Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism
Author(s): Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood
Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Sep., 2005), pp. 403-415
Published by: CAA
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Interventions:
Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism
Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood
The Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio pictured Saint Au
gustine seated at a table in a roomy study, pausing, his pen
raised from the paper. Augustine is writing a letter to Saint
Jerome asking the older man for advice and at that very
moment, in distant Bethlehem, Jerome dies. Augustine looks
up from his desk, as his room fills with light and an ineffable
fragrance, and he hears the voice of Jerome. Carpaccio
painted the picture about 1503 for the Confraternity of S.
Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice, where it still hangs today
(Fig. 1). It is a historical picture, re-creating an incident
supposedly narrated by Augustine himself in a spurious letter
frequently published in late-fifteenth-century Venice as a sup
plement to biographies of Saint Jerome.1 The fluttering
pages of the open codices, the fall of the shadows, the alerted
dog, the poised pen all suggest the momentariness of that
moment, the evening hour of compline, as Augustine tells us.
This is secular time, the time of lived experience, whose each
moment repeats but differs from the previous moment. The
saeculum is measured out against a completely different tem
porality, the time frame of perfect understanding. Augustine
had been planning a treatise on the joys of the blessed and
was writing to Jerome for guidance on the topic. However, his
letter was badly placed in secular time and would never reach
its addressee. Instead, at the moment he put the salutation
down on paper, Augustine reports, Jerome's voice came to
him from that place of the blessed to chastise him for his
hubris in attempting to reason about what was beyond his
comprehension. "By what measure," Jerome asked, "will you
measure the immense?"
The artifacts and the furnishings described by this picture,
occupants of mundane, "fallen" time, are all tied to history by
their forms, but in different ways and with differing degrees
of certitude. It seems at first that everything is much as it
might have been in an Italian scholar's well-appointed study
of about 1500. At the left is an elegant red chair with cloth
fringe and brass rivets and a tiny lectern. A door at the back
opens onto a smaller room with a table supporting piles of
books and a rotating book stand. Carpaccio portrays writing
implements, penholders, scientific instruments, an hourglass,
and, on a shelf running along the left wall, under a shelf of
books, still more bric-a-brac of the sort that scholars like to
collect: old pots, statuettes, even prehistoric flint artifacts,
misunderstood by the painter and his contemporaries as
petrified lightning.2 Some of these objects clash anachronis
tically with the picture's subject matter. One of the small
statues is a representation of Venus, an object that a modern
clergyman, a man of taste and liberal views capable of distin
guishing a shelf from an altar table, might have prized, but
that Saint Augustine would not have owned.3 Augustine was
vehement in his condemnation of pagan statuary, as any of
his Renaissance readers would have known.4 On the rear wall
is a kind of private chapel, a wall niche framed by pilasters
and faced with spandrels with inlaid vegetal ornament, which
shelters an altar. The altar looks as if it is in use: the curtain
is pushed aside and the doors on the front are open, reveal
ing ecclesiastical equipment. Augustine has placed his bish
op's miter on the altar table and propped his crosier and a
censer on either side. They are the appurtenances that a
modern bishop might have owned. Even so, those modern
artifacts, and a modern chapel with its fashionable frame, all
had an alVantica flavor that connected them with the Roman
past, with Augustine's historical world, more or less. Such
artifacts, given a virtual life inside a painted fiction, entered
into poetic play with each other, orchestrated by the painter
author.
A Clash of Temporalities
Many fifteenth-century painters mingled historical and con
temporary references in their works. Even Carpaccio's Augus
tine, it is argued by some scholars, was a screen for a modern
portrait, a papal official in one account, in another, Cardinal
Bessarion.5 Such deliberate anachronisms, juxtapositions of
historically distinct styles in a single picture and stagings of
historical events in contemporary settings, fed back into the
symbolic machinery of the pictures. Fifteenth-century Flem
ish painters, for instance, embedded samples of medieval
architectural styles as an iconographie device: the round
arched or "Romanesque" style as the signifier of the old
covenant, "Gothic" pointed arches as the signifier of the
new.6 Rogier van der Weyden attached an anachronistic cru
cifix to the central pier of a ruinous Nativity shed, site of
maximum condensation and redundancy of epochal time.7
Sandro Botticelli dressed the characters of his Primavera in
the costumes of contemporary festival pageantry, a blend of
the still fashionable and slightly out-of-date, creating a deli
cious tension with the literary premise of a primordial
theophany, the invitation to the first spring of all time.8 The
staged collision between the visually familiar and the unfa
miliar was one of the ways that modern paintings, to borrow
a phrase from Alfred Acres, "customized the terms of their
own perception."9 Such works dared to make reference to a
"here" and a "now" relative to a historical beholder, through
perspective or modern costumes or hidden contemporary
portraits. The "customized," contingent aspect of the work
could be folded back into the work's primary, usually nonlo
cal aims. The internal dissonance between universal and
contingent then generated a whole new layer of meanings.
The condition of possibility for such complex feedback
effects was the idea that form would be legible to the be
holder as the trace of an epoch, a culture, a world?as a
"style," in other words. Behind the idea of historical style
stands a theory about the origins of formed artifacts. Accord
ing to this theory, the circumstances of an artifact's fabrica
tion, its originary context, are registered in its physical fea
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404 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2005 VOLUME LXXXVII NUMBER 3
1 Vittore Carpaccio, The Vision of Saint Augustine, 1502-3. Venice, S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni (photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource,
NY)
tures. A clash of temporalities of the sort we find in Carpaccio
comes about when patrons and artist and beholders all agree
to see the artifacts "cited" in the painting, the buildings or
statues or costumes, as traces of historical moments. One can
characterize this theory of the origin of the artifact?which is
equally a theory of the origin of the artwork?as performative.
The artifact or the work, according to this theory, was the
product of a singular historical performance. Any subsequent
repetitions of that performance, for example, copies of the
work, will be alienated from the original scene of making.
