Identity at the Crossroads:Subjectivity and the Economy of Death in the Carondelet

Diptych

Michael SchwartzAugusta State University

South Eastern College Art Conference (SECAC) Raleigh, North Carolina

29 October – 1 November 2003

1. Introduction: Renaissance Individualism and Death

Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance,

published in 1860, continues to nourish our scholarly

questioning, and perhaps most influentially through his

claim that the Renaissance invented or discovered the

individual.1 Many subsequent and pioneering studies, from

Ernst Cassirer’s The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy

to Steven Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, have taken up,

reformulated, and explored Burckhardt’s thesis, often on new

theoretical, historiographic, or socio-cultural grounds.2

Renaissance art-history has also regularly taken up this

topic, as with Panofsky’s essay on perspective, influenced

as it was by Cassirer’s philosophy of form, or, more

recently, as with post-modern inquiry into the construction

of the self and its connections to social power, often

finding inspiration in Greenblatt’s notion of self-

fashioning.3 Nor are questions about modern individualism

and selfhood simply the habits of an academic discipline;

writing the genealogy of the modern self is perhaps more

germane than ever, as concern for and crises in identity

permeate every fiber of contemporary life: our culture of

regressive narcissism.

The present is essay, then, is a modest contribution to

the now widespread project of writing a genealogy of modern

selfhood. It explores one and only one artwork – a

devotional diptych in Louvre, painted by Jan Gossaert in

1517 for the prominent art patron, religious leader, and

political dignitary Jean Carondelet. This artwork gathers

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and discloses self-identity proper to elite circles of early

sixteenth century Europe. I shall point out four interwoven

moments of selfhood in the painting, attesting to the self-

sense being on the cusp in the early sixteenth century -- at

the crossroads, so to speak -- of modern individuation of

the self as subject.

The Carondelet Diptych is an instance of a painting-

type called the half-length devotional diptych, proper to

Northern European art and culture of the Renaissance.4 The

genre may have first appeared early in the fifteenth

century, as a court document suggests; but, to be sure the

production and use of devotional diptychs took off in

the1460s and came to an end around 1530, a lifespan of about

seventy years. The painting-type has two hinged wings, one

panel with a half-length portrait of the donor or

commissioner, the other with a half-length presentation of

the Madonna and Child. The backs of both panels are 1 Jacob Burchardt, The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance; John Martin, essay.2 Ernst Cassirer’s The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy; Steven Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning.3 Panofsky; book on self-fashioning in Renaissance; individual in renaissance book too.4 Friedman dissertation; MMAB essay – I draw upon these studies, and especially the Friedman, throughout.

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commonly painted; in the Louvre diptych, for example, we see

on the left a skull, a momento mori motif that became

widespread in the arts of these years.

As Jane Friedman has noted in her fundamental study of

this painting genre, death is key to understanding the

functions of the devotional diptych. And, going further, we

can say that concern about death is the flip-side of an

obsession with manifesting personal identity; the Louvre

panels, for example, contain on the front a portrait of the

donor; an inscription on the surrounding frame naming him;

on the back panels the sitter’s coat of arms and insignia;

a personal motto, matura, on the bottom of both

illusionistic niches; and the motif of a skull, more

personal and direct in addressing “one’s own death” than the

figure of a skeleton.

It is a truism to say that everyone dies. Yet how

comfortable are we today, here and now, with regularly

contemplating death? Michel Montaigne, in the latter

sixteenth-century, admonished that failure to contemplate

death inevitably leads to the failure to live life fully --

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a theme found throughout the world’s wisdom teachings,

including a restricted genre of late medieval and

Renaissance texts called the Ars vivendi (which, for the most

part, were addressed to monks and nuns).5 What, more

deeply, might be at stake in contemplating death?

Heidegger taught us that human beings tend to flee

death, to cover it up. Foucault took up this theme and

taught us that we moderns are more invested in this cover-up

than were many cultures of pre-modernity: biopower, in its

various facets, maximizing life even in the face of death.

