Interventions: toward a new model of Renaissance anachronism

21. It is true that the modern statue represents the resurrected Christ rather than the Christ who healed the hemorrhaging woman (as stated in Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea; see n. 17 above). The statue shows the wounds and originally would have held a banner, as we see it in Carpaccio's painting. It is possible that this is an instance of typology prevailing over iconography: the triumphant Christ was by far the most common way of presenting the standing figure of Jesus in late medieval iconography. It is also true that the antique statue form itself carried strong associations of triumph and apotheosis, which would have been best embodied in the figure of the resurrected Christ.

22. Patricia Fortini Brown, Venice and Antiquity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 22-23.

23. Richard Brilliant, "I piedistalli del Giardino di Boboli: Spolia in se, spolia in re," Prospettiva 31 (1982): 2-17. Salvatore Settis develops the concept in "Continuita, distanza, conoscenza: Tre usi dell'antico," in Memoria dell'antico nell'arte italiana, vol. 3 (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 375-486, esp. 399-410. For more on "virtual spolia," see Dale Kinney, "Spolia: Damnatio and Renovatio Memoriae," Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 42 (1997): 117-48.

24. He missed, however, the telling detail of the dropping hem. The statue clearly carried authority for him without the support of "philological" clues such as this.

25. See Otto Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice, 2 vols. in 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), vol. 2, pt. 2, colorpl. 35. The mosaic angels in the pendentives of the Creation cupola are blue and are clearly identified by the inscription as cherubim. Carpaccio isolated the figure in the center of his little apse and made it red, thus promoting it to the level of seraph.

26. Kurt Weitzmann, "The Genesis Mosaics of San Marco and the Cotton Genesis Miniatures," in Demus, Mosaics of San Marco, vol. 2, 105-42.

27. In this sense Carpaccio and his contemporaries were continuing a well-known Byzantine tendency to regard images of later centuries as ancient. Robert Grigg, "Byzantine Credulity as an Impediment to Antiquarianism," Gesta 25-26 (1987): 3-9, explains the chronological confusions that abound in Byzantine writings as the result of Byzantine "credulity," with the result that people were "deceived into thinking there was no difference between ancient and Byzantine art" (7). The substitution model explains these phenomena without the need to speak of deception or error; the Byzantines knew that their images came later and at the same time granted them antique status on the basis of their reference to ancient prototypes.

28. Saint Theodore the Studite, quoted in Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312-1453: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 174.

29. Ulrich Pfisterer builds the strongest case imaginable for the early emergence of the concepts of historical, local, and personal style in the proximity of Donatello, in Donatello und die Entdeckung der Stile 1430-1445 (Munich: Hirmer, 2002).