On the Emergence of the Mimetic Imaginary in Late Medieval ItalianPainting

Michael SchwartzAugusta State University

“Art and the Spectator in Early Italian Art:An International Conference”

Athens, GA25-26 September 1998

In memory of James H. StubblebineScholar, Teacher, Friend

Introduction

*[SLIDES 1L + 1R]* In comparison to earlier medieval styles

of painting, the trecento introduced a more “this-worldly” mode

of depiction, a change that is usually cast as an increase in

realism or naturalism. Without rejecting outright this way of

framing the issue, my paper will propose that what is perhaps

most fundamental about the epochal transformation of medieval to

postmedieval painting paradigms is not so much the more correct

look of the image -- that its painterly marks and traces somehow

correspond better to visual reality -- but more a matter of the

amplified power in the modeling of a beholder’s comportments and

affective responses. Mimesis, in the sense I am using the term,

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is less an epistemic issue of “correct representation” and more

one of a viewer being provoked to imaginatively “mime” depicted

stances, actions, gestures, and attitudes.i My claim is that the

visual culture of the trecento is characterized by an increase in

and complexification of the mimetic imaginary of painting.

In order to entertain this claim, we need to understand the

epochal transformation in picturing around 1300. Yet, for the

most part, we still refer to the earlier modes of depiction in

negative terms -- as cryptogrammic, stylized, conventionalized,

inartistic, not quite realistic or naturalistic, and on so. That

is to say, with few exceptions (Worringer and Belting come to

mind),ii we have yet to venture an adequate positive historical

understanding of earlier duecento painting and to live up to the

demands posed by the Rieglian legacy of Kunstwollen.iii Thus, as a

first step in my argument, it will be necessary to delineate,

even if only in the broadest of terms, the character of this

epochal transformation, all the while keeping in mind that there

was no rupture, that the elements of the new emerged within and

amidst the old, that panel paintings and frescoes of the late

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thirteenth and fourteenth centuries negotiate within themselves

incommensurable pictorial schemas. So, to take a famous example,

Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna, for all its spatial recession, figural

gravitas, volumetric relief, and so forth, is still fundamentally a

goldground painting, that what is particularly interesting about

this great work are the tensions and interplays between the two

pictorial schemas -- which, as I hope to show, are more properly

characterized as two ontologies of painting -- and that the

consonances and dissonances of these ontologies is one way to map

the varying “stylistic” currents running throughout the trecento,

such the “mannerism” recently and so finely delineated by Hayden

Maginnis.iv So, it will be by first reflecting upon these two

ontologies of picturing and their “systematic” differences that

we shall then be able to move onto first topic of this paper, the

mimetic imaginary of trecento painting.

[Having reached certain tentative conclusions, the second

half of the paper will attempt to contexuilze these findings

within larger social and philsophical histories of the West,

those of Foucault, Heidegger, DeBord, and Arrighi. By doing so,

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the hope is that the study of late medieval visual culture moves

beyond its antiquarianism into larger critical projects on

disclosing the contours and conditions of our own modernity,

specifically, the effects and consequences of “moving pictures”

for the mimetic imaginary today. So let us first turn to the more

art-historical portion of the study.

Comparison

*[Slide 2L]* To get clearer about the transformation in the

modalities of picturing between the earlier duecento and

trecento, I would like to begin with a preliminary comparison

between Bonaventura Berlinghieri’s 1235 Vita icon of St. Francis

from Pescia and Pietro Lorenzetti’s 1342 Birth of the Virgin from the

Siena Cathedral. Both works were altarpieces.

The Vita icon is a gabled rectangle with pronounced vertical

dominance and stress on the central axis. The goldground surface

is continuous with the frame, which demarcates the limits of the

field. The saint is frontal and upright; three scenes from his

life are aligned to his left and three more to his right. There

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is minimal spatial depth and figural plasticity; the saint’s

modeling produces surface undulations but no full sense of

volume. The principal pictorial light is not registered through

this modeling, but as splendor “emanating” from the goldground.

Figure aspects are confined to frontality or near-frontality; and

relative importance is largely conferred by size.