David Loy, in his important book Lack and Transcendence, gives

us one the deepest considerations of death: that, as

Heidegger suggested, what we flee, what we fear, is not so

much physical death as the “death” of our sense of being a

separate self.6 Taking up themes from existentialism,

psychoanalysis, and Buddhism, Loy argues forcibly that our

sense of being a self, of being a separate being (with the

feeling-wish that one is substantial, solid, and continuous

5 Montaigne.6 Heidegger, Being and Time; Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume I, final chapter; Loy, Lack and Transcendence.

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as this self), always already contains within it a sense of

lack, that the self-sense is finally ungrounded and always

feels less real than it imagines and wishes itself to be.

Writing in the 1960s and 70s, existential-psychoanalytic

thinkers Ernest Becker and Norman O. Brown suggested that

the fear of death, and not sex, is the primary repression,

with culture serving as a collective defense mechanism, the

source of various historically-changing immortality

projects. Coming from a quite different theoretical

horizon, the great Annales historian Philip Aries likewise

postulated that culture is always already bound up, and in a

primary manner, with the issue of death.7 Loy, on his part,

argues convincingly that such immortality projects and

death-concerns are even more deeply reality projects – projects

for the separate self to feel-real – compensating for the

sense of the lack that attends the lived sense of ego-

bounded existence. The fear of physical death, in Loy’s

view, is itself a kind of cover-up, partially manifesting

latent and repressed emotional energies – doing so as the

7 Aries.

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fear of something (that is, as the fear of death) -- while

still masking the deeper, the more objectless anxiety that

is lack itself.

In this light, the Louvre diptych thematizes the

sitter’s identity in the face of physical death, where focus

upon physical death is at once spur for and impediment to

transcending the separate self altogether, what in the

radical late fourteenth-century mystic teachings of the

Cloud of Unknowing is called a self-forgetting that rests in

the God.

Without transcending ego-bounded identity, there is

regularly some sort of covering over of the sense of lack.

One common strategy is to project a story about the self’s

future, about its continued existence in time, hence re-

assuring itself about its realness in the here and now. But

as Blanchot says “the past never has been”; and one adds

“nor will the future ever be.” Both past and future are

contents of thoughts that are always in the Now.

In this reading of the situation – that is, the

situation of being human -- projects of the separate sense

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of selfhood are always in part ways of defending against

lack, where the fear of death is a partial expression and

near-final masking of existential anxiety and guilt. And

while this view of culture as a series of defensive feel-

real projects is decidedly one-sided – one would want a more

multifaceted sense of the inner and outer purposes and

functions of culture -- it is nonetheless an important

contribution, especially with regard to the Louvre diptych,

concerned as it is with representing a self and propounding

identity in confronting the specter of personalized

physical death.

To be sure, while situated in a Burckhardtian line of

questioning, the present inquiry is not engaged with whether

the Renaissance invented or discovered the individual. The

term “individual” is most often used in a substantive manner

that has sidetracked discussion by focusing on dating the

emergence of the individual. The issue is not the

individual versus the non-individual, but developmental

processes of individuation. The infant, we now know, begins to

develop a self of separate identity, a sense of boundaries,

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by internalizing the gaze of the caretaker and correlatively

internalizing a primitive self-image that is recognized in

this gaze, where this self-image is composed of visual and

tactile matter. Newly independent of the caretaker, the

infant’s internalization of being recognized is both a

genuine process of growth in individuation and also a

defense mechanism, the imaginative securing of the

protective and guiding presence of the caretaker even when

the caretaker is not actually present.8 This is only the

opening act in ongoing processes of individuation,

continuing through a series of developmental phases, now

well explored cross-culturally (that is, not made up, but

based on evidence), including the oedipal phase, and moves

into the emergence of the normative conformist self of

mythic-membership consciousness, where one’s locus of

identity is woven as a web of role-identities. Additional

phases of individuation are possible, if not common to all

cultures and historical periods, as with development of the

autonomous self (a more mature ego-identity) and, further,

8 See Almaas, The Void; idem, The Point of Existence; and Washburn, The Ego and the Dynamic Ground, 2nd edition.

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of the existential or authentic self (to use Jenny Wade’s

profound scheme), where these phases become increasingly

open to the groundlessness of the self-sense in their

greater individuation, the thick network of norm-governed

culture-social relationships (cf. Heidegger’s Das Man) no

longer covering over the anxieties of lack. (It should be

noted that while these developmental phases seem to be

cross-cultural, they do not determine but entertain a wide

variety of cultural and historical expressions and

variations, along with unpredictable tensions and

dissociations that accompany processes of individuation.9)

