Late Gothic Abstractions

Late Gothic AbstractionsAuthor(s): Amy Knight PowellReviewed work(s):Source: Gesta, Vol. 51, No. 1 (2012), pp. 71-88Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the International Center of Medieval ArtStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669948 .

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71GESTA 51/1 © The International Center of Medieval Art 2012

Late Gothic Abstractions*

AMy KNIGhT POwELLUniversity of California, Irvine

Abstract

The steeply inclined ground planes of Early Netherlandish paintings are often covered with a drapery so stiff and heavy that it seems to break rather than fold. Known as the hard style—in opposition to the soft style common at 1400—this drapery tends to push up toward the flatness and verticality of the picture plane, where its angular folds rhyme reflexively with the rectilinear corners of the painted panels in which it appears.

Despite its sweeping generality and seeming anachronism, Wilhelm Worringer’s account of this drapery as a form of ab-straction gets a good deal right. If Worringer is right—that what he calls Gothic drapery is, in an important sense, nonmi-metic—that drapery, especially in its late hard form, may be more “thing” than picture—“thing,” that is, in the specifically medieval sense that Friedrich Ohly describes. Ohly’s account of medieval Dingbedeutung (thing-meaning) lends unexpected support to Worringer’s abstraction thesis by demonstrating the centrality of formal properties to certain modes of medieval exegesis.

At the same time, Ohly’s work suggests an important correc-tive to Worringer’s formalism: because the formal properties of a painting relate it to all those things beyond its frame that share its properties, a painting should not be thought of as an autonomous entity. Reading Worringer through Ohly helps us see that the reflexive abstraction of hard-style drapery—with its flatness and its rectilinear folds, which echo the framing edges of the picture, particularly where they meet to form corners—opens the picture, in fact, first, to its own material substrate and, then in turn, to a wider world of things.

If drapery in northern European art from about 1400 (Fig. 1) hangs with little resistance, the hard or angular style of drapery that replaced it asserts a stubborn autonomy (Fig. 2). by the third decade of the fifteenth century, stiff creases that break free of the bodies that support them had supplanted the gentle curves of the soft style.1

For wilhelm worringer, writing at the dawn of the twenti-eth century, the differences between the hard style and the soft were less important than what they shared. hard or soft, Gothic drapery is a form of abstraction, according to worringer. In his Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (1907)—a sweeping theory of the historical oscillation between nonmimetically and mimetically driven art—worrin-ger goes so far as to say: “the abstract tendencies of the North-ern artistic volition rose to an apotheosis in the treatment of drapery.”2 worringer developed this thesis further in his Form

in Gothic (1911), where he refers to “the drapery which the Gothic artist made the focus of non-actuality, an artful chaos of violently agitated lines.”3

I will suggest in this essay that worringer got something right when he described Gothic drapery—at least in its late, hard instantiation—as a form of abstraction.4 yet I will also argue, with the help of Friedrich Ohly, in particular his essay on medi-eval Dingbedeutung (thing-meaning), that this abstraction is less a matter of escaping the material world, as worringer character-izes it, than mapping the material ground of the image itself.5 In its reflexive allusion to the surface and limits of the image, espe-cially its corners, hard-style drapery insists on what we might, in light of Ohly’s argument, call the image’s own thingness.

My essay is meant to do three things: account for the shift about 1430 to that rather peculiar style of drapery known as the hard style by linking its angularity to the corners of the images in which it appears; show that worringer’s unabashedly modern description of Late Gothic drapery as a form of abstraction is useful for thinking about this link; and, in the second half of the essay, demonstrate with Ohly’s help that all this is not the strictly formalist matter that my invocation of the formalist worringer might lead one to assume.

The Corners of Paintings

Otto Pächt discovers a latent thematic content in the angu-larity of hard-style folds: namely, the suffering of Christ. In a discussion of an Early Netherlandish painting of the Deposition from the Cross, he suggests that Christ’s painful separation from his mother “sounds the keynote for the forming of every detail: the broken line in the draperies, the angular movement of the limbs, the zigzag of the outlines. Discontinuity is raised to the status of a motif in itself.”6

In a Lamentation from Rogier van der weyden’s work-shop, angular folds of cloth echo Christ’s crooked elbow, as if their lengths indeed unfolded a metaphor for his suffering (Fig. 3). From the blue cloth draped over the Virgin’s head, which follows the bend of Christ’s left elbow, these angular creases continue into the more distant reaches of the framing figures’ robes. In a Trinity painted by a follower of Robert Campin, the shroud and angels’ robes fill the lower half of the picture with white cloth that likewise seems to “break” in sym-pathy with Christ’s limbs (Fig. 4).



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by midcentury, the hard style had spread from the south-ern Netherlands into the northern Netherlands and Germany, where artists including Konrad witz and the Master ES took Christ’s broken form as a motif to be elaborated—sometimes it almost seems to be parodied—in cloth (Figs. 5 and 6).7 Judg-ing from the isomorphic relation between the crooks in Christ’s body and the kinks in the surrounding cloths in fifteenth-cen-tury northern European art, drapery may well have taken its cue in this period from Christ’s redemptive suffering. Nonetheless, hard-style drapery is not keyed exclusively to this suffering. To begin with, it sometimes surrounds the intact infant body of Christ or some other figure entirely. Though the absence of the suffering or dead Christ from a given painting would not necessarily preclude his broken body from being the ultimate referent of that painting (and its drapery), hard-style drapery is too pervasive to be grounded in any one person’s physical or psychic state—even such an exemplary figure as Christ.

One need not look far to find another model for the angu-lar folds in hard-style cloth: the corners of many of the images in which they appear. If the lines of the soft style give the impression of going on indefinitely, the lines of hard-style

drapery always seem to be cut short.8 In being cut short, these lines resemble the framing edges of rectangular images, that is, where those edges form corners. hard-style drapery became popular during that period in which curvilinear Gothic frames were gradually giving way to the rectilinear frames of the Renaissance and later periods.9 but even those late medieval altarpieces whose Gothic frames curve at the top generally have rectilinear corners below, where their straight sides and bottoms meet. by insisting, through sheer repetition, on these corners, where one side of the image intercepts the other, bringing its extension to an abrupt end, hard-style drapery reminds us that images have their limits.

Though all images may have limits, not all are equally marked as such. The gold backgrounds typical of northern European panel paintings from around 1400 place the con-tent of those paintings on a surface contiguous with their gold frames, which are contiguous, in turn, with the world of the viewer.10 This contiguity helps make the persons depicted in the paintings, including the holy persons, seem available to their viewers.11 For example, in an Annunciation panel that belongs to a quadriptych now split between Antwerp and baltimore, the

FIGURE 1. Netherlandish, Annunciation, ca. 1400, oil on panel, 32.2 x 21.1 cm, Baltimore, Walters Art Museum (photo: Walters Art Museum, Baltimore).

FIGURE 2. Follower of Robert Campin, Virgin and Child before a Fire Screen, ca. 1440, oil with tempera on panel, 63.4 x 48.5 cm, London, National Gallery (photo: National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY).



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gold-leaf ground runs into the picture frame, pushing the angel forward as if into our space (Fig. 1). Only when illusionistic settings began to replace gold backgrounds like this one did the painting’s framing edge really take on the quality of a cut.12 In the North, this happened first in manuscript illuminations and then in the panel paintings of Jan van Eyck’s generation. with this change, paintings began to resemble windows—of the kind that Leon battista Alberti describes—opening on to worlds separate from those of their viewers.

For hans belting, painting in the modern sense (which he names Gemälde in opposition to the more generic Malerei; the best term in English is probably easel painting, with all its modern connotations) originated at precisely this moment, when paintings began to look like views on to other spaces. where earlier scholarship focused on style, describing a shift from the idealism of international courtly Gothic at 1400 to the bourgeois realism of 1430, belting instead takes up the ques-tion of the medium itself, that is, the structure and symbolic significance of the easel painting as a format, as it emerged in the North. he argues that fifteenth-century Netherlandish painters attempted to recuperate the loss entailed in framing the picture as if it were a window.13 They did this, he says, by

FIGURE 3. (above) Rogier van der Weyden Workshop, Lamentation, ca. 1450, oil on panel, 32.2 x 47.2 cm, Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (photo: © KIK-IRPA).

FIGURE 4. (left) Follower of Robert Campin, Trinity, ca. 1430, oil on panel, 127.7 x 93 cm, Louvain, Stedelijk Museum Vanderkelen-Mertens (photo: © KIK-IRPA).



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treating “in the smallest format, on a framed image-surface, the greatest theme of all: the world, in which man lives, as a whole.”14 Once painting ceased to be contiguous with the world, he suggests, it tried instead to squeeze the entirety of that world into its frame.15

The desire to paint the whole world peaked, according to belting, around the year 1500 in the work of hieronymus bosch: “Again and again, bosch uses image-signs that bring into play the world in its entirety instead of grasping it only in a beautiful part. . . . The round format, which bosch’s paintings often have, gesture toward the gestalt of the world.”16 Though he never says as much, belting’s discussion of bosch’s predi-lection for round formats implies that by 1500 the rectangle had acquired the aura of a fragment. If, at 1500, the circle could support the fantasy of a complete world picture, it was in part because the rectangular painting had come to look like an abridged version. Though bosch may well have brought to a crisis the problem of painting’s plenitude or lack thereof, belting underestimates the extent to which the fifteenth-century tradition that bosch inherited had already registered the impos-sibility of this ideal in the kinks of its hard-style folds, which repeatedly, even obsessively, reinscribe the limits of painting.

