Caught Between Dispensations

journal of visual culture

Caught between Dispensations: Heterogeneity in EarlyNetherlandish Painting

Amy Powell

journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com]

Copyright © 2008 SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)

Vol 7(1): 83–101 [1470-4129(200804)7:1]10.1177/1470412907087203

AbstractThis article considers the generic and temporal heterogeneity of apainting titled Holy Family, made by the Antwerp painter Joos vanCleve around 1515. Hans Belting has used Joos’s hybrid painting, inwhich a still life appears before the Virgin and Child, to illustrate where‘the era before art’ ends and the era of art proper begins, placing thegenre of religious icon and the genre of still life on opposing sides ofthe line separating the medieval from the modern world. It is toBelting’s compelling account of the painting that this article respondsby asking what is lost in the drawing of such periodizing lines.

Keywordsdisguised symbolism ● early Netherlandish painting ● icon ● period eye● periodization ● still life ● uncanny

Periodization, the parceling of the history of images into a series of discreetepochs, can make certain differences visible, but it exacts a certain price fordoing so. Images that sit on the cusp between historical periods have a wayof revealing precisely what that price is. Toward the end of Likeness andPresence: The Image Before the Era of Art (1994), Hans Belting discusses anearly Netherlandish panel painting, which he describes as half medieval iconand half modern still life. The painting was made by the Antwerp painterJoos van Cleve sometime during the second decade of the 15th century andis titled Holy Family (Figure 1).1 It pictures the Virgin and Child with Josephstanding behind them and a still life of fruit, nuts, a beaker of wine, a platter,and a knife on a ledge before them. In Belting’s reading, half the painting isgoverned by an old symbolism and half by a new mimesis:

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The still life is the mirror image of natural objects in the sense of theAugustinian aequalitas, whereas the figure of the Virgin, as an imago,is a likeness in a different, symbolic sense: it is a preexisting image, notthe copy of something from nature. Joos van Cleve distinguished the‘image’ of the Madonna from the painted still life by setting it at adistance and by quoting the figure from an old painting thatsymbolically represents the true prototype: in this case it is Jan vanEyck’s Lucca Madonna in Frankfurt [Figure 2]. . . . The former iconappears as a quotation within the modern invention of the artist.(Belting, 1994: 475)

84 journal of visual culture 7(1)

Figure 1 Joos van Cleve, Holy Family, c. 1515, oil on wood,163⁄4–121⁄2 in. (42.5 cm–31.8 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Friedsam Collection, Bequest of MichaelFriedsam, 1931 (32.100.57). Image © The MetropolitanMuseum of Art. Reproduced with permission.



Belting’s interpretation of Joos van Cleve’s painting places it on the cuspbetween the medieval and the modern worlds, straddling the ‘era before art’and the era of art proper. This is a compelling description of the paintinggiven that at about 1515 a glance backward would have encountered manyicons and only a smattering of pictures that could be called still lifes, a glanceforward a gradual replacement of icons with still lifes and other new genres.Janus-faced, the Holy Family seems to look in both these directions at once.

Because the temporal and generic hybridity of this painting is something itshares with others of its period, Belting’s discussion of the Holy Family

Powell Caught between Dispensations 85

Figure 2 Jan van Eyck, Madonna and Child (Lucca Madonna), c.1434, oil on wood, 26 in.–193⁄4 in. (66 cm–50 cm). StädelschesKunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Photo credit: FotoMarburg/Art Resource, NY. Reproduced with permission.



dovetails with the most significant critical debate about early Netherlandishpainting to have taken place in the 20th century – a debate that concerns theappearance side-by-side of Virgins and things, divine persons in domesticspaces surrounded by prosaic objects. Erwin Panofsky’s theory of disguisedsymbolism, which he formulated most fully in his Early NetherlandishPainting: Its Origins and Character of 1953, and which has become thetouchstone of this debate, was meant to explain the mechanism by which Janvan Eyck and his coevals reconciled these irreconcilables:2

There could be no direct transition from St. Bonaventure’s definition ofa picture as that which ‘instructs, arouses pious emotions and awakensmemories’ to Zola’s definition of a picture as ‘un coin de la nature vu àtravers un tempérament.’ A way had to be found to reconcile the newnaturalism with a thousand years of Christian tradition; and thisattempt resulted in what may be termed concealed or disguisedsymbolism as opposed to open or obvious symbolism. (Panofsky, 1953,Vol. 1: 141)

For all that it has been justifiably criticized, Panofsky’s theory of disguisedsymbolism has the considerable merit of reflecting the heterogeneity of earlyNetherlandish paintings.3 Where Panofsky’s theory posits that thesepaintings have a ‘preconceived symbolical program’ that controls theiriconography down to the ‘smallest detail’, it is too tidy, but where on thecontrary it registers their inconsistencies, it is, it seems to me, extremelyuseful (p. 137).

