed., ILLUMInations 54. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte (Marsilio, 2011), 45. 112 Curiger, ILLUMInations, 43. 113 Ibid., 48–9. For Heinrich Wölfflin, Tintoretto was a ‘destroyer of the classical formulas’. Quoted in Pignatti and Valcanover, Tintoretto, 10. 114 Curiger, ILLUMinations, 65. 115 Ibid., 68, 73. 116 Ibid., 65.

Conclusion 1 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 191

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Jacopo Tintoretto, Creation of the Animals (detail), 1551/2, oil on canvas, 151  ×  258  cm. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.

Index

abstraction 76, 90, 104 aesthetic ideas 97–9 aesthetic judgements 94–100. See also judgement aesthetic paradigm 100–1 aesthetics 6–7, 93–102, 170 n.28, 171 n.33, 171 n.35. See also art Alberti, Leon Battista 27–8, 67, 80, 111 Alpers, Svetlana 5–6, 168 n.10 Althusser, Louis 8, 139 anachronism 129, 131, 134, 136–40, 142–3, 149, 157, 159, 168 n.7, 195 n.30, 196 n.35 a priori 7, 70–2, 74, 87, 95, 137, 142–3, 149, 157, 182 n.6 Arasse, Daniel 137, 139 architecture 53–4, 56–7, 123–4, 126, 179 n.44 Aretino, Pietro 26, 29, 47, 135, 151, 177 nn.15–16, 179 n.52 Aristotle 4, 28, 41, 141, 183 n.27 art. See also sensation; aesthetics; ontology of art and aesthetic 6–7, 99–102 and construction 67–8, 99, 105 Deleuze and Guattari on 10, 13–15, 60, 90, 99–104, 140–5 and diagram 102–4 and time 129–45 art history and aesthetics 6–7. See also aesthetics and Deleuze and Guattari 13–15, 165–6 and difference 1–4, 24 and method 1, 59–60, 77–82 and philosophy 10, 15, 164–6 and theory 7–9, 12, 171 n.41, 172 n.42, 172 n.44 and thought 5, 12, 93, 163–5 and time 129–43 Bacon, Francis 16–17, 68, 103, 143, 147, 149. See also Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

baroque 5, 57, 62–3, 163, 169 n.21 Barthes, Roland 8, 14, 174 n.76 Baudrillard, Jean 8 Baxandall, Michael 2–3, 168 n.5 becoming 13, 101, 124, 138, 150–1, 168 n.8 Bellini, Giovanni 19, 22, 29, 107–8, 181 n.82 Berenson, Bernard 167 n.4, 169 n.16 Bergson, Henri 15, 140, 142, 145–7, 197 n.70, 198 n.71 Bois, Yve-Alain 8, 171 n.41, 172 n.42, 174 n.76 Boschini, Marco 31, 57, 110, 112–16, 125, 136, 154–6 Burckhardt, Jacob 29, 110 Byzantine art 61 Carpaccio, Vittore 22, 46–7 Carracci, Annibale 25, 131 Cézanne, Paul 68, 131, 134–5, 149, 155–6 chaos 74, 147, 149 chiaroscuro 23, 63, 108–9, 154. See also painting chronological time 130–3, 137–8, 140–3, 150–1, 195 n.30, 196 n.35. See also time Clark, T.J. 14–15 Colorito 60, 90, 92, 109, 113–14, 136, 155–6, 164 colour Boschini on 112–14 Deleuze and Guattari on 61–3, 76, 87, 103–9, 143 and Francis Bacon 141, 143 and Tintoretto 57–8, 106–9, 134, 156, 164 composition, and Tintoretto 26–8, 30–7, 57, 82–3, 106, 123, 153–4 concepts and art history 7, 9–10, 14–15, 93, 171 n.33 Deleuze and Guattari on 10, 14–15, 65, 67, 94, 138 Kant on 71–4, 98–101 Maimon on 87–9 of time 137–8, 140, 143–4, 163–6. See also time Concetto 111–13, 186 n.73