Simply put, with increased individuation in the

Renaissance and its greater sense of personal autonomy, the

sense of lack became more open, figured as facing “one’s own

death” (to use of Aries’s felicitous phrase), calling for

the invention of new reality projects in the face of a more

personalized death -- or rather, as in the Louvre, diptych,

an amalgam of such reality-projects, both lingering medieval

and newly early modern. No longer as clearly embedded in

9 Jenny Wade, Changes of Mind.

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pre-given social and cosmic orders, the self-sense seeking

grounds more reflexively, that is, as subjectivity. This is

what we mean when we say that in the Renaissance the self

begins to emerge as subject – which, as we shall see, is an

aspect of the presentation of the self in the Carondelet

diptych..

Of the two sections that follow, the first will address

the more medieval moments of selfhood in the panels; the

second the more modern moments

2. Louvre Diptych as Perpetual Act of Penance

Each panel of the diptych measures 16 ¾ inches in

height by 10½ inches in width. The open left wing

represents the contemporary Jean Carondelet, the right the

Virgin and Child. On the back of the portrait panel are

Carondelet’s coat of arms and his initials, on the other

reversed side a skull and scroll with the wisdom saying of

Jerome. While front and back are post-medieval in style,

this-worldly in reference, simulations of God’s created

substances, they display contrasting modes of simulation.

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The front are representations (the term being the beginning

of the inscription around the sitter’s portrait), the frames

articulating a picture-plane that distinguishes the

pictorial from actual space; in contrast, the back are more

illusionistic, objects located in simulated stone niches,

with these niches open to actual space and surrounded by and

contained within actual wood, juxtaposing simulated and real

substances, breaking down the distinction between the

pictorial and actual realms. The objects on the back are

simulated as present to us, then in the here and now, the

jaw of the skull jutting out; while the figures on the front

are re-presented, the inscriptions above and below defining

the sitter’s age and the year of the painting’s execution,

with the figures separated from us not only in space but

also in time, pictorial representation here seemingly

overcoming the passage of time -- making absent friends

present, as Alberti put it echoing Cicero. The praying

Carondelet, envisioning the Madonna and Child (perhaps

receiving a vision, perhaps exercising his fantasia),

contrasts with the immediacy of the skull, broken-off jaw

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protruding forward but unable to speak, eyes titled upwards

but no longer able to see.

The backgrounds of the representations are black, a

post-medieval transformation of goldground, rationalized as

the absence of illumination light (in contrast to the actual

reflected light of goldground, gold now expunged to the

frame), generating a non-specific environment. Carondelet is

angled to the right in prayer; the Virgin and Child are more

frontal in presentation, with the Child looking leftward.

The panels share a sameness of format, framing, half-length

presentation, figure size, and neutral background, equating

the representations, bringing the worshipper and holy

figures into intimate relation. Differentiation of the two

spheres is manifested by the physical separation of the two

fields, the greater iconicity of the holy figures, and the

deeper modeling of the sitter contrasting the greater

general brightness of the holy figures. That said, the donor

and holy figures are on the same horizontal level, as

defined by the material format, complicating what for

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centuries had been taken for granted presuppositions about

vertical-cosmic hierarchy.10

The half-length presentations, small and portable

format, and subject-matter of a single contemporary in

prayer towards the Virgin and Child, all enhance the sense

of intimacy and immediacy between worshipper and holy

beings. Although the evidence is slight, if not negligible,

the general consensus seems to be that such devotional

diptychs primarily served as an aid in the private

devotional practices of the portrayed contemporary figure,

most likely used in his private oratory or chapel, or in

some cases, as with larger panels, located on the altars of

family chapels.11

The diptych format itself has a long history in

Christian practice, from early Christian times onwards

having associations with the Mosaic tablets, reliquaries,

and especially with the altar.12 Significantly, the Louvre

panels reference what was necessarily absent during private

prayer in one’s oratory, that is, the altar and the priest’s

performance of Mass. Carondelet’s gesture of prayer has its

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origins in the priest’s elevation of the host during Mass

(hands clasped holding the host in elevatio); while the Christ

Child’s nude body, as sign of his humanation, incarnates

into our space, into the world, with one foot seeming to

project out and rest on the front edge of the lower frame: a

visual demonstration of the Real Presence of God proper to

the Eucharist.13 These features of the panels, as Friedman

has demonstrated, reference the celebration of Mass amidst

private devotion.

