The Poetics of the Image- Art History and the Rhetoric of Interpretation.pdf

The Poetics of the Image: Art History and the Rhetoric of InterpretationAuthor(s): Matthew RampleySource: Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 35. Bd. (2008), pp. 7-30Published by: Verlag des Kunstgeschichtlichen Seminars der Philipps-Universität MarburgStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27823060 .

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The Poetics of the Image: Art History and the Rhetoric

of Interpretation

Matthew Rampley

"Art historical writing is for the most part clotted

with jargon and larded with cliche, impenetrable in its density, analytic and contentious to a fault

and, worst of all, utterly predictable."1 "[...] modern professional art historical

interpretation is far more deeply imaginative than most art historians recognize or are willing

to admit [...] art history, despite its efforts to

reject the poetical, belongs, if unwittingly, to the

imaginative tradition of writing about art that

descends from Homer and Vasari."2

Introduction: Taming the Image

The greater part of critical attention devoted to the contours of art history has focused on the Austro

German tradition and its legacy.3 Tracing the de

velopment of institutionalised art history in Ger

many, Switzerland and Austria-Hungary from

the late nineteenth century onwards, historians of

the discipline have seen how it staked its claim to

scholarly recognition through its ability to dem onstrate its use of 'scientific' methods. As one

commentator has stated: "art history endeavoured to demonstrate that its practice was as disciplined and rigorous as any other [...] by mounting a dis course that was tough-minded, logical, detached,

objective."4 Hence the period between the 1870s

and the 1930s in particular witnessed an explo sion of publications devoted to outlining system atic 'principles' of art historical investigation in

the name of a ,strenge Kunstwissenschaft'. These

ranged from the identification of concepts and

structures of formal analysis through to the elab

oration of systematic hermeneutic procedures.5

Linking all was the determination to provide an

'objective' value-free form of scientific inquiry.

To quote one well-known assertion, that of Moriz

Thausing in Vienna: ?Ich kann mir die beste Kun

stgeschichte denken, in der das Wort ,sch?n gar nicht vorkommt."6

The limitations of such an ambition have long been pointed out and highlighted. The desire to

find some Archimedean point from which the his

tory of art could be surveyed is epistemologically flawed, relying on the assumption that the art his

torian could somehow set aside their own socio

historical location.7 It has been argued such uni

versal principles' were most often formulated in

response to one particular artistic phenomenon -

the Italian Renaissance - and were then employed as a means of assessing its difference from others, such as the Baroque or the art of the Netherlands.8

Their applicability to other artistic cultures and

periods, both within Europe and in the wider do

main of global art production, was highly limited. More politically-informed critique has also high

lighted the extent to which such 'scientific' art his

tory served an Enlightenment project of "the fab rication of a past that could be effectively placed under systematic observation for use in staging and politically transforming the present."9 That

political aim was, accordingly, the reinforcement of the modern state and the legitimation of the

colonial belief in the supreme position of Europe as the brain of the earth's body.10 Furthermore, a

recurrent complaint has been that such 'scientific'

procedures bury the artwork in a formidable ap

paratus of dry scholarly analysis that robs it of its

specificity to such an extent that its cultural and

aesthetic value become lost.

I do not wish to rehearse these issues in any fur

ther detail, partly because others have done so in

considerable depth, but mainly because I wish to

contest the idea that such an account represents the

7



whole story. Specifically, it would be possible to write another description of art history that gave a divergent picture. Rather than treating art works as the objects of a detached interest, it would be an art history motivated by an explicit erotic, moral or aesthetic immersion in them. Accordingly, if, instead of focusing on the late nineteenth century,

we consider Johann Winckelmann's writings on

classical art as a point of departure for art history, a rather different image emerges. Winckelmann, of

course, has been identified by many as the founder of modern art history, based on his identification of a principle of historical analysis

- style

- cou

pled with recognition of the historical distance be tween his own time and the classical era. However, as Alex Potts and Whitney Davis have argued, his

writing was also marked by a homoerotic absorp tion in and idealisation of the male Greek nude.11

Further, it was through its homoeroticism that the study of ancient art and its history gained its

moral purpose, modelled on the paederastic ethics of classical Greece: "paederastically determined

judgements [...] relayed an approved notion of a

rational-moral identity [...] Winckelmann insist ed that the ancient images of beautiful masculin

ity socially served only to steer individual culti vations of sensuous and erotic experience towards such a morality."12 Winckelmann thereby opened up the historical study of art to the domain of

aesthetic, moral and sexual engagement. Indeed, in his work it is possible to see a tension that has

marked the subsequent development of art histo

ry. On the one hand, his identification of stylistic categories and periods provided the template for a

'systematic5 art history. On the other, he created the tradition of the art-loving connoisseur such as

Giovanni Cavalcaseli, Bernard Berenson, Julius von Schlosser, Adolfo Venturi, Pietro Toesca or

Max Friedl?nder. An important aim for many was

the formulation of a historical poetics of the image, in other words, articulating a form of historical

analysis that was open to the aesthetic qualities of the individual work of art. In the remainder of this

article, therefore, I explore the work of authors, Roberto Longhi, Adrian Stokes, Georges Didi Huberman and Mieke Bal, who aim at precisely what 'wissenschaftlich' art history has often ex

cluded. In different ways they each raise impor

tant questions about the nature of art historical

interpretation. Motivating my analysis of each is

also the fundamental question: to what extent do

they manage to resist the temptation to contain the image within the deadening grid of systematic analysis that has been such a central force within so much art historical discourse?

Roberto Longhi

Roberto Longhi (1890-1970) is best known as a

scholar and connoisseur of Caravaggio and Piero della Francesca, and for his championing of the idea of a Ferraran School of art. Unusually for a

Renaissance art historian he wrote on contem

porary art and was on good personal terms with Futurists such as Ardengo Soffici, contributing to

the futurist journal La Voce and to other avant

garde journals such as Lacerba or La Ronda. He was critical of the fetishism of Florence in Italian art history, often attending instead to peripheral' art centres, and he was also the first to acknowl

edge the significance of the work of Artemisia Gentileschi.13 Because relatively little of his writ

ing has been translated into other languages, he remains hardly known except to specialists in the field of Italian art.14 With the exception of Ital ian scholars, few have explored the implications of his work for wider reflection on the nature of art

historical representation, in spite of his acknowl

edged importance (for one commentator he was

?der bedeutendste italienische Kunsthistoriker des 20. Jahrhunderts") for the discipline.15

A student of the medieval art historian Pietro Toesca (1877-1962), an admirer of Bernard

Berenson, and highly influenced by the aesthet ics of Benedetto Croce, Konrad Fiedler and Adolf von Hildebrand, Longhi became known above for his connoisseurial activity. This was the source

of his high reputation - in particular in relation

to Caravaggio - but it also gained him the most

notoriety, in terms of both his methodology and also his personal motivations. Although some of his attributions in regard to Caravaggio were sub

sequently vindicated, his reluctance to allow his connoisseurial intuitions to be informed by docu

mentary evidence was a source of constant criti

8



cism, and also led to some major corrections of his

conclusions.16

To describe Longhi merely as a connoisseur

underrates the significance of his work, however,

despite the intellectual milieu he constructed for

himself. In the first issue of Paragone^ the journal he founded in 1950, he offered an outline of the

task of art criticism, which is the nearest to a state

ment of method to be found in his oeuvre.17 In a

well known and much cited passage he declares:

"L'opera d'arte, dal vaso delPartiggiano greco alla

Volta Sistina, ? sempre un capolavoro squisitamen te 'relativo.' L'opera non sta mai da sola, ? sempre un rapport. Per cominciare: almeno un rapoporto

con un'altra opera d'arte. Un'opera sola al mon

do, non sarebbe neppure intesa come produzione umana, ma

guardata con reverenza o con orrore,

come magia, come tab?, come opera di Dio o del

lo stregone, non dell'uomo [...] E dunque il senso

dell'apertura di rapport che d? necessit? alla ri

sposta critica. Risposta che non involge soltanto

il nesso tra opera e opera, ma tra opera e mondo,

socialit?, economia, religion, politica e quant'altro occorra."18

This seems distant from the concerns of the

connoisseur; the emphasis on the relational as

pect of the work, its place within a wider social

context, bears little comparison with the connois

seurial attachment to the masterpieces of the indi

vidual artist. It is also difficult to square with his

actual practice, which paid scant attention to the

social dimension of art. Where Longhi did see art

in relational terms was in viewing the place of the

individual artwork within a formal sequence; he

made this approach central to his work at an early

stage. In his Breve ma Veridica Storia della Pit

tura Italiana published in 1914 he stated: "Porre

la relazione fra [...] due opera ? anche porre il con

cetto della storia dell'arte, corno almeno l'intendo

io, e cio? nuli'altro che la storia dello svolgimento

degli stili figurative [.. .]"19 In a slightly later text he

sharpened the link between intra-artistic relations

and developmental sequence with the assertion

that the "rapporti tra opera e opera si dispongono inevitabilmente in serie di sviluppo storico [...]."20

Although 'style' was a central category of anal

ysis for Longhi, it was not used as an instru

ment of taxonomic ordering comparable to the

approach of W?lfflin or Riegl. Instead, his use

of style bears closer comparison with Julius von

Schlosser (1866-1938) who drew a sharp distinc

tion between epoch-making stylistic masterworks - the 'proper' subject of art history

- and the de

rivative works that disseminated a particular style, but which perhaps could not even be considered

fully as art.21 Longhi did not subscribe to Schloss

er's elitist views; the attention he devoted to minor

individual artists and schools is testimony to his

rather more open-minded views. Nevertheless, he

shared with Schlosser a resistance to the tendency within much art historical scholarship to inter

pret individual artworks by reference to abstract

general analytic categories. Indeed, Schlosser sin

gled out Longhi's early monograph on Piero della

Francesca as a ?Musterbeispiel" ("exemplary in

stance") of the history of style.22 The grounds for the similarity with Schlosser lay

in the fact that for both, the aesthetic theories of

Benedetto Croce provided a powerful conceptual

impetus.23 Croce, for whom ?die eigentliche und

wahre ,Geschichte' der Gesamtkunst [...] nichts

anderes denn den Fackellauf der sch?pferischen H?henmenschen bedeuten kann [...]" placed in

tuition at the heart of the aesthetic and critical en

counter with the artwork.24 The key considera

tion for Croce and, therefore, Longhi, was how to give voice to such intuition; for Longhi the so

lution lay not in the elaboration of any method

ological framework, but rather through the lan

guage of criticism. As Longhi noted in an early essay, "noi pensiamo che [...] sia possibile ed utile

stabilire e rendere la particolare orditura formale

dell'opera con parole conte ed acconce, con une

specie di trasferimento verbale che potr? avere

valore letterario, ma sempre e solo [...] in quan to mantegna un rapporto costante con

l'opera che

tende a rappresentare."25

Central to the understanding of Longhi is rec

ognition of the performative dimension of his

writing.26 It has long been recognised that he har

boured literary ambitions, the "baroque" and

intensely personal nature of his style was com

mented on and commended early on by other art

historians, including Schlosser.27 However, to see

in Longhi merely a stylist is to underplay the in

tellectual basis of his writing. For it was through

9



1 Piero della Francesca, Dream of Constantine, ca. 1466, San Francesco, Arezzo

the poetic description of the image that he sought to articulate the intuitive encounter with it. Pier