212 consciousness 66, 70, 76, 96, 144, 146 constructivism and Deleuze and Guattari 16–17, 65–74, 88, 99, 102–10, 140–1, 149–50 and diagram 93–5 and Kant 71–4, 183 n.33 and Maimon 88–90 and Peirce 72–5 and time 149–50, 157 and Tintoretto 32, 37, 43–4, 106–10, 122, 164 contemporary art 134, 157–61. See also art contextualism and context 1–7, 60, 129, 140, 172 n.43 cosmic 23, 83–4, 104–5, 110, 166 Damisch, Hubert 3, 81–2, 113, 137, 168 n.9, 185 n.65, 186 n.74 Deleuze, Gilles Difference and Repetition 9, 16, 67–9, 89–90, 97, 141, 149 Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation 13, 17, 62, 67–8, 71, 75, 103, 143, 149 Deleuze and Guattari. See also art history on aesthetics 93–102 Anti-Oedipus 60, 62, 68, 104 on diagram 15–19, 65–76, 90, 93–4, 97, 100–4, 112, 141–3, 147–52, 165–6 and Kant 71–2, 94–101 and Maimon 86–8, 144–5 and Peirce 17, 72–6 philosophy of art 99–104 A Thousand Plateaus 9, 16–17, 68 and time 140–52 on Tintoretto 60–3 transcendental empiricism 88–90, 95–6, 103–4 What is Philosophy? 10, 63, 66, 68–9, 100, 102–4, 137 Derrida, Jacques 8, 12–14, 173 n.60 diagram. See also Deleuze and Guattari; constructivism etymology of 16–17 and form 17, 73–4 and Peirce 72–6 and schema 70–1 dialectics 11–12, 148 Didi-Huberman, Georges 2, 11, 137, 139–40, 168 n.7, 170 n.24, 170 n.28 difference, xiv 2–5, 10–12, 16, 24, 60, 65–71, 88–90, 93–5, 129–30, 135–6, 140–1, 143–6, 150, 159–60, 163–6 differentials 86–9, 144

Index Disegno 37, 60, 90, 92, 106, 110–11, 113–14, 135–6, 149, 155–6, 164, 191 n.75 drama 21–2, 26–31, 47–56 Dvořák, Max 7, 110, 134 Elkins, James 6, 8, 170 n.25, 172 n.30 empiricism 9, 14–15, 66, 89, 95–6, 106–10 eternity 141, 143, 148. See also time Focillon, Henri 2, 137 forces 17, 21, 71, 92, 99, 101, 104–5, 109, 135, 137, 149–51 Foucault, Michel 8, 12–13, 17–18, 150–1, 157, 173 n.62 Freedberg, Sydney 57, 180 n.61 genealogy 150–2 genesis and genetic Method 86–90, 93–100, 104–5, 133, 138, 145, 149–54 genius 67, 98, 101, 110–15 geometry 103, 143 Giorgione 22, 28–9, 106 habit 145–8, 197 n.70, 198 n.71 Hauser, Arnold 130, 137, 139, 195 n.32 Heidegger, Martin 10, 13, 193 n.5 Historia 26–8, 41, 77, 81, 83, 86, 90–2, 111, 127, 155–6 historical time 2, 4, 129–30, 137, 139–40, 149, 155, 163–4, 193 n.5, 195 n.30. See also time; contextualism and context history. See also art history; historical time Deleuze and Guattari on 13–15, 62, 149 diagram and 17, 150–1 Historia and 28, 77 houses 30–1, 44, 102–5, 110, 190 n.45 Hume, David 66, 87, 90, 145–6, 197 n.70, 198 n.71 Husserl, Edmund 96, 140 hylomorphism 183 n.27 icon 72–3, 75–82 iconography 76–7, 80–1, 116–17, 122, 126–7 ideas 87–90, 92, 98, 101, 111–12. See also concepts; aesthetic ideas illusionism 44, 46–8, 107 image and concetto 111, 186 n.73 and iconography 80, 86–7. See also iconography Peirce and 75 of thought 93

Index imagination 71–5, 87, 96–8, 110–15, 144–7, 183 n.25, 183 n.33, 189 n.25, 198 n.71 immanent 9–10, 15, 17, 66, 71, 88, 96, 105 intensity 88, 95, 144 intensive magnitudes 87, 144 intuitions 70–2, 87–9, 98, 110, 141–5, 182 n.18 judgement 70, 92, 97–9, 110–13, 188 n.10, 191 n.75. See also aesthetic judgements Kant

