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Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700. - book reviews
Art Bulletin, The, March, 1995 by Celeste Brusati
If anything might be said to characterize art history in the nineties it is the acceptance of interdisciplinarity as an inevitable fact of life. Recognition of the value of other disciplines is, of course, not new to art history; substantive scholarship in the field has always involved some measure of familiarity with the methods and materials of other disciplines - history, literary studies, philosophy, and anthropology are among the most obvious examples. Yet this acknowledgment of the value of other fields to the art-historical enterprise used to go hand in hand with a fairly clear notion of what was and what was not art history proper. By contrast, much current historical scholarship on art and visual culture is marked by a blurring of disciplinary boundaries, together with a more inclusive sense of what might be appropriate subjects for art-historical study, and a more elastic notion of art-historical "method." This disciplinary fluidity has had many salutary effects on the field. These are perhaps most evident in the variety of stimulating studies which have powerfully shaped and raised the level of critical discourse in art history during the past twenty years. I am thinking here of the influential work of Michael Baxandall, Svetlana Alpers, Michael Fried, Louis Marin, T.J. Clark, and the thought-provoking contributions of Norman Bryson, Mieke Bal, and Griselda Pollock, to name just a few. This interdisciplinary scholarship has also had its impact outside the field, especially among historians and literary scholars interested in visual culture.
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As exciting and beneficial as these exchanges among the disciplines have been, they have also brought in their wake pressing challenges which face everyone seeking to do art-historical scholarship effectively across disciplines. With every aspect of visual culture open for exploration and with the interpretive protocols of many disciplines at hand, the possibilities can sometimes induce a sense of intellectual vertigo. Where do we begin? By what criteria do we decide that particular historical circumstances are relevant to the visual artifacts of our study? And how do we construct historically explanatory linkages in our interpretive analyses between, say, pictorial representations and quite dissimilar kinds of data and cultural productions? There are clearly no fixed answers to these questions. The responses we offer will depend to some extent upon our intellectual, political, and yes, even disciplinary commitments.
The difference such commitments make is tellingly and instructively evident in Christopher Braider's Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700. Braider, a professor of French literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder, seeks in this ambitious study to elucidate the "deep and pervasive commitment to forms of picturing" which he sees as a signal feature of "Western thought" from the late Middle Ages to the dawn of the Enlightenment. His twofold aim is to examine these forms of picturing and to reveal "their contribution to postmedieval culture as a whole." Ultimately his goal is to expose the fundamental role of pictorial naturalism, both in images and texts, in shaping a new experience and understanding of reality that is recognizably "modern."
Braider deploys the terms "modern" and "modernity" in various senses, but perhaps most crucial to his argument is the notion of the modern as inextricably bound to the metaphysical meaning and vicissitudes of representation, which he sees most clearly manifested within the discourse and doctrine of the Sister Arts. The historical parameters of Refiguring the Real thus deliberately coincide with the three-hundred-year period during which European art theory recognized the kinship of painting and poetry as a key principle. Braider contends that the discourse of ut pictura poesis reinforced the theoretical and critical privilege accorded to visual images with obvious textual referents, while at the same time obscuring the significance of pictorial naturalism itself as a bearer of a novel conception of reality. His argument for the ontological importance of the painted image as the paradigm for other modes of expression is therefore also an argument against the use of ut pictura poesis as an explanation of the enhanced status of the pictorial arts in early modern Europe. Braider sees his project as a response to previous studies of the meaning and influence of the ut pictura poesis topos, such as those of Rensselaer Lee, Murray Roston, and Clarke Hulse.(1) In Braider's view none of these scholars has addressed sufficiently the degree to which the doctrine of the Sister Arts was a symptom rather than a cause of painting's privileged epistemological status. Braider's "revisionist" move is to propose another master narrative, which treats the development of naturalism in the arts as a catalyst in the ontological shift to a fully modern conception of reality.
In theory, Braider's revised account should offer a much more inclusive explanation of both the privilege accorded to the painted image and of the pictorialism evident in the discourses of philosophy, literature, science, and religion than does the humanist trope of the kinship of painting and poetry. His epistemological brief draws into his discussion texts of many different sorts as well as the descriptive types of paintings which he considers to have been marginalized under the influence of ut pictura poesis. Braider makes a point, for example, of choosing Netherlandish rather than Italian pictures as the main focus of his analyses. Yet at the same time, Braider's totalizing project of showing the "identity embracing the several arts and sciences as integral moments of a single evolution" (p. 4) works in precisely the opposite direction, necessitating other exclusions and elisions, and occasioning a dependence on canonical images and texts as privileged evidence for his claims. The movement of his argument is at once expansive and reductive, and the shifts from detailed analysis to larger historical transformations are sometimes dizzying. The tension between the sweeping claims of Braider's master narrative and the selectivity of his evidence and his interpretive strategies often undercuts the credibility of his arguments.