In contradistinction, the Lorenzetti is a triptych that

would have originally had gilded architectonic framework. The

ensemble is as wide as it is high, although each of the separate

fields has an arched upper boundary that accents its central

axis. The horizontal finds its expanse through the virtual space

apparently continuing amongst and hence unifying the three

laterally adjacent fields. This horizontal unification of

pictorial space accommodates a complex array of narrative acts,

set in architectural environments more specific in make-up than

those in the subsidiary scenes of the Vita icon.v The frame

does not simply mark the termini of the field but articulates an

imaginary threshold between actual and pictorial spaces.

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Modeling achieves relief-like effects, and offers hints of

directional light sources. Figure aspects range from frontal to

profile to dorsal; and figure importance is still mostly signaled

by size, notwithstanding the organized diminution into depth of

the elements of the architecture.

How are we to see any “systematic” distinction between these

two constellations of elements? In what follows I would like to

launch such a project at least so far as it leads us into an

examination of the mimetic imaginary of the new painting. What I

want to explore is the differing “twofoldness” of the pictorial

schemas, the different interrelationship between the picture as

an image-world and the picture as a thingly component woven into

the world-fabric.vi

The framework of the Vita icon is a physical continuation of

the panel surface itself, a small physical lip with thin band of

black paint. Rather than demarcating a picture-plane separating

the pictorial and actual spaces, the frame is itself no more than

a differentiation of the goldground surface, articulating the

boundaries of the field. Now, the goldground is also the virtual

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background for the figuration; warm, bright, optically advancing,

and depth denying, it emphatically exhibits its own substantial

makeup as gold. There is then, with the Vita icon, a certain

non-distinction between physical surface and virtual depth,

between background and goldground, hence a phenomenal “tightness”

between the picture as a thingly component of the world and the

picture as an image-world. As such, the picture-world is not

separated in substance from the other substances of the world at

large, is not an opening into an “elsewhere,” but is itself

ontologically woven into the very fabric of creation, God’s

teleological order of created substances. Even as a pictorial

being, incorporeal, weightless, floating, the figure of St.

Francis has a substantial presence in our immediate world. This

schema of depiction, this ontology of painting, is the condition

of possibility for the medieval experience of speaking icons, the

miraculous healing powers of images, and the like. The image-

world, through its substantial integration into the world at

large, participates directly in the divine order of creation.

By way of marked contrast, the Lorenzetti effects a certain

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“de-materialization” of the surface -- or to put this more

precisely, a certain de-substantialization -- in that we have a less

pronounced sense of the literal materials of the painted panel

and a concomitantly more intensified experience of the pictorial

simulation of such substances. There is a “loosening” of the

ontological “tightness” between the image as a thing and the

image as a picture-world. This dislodges the picture-world from

immediate inclusion in the fabric of creation, opens ups a

virtual space or place that is “other,” and entails a new mode of

picturing, representation, that is to say, the re-presentation of the

created world.vii Most immediately, the frame of the Lorenzetti

articulates this ontological “distancing” of the image-world from

the world in which one dwell, setting up an architectural

threshold and passageway that at once differentiates the two

orders of space and coordinates an imaginary connection between

them.viii

Real Fictions, Possible Worlds

Following the lead of Klaus Krüger and Hans Robert Jauss, I

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would propose that it is with works like those by the Lorenzetti,

and not the earlier Vita icon, that we can begin speaking of

distinctions like the real and the fictive.ix For it is only

when the picture-world becomes other-in-substance than the world

in which we dwell that the question of its reality or non-reality

-- meaning its representational correspondence or non-

correspondence to an external referentx -- can be at stake. In

this view, the real/fictive distinction does not properly apply

to the Vita icon, which manifests correspondences not via

representational processes but through immediate inclusion in

God’s teleological order of created substances, as for example,

with the splendor of the goldground as analog of the emanating

invisible Light of the Godhead.xi And yet, we are very much in

the habit of characterizing the epochal transformation itself in

just these terms, that the new modes of picturing of Giotto, the

Lorenzetti, and Masaccio are more real or natural, the older pre-

Duccioesque schemas more “fictitious” in the sense of stylized

cryptograms. But this is a historical slippage, where having

lost contact with the older pictorial practices (perhaps as

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earlier as Vasari),xii we have imposed the dictates of

representation upon picturing tout court, which according to the

argument I an unfolding is improper for works like the Vita

icon.xiii So, in following the lead of Krüger and Jauss, my

point would be that the real/fiction distinction begins to take

on its force when elements of representation began to emerge in

later duecento painting.

