Art Historian Erwin Panofsky Wrote That the Rise of Was Integral to Renaissance Art

Issue 01: The Worlding of Cultural Studies (Winter 1998)

Stephen Melville

I

I want to start by talking a flake nearly imaginations of what we tend to telephone call "historical distance," and then to push that talk toward a thought most the forms of objectivity available to the history of art. In doing so I hope besides to exist able to demonstrate something of one art historical object; it is a function of my argument that at that place is no imagination of fine art history or art historical method that does not depend upon, does non emerge from, such demonstration.

Allow me begin by simply remarking there is no compelling reason in the nature of things to imagine that what separates u.s. from the past is all-time named "altitude" nor any particular reason to call back that this separation is different in kind from other ways in which we are separated from one some other (we don't actually know what qualification "historical" is adding to the notion of a "distance"). This is, of course, not to say that the notion of historical distance is not native to us, both in general and more than specifically equally art historians; information technology is in fact a notion in which we are very much at home.

As concerns art history, much of our, perhaps more or less specifically American, home in this notion has been powerfully shaped by Erwin Panofsky, so I will start there. I take the following points to have been more than than adequately established at present, largely through the efforts of Michael Podro and Michael Ann Holly:

1. Panofsky imagines appropriate distance to be integral to the piece of work of the history of fine art.

2. The model for such advisable distance is established first of all in the fine art of the Italian Renaissance.

3. This appropriate distance is characterized by a clear stardom between subject field and object and thus as well a right understanding of the relation between motif and content.

4. The model for such objectivity is given by the practice of rational perspective.

Francesco Maffei / Bernardo Strozzi / Paolo Pagani, "Salomé with the Head of John the Baptist / Judith and the Head of Holofernes"

Panofsky works out this position in a serial of essays written in Frg in the 1920s. The virtually important of these arePerspective as Symbolic FormandThe History of the Theory of Human being Proportions as a Reflection of the History of Styles, but ane tin can besides include the 1930 essay on the start page of Vasari'sLibro and several further essays on Dürer from the 20s. The essays on perspective and on man proportion are, in effect, a pair, jointly testifying to the Renaissance arbitrament of subject and object and so structuring discussions of art historical method around this polarity.

Much of this is clearly visible in the major methodological statement Panofsky produces in the U.Southward., "Iconography and Iconology," and I will take it every bit not in demand of whatsoever further special remarking. Instead, I desire to focus briefly on the example Panofsky uses to conclude the methodological portion of the essay–"a picture by the Venetian seventeenth-century painter Francesco Maffei, representing a handsome young woman with a sword in her left paw, and in her correct a charger on which rests the head of a beheaded human."¹ The question is whether this is a Salomé or a Judith, and Panofsky makes a convincing case for redescribing it equally a particular variant type of Judith with the caput of Holofernes. I meet no reason to quarrel with this identification, at least non in any direct mode. What mostly interests me, for the moment, is the mode the case layers a moment of decapitation, a moment of rejoining motif and content, and a moment of radical distinction between Judith and Salomé. I might notation that while Panofsky's proposed grafting or regrafting of the title Judith and the Caput of Holofernes to the painting has plainly taken, the painting has itself in the meantime been grafted to diverse other easily, that of Bernardo Strozzi and, more recently, Paolo Pagani.² This is style out of my own scholarly depth, simply it seems worth mentioning that although Strozzi's oeuvre displays, pretty much from the outset, a recurrent involvement in large plumes and swords, perhaps particularly in the hands of women, "his" Judith would seem to vest to a particular menses of his fine art in which he seems above all interested in decapitations, as it were regardless of the particular amanuensis or victim–so we have a run of Davids with the caput of Goliath, Salomés with the head of John, and Judiths with Holofernes. It does not seem much of a stretch, at least under this attribution, to fence that the insistence that Judith and Salomé, John and Holofernes remain palpably distinct is one brought to the cloth by Panofsky, and of uncertain forcefulness or relevance for Strozzi, in whose hands the stardom might be subject to a degree of migrate or blurring or might even exist no more than than nominal. In this, he might be in some means like to Caravaggio, who will in fact stand in for him to some degree later in this newspaper. Ii general points from all this and so: First, Panofsky is–this will not exist news–considerably more interested in the meaning of paintings than in their painting, and is particularly closed against the thought that the painting might itself override its meaning.³ Second, and more interesting, Panofsky's example here is conspicuously and grossly overdetermined: it is, like so many of his early objects, a curtained just agile allegory of what he proposes every bit method–and what it shows is a violence at its middle.