Thomas Puttfarken has argued that Italian Renaissance painters did not, in fact, have a strong sense of paintings as bounded compositions. The impression that they did, he says, is an anachronistic fiction cooked up by twentieth-century for-malists. Even Puttfarken, however, believes that such a con-ception of painting existed in the North.17 when, in his treatise on painting of 1604, the painter and poet Karel van Mander addressed the framing edges of pictures, he put into words a long-established northern European studio practice of consider-ing the disposition of elements within a bounded space.18 Van Mander suggests: “At all times arrange things in accordance with the size of the space available, and make sure that the fig-

ures neither support the frame, nor lie cramped as if in boxes. Put your people in loosely, for a pleasant effect; don’t allow your spirit to get so carried away that you make your things so large that hands and feet have to run into the frame, or lie use-lessly twisted because you were constrained by the space.”19

In his Uffizi Lamentation in Front of the Tomb, Rogier van der weyden does not commit the sin of boxing in his figures—as he does in some of his other paintings, including the Prado Deposition from the Cross—but he finds other ways of making us aware that their space is limited to what can fit within the frame (Fig. 7): the toes of the kneeling Magdalen, the corner of the stone slab beside her, and the edge of John the Evangelist’s red robe all extend to just shy of the picture’s edge. The shroud that trails from Christ’s feet also calls attention to the picture’s framing edge but in a less direct manner, as I will try to explain.

Ostensibly lying on the ground, the gray slab onto which the shroud spills tilts up toward the picture plane, dramati-cally setting off that trailing bit of white cloth against a field of gray. As if this monumental, upward-tilting stone slab were not enough to call attention to the shroud, Mary Magdalen and John the Evangelist each gesture toward it, her fingers and his toes coming right up to its edges without touching them (Fig. 8). Attending to the edges of this shroud leads us, eventually, to the edges of the painting, insofar as the shroud’s rectilinear folds echo the edges of the slab, which echo the edges of the open-ing to the tomb, which echo, in turn, the edges of the painted panel itself.

FIGURE 5. Circle of Konrad Witz, Pietà, ca. 1440, tempera and oil on panel, 47 x 53 cm, New York, The Frick Collection (photo: © The Frick Collection).

FIGURE 6. Master ES, Lamentation, ca. 1450, engraving, 11.1 x 10.4 cm, London, British Museum (photo: © Trustees of the British Museum).



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In arguing that hard-style kinks like those in Rogier’s Lamentation in Front of the Tomb echo not only the broken body of Christ but also the corners of the rectangular support that would become a hallmark of the modern easel painting, I do not mean to suggest a one-to-one correspondence. hard-style drapery quickly became ubiquitous in the North. It shows up in manuscript illuminations, altarpieces, and prints as well. but when it appears in these other formats, I think we will tend to find that they share an essential feature of the modern easel painting: the illusion of an opening on to another space.

In the mid-twentieth century—when the era of the easel painting seemed to be drawing to a close—Clement Greenberg again stressed this defining characteristic: “The easel painting, the movable picture hung on a wall, is a unique product of the west, with no real counterpart elsewhere. Its form is determined by its social function, which is precisely to hang on a wall. . . . It cuts the illusion of a box-like cavity into the wall behind it, and within this, as a unity, it organizes three-dimensional sem-blances.”20 The modern easel painting, which is rectangular, independent of a larger ensemble, and usually relatively small, certainly represents the painting-as-window in its most realized form. but what about two-dimensional images that look like windows but do not otherwise meet this definition of an easel painting? Many fifteenth-century manuscript illuminations and altarpiece panels create box- or windowlike cavities despite

the fact that they do not hang on walls. And many, if not all, of the pleasures and troubles associated with easel paintings proper escape from the Pandora’s boxes that they seem to open. Though only some of the fifteenth-century images that I discuss in this essay are really easel paintings, they all raise questions about the kind of limit their framing edges represent.

Then there is the issue of hard-style drapery in sculpture, much of which has no framing edge at all. In fact, it has often been surmised that hard-style drapery is hard because it origi-nated in wood carving, where the intractable nature of the mate-rial is said to have given rise to angular shapes. Scholars have explained the crumpled quality of Albrecht Dürer’s drapery, for example, by tracing it to sculpture.21 This is a bit mislead-ing. Even if Dürer’s drapery derives in part from the influence of German sculpture, the drapery of that sculpture only really began to harden—that is, its folds only became truly angular—after the drapery styles of Early Netherlandish painters had made an impact on it, either directly or indirectly through the engravings of the Master ES and Martin Schongauer.22

If the hard style has its origins in a particular medium, that medium is probably painting rather than sculpture.23 Moreover, before being translated into three dimensions, the hard style seems to have reached its apogee in that other two-dimensional medium—engraving. The hard style was probably never harder (that is, more angular) than in the engravings of the Master ES and Schongauer. by the time it made its way in the later fifteenth century into sculpture—the reputed source of Dürer’s Faltenstil—it had softened a bit. So, though it is far from exclu-sive to painting, hard-style drapery nonetheless, I would sug-gest, bears a special relation to that two-dimensional format.

To focus on the framing edges of pictures is to address a topic dear to many formalists of the twentieth century. In tak-ing up this issue, however, my aim is to counter one of their foundational claims: that a work of art is an autonomous entity, whose interpretation, even where it opens on to larger cultural

FIGURE 7. Rogier van der Weyden, Lamentation in Front of the Tomb, ca. 1463, oil on panel, 110 x 96 cm, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi (photo: © KIK-IRPA).

FIGURE 8. Rogier van der Weyden, Lamentation in Front of the Tomb, detail of shroud (photo: © KIK-IRPA).



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issues, should not violate that work’s self-sufficient integrity. For Pächt, the description of a work of art depends on “an inner grasp of the coherence of the whole.”24 worringer calls the work of art an “autonomous organism.”25 For worringer, abstraction is particularly effective in sealing the work of art off from the rest of the world, as a “closed material individuality.”26 Abstraction gives the impression, he says, of purifying painting “of all dependence upon the things of the outer world, as well as from the contemplating subject himself.”27

In calling attention to the corners of paintings, however, hard-style drapery does not make those corners into emblems of painting’s closure. On the contrary, this drapery seems designed to make us see these paintings as fragments of a larger whole—truncated bits of the world. In Rogier’s Uffizi Lamentation in Front of the Tomb, the folds of the shroud form a pile of broken shapes. Inasmuch as this pile functions as a reflexive metaphor for the painting in which it appears, it characterizes that paint-ing as anything but complete. where Rogier crops the stone slab below John the Evangelist’s feet, he insists again on this same kind of fragmentation.

The Flatness of Abstraction

Flatness is fundamental to the abstraction of Gothic drap-ery, including hard-style drapery, as worringer describes it. In fact, for worringer, flatness is an essential characteristic of all abstraction, which he associates with geometric and lifeless shapes.28 Abstraction tends toward flatness, he says, because it seeks to lift phenomena out of the spatial (and temporal) flux of experience into a condition of static permanence.29 by contrast, the work of art shaped by empathy is a “theater for the free, unimpeded activation of [the viewer’s] own sense of life.”30 Empathic art celebrates vitality, movement, and our shifting perceptions of the world. In its flattering mirroring of human life, worringer says, it favors organic and animate shapes. If abstraction represents the subject’s frightened desire to flee the three-dimensional world, the empathic work of art enables a happy flowing of one into the other.31

worringer understands Gothic art to be a hybrid of these two poles. In Gothic art, “the conception of actuality is con-centrated in all its intensity in the naturalistic treatment of the face.”32 This naturalism contrasts with Gothic drapery’s “super-actual, fantastic play of line, uncontrolled by an object.”33 For worringer, “the whole development of the Gothic art of repre-sentation is determined by this counterplay and interplay.”34 I find this “counterplay and interplay” easier to make out in the hard style than in the soft.35 In the soft-style Annunciation in baltimore, which I discussed earlier, the Virgin’s blue mantle is of a piece with the rest of the composition—neither more nor less flat than other things in the painting (Fig. 1). hard-style drapery, by contrast, tends to erupt as a break in the spa-tial logic of the picture. Colonizing the foregrounds of Early Netherlandish paintings, for example, Virgin and Child before a Fire Screen, hard-style drapery takes up more space, more

emphatically, than its softer predecessor (Fig. 2).36 Rarely in Early Netherlandish paintings do the bodies and other things—of which there tend to be very many—quite share the flatness of hard-style cloth. The abstraction of hard-style drapery depends on this contrast.