Furthermore, the real and the fictive in the trecento are

not so much mutually exclusive terms but entail each other in a

dialectic of the real and the fictive. For example, there are two moments in

the relation of the picture-world of the Lorenzetti altarpiece to

the world in which a beholder stands: (1) the pictorial space is

an extension of our actual space, as coordinated and mediated by

the architectonic framework; and (2) the pictorial space,

receding away from and out of our lived place of beholding, is

itself unreal, an emphatic fiction, as foregrounded by the

ontological discrepancies between the gilded three-dimensional

architectonic frame and the non-substantial depicted

architecture. The picture-worlds of the trecento open up a

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complex interplay between the real and fictive, generating what

in brief we might call real fictions -- worlds like ours but divorced

from our realm in substance.

One way to contextualize the ontotheological status of such

real fictions is to consider the issue, discussed widely in the

thirteenth century, about possible worlds. According to Hans

Blumenberg, the thirteenth century witnessed profound debates

about the status of creation and the omnipotence of God. To put

the matter very succinctly and in an overly simple manner,

bracketing much of Blumenberg’s massive and difficult argument,

the question became pressing whether there were other possible

worlds than the one that God created and in which we exist. In

1277 the Bishop of Paris “condemned a list of propositions that

as a whole reflected the conclusions of the thirteenth century’s

completed reception of Aristotle. Three years after the death of

the classic author of High Scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas, his

acceptance of the Aristotelian proof of the uniqueness of the

world was condemned as a philosophical restriction of divine

omnipotence.”xiv In Blumenberg’s view, this had many

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consequences beyond its primary theological intent, which would

come to include the unleashing of the theoretical imagination in

propelling modern scientific inquiry and existential self-

assertion.

Similarly, I want to argue that the epochal transformation

in the ontology of the picture during the thirteenth and

fourteenth centuries (and after) entailed a shift from the

singular world of created substances into which the picture-world

was ontologically woven (and as a consequence in which it

divinely participated), to the incipient breaking-up of the

certain singularity of creation where pictures began to become

re-oriented in their relation to the world, diminishing their

sense of immediate substantial inclusion, and opening up real

fictions, or following Blumenberg what we can call possible

worlds. But let us keep in mind that whereas Blumenberg’s

account stresses the theoretical imagination for scientific

investigation and human self-assertion, our account, with its

specific regard to painting, focuses on possible worlds not as

theoretical schemas but as alternative worlds of possible

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existence and life -- that is, the realm of the mimetic

imaginary.

Mimetic Imaginary

As we have seen, the image-world of the Vita icon and that

of the Lorenzetti altarpiece have different incorporations into

the world at large. By extension, this entails that a beholder,

dwelling in the world with and alongside the picture, has in each

instance a different relationship with picture.

In the case of the Vita icon, the goldground reflects

ambient light; as one moves, so does the splendor. Now, this

shifting of the luster in accord with bodily movement is, in

principle, not just a local phenomena for such pictures, but

definitive of the very ground and substance of such works. The

effect is that ongoing bodily movement is thematized in the

experience of the picture.xv A beholder comes to recognize

herself as a bodily being located in a specific place and

situated within the flow time.

The figure of Francis is centered and strictly frontal,

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mirroring our own bodily stance before the image. But this

specular reciprocity and identification between saint and

beholder is quickly disrupted. For the saint is located in a

kind of non-place spanning heaven and earth, while a beholder is

located in a specific earthly local. And whereas the saint is

de-corporealized and static, even floating amidst the lustrous

goldground and in defiance of gravity (while paradoxically co-

terminus with the substances of the panel), a beholder

understands herself as a motile body, weighty, temporal, bound by

the mortal laws of this world. Through the activity of mutual

confrontation and mirroring, the figure of the saint is

differentiated as a being who, although substantially present in

the world, is transcendent of the worldly parameters of space and

time that define a beholder’s mode of existence. Saint Francis

and a beholder enter into a mutually defining spiritual

hierarchy.xvi

The flanking narrative scenes complement this process. They

are arranged vertically, paralleling the saint’s upright posture,

countering the horizontal dimension in which a beholder moves

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within the world. The figures within these scenes are frontal or