This theory of origins came into especially sharp focus over
the course of the fifteenth century. An artist was now con
ceived for the first time as an author, an auctor or founder, a
legitimate point of origin for a painting or sculpture, or even
a building. The author, more generally the entire context of
fabrication, leaves traces in the fabric of the work. By the
third quarter of the fifteenth century, the image of the stylus
or pen, the writing instrument that both in ancient rhetorical
treatises and in modern Petrarch had come to stand symbol
ically for the individual author's peculiar, inalienable way
of putting things into words, was carried over into the con
temporary discourse on painting. The Florentine Antonio
Filarete, in his Treatise on Architecture (1461-64), wrote that
"the painter is known by the manner of his figures, and in
every discipline one is known by his style."10 A character in
Baldassare Castiglione's dialogue The Courtier (1528) says of
Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea Mantegna, Raphael, Michelan
gelo, and Giorgione that "each is recognized to be perfect in
his own style."11 Since the late fifteenth century some version
of this theory of origins is inscribed into every European
painting.12
Carpaccio's painting dramatizes the clash between tempo
ralities. At the heart of the picture, inside the wall niche, the
system of anachronistic citations reaches a crescendo and
then collapses in upon itself. On Augustine's private altar
stands a statue of the resurrected Christ. Here Carpaccio has
imagined an Early Christian altar, adorned not by a carved
and painted retable but by a freestanding bronze. Of course,
no such work would have stood on a fifth-century altar.
Carpaccio in fact was describing a modern work, a bronze
statue today in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan (Fig. 2). The
work was made in the V?neto in the early 1490s and could be
found, at the time Carpaccio painted his picture, on an altar
in the Venetian church of S. Maria delta Carita in Venice.13 It
was commissioned, together with an elaborate chapel, by the
weal thy jeweler and antiquarian Domenico di Piero.14 At 54%
inches (138 centimeters), it is significantly larger than a
statuette, though under life-size.15
Since the Christ figure on the altar was a modern work, it
seems to match the other anachronisms in the room, the
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INTERVENTIONS: A NEW MODEL OF RENAISSANCE ANACHRONISM 4Q5
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 six
teenth-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 pre
modern 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 per
ceived 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 under
stood 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 align
ing itself with a diachronic chain of replications. It substi
tuted for the absent artifacts that preceded it within the
chain. Richard Krautheimer, in his seminal article "Introduc
tion 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
2 Resurrected Christ. Milan, Poldi Pezzoli Museum
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
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406 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2005 VOLUME LXXXVII NUMBER 3
3 Resurrected Christ, detail of foot and plinth (photo: Alexander
Nagel)
its original brief, to the painting and the sculpture of the
Renaissance.
The bronze Christ once in Venice and now in Milan did
not actually belong to a chain. It appears to have been a
philologically sensitive replica of the historical statue de
scribed by Eusebius and others through to the Golden Legend.
The modern statue preserves a peculiar detail of the legend.
According to the texts, exotic plants that grew beneath the
statue and came into contact with the sculpted hem of
Christ's cloak took on miraculous powers and were used to
heal illnesses of all kinds.20 (Luke 8:44 and Matthew 9:20
specifically say that the hemorrhaging woman was healed by
touching the hem of Christ's garment.) On the bronze statue
now in Milan, the very work Carpaccio used as his model, the
pedestal carries a dense motif of foliage, and the hem of
Christ's pallium drops down sharply below the level of his feet
(Fig. 3). The motif is strange and emphatic: the cloth pools
up to the side of the pedestal as if to insist on the idea that it
has come into physical contact with the ground. The vegetal
ornament and the overflowing hem show that the patron of
the bronze statue, Domenico di Piero, deliberately under
stood it as a replica of the original ancient statue of Christ
recorded by Eusebius.21
In the literature on the ancient and medieval use of spolia,
that is, elements of early monuments reused in later times,
some conceptual space has been cleared for artifacts like this.
In her book Venice and Antiquity, Patricia Fortini Brown iden
tifies a "level of copying?the deliberate faking of an antiq
uity?in which the present virtually becomes the past."22 Fol
lowing a distinction drawn by Richard Brilliant, she describes
such works as the thirteenth-century relief Hercules with the
Cerynean Hind and the Lernean Hydra on the facade of S. Marco
or the thirteenth-century ducal tombs as "conceptual spolia":
artifacts filling gaps in the monumental record and made to
look as if they might have been spolia.22. Our model amplifies
and radicalizes this argument. Not just a few but a vast range
of works can be understood as virtual spolia or fabricated
antiquities, whether they closely resemble real antiquities, to
our eyes, or not. The rare examples that succeed in simulat
ing the look of antiquity serve as signposts that help us map
out the full reach of the model.
The simple presence of an artifact like the Venetian Christ
carried enormous validating power. Reflexively placing it
within a substitutional mode of production, contemporary
viewers looked past the local circumstances of its fabrication
and instead concentrated on the referential target. Even a
prototype otherwise unknown was in effect "retroactivated"
by such a work. In the presence of the actual statue?espe
cially one in bronze, a rare sight in churches at this time?the
legend of an antique original immediately gained compelling
concreteness.
The substitutional, retroactive power of the bronze Christ
explains why the statue, which appeared in Venice in the
1490s, had such an extraordinary and immediate impact on
Venetian art of the period. Although authorless and virtually
unknown today, about 1500 the figure carried great author
ity, as if it were understood to be more than an imaginative
fiction. It was often copied. In S. Maria della Carita in Venice,
where the bronze originally stood, the Christ in the Resur
rection relief from the Barbarigo Tomb, finished by 1501, is
closely based on the statue. Freer emulations of the statue
abounded: Alvise Vivarini's Resurrected Christ of 1497 in S.
Giovanni in Bragora, Cima da Conegliano's figure of Christ
in his Doubting of Saint Thomas of 1504, the statue of Christ in
marble by Giambattista Bregno in the de Rossi Chapel in the
Treviso Duomo of 1501-3. Its powerful effect on Fra Bar
tolommeo, who visited Venice in 1508, can be seen in the
Florentine altarpiece he painted for Salvatore Billi in 1516
(now in the Palazzo Pitti). And Carpaccio, as we have seen,
copied it closely.24 This reception history reveals that the
Christ statue had come close to attaining the status of a true
likeness.