In Van Eyck’s Lucca Madonna, an expanse of red cloth stretches across about one-third of the composition, intercept-ing our gaze as it moves into the painting’s illusionistic cham-ber (Fig. 9). The tension between the depth-describing elements of this painting and this depth-denying red cloth is most acute along the left edge of the throne, where the wooden platform meets the Virgin’s jewel-encrusted hem. here the orthogonal line that describes the edge of the platform changes course only slightly to become the nearly vertical contour of the Virgin’s monumental shape.37 This alignment of horizontal platform and upright figure makes it difficult to distinguish between forms that run perpendicular to the picture plane and forms that run parallel to it. The double red band bordering the carpet extends this ambiguity down to the bottom of the painting, and the thin red line edging the cloth of honor carries it up toward the top,

FIGURE 9. Jan van Eyck, Lucca Madonna, ca. 1437, oil on panel, 65.5 x 149.5 cm, Frankfurt, Städel Museum (photo: U. Edelmann–Städel Museum/ARTOTHEK).

Figure 9 also appears in the color plates between pp. 34 and 35 of this issue.



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extending the flatness of the red mantle well beyond its own reach.

If worringer were to describe Van Eyck’s construction of this mantle, he might say that the painter has translated “depth relations into surface relations,” pushing the mantle’s hidden sides into the light and, thereby, overcoming the limitations of any single subjective point of view.38 Indeed, the shallow-ness and lateral spread of the Virgin’s mantle counteract the essentially secretive nature of its folds. There would be little to discover in these folds by unfolding them; they are that shallow. Nor would we gain much information by viewing them from a different angle, whereas we might well learn something about the hidden side of the infant’s face by moving a bit to the right. Our ordinary bodily relation to objects in three-dimensional space is largely irrelevant to our experience of this relatively flat expanse of cloth.

For worringer, a “spiritual dread” of three-dimensional space motivates this kind of flattening. Space is dreadful, he explains, in that it prevents us from seeing objects in their entirety and knowing them in their immutable truth.39 with so little to suggest dread in Van Eyck’s painting, however, his translation of depth into surface would seem to be less a matter of overcoming the limits of human perception than of inviting us to see the surface of his own painting. Though worringer routinely overlooks this kind of reflexivity in abstraction, he nonetheless acknowledges that abstraction is about making the “material individuality” of objects—including the individual work of art—palpable to the viewer.40 To the extent that Gothic drapery is a form of abstraction, then, it facilitates our appre-hension of the painting as object.

Though worringer’s attention to the abstract flatness of Gothic drapery clearly reflects his own historical moment—the eve of the birth of twentieth-century abstract art—it is not entirely anachronistic. Descriptions of Late Gothic drapery as flat and accounts of the difference between it and other aspects of the paintings in which it appears were already in place when Van Mander wrote his treatise in 1604. Van Mander quotes his teacher Lucas de heere’s commentary on Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. writing in the mid-sixteenth century, De heere says that Van Eyck’s rendering of faces and just about every-thing else is perfect, except his draperies. Regarding these, De heere can muster only: “good draperies—at least considering those times” (Fig. 10).41 According to Van Mander, only with Albrecht Dürer was there a decisive break with the “confused” drapery of earlier periods.42 Even with Dürer, though, we have to wait for the later work, and, even there, Dürer’s break with the hard style is not as complete as Van Mander would like it to be (Fig. 11).43

what Van Mander finds lacking in the hard style is evi-dence of observation of the variety of forms that different kinds of cloth take as they fold.44 Also lacking for Van Mander is a meaningful relationship between hard-style folds and the bod-ies that make them. he admonishes painters that “the folds must come out of each other, spreading from something that sticks out or that pushes the material outwards.”45 hard-style drapery breaks this rule as a matter of course. Rarely originating from a protrusion, hard-style folds fail to achieve the volume that Van Mander would like. Van Mander also feels that the folds of the hard style are too angular or, as he says, “broken”: “one must not crumple the fabric too much, confusedly and laboriously, as if it were all ravaged and broken. Many earlier painters went awry in this way out of a lack of understanding.”46 when wor-ringer describes Late Gothic drapery as flat and when he refers to it as “crinkled, angular, brittle drapery,” he is in agreement with De heere and Van Mander.47 he differs from these ear-lier historians of Netherlandish art only in his admiration for exactly what they disdain and in his dignifying of it with the name abstraction.48

From its beginnings in the fifteenth century, hard-style drapery must have struck viewers, as it would strike De heere

FIGURE 10. Jan van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece, 1432, oil on panel, 162.5 x 71.7 cm, Ghent, Sint-Baafskathedraal, detail of the Angel Annunciate (photo: © KIK-IRPA).



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and Van Mander (and later worringer), as spatially and stylisti-cally distinct from the objects around it. but its sheer celebra-tory abundance suggests that its earliest viewers could hardly have regarded the flat and broken manner as something to be overcome. Like worringer yet with a much closer eye to par-ticulars, Pächt tries to give a positive account of why certain things in Early Netherlandish paintings, including the draper-ies, often look so surprisingly flat: “the path toward perspectival correctness was blocked not so much by inadequate (technical) ability as by positive compulsion, namely, the pressure, to pro-ject three-dimensional space onto the surface in such a way as to yield an aesthetically relevant order.”49 Fifteenth-century northern composition is governed by two (often competing) aims, according to Pächt: the arrangement of objects within illusionistic space and the satisfying organization of these same objects on the level of the picture plane. The latter explains why hard-style drapery so often seems to organize itself in relation to the surface of the picture rather than in accordance with its illusionistic depths.

As much as Pächt’s argument explains, it suffers from a typically formalist tendency to discover closure and unity exactly where they are lacking: “The impression of com-pleteness [that a fifteenth-century northern painting gives] is grounded first of all on a particular accentuation of the picture’s edge, through which an internal picture frame is created.”50 As examples of such internal frames, Pächt mentions “doorposts, ceiling beams, the erect contour of a human figure’s back.”51 while flat expanses of hard-style drapery with their sharply cut folds also accentuate the picture’s surface, edge, and particu-larly its corners, they do not at all add to any impression we

might have of the painting as a “self-contained whole.”52 On the contrary, in calling attention to the painting’s limits, they remind us that, where that painting ends, a whole world of other things immediately begins.

The Properties of Things

Insofar as the flat, angular abstraction of hard-style drap-ery calls attention to the painting’s status as a thing among other things, it does not exclude the world beyond the painting—as abstraction is so often said to do. To really see how external things press in on Early Netherlandish paintings, we must turn to Ohly’s discussion of how things in general were thought to relate to one another in certain medieval systems of interpreta-tion. In these modes of interpretation, as Ohly describes them, it is the properties of a thing that carry its meaning: “The proper-ties of the thing are what bear its signification, and the number of possible meanings of a thing is fixed by the number of its properties.”53 Things differ from the words that name them, therefore, in that they have more than a few meanings. Ohly quotes Richard of St. Victor: “The sounds of words do not have more than two or three meanings. but things can have as many meanings as they have properties.”54

The meaning of any given property is in turn multiple: “If a thing’s world of signification develops from the aggregate of its properties, that of the property . . . develops from the aggregate of things to which it may refer.”55 because of this, the properties of a thing can lead the interpreter to any num-ber of otherwise unrelated things: “In a shift from the thing ‘feather’ to the property ‘silver-colored’—which, because of

FIGURE 11. Details of drapery from left to right: Jan van Eyck, Lucca Madonna; Albrecht Dürer, Salvator Mundi, ca. 1505, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (photo: © MMA); Albrecht Dürer, Four Apostles, 1526, Munich, Alte Pinakothek (photo: Bayer & Mitko / ARTOTHEK).



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its frequency, might almost be called characteristic of the inter-pretation of things—the interpretation then finds its way to the thing ‘silver’ [as in the metal].”56 In such a world, to know a thing is to bear in mind all the many other things that share its properties.

The meanings of things are more abundant than the mean-ings of words, according to hugh of St. Victor, because things are made by God: “The meaning of things is much more excel-lent than the meaning of the sounds of words, because cus-tom determined the latter, but nature determined the former. The latter is the voice of men, the former the voice of God to men.”57 Anonymous of Clairvaux makes the same distinction: “The sounds of words have their meaning by human, things by divine, ordinance. For as man indicates his will by words to another, God does so through created things.”58

Ohly reins in the divine polysemy of created things, how-ever, by reminding us that the correct interpretation of a thing ultimately depends on which of its many possible senses is relevant to the textual context in which it appears: “It is the task of the Middle Ages to elucidate the world of meanings

(Bedeutungswelt) invested in things since Creation as the sum of possible spiritual meanings, in order to be able to apply it in the concrete instance through the discovery of the appropriate meaning.”59 This means that interpretation will often entail a difficult act of selection. In some cases, however, this selec-tion may in fact be impossible, since a single meaning will not necessarily answer to all the various contextual pressures that bear on a thing even in one particular instance—whether in a text or, as we will see, in an image.

Transposing the distinction between (man-made) word and (god-given) thing onto the visual arts, we might say that, insofar as images picture things, they have their meaning by virtue of an implicit agreement between the painter and the viewer. For example, we may agree that certain two-dimensional shapes laid down on panel or parchment represent three-dimensional objects. To the extent that their relation to the things they rep-resent is conventional (and limited), such images of things are like the words we use to name them. where the shapes laid down on a two-dimensional surface do not clearly represent things—where, for example, we might be inclined to call them abstract—we have a somewhat different situation.