Panofsky begins his discussion of disguised symbolism by analyzing severalpaintings of the annunciation, in each of which he identifies Romanesquearchitecture as a symbol of the old era of Jewish law and Gothic architectureas a symbol of the new era of grace brought about by the incarnation ofChrist (pp. 131–40). In these annunciations, architectural symbolism repre-sents ‘the doctrine that the Virgin’s impregnation with the Holy Spirit marksthe transition from the Old Dispensation to the New’ (p. 132). The choice ofthe annunciation as first example in a discussion of disguised symbolism canhardly be arbitrary. It is because of the incarnation that the Christian God isvisible in the world. In using the annunciation to illustrate his argument,Panofsky implies that the phenomenon of disguised meaning is not restrictedto pictures. It is a mode of symbolism that belongs first to the world (p. 142).

But the world of disguised symbolism is a world caught between twodispensations. In none of the annunciations Panofsky considers is the olddispensation, which is represented by Romanesque architectural elements,fully surmounted. In an annunciation attributed to Petrus Christus, ‘theshrine of Judaeo-Christian religion, divided though it is into the Old and NewDispensation (or, as the schoolmen put it, the spheres of ‘imperfect’ and‘perfect’ revelation), appears as one indestructible edifice’ (p. 134) (Figure3).4 This is a world marked by both the old blindness and the new revelation;it is a place in which God both does and does not appear.




Eight years before the publication of Early Netherlandish Painting, MeyerSchapiro wrote an essay outlining a theory of disguised symbolism much likePanofsky’s. The essay focuses on a mousetrap found in the right wing of anannunciation altarpiece in the Cloisters Collection of the MetropolitanMuseum of Art (Figure 4). Schapiro argues that this humble domestic object,which Joseph is busy making as the angel Gabriel appears to Mary in the nextroom, is a metaphor for the cross on which Christ was crucified. He quotesAugustine and others to demonstrate by what logical feats theologians madethe one wooden object stand in for the other:


Figure 3 Attributed to Petrus Christus, Annunciation, c. 1450, oil onwood, 31 in.–257⁄8 in. (78.7 cm–65.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum ofArt, New York, The Friedsam Collection, Bequest of Michael Friedsam,1931 (32.100.35). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.Reproduced with permission.



The devil exulted when Christ died, but by this very death of Christ thedevil was vanquished, as if he had swallowed the bait in the mousetrap. . . The cross of the Lord was the devil’s mousetrap; the bait by whichhe was caught was the Lord’s death. (Augustine quoted in Schapiro,1979[1945]: 1)

The mousetrap qua cross is already a strange thing, but Schapiro makes itstranger still by arguing that, in addition to its theological meaning, it haslatent sexual content: the mousetrap is, ‘at the same time, a richcondensation of symbols of the diabolical and the erotic and theirrepression; the trap is both a female object and the means of destroyingsexual temptation’ (p. 9).

As does Panofsky, Schapiro sees in early Netherlandish paintings signs of adifficult transition, in which old and new modes of thinking compete for thedomain of picture making, neither fully prevailing over the other:

The devoted rendering of the objects of the home and the vocationforetells the disengagement of still life as a fully secular sphere of theintimate and the manipulable. Religious thought tries to appropriate allthis for itself; it seeks to stamp the freshly discovered world with its owncategories, to spiritualize it and incorporate it within a scheme of other-worldly values. (p. 9)


Figure 4 Robert Campin and assistant, Annunciation Triptych (MérodeTriptych), c. 1425, oil on wood, 253⁄8 in.–463⁄8 in. (64.5 cm–117.8 cm). TheMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1956(56.70). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Reproduced withpermission.



Schapiro here identifies a watershed in the history of western painting, butagain – as in Panofsky’s discussion of the annunciations – the appropriatenessof Schapiro’s central example connects his theory of disguised symbolism toa world beyond painting. The mousetrap is not just any disguised symbol; itis a disguised symbol that symbolizes nothing less than disguise, the ultimatedisguise: a God in human form. Christ is as much a disguised symbol as is themousetrap and the viewer’s failure to recognize the mousetrap as a symbolof redemption is tantamount to the devil’s failure to recognize the crucifixionas trap.