Let us return to the Carpaccio painting, moving outward
from the statue. The mosaic in the apse behind the statue
unmistakably renders an actual mosaic of a seraph from the
Creation cupola of the atrium of S. Marco in Venice.25 Made
in the thirteenth century, the mosaic is only a few hundred
years distant from Carpaccio's painting. Augustine never saw
it or anything like it. Perhaps Carpaccio simply did not know
how to date the mosaic and in citing it actually meant to
invoke the remote time of Christian antiquity, the time of the
Church Fathers. To put it in these terms, however, to speak of
a "misdating," is to misunderstand the mechanism of the
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INTERVENTIONS: A NEW MODEL OF RENAISSANCE ANACHRONISM 407
substitutional mode. Carpaccio knew that S. Marco and the
mosaic were postantique; at the same time, he considered
them substitutions for lost antiquities. Nothing was more
natural than the hypothesis of a chain of replicas linking the
mosaic in S. Marco back to an origin. It has been shown that
these mosaics from the S. Marco atrium were, in fact, mod
eled especially carefully and thoroughly on illustrations of
the type of the fifth-century Cotton Genesis.26 The principle of
substitution was powerful enough to make the S. Marco mo
saic an antiquity.27
To perceive an artifact in substitutional terms was to un
derstand it as belonging to more than one historical moment
simultaneously. The artifact was connected to its unknowable
point of origin by an unreconstructible chain of replicas.
That chain could not be perceived; its links did not diminish
in stature as they receded into the depths of time. Rather, the
chain created an instant and ideally effective link to an
authoritative source and an instant identity for the artifact. If
under the performative theory of origins a given sequence of
works is seen perspectivally, each one with a different appear
ance, under the substitutional theory different objects stack
up one on top of another without recession and without
alteration. The dominant metaphor is that of the impress or
the cast, allowing for repetition without difference, even
across heterogeneous objects and materials. Striking affirma
tions of the idea emerged in Byzantium in the wake of the
iconoclastic controversy. The ninth-century theologian Saint
Theodore the Studite, for example, compared the relation of
image to prototype to the impress of a seal on different
materials at different times: "The same applies," he wrote, "to
the likeness of Christ irrespective of the material upon which
it is represented."28
It is not enough to see the painting as a virtuoso manipu
lation of historical styles. Nor can it be described as an
incompletely performative picture, with its historical vision of
the past not yet quite in focus. Its interlocking anachronisms
cannot be explained away as fancies of the artist or the
peculiar preoccupations of the Venetians. Within the substi
tutional mode, anachronism was neither an aberration nor a
mere rhetorical device, but a structural condition of artifacts.
Carpaccio's painting stages the statue's substitution mode
against a context of performativity, and in so doing diagrams
a clash between two different versions of the time-artifact
relation. From one point of view, the painted statue is the lost
and absent original, the nonexistent original, that the mod
ern Italian statue reinstantiates. From another point of view,
the statue is simply an anachronism, a citation of a modern
work. The painting thus becomes something like an anatom
ical model, revealing the inner workings of picture making at
this historical moment. The painting proposes as the resolu
tion of the predicament a new, or at least newly institution
alized, function for pictures: the staging operation itself.
Pictures like Carpaccio's become places where competitive
models of the historicity of form can be juxtaposed, places of
impossibility, of critical reflection and nonresolution. This
staging operation is itself noncompetitive with the substitu
tional and performative modes. That is, a picture like Car
paccio's can itself maintain a particular substitutional rela
tion to the past, or a performative relation to the past, or a
combination of the two, and at the same time function as a
diagram of the conceptual interference between the two
modes. And that simultaneity of operations becomes an es
sential feature of the work of art in the modern period.
This project has three aims: to outline two theories of the
historicity of form that competed in the Renaissance, the
performative and the substitutional; to suggest that the pat
tern of dialectical interference between the two theories so
clearly diagrammed by Carpaccio's painting was constitutive
of all European art in this period; and to argue that the
historiography of Renaissance art, and of art historical dis
courses generally, is structurally compelled to misrecognize
that pattern.
Good and Bad Anachronism
The substitutional mode of artifact production hides behind
the idea of style. The idea that the look of a painting or a
building registers the mind of a historical artist, or even an
entire historical period, in the way that a pen responds to the
workings of the mind of an author is, according to the
powerful model established by Erwin Panofsky and never
since challenged, the defining achievement of Renaissance
art. According to this celebrated thesis, the Renaissance artist
saw historical art in perspective. One thinks of the range of
Donatello's interpretations of Roman sculpture, from impec
cable pastiche to poetic imitatio,29 or of Mantegna's fine
grained antiquarian reconstructions of Roman architecture
or weaponry.30 The insight into the relativity of style was the
precondition for a rebirth of antique art, for not until one
could perceive ancient art as a corpus of works united by a
common period style, clearly distinct from all the works made
in the intervening "middle" period, could that corpus be
come the basis for a revival of the arts. The idea that a
performative or relativist conception of style was the precon
dition for the Renaissance itself has for a long time been the
basic premise of historical scholarship in that field, but it is
also the founding myth of the discipline of art history, for
were not Renaissance artists, in their ability to match up
historical styles with historical epochs, themselves the first art
historians?
The performative mode of artifact production brings the
art of painting into alignment with the art of poetry. Delib
erate anachronism was the catalyst of poetic creation in the
Renaissance. To imitate an ancient literary model was to
extract it from a historical matrix and reactivate it in the
present. When fifteenth- and sixteenth-century architects,
sculptors, and painters first saw themselves as creative au
thors, they, too, began to provoke what Thomas M. Greene
called "miniature anachronistic crises" in their works.31 The
scholarly study of early modern visual culture recognizes the
category of "good," or artistically productive, anachronism.