10 This strategy is also found in the Merode Altarpiece, where the donors inprayer at left are envisioning the event of the Annunciation at center. The respective settings of the two scenes define the donors as located on the ground, the Annunciation elevated above, the three stairs at lefta metaphor for the spiritual ascent of the donors (the door convenientlyblocks any visible connection of the stairs to the room at center; whilethe left edge of the central scene displays the inner edge of an architectural opening, without showing that opening to the left scene, where this edge at first seems like a doorway, but does not come to the floor, hence is suggestive of a window). The floor of the central scenetilts downward and implicitly continues past the lower boundary, out anddown, and at such an angle, that our position on the actual floor is undercut, as if we are floating before the central scene, our soul’s having ascended in parallel to the acts of the donors at left. (In passing I note that this contrasts the contemporaneous strategy of Masaccio’s Trinity, where vertical hierarchies are not simply implied but are correlative of lived space. Penetrating the significance of these related but bifulcating approaches of the new painting to figuring cosmic hierarchies in relation to a beholder’s lived place goes a long way towards defining differences, at their origins, of Early Italian Renaissance and Early Netherlandish painting.) In the case of the Louvrediptych, the non-place of backgrounds even further eliminates the sense of vertical-cosmic hierarchy.

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This sitter’s witnessing and recognition of the word

made flesh is complemented by a verbal extension of the his

gesture of prayer: starting from the lower left (next to the

donor’s panel) and moving up, around, and down, we read an

inscription that petitions the Virgin to intercede on the

speaker’s behalf, that is, most immediately, on behalf of

the praying and envisioning Carondelet.

What are we to make of this private devotional

reference to the celebration of Mass in conjunction with a

petitionary prayer to Mary? Among developments in the

medieval and early Renaissance church, key is the Papal

Reform of the late eleventh-century. Loy, following Harold

Berman’s monumental and authoritative study of Law and

Revolution in the West, sees these Reforms as constituting one

of the most important revolutions in the history of Western

culture, one that still orients how we live today.

Condensing century-long changes that carried into the early

modern period of the Renassaince (and beyond), Loy offers

11 MMAB and Friedman; latter most thorough discussion of the function issue.12 Friedman on history of format.13 Ibid; Steinberg

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the following summary of this decisive transformation of

religious culture:

Prior to this revolution, sin had been understood as a condition of alienation from God, which implied a diminution of one’s being. The development of canon lawled to a new understanding of sin, now defined in legalistic terms as specific wrongful acts, desires, orthoughts, for which painful penalties must be paid either in this life or in the next. This tended to reduce the importance of the Last Judgment and led to the “legalization,” so to speak, of life after death inPurgatory, an intermediate realm where all of one’s remaining debts must be repaid. This was an important shift from the earlier meaning of penance – acts of contrition symbolizing a turning away from sin back to God and neighbor – into a more objectified sense of sinas an entity, which, as the church soon discovered, could be commodified…. In the Eastern Church, sin continued to be understood mainly as the fallen state of one’s soul, a disharmony in one’s relationship with God rather than an act violating a divine legal code…. Redemption became essentially a legal transaction. Christ’s sacrifice paid for our original sin, but we must suffer for all the sins we have committed since then. Justice required that all such violations be repaid with a penalty suitable to the violation. Inevitably, the nature and source of mercy also came tobe understood in a new way: As God became more of a stern judge, Marys’ role became more important as a compassionate intercessor.14

Overall, the concern for penance increased during subsequent

centuries; what counted as penance also evolved, as with the

increasing (and notorious) sale of indulgences. By the time14 Loy, A Buddhist History of the West, p.49

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of the Renaissance, two of the main types of penance were

attending Mass and daily prayer, especially those addressed

to the Virgin. Both acts are figured in the Louvre diptych.