The hybridity of early Netherlandish paintings reflects not only theoverlapping of art historical periods explicitly identified by Schapiro andPanofsky but also the coexistence of dispensations that is implied in theirchoice of primary examples. For a world steeped in an incarnation theorythat permits the simultaneous availability and unavailability of God to humansight, disguised symbolism was more than clever picture-making. As long asGod’s presence in the world was simultaneously as tangible as an object andas intangible as spirit, the disguised symbol was able to generate theuncanniness necessary to make it compelling.

Joos van Cleve’s Holy Family, c. 1515

Such a world betwixt and between is the one in which Joos van Cleve’s HolyFamily appeared and it is, therefore, fitting that Belting should describe it asa bifurcated painting. The evidence Belting (1994) provides for his claim thatthe Holy Family is divided along the lines of genre and period lies beyondthe frame of the painting in, on the one hand, Jan van Eyck’s Lucca Madonnaand, on the other hand, the world of real objects. For Belting, the differencebetween these two referents determines the distinction between the iconand the still life. But visual evidence from within Joos van Cleve’s paintingcan also be marshaled in support of Belting’s claim, and should be in orderto make clear that what we are dealing with here is the ‘sensible substance’of the painting as much as its modes of signification.5

The still life casts no shadow on the figures behind it, and the figures noshadow on the still life. This tear in the connective tissue of penumbral forms– which binds mother to child and fruit to platter – separates the space of theicon from that of the still life. Although it contains a milky version of the redcherries and the yellowish pomegranate and quince (?), the rim of the shiny,pewter platter likewise fails to reflect the Virgin’s red garment. Color alsomarks a division between the two spheres. The green of the ledge reappearsin the grapes and pear, making it the dominant color in the foreground,while it remains absent from the rest of the painting, except for the mossgreen of Joseph’s shirt. Finally, we view the ledge and the still life from a well-elevated vantage point that is incommensurate with the angle from which weview the shelf mounted on the wall behind the figures; that shelf reveals itsunderside to our gaze. This shift in perspective is typical of paintings of theperiod. Here its effect is to weaken the connection between the two spaces.




If one overlooks the divide that Joos van Cleve inserted between the icon andthe still life, one is liable to miss some of the painting’s rhetorical subtlety.The still life has sometimes been read as a translation and elaboration of thefirst phrase that appears in the scroll in Joseph’s hands, ‘and blessed is thefruit of your womb’ (Luke 1: 42) (Bedaux, 1987: 162). It has also beenexplained as a complex set of Christological symbols:

In this Holy Family there is an apple of original sin on the dish . . . themystic grape; the half of a walnut, exposing the sweet kernel, is thedivine nature of Christ, and its shell signifies the wood of the Cross,lignum crucis. From these we pass on to the beaker containing wine,which is a symbol of Christ’s blood poured out on the Cross. On thedish is a pomegranate, typifying the Resurrection, and cherries, specifi-cally regarded as fruits signifying Paradise. (Bergström, 1955: 304)

For all its richness, this reading does not address the seemingly accidentalarrangement of these objects, the way in which the cherries are scatteredwith their stems pointing in different directions. A passage from the auto-biography of the 14th-century Dominican mystic Heinrich Suso concerningthe eating of fruit offers a foil for the painted still life. Suso transforms everycut and each act of consumption into a symbol of someone or somethingholy:

Large pieces of fruit he divided into four parts. Three parts he ate in thename of the Holy Trinity, the fourth part in the love with which theheavenly Mother gave her tender child Jesus an apple to eat. This parthe would eat unpeeled because children usually eat it unpeeled. (Suso,1989: 77)6

At Suso’s table, no wedge of fruit or scrap of peel is left unaccounted for andobjects are arranged – the reader is led to imagine – meticulously. Theiconographer is always in danger of reading Joos van Cleve’s still life as if itwere Suso’s, that is to say, as if its symbolism were ‘open or obvious’(Panofsky, 1953, Vol. I: 141), disregarding the painter’s efforts to arrange hisfruit seemingly without rhyme or reason. This arbitrariness is what Beltinghas called the attempt of the still life to ‘deceive the eye by duplicating realobjects’; it is what Roland Barthes called the reality effect (Barthes,1986[1967–80]: 148);7 and it is the aspect of early Netherlandish paintingthat provoked Panofsky and Schapiro to concoct a theory unlikely enough toallow a mousetrap to be a device for trapping mice, the cross on which Christwas crucified, and a vagina.