Leonard Barkan, in some ways building on Greene, has re
cently shown how Renaissance archaeology became a frame
work for poetic storytelling about objects and origins. In
Barkan's analysis, the fictions and projections with which
Renaissance writers and artists responded to these anachro
nic irruptions of the material past became paradigmatic for
Renaissance fiction making and aesthetics generally.32
It has proved much harder to make historical sense of the
period's many "bad" anachronisms: misidentifications and
wild misdatings of old buildings and sculptures, iconographie
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408 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2005 VOLUME LXXXVII NUMBER 3
solecisms, deliberate forgeries. Modern scholars, for exam
ple, have tried to inventory all the works of ancient art known
in the Renaissance.33 But this inventory?a colossal and in
valuable undertaking?is distorted by a massive historical
misperception: it includes only works of art that modern
scholarship judges to be antiquities. It excludes everything
else that for Renaissance beholders carried the authority
of antiquity: "medieval" sculpture thought to be Roman,
Early Christian icons and mosaics of various periods, a whole
range of buildings, from Carolingian to Gothic, celebrated
in the Renaissance as models of ancient architecture?that is,
the vast corpus of artifacts governed by what we have called
the principle of substitution. When it comes to the problem
of the historicity of form, art historians still proceed as if the
best observers of the period?artists and architects and acute
patrons?saw buildings or pictures more or less as we do.
This essay proposes that thinking about historical artifacts
in the late medieval and early modern period, and even the
production of images and buildings were built on the follow
ing paradox: the possibility that a material sample of the past
could somehow be both an especially powerful testimony to a
distant world and, at the same time, very likely an ersatz for
some earlier, now absent artifact. The interpretation of arti
facts rested on two logically incompatible convictions, neither
of which could be easily abandoned: on the one hand, that
material evidence was the best sort of evidence; on the other
hand, that it was very likely that at some point material
artifacts had been replaced. Instead of allowing one convic
tion to prevail, people thought "doubly" about artifacts. They
did not think doubly about holy relics. A pig's bone was not
an acceptable substitute for the bone of a saint. The falsifi
cation of relics was plainly seen to be wrong. Nor did they
think doubly about nondocumentary verbal texts, which were
obviously subs ti tu table, handed down through time from one
material vehicle to another without loss of authenticity. The
force of an old poem did not depend on the literal antiquity
of the page it was written on.
A political document like a charter or a deed, or a material
artifact like an image, moved between these two poles, be
tween the nonsubstitutability of the bone and the perfect
substitutability of the linguistic text. Under the substitutional
theory of artifact production, the forgeries of documents so
common in the Middle Ages can be understood as the legit
imate reproduction of accidentally misplaced facts.34 Thou
sands of documents were fabricated and planted in archives
by later scholars, monastic or courtly, between the eleventh
and the fifteenth centuries. Such documents were used to
shore up the claims to antiquity or legitimacy of a monastic
foundation or a bishopric or a ducal house. They attested to
origins. If the crucial document did not exist, it was invented.
"Double think" meant that a document?or, in our case, an
image?was at the same time thought of as something like a
relic and as something like a poem. In the statue of Christ at
the center of his picture, Carpaccio captured such an artifact,
half relic and half fiction.
The claim put forward here is that all these kinds of
anachronism, good and bad, were grounded in a common
way of thinking about artifacts and have to be dealt with
together. Renaissance beholders understood medieval or
even modern works as antique not because they were con
fused about dates but because they were preoccupied with
the relation of artifacts to prototypes. In contrast to modern
art historians, they focused on the referential authority of the
work, its transmission of authoritative content, rather than
those context-reflexive elements that advertise the moment
of the artifact's production. The enabling premise of the
discipline of art history?that style is an index of history?has
actually disabled our efforts to understand premodern visual
culture.
Figure and Discourse
The model of linear and measurable time was by no means
foreign to the Western historical imagination before the
modern period, as many medieval chronicles attest. But to
tell a story from year to year, from event to event, was simply
one way of organizing time. Artifacts and monuments con
figured time differently. They stitched through time, pulling
together different points in the temporal fabric until they
met. By means of artifacts, the past participated in the
present. A primary function of art under the substitution
system was precisely to collapse temporal distance. Such tem
poralities had something in common with the typological
thinking of biblical exegetes, according to which sacred
events, though embedded in history, also contained what
theologians called a mystery, figure, or sacrament?a spiritual
meaning that lifted the event out of the flow of history. The
"omnitemporal" scheme of history presupposed by figurai
thinking constituted an effort to adopt God's point of view,
which grasps history all at once, topologically, not in a linear
sequence.
This way of thinking was not limited to the educated elite:
figurai structures were embedded in every Mass ceremony
and in virtually every sermon.35 There is a mystical dimension
to the substitutional approach to artifacts, a conviction of the
real, and not merely symbolic, link between artifact and
artifact. Visual artifacts by their very nature were well suited to
the representation of the figurai dimension of history. The
juxtapositions, stackings, displacements, and cyclic configu
rations found in countless medieval church facades and al
tarpieces presupposed the beholder's competence for think
ing through time in flexible and associative ways.
Visual artifacts collapsed past and present with a force not
possessed by texts. They proposed an unmediated, present
tense, somatic encounter with the people and the things of
the past. Artifacts enacted a breaking through time and a
raising from the dead. The Greek scholar Manuel Chrysolo
ras, who taught in Italy for several years around the turn of
the fifteenth century, vividly expressed the contrast when
confronted with the material remains of ancient sculpture in
Rome in 1411:
Herodotus and the other historians are thought to have
done something of great value when they describe these
things; but in these sculptures one can see all that existed
in those days among the different races, and thus this
[image-based] history is complete and accurate: or better,
if I may say so, it is not history, so much as the direct and
personal observation [autopsia] and the living presence
[parousia] of all the things that happened then.36
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INTERVENTIONS: A NEW MODEL OF RENAISSANCE ANACHRONISM 4QQ
The anachronistic force of images and other artifacts was
grounded in assumptions about the straightforwardness and
instant intelligibility of figurai representation.
Here and elsewhere the direct and time-collapsing power
of the image is compared favorably with the confusing filter
of discursive representation. Discourse or linguistic signing
proceeds linearly into the future and thus involves a perma
nent falling away from the event. The real event is rendered
in conventional signs whose deciphering is not a simple
matter but an ongoing, dynamic process. The image, by
contrast, had a way of bending the linear sequence of events
back on itself, as if exerting a pull on time. This followed as
a psychological fact from the capacity of the figure to embody
materially its own signified.