Panofsky knows this–or perhaps its better to say that he knew it once, in 1932 when he wrote, in a text that did not make the passage to English but was instead supplanted by "Iconography and Iconology:"

In his volume on Kant, Heidegger has some remarkable sentences virtually the nature of interpretation, sentences that on their face refer only to the estimation of philosophical texts but at bottom characterize the problem of any interpretation. "Nevertheless, an estimation limited to a recapitulation of what Kant explicitly said can never exist a real explication, if the business of the latter is to bring to lite what Kant, over and above his express formulation, uncovered in the course of his laying of the foundation. To be sure, Kant himself is no longer able to say annihilation apropos this, only what is essential in all philosophical discourse is not found in the specific propositions of which it is equanimous merely in that which, although unstated as such, is made axiomatic through these propositions . . . . It is true that in club to wrest from the actual words that which these words 'intend to say,' every interpretation must necessarily resort to violence." We do well to recognize that these sentences concern also our minor descriptions of painting and the interpretations we give of their contents to the extent that they practice not rest at the level of uncomplicated statement but are already interpretations.⁴

"Iconography and Iconology" is the developed forgetting or repression of this position, and its invocation of Salomé or Judith is, one might say, the symptomatic return of a violence that remains both integral to and invisible within the theory and exercise of estimation advanced to fine art historical axis by that essay.

Two

If we turn from Panofsky toward Heidegger, the ground will be sufficiently shifted that we cannot expect to find the topic of "historical distance" straight available under this name or some equivalent to information technology, so I will begin by simply pointing to some of its more than or less scattered aspects.

The first is the ane nosotros have already seen: something of what Panofsky sets up as "historical altitude" at present appears as the "distance" (if that is the right give-and-take) betwixt idea and unthought–that is, it has go internal to the object of interpretation. It no longer appears as "historical distance" considering "history," understood as something similar the object's standing and transformative presence, is one of its furnishings. Such distance is something to be more than almost discovered in the object than a precondition for our arroyo to it.

A 2nd attribute becomes visible if nosotros turn back to the early formulations of distance itself in Being and Time. The analysis of human spatiality is fundamental to Heidegger's business relationship of being-in-the-globe and what he calls "the worldliness of the world." Human being, Dasein, "being-in that location," is for Heidegger fundamentally characterized by a primordial entanglement or date with the world that places itself always beyond itself, thrown into ecstatic projection. Thus:

When we attribute spatiality to Da-sein, this 'being in space' must obviously be understood in terms of the kind of being of this existence. The spatiality of Da-sein, which is substantially not objective presence, can mean neither something like being institute in a position in 'earth space' nor beingness at paw in a place. Both of these are kinds of being belonging to beings encountered in the world. But Da-sein is 'in' the world in the sense of a familiar and heedful association with the beings encountered in the world. Thus when spatiality is attributed to it in some way, this is possible only on the ground of this being-in. But the spatiality of being-in shows the character of de-distancing and directionality. . . .

De-distancing means making distance disappear, making the being at a distance of something disappear, bringing information technology near. Da-sein is essentially de-distancing. As the being that it is, it lets beings be encountered in nearness. . . . Just because beings in general are discovered by Da-sein in their remoteness, do distances and intervals among innerworldly beings become attainable in relation to other things.^five

Our dealings with things are always already an overcoming of distance, and there is no possible reduction to a situation of simple and rationally negotiable distance (things cannot be put in perspective).⁶ Ane useful way to rephrase this is to say that the distance we are the overcoming of does not belong to us but is something like a dimension of objects equally such; severance or distantiation is a condition of our proximity to them (and so also, contra Panofsky, prejudice is not a barrier to but a condition for estimation).

