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Interventions: toward a new model of Renaissance anachronism
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 2005 by Alexander Nagel, Christopher S. Wood
In two recent books Georges Didi-Huberman has pointedly confronted the modern discipline of art history with its own chronographic complacency. In Devant le temps (2000), he identifies two modern modes of dialectical and productively anachronistic thinking about images, montage and symptom, associated in multiple ways with Benjamin and Carl Einstein. In L'image survivante: Histoire de l'art et temps des fantomes (2002), he takes Aby Warburg as his guide and unravels the obsolete evolutionary temporal schemas that have structured the historical study of Western art. As an alternative to a developmental, "biomorphic" conception of history, Warburg offered a discontinuous, folded history in which time is redistributed in strata, networks, and deferrals. Above all, Didi-Huberman brings Warburg's model of the Nachleben, or survival of antique pathos formulas, into alignment with the psychoanalytic mechanism of Nachtraglichkeit, or "delayed activation." (39) Our own project responds to Warburg's provocation, amplified in Didi-Huberman's exegesis, by attempting to draw a nonevolutionary "metaphorics" of time from the historical works themselves, a temporality in structural misalignment with, and therefore systematically misrecognized by, art historical scholarship. We want to work by a process of reverse engineering from the artworks back to a lost chronotopology of art making.
The idea of a nonlinear, nonperspectival, "artistic" time plays no role in the most influential interpretation of Renaissance historical attitudes, that of Erwin Panofsky. For Panofsky, a lucid sense of historical distance was the basis of what he called the "factuality" of the Renaissance as a period concept. (40) He argued that the Renaissance distinguished itself from the Middle Ages by its sense of "an intellectual distance between the present and the past." (41) Medieval art, for Panofsky, had been incapable of joining historical subject matter with its proper historical form: Eve was portrayed in the pose of a Venus pudica, for example, and the Trojan priest Laocoon tonsured like a monk. Panofsky maintained that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian scholars and artists reactivated the power of classical culture through an accurate realignment of classical subject matter with its proper classical form: literally, the representation of ancient Greek and ancient Roman gods and heroes with their correct costumes, physiognomies, and attributes, rendered in ancient Greek and Roman style. Renaissance culture was essentially a "stabilizing of the attitude toward antiquity," (42) a dispelling of temporal confusion and the blind clash of cultures.
Panofsky drew an explicit analogy between the Renaissance historical imagination and Renaissance perspective:
In the Italian Renaissance the classical past began to be looked upon from a fixed distance, quite comparable to the "distance between the eye and the object" in that most characteristic invention of this very Renaissance, focused perspective. As in focused perspective, this distance prohibited direct contact--owing to the interposition of an ideal "projection plane"--but permitted a total and rationalized view. Such a distance was absent from both medieval renascences [that is, the "incomplete" revivals of antiquity that occurred in the Carolingian era and then again in the twelfth century]. (43)