The panels then not only served as an aid for Carondelet’s

private devotional and meditation exercises, but beyond use

as spiritual support, they functioned as a kind of ex-voto,

the magical efficacy of which establishes perpetual acts of

penance – praying for salvation and attending Mass -- where

it was the number of such acts of penance that mattered.15

Indeed, post-reform culture was a culture defined by an

economy of death, a quantification of acts of penance (or

payments for indulgences) that balanced out one’s sinful

acts, shortening the time spent and the pain endured in

Purgatory. Even beyond the commissioner’s own death, the

diptych would continue as a magical stand-in perpetually

performing acts of penance.

In this scheme of salvation, death is not really much

of an ending: physical death is only a transition to another

realm in which the separate self continues to experience

15 Warburg ref in essay to this issue; Friedman

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sensations of pain and pleasure in a manner not unlike here

on earth. The time spent in Purgatory extends the

horizontal time of the self’s existence in awaiting the Last

Judgment. While the eternal fate of the soul, and the final

ending of temporal existence, was never far from mind, this

widespread and intense concern with reducing time in

Purgatory surely displaced focus away from final endings and

towards an extension in historical time of the existence of

the separate self in Purgatory. Much has been written about

the social-political consequences of the Papal Reform. Let

us here add that they contributed to deflecting attention

away from ultimate endings, hence away from the underlying

sense of lack, towards the continuity of selfhood in

Purgatory, even with all its pain.16

We have already seen that individuation hinges on

recognition. That is, for the separate self to have a sense

16 The diptych thus acknowledges the Last Judgment, the seeking of the immortality of the self, in a vertical direction, once and for all; but in its cultural context this final judgment, this final verdict of death, is delayed, pushed indefinitely ahead, a kind of secularization of being in the world (as Blumenberg once argues, although on slightly different grounds)?, where the efforts to reduce time spent in Purgatoryat once created a future oriented project that whether successful or notin reducing the sinful debt nevertheless projected an not exactly unearth-like existence beyond physical death.

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of its own existence, it needs to have a sense of being

recognized (the insight here is Hegel’s, having been fleshed

out, of course, in modern psychology).17 Carondelet

petitions Mary’s attention so to receive affirming

recognition from God (hinted at in Christ’s turning

leftward), the sitter’s sense of self situated in a cosmic

order of divine credits and debits, where the seeking of

recognition from God is to secure an ultimate grounding of

the permanent existence of the “I,” countering the self’s

sense of lack.

Related to this primary facet of identity-formation in

the diptych is a second that involves other human beings:

those who, during the sitter’s lifetime or after, might

behold and engage the painting in a devotional manner. When

a beholder other than Carondelet reads the prayer

surrounding the Virgin and Child, she in a sense activates

it on behalf of the portrayed figure at left, working to

reduce the sinful debts of the sitter (the practice of

praying for those in Purgatory was common to the period).

17 Hegel; Almaas

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But, too, in reading this inscription, the beholder assumes

the voice of the enunciator of the prayer, the panel thereby

a gift to others, Carondelet a genuine donor, his prayer not

only for himself but for all those who use the panels, a

gesture of caritas proximi and as such an act of penance. The

sitter’s identity is fleshed out in a network of mutual

recognition, his gift acknowledging the other as the

neighbor, with others before the image praying for the

donor, an exchange of penitential aid mediated by God who

recognizes all acts of penance and Whose judgment mediates

this recognition amongst donor and viewers.

Such are the first two moments of selfhood under

discussion. Let us now turn to two more, both of which are

surer modernity.

3. Modern Moments of Self

The third mode of identity-formation at which we shall

look projects, like the first two, a future in which the

self is to be recognized, thereby perpetuating identity.

But in this case, vertical release at the end of time has

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been more or less tacitly suspended or bracketed,

recognition more of a horizontal affair.