near frontal in aspect, further arresting lateral narrative

activity and thus iconicizing the depicted events.xvii Both the

composition of the narrative scenes and their internal

formulations arrest the time proper to narrative action,

differentiating the deeds of saint -- here, mostly posthumous

miraclesxviii — from a beholder’s time-bound existence.

The saint and his deeds embody virtues, such as caritas,

attesting to the stigmatized Francis as alter Christus. But the Vita

icon iconicizes narrative actions and presents the saint in an

“otherworldly” manner with the effect that in the last instance

Francis exemplifies what we cannot become and achieve. For the

saint, in the last instance, is spiritually Other than and

superior to us as beholders. That is to say, we may all strive

to imitate the life of Christ, but the Vita icon of St. Francis

presents the saint in his temporal and spatial transcendence,

locating his example in imitating Christ beyond the time and

space of our dwelling and hence beyond our mortal grasp.

Although the image of Franics is substantial present to us, his

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figure projects limit-ideals of earthly existence, and even as we

emulate the saintly virtues, it is left unspecified how to do so

in the world, what would be a proper course of action to take.

If we can speak of the mimetic imaginary here, it is more the

presentation of a saintly ideal towards which one can aspire, but

never reach, where the image does not offer specific comportments

of how to take up the saintly way of life.

With the Lorenzetti matters have changed. Iconic

presentation has yielded to a multifaceted narrative

representation. The settings of the actions are specific earthly

sites -- domestic bedroom, adjacent antechamber, urban street

(even if there are certain metaphoric plays on this specificity,

as with the vaulting of the bedroom alluding to an ecclesiastical

setting). With the reduction of goldleaf -- limited to haloes,

garment decoration, and the window views in the bedroom -- the

thematization of one’s bodily movement is diminished with one’s

attention now becoming more deeply absorbed in looking into the

depths of the virtual space. Of course as beholders we continue

being agents, and experience is still conditioned by our

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motility, but bodily movement is no longer thematized as

strongly, and, in fact, is countered by the absorptive and

attentive viewing of the newly expansive virtual world of the

picture. xix

Accordingly, a beholder “forgets” his or her actual

embodiment in the lived time of viewing and focuses instead on

the ins and outs of the image-world. We become engaged with a

picture-world that is ontologically “distanced” from the world in

which we dwell, with our attention drawn into pictorial depths

and hence away from our immediate rootedness in the world at

large. Furthermore, the architectonic conceit of the frame, in

its coordination with the pictorial construction, invites us to

pass imaginatively into the picture, to participate in a

possible world, perhaps by projecting ourselves into unoccupied

subsidiary roles in relation to the narrative or by identifying

with some of the depicted figures and their activities.xx Such

operations suggest and even model specific ways of comporting

oneself. And it is this intensification of the specificity in

modeling worldy conduct that characterizes the mimetic imaginary

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of the new painting.xxi

Now, I am not saying that the mimetic imaginary is all there

is; for the Lorenzetti altarpiece is didactic, instructing about

theological matters. But it does so, I am arguing, by

instituting an increase in the mimetic imaginary of painting.

And, I would caution, it would be misleading to see the mimetic

imaginary as merely a means to an end, a new pictorial rhetoric

to encode the religious stories so to press them upon us with

visual “reality,” which would be to construe the image as a mere

relay of mentalistic information or linguistic meaning and thus

bypass the picture qua picture.xxii What is at stake more fully,

I am arguing, is a fundamental alteration in one’s being in the

world with picture, of a beholder taking up through the mimetic

imaginary ways of comporting oneself in the everyday.xxiii

*[SLIDE 3L]* Of course this analysis is only a beginning;

for the Lorenzetti is not devoid of the aesthetic of created

substances proper to earlier painting, but in fact has

significant areas of goldleaf in the tooled frontal haloes and as

the upper window views in the bedroom. The latter are especially

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interesting, because they establish a gold surface as the far