Vincenzo Mengaldo has outlined some of the dis

cursive tropes Longhi employed to this end. They include, amongst others: a refusal to employ the

traditional language of criticism and the inven

tion of novel technical terms on a work-by-work basis, a mixture of interpretative genres (icono

graphy, naturalistic depiction, poetic evocation,

biography, technical description, narrative), heavy use of adjectival verbs and nominal phrases.28 To

these one can add irony, wit, playfulness. A few

examples from his celebrated monograph of 1949 on Piero della Francesca illustrate the nature of

his writing.29 Discussing Piero's Dream of Con

statine (Fig. 1) he writes: "[...] il fiabesco nottur

nale del gotico collima col classicismo antico, col

luminismo struttivo del Caravaggio, con quello

magico del Rembrandt, e, persino, con la pesatura

pulviscolare del Seurat [...]."30 This broad characterisation of the painting's lu

minosity sets up a clear system of relations that weave back and forth in time, from the Gothic

past to the late nineteenth century, and which

foreground the distance between Longhi and tra

ditional art historical concerns with establishing historical sequences and relations. In this passage

adjectives become substantives (e. g. "fiabesco not

turnale"), substantives are turned into adjectives

("pulviscolare" from "pulviscolo"). In a slightly later passage Longhi summons up the range of

imaginative associations prompted by the paint

ing: "Si pensa alle tende Argive, al sonno di Anni

bale prima di Canne, a quello d'un gran Crociato in Asia [...] e subito un gran lume piove dall'alto, a

strapiombo, scrutando da presso, come un oc

chio di luna."31

There then follows a more prosaic descrip tive enumeration of the different objects and fig ures within the painting, before, extraordinarily,

Longhi refers to the space of the opening of the tent as "una concavit? di collinosa dolcezza" ("a

concavity with a hilly sweetness").32 There is a re

markable conceit in describing a negative space in

the terms of something as solid as a hill, although this is clearly aimed at evoking the tectonic quali ties of Piero's depiction of space, but equally chal

lenging is the notion of the "dolcezza," a lyrical sentiment that seems all the more incongruous

within an image marked by its Gothic, fantasti

cal qualities. In his discussion of Piero's fresco of

the Battle of Constantine and Maxentius (Fig. 2)

Longhi writes of the "velario segreto, ineffabile, di un lume" ("secret, ineffable, veil of light") in

which "le cose paion rifiorire [...] nel liquore so

lare" ("things appear to flourish in a solar liq uid").33 Turning first to the "cavalli teorematici"

("theorematic horses") of Constantine's army, which, he speculates, might owe their descent to

those of the Dioscuri or to the stallion of Sir John Hawkwood, he then describes the riders them

selves: "Su codesta nobilissima progenie animale

10



2 Piero della Francesca, The Battle of Constantine and Maxentius, ca. 1466, San Francesco, Arezzo

ora s'incastellano quasi inumani, e pur civilissimi, non sai se pi? gli arti o le elitre dei guerriere cris

tiani [...] interiti sulle cavalcature, levano al cielo

la spalliera artificiale degli elmi mostruosamente

belli e in vista terrificanti [...]?"34

Longhi shifts between the mythical (the Dio

scuri) and the historical (Sir John Hawkwood), and his lexical register varies widely; the meta

phor of a terrible beauty was a widespread trope in modernist poetics, but he then adds the unu

sual scientific terms "teorematico", "elitro" ("the orematic" and "elytron"). "Teorematico", drawn

from mathematics is seldom associated with hors

es, although it richly evokes the strong geometries of Piero's depiction, while "elitro" is hardly en

countered outside of entomology, since it refers to the wing case of beetles.

In a later work on the Ligurian artist Carlo

Braccesco (1478-1501) Longhi adopts an entirely different voice. Discussing the Virgin in Brac

cesco's Annunciation he writes as follows: "Chi

sar? intanto questa Signora della Loggia? La 'pu cella' dello stile cavalleresco, suggerita dai mini

atori francesi del Duecento [...]? O non pi? che un ricordo di essa, gi? divenuta castellana un po' greve di riviera ligure e magari della Costa Az

zurra? Ancora alquanto 'bas bleu' ma, ormai, non

senza sospetto di 'bas de laine'."35

Having speculated on the art historical prece dents for such a figure, with an allusion to her class

equivalent in the Middle Ages and later, Longhi then goes on, in humorous vein, to allude to her

personal character. He writes of her "sguardo ac

corto e smarrito" ("shrewd and deamy gaze"), of the "ombra sorniona accoccata agli angoli della

bocca" ("the mischievous shadow at the corners

of her mouth") with the "aria di castellana saputa" ("air of a smug ch?telaine").36 The sacred charac ter of the image is almost thereby lost, an impres sion strengthened by his reference to the Angel

Gabriel "ronzando" ("buzzing") like a fly in the

hot summer sky. There are few more striking descriptions of in

dividual artworks than are to be found in the writ

ings of Roberto Longhi, and these few examples indicate the distinctiveness of his practice as an

art historian. The interp?n?tration of myth, his

tory and legend that occurs in his writing hardly concurs with the professional protocols of art his

torical argumentation. Instead, as one commenta

tor has noted: "The tendency to interpret works

of art in their cultural and historical setting, all

those things which distinguished the nineteenth

century, seem, in his work, to give way to a meth

od of seeing what was essentially grounded in the

immediate perception of the work of art itself."37 As I have suggested, this does not entirely summa

rise his approach; Longhis analyses look out be

yond the work to consider its relation to the wider

corpus of artistic masterpieces. However, Longhi

11



pays little regard for traditional art historical con

cerns with chronology or inferences of influence.

Instead, he evokes trans-historical connections; within one sentence Piero is compared with Ma

saccio, Caravaggio and Rembrandt, or, later, with

Vermeer, Titian or Giorgione. Yet it is clear that

he is not positing a distinct tradition or pattern of influence; rather, he is describing the associ

ations conjured by the paintings for the viewer.

Thus Piero's profile portraits of Battista Sforza

and Federico da Montfeltro "si pensi ai profili del

Pontormo" ("make one think of the profiles of

Pontormo"), in an inversion of the chronological sequence one would normally expect from an art

historical account.38

Longhi uses such references not in the service

of art historical arguments, but as a way of ar

ticulating his own aesthetic response and, in par ticular, as a way of giving concrete form to such a response. As Mengaldo suggests, at the heart of

Longhi's approach was the problem of reconcil

ing the difference between the experience of the

painting, in particular, the experience of its pre sentness, its aesthetic immediacy, and the tem

poral basis of language.39 The title alone of his

journal Paragone betrays this concern with the

relation between word and image. He attempts to

overcome this difference by means of a play of as

sociations and a depth of metaphor that disrupts the flow of narrative and puts time into a kind of

suspension; the use of unfamiliar terms and un

orthodox grammatical constructions draw the

reader into the language of his texts, triggering an

aesthetic absorption that presents a discursive an

alogue of the visual perception of the image. The extent to which these practices provide a

model for another kind of art history, one free of

the charge of 'taming' the image, will be explored later. First, however, I consider a near contempo

rary of Longhi, Adrian Stokes.

Adrian Stokes

From the mid-1920s until his death in 1972 Stokes

produced a stream of articles and books on a wide

range of topics: from ballet, to contemporary art, ancient Greek art, modern painting, and Italian

art. His work defies easy categorisation. It can be

regarded neither as straightforward art criticism -

although some of his pieces were written while

he was art critic for the Spectator magazine - nor

as art history. Stokes' writing occupies a kind of

space between art criticism and art history, and

it also merges with other genres of writing such

as autobiography, travelogue and diaristic reflec

tion.40 He came increasingly to rely on the psycho

analysis of Melanie Klein as a source of insights into art, but not until his later writings did he at

tempt to apply this rigorously as an interpretative

methodology.41 In order to get some sense of Stokes' writing I

focus on an early text, The Quattro Cento (1932), which is also perhaps one of his most famous.42 On

one level it is a historical disquisition on the emer

gence of renaissance art and architecture in fif

teenth-century Italy, on the persistence of Gothic

in the period in question, and on the foreshadow

ings of the Baroque, and it has become the subject of no small amount of contemporary interest.43

It is shaped by some familiar art historical dual

isms: Florence stands in opposition to Venice (for

which, for reasons I shall come to shortly, Stokes

substitutes Verona); North stands in opposition to South. On this latter point Stokes frequent

ly refers back to the work of Josef Strzygowski, whose positing of a near Eastern origin for medi

eval Christian art Stokes accepts unquestioning

ly. He also adopts some of Strzygowski's theories

of the racial origins of art, seeing in Florentine art the expression of a distant racial memory of

Etruscan and, further, Semitic origins.44 At this point, however, further resemblance to

canonical art history ceases, starting with the title.