Erich Auerbach insisted that the figurai or typological
relation was not allegorical but real. The Old Testament type
did not merely stand for the New Testament antitype: both
were equally real events in the flow of history. The connec
tion between the two events, indeed, the identity of the two
events, was perceptible to an exegete, who did not see them,
as a modern observer might, in historical perspective, fore
shortened, but instead saw their symmetrical subordination
to a higher, ultimate truth. That identity across time was
sustained by substitution, and it is disrupted by modern his
toricism.
The figurai alternative to discursive and causal temporality
is a permanent lure, a rhetorical, poetical, and political oc
casion. Figurality played a major role in twentieth-century
efforts to adjust the relation between history and memory: in
Sigmund Freud's isolation of the psychic operations of con
densation and displacement; in the art historian Aby War
burg's paratactic memory atlas diagramming the coils of
transhistorical pictorial reference; or in Walter Benjamin's
adaptation of the principle of montage to history writing. For
Benjamin, the "constellation" or configuration of images
held a critical power, the capacity to shatter the order of
things.3 He saw in Surrealism the promise of the figurai
irruption or "illumination." Indeed, Louis Aragon had spo
ken of the critical productivity of stylistic clashes, violations of
the historical logic of style: such "asynchronisms of desire"
would reveal the contradictions of modernity.38
In two recent books Georges Didi-Huberman has pointedly
confronted the modern discipline of art history with its own
Chronographie complacency. In Devant le temps (2000), he
identifies two modern modes of dialectical and productively
anachronistic thinking about images, montage and symptom,
associated in multiple ways with Benjamin and Carl Einstein.
In L'image survivante: Histoire de Vart et temps des fant?mes
(2002), he takes Aby Warburg as his guide and unravels the
obsolete evolutionary temporal sch?mas that have structured
the historical study of Western art. As an alternative to a
developmental, "biomorphic" conception of history, War
burg offered a discontinuous, folded history in which time is
redistributed in strata, networks, and deferrals. Above all,
Didi-Huberman brings Warburg's model of the Nachleben, or
survival of antique pathos formulas, into alignment with the
psychoanalytic mechanism of Nachtr?glichkeit, or "delayed ac
tivation."39 Our own project responds to Warburg's provoca
tion, amplified in Didi-Huberman's exegesis, by attempting
to draw a nonevolutionary "metaphorics" of time from the
historical works themselves, a temporality in structural mis
alignment with, and therefore systematically misrecognized
by, art historical scholarship. We want to work by a process of
reverse engineering from the artworks back to a lost chrono
topology of art making.
The idea of a nonlinear, nonperspectival, "artistic" time
plays no role in the most influential interpretation of Renais
sance historical attitudes, that of Erwin Panofsky. For Panof
sky, a lucid sense of historical distance was the basis of what
he called the "factuality" of the Renaissance as a period
concept.40 He argued that the Renaissance distinguished
itself from the Middle Ages by its sense of "an intellectual
distance between the present and the past."41 Medieval art,
for Panofsky, had been incapable of joining historical subject
matter with its proper historical form: Eve was portrayed in
the pose of a Venus p?dica, for example, and the Trojan priest
Laoco?n tonsured like a monk. Panofsky maintained that
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian scholars and artists
reactivated the power of classical culture through an accurate
realignment of classical subject matter with its proper classi
cal form: literally, the representation of ancient Greek and
ancient Roman gods and heroes with their correct costumes,
physiognomies, and attributes, rendered in ancient Greek
and Roman style. Renaissance culture was essentially a "sta
bilizing of the attitude toward antiquity,"42 a dispelling of
temporal confusion and the blind clash of cultures.
Panofsky drew an explicit analogy between the Renaissance
historical imagination and Renaissance perspective:
In the Italian Renaissance the classical past began to be
looked upon from a fixed distance, quite comparable to
the "distance between the eye and the object" in that most
characteristic invention of this very Renaissance, focused
perspective. As in focused perspective, this distance pro
hibited direct contact?owing to the interposition of an
ideal "projection plane"?but permitted a total and ratio
nalized view. Such a distance was absent from both medi
eval renascences [that is, the "incomplete" revivals of an
tiquity that occurred in the Carolingian era and then
again in the twelfth century] ,43
The new "cognitive distance" from the past, crucially,
brought the freedom to choose between stylistic models.
Freely chosen anachronism, Panofsky contended, was good
anachronism. Panofsky showed how cognitive distance could
generate not only the approved neoclassicism of the High
Renaissance?basically a rejection of local and prevailing
artistic custom in favor of antique style?but also the accurate
emulation of obsolete medieval styles, if desired. Panofsky
demonstrated this in his article "The First Page of Vasari's
'Libro'" (1930), the earliest formulation of his cognitive
distance thesis.44 In this article, Panofsky pointed out that the
logical complement of Giorgio Vasari's neoclassicism was his
ability to emulate with his drawing pen late medieval formal
vocabularies, the very same styles that he was elsewhere at
pains to discredit with his writing pen. According to Panofsky,
in Vasari's album of drawings by the great Italian masters,
which he called his Libro, Vasari drew architectural frames
around the mounted drawings in the style of the period of
the drawing. The frames around the drawings that Vasari
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410 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2005 VOLUME LXXXVII NUMBER 3
attributed to the early Florentine artist Cimabue, for in
stance, used finials and gables characteristic of that very
Gothic style, or maniera tedesca, that he so violently disparaged
in his history of Italian art. Vasari was thus, in Panofsky's view,
capable of perceiving and replicating Gothic ornamental
style "on its own terms." For Panofsky that was the very core
of historicism.
Bad anachronism, the blind disjunction of medieval art,
was by contrast unfree, a simple incapacity to perceive histor
ical style on its own terms. Unlike his contemporaries Ben
jamin and Aragon, Panofsky had little faith in the disruptive
power of the figure. And he did not share Warburg's concep
tion of a history of images carrying persistent figurai charges
that concretized elemental impulses and aversions. Art in his
view did not really enter into its full historical role, its civiliz
ing potential, until the figurai and substitutional folding of
time had finally been straightened out.