This is, in general, the management in which Heidegger takes these thoughts in his later writing; in particular, Heidegger's imagination of the piece of work of art seems a particular regathering and redistribution of these two earlier moments.

I will not try to review the whole, rather complex, writing and argument of "The Origin of the Work of Art," simply instead but choice out a few central assertions pertinent to my argument. The work of art is held to be the origin of things in such a mode that the "thingliness" both of the work and of the thing is held to be, in effect, an abstraction from the self-secluding of the "earth" within the "world" opened upwardly by the work⁷–this is, 1 can say, the moment of severance or distantiation that appears as such just under the status of de-severance or de-distantiation. Hither over again Heidegger is concerned to trace the logic of this into the work itself, so the work appears as, in its inmost structure, a "rift"–say, an establishing of distance as the very means of the work's intimacy with itself (what 1 might call its autonomy).⁸ Heidegger's formulations here are difficult and worth hearing:

But as a globe opens itself the earth comes to rising upward. Information technology stands along equally that which bears all, as that which is sheltered in its own law and always wrapped upwards in itself. Earth demands its decisiveness and its measure out and lets being reach to the Open up of their paths . . . . The rift does not permit the opponents break apart; it brings the opposition of measure and boundary into their common outline.⁹

Some of what I recall needs hearing in this is the way in which the passage from what is "sheltered in its own law" to the demand for "decisiveness" and "measure" is precisely a critical passage, a passage into the infinite of judgment, and 1 might hear also the style in which the rift, bringing mensurate and boundary together, functions as a limit, as what both contains and opens, defining the dimensions of the work and doing so by ways of a kind of cutting that both cuts in insofar as it opens the work and finds the terms of its internal measure, and cuts out insofar as it marks the work off from what is not it.

Inside the abstractness of this description i can feel the pressure of various more than concrete images–virtually strongly a certain paradigm of sculpture, probably derived in large role from Rilke's writings on Rodin, and, to a lesser caste, an image of painting that can come to a sure focus well beyond, certainly, Heidegger'due south own ken (ane might think, for example, of Pollock). Heidegger himself finds it easiest to return these thoughts concrete in dealing with verse, where he can adhere measure to meter (as well as the caesura that interrupts it) and so make most fully apparent the play between internal articulation and external boundary that at various times one will phone call "composition" or "structure."¹⁰ One fashion Heidegger phrases this is as follows:

The strife that is thus brought into the rift and thus fix back into the earth and thus fixed in place is effigy, shape, Gestalt. Createdness of the work ways: truth'south being fixed in place in the effigy. Figure is the structure in whose shape the rift composes and submits itself. This composed rift is the plumbing fixtures or joining of the shining forth of truth. What is hither called effigy, Gestalt, is e'er to be be thought in terms of the particular placing (Stellen) and framing or framework (Ge-stell) as which the work occurs when its sets itself up and sets itself forth.¹¹

But hither some important things are beginning to slip in Heidegger's account: the term "Ge-stell," offered as a sort of summary of the work of figuration proper to art and most especially to what Heidegger calls its "createdness" (as opposed to its preservation, which would be the giving of the piece of work over to history, thus the fact that its originality does not escape its own effects), this term "Ge-stell" will soon play a leading role in Heidegger'southward description non of fine art but of technology, which in its form every bit aesthetics amounts to the roofing over or forgetting of fine art's actual piece of work of origination, something from which Heidegger is actively working in this essay to wholly separate the work of fine art.¹² In this passage nosotros glimpse the Ge-stell in its actual supplementarity, naming both what is essential to and completing of the work and what is imposed upon it from the outside that is, in this instance, 1 of its effects. Information technology is, one might say, the revenge or at to the lowest degree the becoming explicit of the frame so carefully elided or sublated in the essay'south pivotal see with Van Gogh's shoes.