Stokes splits the quattrocento of the title into its

two constituent words in order to communicate

that the concept is not defined as historical era, but rather as an aesthetic category. Central to the

character of Quattro Cento art in Stokes' sense of

the phrase is the handling of stone. He sees stone

as the quintessentially southern medium - in con

trast to the Northernness of wood - and key to its treatment of stone is evocation of its material 'pre sentness'. As such there is discernible here a par allel with Longhi

- although Stokes' intellectual

roots were rather different. Moreover, the interest

12



3 Filippo Brunelleschi, Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1419-1441, Florence

in presentness became a more widespread concern

of modernist aesthetics. It found its most celebrat ed expressed within in mainstream art criticism

and history, such as in Michael Frieds reading of

modern sculpture, or in the aesthetic thought of more heterodox figures, such as the poet-critic Yves Bonnefoy.45

For Stokes presentness with the Quattro Cento

is linked to a particular subjective impulse. As he

puts it: "The process of living is an externalisa

tion, a turning outward into definite form of in ner ferment," and the Renaissance was marked by a compulsion "to throw life outwards, to make

expression definite on the stone."46 More specifi

cally: "I call Quattro Cento the art of the fifteenth

century which expresses this compulsion without

restraint. The highest achievement in architecture was a mass-effect in which every temporal or flux

element was transformed into a spatial steadiness

[...] At no other time have the materials that artists

used been so significant in themselves. The ma

terials were the actual objects of inspiration, the

stocks for the deeper fantasies."47

The grounds of such a notion of externalisation, which Stokes saw manifest in "spatial steadiness", are not developed in great depth in 'The Quattro Cento\ In his later autobiographical essay of 1947

Inside Out, for example, he would state that art,

as the product of an 'object-seeking' libido, "ex

presses the universal desire to translate life into an

outward attachment."48 There is little explicit psy

choanalytic terminology in 'The Quattro Cento'.

Stokes's concern with externalisation -

howev

er formulated in conceptual terms - informed his

historical judgements on Italian art. He saw this

compulsion as rooted in the geography and cli mate of Italy, "in that part of the South where light induces even a Northerner to contemplate things in their positional or spatial aspect as objects re

vealed, as symbols of realization."49 This placed Southern art in opposition to Northern art, which

Stokes, drawing on Strzygowski and, ultimate

ly, Gottfried Semper, regarded as an art of line,

rhythm and time. It was also rooted in geology; little Quattro Cento art was to be found in Flor ence because of the quality of its Fiesole marble:

"This stone cannot be seen as welling up gradually, as indicating some core within."50 Instead it was

cold and inhuman, pietra morte as he described

it. Brunelleschi's Duomo he regarded as domi

nated by an aesthetic of linearity that betrayed its

roots in the Northern (Etruscan) primitive under currents of Italian culture, and he contrasted the

"meaningless wall space" of Brunelleschi's Os

pedale degli Innocenti (Fig. 3) with Luciano Lau

rana's ducal palace in Urbino (Fig. 4), which he

13



^^^^^^L^^^^B^E ?^ ' ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

4 Luciano Laurana, Ducal Palace, ca. 1465-1472, Urbino

proposes as the quintessential expression of Quat tro Cento art. In the palace Laurana accords a "su

preme individuality to each stone shape". Regard

ing the pilasters, for example, he writes: "[...] each

[is] designed to show the beauties of his neighbour as unique. There is no other traffic between them.

Their positions are untraversable, and no hand

shall dare to touch two stone forms at a time. They flower from the brick, a Whole made up of Ones

each as single as the Whole. What could be more

different from Brunellesque running lines [...]?"51 Stokes' book is remarkable in a number of ways;

it challenges the hegemony of Florence by attend

ing to the art of provincial centres such as Vero

na, Urbino, Jesi, Ancona, or Rimini, which all be come the 'true' sites of Quattro Cento art. Yet this

is not an art historical study as traditionally un

derstood. The chronological framework is vague,

the monuments are chosen to illustrate an aesthet

ic argument that also engages in wildly unhistori

cal speculations as to the relation between Renais sance and Japanese, Chinese and Oriental' art.52

Stokes further sees Florentine art as rooted in the

aesthetic values of Etruscan art, a first, completely

unsupportable claim reliant on a second, namely, that the 'brutality' of Etruscan art betrays the ag

gressive Semitic origins of the Etruscans.53

The reader is alerted from the very start that this

is not an orthodox piece of art historical scholar

ship; it opens with a description of Stokes' arrival one wet afternoon at the railway station in Jesi, and of his encounters with carabinieri, children

playing on the streets, the ear-blasts of the siren

of a silk factory, a street beggar, and his hesitation at ringing on the front door bell of the Palazzo del

Commune. No detached observer, Stokes projects

14



himself into his subject, and this is evident, too, in his prose, which has a remarkable power to

conjure up the material, aesthetic qualities of the

works he refers to. I cite one instance, his descrip tion of Verrocchio's lavabo (Fig. 5) in San Loren zo in Florence. A minor work, he nevertheless

regards it as a masterpiece of Quattro Cento art -

ironically, despite its Florentine location.

"It glistens, ascended from an imaginative fund

whence strong roots have shot up in unexampled

profusion, necessitous thongs and twines bound for the light from stirred under-consciousness.

[...] the falcon is spread upon the background, rec

ognized mark nearest the depleted caves of under

consciousness, now shut with marmolite, with

which revolves a band of oak leaves and acorns. In

front, coming clear of this wall an urn, a cup and

bath, one inside the other; these upon their slopes and incrustations receive the large and slow rain

of beasts more primitive than to act prehensile, as

scales drop inch by inch, wet thorny tissues caught

by sun as iridescent mud upon the vessels grazed to warmth and wet. The hooded beast-rain is per

pendicular: any other that struck oblique would

over-balance the stoppered urn set in the precious cup standing in the bath."54

This richly metaphoric description continues

for four more densely written closely type-set pag es. It becomes clear from this passage alone how

'presentness' is not merely a theoretical concept; it

informs the discursive forms he employs. Indeed, his attempt to evoke 'presentness' through a wide

range of metaphorical tropes invites comparison with Longhi. As with Longhi, Stokes startles with

his use of unusual metaphors and grammatical contortions (e. g. "to act prehensile", or "hooded

beast-rain") but in addition he constructs chains

of metaphors, with extended sentences consist

ing of numerous subordinate clauses in which the

main verb becomes lost. Rather than functioning as a means of communication, language becomes a medium wherein the concrete presentness of the

Quattro Cento becomes manifest.

Stokes has been seen as the heir to Walter Pater, as the last, and perhaps most sophisticated repre sentative of English aestheticism.55 However, he

sought to distance himself from his Bloomsbury aesthetic contemporaries, maintaining a particu

5 Andrea del Verrocchio, Lavabo, ca. 1465, San Lorenzo, Florence

larly dismissive attitude toward Clive Bell, and

his own later intellectual trajectory moved in a

completely different direction. The conceptual framework of psychoanalysis, in particular that

of Melanie Klein, came increasingly to the fore in

his concern with 'presentness'. In a late work, The

Invitation of Art Stokes emphasis the central role

of projection and absorption within the act of aes

thetic contemplation: "[...] contemplation, even

crystal-gazing, the inducement of hypnotic states, is to some degree an awareness through an outer

form, as in art, of an aspect of our inner states [...]. And so we are immersed, a part of ourselves is im

mersed, in communion, through it be far short of a

hypnosis, since our separateness, and many kinds

of judgement, are evoked at the same time."

This description, which highlights a complex

interplay of immersion and distance, is remote

from the assumed attitude of detachment of the

disinterested aesthete.56

Stokes' work has been taken up by a range of commentators, such as Michael Ann Holly,

15



Stephen Bann and David Carrier as offering an

alternative kind of art history.57 Its self-conscious

probing of the representational possibilities of

language, its refusal to fall back on the manda

rin terms of it to which art historians so often fall

prey, has been seen as freeing art historical writ

ing from the dead hand of institutionalised disci

plinary procedure.

Stripped of its specifically Kleinian psycho

analytic framing, it can be seen as instantiating the general problem of art historical represen

tation; addressing the gap between image or, in

Stokes's case, material object, and discourse. In

summoning up the different kinds of aesthetic

engagement, visual, tactile, at times even olfac

tory, with artworks, Stokes appears to be mobi

lising a trope within art history commonly asso

ciated with writers such Alois Riegl or the early W?lfflin. Riegl's notion of haptic seeing evoked

the complex interaction of the sense, while W?lff

lin's doctoral dissertation explored the corporeal

projective and empathie processes underlying the

aesthetic experience of architecture.58 Stokes, in

contrast, resists the temptation to provide a sys tematic taxonomy of such experience of the kind

that characterised their work; he also has no time

for the usual procedures of art historical scholar

ship, something which has made him all the more

appealing as a figure. He immerses himself mi

metically in his subject, and his work is dedicated to summoning up the material presence of his ob

jects, circumventing their 'taming' in the formal,

iconographie or conceptual meshes of traditional art historical interpretation.

There is a remarkable rhetorical and metaphori cal depth to Stokes' writing; when first published

The Quattro Cento was presented in part as an ex

ercise in creative writing, a demonstration of the

abilities of creative fantasies to reveal the roots

of Italian art. The opening chapter of Stones of Rimini, published in 1935 as a companion to The

Quattro Cento, consists of an elaboration of the

qualities of Venetian stone, followed by a 14-page

chapter on The Pleasures of Limestone. No other writer has managed to evoke with such richness

and depth the qualities of one particular artistic

medium and its incrustations of geology, history and politics.

These are admirable qualities of his writing, but

this is also where the difficulties begin in trying to take his work as a model for a possible 'other'

kind of art history. For Stokes' writing is too in

dividual, too rooted in his own personal aesthet

ic absorption in stone, for it to serve as means of

constructing a shared community of knowledge. As a reader one has the sense of being an outside

observer, almost of being an intruder into an in

tensely personal set of contemplations. As David

Carrier has observed in relation to Stokes' later

writings on carving, "Carving is made meaning ful for him because it is placed within a story of

personal development [...] we can understand

the [carved] work only by learning Stokes's life

history," and, more generally, "To understand

Stokes's account of art's presentness we need to

know about his childhood memories, his broth

er's fate, and the birth of his son."59 A similar issue

attends the work of Longhi; his descriptions of

the paintings of Piero della Francesca, Caravaggio, Artemisia and Orazio Gentileschi or of any of the

other artists he turns to are likewise rooted in a

highly subjective aesthetic response that can nei

ther be challenged nor confirmed. To refer to the

concave space of the interior of Constantine's tent

as possessing "una concavit? di collinosa dolcezza"

adds to the aesthetic and semantic depth of Piero's

painting, but cannot serve as prompt to further

historical investigation. Stokes opens up novel possibilities of analysis,

but the extremely personal nature of his identifica

tion of Quattro Cento 'presentness' raises further

questions: he detects the Quattro Cento quality in a variety of monuments, from the Sforza palace in Pesaro, to the Tempio Malatesta, or Alfonso of

Aragon's Triumphal Archway (Fig. 6) in Naples. But because this category is not supported by any reference to anything external to Stokes' own re

sponses, these buildings could, equally, be seen as

embodying completely different aesthetic princi

ples. Indeed, Stokes' 'Quattro Centism' is argu

ably as reductive as any other aesthetic term of

analysis; for all its suggestiveness, it functions as

a formal category that he employs to create an al

ternative taxonomic ordering of the Renaissance

architectural monuments of Italy.