The blind spot in Panofsky's powerful schema emerges
clearly at the end of his book Renaissance and Renascences, as
his account converges on the so-called High Renaissance.
Panofsky treats the antiquarian art of the late fifteenth cen
tury as fundamentally reconstructive and even pedantic in
spirit. Not until Raphael, he suggests, does the project of
reuniting classical form with classical content transcend mere
philological accuracy and generate real art. Raphael, he
points out, was able to put a modern lira da braccio in the
hands of his Apollo and, in effect, get away with it. But
Panofsky does not actually spell out what Raphael did to
escape the logic of historicism. He never explains the relation
between cognitive distance from the past?the criterion of
the historical period as a whole?and the aesthetic achieve
ment of Renaissance art, whatever that might be. It is a
moment comparable to the closing page of Panofsky's opus
magnum Early Netherlandish Painting (1953), where he brings
his account face to face with, but then declines to comment
on, the mysterious art of Hieronymus Bosch.
Anachronic Renaissance
Early modern notions of the past were in fact nowhere less
perspectival than in the realm of artifacts, of pictures and
statues and buildings. No one in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries was entirely clear about which artifacts were antique
and which were not; about when things had been made;
about what it meant to speak of the age or the date of an
image or a building. Even humanist scholars and the most
thoughtful artists were unmodern in their indifference to or
vagueness about the historicity of art. Leonardo da Vinci, for
instance, wrote a great deal about how to make art and what
good art might be, but he never once discussed historical art
or the relation of modern to historical art.45 Leonardo was
interested in architectural types and made many drawings of
centrally planned churches similar to S. Lorenzo in Milan,
whose core dated to late antiquity.46 One gets the sense that
the exemplarity of S. Lorenzo for him was a matter of its plan
and not of its antiquity per se. S. Lorenzo held for him the
authority of an example and it did not occur to him to ask
overprecise questions about when it was built. There is no
evidence to indicate that the keenest critics of ancient art,
such as Michelangelo, ever concerned themselves with the
precise dating of ancient objects. For Michelangelo it was all
the buon antico; if he made any distinctions, they were distinc
tions of category and motif. When the Paduan humanist
Niccol? Leonico Torneo was presented with a bust of Socrates
for potential purchase his main preoccupation was with the
accuracy of the likeness. In his extended rumination he did
not ask whether the work was Roman or Greek nor speculate
on its date.4 Such indifference to the performative dimen
sion of the artifact is typical for their period.
Raphael's famous letter to Pope Leo X on the preservation
and recording of the remains of ancient Rome, written with
the help of Baldassare Castiglione, has often been taken as
the first clear statement of a historical understanding of art.
Yet even here, the history is very rough. The letter asserts that
"there are only three kinds of architecture in Rome": that
produced by the ancients, that produced "during the time
that Rome was dominated by the Goths, and one hundred
years after that," and finally, the architecture of the period
extending from that obscure moment until the present.48
The blurred coordinates of that middle period remind us of
the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian's similarly vague ap
proach to chronology when he announced in these same
years that he would reward humanist scholars for discoveries
of any "treatises or documents" written "more than five hun
dred years earlier."49
Chronology is sketchy in the Raphael letter because strict
historical accuracy and clarity were not the letter's main
purpose. While he distinguished between the Cons tan tinian
and the Trajanic, Hadrianic, and Antonine sculptural ele
ments on the Arch of Constan tine, the point was not to assign
every possible style to a historical moment but rather to
demonstrate that ancient architecture remained consistently
good: "Let no one harbor doubt that among ancient build
ings the less ancient were less beautiful, or less well under
stood, because they were all made according to the same
principles [perch? tutti erano duna raggione]."50 The letter
aimed to reveal these principles, to make ancient architec
ture into a coherent corpus, a canon, and it is, in fact, the first
document in the history of architecture to n?tate the varieties
of classical columns as orders. Again, what mattered above all
to the Renaissance artist and critic was the exemplary model,
not the vicissitudes of historical styles. This is why later con
structions thought to embody the best antique principles
were given the authority of the antique.
The importance of typological over chronological thinking
is at the basis of the spectacular misdating of the eleventh
century Baptistery in Florence, thought by knowledgeable
Renaissance artists and scholars to be an ancient temple.
Some modern historians propose that the Florentines could
not really have believed that their Baptistery was built by
Romans but merely thought it a very old structure. However,
Filippo Villani in 1330 asserted that it had begun its existence
in antiquity as a temple of Mars, as did Coluccio Salutati.
Vasari proposed with great architectural sophistication that
the Romanesque S. Miniato emulated "l'ordine buon antico"
found in the "antichissimo tempio" of S. Giovanni al Monte
(that is, the Baptistery). Only in the later sixteenth century
was the building's antiquity seriously challenged, in the care
fully reasoned treatise of Girolamo Mei.51
In our view, the misdating of the Baptistery was not just a
blind spot in an otherwise lucid vision of the past, a break
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INTERVENTIONS: A NEW MODEL OF RENAISSANCE ANACHRONISM ?\\
down of rationality explained by local patriotism and rivalry
with Rome's antiquity. It is instead a crucial clue to the way
scholars and artists thought about old buildings all the time.
This way of thinking was made explicit only when critics such
as Vincenzo Borghini were put on their mettle to defend the
Baptistery's antiquity. There are many more "errors" of this
sort, which were not errors at all, any more than premodern
copies were forgeries. They only seem so to us because they
do not conform to a modern, scholarly conception of build
ings as authored artifacts anchored in historical time and to
our conviction that this anchoring must be legible in style.
Panofsky had to ignore or explain away these errors in
order to keep his thesis of cognitive distance intact. He did
not discuss Leonardo's interest in centrally planned churches
at all. He explained the alarmingly inaccurate phrase "an
chora Cento anni di poi" in the Raphael letter as a way of
saying "an indefinite period of considerable length."52 He
absorbed the misdatings of the Florentine Baptistery by
pointing out simply that Filippo Brunelleschi was influenced
by various Romanesque and pre-Romanesque buildings.53
Panofsky maintained that the artists and writers of the Re
naissance were able to imitate the classical style because they
had achieved historical perspective on antiquity. We contend
that architects were able to pick out a historical antique style
only insofar as it exemplified some normative conception of
architecture.