Jean-Luc Nancy, working in the wake of Derrida and within the Derridean recognition of the supplementarity of the Ge-stell, in issue turns Heidegger's imagination inside out in trying to depict what he calls "the unimaginable, the gesture of the beginning imager."^xiii Nancy thus insists on the primacy of the rift or cut over the presence to which it gives rise.¹⁴ Every bit he puts it, the manus of the offset imager

advances into a void, hollowed at that very instance, which separates him from himself instead of prolonging his being in his human action. Merely this separation is the act of his being [in Nancy's French, l'acte de son être, in which ane can also hear fifty'acte de son naître, the act of his birth.] Here he is outside of self even earlier having been his ain self, earlier having been a self. In truth, this hand that advances opens by itself this void, which it does non fill up. Information technology opens the gaping hole of a presence that has merely absented itself by advancing its hand. . . .

For the first time, he touches the wall not equally a back up, nor as an obstacle or something to lean on [all of which might every bit accept left prints, none of which volition have counted, will accept washed this work–at least not until this work has been done], but as a place, if one can touch a place. Only every bit a place in which to let something of interrupted being, of its estrangement, come up about. . . .

The globe is as if cut, cut off from itself, and information technology assumes a effigy on its cutaway section. . . .

The line divides and sets out the form: it forms the course. It separates at the same moment–with the same deftness, with the same drafted line–the tracing animal and his gesture . . . .

Non a presence, but its vestige or its birth, its nascent vestige, its trace, its monster [one will want to hear in this terminal "monstrance" and "demonstration"].^xv

These revisions make the history the piece of work effects non a destiny but a drift with no greater or deeper ground than the self-sectionalisation of the mark that is the very condition of its appearing.¹⁶ Like Heidegger, Nancy sees this as having the strength of "pure fact," ("factum est," says Heidegger) but this createdness is now itself already as well displacement, given over to both preservation and loss, constitutively a vestige. This tin–should be–taken as a reading or revision of Hegel'southward "Absolute," equally too of Heidegger's rewriting of it as "Ab-solvent," cut abroad. And information technology is a reading of this Absolute that does not let it escape its material conditions, thus i that grants art its own irreducible history–on the difficult condition that the history exist always of a vestige. Historical distance and presence are the ii edges of the same cut, and that cut is what we stand before with, for instance, Maffei's or Strozzi's or Pagani's Judith or Salomé belongings the head of John or Holofernes. These disjunctions are the stuff of the painting's identity, the places in which its meanings are both defenseless and adrift, that to which they are accountable.

Iii

Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio, "Judith and Holofernes." Galleria Nazionale di Arte Antica, Rome.

At that place are a number of ways to describe what's in play every bit nosotros laissez passer from Panofsky to start Heidegger and and then Nancy–it's a kind of trade-off betwixt history without an object and the emergence of an object in which one's involvement is not clearly historical, and in terms of intellectual history this is, amid other things, the exchange at pale in the passage from Kantian to Hegelian aesthetics. Since what I am interested in pursuing here is a certain imagination of objectivity, I'chiliad especially interested in maxim that in this passage we witness the reabsorption of "historical altitude" into the object from which it first arose, and that with this we are returned to the proper ground of questions of objectivity in the history of art. The notion of "objectivity" I'thousand appealing to is somewhat obscure, or at to the lowest degree unusual, and then what I'd like to do in the remainder of this talk is try to sketch out a version of it. I want to be clear in accelerate that my intentions here, although in some sense serious, are too clearly more than demonstrative or provocative than properly scholarly. The sense of objectivity in question, I may besides say, is not "scientific"–it has essentially to exercise with "having an object," and doing and so within a thoroughly relational context.

Since I set off from a decapitation, I'd like to stay with that theme just return from the uncertainties of Maffei and Strozzi and Pagani, about whom I know nothing, to Caravaggio, with whom the theme tin exist said to gain its hold on their attention and about whom I know at least a little, although non much.

Jackson Pollock, "Convergence" (detail), oil on canvas, 1952, Buffalo, Albright-Knox Museum.