16



6 Francesco Laurana, Triumphal Archway for Alfonso V, ca. 1443, Castel Nuovo, Naples

Despite the attention to the material present ness of artworks, Stokes' writing, paradoxically, draws the reader away from the object and to

wards his own artful rhetoric. I already cited a

small excerpt from his description of the Verroc

chio lavabo, which gives a sense of this, and it is

evident, too in the following passage from The

Stones of Rimini: "Istrian marble blackens in the

shade, is snow of salt-white where exposed to the sun. Light and shade are thus recorded, abstract

ed, intensified, solidified. Matter is dramatised in stone [...] it is the sea that thus stands petri fied, sharp and continuous till up near the sky. For

this Istrian stone seems compact of salt's bright yet shaggy crystals. Air eats into it, the bright ness remains. [...] Again, if in fantasy the stones

of Venice appear as the waves' p?trification, then

Venetian glass, compost of Venetian sand and wa

ter, expresses the taut curvature of the cold under

sea, the slow, oppressed yet brittle curves of dimly translucent water."60

There is a poetic beauty about much of Stokes'

writing, which shows up the dreariness of much

academic art historical literature, but it is too id

iosyncratic, too embedded in personal response,

lacking any historical compass, for it to contrib ute to a stock of shared communal and transfer

able knowledge concerning Renaissance art and

architecture. And this throws up the very issue of

what art history is for. I shall return to this ques tion later, but turn first to the contemporary writ

ing of Mieke Bal.

Mieke Bal

The concern with presentness in the work of

Stokes and Longhi might now be regarded as

deeply problematic. Since the critique of Western

logocentrism by, amongst others, Jacques Der

rida, meaning and perception have come to be

understood as structured around a sequence of

delays.61 Ironically, given Stokes' concern with

psychoanalysis, this can be traced back to Freud's

analyses of the constitutive function of deferral

('Nachtr?glichkeit') which has come to play a

fruitful role in much recent and contemporary art

historical writing.62 It is this epistemologica! shift,

17



and its consequences, that forms the central pre

occupation of Mieke Bal. Having started out her career as a literary critic and theorist - her earli est works were on narrative theory

- Bal's work

has come increasingly to focus on art and visual culture.63 In the 1990s she established a reputa tion within art history on the basis of her work on Rembrandt and Caravaggio, and has also writ ten widely on contemporary artists such as Lou ise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Balthus or Olafur

Eliasson.64 The Amsterdam School for Cultural

Analysis, in which she occupies a leading position, has also come to play an important role in chal

lenging traditional art historical practice. A recurrent preoccupation of Bal has been the

semantic complexity and indeterminacy of the

image. Following the lead of Derrida, Bal fore

grounds the uncontrollable dissemination of

meaning in paintings, her writings speculating on

the undecidable semiosis of the image. I cite an

instance, her reading of Vermeer's Woman Hold

ing a Balance. "Since the part of the woman's

dress that is illuminated is also the part that cov ers her womb, it may, through metonymy, repre sent the slit that stands for that archaic opening of the womb - the navel [...] we may come to as

sociate the woman in this painting with the preg nant Madonna [...] The woman's headdress and the blue colour of her mantle may then be seen as

emphasizing the visual similarity in the distribu tion of space between her and God in The Last

Judgement - a text whose embedded position un

derlines the intertextual status of the embedding work."65

One notes the tentative tone of her writing -

the introduction of the permissive mood by the use of the modal verb "may." What Bal deliber

ately leaves out is the question of which of these

alternatives one might opt for. As she states: "The

point is not to convince readers of its appropri ateness or truth, but to offer the speculative pos

sibility of demonstrating polysemy in principle."66 Indeed, elsewhere she fixes on Danae's navel in

Rembrandt's eponymous painting as a metaphor for such instability, a visual equivalent for what

Derrida had described by means of the figure of the hymen.67

Attribution of meaning is grounded in social

and power relations, and opening up pictorial

meaning to a radical undecidability forces the in

terpreter to reveal their own position in opting for one set of meaning over another. One s subject po sition as an interpreter

- an expository agent, Bal terms it - has to be declared and made transparent.

Her own writing exhibits such an approach: "At

the moment when I became really excited about

the painting, became a factor in its game", and

the first person pronoun became markedly more

evident in her discussion.68

Bal has made an important intervention in art

history, demonstrating on the basis of historical

examples many of the theoretical tenets of Derri

dean deconstruction. And of course she is correct

in highlighting the process of polysemy, and in

stressing that the choice of one meaning over an

other is a function of other extrinsic factors, such as the expository agent's subject position within a network of power relations, or the determining role of disciplinary paradigms and habits. Yet her

work also presents a number of difficulties. First, while it problematises the reading of images, it re

lies on a strangely Enlightenment commitment to

the idea that one's own subject position can, on the

contrary, be rendered transparent. With regard to

the self-identification above, can she really be sure

of having identified correctly the moment at which she became excited about Vermeer's painting? Per

haps there was some earlier moment of which she was unaware, which was repressed within the as

sumed objectivity of her discourse, but which was

always already informing her writing. Can she be sure what the basis of that excitement might be?

And at what moment did she become aware of the need to disclose her own investment in the image? For all her emphasis on subjectivity as a factor in

the interpretative process, Bal's writing is a little too self-controlled, too self-aware for it to be a

convincing performance of her own theoretical

position. What is the subject position of someone

wishing to foreground polysemy? What is their

location within the network of social and discur sive power? What determines their decision to de scribe such a location with the language that they do, rather than by employing an entirely different

terminology? Foregrounding the subjectivity of

18



the interpreter in this way risks stepping out into

the quicksand of reflexivity that has preoccupied

philosophical thinking since Kant, and which has never been resolved, because unresolvable.69

There is a point, too, at which such self-reflec

tion, and in particular, making it into a feature of

the text, lapses into a rhetorical mannerism. In the case of Bal this includes, for example: the author

ostentatiously referring to her own attitudes, the use of rhetorical questions, extensive self-quota tion, the recurrent highlighting of small details

such as a nail, a navel, a dagger (another Freud

ian trope) that prompt speculation about the

(im)possibility of reading and provide visual met

aphors for Derridean conceptions of diff?rance, the hymen, dissemination.70 At other times ap

parently meaningless details become the point of

inversion, functioning as the axis of new readings. Thus a blot of ink in a Rembrandt, "once semi

otically framed, even becomes the central, crucial

sign of the image, the one that is capable of turn

ing the recognized story around and offering a

new one [...]."71

Bal's primary concern is to draw attention to

the treacherous waters of art historical interpreta tion; constructing the intertextual web of mean

ings within which the image and its interpreter can become caught, her aim is to destabilise the

act of reading. Yet the figure of the interpreter is a curiously ahistorical one. There is also little sense of the pragmatics of meaning, i.e. of the re

source of meanings available at a particular time, or of the meanings that might accrue to images in particular (historical or contemporary) situa

tions. Indeed, Bal distances herself from the his

torical and theoretical commitments that such an

approach would imply, and this is part of an ex

plicit series of criticisms of the values of art his

tory to which she gives voice. She criticises the

discipline on account of its desire to established

historical sequences, or to seek historical prec edents: "[...] iconography [...] construes the an

tecedent as a sounding board against which the

posterior visual work can stand out in its differ

ence, the narrative of anteriority uses the prior text or image as a measuring stick."72 The prob lem of such an emphasis, for Bal, is that it detracts

from the sense of originality of the work of art. As

she states, "it defeats the point of visual art which is not to reiterate but to innovate, to offer experi ences and insights, sights and sites that we did not as yet possess. This has nothing to do with roman

tic originality, but a lot to do with art's efficacy (rather than 'essence'); with an understanding of art as process; with cultural life at the crossroads of significant events."73 In other words, art history robs the art work of its vitality, and although Bal's

work is ostensibly to do with the theory of inter

pretation, this comment reveals her final concern:

the articulation of aesthetic response. Such an op

position between art history and aesthetics is not so straightforward however; relationality to other,

prior, works of art has always been a central aspect of gauging aesthetic response. One might think,

here, of the importance attached to the 'exempla riness' of the works of genius by Kant or, indeed, the central role played by relationality in the writ

ings of Longhi.74 As Bal herself admits, the "nar

rative of anteriority" plays a vital role in provid

ing some means of establishing the way in which

this artwork offers these particular new insights and experiences, but having first critiqued cer

tain types of narrative ("I know of no writing on

Bernini's Apollo and Daphne from 1622-1625, at

the Borghese Gallery in Rome, for example, that

does not 'explain' or 'describe' the sculpture in terms of Ovid's story"75) she rejects the idea of

any such narratives. Having initially critiqued the

resistance, among many art historians, to the idea

of the ambiguity of works of art, Bal embarks on a

trajectory that takes her further and further away from the discipline; her critical comments end up

having little relevance to the historical study of art. This raises more general questions to do with

the meaning and nature of art history, but before

turning to these I explore the work of one final

author: Georges Didi-Huberman.