In his discussions of medieval stained-glass windows and illuminated manuscripts, in which Ohly himself begins to do the work of transposing his word/thing opposition onto images, he quickly comes up against the problem of properties—spe-cifically colors—that appear detached from objects. he even uses the adjective “abstract” to refer to this detached state: “The Annunciation in a Cologne sacramentary represents Mary and the angel in a concrete scene of bold architecture in front of a cloudlike abstract green that stands in space like a miracle” (Fig. 12).60 Intervening between the relatively solid architecture in the background and the human figures in the foreground, greenness here belongs to no thing. The free-floating existence of this property is difficult to describe. A little farther along, Ohly uses the term “de-objectified”:

There is the phenomenon that properties, like colors, no longer visibly linked to a thing, seem to have a meaning of their own. Thus, at the time of the Annunciation, in a scene filled with objects, buildings, towers, cupolas, and Mary’s throne, in the presence of a sort of numinous miracle in a de-objectified green . . . color has acquired a life of its own that is only itself, in order, as such, to signify something.61

As a deobjectified property, this greenness demands interpre-tation in a way that the surrounding colors, which are more closely bound to objects, do not. It is easy to feel, for example, that we understand this miniature whether or not we have attrib-uted any particular meaning to the blues and reds in the back-ground, because they belong so clearly to the buildings whose properties they are. but I wonder if the greenness swirling between the Virgin and angel is really quite as deobjectified as Ohly says. while it may perhaps not be a property of any object

FIGURE 12. Sacramentary of St. Gereon, Cologne, ca. 1000, Paris, BnF, MS lat. 817, fol. 12, Annunciation (photo: BnF).




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pictured in the painting, it is indeed a property of the paint that was used to make it.

when this Cologne sacramentary was illuminated around the year 1000, the paint with which it was decorated was unlikely to have entirely escaped notice.62 Four hundred years later, when Van Eyck was experimenting with oils as a vehicle for his pigments, paint as such would have been, if anything, harder to overlook. Van Eyck’s reputation, and the reputation of Early Netherlandish painters in general, rested in no small measure on the seemingly magical properties of their oil paints. Already in 1456 bartholomaeus Facius could write: “Jan of Gaul has been judged the leading painter of our time. . . . he is thought . . . to have discovered many things about the proper-ties of [oil] colours.”63 Oil paints were particularly admired for their highly saturated and seamless fields of color. In extolling their virtues, Van Mander explains that “they did not need to be hatched,” unlike tempera paint, which had to be applied in many small strokes to create the appearance of a solid field of color.64

For Van Mander, the art of painting is first and foremost a matter of creating these fields of color. In the title of the twelfth chapter of his Foundations of the Noble and Free Art of Paint-ing, he simply equates the two: “On the Fine Art of Painting, or Coloring” (Van wel schilderen, oft Coloreren).65 Unlike Giorgio Vasari, Van Mander does not privilege disegno over colorito.66 In fact, in addition to saying that “the most important thing is painting well,”67 he traces the origins of “coloring” all the way back to Creation: “In the beginning, when all created things received their origin, form, and being from their most praise-worthy creator, everything that the eye can see . . . received its color from this most artful image-maker and painter.”68 For Van Mander, color is what makes “everything that God has created in the world visible.”69

Van Mander borrows much of what he says about color from a handbook of the fifteenth century, Le blason des cou-leurs en armes, livrées et devises: Livre très utille et subtil pour sçavoir et congnoistre d’une & chacune couleur la vertu et propriété.70 To the extent that his attitude toward color can be traced back to the fifteenth century, Van Mander brings us a little closer to understanding the surprisingly large mono-chrome passages of drapery in Early Netherlandish paintings. Though richly modulated from light to dark, the red mantle in the Lucca Madonna, for example, is a much larger area of a single hue than we find anywhere else in the painting, and this is typical of hard-style drapery.71 In a context in which noth-ing was held to be more essential to painting than color, these swaths of single hues would have registered as painting in its most elemental form: its degree zero, if you will.72

The medieval exegesis of things that Ohly describes turns out to be a materialist formalism, wherein the formal proper-ties of things—their shapes, colors, and so on—bring to mind myriad other material things that also bear those properties. The significance of the redness of the mantle in Van Eyck’s Lucca Madonna cannot be limited to an association with Christ’s

Passion, for instance, because redness is capable of evoking every other red thing—every other red thing, that is, including the paint(ing) to which the property of redness here, in fact, belongs.

by exceeding without entirely abandoning the mimetic project of Early Netherlandish painting, hard-style drapery invites us to see in terms of properties, including the proper-ties of the paintings in which it appears. The abstraction of the drapery in the Lucca Madonna encourages us to see in its redness the redness of the pigment Van Eyck painted it with, and in its flatness and brokenness the flatness and brokenness of the panel he painted it on. Far from isolating the painting, as a perfect and self-sufficient projection of an ideal form, the formalism that Ohly describes opens it to its contiguity with other things—in whose light its own thingness appears. In argu-ing that Ohly’s materialist formalism ultimately turns back on the painting itself, I go further, I think, than he himself would allow. but, by forcing us to take into account the image’s own thingness, Late Gothic abstraction blurs the distinction between image and thing that Ohly would like to draw.

The Lining of Heaven

Scholars have documented many instances of avant-garde artists finding and appropriating for their own “nonobjective” experiments what they considered to be abstraction in premod-ern art—including ancient Iberian sculptures, medieval Ger-man woodcuts and paintings on glass, and byzantine icons. It is not by chance that their contemporary worringer discov-ered his own version of abstraction in old and marginalized images. but rather than trace the ways in which premodern art forms influenced the development of twentieth-century abstrac-tion, my aim here has been to follow worringer in seeing what twentieth-century abstraction can show us about Early Nether-landish painting that strictly historical, which is to say, human-istic, modes of analysis are unlikely to reveal.

worringer’s association with Expressionism has given rise to the assumption that he celebrated abstraction as an out-pouring of subjective feeling.73 In fact, he repeatedly describes abstraction as the impersonal, inorganic, and even inhuman counterpart to empathy’s anthropomorphic picture of the world.74 Abstraction, worringer explains, is motivated by a desire to move outside the realm of lived human experience. As such, it can either pull us down below the human—“down from the pride of knowledge”—into a primitive state or ele-vate us above the human.75 As the most primitive of artistic impulses, abstraction is rooted in the viewer’s “somatic and psychic constitution” and in the “morphological law of crys-talline-inorganic matter,”76 yet it also corresponds to a desire to transcend the physical world.77 while abstraction’s geometric forms anchor us in our bodies and in matter, they also lift us somehow above the sensuous plane.

worringer’s recognition of abstraction’s competing mate-rialist and transcendental aims would turn out to be prophetic



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for twentieth-century abstract painting, which had not even quite begun when he published Abstraction and Empathy in 1907.78 his prescience in this regard is related to his recognition of the tension between abstraction and humanist ideology. wor-ringer’s antihumanistic (and primitivist) theory of abstraction differs, as hal Foster has pointed out, from later celebrations of abstraction as a form of artistic mastery.79 Though worringer certainly thinks that abstraction reflects a desire to control the world, he does not seem to believe that such mastery is actually within human reach. The dream of transcending the contingen-cies of existence is never more than a fantasy; the waxing and waning of abstraction through the ages marks this fact.80

As worringer seems to have anticipated, twentieth-cen-tury abstraction has been shaped by diametrically opposed impulses—sometimes to be discovered within the very same artist or work: on the one hand, the desire to represent some-thing immaterial (in Kazimir Malevich’s case, “pure sensation,” the “fifth dimension,” “economy,” “infinity,” “nothing”) and, on the other hand, the will to expose the material conditions of painting, often by deducing the painting’s figures (for example, the red quadrangle in Fig. 13) from the flatness and shape of the canvas itself.81 For Malevich, these opposing impulses reflect an ideological divide that goes well beyond painting: “One side holds that true life is only in the spirit, the other that truth is in matter, and in this way there have arisen two movements in life—the spiritual and the material.”82 Ma levich insists, how-ever, that this distinction is mere ideology:

Under the pressure of investigation, things . . . disinte-grate into a multitude of things, whose investigation will prove that these disintegrated things also in their turn disintegrated into independent things and bore a mass of new links and relations with new things, and so on ad infinitum. The investigation will prove that things do not exist, and at the same time there exists their infinity, “nothing” and at the same time “something.”83

Under the pressure of Malevich’s investigation, the utterly concrete, material thing that a painting is can begin to lose its substance. but while his own paintings often do seem to gesture toward this kind of transcendence, the best of them do so without shedding their resolute insistence on their own (manu)facture.84

Though Malevich may argue that there is no real distinc-tion between the spiritual and the material, the most influen-tial critic of postwar American abstraction seems to have felt compelled to choose. Greenberg’s career can be divided into two largely irreconcilable phases. The turn in his thinking occurred in the mid-1950s, when he began to praise paint-ings for their optical rather than tactile qualities and painters for their idealist rather than materialist aims.85 where he had earlier applauded the picture that is “one with the pigment, the texture, and the flat surface that constituted it as an object,” he would eventually insist that, “like any other kind of picture,

a modernist one succeeds when its identity as a picture, and as a pictorial experience, shuts out the awareness of it as a physical object.”86

The quintessentially modernist tension between transcen-dence and truth to materials that sustained Malevich’s career and divided Greenberg’s is not unlike the tension one feels in those medieval encyclopedias and other books devoted to the world of terrestrial things that are the basis of Ohly’s analysis of medieval Dingbedeutung, especially where the authors of those books justify their investigations of the natural world by asserting that in descending to the level of matter, they are able to ascend to a world of divinely given meaning: “All the arts are subject to divine wisdom and the lower science, properly regulated, leads to the higher,” writes Richard of St. Victor.87 hugh of St. Victor puts it in terms of fecundity: “The whole of nature speaks of God. . . . and nothing in the universe is ster-ile.”88 If things disintegrate under Malevich’s gaze into an infin-ity of other things, eventually giving way to the transcendence of nothing, medieval investigations of things likewise seem to bear fruit in the form of more things—the endless number of which marks the world as God’s creation and allows the inves-tigator to ascend, finally, to its maker.