17, 65, 69–72, 74–5, 86–8, 93–100, 111–15, 141–5, 147, 150–1, 183 n.33 Kleinbauer, W. Eugene 137, 142, 170 n.28 knowledge 5, 11–12, 24, 65, 170 n.24, 182 n.6 Kubler, George 137, 189 n.39, 195 n.25 Leibniz, Gottfried 62, 141, 187 n.80 Maimon, Solomon 86–90, 96, 144–5 mannerism 4, 130, 191 n.75 material 6–7, 13, 15, 48, 60, 62, 67–9, 71, 73–6, 81–2, 86, 90, 92, 99–108, 130–3. See also matter; materialism materialism 15, 99, 102, 113 mathematics 66, 72–4 matter 16–17, 65, 67, 71, 88–96, 99, 113–14, 154 memory 146–7, 197 n.70, 198 n.71 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 8, 13, 190 n.45 method 1–15, 59, 66, 72, 77, 80–1, 86–8, 95–6, 100, 138–9, 170 n.26, 171 n.30, n.35, 172, n.43, 173 n.62 Michelangelo 4, 13, 24, 58–60, 119, 129, 160–1, 191 n.75 mind 66, 70, 72–3, 90, 93, 95–6, 98, 112–13, 146 motto 58–60, 180 n.71, n.74 naturalism 27, 37, 108, 113 nature 22, 31–2, 90–1, 97–100, 111–12, 114–15 Newton, Eric 2, 12, 31, 34, 58–60, 131, 134 Nietzsche, Friedrich 17, 133, 137, 140, 145, 147–8, 150 ontology of art 6–7, 93, 97, 99, 105, 141. See also art Osborne, Peter 182 n.10, n.12, 184 n.43 painting 28, 56–63, 76–7, 80–1, 90–1, 102–16, 149–50, 156–9 and environment 56–7, 122–7, 156

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and grounds 62–3, 104, 108–9, 190 n.48 modern 62, 134, 158 and theatre 41–8 Panofsky, Erwin 4, 7, 80–2, 111, 137, 142–3, 169 n.12 Pathosformeln 139, 196 n.40 Peirce, Charles S. 17, 72–7, 81–2, 86, 88, 90–1 perception 60, 66, 87, 90, 94, 96, 129, 134–5, 141, 144, 146–7, 157, 159–60, 197 n.70 period eye 2–3, 168 n.9 phenomenology 190 n.45 Pino, Paolo 28, 58 Poussin, Nicolas 156, 178 n.38 praxis 8–10 problems 11–15, 60, 89, 163, 173 n.62 Proust, Marcel 147 reason 70, 73–4, 76, 97–8, 114–15, 145 recognition 11–13, 69, 89, 91, 98, 127, 134–5, 144, 152, 156, 159, 161 Renaissance 4–5, 41, 44–6, 80–1, 100, 134, 139–40 repetition 145, 147, 149, 155, 197 n.63, n.70, 198 n.87 representation 5, 13, 62, 68–70, 73–4, 86, 90, 95–6, 98, 140–5, 152–3, 165, 183 n.27 return 133, 148–50, 152, 155–61 Ridolfi, Carlo 30, 46–7, 58–9, 108, 136, 176 n.1, 177 n.14, 180 n.71, n.72, n.74 Riegl, Alois 7, 103, 137, 189 n.41, 194 n.10 Ruskin, John 21, 110, 191 n.66 Sartre, Jean Paul 11–12, 173 n.57, 181 n.83 schema 70–2, 74–6, 87–9, 94, 96, 103, 151, 183 n.27, 190 n.45 Scuola Grande di San Rocco 21, 29, 34, 47, 56–7, 91, 108, 116–27 semiotics 14, 16, 75, 82, 175 n.80, 186 n.74 sensation 16–17, 62, 86–9, 93–6, 99, 102–5, 123, 143–4, 149, 152–3, 188 n.9, 190 n.45 sensibility, and the sensible 68, 70–1, 87–9, 93, 95, 102, 182 n.18, 187 n.80 Serlio, Sebastiano 44–54, 57, 91, 103, 105, 179 n.44 signs 14, 17, 72–6, 80–1, 86, 90, 113, 199 n.102 space 46, 50–7, 103, 105, 196 n.50 space and time 2, 87, 90, 137, 141–5, 196 nn.47–48, 197 n.64 stage-method 30–41, 48–57, 59–60, 90–2, 104–8, 125, 130, 136, 149, 151–7, 160–1, 164–6. See also drama; composition; theatre sublime 97–9, 145