Georges Didi-Huberman

A central pre-occupation of Didi-Huberman's

writing has long been the critique of the episte

mologica! and ontological foundations of art his

tory. He has repeatedly attacked its assumptions the image is accessible to visual description and

19



interpretation. In contrast, as Didi-Huberman states: "C'est un fait d'exp?rience sans cesse r??

prouv?, in?puisable, lancinant: la peinture, qui n'a

pas de coulisses, qui montre tout, tout en m?me

temps, sur un m?me superficie - la peinture est

dou?e d'une ?trange et formidable capacit? de dis

simulation. Elle ne cessera jamais d'?tre l?, devant

nous, comme un lointain, une puissance, jamais comme l'acte tout ? fait."76

For Didi-Huberman art historians have de

vised a number of strategies for disavowing the evasiveness of pictorial meaning; one, first pio neered by Giovanni Morelli, is to adopt the mo

tif of the detail, based on the idea that the deter

mination of meaning depends on close attention to the picture.77 Another is to establish the causal

chains of influence, which seek to tie the artwork into a determinate sequence; a further strategy is

the iconographie method of tying the work down to its symbolic tropes and figures, the meaning of which can be determined through their place

within a stable lexicon of visual symbols. Under

pinning the resort to the detail is a positivistic

epistemology: "il postule que tout le visible peut ?tre d?crit, d?coup? en ses elements (comme les

mots d'une phrase, les lettres d'un mot) et compt? comme tout; que d?crire signifie bien voir, et que bien voir signifie voir vrai [...]."78

In place of this Didi-Huberman proposes an al

ternative approach that hesitates to impose mean

ing on the image and does not equate viewing with

knowing, indeed recognises that viewing is itself

governed by ambiguity, uncertainty and the de

ferral of meaning, and that the power of images derives precisely from such destabilising of vision

and meaning, rather than from their ability to

transmit knowledge about the visual world. Such an approach, he states, "exige donc un regard qui ne s'approcherait pas seulement pour discerner et

reconna?tre, pour d?nommer ? tout prix ce qu'il saisit - mais qui, d'abord, s'?loignerait un peu et

s'abstiendrait de tout clarifier tout de suite. Quel que chose comme une attention flottante, une lon

gue suspension du moment de conclure [...]."79 The image is to be understood as a rupture

("d?chirure") in the field of the visible, a site of

indeterminacy; in place of the idea of the image as a visual symbol

- central to the humanist tradi

7 Fra Angelico, Detail of Noli me tangere, 1437-1446, Con vent of San Marco, Florence

tion of art history - Didi-Huberman substitutes

that of the image as symptom. This use of psy

choanalytical terminology implies that the image is meant to be understood as the index of the un

conscious of the artist, but Didi-Huberman ex

plicitly rejects such a reading; the Freudian con

nection is solely in terms of the images resistance to interpretation, which bears comparison to the

multiple ambiguities of the dreamwork.80 As Didi

Huberman states, paraphrasing Freud, "le symp t?me [...] se pr?te justement ? une dialectique de

la dissimulation."81

Didi-Huberman focuses on artworks that ex

emplify such visual and semantic indeterminacy, and his work foregrounds in an astonishing man

ner the visual and semantic ambiguities of the im

age, casting fundamental doubt on the familiar

and traditional art historical trope of close read

ing. An example of this can be seen in the extend

ed discussions in his monograph on Fra Angeli co.82 The latter is the painter of dissemblance par excellence; in his Noli me tangere (Fig. 7) Fra An

gelico paints a number of red blotches that fune

20



^m^S^ 'mt^?' j^^^^P^^ft v ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 1

'

8 Fra Angelico, Annunciation, 1441, Convent of San Marco, Florence

tion, in turn, as signifiers of the stigmata of Christ

and as flowers in the meadow. They are painted

identically; Fra Angelico makes the blotches rep resent both, as if to suggest that Christ is sowing his stigmata in the soil of the mundane garden, a

reading that binds together the allegorical and mi

metic registers of the painting. Yet more is stake

here. First, Fra Angelico is using the ambiguity of

these blotches - are they stigmata, flowers, or just blotches? - to displace pictorial meaning. Second, such a displacement of meaning is rooted in his

immersion in Thomist thought and in the nega tive theology of Dionysus the Areopagite, with

their concern of the non-representability of the

divine mystery: dissemblance and pictorial ambi

guity points towards the impossibility of such a

goal. In this respect Fra Angelico stands, for Didi

Huberman, as the opposite to the pictorial regime

emerging in the Renaissance, which found theo

retical expression in Alberti's De Pictura and also

provided a visual analogue to the practice of art

history itself - with its scientific pretensions and

its claims to clarity.

Although he privileges ambiguity within An

gelico's images and hence works to deny the pos

sibility of traditional iconological readings, Didi

Huberman's study is in other respects an orthodox

exercise in art historical scholarship; concerned

21



9 Jan Vermeer, Detail of The Lacemaker, 1669-1670, Louvre, Paris

10 Jan Vermeer, Detail of The Lacemaker, 1669-1670, Louvre, Paris

with laying out the limits of interpretability in re

lation to the horizon of readings available in the

fifteenth century, it anchors the reading of Fra

Angelico to the reconstruction of a specific his

torical context of philosophical and theological

thought. The passing suggestion of a correlation between

the epistemology of the discipline of art history and the pictorial logic of the Albertian quattro cento implies the need for a different kind of inter

pretative discourse in order to be able to approach

images such as Ang?licos. However, Didi-Huber man has a more general critique of art history in

his sights, and elsewhere the Florentine painter serves as the prompt for a much more wide-rang

ing set of speculations on the nature and limits of art historical interpretation. In Devant l'Image his

discussion of Fra Angelico focuses on the enigma of Ang?licos Annunciation fresco (Fig.8) in San

Marco. In particular, the vacuity of the image, the

minimalism of the interior of the cell, the absence

of variet?, to use an Albertian term, presents an

interpretative dilemma. On the one hand it has

been seen as an indication of naivety on the part of Angelico, on the other, as a visual symbol of

divine mystery. Yet Didi-Huberman suggests an

alternative, namely, a suspension of the demand

that the image should 'mean' something. In his reading of Fra Angelico Didi-Huberman

dismantles the process of looking in order to dis

turb the readers ability to identify the object of

vision. Attention to details has usually served as

the key to definitive interpretation, but it is pre

cisely at this point, argues Didi-Huberman, that

the meaning and identity of the picture becomes most unstable. Yet it is in examination of the de

tails of a painting, of an image, where meaning

begins to unravel. Following on from the discus

sion of the red blotches of Fra Angelico I take as another example Didi-Huberman's reading of

Vermeer's The Lacemaker (Fig. 9). The focus of

the discussion here is the detail of what the lace

maker is actually doing, for although the picture as whole would appear to imply that it she is ob

viously sewing lace, closer inspection reveals, he

argues, that matters are not at all that clear-cut. Of

particular interest is the thread (Fig. 10). The dis

cussion is a long passage, but it is worth quoting in

its entirety: "En quoi consiste-t-elle, exactement?

C'est un coulee de peinture rouge. Associ?e, l?, ?

une autre, blanche, moins circonvolu?e, mais non

22



moins stup?fiante. Elle surgit du cousin, ? gau che de la dentelli?re. Elle s'effiloche d?raisonna

blement, devant nous, comme une affirmation su

bite, sans calcul rep?rable, de l'existence vertical et frontale du tableau. Le trac? y semble divaguer; son schema lui-m?me fait tache. Les emp?tements,

quoique subtils, les modulations de valeurs, tout

semble donn? comme fruit de hazard; une pein ture toute liquide, qui aurait ?t? en quelque sorte

laiss?e ? elle-m?me [...] nous voyons bien qu'il n'y a l? rien ? voir qu'un filet, un effilochement insen

s? de peinture [...] ce filet de vermilion deviant, ?

strictement parler, inidentifiable, sauf ? dire qu'il est de la peinture en acte; sa forme est domin?e

par sa mati?re, son statut repr?sentatif est domin?

par la dimension du quasi, pr?caire en cela, ni dis

tinct ni clair: il imite peut-?tre ?du fil' mais il n'est

pas d?peint comme du fil'; donc il est peint, peint comme de la peinture."83

The colour spills out of any determinable form

into a base materiality that defies interpretation. In his polemics against the art historical search

for meaning Didi-Huberman repeatedly turns to

the destabilising effects of colour; this is linked

to a persistent concern with the work of Merleau

Ponty in whose phenomenological investigations colour -

specifically, the colour red - also plays an

important role.84 However, it also bears compari son with Julia Kristeva's analysis of colour in the

history of art; here the denaturalisation of colour

by modernist artists such as van Gogh or Matisse

is part of a project to negate meaning by drawing on colour's appeal to the pre-symbolic drives of

the unconscious.85

Like Kristeva, Didi-Huberman is working

through the implications of Freudian thinking for

the understanding of interpretation, but he also

has more directly art historical objectives. His

discussion of the vermilion in Vermeer is part of a

longer polemic against Svetlana Alpers; specifical

ly, he targets her reading of Dutch art as concerned

with a kind of visual mapping, an art of describing, to use her famous phrase.86 Analysing other paint

ings by Vermeer such as his View of Delft (1658?

1660) or The Girl with a Red Hat (1665), Didi-Hu berman again takes apart their mimetic legibility; the art of describing is precisely what Dutch paint

ing - indeed painting in general

- is not.

For Didi-Huberman the compulsion to submit

works to art historical interpretation, to cfix' their

meaning, finds its most powerful expression in

the iconographical methodology of Panofsky. The

latter's creation of an interpretative 'system' seems

designed to minimise the possibilities of semantic

slippage or indeterminacy. Didi-Huberman con

sequently draws a marked contrast between Pa

nofskian iconology and the intellectual enterprise of Aby Warburg.87 Indeed, Aby Warburg is seen

as providing a kind of counterpoint to the reduc

tive iconology of Panofsky (who, for Didi-Huber

man, stands for the entire discipline). In his penetrating and exhaustive study of War

burg, Didi-Huberman covers a wide range of is

sues, considering Warburg's place within art his

tory, his intellectual debt to anthropology and his

relation to Ludwig Binswanger, at whose clinic in

Kreuzlingen he was a patient in the 1920s.88 As

with Didi-Huberman's other works, the symptom is again a central topic, and particular prominence is accorded to Warburg's notion of 'Nachleben', a

kind of collective recurring unconscious, which

Didi-Huberman reads as a symptomal disruption of time: "Ce que Freud a d?couvert dans le symp t?me - et Warburg dans la survivance - n'est autre

qu'un r?gime discontinu de la temporalit? [,..]."89 The constant reappearance of repressed trau

mas from a distant past - their recurrence in a

variety of symbolic images -

disrupts the clean

chronologies of art history, and also challenges the measured, contained interpretation of Renais sance culture associated with Panofsky. Warburg's

tracing of the migration of symbolic images of fear

-pathos formulae - across time and space, indeed,

his concern with their ability to leap across great

temporal and spatial intervals, becomes for Didi

Huberman the model of an alternative theory of

the image that dispenses with many of the most

problematic aspects of orthodox art history.90 Al

though persuasive, this is, however, only a partial account; Warburg's published writings always in

cluded a meticulous scholarly apparatus that dis

played an exhaustive concern with historical and

chronological minutiae of the kind dismissed by Didi-Huberman. While the transhistorical image

plays a key role in Warburg's thinking, a central

strand of his project is to consider how such an

23



image is translated and modified at particular his

torical moments.91 Moreover, from his first ma

jor work, the doctoral thesis of 1893 on Botticelli,

through to later texts, such as study on Reforma

tion propaganda in sixteenth-century Germany,

Warburg unearthed masses of primary material

precisely to legitimise certain interpretations as

authoritative. There is little of the sense of ambi

guity or uncertainty valued by Didi-Huberman.