A miniature of the Agony in the Garden from the Turin-Milan hours allegorizes this kind of ascent by way of a descent into the world of things (Fig. 14). where Christ’s torso and bent arms cross the horizon of the hill, they form the nexus of the upper half of the composition. below this, the sleeping apostles nestle into rocks. One long line extends from the lower left

FIGURE 13. Kazimir Malevich, Red Square, 1915, oil on canvas, 53 x 53 cm, St. Petersburg, Russian State Museum (photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY).




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corner, along the upper contour of Peter’s red mantle, along the rock above his head, and along the top of the hill behind that rock, bisecting the composition diagonally and bundling apostles, rocks, and hillside into an aggregate entity.

The apostles, rocks, and grassy hillside are further linked by properties they have in common: the drapery of the apostle to the far right shares its greenness with the grass, and the drap-ery of all three shares its “brokenness” with the rocks. where the frame of the miniature crops the bodies of the sleeping apos-tles, it indicates that this picture is a window on to a fragment of a larger whole. but the properties of this framed fragment link it to the larger world from which it is separated. The redness and blueness of the apostles’ robes reappear in the border of the miniature’s frame, and flecks of these same two colors decorate the leaves sprouting from the vine that crawls over the surface

of the manuscript page. The dissemination of the red and blue from within the miniature’s fictive world over the flat surface of the parchment blurs the line between that fictive world and the larger world that is our own.

If there is upward movement built into this composition, it extends along Christ’s body, gathering strength as it nar-rows where his torso breaks through to the sky. This climactic moment is only possible because of our detour through the cat-egorical confusion of the world below, where we have learned to see in terms of properties. It is this mode of seeing that allows us to climb from the blueness of Christ’s earthly robe to the blueness of the heavens. but this mode also makes us aware that our interpretative movement can be ironically reversed. After all, there is nothing to stop our slipping from the blue ether back down to earth—that is, from what Richard of St. Victor calls the

FIGURE 14. Turin-Milan Hours, Turin, Palazzo Madama Torino, MS Inv. 47, fol. 30v, follower of Jan van Eyck, Agony in the Garden, ca. 1440 (photo: Fondazione Torino Musei).

FIGURE 15. Jan van Eyck, St. barbara, 1437, ink and silverpoint drawing on panel, 31 x 18 cm, Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY).




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“higher science” back down into the low, albeit fecund, world of things—where we will discover the heavens now pooling (somewhat ignominiously) at Christ’s feet.

According to Ohly, this kind of slippage between heaven and earth was well accounted for in medieval exegesis: “since things have as many meanings as properties, while properties however can be both good and evil, the same thing can have good as well as evil meanings, those, as the Church Fathers already express it, in bonam partem [in a good sense], as well as those in malam partem [in an evil sense].”89 Ohly does not seem to think this ever led to confusion. Though a “thing has a world of meanings, which extends from God to the devil,” in any given textual (or pictorial) instance, he explains, its mean-ing must be univocal: “in a concrete textual instance the lion [for example] cannot signify ‘God or the devil,’ but only one of them.”90 while things in the world may have many mean-ings, things in texts (and pictures), Ohly says, have only one.

If Ohly would have us choose between competing proper-ties when it comes to the interpretation of things, it stands to reason that he would have us choose between competing things when it comes to the interpretation of properties. I think we would be hard pressed, though, to choose between the heav-enly and baser things associated with the property of blueness as it appears in the Turin-Milan Agony in the Garden—and for good reason. To choose would be to unravel the image’s fabric of associations.

“I have conquered the lining of the heavenly,” Malevich boasts, “have torn it down and, making a bag, put in colours and tied it with a knot. Sail forth! The white, free chasm, infinity is before us.”91 bagging heaven is not an especially felicitous metaphor, whether in a late medieval miniature or a utopian, avant-garde rant. but its infelicity, in both cases, is precisely the point. while the metaphor may ask us to hold the material and the ethereal together, its awkwardness—the excessive lit-eralness of turning heaven into a bag or a mound of crumpled cloth—blocks us, finally, from experiencing matter as a univo-cal expression of sense.

Brokenness

Everything fans out from St. barbara’s cinched waist, as if her impossibly tight belt were holding together not only her gown but also the composition (Fig. 15). Adorned with jew-els that look like tacks pinning it down, her hem just barely touches the frame at lower right, extending up from there in a line roughly parallel to the edge of the panel. All this has the effect of pushing the gown up toward the vertical rectangle of the picture plane and setting it apart from the deep landscape around the tower, which bustles with the labor of building. Much of this labor involves the manipulation and transporta-tion of stones that have not yet been transformed into masonry. The still raw material of rough-hewn stone would seem to have little to do with barbara’s gown, which is made of scarlet, as the supremely refined and most expensive of Flemish woolens

was called, regardless of its color.92 To produce scarlet, wool had to be washed, oiled, combed, carded, spun, woven, dyed, fulled, tentered, sheared, and teaselled.93 Their differences not-withstanding, the pile of stones just beyond the hill to the right shares at least one property with the pile of folds in the fore-ground—the property of brokenness (Fig. 16).

In the medieval world of things that Ohly describes, where one sees in terms of properties, ordinary distinctions can give way, it seems, to other systems of relations. here, the distinc-tions that give way include not only those between the things that are represented (scarlet, stone, and so on) but also the dis-tinction between what Greenberg calls the painting’s “identity as a picture” and our “awareness of it as a physical object.”94 For once we make the comparison between the brokenness of scarlet and the brokenness of stone, we are only a small step from seeing the brokenness of the physical line that describes them both. (The absence of color from Van Eyck’s drawing on panel makes this step an especially easy one to take.95) As we bring this brokenness into focus, we begin to see abstractly, in a twofold sense: we see a physical property of the drawing’s line rather than what it represents; and we see that physical aspect of the drawing’s support to which this brokenness directs our eye—namely, its corners.

Ohly’s Worringer

In the Late Middle Ages, the humanity of Christ became a subject of intense pictorial (as well as textual) investigation. Picturing Christ’s human body became a matter of emphasizing its brokenness in opposition to the perfection of God. I have suggested here that, around this same time, as paintings tended more toward the rectangular and as they gained their indepen-dence from larger ensembles—in short, as the era of the easel painting took shape—paintings, too, came to be perceived as fragments of a more perfect whole: a world whose scope they could never possibly match. Drapery seems to have registered this double interest in brokenness, when the seemingly endless lines of the soft style gave way to the hard-style kinks found in Early Netherlandish paintings.96

FIGURE 16. Jan van Eyck, St. barbara, details of drapery (left) and stones (right).



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One probably needs to be at least a bit of a formalist to see things in this way. It is certainly worringer’s formalism (his sense that the cultural context of a work of art tells us little about it) that frees him to compare medieval and modern art and to discover the latter in the former.97 while Ohly exercises no such freedom, he nevertheless acknowledges a medieval habit of finding relations between categorically different things that happen to share certain formal properties. Ohly’s close, philological attention to specific texts and images is an effec-tive antidote to worringer’s grandiose theorizing. but to take Ohly as antidote to worringer is not to do away entirely with the latter’s formalism. On the contrary, I hope to have shown that Ohly’s own attention to form lends unexpected support to

worringer’s thoroughly formalist thesis about the abstraction of Late Gothic drapery.

Still, Ohly also helps us counter worringer’s typically for-malist insistence on the autonomy of the work of art, the fantasy that it is complete unto itself. In the medieval context, Ohly suggests, attention to the formal properties of things opened them, in fact, to the plurality of the material world. Taken together, worringer and Ohly show us that, in the abstraction of their hard-style folds, Early Netherlandish paintings, which appear to record a world of things beyond themselves, ask, in turn, to be seen as things—not as autonomous things but, rather, as things among the world’s many other things.