limit of the pictorial realm, with the implication that the gold

extends as unseen goldground behind the entire architectural

construction of the central and right panels. In the final

instance, the most sacred pictorial space of the Lorenzetti

ensemble defines itself as grounded and contained within the

confines of God’s world of created substances, even as it opens

up a possible world within these confines. An interesting

question, one that I cannot broach here, is what does this signal

for the status of artistic production in the trecento, about a

painter who produces a possible world other than that of the

substantial world in which we dwell, with this possible world

nevertheless contained within the limits of God’s creation, hence

within the confines of God’s omnipotence? At the very least, we

should be very cautious about speaking too quickly about the

trecento painter as a “creator” of some sort.xxiv

A fuller account of a work like the Lorenzetti or the

Ognissanti Madonna might go onto exploring how the two pictorial

ontologies interact, how for example they establish two different

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and incommensurable beholding relationships to the image-world.

My thinking about such matters is very much in progress, so

rather than presenting inchoate views, I would like to conclude

this paper with a careful analysis of the mimetic devices in a

single painting, Scene I from the St. Francis cycle in the Upper

Church of Assisi.

Assisi

*[Slides 4L + 4R]* What I have been suggesting is that the

new ontology of picturing opened up an enhanced propensity for a

beholder to identify with facets of and participate in the

depicted world.xxv To be sure, there emerged as well various

devices for focusing and intensifying mimetic identification.

One of these was the dorsal figure, which I have discussed in an

earlier study.xxvi There were many other strategies, and great

inventiveness in this regard. A case in point are the scenes

from Assisi.

*[Slide 5R]* The first of the scenes of the cycle of the

life of Saint Francis in the Upper Church is Francis honored by a

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Simple Man, who “sees in the young patrician Francis spiritual

depths of which more worldly folk are as yet unaware. As Francis

walks in the town square of Assisi with its Roman temple behind

him, the man throws his cloak down to the ground for Francis to

tread upon.”xxvii Francis and the simple man face each other in

profile at the left and right of the temple. Behind and to the

side of each of the main protagonists are a pair of standing men,

dressed in contemporary garb; they are paired in conjoined

frontal and profile stances, each pair mirroring the other. Of

particular interest are the two at right, especially the man in

red. His body is frontal; the structure behind, through a

planar-effect-within-depth, creates a kind of niche or frame for

him, the only figure so presented. With his right arm extended

away from his body, gesturing towards the cloak in front of the

temple entrance, and his left held into his abdomen, clutching

his own garment, he seems to be speaking about the unusual event

at center. In fact, his stance and gestures calls to mind the

basic pose of the orator as defined by Quintillian, although what

if any historical connection can be made here remains uncertain

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to me. In any case, he does seem to speak, for his hand

positions are not unlike that of Francis himself who addresses

the simple man presumably about the latter’s act of uncommon

generosity.

Yet the questions remains as to whom is the red-garbed man

speaking. His body orientation, gestures, and “framed”

presentation suggest that he is addressing us. But he turns his

face to the right in the direction of the adjacent man in

profile. It is as if his oratorical address to us, as effected

by his frontal presentation, is somehow displaced at the last

moment to his neighbor. And this latter figure, in his turn,

does not remain passive, but seems to respond in raising his

right hand and gesturing towards the scene at center. Through

the displacement of the oratorical address from us towards this

figure, the latter’s response becomes a kind of replacement or

stand in for our own, a model for how we are to react to the

“oration” concerning the event at center stage.

*[SLIDE 6L]* What then is the character of this reaction --

that is to say, our response as constituted in the mimetic

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imaginary of this painting? This figure’s gesture has been

identified by Barasch as a “speaking hand, but it seems to me

more like the gesture of greeting and welcome decoded by

Baxandall in certain quattrocento pictures.xxviii The man at far

left, aligned in profile so in planar accord with narrative

action at center, responds to the locution about the unusual

display of honor by welcoming and greeting Francis’s stepping

onto the cloak and passing before the temple front. This figure

models less an affective response (as Alberti would theorize

about in the next century);xxix and instead we are posited as

adopting a bodily relationship to the historical event, as if

standing in the nearby and still extant piazza in Assisi and

assuming a welcoming gesture.xxx And, furthermore, as the first

scene of the cycle, this becomes something like a welcoming of

the saint’s entrance into and inauguration of the narrative cycle

as a whole.