It might also be noted that Warburg's project was

only ever conceived as a particular thematic in

vestigation within the much wider field of art his

tory (or, indeed, Kulturwissenschaft), and not as a

replacement for a vastly larger discipline. In one

sense, of course, this is irrelevant to Didi-Huber

man's own goals, yet it highlights potential diffi

culties in his claims on behalf ofWarburg. Didi-Huberman undermines many basic as

sumptions about paintings, painterly representa tion and art historical interpretation. Yet is pre

cisely where he is most critical of art history that

the difficulties attending his own project begin to

emerge. In her study of Dutch painting, for ex

ample, Svetlana Alpers attempts to describe a dis

tinctive culture of pictorial representation, plac

ing the images of Vermeer and his contemporaries into some kind of social context. This is, with

the exception of his monograph on Fra Angeli co, missing in Didi-Huberman's writing. In Didi

Huberman's work there is little sense of the con

crete historical task facing Vermeer or indeed Fra

Angelico, or of the nature of his or her singular response to questions of pictorial representation

bequeathed by earlier painters. Didi-Huberman

discusses Fra Angelico, for example, in terms of

larger abstractions - chief among which are the

opposition between medieval and renaissance

(modern). Whether dealing with the interpreta tion of Fra Angelico, Vermeer, or any other painter or image-maker, the conceptual problems are the

same, with an attenuated sense of the historical

specificity of each of their work.92 Of course, in

Didi-Huberman's defence it might be simply stat

ed that this is a typically art historical response, which fundamentally misunderstands the nature

of his project. However, the question then has to

be posed as to what kind of alternative art history he envisages.

Didi-Huberman's emphasis on the semantic in

determinacy of the image provides an important corrective to many of the guiding assumptions of

traditional art historical investigation. However, even here criticisms can be voiced, and he even

provides the tools of critique. In his discussion of

Vermeer's The Lacemaker he states that the rea

son we read the vermilion paint as 'red thread' is

because of the larger context of the painting. Spe

cifically: ??[...] l'?conomie g?n?rale d'une oeuvre

comme celle de Vermeer est une ?conomie mim?

tique [...]. C'est ainsi que, malgr? tout, nous croi rons y voir clair: nous reconna?trons, sans presque

y r?fl?chir, du fil, du fil rouge qui s'?pand hors d'un

n?cessaire ? couture."93 In other words, the desta

bilising detail of the "pan" ("patch") of vermilion

only achieves its effect if we suspend the overall

representational regime of the picture. With this

apparently minor incidental comment Didi-Hu

berman opens up the entire question of the prag matics of viewing and interpretation. We then ask, under what conditions, what kind of reading does

the vermilion patch disrupt the mimetic reference

of the painting? This is, of course, a question that was already being addressed some 40 years ago

by Gombrich, who examined the ways in which

cultural expectations literally determine what the

viewer sees, or at least think they see. Drawing on

the communication theory of Shannon and Weav

er, Gombrich explored the ways in which read

ing - whether of text or of image

- compensates

for 'blanks' and constructs meaning as if they did

not exist.94

In speaking of Gombrich, I am not trying to

establish a counter-theory to that of Didi-Hu

berman, most especially since Gombrich's un

derstanding of images and interpretation has it

self been the object of a sustained critique.95 On

this particular point, however, his work implies that the significance of the detail within the paint

ing as a whole is less than Didi-Huberman's argu ment might suggest. Given that the undecidabil

ity of the vermilion only becomes apparent upon

suspending its representational logic, it seems that

Didi-Huberman is not offering a theory of inter

pretation at all, but rather, an account of aesthetic

experience; his call for a detached gaze that re

sists the temptation to search for meaning recalls

24



a rather more familiar notion, namely, the disin

terested observer of Kant's aesthetic theory. Didi

Huberman depicts his idealised viewer as opting to occupy a space of ambiguity, where the mean

ing of the image, even its physical identity, is put into suspension. This suggests a lineage that can

be traced back through Derrida to Barthesian no

tions o? jouissance, but it also evokes the free play of the imagination and the understanding that

was so central to the Kantian formulation of aes

thetic experience.96 In other words, the art histo

rian seems to be replaced by the aesthete, and with

this we are brought back to many of the problems we observed in Stokes and Longhi. I shall con

sider these within the context of the wider issues

that the work of all four writers I have examined

raises.

Concluding Thoughts

In a recent commentary on Adrian Stokes Michael

Ann Holly asks: "Surely it is not too absurd to

wonder why we do not write today as Stokes once

did", adding later that "[...] the romance of writ

ing about the past has been squeezed out of our

profession, and I think that is why I have turned

to Stokes to put some of it back in again."97 Im

plicit in her question is an acceptance of the no

tion that art history does indeed constitute a kind

of taming of the image. This taming can take

place at a number of levels. It can be at the level of

emotional response - where the affective encoun

ter with art works is repressed under the guise of

connoisseurial detachment, or buried under the

apparatus of dry 'scientific' scholarship. It can

also be at the semantic level, where the image is

controlled through its immersion in hermeneutic

and historical grids and systems. One might broaden Holly's question in order

to consider how, in general, art history might be

enhanced by a poetics of the image of the kind

undertaken by the authors explored here. On one

level it is clear that their work serves as an impor tant critique of the ease with which art histori

cal writing can lapse into turgid prose reliant on

stale interpretative procedures. On another level,

however, it can be argued that these four authors

undertake a different kind of taming, in which the

artwork is used as a prompt for a certain kind of

speculation on subjective response and the limits of

interpretation. No longer lost in the hermeneutic

jargon of art history, they become lost in another

kind of discourse, in which the language of repre sentation blots out the object of discourse.

Of course, to view the issue as merely one of

art historical stylistics risks offering a superficial

interpretation of the significance of these writers

for the practice of art history. I have on several

occasions highlighted a difficulty that attends the

work of each author, namely, its intensely personal nature. This is most evident in the case of Longhi and Stokes, but it is present, too, in Didi-Huber

man and Bal. This stems from an important ap

proach shared by all of them; their work is less an

exercise in art historical investigation and rather more the attempt to objectify their own aesthetic

response to varying types of artwork. The ques tion is then no longer one of rhetoric but instead

focuses on the role of aesthetics within art his

tory.

In order to address this I wish to turn to a no

tion I have referred to at several points: that of art

history as a collective enterprise. This can be un

derstood in a number of different ways. First, one

can point to a Kuhnian notion of scholarly en

deavour as governed by institutionally and socially constituted paradigms.98 Such paradigms outline not only the object domain and dominant meth

odologies of the discipline in question, but also its

working procedures and basic epistemological is

sues, including what counts as evidence and how.

Other authors, such as Imre Lakatos have laid a

similar emphasis on the collective basis of schol

arly research that relies on a shared understanding of basic norms of argumentation and demonstra

tion. 99 Within this analytical framework we can

think of writers such as Bai or Didi-Huberman as trying to effect a paradigm shift, to employ a

Kuhnian metaphor, reshaping the boundaries, as

sumptions and procedures of art history. The dif

ficulty in thinking about their work in such terms

(much less that of Stokes or Longhi) is that while

the paradigm may shift, the collective basis of the

discipline persists. Indeed, it is meaningless to talk

of a paradigm as anything other than a commu

25



nally binding framework. Seen as such, it is diffi

cult to identify what paradigm is being established in place of the old art history; no set of proposi tions about Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Piero della Francesca or Vermeer is being advanced that could

be the subject of debate. Stokes's observation that

Verrocchio's lavabo, for example, displays "neces

sitous thongs and twines bound for the light from

stirred under-consciousness" can play little role in

any body of knowledge, other than as the articu

lation of a specific aesthetic response. Alternative

ly, one might ask what kind of discourse art his

tory might be in which Stokes's poetic description could comprise a body of knowledge? Although it

opens up possibilities for a new aesthetic sensibil

ity, it does not, for example, provide insights that

would generate further interpretations of Verroc

chio. With regard to Longhi, his lasting contribu tion to art history as a collective activity lay rather

more in the orthodox and traditional area of attri

butions than in his expansion of the range of de

scriptive rhetoric available. A similar observation

could be made of Bal and Didi-Huberman; they offer a meta-theoretical reflection on art historical

interpretation, but much else about the artists they

discuss remains the same. This is not merely due, in the case of Bal, for instance, to the conserva

tism of much Rembrandt scholarship. Rather, it

is because the open up of a space of interpreta tive possibilities without committing to a specific

reading that might be the object of contention. It

is possible to re-orient the reading of Rembrandt,

Vermeer, Fra Angelico and others around appar

ently random ink blots, patches of vermilion, in

significant nails, and so forth. What is not made

evident is what might be gained, in art historical

terms, from such interpretative reversals.

Considering the four authors I have examined, it appears that while basic weaknesses within art

history are exposed, constructing a counter-dis course creates as many difficulties as it solves. The

image remains 'tamed,' albeit in a different way. What does emerge out of this discussion is the

need to consider not simply the contribution of

individual authors, but also more fundamental is sues to do with the status of art history as a shared

enterprise and the implications that might have for a critical assessment of how art historical knowl

edge is generated, what 'knowledge' in this con

text means, and to whom it is addressed.

Notes

1 Paul Barolsky, Writing Art History, in: The Art

Bulletin, 78, 3, 1996, 398. 2 Paul Barolsky, Art History as Fiction, in: Artibus

et Hist?ri??, 17,34, 1996, 17.

3 See, for example Michael Podro, The Critical Hi storians of Art, London/New Haven 1982; Do

nald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History. Meditati ons on a Coy Science, London /New Haven 1989;

Mark Cheetham, eds. Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, The Subjects of Art History. Histo rical Objects in Contemporary Perspective, Cam

bridge 1998; Keith Moxey, The Practice of Persua sion. Paradox and Power in Art History, Ithaca

N. Y. 2001; Hubert Locher, Kunstgeschichte als

historische Theorie der Kunst 1750-1950, M?n

chen 2001; Regine Prange, Die Geburt der Kunst

geschichte, Berlin 2004. 4 Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, Lon

don/New Haven 1989, 83.