NOTES* My sincerest thanks to Aden Kumler, Christopher Lakey, Lisa Reilly,

Fronia w. Simpson, and my anonymous reader.1. On the expensive, heavy, feltlike, woolen fabric that appears in Early

Netherlandish paintings, see D. M. Cottrell, “birds, beasts, and blos-soms: Form and Meaning in Jan van Eyck’s Cloths of honor” (Disserta-tion, Case western Reserve University, Cleveland, 1998), 82–86. One might ask whether a change in woolen production could explain the shift from the soft to the hard style. I have not found any evidence of this. Once the horizontal loom was introduced in the eleventh century, very heavy woolens could be and were produced along with lighter ones. On the introduction of the horizontal loom, see F. Piponnier and P. Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages, trans. C. beamish (New haven, 1997), 15–16; and J. h. Munro, “The Anti-Red Shift—to the Dark Side: Colour Changes in Flemish Luxury woollens, 1300–1550,” in Medieval Clothing and Textiles, ed. R. Netherton and G. R. Owen-Crocker (woodbridge, 2005), 3:66. For detailed accounts of the Flemish textile industry in the four-teenth and fifteenth centuries, see idem, Wool, Cloth, and Gold: The Struggle for Bullion in Anglo-Burgundian Trade, 1340–1478 (Toronto, 1972); and P. Corley, “The Evolution of the woollen, 1300–1700,” in The New Draperies in the Low Countries and England, 1300–1800, ed. N. b. harte (Oxford, 1997), 6–33.

2. w. worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychol-ogy of Style, trans. M. bullock (Chicago, 1997), 119. See also idem, Form in Gothic, trans. h. Read (New york, 1957), 63. worringer’s Abstrak-tion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie was published as a dissertation in 1907. The Piper Verlag of Munich published it as a book one year later. hubert Damisch refers to it as “one of the key texts on abstraction in the artistic realm”; Damisch, “Remarks on Abstraction,” October, 127 (2009), 147.

3. worringer, Form in Gothic, 64. worringer uses the term Gothic in its ordinary sense, that is, to refer to a style of the later Middle Ages, but he also uses it to designate a suprahistorical impulse, whose history he traces

from the great migration period right through to the Expressionism of his own time. Ibid., 38. For discussion of worringer’s “Gothic,” see, for example, w. Kemp, “Der Über-Stil: Zu worringers Gotik,” in Wilhelm Worringers Kunstgeschichte, ed. h. böhringer and b. Söntgen (Munich, 2002), 9–21.

4. Of course, worringer—who was adopted by both the right and the left—also got a lot wrong. Most problematic is his tendency to explain formal issues in terms of nation and race. See, esp., M. bushart, Der Geist der Gotik und die expressionistische Kunst: Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttheo-rie, 1911–1925 (Munich, 1990).

5. F. Ohly, “Friedrich Ohly: ‘The Spiritual Sense of words in the Middle Ages,’” trans. D. A. wells, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 41/1 (2005), 18–42.

6. O. Pächt, Van Eyck and the Founders of Early Netherlandish Painting, trans. D. britt, ed. M. Schmidt-Dengler (London, 1994), 49. Pächt also discusses Early Netherlandish drapery in the following: ibid., 22–23, 42, 88, 164; idem, Early Netherlandish Painting: From Rogier van der Weyden to Gerard David, trans. D. britt, ed. M. Rosenauer (London, 1997), 13–14, 22; and idem, “Design Principles of Fifteenth-Century Northern Painting (1933),” in The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, ed. C. S. wood (New york, 2000), 275, 277. Compare hans Sedlmayr’s account of the hard style; Sedlmayr, “bruegel’s Macchia (1934),” in wood, 349.

7. For the influence of Early Netherlandish painting on Konrad witz, see h. J. van Miegroet, De invloed van de vroege Nederlandse schilderkunst in de eerste helft van de 15de eeuw op Konrad Witz (brussels, 1986); and S. Kemperdick, “Saints with Shadows: Konrad witz and Nether-landish Painting,” in basel, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Konrad Witz (Ostfildern, 2011), ed. b. brinkmann et al., 32–46. For the influence of Early Netherlandish painting on the Master ES, see J. höfler, Der Meister E.S.: Ein Kapitel europäischer Kunst des 15. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg,



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2007), 12–13; Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Meister E.S.: Ein oberrheinischer Kupferstecher der Spätgotik (1986), ed. h. bevers, 10–12; and Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Master E.S.: Five Hundredth Anniversary Exhibition (Philadelphia, 1967), by A. Shestack. wilhelm Pinder sees the hard style as a pan-European rejection of the international or soft style of 1400. Pinder, Die deutsche Plastik vom aus-gehenden Mittelalter bis zum Ende der Renaissance (wildpark-Potsdam, 1929), 2:245.

8. worringer, Form in Gothic, 41: “Again and again the line is broken, again and again checked in the natural direction of its movement, again and again forcibly prevented from peacefully ending its course.” Compare b. Fürst, Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der oesterreichischen Plastik in der 1. Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1931), 32, 41. Fürst (34, 44) also notes that the Zickzack of the hard style repeats the rectangular limits of some images, including some relief sculptures.

9. On the transition to rectilinear formats in the Italian context, see C. Gard-ner von Teuffel, “Lorenzo Monaco, Filippo Lippi und Filippo brunelle-schi: Die Erfindung der Renaissancepala,” ZfKg, 45/1 (1982), 1–30; and eadem, “From Polyptych to Pala: Some Structural Considerations,” in La pittura nel XIV e XV secolo: Il contributo dell’analisi tecnica alla storia dell’arte, ed. h. w. van Os and J. R. J. van Asperen de boer (bologna, 1983), 323–44.

10. On the gold backgrounds of pre-Eyckian panel paintings, see P. Lorentz, “Des tableaux de peinture comme les tableaux d’orfèvrerie,” in Paris, Musée du Louvre, Paris 1400: Les arts sous Charles VI (Paris, 2004), ed. E. Taburet-Delahaye, 194–200; and C. Stroo, ed., Pre-Eyckian Panel Paintings in the Low Countries (brussels, 2009), 1:22.

11. h. Locher, “Das gerahmte Altarbild im Umkreis brunelleschis: Zum Realitätscharakter der Renaissance-Retabels,” ZfKg, 56/4 (1993), 490–92; E. Maurer, “Vom Ziborium zum Triumphbogen: Skizzen zu einer Ikonologie des frühen bilderrahmens,” in Architektur und Sprache, ed. C. braegger (Munich, 1984), 203–4; and G. Peers, Sacred Shock: Fram-ing Visual Experience in Byzantium (University Park, PA, 2004), esp. 1–12. See the notes in these sources for some of the extensive bibliogra-phy on histories and theories of framing.

12. This is, of course, related to the issue of perspective. E. Panofsky, Per-spective as Symbolic Form, trans. C. wood (New york, 1997), 77n5: “For us perspective is, quite precisely, the capacity to represent a number of objects together with a part of the space around them in such a way that the conception of the material picture support is completely supplanted by the conception of a transparent plane through which we believe we are looking into an imaginary space. This space comprises the entirety of the objects in apparent recession into depth, and is not bounded by the edges of the picture, but rather only cut off.”

13. h. belting and C. Kruse, Die Erfindung des Gemäldes: Das erste Jahr-hundert der niederländischen Malerei (Munich, 1994), 39: “Der bilder-rahmen ist—gerade in den Niederlanden—gleichsam ein Fensterrahmen, der die welt des betrachters, der davor steht, von der welt des bildes, die dahinter liegt, trennt.” Compare Locher’s discussion of this kind of window frame in the Italian context in “Das gerahmte Altarbild,” esp. 497–98.

14. belting and Kruse, Die Erfindung, 34: “auf kleinstem Format, in einer gerahmten bildfläche, das überhaupt größte Thema abhandeln zu wollen: die welt, in welcher der Mensch lebt, als ganze.”

15. Ibid., 64: “Die Einheit der welt wiederholt sich in der Einheit der Darstel-lung, die fortan die Malerei zu einer autonomen ‘Kunst’ machte.”

16. Ibid., 86–87, also 28: “Immer wieder verwendet bosch bildzeichen, welche die welt in ihrer Ganzheit ins Spiel bringen, statt sie nur im schönen Ausschnitt zu erfassen. . . . Die Rundform, die boschs Gemälde oft haben, verweist auch auf die Gestalt der welt.”

17. Their discussions of composition notwithstanding, Italian Renaissance painters did not, Thomas Puttfarken says, conceive of a painting as a “self-contained and unified formal whole”; Puttfarken, The Discovery of

Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting, 1400–1800 (New haven, 2000), 18, also 10. In his discussion of the Italian context, Puttfarken relies on J. Stumpel, “On Grounds and backgrounds: Some Remarks about Composition in Renaissance Painting,” Simiolus, 18/4 (1988), 219–43. In his discussion of the northern context (esp. 189–99), Puttfarken relies on P. Taylor, “Composition in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art Theory,” in Pictorial Composition from Medieval to Modern Art, ed. Taylor and F. Quiviger (London, 2000), 146–67. On the imposi-tion of modernist formal analysis on early modern paintings, see also R. Zorach, The Passionate Triangle (Chicago, 2011), 3–12, 24.