There is, unquestionably, a violence at work in Caravaggio'southward painting, and i of its near prominent expressions is clearly to be found in his various Davids and Salomés and Judiths. My general claim has been that, faced with such paintings, Panofsky tin only reduce them to singled-out meanings and has no manner of capturing the interest that informs them precisely as paintings. A inexpensive fashion to make the indicate–that I exercise not for all its cheapness take to be completely empty–is to pair the 1597-98Judith Beheading Holofernes ¹⁷ with a Jackson Pollock and then to advise that Caravaggio is interested in his subject because information technology permits him the moment of pure pigment–the corking multiple jet of blood–that is what also interests and informs everywhere Pollock'due south painting (the same painting, peradventure, that I earlier suggested might seem well defenseless by Heidegger'south remarks on rift and line and abyss). I practise indeed want to say something of this kind, but I want to do it along a slightly different trajectory, one for which I tin can brand a slightly more than responsible and expansive case, although I also promise that I can keep something of the simultaneous dumbness and improbability of the pairing. So I want to talk loosely around another pair–Caravaggio once over again, and Christian Bonnefoi, a contemporary French painter in whose piece of work I have been interested for several years.

What would make these a pair worth discussing would be a presumed shared interest in cutting. This appears at first as just a thematic concern in the Caravaggio, while in Bonnefoi'southward case it is embedded in his practice every bit a painter in ways that arise quite directly out of a fundamental relation to collage, so this juxtaposition as it stands without any farther elaboration looks at best metaphorical and willful.

Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio, "Medusa," oil on canvas, circa 1608, Florence, Uffizi.

There are at least two relatively recent studies of Caravaggio that move in my direction: Louis Marin'sTo Destroy Painting ¹⁸ and Michael Fried's "Thoughts on Caravaggio."¹⁹ Neither of these tin be taken equally in any way definitive–Fried's piece is overtly speculative and prospective, while Marin's is considerably weakened past its shakey entreatment to optics (in part because of its uncritical acceptance of Panofsky on perspective). The two studies also have very dissimilar theoretical foundations and stakes–Marin is working out of a very particular semiotic model while Fried is continuing to explore a sort of phenomenology of painting closely related to his earlier work on Gustave Courbet. Within these limitations one can however say that both share a view of Caravaggio's work as containing a violence integral to it as painting. Both are also inclined to approach this violence by considering Caravaggio in terms of a deep and generalized engagement with bug of self-portraiture and mirroring; and both empathize the logic they unfold effectually these issues to crucially involve also a moment of beholding (Fried) or a space of representability (Marin) that belongs both to the painting and to its viewer–a fact of what I would call its exposure. Thus, for example, Marin argues at one point that the logic of the mirror, peculiarly the convex mirror implied in this Medusa, is, in and of itself, "decapitating," separating caput and body, as gaze and hand, thus likewise breaking upwards the otherwise perfect reversibility that binds seeing and making, gaze and hand, painter and model within the platonic cocky-portrait. Marin'southward actual argument hither seems to me wrong–in that location is nothing really decapitating almost the mirror as such; information technology does not impose, although it may invite, any distinction in the handling of head and body (and this invitation is undoubtedly stronger in curved mirrors than flat ones considering such mirrors do make the general difference between middle and periphery count. Fried in effect recovers what matters here by focusing more clearly on the simple studio fact that a practise of cocky-portraiture always depends upon an arrangement of mirrors that is, from the commencement, at odds with any "perfect reversibility"–that is, there is e'er one place in which 1 regards oneself and some other identify in which 1 represents that self, and the self-portrait is then e'er a negotiation with the move between these two places or moments. Fried argues that in Caravaggio'due south case, the artist's refusal to follow the and then-standard exercise of correcting for the mirror's right-left reversal and the uniquedispositif informing this practice results in the painting'southward appearing e'er as a displacment of itself. Equally he summarizes this particular indicate:

. . . the logic of this detail mode of mirror-representation . . . is such that the painting appears to insist on its virtual identity with the absent mirror while at the same time representing itself–itself "orginally," in the process of existence painted–equally nonidentical with the picture surface.^twenty

Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio, "Expiry of the Virgin," oil on sheet, circa 1605, Paris, Louvre.

The painting does non stand in the place of the mirror but shows itself every bit a mirror displaced from itself. Marin makes a very similar point in insisting that Caravaggio's painting "transgresses its own boundaries within itself, that is, inside the various spaces that it brings together and encloses."²¹ This is to say that Caravaggio'southward painting happens, in the terms I've used earlier in this paper, every bit the finding or securing of a limit.

