Interventions: toward a new model of Renaissance anachronism

Since the Christ figure on the altar was a modern work, it seems to match the other anachronisms in the room, the modern furniture and the bound codices. But this statue is presented as an ancient work. Of course, no such artifact had survived from Early Christian times. The literary tradition, however, mentions an ancient bronze statue of Christ. The early-fourth-century church historian Eusebius had described a bronze statue group in Paneas (present-day Baniyas, north of the Sea of Galilee) that showed a woman kneeling in supplication before a man with a cloak draped over his shoulder and with his arm outstretched to her. (16) Eusebius's account was retold and embroidered throughout the Middle Ages and in the thirteenth century made it into the pages of the Golden Legend, one of the most widely read devotional texts of the later Middle Ages. In the Golden Legend the two-figure group had become a single statue of Christ. (17) The story was frequently invoked by iconophiles during the sixteenth-century image controversy as an example of the use of images in archaic Christian times.

We will argue that the bronze Christ cited in the painting was not merely, for Carpaccio, a modern work functioning as an ingenious hypothesis of a lost ancient work. The bronze Christ did not just "stand for" or refer poetically to antiquity. Rather, for him the statue was an antique work. (18)

Substitution

To make sense of this claim about the statue we will need to introduce a new model of the relation of artifacts to time. The thesis proposed here and in the research project it introduces is that all artifacts--not just statues but also chairs, panel paintings, even churches--were understood in the premodern period to have a double historicity: one might know that they were fabricated in the present or in the recent past but at the same time value them and use them as if they were very old things. This was not a matter of self-delusion or indolence but a function of an entire way of thinking about the historicity of artifacts repeatedly misunderstood by the modern discipline of art history.

Images and buildings, as a general rule, were understood as tokens of types, types associated with mythical, dimly perceived origins and enforcing general structural or categorical continuity across sequences of tokens. One token or replica effectively substituted for another; classes of artifacts were grasped as chains of substitutable replicas stretching out across time and space. Under this conception of the temporal life of artifacts, which we will call the principle of substitution, modern copies of painted icons were understood as effective surrogates for lost originals, and new buildings were understood as reinstantiations, through typological association, of prior structures. The literal circumstances and the historical moment of an artifact's material execution were not routinely taken as components of its meaning or function; such facts about an artifact were seen as accidental rather than as constitutive features. Instead, the artifact functioned by aligning itself with a diachronic chain of replications. It substituted for the absent artifacts that preceded it within the chain. Richard Krautheimer, in his seminal article "Introduction to an Iconography of Medieval Architecture," of 1942, made this point about medieval buildings. (19) He held that the ground plans of many early and high medieval churches were governed not so much by structural, formal, or liturgical concerns as by a desire to comply with a set of simple design principles embodied in a few prestigious and symbolically weighty early models. Krautheimer carefully declined to push his thesis beyond a limited group of centrally planned churches dating from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. In effect, we are trying to extend the Krautheimer thesis, beyond its original brief, to the painting and the sculpture of the Renaissance.