5 See August Schmarsow, Grundbegriffe der

Kunstwissenschaft, Leipzig 1905; Hans Tietze, Die Methode der Kunstgeschichte, Leipzig 1913;

Heinrich W?lfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grund

begriffe. Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst, M?nchen 1915; Robert He

dicke, Methodenlehre der Kunstgeschichte. Ein Handbuch f?r Studierende, Strassburg 1924; Jo sef Strzygowski, Grunds?tzliches und Tats?chli

ches, in: Die Kunstwissenschaft der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, ed. Johannes Jahn, Leip zig 1924, 157-81; Erwin Panofsky, Introduction, in: Studies in Iconology, Oxford 1939. On the

question of 'strenge Kunstwissenschaft' see Hans

Sedlmayr, Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft, in: Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen, I, 1931,

7-32; Eberhard Hempel, Ist ,eine strenge Kunst

wissenschaft' m?glich? in: Zeitschrift f?r Kunst

geschichte, 3, 3, 1934, 155-163. 6 "The best art history I can think of is one in which

the word 'beautiful' never appears." Moriz Thau

sing, Die Stellung der Kunstgeschichte als Wis

senschaft, in: idem, Wiener Kunstbriefe, Leipzig

1884,5. 7 See, for example, Preziosi (as in Note 4).

26



8 One of the first to comment on this was, of course,

Svetlana Alpers, whose The Art of Describing, Chicago 1983, offered an alternative interpreta tive model that dispensed with iconological con cerns with symbolic and allegorical meaning.

9 Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History, in: The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. idem, Oxford 1998,521.

10 Preziosi (as in Note 9), 519. See too Preziosi, Brain of the Earth's Body: Art, Museums, and the Phan

tasms of Modernity, Minneapolis 2003. 11 Johann Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des

Alterthums, Dresden 1764. This has been explored by Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal. Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, London/New

Haven 1994. Whitney Davis, Winckelmann's

'Homosexual' Teleologies, in: Sexuality in An

cient Art, ed. Natalie Kampen, New York 1996, 262-275.

12 Whitney Davis, Homoerotic Art Collection from 1750 to 1920, in: Art History, 24, 2, 2001, 252.

13 See Roberto Longhi, I Pittori Futuristi (1913) and La Scultura Futurista di Boccioni (1914), in: idem, Opere Complete. Tomo I: Scritti Giovanili 1912?

1922, Florenz 1961, 47-54 and 133-162. 14 German translations of his work include: Kurze,

aber wahre Geschichte der italienischen Kunst,

K?ln 2002; Caravaggio, Dresden 1993; Venezia nische Malerei, Berlin 1995; Masolino und Ma

saccio, Berlin 1992. English editions of his work include: Three Studies. Masolino and Masaccio,

Caravaggio and his Forerunners, Carlo Braccesco,

ed. David Tabbat, New York 1995 and Piero della

Francesca, transi. David Tabbat, New York 2000.

15 Eduard H?ttinger, Stilpluralismus im Werk von Roberto Longhi. Ein kunsthistoriographischer Versuch, in: idem, Portr?ts und Profile. Zur Ge

schichte der Kunstgeschichte, Sankt Gallen 1992, 210. Amongst Italian writers on Longhi see, for ex

ample, Gianfranco Contini, Contributi Longhia

ni, in: Altri Esercizi (1942-1971), Turin 1972; Pier Vicenzo Mengaldo, Note sul Linguaggio Critico di Roberto Longhi, in: idem, La Tradizione del

Novecento, Milan 1975; Giovanni Romano, Storie

dell'Arte. Toesca, Longhi, Wittkower, Previtali,

Rom 1998; Giorgio Patrizi, Narrare l'Immagine. La Tradizione degli Scrittori d'Arte, Rom 2000. The critic Contini had a long and complex relation with Longhi and modelled his work, in certain re

spects, on the approach of Longhi. On the relation

between the two see: Manuela Marchesini, Scrit

tori in Funzione d'Altro: Longhi, Contini, Gadda, Modena 2005.

16 See, for example, Denis Mahon, Contrasts in Art

Historical Method: Two Recent Approaches to

Caravaggio, in: The Burlington Magazine, 95,603,

Juni 1953, 212-220; Per Jonas Nordhagen, Rober to Longhi (1890-1970) and His Method: Connois

seurship as a Science, in: Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, 68,2, 1999, 99-116.

17 Roberto Longhi, Proposte per una critica d'arte, in: Paragone, January 1950, 1, 5-19.

18 "The work of art, from a Greek vase to the Sistine

Chapel ceiling, is always a masterpiece in exquisi tely relative terms. The work of art does not exist

in isolation, it is always a relation to something else. To begin with: at the very least, a relation to

another work of art. A work of art isolated in the world would not even be understood as a human

product, but would be guarded with reverence and horror, like magic, like a taboo, like the work of God or of a magician, not of man [...] the sense

of a relation makes a critical response necessary. The response includes not only the connection of

one work to another, but that also between the

work and the world, society, the economy, reli

gion, politics and whatever else takes place.", in:

Roberto Longhi, Proposte per una critica d'arte,

(as in Note 17), 16. 19 "To establish the relation between two works is

also to establish the concepts of art history, as I at least understand it, that is, nothing other than the

development of figurative styles [...]", in: Roberto

Longhi, Breve ma veridica storia dell'arte italia

na, Florenz, 1980, 36. These were notes originally written 1913-1914.

20 "[...] the relations between one work to another

inevitably dispose themselves in a historically de

veloping series [...]", in: Roberto Longhi, Review

of E. Petraccone, Luca Giordano, in: LArte, 1920, 92-93.

21 Julius von Schlosser,,Stilgeschichte4 und ,Sprach geschichte' der bildenden Kunst. Ein R?ckblick, in: Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische Abteilung, M?nchen, 1935, 3-39.

22 Schlosser (as in Note 21), 22. 23 The key work by Croce was Estetica come Scien

za dell'Espressione e Linguistica Generale: Teoria

e Storia, Bari 1908.

24 "[...] the real and true 'history' of all art can mean

nothing but the torch race of eminent creative in

dividuals, in: Schlosser (as in Note 21), 8. Schlosser was tireless in his efforts to disseminate the ideas of Croce across Austria and Germany, translating

much of Croce's work into German. Examples in

clude: Goethe, Z?rich 1920; Randbemerkungen eines Philosophen zum Weltkriege, 1914-20, Z? rich 1922; Gesammelte Philosophische Schriften,

T?bingen 1929. 25 "We think [...] it is possible to and useful to esta

blish and represent the formal structure of the

27



work in clear and appropriate words, with a kind of verbal transfer that might have literary value, but only ever [...] insofar as it maintains a con

stant relationship to the work it aims to depict." in: Longhi (as in Note 20), 93.

26 As H?ttinger remarks, ?Roberto Longhi hat nie die N?tigung gesp?rt, sich systematisch und ex

plizit ?ber die Prinzipien seiner Kennerschaft, seiner Arbeit ?berhaupt, auszusprechen." in:

H?ttinger (as in Note 15), 219. 27 As Schlosser wrote: ?Longhis eigenth?mlicher,

oft fast barocker, jedenfalls aber ganz pers?nlicher Stil macht namentlich dem Ausl?nder die Lekt?re nicht eben leicht; aber er ist niemals phrasenhaft und snobistisch, sondern auch in seinen Neubil

dungen schlagkr?ftig und bildhaft.", Schlosser, K?nstlerprobleme der Fr?hrenaissance, in: Sit

zungsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, 214, 5, 1933,5.

28 Mengaldo (as in Note 15), 274-275. 29 Roberto Longhi, Piero della Francesca (1927), in:

idem, Piero della Francesca, Florenz 1975, 9-111.

30 "The nocturnal fabulousness of Gothic blends with ancient classicism, with the constructive

illumination of Caravaggio and the magic illu mination of Rembrandt, and even with the dust

weighing of Seurat [...]", in: Longhi (as in Note

29), 55-56.

31 "You think of the Argive tents, of Hannibal's

sleep before Cannae, or of the slumber of some

great crusader in Asia [...] and suddenly a great

light rains sheer down from above, searching clo

sely, like an eye of the moon." in: Longhi (as in Note 29), 56.

32 Longhi (as in Note 29), 55. 33 Longhi (as in Note 29), 56. 34 "[???] on this noblest animal progeny tower up, al

most inhuman, and yet most civil, either the limbs or the elytra, I don't know which, of the Christian warriors [...] Upright on their mounts they raise to heaven the artificial trellis of their monstrously beautiful helmets, terrifying to behold [...]", in:

Longhi (as in Note 29), 57. 35 "In the meantime, who is this Lady of the Log

gia? Is she a 'damsel' in the chivalric style, of the kind hinted at by the French miniaturists of the thirteenth century [...]? Or nothing more than a

memory of her, having already become a slightly course chatelaine of the Ligurian Riviera or the C?te d'Azur? She is still something of a 'blue stok

king' though not without the suspicion of bour geois wool." Roberto Longhi, Carlo Braccesco

(1942), in: idem, Lavori in Valpadana, Florenz 1973, 272. The text is also available in English translation in: Longhi, Three Studies (as in Note 14), 159-187.

The passage in English here is cited from 167.

36 Longhi, Carlo Braccesco (as in Note 35), 167. 37 Vitale Bloch, Roberto Longhi Obituary, in: The

Burlington Magazine, 113,1971, 610. 38 Longhi (as in Note 29), 86. 39 Mengaldo (as in Note 15), 260. 40 David Carrier, The Art Historian as Art Critic:

In Praise of Adrian Stokes, in: Stephen Bann, ed., The Coral Mind, London 2002, 151-159.

41 This is most evident in texts such as Inside Out. An

Essay in the Psychology and Aesthetic Appeal of

Space (1947), in: Adrian Stokes, Collected Critical

Writings, London, 1978, II, 139-182; idem, Smooth and Rough (1951), in: ibidem, 213-256, or Greek Culture and the Ego (1958), in: ibidem, 77-141.

42 Adrian Stokes, The Quattro Cento, in: Collected Critical Writings, I (as in Note 41), 29-180. All references will be to this edition.

43 A new edition was recently published as 'The Stones of Rimini' and 'the Quattro Cento': A Different Conception of the Italian Renaissance, London 2002, with interpretative essays by Ste

phen Bann, David Carrier and Stephen Kite. 44 On Stokes' subscription to various racial theories

see Richard Read, Art and its Discontents. The

Early Life of Adrian Stokes, London 2002, 173ff. 45 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, in: Artfo

rum, 5, 1967, 12-23; Fran?oise Ragot and Daniel

Lan?on, eds., Yves Bonnefoy: Ecrits sur l'Art et

Livres avec les Artistes, Paris 1993.