There are other moments of the mimetic imaginary operative

here. The cloak forms something like a bottom step leading up

from the picture’s lowest boundary to the temple stairs onto the

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loggia itself. Francis’s stepping onto the cloak is thus like

his walking upon and across the lowest step of the temple

entrance. But this “stairway” to the temple seems to address us

as well, inviting us to enter the scene, walking up and onto the

loggia, which mysteriously lacks an entrance. Is the welcoming

at right, then, somehow not only a model for our embodied

response to Francis, but an invitation for us to step onto the

cloak as well?xxxi I note, as well, that the third scene of the

cycle, the symmetrical counterpart to this one in the grouping of

three scenes per bay, the episode of the Vision of the Palace, also

has a series of “steps” leading up from the lower boundary to the

reclining and sleeping figure of Francis; and that Christ’s right

hand, directed outward towards a beholder, may indicate speech of

some sort, and perhaps again a sign of welcome and greeting.

Whatever is more precisely going with these invitational

“stairways” in these two scenes, it has something to do with the

mimetic imaginary.xxxii And such devices can be found throughout

the scenes at Assisi.

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Conclusion

In this paper I have tried to do nothing more than convey my

intuition that the increase in and complexification of the

mimetic imaginary is a major component in the birth of the new

painting around 1300. Let me suggest that this proposal is at

once both less radical and more radical than it might first

appear.

It is less radical because we know, from texts like the

Meditations on the Life of Christ and a few, isolated early 15th

statements, that visualizations and actual pictures were cited as

useful for focusing mimesis.xxxiii It is more radical in that the

analysis does not rely upon texts per se, which are scanty with

direct reference to contemporary painting, and which, as

propositional, can be either true or false about contemporaenous

art. And further, such studies offer interpretations of specific

works, as if the increase in mimesis is reducible to a function

or use of isolated cases. Instead, the argument I have presented

focuses on the matter of the art itself -- having sketched an

analysis of the epochal shift between two ontologies of

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picturing, where the move towards amd emergence of

representational paradigms of painting involved an increase in

pictorial mimesis, understood not as an epistemic gain in

depictive accuracy (since medieval and postmedieval painting

paradigms are “incommensurable”), but as a more intensive

modelling of specific ways a beholder might comport herself in

the world.

The paper thus strives to inflect our understanding of the

epochal shift in picturing in the late thirteenth and early

fourteenth centuries, moving it away from twentieth century

tendencies to project onto pictures the epistemological concerns

of science in lieu of a more engaged and agencial, existential

and pragmatic view of the beholder-image relationship. And this

has consequences for reconceiving the positive historical

significance of medieval painting styles on the one hand --

finally doing justice to the Rieglian demand of the Kunstowollen

(and complementing Belting’s majestial history of the icon) ---

and on the other altering the kinds of questions we might want

ask of the visual past. What new social functions did images

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begin to play in constructing spheres of the mimetic imaginary?

Why did the early modern West require its visual culture to

undergo such a profound shift so to model, with a new intensity,

specific modes of comportment for viewers of all kinds? What

does this epochal shift in picturing have to do with the

emergence of both European capitalism and an elite consumer

culture, if anthying?xxxiv Do we see around 1300 the beginnings of

our own visual culture, one now centered on images which move,

intensifying the mimetic imaginary once again, images that

function directly and indirectly to promote consumption?

No doubts these are tough questions to answer, but they are

germane to a social history of art that, instead of exclusively

focusing on contexts, grounds itself in the historical

phenomenality of pictures. Only by understanding what images do,

how they work structurally, might art history, as a history of

the image, make its singular contribution to larger histories of

cultural and social developments.