Belting’s attention to the novel realism of the still life is a necessary antidoteto readings that would turn Joos van Cleve’s table into Suso’s.8 But hisrecognition that the icon and the still life demand different modes of readingshould be a precursor to the question of what to make of the fact that,despite their differences, they do indeed appear together in this painting,and they do appear very much together. The icon, which is a quotation from




Jan van Eyck’s Lucca Madonna of around 1434, lacks quotation marks. IfJoos van Cleve had wanted a pictorial equivalent to the quotation mark,something alerting us to the fact that the icon has a status different from thatof the still life, he might have used angels or a halo to indicate that the latteris a vision. By leaving these out, he brings the icon and the still life into thegreatest possible intimacy without, that is, allowing them to completelymerge with one another.

Two objects reinforce this intimacy. The piece of fruit cradled in the hand ofthe Christ child, embedded in the hollow between his belly and the body ofthe Virgin, seems to have strayed from the world of the still life. With onehand on his mother’s wrist and one cupped around the stolen piece of fruit,the Christ child cross-fertilizes the two worlds. The beaker of wine in thelower left corner also pulls the two parts of the painting together. Its trans-parent glass reveals the cloth of the Virgin’s robe behind it. To emphasize thisoverlap, the painter made the folds of the cloth run parallel to the right edgeof the beaker and parallel again to the three highlights (a Trinitarian symbol?)that fall on the glass. These lines are the culmination of the long diagonalthat extends from the Virgin’s chin along her breast, through the sightline ofthe Christ child and down the length of the Virgin’s red robe. The wine of thePassion held in the beaker seems to have flowed along this trajectory, adistillation of the living couple of mother and child.

The lone piece of fruit cradled in the Christ child’s hand and the red of theVirgin’s robe distilled into the liquid in the beaker are the elements that crossover from the icon to the still life and back again, transgressing the divisionbetween the two and complicating Belting’s periodizing efforts in theprocess. To see this painting, one needs to see both the difference betweenthe icon and the still life identified by Belting and the fact that the paintingbrings them together, and then one needs to ask how in their proximity theyoperate on one another.

The Still Life

When the still life and icon are seen together in their difference, the iconinflects the fruit, not only by lending it a set of symbolical meanings as somehave argued, but also by turning it into a metaphor for the picture’s capacityto produce meaning abundantly.9 In the late middle ages, scripture wasdescribed as fecund and compared to fruit and fruit trees, and the process ofits exegesis was metaphorically designated as a harvesting or pressing of fruit.In his monumental work, The Four Senses of Scripture, Henri de Lubaccollected examples of the trope of scriptural fecundity, for example, as itappears in a letter of 1452 written by Nicholas of Cusa: ‘The inexplicablefecundity of Divine Scripture is diversely explained by diverse writers, so thatits infinity might shine forth variously in a great number of ways’ (Nicholasof Cusa, quoted in Lubac, 1998, Vol. 1, 328, no. 44).10 A 12th-century abbot,perhaps Gilbert of Hoyland, employs the metaphor:




For you know that the words of Sacred Scripture, when they have beengleaned for a first and second vintage, can be squeezed so as to yield arich and intoxicating liquid, as if it were usual for them, laden withsacred meanings as they are, to flow again even as if they had neverbeen touched in the first place.11

In his Epistles, the 12th-century, Praemonstratensian abbot Philip of Harvegntexplains:

Though a manifold mystery is contained in the things that have beensaid, that mystery is not held to be contrary to the literal sense . . . onearrives the more gracefully at the innermost fruit by as much as thesurface of the letter is found to be not only leafy with words but alsofruitful with truth.12

The trope of the fecundity of scripture as these late medieval writerselaborate it pertains specifically to scripture in its relation to readers and towhat is made available through their interpretive efforts.

The personal address of scripture to the reader was the subject of whatmedieval exegetical terminology designated as the tropological mode ofreading. Lubac explains this mode:

In the most general acceptation, a trope was a figure, a mode, or a turnof phrase ([Gk.] tropos, [Lat.] conversio), by which one turns someexpression to designate some object other than the one naturallymeant. Tropologia, accordingly, was a ‘speech turned around’ or‘turning’ something else ‘around’; it was a ‘turned’ or ‘turning mannerof speech’.13 (Lubac, 1998, Vol. II: 129, see also 127)

