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Interventions: toward a new model of Renaissance anachronism
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 2005 by Alexander Nagel, Christopher S. Wood
The interference between the substitutional and the authorial principles had as one of its effects the emergence of the category "art forgery." The art forgery was a historical novelty of the Renaissance. Until the late fifteenth century, when the market for art began to link value to demonstrable authorship, no one had been accused of "forging" an artwork. This criminalization of substitution came about only when the two modes of production we have been outlining entered into their dialectic. What is an art forgery if not a substitution cruelly unmasked as a mere performance? (68)
Archaism, aesthetic primitivism, pseudomorphic imitation, typology, forgery, misdating, citation, the deliberately "style-less" mode, ideal classicism: each of these temporal disturbances of the Renaissance image was an effect generated by conflict between the two theories of origins. The friction of mutual interference only brought out the contours of the competing theories with greater conceptual clarity. By 1500 the two principles, performative and substitutional, needed one another. No sooner had the performative mode emerged than artists began to reinforce and restage the substitutional mode in compensation. Many of the archaizing tendencies in Renaissance art, including the revival of ancient art, can be seen not simply as exercises in formal imitation but as quasi-theoretical efforts to reinstate the substitutional approach to artifact production. In works of art, like Carpaccio's picture, the principle of substitution was mobilized deliberately, and its workings revealed. A painting might do such a thing for any number of reasons: to bend the expectations of a beholder, for instance, and so generate a peculiarly aesthetic effect, or to comment negatively on the competing, performative theory of origins.
Over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as prints sent pictorial ideas circulating all over Europe, and as published treatises and dialogues and ephemeral conversations created an independent culture of art, the dialectic between the two theories of production accelerated and the cycles of response and counter-response became briefer and briefer. Artistic authorship itself, which emerged in the early fifteenth century as a purely performative mode, later learned to manipulate substitution. Already by the beginning of the sixteenth century, one can almost define artistic authorship as the capacity to manipulate the two modes within the confines of an aesthetic field. It is just such a dynamic historical model, involving continual interaction between substitution, theories of artistic authorship, and self-conscious revivalism motivated by propagandistic or doctrinal principles, that has the best chance of making sense of the strange density of the bronze Christ at the center of Carpaccio's anachronistic kaleidoscope.
Alexander Nagel is Canada Research Chair in the Graduate Department of the History of Art at University of Toronto. He is currently Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. [Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Room EB-527, 2000B South Club Drive, Landover, MD 20785, a-nagel@nga.gov].
