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Interventions: toward a new model of Renaissance anachronism
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 2005 by Alexander Nagel, Christopher S. Wood
Today it is easy to agree that "artistic" time--folded, mis-remembered--is more interesting than merely linear historical time. The modern scholar willingly submits to what Jorge Luis Borges called the "plebeian pleasure of anachronism." (57) The principle of substitution generates the effect of an artifact that seems to double or crimp time over on itself. The time of art, with its densities, irruptions, juxtapositions, and recoveries, comes to resemble the topology of memory itself, which emerged in the twentieth century in all its tangledness as a primordial and powerful model of historical understanding, a threat to the certainties of empirical historical science. In the substitutional mode, however, no human subject is involved. Substitution resembles the modern topology of memory, but there is no place in it for an actual working memory. It is a memory effect generated by the substitutional machine.
It may actually have proven convenient to modern theorists of memory-based time to preserve the image of a prosaically historicist Renaissance, something like Panofsky's Renaissance. For them, modernity can be seen to emerge out of this delusion of lucidity with its own more fluid, sophisticated, and complicated notion of time and history. There may be an incentive to overrate the clarity of Renaissance and Enlightenment thought so that a delirious twentieth- and twenty-first-century modernity can stand out in relief.
And for those who wish to believe in the lucidity of the Renaissance, either as the foundational moment of their own lucid modernity or as the foil for their own obscure modernity, it may be equally convenient to stress the confusion and irrationalism of medieval thought. In the 1961 postscript to his well-known article on the iconography of medieval architecture, Krautheimer spoke of the "medieval pattern of 'double-think,' or, better, 'multi-think,'" and said that multiple connotations and images "all 'vibrated' simultaneously in the mind of educated Early Christian and medieval men." (58) Krautheimer had been careful to explain in the article itself that all this "vibration" settled down as the Middle Ages came to a close and the archaeological vision of the artistic past came into focus. By the time of the Renaissance, "multi-think" was over. From that moment on, apparently, people were careful to think only one thought at a time. Krautheimer maintained this distinction in all his writings, as Marvin Trachtenberg pointed out. Krautheimer's Middle Ages were endlessly complicated and self-contradictory. The Italian Renaissance, by contrast, remained for Krautheimer an idealized "never-never land" insulated "from the complexities of facture and chronology, from the messy realities of Renaissance practice, and from ... social context." (59)
The same schema is at work in the writings of Didi-Huberman, although with the values reversed: here, the "delirious" Middle Ages are prized over a rationalist modernity launched in the Renaissance. In imposing a mimetic function on the image, the Renaissance introduced a "tyranny of the visible," suppressing an indexical conception of the image that prevailed in the Middle Ages. In contrast to the Renaissance rhetoric of mastery, adequation, and intelligibility, the medieval image, in Didi-Huberman's histories, presents an opacity, a disruption of the coded operations of the sign, a disjunctive openness by which the image is opened onto a dizzying series of figurative associations well beyond the logic of "simple reason." It is an understanding of the image better served by the Freudian concepts of the symptom and of dreamwork than by the procedures of iconology developed by the Kantian inheritors of Renaissance humanism, in particular, Panofsky. (60)