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i. Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty”; Heidegger, BT

ii. Worringer and Belting.

iii. Riegl, LRA; discussion, perhaps Podro; Magginis on historiography; today, with few exceptions, such as the admirable andsophisticated “functionalist” approach of Belting, we still revive the Vasarian distinction.

iv. Maginnis.

v. Maginnis on place.

vi. Twofoldness: Merleau-Ponty; Wollheim; Heidegger (via Braver paper); also own essay

vii. Schwartz, “Beholding,” 231-232; idem, “Raphael’s Authorship” [rep literature: Heidegger; Foucault; mediology]

viii. Of course this division is complicated by the inclusion of the haloes and, most interestingly, by the deepest plane, the view through the window at left, as a sheet of goldgrond, thus defining the outmost (back)ground of the virtual world as still encompassed bythe substances of God’s creation, this deepest plane, presumably cropped by the window view hence continuous if unseen behind the pictorial architecture, linked in substance to the gold of the plastic frames before the picture-plane and pictorial sphere proper.

ix. Here Klaus Krüger’s work (in its taking up the lead of Jauss) is very instructive.

x. (“external” because this picture-world now is dislodged from immediate ontological inclusion in the environmental-fabric)

xi. Suger via Panofsky; Schöne; Hills.

xii. Maginnis on Vasarian tradition and after.

xiii. Mediaology

xiv. Blumenberg, LMA, p.16o.

xv. (not an objectification of such movement, since it is always ongoing, nor is this thematization necessary at the level of consciousness and discursive thought, but it nonetheless is a

fundamental component of the experience of the picture; our motility as agents, literally, is thematized; one is a body in movement and intime, perhaps ultimately a mortal body within the time of creation (in Augustine’s sense of created time); note in book on St Francis onshift from mosaic to fresco as prefered medium of murals during 13th century (book has note that modifies but does not cancel this view)

xvi. eyes; recognitional interactions; issue of mutual recognition itself

xvii. Cf. Gombrich, Means and Ends (see now Prentice Hall books on Romanesque and Gothic; also in this section bring in Schapiro and Rosand into the footnoting).

xviii. Maginnis, p.148.

xix. Cf. Fried.

xx. [Baxandall, PE, new meditational practices]

xxi. This is how I interpret Shearman’s claim, in only connect, that there is an increase in viewer participation.

xxii. This would be to re-introduce an unwanted “logocentrism” that would negate the image qua image.

xxiii. [this could be an implication of Baxandall’s argument; but cf.recent Giotto article on “handbook” of comportments for upper classes]; RS essay on Giotto

xxiv. See my AB essay; more broadly, see Blumenberg. Cf. Land, where Pertrach might have articulated a position positing painters as quasi-creators in the 14th ct, anticipating later trends.

xxv. In this regard, Lagan’s model is especially provocative, if we keepin mind (1) that it is best taken not as referring to human-human interactions of identity formation (IE, the mirror phase deworlds thetwo participants and mistreats self-body as an object), and (2) is proper to historical modalities of picturing of the post-medieval West.

xxvi. “Beholding”

xxvii. Stubblebine, p. 3.

xxviii. Barasch; Baxandall.

xxix. (as Alberti would theorize in the fifteenth-century with reference to Giotto’s Navicella Cf. “Beholding” discussion of Alberti contra displacements; Belting on Alberti projecting back onto 14th ct?

xxx. First dispossession of self via locution of hearing (Judovitz); second a re-possession via the mimetic imaginary of the modeled embodied response. Also, man clutching cloak perhaps as if holding onto himself, his possession of fine fabric, whereas the respondent “sees” the appropriateness of the cloak’s place on the ground; that is, one man questions how could one throw down one’s garment, even a simple man of meager means, while the response is one of acceptance and the appropriateness of crossing the threshold.

xxxi. Here the problem is how to understand the 90 degree rotation of the narrative action at center as aligned with the welcoming figure at far right and our confronting stance before the scene.

xxxii.Assisi section; mosaic gives ways to fresco, eliminating luster; similar issues; mention Cavallini as similar to Giotto in this regard; increase even within frescoes, cite Quattro santi sceneswith frontal figures; move on to Assisi scene; minimal discussion of framework {save for separate article on ontology of Assisi scenes}]

xxxiii. Meds; text from early 15th; Baxandall perhaps here too.

xxxiv. Arrighi, Jardine.