18. Puttfarken, The Discovery, 121, 201.19. Karel van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck (Den Grondt) (haarlem, 1604),

fol. 15v: “t’allen tijden / hem nae des percks grootte schicken, en mijden / Dat de beelden de lijsten niet en draghen, / Oft datse benouwt als in kisten laghen. // Stelt u volcxken wat los, om een versoeten, / Laet uwen gheest soo wijdt niet zijn ontspronghen, / V dinghen soo groot te maken, dat moeten / In de lijsten loopen handen oft voeten, / Oft onbequamelijck ligghen ghewronghen, / Om dat ghy door de plaetse zijt ghedwonghen.” As translated in Taylor, “Composition,” 155. Further along, Van Mander (fol. 16) recommends that painters fill the corners of their paintings, but he discourages them (fol. 17) from having their figures cropped by the frame.

20. C. Greenberg, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (boston, 1961), 154.

21. This is a cliché of the literature. See, for example, h. Knackfuss, Dürer (bielefeld, 1899), 2; and S. Reinach, Apollo: An Illustrated Manual of the History of Art throughout the Ages (New york, 1921), 236–37. Fol-lowing Alois Riegl, worringer rejects this kind of claim on principle. In general, though not here, he associates this manner of explanation with Gottfried Semper (Abstraction and Empathy, 138–39n17): “The broken, angular style of drapery of this period has been described as a legacy of wood-carving, where it was conditioned by the character of the material. we even doubt whether the material character of wood is sufficient to explain such an arbitrary and independent phenomenon; but we are still more strongly opposed to the explanation, as simple as it is psychologi-cally impossible and shallow, that a phenomenon of material restraint such as this was carried over, without any understanding, to stone-carving and painting. There can be no doubt that the roots of this phenomenon lie deeper.” For a much more nuanced reading of Dürer’s Faltenstil than the kind we find in Knackfuss, see C. heuer, “Dürer’s Folds,” Res, 59–60 (2011), 249–65.

22. On the influence of Early Netherlandish painting on German sculpture, see, for example, M. baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New haven, 1980), 12, 269; T. Müller, Sculpture in the Neth-erlands, Germany, France, and Spain, 1400–1500 (baltimore, 1966); and washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, Tilman Riemenschneider: Master Sculptor of the Late Middle Ages (washington, DC, 1999), ed. J. Chapuis and M. baxandall, 24, 54, 170–71, 183, 201. On use of Master ES and Schongauer prints as models for German sculpture, see baxan-dall, The Limewood Sculptors, 15; J. bier, “Riemenschneider’s Use of Graphic Sources,” Gazette des beaux-arts, 50 (1957), 203–22; E. hessig, Die Kunst des Meisters E.S. und die Plastik der Spätgotik (berlin, 1935); höfler, Der Meister E.S., 121–32; Pinder, Die deutsche Plastik vom aus-gehenden Mittelalter, 2:256–59; A. Shestack, “Master Prints as Visual Messages,” ARTnews, 70/9 (1972), esp. 33; w. Thöllden, Die Wirkung der Schongauerstiche auf die deutsche Plastik um 1500 (Dresden, 1938); washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, Fifteenth-Century Engravings of Northern Europe from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (washington, DC, 1967), by A. Shestack, unpaginated introduction; and washington, DC, Tilman Riemenschneider, 25, 44, 52, 62–63.

23. Pinder says this explicitly (Die deutsche Plastik vom ausgehenden Mit-telalter, 2:246): “Es ist bezeichnend nun, daß dieser ‘eckige Stil’ am frühesten in der nordischen Malerei auftaucht.” In Pinder’s chronological



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survey of fifteenth-century German sculpture, I would say that only with Fig. 42 (Unbekannter Schwäbischer Monogrammist, Vesperbild von He-delfingen, 1471) do the folds in the drapery become truly eckig. Though Pinder himself argues that the tendency toward angularity began already in the 1440s, this still postdates the introduction of the hard style in Early Netherlandish painting; w. Pinder, Die deutsche Plastik des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1924), 18–19. On the hard style, see also Pinder, Die deutsche Plastik vom ausgehenden Mittelalter, 2:243–60. According to Fürst (Beiträge zu einer Geschichte, esp. 6), the hard style only takes hold in sculpture about 1460.

24. O. Pächt, “The End of the Image Theory (1930/1931),” in wood, The Vienna School, 188–89.

25. worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 3.26. Ibid., 37, 38, 39, 44.27. Ibid., 36.28. David Morgan points out that worringer’s abstraction should not be un-

derstood strictly as nonmimetic form; Morgan, “The Idea of Abstraction in German Theories of the Ornament from Kant to Kandinsky,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 50/3 (1992), 238; and idem, “The En-chantment of Art: Abstraction and Empathy from German Romanticism to Expressionism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 57/2 (1996), 324. Though this is true, worringer does speak (Form in Gothic, 63) of free-ing line from its subservience to objects. And he insists (Abstraction and Empathy, 44) that “the primal artistic impulse [, which he associates with abstraction,] has nothing to do with the rendering of nature.”

29. worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 44, also 36–37: Abstraction of-fers “emancipation from all the contingency and temporality of the world-picture.”

30. Ibid., 28.31. Ibid., 16, also 45: “The happiness [that the abstract artists] sought from art

did not consist in the possibility of projecting themselves into the things of the outer world, of enjoying themselves in them, but in the possibility of taking the individual thing of the external world out of its arbitrari-ness and seeming fortuitousness, of externalizing it by approximation to abstract forms and, in this manner, of finding a point of tranquility and a refuge from appearances.”

32. worringer, Form in Gothic, 64. See also idem, Abstraction and Empathy, 118.

33. worringer, Form in Gothic, 63.34. Ibid.35. At moments, worringer seems to imply that the hard style is indeed the

epitome of Gothic abstraction. Toward the very end of Form in Gothic (176), he describes the Gothic style yielding to Renaissance naturalism: “The hard, rigid outlines of the characteristic drawing grow soft. Rhyth-mically smooth calligraphy is substituted for crinkly angularity. . . . the linear expression ebbs away into calligraphic intricacy. what is lost in greatness is gained in beauty.”

36. while drapery was being lavishly depicted in Early Netherlandish paint-ings, the Flemish textile industry was in crisis, after having peaked as early as the 1290s and having suffered a serious decline in the fourteenth century. See J. h. Munro, “Economic Depression and the Arts in the Fif-teenth-Century Low Countries,” in Textiles, Towns and Trade: Essays in the Economic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries (Aldershot, 1994), 235–50. On how the industry weathered this crisis, see M. boone and w. Prevenier, eds., La draperie ancienne des Pays-Bas: Débouchés et stratégies de survie (14e–16e siècle) (Leuven-Apeldoorn, 1993).

37. For an excellent description of the unlikely massiveness of this mantle, see C. harbison, Jan van Eyck: The Play of Realism (London, 1991), 78–79. barbara G. Lane interprets the Virgin’s monumental form here

as an altar; Lane, The Altar and the Altarpiece: Sacramental Themes in Early Netherlandish Painting (New york, 1984), 16, 53.

38. worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 42, also 21–22, 38–42.

39. Ibid., 15.

40. Ibid., 22. Michael w. Jennings summarizes worringer: “Abstraction does not merely represent things, but attempts through geometrical precision and the analogy to the anorganic to lend to them a materiality, a regular-ity, and a stability they cannot attain in their original context”; Jennings, “walter benjamin and the Theory of Art history,” in Walter Benjamin (1892–1940): Zum 100 Geburtstag, ed. U. Steiner (bern, 1992), 95.

41. Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck (Nederlandtsche Schilders), fol. 201: “laken goet, oft emmers nae dien tijdt”; as translated by h. Miedema in Carel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and Ger-man Painters, from the First Edition of the Schilder-Boeck (1603–1604) (Doornspijk, 1994), fol. 201. Van Mander (Het Schilder-Boeck [Ne-derlandtsche Schilders], fol. 200v) offers equally faint praise: “de la-kenen zijn ghenoech nae den aert der ployen, op de maniere van Albertus Durerus.”

42. Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck (Den Grondt), fol. 43v: “Dats de maniere, die men heet confuysich.”

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid., fols. 42v–43; and Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boek (Nederlandtsche Schilders), fols. 207v, 211v.

45. Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck (Den Grondt), fol. 43: “De ployen uyt malcander oorsprongh nemende van yet dat uyt steeckt, oft verheft.”

46. Ibid., fol. 43v: “Te weten, datmen confuys en swaermoedich / Niet en sal het Laken te seer verkroken, / Als oft al waer verdouwen en ghebroken: / waer in ons Voorders dwaelden veel onvroedich.”

47. worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 119.

48. worringer (ibid., 62) tends to privilege abstraction over empathy. he goes to great lengths to show that abstraction is the earliest art form, includ-ing dismissing figurative cave painting (ibid., 55) as not art. To establish the priority of abstraction, he also argues (ibid., 57–63, 75) that plant and animal ornament are not abstractions of natural forms but, rather, naturalizations of abstract forms.

49. Pächt, “Design Principles,” 244. Pächt’s emphasis.

50. Ibid., 264.

51. Ibid., 265.

52. Ibid., 248–50.

53. F. Ohly, “Problems of Medieval Significs and hugh of Folieto’s ‘Dove Miniature,’” in Sensus Spiritualis: Studies in Medieval Significs and the Philology of Culture, trans. K. J. Northcott, ed. S. P. Jaffe (Chicago, 2005), 71.