Overall, Fried urges the centrality to Caravaggio's painting of a "double or divided human relationship betwixt painter and painting–at once immersive and specular, continuous and discontinuous, prior to the act of viewing and thematizing that act with unprecedented violence . . . ."²² Marin'due south equivalent formulations here stress how far Caravaggio'sMedusa in particular appears as nothing other than a rift, cut, or caesura. Both of these analyses tin exist usefully set along side Jean-Luc Nancy's discussion of Caravaggio'sDeath of the Virgin–a more than breezy work that finds its repeated betoken of appeal in the play between the represented drapery and the canvas itself, a play Nancy attaches both to the ravishing force of the painting and to its manner of making the painting a pure threshold in which separation and adhesion occupy the same problematic place: "From the inside of (the) painting to the outside of (the) painting, there is nothing, no passage. Here, (the) painting is our access to the fact that we practise not accede–either to the within or to the outside of our selves."²³

Despite the differences in arroyo that split Marin and Fried, both of their accounts tin can be called "structural" insofar equally they are concerned to observe belittling terms that allow both formal and thematic address to the piece of work and that tin can bear witness it every bit generative of specific effects (and here one tin add that both Fried and Marin are deeply interested in Caravaggio'due south ability to project instantaneity as the result of a more complex quasi-temporal structure of "moments" or "aspects").

Christian Bonnefoi, "Hyperion III," 1979, 200 x 200 cm., Private Collection.

Christian Bonnefoi'due south work emerges from a relatively continuous postwar French tradition that takes painting as more nearly a material than a visual practice–a exercise crucially grounded in such things as canvas and stretcher and paint. 1 tin come across a distant reflection of this line of work in, for instance, Nancy's noting, in his drapery-driven Caravaggio piece, the way "the heart touches on the underside of the paint, on its support, its subject, its substance, and its cloth or stuff"; and one tin can see it equally well in Derrida'southward insistence, in his accost to the quarrel betwixt Heidegger and Schapiro, on employing a figure of "lacing" that passes back and along through the depth of the sail. More historically aware versions of it inform the writings of Hubert Damisch and Yve-Alain Bois, with whom Bonnefoi for a time collaborated in the French journalMacula. And ane final, oddly unanchored reflection is perhaps to be plant in Fried's picking upwardly, equally office of his dealings with Caravaggio, on the French term "dispositif" to proper noun the detail mirror-logic he sees in the piece of work. The scope and history of this term remains a chip obscure to me, simply it figures in both Lyotard and Damisch, has on occasion been used to return Heidegger's "Ge-stell," and is cardinal to Bonnefoi'south own attempts to describe the workings of his paintings.²⁴ At least loosely, a dispositif is a set up-up exterior to painting that provides a way for painting to happen, something capable of assigning painting its structure, or, as one might say in a different idiom, discovering its medium. For Caravaggio, on Fried's business relationship, this would lie in a particular right-angled organization of mirrors; for Bonnefoi'due south painting, it lies in collage, which teaches in its ain way that painting is made up of divisions through which it finds its proper surface. A Bonnefoi painting is fabricated up of a certain play of cuts or divisions that articulate the pictorial surface that we see every bit a function of its (invisible) material and temporal depth, and I desire, of grade, for you to run across this as chiefly the same as what Marin and Fried pick out at piece of work in Caravaggio–an access of dividedness as the stuff of painting itself. And I want you to meet this as offer not only a painterly but also a historical alternative to or complication of Panofsky's mode of rendering artful unity and historical distance as one some other's support and guarantee.

Christian Bonnefoi, "Babel IV," 1984, 200 x 230 cm., Private Drove.

I don't imagine that I have done the piece of work that would secure this vision for you, but I hope I have washed plenty to allow an interest in its scope and issue. What I accept perhaps washed is indicated two widely separated moments of a field in which painting shows itself as specifiably "non collage," that is, as a field of edges describable as cuttings out, or foldings, to which one might want to add certain kinds of stamping or impressing. If painting tin exist described equally a field of what is non collage, this would patently be not because collage is foreign to it but because collage can appear as a way of making wholly explicit a violence and heterogeneity already at piece of work within information technology. Then I'grand offering Caravaggio and Bonnefoi as moments inside the articulation of a physical theoretical object called painting and described in a very particular style. I might become on to ask how far Velásquez or Manet participate in this object–or gain their visibility within its field. Ane might, moving to the limit, ask the aforementioned of the work of Frank Stella.