Medieval exegetes then transposed the turning within the text onto therelationship between the reader and its text: ‘[Tropology] would beexplained as being “a speech turned around toward us, i.e., toward our waysof behaving,” or “a speech turning around, pertaining to the mind’s ways ofbehaving”’ (Lubac, 1998, Vol. II: 129).14 In its ‘turning manner of speech’,tropology finds in scripture the personal address to the reader, discoveringwhere scripture speaks as if it knew that this or that particular reader werethere. Quoting Saint Gregory, Lubac writes:

It is by the tropological sense thus understood that Scripture is fully forus the Word of God, this Word which is addressed to each person, hicet nunc [‘here and now’] as well as to the whole Church, and tellingeach ‘that which is of interest to his life’. (Lubac, 1998, Vol. II: 140)

In being for us, regardless of who, when, or where we are, the text is volatile.By providing lessons for ‘our way of behaving’, scripture changes along withthe readers before whose eyes it is brought. The capacity of scripture to enterthe body and undermine the distinction between text and reader then finds




its metaphor in a fruit that is comestible. For Alan of Lille, ‘the flower ofallegory gives off its scent, the fruit of tropology suffices’.15 Tropology’sturning toward the reader becomes a turning into the reader throughingestion.

Understood in an analogous manner, the fruit in Joos van Cleve’s HolyFamily not only symbolizes specific elements of the narrative of Christ’s life,but also functions as a metaphor for the capacity of the image to producemeaning – as scripture does – abundantly and as if in response to individualviewers. The location of the still life on this side of the ledge reinforces thesense that it is for us. The knife and platter are pushed so far in our directionthat they threaten to fall into our space; the glass and nuts are also here onour side of the table. The painting is not a mirror that once reflected theworld in which it was made – as most definitions of realism would have it –but rather something uncanny in its ever-renewable capacity to reflect theworld in which it now exists, uncanny insofar as the uncanny ‘is often andeasily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality iseffaced’ (Freud, 1953[1919]: 244). Where Suso’s apples can be fullyexplicated through a symbolic decoding, Joos van Cleve’s fruit is morecomplex, containing in its delicate flesh a life vibrating in response to theviewer’s imagination.

The complexity of Joos van Cleve’s fruit gets overlooked if one followsBelting in rendering the icon and the still life each to its own discreet world.To read the still life tropologically, that is, to see it as an uncanny address tothe viewer on the model of scripture, requires seeing across periods.Belting’s periodization may well be indispensable to understanding thedifference between these two modes of painting, but when followed toorigorously it prevents one from seeing what their proximity precipitates (seeDamisch, 1997: 82–3). The disciplinary quarantining of ‘old’ and ‘new’ killsthe fleeting sense of strangeness that comes from their meeting. Against thepractice of periodization, Georges Didi-Huberman has insisted on a mode ofart history that is sensitive to hybridity: ‘The history of images is a history ofobjects that are temporally impure, complex, overdetermined. It is thereforea history of polychronistic, heterochronistic, or anachronistic objects’ (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 42; see also Nagel and Wood, 2005). Historical images arealready – before the intervention of the historian whose relationship to theimage is by definition anachronistic – temporally complex and, in the case ofthe Holy Family and other early Netherlandish paintings, generically andontologically complex as well.

The Icon

If reassembling the pieces of Joos van Cleve’s painting invests the still lifewith an uncanny volatility and sensitivity to the viewer’s imagination, it alsohas its effect on the icon. Belting explains Joos van Cleve’s quotation fromJan van Eyck’s Lucca Madonna as a tapping of the authority of an oldermodel. This he views as a medieval strategy: ‘For the medieval mind, the old




was the mark of tradition, which in turn guaranteed authenticity, the rampartagainst the flood of time. This idea was also applied to images’ (Belting,1994: 432). But the exactness of early Netherlandish copies at 1500distinguishes them from their medieval predecessors, which recapitulatedfamiliar patterns and motifs but tended to do so more loosely.16 In additionto their exactness, early Netherlandish copies are remarkable for their ten-dency to reproduce works from only a generation or so earlier and from theirown tradition. Only about 80 years and the distance between Antwerp andBruges, for example, separate Joos van Cleve’s Holy Family from van Eyck’sLucca Madonna.

The self-reflexivity of early Netherlandish copying led Wolfgang Schöne tospeak of a ‘narcissism of Netherlandish art’ (Schöne, 1938: 72). Panofsky callsarchaism at 1500 a form of nostalgia: ‘The works of the great masters cameto be looked upon “at a distance”: no longer as possessions, howevercherished, but as monuments of a past worthy of study and admired with afeeling akin to nostalgia’ (Panofsky, 1953: 351). Paul Philippot stresses thenewness of the aesthetic attitude toward the image evinced by earlyNetherlandish copying: ‘The becoming conscious of the image as image isalso at the origin of a phenomenon characteristic of the end of the fifteenthcentury in the southern Low Countries: exact copies’ (Philippot, 2005: 174).