Carondelet was intimate with humanist circles, friends

with the great Christian humanist Erasmus, who wrote several

letters and dedicated a publication to Carondelet. The

Louvre diptych, not surprisingly, has a number of humanist

elements: the artist’s signature, located on the frame below

the Virgin and Child, using the Latin “pingebat”; the

stature and presentation of the sitter having the feel of an

antique bust; and the Child’s form having something of a

classical touch as well. (Gossaert was innovative and

influential in early sixteenth-century Northern circles for

his blending the styles of late Northern European Gothic and

the antique.18) In On Painting, the first humanist treatise of

its kind, Alberti declares:

Painting possesses a truly divine power in that, not only does it make the absent present (as they say of friendship), but it also represents the dead to the living

many centuries later, so that they are recognized by spectators with pleasure and deep admiration for the artist. Plutarch tells us that Cassandrus, one of

Alexander’s commanders, trembled all over at the sight of a portrait of the deceased Alexander which he 18 Style and influence article

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recognized the majesty of his king. He also tells us how Agesilaus the Lacedaemonian, realizing that he was very ugly, refused to allow his likeness to be known to posterity, and so would not be painted or modeled by anyone. Through painting, the faces of the dead go on livingfor a very long time.19

In this humanist formulation, the portrait perpetuates the

likeness and memory of the sitter, an immortality project

centered on fame: that is, the recognition of self by

others, both during and after the sitter’s death, but with

no decided stress on vertical release at the end of time,

that is, no recognition by God as judge, so that continuing

fame in this serves as the self’s “afterlife.”

Even with the divine power to make the absent seem

present, the humanist breath of the diptych no longer

assuredly secures magical ex-voto capacities. The

inscription around the sitter begins with the word

“representation”; that around the holy figures ends with “me

representa” (represent me), a plea to the Virign to

represent to Christ the speaker, most immediately the

praying Carondelet. Ascending and descending, the placement

of the words “representation / represent me” mirror one 19 Cited in Cranston, p62.

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another on the lower outer portion of the frames; with the

diptych closed, they almost touch. How might we understand

this structured correspondence of terms? One interpretation

is that the pictorial representation of the sitter is in the

end inadequate, requiring the Virgin to do the requested

“representing” of Carondelet to God.

These representations are indexed as the product of the

painter, who signs his name below the holy figures with the

Latin “pingebat.” This use of the imperfect echoes the term

“faciebat,” used by Renaissance artists, a reference to a

Plinyian passage about unfinished works by great masters, a

celebration of great art, but in our present context also

suggestive that perhaps the painting is unfinishable, that

is (in this reading), could never be completed or perfected.

The humanist associations of the signature celebrate the

coloring and painting powers of the artist, Jan Gossaert, in

line with comparison to the ancients themselves, while also

declaring the representation of the holy figures to be

incomplete, imperfect so to speak, leaving open whether

anyone is capable of “perfecting” an image of God Incarnate

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and His Mother. The conceit is at once humanist praise for

the artist’s stature and a Christian sign of modesty or

humility in representing the Virgin and Child (perhaps with

deference to the visionary icon of St. Luke, even as the

composition of the two holy figures does not directly allude

to that visionary portrait as its source).

Such sophisticated and multivalent plays on the terms

of representation seems to undercut the magical efficacy of

the painting as a perpetual prayer that can reach God, the

humanist aspects of the diptych aligning with the

immortality of the self-sense in a horizontal register of

historical time, the stature and achievement of both donor

and artist to be recognized by later generations. As

counterpoint to this weakening of the magic of the image,

Jan draws upon, congeals, and references two historical

styles: (1) the textural precision of the founders of

Netherlandish art, like Jan Van Eyck and Rogier; and (2) the

antique feel of sitter and Child. The referencing of these

historical styles evokes past authority to empower a

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pictorial representation that has lost something of its