Christian Bonnefoi, "Y.A.B.," 1986, 165 10 130 cm., Individual Collection.

And if one wanted now to option upwardly on the easy and abandoned juxtaposition of Caravaggio and Pollock that I so briefly proposed earlier, it's worth noticing that it would no longer be thing of something like a moment of pure paint captured in Caravaggio and freed into itself by Pollock. Rather, ane would at present accept a question about an inner working of something like cutting or collage (a rift design perhaps) in Pollock every bit what enables an appearance of "pure" pigment–only the underlying logic would be grounded in a work of cut, of absoluteness or "absolvence," that i would have been taught to see by Caravaggio. This is a shift in the grammar of certain questions that interests me directly as someone working with gimmicky French and American art. And this is to say that the particular model of objectivity–having an object–I'1000 sketching here does non go autonomously from my own attachment to sure works.²⁵

I am so proposing a view of fine art historical objectivity that does not depend upon–indeed refuses–the arbitration of historical altitude in favor of discovering an internal rhythm of dis-severance or ab-solution that shows what counts as consequence, every bit historical attachment or detachment, within and amid works merely also betwixt works and their shifting circumstances. Such objectivity–any objectivity of this general kind–cannot happen apart from its objects, which is to say it cannot proclaim itself in advance of the work it shows, and it cannot claim to show everything. Its interest in theory is non methodological.

4

Albrecht Dürer, "Self-Portrait in a Fur Glaze," lime console, 1500, Pinakothek, Munich.

When I say that what I have tried to sketch is a model for how art historical objectivities are constituted, I do not hateful that sketch to stand merely as an culling to Panofsky'south settlement of historical distance. It should count also as a reading, or a diagnosis, of the actual structure of what Panofsky so successfully made seem a natural way of standing toward something chosen "the past." That is to say, Panofsky engenders his objectivity in ways wholly parallel to those in which I take constituted mine–fastening himself to certain objects and teasing out of them the terms of their own historicity–but he does then in a way that systematically forgets or conceals its ain foundations, actualization equally a manner of disengagement wholly distinct from the attachment information technology also is. The working of this deeper logic notwithstanding remains readable within Panofskyan objectivity, perhaps in a higher place all in or as his attachment to the work and figure of Albrecht Dürer.

There is, afterwards all, a history that passes from Northern German St. Johns-on-a-charger not only through Carvaggio and such followers as Strozzi, Pagani, and Maffei, merely also through thevera icon–interestingly touched upon past Marin in his discussion of Caravaggio–and that finds one of its ultimate and pivotal expressions in the cocky-portraits of Albrecht Dürer, self-portraits that are intimately leap up with, among other things, Dürer's systematization of man proportion, which Panofsky then takes as evidence of the emergence of a grasp of subjectivity advisable to the objectivity of the perspective Dürer also formalizes. The moment here is complex–and it is been both illuminated and evaded past Joseph Koerner in a contempo study of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien, that, like this newspaper, means ultimately to show something of the inner rhythms of historical disengagement and attachment.²⁶ A considered account of that study might lead 1 to further remarks about how Panofsky'due south fine art historical detachment not merely ties itself to a particular notion of appropriate fit of motif and content but also finds a crucial prop in Dürer's self-attachment, and so as well to further consideration how Panofsky's "founding" of modern art history repeats Dürer's "origination" of Northern art's history. These final remarks might then open into a still further consideration of the pairs Panofsky/Dürer and Heidegger/Hölderlin that would thicken and transform the terms of the field I've tried to sketch.

The theoretical issues that gear up this talk take, then, never stood apart from the objects that back up them, because at that place is no other place to stand. And considering that place is e'er divided, art history is pledged to the invention of objectivities that are the consequence and mensurate of the absoluteness of its objects.

© Journal of InVisible Culture, 1998

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Source: https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/attachments-of-art-history/

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