Schöne, Panofsky, and Philippot all consider archaism at 1500 a modernphenomenon, whereas Belting seems to view it primarily, if not exclusively,as a perpetuation of medieval practices.17 This difference notwithstanding,each of the four grapples with the question of whether archaism is a productof inclusion or exclusion (proximity or distance) vis-à-vis tradition, and eachrepresents the relation of painting at 1500 to its history as a form ofobjectification. Already in 1956, when Johannes Taubert took up the issue ofearly Netherlandish copying, he had brought this line of thinking to its logicalconclusion, arguing that the realism of early Netherlandish paintingconditioned artists to see the world as a collection of things, and that itwas this mode of seeing that they directed toward paintings, such thatpaintings appeared as objects like any other objects in the world. (Taubert,2003: 140).

This making of a painting into an object is precisely what happens in Joos vanCleve’s Holy Family, where the objectification of the icon that is initiatedthrough quotation is reinforced by the presence of the still life in front of it.When placed behind the still life, the quotation of the old icon becomes lessa claim to authority – as Belting suggests – than a conflation of the animateand the inanimate. ‘Doubts whether an apparently animate being is reallyalive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate’give rise, according to Freud, to uncanny effects (Freud, 1953[1919]: 226,quoting Ernst Jentsch). The human figures in this painting, althoughconvincingly three-dimensional, are indistinguishable in their stillness fromthe objects on the ledge. The proximity of the living mother and child to thecollection of inanimate objects makes the human figures, already reifiedthrough quotation, strangely lifeless.




If we follow Belting in seeing the icon in a register different from that of thestill life and also in seeing it separately from the still life, we can restore to ita certain degree of liveliness. This requires strictly differentiating betweenthe mimetic representation of objects in the world (art) and the quotation ofthe icon (the image before the era of art). But for many who have com-mented on early Netherlandish copying and quotation – including Schöne,Taubert, Panofsky, and Philippot – this distinction is what early Netherlandishcopying calls into question. For each of these commentators, that copyingentails an objectification of the old image that transforms it into a thingdifficult to distinguish from the furniture and fruit with which Joos van Cleveso tellingly brings it together. It is only by seeing the two parts of Joos vanCleve’s painting together without seeing them as the same, that we can dojustice to this uncanny ambiguity.

‘Eyes Here! Eyes Here!’18

When questioned about the Sand-Man, his mother, it is true, deniedthat such a person existed except as a figure of speech; but his nursecould give more definite information: ‘He’s a wicked man who comeswhen children won’t go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in theireyes so that they jump out of their heads all bleeding. Then he puts theeyes in a sack and carries them off to the half-moon to feed hischildren.’ (Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 1953[1919]: 227–8)

For Belting, the two parts of Joos van Cleve’s painting must be separatedbecause they represent two different ways of seeing. The period divisionsthat structure the discipline of art history have been justified both by a beliefin the relativity of vision and by demands for scholarly expertise. Theyrepresent perceived watersheds in what, by a certain turn of speech, hascome to be called the period eye (see Baxandall, 1988[1972]: 29–108).Periodization ensures that the historian will gather the information necessaryto allow him or her to exchange his or her eye for the eye of the period thatis his or her subject. Taken literally and against any claim that it is merely afigure of speech, this fantasy of trading eyes is macabre and brings to mindFreud’s reading of E.T.A. Hoffman’s story The Sandman, in which eyes aresnatched, pecked, stolen, sold, supplemented with prosthetics, and con-structed entirely artificially – all, Freud tells us, as displaced forms of castration.The concept of the period eye, indeed, checks the fantasy of the omniscienteye, cutting it down to size with the sobering fact of historical difference. Inthis regard it is salutary, but a two-fold danger lurks in the use to which theconcept has often been put. The first is that it can turn the historian’srelationship to historical images into a form of hallucination; the second isthat it can rob images of their incoherencies.