46 Stokes (as in Note 42), 40. 47 Stokes (as in Note 42), 40. 48 Stokes, Collected Critical Writings, II (as in

Note), 180-181. The character of Stokes' aesthetic

(though with little reference to its psychoanalytic dimension) is discussed in greater detail in Da vid Carrier, The Presentness of Painting: Adrian Stokes as Aesthetician, in: Critical Inquiry, 12, 4, 1986, 753-768.

49 Stokes (as in Note 42), 40. 50 Stokes (as in Note 42), 78. 51 Stokes, (as in Note 42), 134. 52 Stokes' orientalism is explored by Stephen Kite,

'South Opposed to East and North': Adrian Stokes and Josef Strzygowski. A Study in the aes thetics and historiography of Orientalism, in: Art

History, 26, 4, 2003, 505-532. 53 "I believe the Etruscans were Semitic or Hittite by

race. Certainly one attributes to them [...] the par

ticularly graphic mode of Semitic, but particularly representation; also sadistic propensities in gene

ral, brutalities of a kind that we have always asso ciated with the East.", in: Stokes (as in Note 42), 65.

54 Stokes (as in Note 42), 72. 55 David Carrier, England and its Aesthetes, in:

idem, ed., John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Adrian

28



Stokes. England and its Aesthetes, Amsterdam,

1997, 1-24: "Ruskin, Pater and Stokes, noted art

critics, are not primarily concerned - in the wri

tings collected here - with artworks; they are con

cerned with perception as a way of knowing, and

with self-knowledge gained from aesthetic expe rience. Art for them comes afterward" (6).

56 Adrian Stokes, The Invitation in Art, London

1965,53. 57 Stephen Bann, The Case for Stokes (and Pater), in:

Poetry Nation Review, 9, 6,1,1978, 6-9; Geoffrey Newman, Adrian Stokes and Venice, in: British

Journal of Aesthetics, 35, 3, 1995, 254-261; Eti enne Joll?t, To Bring Distant Things Near: Di stance in Relation to the Work of Art in Stokes's

Thought, in: The Coral Mind. Adrian Stokes's En

gagement with Architecture, Art History, Criti

cism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Stephen Bann, Uni

versity Park, PA 2007, 189-198. 58 Alois Riegl, Sp?tr?mische Kunstindustrie, Wien

1901; Heinrich W?lfflin, Prolegomena zu einer

Psychologie der Architektur, M?nchen 1886. 59 David Carrier, Artwriting, Amherst 1987, 69-70.

60 Adrian Stokes, The Stones of Rimini, in: idem (as in Note 41), I, 185.

61 Jacques Derrida, La Diff?rance, in: idem, Marges de la Philosophie, Paris 1972, 1-29.

62 See, for example, Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge MA 1996, 21-25.

63 See Mieke Bal, Complexit? d'un Roman Popu laire, Paris 1974; idem, Narratologie. Essais sur la

Signification Narrative dans Quatre Romans Mo

dernes, Paris 1977.

64 Mieke Bal, Reading Rembrandt, Cambridge 1991; idem, Quoting Caravaggio, Chicago 1999; idem, Louise Bourgeois's Spider: the Architecture of

Art-Writing, Chicago 2001; idem, Earth Aches: the Aesthetics of the Cut, in: idem, Doris Salce do: Shibboleth, London 2007, 40-63; idem, Light Politics, in: Take Your Time Olafur Eliasson, ed. Madeleine Grynsztejn, San Francisco 2007, 153

182; idem, Balthus. Works (Interview), Barcelona 2008. A sample of her work has been published in German as: idem, Kulturanalyse, Frankfurt am

Main 2002. 65 Mieke Bal, Dispersing the Image, in: idem,

Looking In. Vermeer Story, Amsterdam 2001, 73.

66 Bal (as in Note 65), 73. 67 As Derrida notes, "La syntaxe de son pli interdit

qu'on en arr?te le jeu ou l'ind?cision", in: Jacques

Derrida, La Diss?mination, Paris 1972, 283-284.

68 Bal (as in Note 65), 75. 69 See Manfred Frank, Die Unhintergehbarkeit von

Individualit?t: Reflexionen ?ber Subjekt, Person und Individuum aus Anla? ihrer ,postmodernen

Toterkl?rung, Frankfurt am Main 1986, and idem, Selbstgef?hl. Eine historisch-theoretische Erkun

dung, Frankfurt am Main 2002.

70 In terms of organising readings around details,

Bal is of course enacting an art historical procedu re that has been well-established since Giovanni

Morelli or Aby M. Warburg. On the art historical use of details see Daniel Arasse, Le Detail, Paris

1996, and Carlo Ginzburg, Spurensicherung. Die Wissenschaft auf der Suche nach sich selbst, Berlin

2002.

71 Mieke Bai, Semiotic Elements in Academic Prac

tices, in: Critical Inquiry, 22, 3, 1996, 576. 72 Mieke Bal, Narrative Inside Out: Louise Bour

geois' Spider as Theoretical Object, in: Oxford Art Journal, 22,2, 1999, 116.

73 Bal (as in Note 72), 117. 74 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Frank

furt am Main 2006, ?46. 75 Bal (as in Note 72), 115. 76 "We are repeatedly made aware of the painful fact

that painting, though it has no hidden exits and shows everything at once on a single surface, pos sesses a strange and awesome capacity to dissimu

late. Painting will never cease to be there in front of

us, like a distant horizon or some potential act, but

never the act itself", Georges Didi-Huberman, De

vant l'Image, Paris 1990, 273. English translation

taken from Didi-Huberman, The Art of Not De

scribing: Vermeer - the Details and the Patch, in:

History of the Human Sciences, 2, 2, 1989, 135. 77 See Giovanni Morelli, Die Werke italienischer

Meister in den Galerien von M?nchen, Dresden

und Berlin, Leipzig 1880. 78 "It postulates that the visible, in its entirety, can

be described, cut up into its elements (like the words in a sentence or the letters in a word), and

counted, just like anything else; it postulates that to describe means to see well, and that to see well

means to see the truth.", in: Didi-Huberman, De

vant l'Image (as in Note 76), 275. English trans lation from The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer, 136.

79 "[???] demands a way of viewing that would not

focus on looking and recognising [...] but rather

one which would first step back and abstain from

seeking clarity immediately. A sort of floating at

tention, a lengthy suspension of the moment of

reaching a conclusion [...]", in: Didi-Huberman, Devant l'Image (as in Note 76), 25.

80 SigmundFreud,DieTraumdeutung, Leipzig/Wien, 1900.

81 Georges Didi-Huberman, La Peinture Incarn?e, Paris 1984,31.

82 Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico. Dissem

blance et Figuration, Paris 1990. Published in

29



German as: Fra Angelico. Un?hnlichkeit und Fi

guration, M?nchen 1995.

83 "What exactly does it consist of? It is a run of red

paint. Joined by another, white this time, and less convoluted, but no less stupefying. It springs out

from the cushion, to the left of the lacemaker. It

frays out unreasonably, right in front of our eyes, like a sudden affirmation, like a sudden affirmati on - in no way calculated, apparently

- of the ver

tical, frontal existence of the canvas. The outline

seems to wander, causing the pattern it makes to

spread. The thick layers of paint and the modulati ons in colour values, though subtle, seem to be of

fered as the product of chance. A completely liquid painting appears to have been somehow left to it

self [...] we can see perfectly well that there is in

fact nothing there to see other than a meaningless,

ragged-edged run of paint [...] the run of vermi

lion becomes, strictly speaking, unidentifiable, other than to say it is painting in action. Its form

is dominated by its matter, and its representatio nal status, being dominated by the dimension of the not quite, is precarious in this respect. Neither

distinct nor clear, it perhaps imitates ca piece of th

read', but it is not depicted 'like a piece of thread'. It is therefore painted, painted like paint, not th read.", in: Didi-Huberman, Devant l'Image (as in

Note 76), 301. English translation from: The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer, 154-155.

84 See Georges Didi-Huberman (as in Note 81), 42. The text in question was Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'Invisible, Paris 1964.

85 Julia Kristeva, La Joie de Giotto, in: Polylogue, Paris 1977,383-408.

86 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing, Chicago 1981.

87 See Georges Didi-Huberman, Artistic Survival:

Panofsky vs. Warburg and the Exorcism of Im

pure Time, in: Common Knowledge, 9, 2, 2003, 273-285.

88 Georges Didi-Huberman, Histoire de l'art et temps des fant?mes selon Aby Warburg, Paris 2002.

89 "What Freud discovered in the symptom - and

Warburg in Nachleben - was nothing other than a

regime of discontinuous time.", in: Didi-Huber

man (as in Note 88), 317. 90 See Aby Warburg, Die Erneuerung der heidni

schen Antike, Berlin 1998. 91 See Matthew Rampley, Iconology of the Interval.

Aby Warburg's Legacy, in: Word and Image, 17, 4, 2001, 303-324.

92 Similar criticisms were made by Alexander Nagel, Review of Georges Didi-Huberman, Tra Angeli co' and William Hood, Tra Angelico at San Mar

co', in: The Art Bulletin, 78, 3, 1996, 559-565.

93 "Vermeer's work functions, overall, within the

general order of mimesis [...] thus we will believe, in spite of everything, that we understand what

we see: almost without thinking about it, we will

recognize thread, red thread spilling out of a se

wing-box.", in: Didi-Huberman, Devant l'Image

(as in Note 76), 300. English translation from: The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer, 154.

94 Ernst Gombrich, The Evidence of Images, in: In

terpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles

Singleton, Baltimore 1969, 35-104.

95 The first, and best known, criticism of Gombrich remains Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting.

The Logic of the Gaze, London 1983. 96 See Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du Texte, Paris

1982.

97 Michael Ann Holly, Stones of Solace, in: Stephen Bann, ed., The Coral Mind, London 2002, 200, 208.

98 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revo

lutions, Chicago 1960. 99 Imre Lakatos, ed., Criticism and the Growth of

Knowledge, Cambridge 1970.

Photo Credits

All Figures: Middlesbrough, University of Teesside

Library

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The Poetics of the Image- Art History and the Rhetoric of Interpretation.pdf