Renaissance artists and scholars could refer to no estab
lished chronology of artifacts, nor did anyone make much of
an attempt to establish such a chronology. The full system of
historical chronology, on which Panofsky's cognitive distance
thesis and the very idea of a unity of time depend, was the
laborious construction of later sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and
eighteenth-century scholarship. Historical chronology as the
chronographers built it was a sequence of events, and it was
not at all clear that artifacts were to be understood as events.
When people in the Renaissance did measure out a "cogni
tive distance" to a historical work of art or building, it turns
out to be a peculiar, contrived aspect of the period's histor
ical imagination, not more essential to the period than other
aspects. Historical lucidity was scarce in the Renaissance.
That has seemed clear enough to historians such as Elizabeth
Eisenstein, who wrote of the "amorphous spatio-temporal
context" of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanist schol
arship, and Lucien Febvre, who described the multiple tem
poralities that structured life in sixteenth-century Europe.54
The researches of Frank Borchardt, Walter Stephens, An
thony Grafton, and others force us to take seriously the
vitality and persistence of old stories about races of giants
locked in combat with Egyptian gods in the valleys of ancient
Europe.55 Fantastic myths of national origins were promul
gated well into the seventeenth century.56 Yet in Panofsky's
model, a historical chronology of artifacts, medieval and
ancient alike, snaps suddenly into perfect focus.
Today it is easy to agree that "artistic" time?folded, mis
remembered?is more interesting than merely linear histor
ical 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 arti
fact 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 understand
ing, 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 Renais
sance. 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 Enlight
enment 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 moder
nity, 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 archi
tecture, Krautheimer spoke of the "medieval pattern of 'dou
ble-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. Krauthei
mer maintained this distinction in all his writings, as Marvin
Trachtenberg pointed out. Krautheimer's Middle Ages were
endlessly complicated and self-contradictory. The Italian Re
naissance, by contrast, remained for Krautheimer an ideal
ized "never-never land" insulated "from the complexities of
facture and chronology, from the messy realities of Renais
sance practice, and from . . . social context."59
The same schema is at work in the writings of Didi-Huber
man, 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 pre
vailed in the Middle Ages. In contrast to the Renaissance
rhetoric of mastery, adequation, and intelligibility, the medi
eval image, in Didi-Huberman's histories, presents an opac
ity, a disruption of the coded operations of the sign, a dis
junctive 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 par
ticular, Panofsky.60
In the end, all parties agree that the Italian Renaissance
imposed the contrivance of cognitive distance on the fluid,
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412 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2005 VOLUME LXXXVII NUMBER 3
memory-based models of historical time that prevailed in the
Middle Ages. The only point of difference is that Panofsky
prized cognitive distance as one of the founding intellectual
achievements of European civilization, whereas his many lat
er-twentieth-century critics repudiate the historical objectivity
of the Renaissance and the succeeding "classical" epoch as a
grand lie that needed to be unlearned in the twentieth
century.
To continue the debate in these terms is pointless. Panof
sky knew very well that cognitive distance was a cultural
contrivance that overcame the subjective, "interested" distor
tions of memory. The tension between unmeasurable mem
ory and measured historical chronology was implied, for
Panofsky, in the system of linear perspective developed by the
fifteenth-century painters: "the history of perspective," he
had explained in his 1927 essay Perspective as Symbolic Form,
"may be understood with equal justice as a triumph of the
distancing and objectifying sense of the real, and as a tri
umph of the distance-denying human struggle for control."61
To continue discussing the Renaissance vision of history as a
contest between, on the one hand, an invested and interested
figurai imagination and, on the other, the contrivance of
disinterested cognitive distance is to repeat the error of those
historians and critics of modern art who struggled intermi
nably to overcome the legacy of Clement Greenberg by re
futing him in terms that were already dialectically present in
Greenberg's own writing. For both the formalist and the
political or critical reading of modern art are contained
within Greenberg's avant-gardism.
Interference
In seeking to transcend this dilemma we might ask: How
was the question of origins addressed by the work of art}
Panofsky actually pointed to the answer, in the essays
collected in Studies in Iconology (1939), trackings of the
artistic fortunes of iconographie motifs such as "Father
Time" or "Blind Cupid." Here, he relaxed the historical
schema implied by the "principle of disjunction," crossing
the threshold of the sixteenth century and looking directly
at the fully developed Renaissance artwork, supposedly
purged of temporal confusion, in a way that later, in the
closing pages of Renaissance and Renascences, he was unable
to do. In Studies in Iconology, he conceded that medieval
attributes and features frequently "clung" to the new, ar
chaeologically correct image of the Renaissance.62 To
characterize such persistences of the medieval mismatch
between historical form and historical content, Panofsky
borrowed a term from Oswald Spengler (without actually
naming Spengler) : pseudomorphosis, a term that Spengler in
turn had adapted from mineralogy.63 Spengler had used it
in his Decline of the West to denote the unwilling conformity
of a new and dynamic culture to the forms and formulas of
an older culture, for example, when the early Christians
adopted the pagan form of the basilica. The basilica "em
ploys the means of the Classical to express the opposite
thereof, and is unable to free itself from those means?that
is the essence and the tragedy of the 'Pseudomorphosis.'"64
Although Panofsky did not dwell further on the idea of
pseudomorphosis,65 his practical iconological readings can
be understood as demonstrations of the "unwilling" and in
complete character of the early modern artwork. Silvia Fer
re tti has argued that Panofsky's artwork was temporally "an
tinomic," that is, it occupied two incompatible time schemes
at once. On the one hand, the artwork was fixed within
historical or absolute time, and on the other, it inhabited an
ideal or immanent time structured by an artistic problem.66
One could make the case?in defense of Panofsky?that
although this antinomy slips through the mesh of the peri
odization schema entailed by the principle of disjunction, it is
brought out by the practical hermeneutic of iconological
analysis.