A crucial moment in Belting’s reading of Joos van Cleve’s Holy Family, thesentences devoted to the old man in the background of the painting,concerns directly this problem of eyes. Belting finds in this figure not a




picture of Joseph, whom we would expect, but rather a portrait of the latemedieval viewer:

The old man who appears in the background before an open window. . . is no longer . . . Joseph from a ‘Holy Family’ but the client whocommissioned the painting . . . The figure of the Virgin in the paintingis the one that appears before his inner eye, which is why he has takenoff his reading glasses. This finally helps to exclude any literal meaningof the image. (Belting, 1994: 275)

By removing his glasses, Belting argues, the old man reveals himself to be anembodiment of a peculiarly medieval mode of viewing that has little to dowith seeing in the ordinary sense. But why, one might ask, would the old manneed to take off his reading glasses in order to behold a vision of the Virginwith his inner eye? Reading glasses do not affect inner eyes. Reading glassesare removed in order to look at something other than writing with one’sordinary eyes.

Belting’s way of thinking about seeing in early Netherlandish painting has atendency to domesticate its strangeness by relegating what it represents tothe category of phantasmagoria. Belting is not alone in this line of thinking.Craig Harbison believes that the canon in Jan van Eyck’s Madonna withCanon van der Paele ‘remov[es] the eye-glasses which he needs for hisearthly vision. What he sees before him is not, of course, merely earthly, nordoes he see it, strictly speaking, except in his mind’s eye’ (Harbison, 1985:100; see also Rothstein, 1999) (Figures 5 and 6). But, once again, the glassesremoved are reading glasses. The nearsighted canon removes them, I wouldsuggest, to see with his corporeal eyes the Virgin who would otherwise benothing but a blur. In which case, the removal of the glasses demonstratesthat this Virgin has made her appearance in the flesh.

This seemingly minor issue of a pair of reading glasses represents the rathermajor issue of how medieval viewers looked at sacred images. Belting’sinterpretation of the old man in the Holy Family and Harbison’s inter-pretation of the canon in the Madonna with Canon Van der Paele amount toan argument that the late medieval viewer did not look at the sacred picturewith corporeal eyes but instead used that picture to generate an image beforehis or her inner eye. This is compelling insofar as the appearance of theVirgin in an ordinary domestic space indeed calls for an explanation of somekind. But my eye fails to find evidence that the donors depicted in the HolyFamily and the Madonna with Canon Van der Paele see anything other thanthe world so vividly represented around them – a world that happensmiraculously to contain the Virgin. It is the fact that these donors see whatcannot be seen that makes these paintings strange. Precisely this strangenessis filtered out by the theory that early Netherlandish paintings represent thehallucinatory visions of their donors. In the case of the Holy Family – if theremoval of the reading glasses does not settle the matter – the lasciviousnessof Joseph’s gaze, which reflects the popular iconography of the ill-matchedlovers, in which a wizened old man gropes a young woman, should give





Figure 5 Jan van Eyck, Madonna with Canon van der Paele, 1436, oil on wood,48 in.–613⁄4 in. (122 cm–157 cm). Groeningemuseum, Bruges, Belgium. Photo credit:Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 6 Detail of Figure 5.



pause to anyone tempted to imagine that this man is not in the presence ofan entirely corporeal woman.

Belting’s figure of the medieval donor, who ‘sees’ the image only with hisinner eye, is intended to illustrate the fact that that person did not see theway people in the modern world do, but I would also venture to suggest thatBelting makes of this figure a model for the conscientious historian ofimages. That historian is meant to ‘see’ the painting by gazing beyond it to ahallucinatory vision of what it once was, which means looking at the paintingas if it were no longer available to sight, but instead only to the imaginationand only by means of the labor of gathering up again the historical contextthat has fallen away from it. According to this dogma, the person who lookstoo directly at the image makes the idolatrous mistake of worshipping merematter. The good historian beholds with his or her inner eye the image of thepainting, as it really was when it was visible – as it no longer is – to the outereye. In such a writing of the history of images, the rules of period divisionsare of paramount importance and the appearance side-by-side of historicallydistant images is strictly prohibited; the image is imprisoned in a historicalhothouse, shielded from winds that might perchance bring it into contactwith something in whose presence it would appear strange, even where thatsomething is to be found within its very own frame.

Acknowledgements

Versions of this article were presented at the 2003 Interdisciplinary Graduate Student

Conference sponsored by the Humanities Center and English Department of Harvard

University and at the Renaissance Colloquium held at Temple University in 2005. For

their insights and suggestions, I would like to thank Raiford Guins, Richard Neer,

Alicia Walker, Henri Zerner, and the anonymous readers and editorial board of the

journal of visual culture.