54. Ohly, “The Spiritual Sense of words,” 37n9. For Ohly’s discussion of this issue, see ibid., 21, 35.

55. Ohly, “Problems of Medieval Significs,” 104.

56. Ibid., 103.

57. Ohly, “The Spiritual Sense of words,” 39n20.

58. Ibid., 24.

59. Ibid., 23.

60. Ohly, “Problems of Medieval Significs,” 74.

61. Ibid., also 76, 103.

62. herbert Kessler, for example, has shown how insistently medieval im-ages foreground what they are made of; Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art, Rethinking the Middle Ages, 1 (Peterborough, ON, 2004), 19–44.



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63. As translated in M. baxandall, “bartholomaeus Facius on Painting: A Fifteenth-Century Manuscript of the De Viris Illustribus,” JWCI, 27 (1964), 102.

64. Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck (Nederlandtsche Schilders), fol. 199v: “en niet en hoefde so ghetrocken te zijn gedaen”; as translated in w. S. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck (Chicago, 1991), 79.

65. Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck (Den Grondt), fol. 46v. See h. Mie-dema’s commentary in Miedema, ed., Den Grondt der edel vry schilder-const (Utrecht, 1973), 2:591.

66. Though he does follow Vasari (Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck [Den Grondt], fol. 8v) in calling drawing “Vader dan van t’Schilderen.” Ac-cording to Miedema, Den Grondt, 2:425, “bij Van Mander teken- en schilderkunst als volstrekt gelijkwaardige polen één ding fungeren.”

67. Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck (Italiaensche Schilders), fol. 116: “het boven al gaende is, het wel schilderen.” Discussed by Miedema, Den Grondt, 2:588n1.

68. Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck (Den Grondt), fol. 50: “In’t begin, als alle gheschapen dinghen / Van hunnen Schepper, alderhooghst ghe presen, / begin, ghedaent, en het wesen ontfinghen, / Al wat de ooghe mach sichtbaer bestringhen, / hoe veel, verscheyden, en hoe vreemdt van we-sen, / het heeft al zijn coleur ghehadt van desen / Alder constichsten beeldenaer en Schilder.”

69. Ibid., fol. 51: “verwe doet hier sichtbaer betrapen, / Al wat ter weerelt van Godt is gheschapen.”

70. The text combines a section on heraldry by Jean Courtois van Enghien (named Sicile) and a text on color symbolism by an anonymous author of the fifteenth century. On the authorship of the handbook, see the in-troduction to Sicile, herault d’Alphonse V, roi d’Aragon, Le blason des couleurs, ed. h. Cocheris (Paris, 1860), vii–xxxii. For Van Mander’s reliance on this fifteenth-century text, see Miedema, Den Grondt, 2:608, 647.

71. Van Mander indeed comments on the colors of Van Eyck’s draperies (Het Schilder-Boeck, 201): “en de coleuren, blaeuwen, roon, en purpuren, die zijn onsterflijck, en alles so schoon, datse noch versch gedaen schijnen, en alle ander schilderije overtreffen.”

72. On abstraction as the degree zero of painting, see, for example, h. Da-misch, “hubert Damisch and Stephen bann: A Conversation,” Oxford Art Journal, 28/2 (2005), 8. Pächt points out (“Design Principles,” 273) that, in fifteenth-century northern painting, “no section of the pictorial field possesses the value of ground or pattern in absolute terms, as was the case in early- and high-medieval painting (where a gold ground or absolutely blank colored surface was used as a screen). In this sense, . . . every projected form is fundamentally ambivalent.” This means that every patch of Early Netherlandish painting is capable of being read as a token of the flatness of its support; every illusion of relief or depth is provisionary, capable of reverting to the flat foil of a color patch that is synonymous with painting itself.

73. M. w. Jennings, “Against Expressionism: Materialism and Social Theory in worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy,” in Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. N. h. Donahue (Uni-versity Park, PA, 1995), 90–91: “worringer’s designation as theorist of Expressionism has led to a serious subjectivist bias in his reception. . . . Abstraction and Empathy is not a disquisition on the torment of the bour-geois artist, nor is it an examination of the psychic state of the bourgeois subject.”

74. worringer, Form in Gothic, 173: “The abstract is precisely the imper-sonal, the super-personal, and, as such, an expression of the undifferen-tiated crowd.” Idem, Abstraction and Empathy, 110: “Proclivity to the inorganic line, to the life-negating form.” On empathy’s anthropomor-phizing of the world, by contrast, see ibid., 47–48, 128. worringer also

speaks (ibid., 23–24) of abstraction in terms of self-alienation. According to Jennings (“walter benjamin,” 96–97), worringer’s preference for ab-straction’s inorganic forms implies a latent materialism: “If worringer’s materialism is still only implicit, then walter benjamin’s later work must represent the full realization of his implications. . . . The importance of the anorganic for both thinkers must surely be understood as a reaction against the stress on organicism, vitality, and wholeness that dominates the ‘philosophy’ of the German right from vitalism through the Conserva-tive Revolution to Nazism.” On worringer’s sense of a life that exceeds organisms, including the human organism, see G. Deleuze and F. Guat-tari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, 1987), 411, 495–99.

75. worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 18, also 15–16, 19, 41, 102, 107: “having slipped down from the pride of knowledge, man is now just as lost and helpless vis-à-vis the world-picture as primitive man.”

76. Ibid., 35, also 19, 79: “pure geometric abstraction, which, set free from all external connections with the world, represents a felicitation whose mysterious transfiguration emanates not from the observer’s intellect, but from the deepest roots of his somato-psychic constitution. . . . In conse-quence of the most profound inner connection of all living things, this geometrical form is also the morphological law of crystalline-inorganic matter. . . . every spiritual attitude has its physical significance.” wor-ringer here and elsewhere (ibid., 20, 36, 65), somewhat surprisingly, as-sociates geometry with matter, particularly the matter of the human body.

77. Ibid., 15: “The urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world; in a religious respect it corresponds to a strongly transcendental tinge to all notions.”

78. On these competing aims, see R. E. Krauss, “Grids,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 10; T. J. Clark, “God Is Not Cast Down,” in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New haven, 1999), 254, 288; and h. Fos-ter et al., Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London, 2004), 119, 124, 400.

79. h. Foster, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 135.80. worringer (Abstraction and Empathy, 34, also 45) refers to “a thousands

of years long disputation between” abstract and empathic art. For wor-ringer, then (ibid., 127), the history of art can never take the form of a progressive evolution.

81. On the significance of flatness, see Clark, “God Is Not Cast Down,” 235, 254; and D. Joselit, “Notes on Surface: Toward a Genealogy of Flatness,” AH, 23/1 (2000), 19–34.

82. K. S. Malevich, “God Is Not Cast Down,” in Essays on Art, 1915–1928, trans. X. Glowacki-Prus and A. McMillin, ed. T. Andersen (Copenhagen, 1971), 206.

83. Ibid., 194–95.84. Clark, “God Is Not Cast Down,” 268–71.85. y.-A. bois, “Greenberg’s Amendments,” Kunst & Museumjournaal, 5/1

(1993), 1–9.86. C. Greenberg, “Picasso at Seventy-Five,” in The Collected Essays and

Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. J. O’brian (Chicago, 1993), 33. Quoted in bois, “Greenberg’s Amend-ments,” 4.

87. As quoted in Ohly, “The Spiritual Sense of words,” 21.88. As quoted in ibid.89. Ibid., 22.90. Ibid., 23.91. K. S. Malevich, “Non-Objective Creation and Suprematism,” in Troels,

Essays in Art, 1915–1928, 122.92. Scarlet was originally the name of a textile. It only later became the name

of a color. This is a nice example of the errancy of properties that Ohly



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describes. On the term scarlet, see J. h. Munro, “The Medieval Scar-let and the Economics of Sartorial Splendour,” in Textiles, Towns and Trade, 13–70; idem, “Medieval woollens: Textiles, Textile Technology and Industrial Expansion,” in The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, ed. D. Jenkins (Cambridge, 2003), 212–15; and idem, “The Anti-Red Shift,” 55–95.

93. The cloth produced in this way was heavy, thick, and strong enough to support jewels, gold embroidery, and fur linings. It was also extremely expensive. On the cost of Flemish scarlet in the mid-fifteenth century, see Munro, “Medieval woollens,” 115.

94. Greenberg, “Picasso at Seventy-Five,” 33.

95. whether this is an unfinished painting or an anomalous framed and signed drawing in the form of a panel painting remains a subject of debate. See Antwerp, Rubenshuis, Early Netherlandish Drawings: From Jan van Eyck to Hieronymus Bosch (Antwerp, 2002), ed. F. Koreny, 39–42.

96. The broken image of God and the broken painting may, anyway, stand for one and the same Christian belief that all created things stand in need of repair. There would be no need for the Incarnation, if the things of this world were still intact.

97. See, for example, w. worringer, “Spätgotisches und expressionistisches Formsystem (1925),” in Fragen und Gegenfragen: Schriften zum Kunst-problem (Munich, 1956), 65–77.



Late Gothic Abstractions

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