magical aura, the aura of art on the rise.20

Also bracketing or suspending immediate recognition by

God is the fourth moment of self in the diptych: that a

patron would have commissioned a portrait of himself to be

used mirror-like as a model of identity. The diptych offers

an intimate, half-length likeness, a portrait contained in

its own field, as a self-model for prayer. The effect is,

within the intimacy of its use, that the donor sees a model

of himself outside of himself that defines who he is. Self-

recognition grounds the sense of self – a thoroughly modern

move, that of subjectivity. Famously, in the seventeenth-

century, Descartes presents the self as a thinking substance

that reflexively grounds itself by recognizing that in

doubting it is thinking, thereby proving that the self, the

“I,” exists (“I think, therefore I am”). Identity is

initially founded in the Meditations not in the placement of

oneself in a prior social or cosmic order, but in self-

20 [(1) not clear if these prior styles accrue authority based on who painted them, the institutions of their association, or the patrons; (2)Benjamin on waning of aura in Renaissance, due to separation from ritual, here Mass absent from the locale of use but referenced by art]

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reflection grounding the existence of the “I,” the existence

of self as thinking subject. In the Louvre diptych, there is

similar if more perceptual-embodied movement: “I see myself,

therefore I am” (that is, I see myself out there, therefore

I exist as self over here in relation to my body

sensations), where the existence of oneself is not founded

in relation to others nor in relation to a pre-given cosmic

order, but in relation to oneself and likeness in the

intimate setting of private prayer. To be sure, this

externalized model of self is the point of departure, an

aid, in the actual practice of spiritual exercises,

exercises that seek recognition by God; and where these

practices could and, in instances did, effect the

surrendering of identity concerns, promoting a self-

forgetting resting in God (as in the Cloud of Unknowing put

it). But the starting point is an intimate engagement with a

half-length portrait of oneself that reflectively grounds

the self-image.21

Both of these more modern moments of self-formation

eschew recognition by God, at least in the first place,

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opting for a more horizontal plane of activity: the humanist

trope seeking fame and recognition by others, the subjective

impetus enacting recognition of oneself by oneself alone.

4. Conclusion: Identity at the Crossroads

In this essay I have tried to trace four interrelated

moments of self-formation as constellated and embodied in a

brilliant work of art, the Carondelet diptych in the Louvre.

Whereas the first two moments are more medieval in

character, the latter two are more modern and forward

looking. To rephrase our results in terms of contemporary

developmental theories, the first two situate the self in

pre-given socio-cultural and cosmic orders, establishing a

primary locus of role-identities, the latter two doing so less

so, establishing a primary locus of a more autonomous ego-21 [[a model, for a prayer that will further ground the subject in seeking God’s recognition, it is a moment of selfhood that is decidedly modern [but this self-model is one of devotion; grounded in an externalized self-grounding subjectivity, it is the point of departure for the possibility, through spiritual practice, of expanding consciousness beyond its egoic boundaries and diminishing the fear of death of the self-sense.] and Child, that in prayer he envisions the VM and Child (cf. non-site of the backgrounds); raises questions about the origin of the image at right (produced by donor’s fantasia – possible reason that artist cannot paint it exactly; or receives a vision via praying and surrendering, etc.);]]

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identity. We see here the presentation of self at the

crossroads of medieval and modern identity-formation, a

self-sense more individuated and expansive than in the past,

self-fashioned and no longer as completely or surely part of

a cosmic order (that is, its place in that order), more open

to the sense of lack and the anxieties unleashed by the

specter of one’s own physical death, intensively, even

obsessively, seeking existential grounds anew, and in sundry

ways, even inventing a stunning moment of subjective self-

mirroring.22

[Working Endnotes:]

22 J. Martin, American Historical Review, 1997 on Concordia to Sincerity; devotion moderna (central in Friedman’s study) still with former virtue. But let’s take the panel’s inscription: is it a concordant expression produced from inner prayer that aligns the donor’s inwardnesswith the image of God within, hence placing him on the same level as that of VM and X, and as Friedman suggests, behind the same window of heaven through which we see the holy persons, hence by analogy, althoughseparate, his soul having elevated to paradise?; or in this highly individuated presentation of self, this fashioning of a self, a matter of the new humanist views of sincerity, soon to be taken up and radicalized by the Protestant reformers, hence a sincere utterance coming from the donor’s heart, but of subjective origin? At the crossroads of modern subjectivity, this pictorial self-presentation perhaps entertains both virtues.

[discussion of historical modes of freedom somewhere??]

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