Notes

1 On Joos van Cleve, see Hand (2004). On the Holy Family, see Ainsworth (1998:

246–9). On the appearance and development of devotional images with still life

elements, see Falkenburg (1994: 6–7, 14).

2. For references to earlier theories of disguised symbolism in Panofsky’s own work

and in the work of others, see Pächt (1956: 275).

3. For one of the first and most trenchant critiques of Panofsky’s concept of

disguised symbolism, see Pächt (1956: 275–9), Benjamin (1976: 11–24) and

Bedaux (1986: 5–28). Disguised symbolism is a subcategory of symbolism and

its interpretation a subcategory of iconology. Iconology has come in for a great

deal of criticism, which I regard as very useful. A particularly good critique of it

is to be found in Damisch (2005).

4. In Matthew, Christ speaks of the ongoing validity of the law: ‘Think not that I

have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish

them but to fulfil them’ (Mt 5:17).

5. On iconology’s reduction of painting to a system of signification at the expense

of its ‘sensible substance’, see Damisch (2005: 264–6).

6. ‘Daz gross ops teilt er in vier teil: dú drú ass er in dem namen der heiligen

drivaltekeit, daz vierde teil in der minne, als dú himlesch múter irem zarten




kindlin Jesus ein epfelli gab ze essen. Daz selb teil ass er unbeschniten, wan es

dú kindelú also unbeschnitten pflegent ze essene’ (Seuse, 1907: 25).

7. On the reality effect in early Netherlandish painting, see Moxey (1996).

8. Belting by no means entirely discounts the idea that the still life has symbolic

meaning determined by the story of Christ’s Passion. He simply stresses the fact

that its rhetorical mode is one of realism (Belting, 1994: 474–5).

9. For a discussion of the polysemy of late medieval still life, see Falkenburg (1994:

93).

10. ‘Inexplicabilis divine scripture fecunditas per diversos diverse explicatur, ut in

varietate tanta eius infinitas clarescat’ (Nicholas van Cusa, quoted in

Vansteenberghe, 1920: 111).

11. ‘Nosti enim quod sacrae verba Scripturae, cum semel et bis vindemiata sunt, ac

si gravida sacris iterum soleant influere sensibus et quasi prius tacta non essent,

ubertem et inebriantem effundant expressa liquorem’ (Gilbert of Hoyland,

quoted in Lubac, 1998, Vol. I, 79). For other uses of fruit, nuts, and tables laden

with food as metaphors for scriptural fecundity, see Lubac (1998: Vol. I: 29, 62,

75; Vol. II: 68).

12. ‘Esti in his quae dicta sunt mysterium multiplex continentur, illud tamen litterali

sensui contrarium non habetur . . . nec tamen ab ea litteralem intelligentiam

removeri; et eo gratius ad fructum intimum pervenitur, quo, non solum verbis

frondosa, sed et veritate fructuosa litterae superficies invenitur’ (Philip of

Harvegnt, quoted in Lubac, 1998, Vol. II: 68, 289, n. 119).

13. The quotations are from Philo, Augustine, Isidore of Seville, Hugh of St. Victor,

and Peter Comester. The four-fold structure of medieval exegesis comprised the

historical, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical modes of interpretation.

14. The quotations are from Peter Comestor.

15. ‘Redolet flos allegoriae, satiat fructus tropologiae’ (Alan of Lille, quoted in

Lubac, 1998, Vol. II: 129).

16. On the scarcity of exact copies in medieval art, see Alexander (1989: 61). On the

use of labor-saving devices in medieval art, see Scheller (1995: 70–7). On the

novelty of the exactness of early Netherlandish copies, see Taubert (1960: 67).

For an overview of the literature on these copies, see Van den Brink (2001).

17. Belting (1994) also alludes to a new consciousness of history reflected in the

practice of copying (p. 475).

18. In summarizing E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Sandman, Freud writes: ‘His father and

the guest are at work at a brazier with glowing flames. The little eavesdropper

hears Coppelius call out: “Eyes here! Eyes hear!” and betrays himself by

screaming aloud’ (Freud, 1953[1919]: 228).

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Amy Powell is Assistant Professor of Art History at Temple University. Shehas published on early Netherlandish painting in The Art Bulletin and ArtHistory, and is currently working on a book about the impact that Protestanticonoclasm had on the genre of landscape as it developed in 17th-centuryNetherlands.

Address: Art History Department, Temple University, 1301 Cecil B. MooreAvenue (004-01), Ritter Annex 857, Philadelphia, PA 19122-6091, USA.[email: [email protected]]




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