214 survival 132–3, 139–40, 196 n.38, n.40 synthesis 16–17, 58, 69–72, 88–9, 93, 98, 103, 136, 141, 143–9, 151–2, 183 n.21 theatre 14, 41–54. See also drama; stage-method theory 7–15, 168 n.7, 170 n.24–5, 171 n.39, n.41, 172 n.42–4 Tietze, Hans 7, 31, 109–10, 130, 171 n.35, 180 n.74 time 129–61, 183 n.27, 193 n.2, n.5, 195 n.26, 197 n.76. See also chronological time; historical time; space and time future 13, 60, 133, 138, 145–8, 150–1, 155–8, 168 n.8, 195 n.26, 198 n.71, n.87 past 3, 60, 130–1, 133–5, 138–40, 145–50, 156–7, 159–60, 167 n.7, 168 n.7, 193 n.5, 195 n.26 present 3–4, 61–2, 68, 130, 133–5, 138–41, 146–9, 156–60, 193 n.5, 197 n.69 three syntheses of 145–6 pure form of 141–5 Tintoretto, Jacopo Adoration of the Shepherds 77, 79, 118, 121 Agony in the Garden 48, 52 Agony in the Garden (Scuola di San Rocco), 114, 115, 117, 121 Annunciation 32, 34, 77, 79, 121, 126–7 Apotheosis of Saint Roch 118, 119, 133 Baptism of Christ 83, 84, 92, 121, 132 Baptism of Christ (detail) 85 Brazen Serpent 34, 42, 120, 122–3 Christ among the Doctors xvii, xviii, 24, 47–8, 77, 105, 154 Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery 50, 54 Christ Washing the Feet of the Disciples 21, 50, 91 Circumcision of Christ 121 Creation of the Animals 22, 23, 61–2, 153, 158 Crucifixion 119, 120, 126 Deposition of Christ 154, 155 Descent into Limbo 34, 40 Ecce Homo 119 Elijah Fed by the Angel 34, 40, 121 Feast at Cana 34–5, 44, 54 Finding of the Body of Saint Mark 34, 43, 54, 112–13 Flight into Egypt 118, 121 Fragment of a Panel with Apples 131, 132, 134 Gathering of Manna, (San Giorgio Maggiore) 81–2, 82

Index Gathering of Manna, (Scuola di San Rocco) 120–3, 121 Holy Family with Saint Jerome and Procurator Girolamo and Marcello 19, 20 Jacob’s Ladder 121–3, 123 Last Judgement 32, 36, 56, 63, 114, 124 Last Supper, (San Trovaso) 77, 78 Last Supper, (San Giorgio Maggiore) 77, 78, 158 Martyrdom of Saint Paul 32, 37 Mary Reading in a Landscape 33 Mary Reading in a landscape with Palm 32, 33 Massacre of the Innocents 105, 106, 121 Miracle of Saint Augustine 55, 77, 80 Miracle of the Slave 2, 3, 26, 29–30, 32, 53, 59, 77, 105, 107, 135, 153 Moses Striking the Rock 47, 51, 120, 122 Paradise 21, 22, 167 n.4 Pillar of Fire 123, 124 Pool of Bethesda 121 Rescue of the Body of Saint Mark 47, 49, 54, 83, 86, 91, 153, 158 Rescue of the Body of Saint Mark (untrimmed) 50 Rescue of the Body of Saint Mark (detail) 85 Resurrection of Christ 48, 52 Sacra Conversazione. Virgin and Child with the Infant Baptist and Saint Joseph, Elizabeth, Zaccahrias, Catharine and Francis 19, 20, 21 Saint Demetrius and a Donor from the Ghisi Family 37, 45 Saint George and the Dragon xvii, xix, 152–3 Saint Mark Rescuing a Saracen from a Shipwreck 32, 39, 114 Saint Roch in Prison Visited by an Angel 32, 38 Solomon and the Queen of Sheba 50, 53 Susanna and the Elders, (Louvre) 53, 56 Susanna and the Elders 48 Temptation of Christ 121 The Temptation of Saint Anthony 32, 38 Venus and Vulcan 31 Vision of Ezekiel 34, 41, 121–2 Worship of the Golden Calf 32, 35, 56, 124 Titian 22, 25, 28–9, 58–60, 107–8, 112, 114, 156, 158, 160, 190 n.48, 193 n.101 Miracle of the Newborn Child 30 tradition 1–2, 4–5, 59, 136, 161, 194 n.11 transcendental empiricism, and transcendental 15, 66, 71–2, 75, 86, 88–90, 95–9, 102–4, 144, 149, 166

Index understanding 70, 87–8, 95–9, 113–14, 145–6 Vasari, Giorgio 26, 46, 92, 110–15, 118, 191 n.75 Venetian painting 4–5, 22–4, 28–30, 36–7, 44–7, 58, 60–2, 104, 106–9, 112–14, 134, 156–7. See also painting

Venice Biennale 158–9. See also contemporary art Veronese, Paolo 48 Feast at Cana 46, 114 Warburg, Aby 133, 137, 139–40, 166, 194 n.10, 196 n.40 Wölfflin, Heinrich 6–7, 171 n.33

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