Iconoclastic Images

Abstract

painting). Palace its modern figure has been established. Virtually every painting in the Palatine Gallery is a rectangle. By the time we get back on the bus, even a tourist in the field of art history like me cannot fail to be struck by the question: What determined this modern figure of painting as the historical shape that has dominated it until the present day?8 We know that painting created the modern picture plane by stretching linen over a wooden frame, no longer working on the more sculptural wooden panel but, instead, on the flat surface of a lightweight material, creating portable paintings that, while still attached to the wall, were free to move from one wall to another. Not only was the compositional structure of linear perspective enhanced by the rectangular framework of modern painting (as is clear in Alberti’s visual pyramid) but its own three-dimensionality was kept out of the picture by a second frame: a “picture frame” that is designed to conceal the edge of the material apparatus that is the new (and true) “frame” of painting, namely, the stretcher.9 The aim is to create the appearance of the picture plane as a two-dimensional surface whose flatness is retained by maintaining the tension of the canvas through an adjustable framework whose material outline is effaced by the picture frame. It is on this virtual plane that painting will be free to claim its birth right as a visual art. To do so, however, requires the operation of a double frame in which the edge of the apparatus that creates the picture plane is concealed by the edge of the rabbet frame, such that the painting is free to create a limit that would appear to be set by the picture plane itself, not imposed upon it from the outside as a boundary. At the same time, its material structure will raise the question of the nature of painting in its modern condition: the metaphysical question of its existence as an autonomous creation in so far as painting is free to project a visual space of its own on the picture plane. As Hegel would see, this threedimensional virtual space is not simply a matter of drawing, but operates as IconoclastIc Images 29 a kind of apparition (Schein) or what we would like to think of as a spectral image, and not just (as it was for him) in the “magic” that takes place in oil painting in its “pure appearance” as a chromatic creation (“coloration”).10 Not only was the compositional structure of linear perspective enhanced by the rectangle in the creation of the virtual space of the picture plane, but the real three-dimensionality of the painting was kept out of the picture by a second frame that was designed to present the picture plane as a two-dimensional surface without an outline that would define it as a material form. In this respect, a spectral rectangle was created, and one that was designed to provide a format that saved the painting itself from operating as a “plastic” image. Instead, strictly “visual” images would take place on the picture plane, while the painting will present itself as a figure that does not have a concrete shape, ironically, thanks to the material structure of its new framework. In effect, painting will recreate itself as a modern art by seeking recognition of its absolute right to the virtual realm of the picture plane as a visual space that is proper to it, claiming the right to rule this metaphysical plane as its sovereign domain. In that case, we would trace the modern attraction to the rectangle in painting to a certain reversal of fortunes in the Renaissance, as its rebirth in the “form” of the picture plane or, indeed, its breech birth. For a topological transformation occurred in the breach between the medieval and the modern period, when painting sought its justification, not in its service to theology but in a representational painting that prides itself on its accuracy as an optical science.11 To appreciate how this conversion works, we would stress the character of the rectangle—or lack thereof—as a neutral form: a spectral figure that is designed to neutralize the material shape of painting through the standardization of a format that effectively becomes pro forma and, as such, (dis)appears as a pure formality. Suffice it to say that the modern spectator no longer desires a painting that assumes a physical form but would prefer a picture plane that aspires to become a formless figure, described by the twodimensional surface of a flat plane that conceals its real three-dimensionality behind a rabbet frame. “Spatial” forms now occur in the painting as a threedimensional virtual space created on the picture plane, thanks, in part, to a sculptural drawing. The painting itself, however, no longer has a concrete shape or, for that matter, appears to take place in a real space or time. Instead, in the form(at) of a spectral figure, the pictorial image operates as a specter or, indeed, a speculum of our visual field: a mirror as well as a compendium, 10 See Hegel’s Aesthetics, vol. II (trans. T.M. Knox, Oxford University Press, 1979) 797ff. We may speak of a “specter” here even though we know that, technically speaking, Hegel has a “tonal” and not a “spectral” account of color. 11 As Leonardo famously argued in his Paragone (translated by Claire J. Farago, E.J. Brill, 1992). 30 The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 56 12 Norman Bryson has detailed certain aspects of this operation in the development of linear perspective in his Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (Yale University Press, 1986). 13 While standing on the steps of Santa Maria de Fiore (or, to be precise, in its central portal) and facing the Baptistery, Brunelleschi’s contraption presents the viewer with a painting of the latter which is seen through its image in a mirror. By peering through a hole that has been drilled in the painting, which is viewed from the backside of the picture plane, the viewer sees the painted image in a mirror, such that the mirror image can be compared to the actual Baptistery, confirming their visual identity in a verisimilitude whose linear perspective is enhanced, if not magnified, by viewing the image (painted in geometrical perspective) in a mirror. In peeking through a (single) keyhole from the backside of the picture plane, the eye is isolated from the other senses (not to mention from the other eye), while the body is placed, if not entirely out of commission, then literally backstage, as it is upstaged by a virtual displacement: not just placed behind the scene but, as such, displaced from the space in which the painted image is taking place. whose physical shape does not have a well-defined outline but may be said to represent the open form of the spectator’s field of vision. In this respect, the double frame is designed to erase the material outline of the picture plane in order to create a virtual opening without a clear-cut boundary, in an aesthetic speculation in which the limit will appear to be strictly visual: set by vision itself, not imposed from the outside. As such, a virtual autonomy reigns in the self-determination of a visual domain in which painting would appear to be free to set the rules in the creation of a space that is entirely its own. To accomplish this convincingly, the eye must not only be segregated from the other senses but must be separated from the body, if painting is to be rendered as a strictly visual art.12 An optical epoché must take place in the initiation of a visual epoch in which painting will become the model for an aesthetic experience that is not kinesthetic. There is, perhaps, no more telling indication of this than Brunelleschi’s famous demonstration on the steps of a cathedral in Florence, which effects the isolation of the eye from the body, by embodying it in an apparatus that is designed to demonstrate a complex visualization that takes place in the invention, or as Edgerton insists, the “rediscovery” of linear perspective in modern painting. For Brunelleschi’s set-up is designed to make a display of vision itself in an optical array that is framed through a rather complicated operation in the creation of a double image.13 In looking through what turns out to be a metaphysical apparatus, what we see is the visualization of reality in the virtual image: not just the virtual image that is created in a three-dimensional projection on the picture plane, but in so far as what is assumed to be the first painting in the Renaissance to be painted in geometrical perspective is viewed through its virtual image in a mirror. In this respect, the space of modern painting is reflected in an image whose virtuality is doubled in so far as the painted image appears in its image in a mirror. At the same time, not only has the painting become a virtual image—and not just in its pictorial representation, but in so far as it IconoclastIc Images 31 has been reduced to its visual dimension when viewed in a mirror—but the reality that it represents is similarly “visualized” when the mirror is lowered and the painted image of the Baptistery is compared to the reality that the viewer now can see. For Brunelleschi’s aim is to assert a claim to truth when he inserts the picture plane into an apparatus that is designed to create a specific visual outlook in which the painting operates (albeit from behind) as a kind of viewfinder that directs the viewer to focus on the structure of reality as a visual event, however illusory the virtual image may appear to be. In its modern operation, the true image is no longer thought, as it was in the Middle Ages, to be the “perfect likeness” of reality, appearing in the flesh of a physical Incarnation.14 Instead, as Hegel will insist, painting is a perfect illusion—like a magic trick—that, he claims, has reached its apex (and, therefore, its end) in the chromatic rendering of human skin (“carnation”) as a sign of subjectivity, and not in a duplication, or even as a representation of reality, but as a free cr