Our own angle of approach to Ferretti's antinomic artwork
is what we have been calling the substitutional principle,
which held that an image or a building was a token of a type,
invoking and perpetuating an originary authority through
participation in a sequence of similar tokens. The principle
of substitution created conditions of real identity between
one token and another, something like a magical bond. It is
neither an absolute, historical conception of time nor an
idealist, extrahistorical time, but another temporality alto
gether.
We are not proposing simply that substitution was a medi
eval way of thinking about artifacts that persisted but was
finally vanquished in the Renaissance. Modern understand
ing of the Renaissance is already governed by a version of this
schema: for did not Vasari say that in the Middle Ages artists
were content to copy one another and only with Giotto
stopped copying and began attending to nature?67 Since
then, basically, we have heard nothing but versions of this
account. It is true that in many medieval images we find an
attempt to make their contents present by downplaying their
historical fabrication and instead claiming magical, handless
production. Renaissance images, by contrast, were more
likely put forth as authored and anchored in this world, in
the saeculum. Under the theory of artifacts as singular perfor
mances emerging out of unique historical circumstances,
associated with the historical rise of artist-authors in the
fifteenth century, copies can be seen only as repetitions, not
substitutions. But the interference between the substitutional
principle of origins and the authorial or performative prin
ciple of artifact production was dynamic. Although two com
pletely different theories of origins, substitution and perfor
mance each had its uses. In every case, it must be asked which
conception of origins was in effect. Very often both concep
tions were in effect at once.
The author-based theory of artifact production was neither
a historical inevitability nor an enlightenment; it was not
more true than the other theory. Nor can it cleanly be
coordinated with other "progressive" developments, like the
rise of pictorial naturalism or the revival of antiquity. Indeed,
it is possible to argue that the neoclassicism of the early
sixteenth century, prized by Panofsky as the product of self
conscious historical distancing, may equally reflect just the
opposite trend, a deliberate reapplication of the substitution
principle in the face of an emerging culture of artistic per
formance. Likewise, the symmetrical case can be made that
new conceptions of artistic authorship arose within and
against the highly substitutional tradition of painted icons?
think of the emergence of Jan van Eyck's authorial self
consciousness against the model of the Byzantine icon. The
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INTERVENTIONS: A NEW MODEL OF RENAISSANCE ANACHRONISM 413
disengagement of a few prestigious artifacts from their tradi
tional functions and the establishment of non-labor-based
and non-material-based criteria of value?the emergence, in
other words, of the work of art?developed in a dialectical
relation with the substitutional principle of artifact produc
tion.
The interference between the substitutional and the autho
rial 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 author
ship, 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 distur
bances 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 be
holder, for instance, and so generate a peculiarly aesthetic
effect, or to comment negatively on the competing, perfor
mative 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 conversa
tions 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 au
thorship 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-con
scious 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 Carpac
cio's anachronistic kaleidoscope.
Alexander Nagel is Canada Research Chair in the Graduate Depart
ment 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].
Christopher Wood is professor of history of art at Yale University. He
is the recipient of a junior fellowship at the Society of Fellows,
Harvard University; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship; an NEH
Rome Prize Fellowship, American Academy in Rome; and the Ellen
Maria Gorrissen Fellowship, American Academy in Berlin [Depart
ment of History of Art, Yale University, P.O. Box 208272, New
Haven, CT 06520, christopher.wood@yale.edu].
Notes
1. The subject was identified by Helen I. Roberts, "St. Augustine in 'St.
Jerome's Study': Carpaccio's Painting and Its Legendary Source," Art
Bulletin 41 (1959): 283-97.
2. Alain Schnapp, La conqu?te du pass? (Paris: Carr?, 1993), 318-19, 346
47.
3. On the Venus and other items in the picture, see Zygmunt Wazbinski,
"Portrait d'un amateur d'art de la Renaissance," Arte Veneta 22 (1968):
21-29.
4. See Karel Svoboda, L'esth?tique de Saint Augustin et ses sources (Brno: Vy
d?v? Filosofick? Fakulta, 1933), 144, 156.
5. The identification of the figure as Bessarion was first suggested by
Guido Perocco, "La Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni," in Venezia e
VEuropa: Atti del XVIII Congresso Internazionale di Storia delVArte, Venice,
12-18 Settembre 1955 (Venice: Arte Veneta, 1956), 23. Vittore Branca,
"Ermolao b?rbaro e l'Umanesimo Veneziano," in Umanesimo Europeo e
Umanesimo Veneziano (Florence: Sansoni, 1964), 163-212, at 211 pro
posed that the seal in the foreground could be that of the cardinal.
Augusto Gentili, "Carpaccio e Bessarione," in Bessarione e VUmanesimo,
ed. Gianfranco Fiaccadori (Naples: Vivarium, 1994), 297-302, argued
compellingly against basing the identification on either the seal or the
likeness. However, Patricia Fortini Brown, "Sant'Agostino nello studio
di Carpaccio: Un ritratto nel ritratto?" in Bessarione e VUmanesimo, 303
19, strongly reaffirmed the identification on the basis of a close exami
nation of the patronal context and the divergences between the prepa
ratory drawing in Vienna and the final painting.
6. Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1953), 131-48.
7. Alfred Acres, "The Columba Altarpiece and the Time of the World,"
Art Bulletin 80 (1998): 422-51, esp. 424-25, 432-34.
8. Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli's "Primavera" and Hu
manist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1992), 65-78.
9. Acres, "The Columba Altarpiece," 432.
10. Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, trans, and ed. John R. Spencer (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), vol. 1, 12; Filarete, Trattato di ar
chitettura, book 1, fol. 5v, ed. Anna Maria Finoli and Liliana Grassi (Mi
lan: II Polifilo, 1972), 28: "cos? colui che dipigne la sua maniera d?lie
figure si cognosce, e cos? d'ogni faculta si cognosce lo stile di ciasche
duno. . . ."
11. Baldassare Castiglione, // libro del cortegiano, ed. Vittorio Cian (Florence:
Sansoni, 1947), 93: ". . . si conosce ciascun nel suo stil essere perfettis
simo."
12. For a clear statement of the performative principle, see Leonardo, "On
the Imitable Sciences," chap. 8 in Paragone, parte prima, where he says
"painting alone . . . honors its author"; Claire J. Farago, ed., Leonardo da
Vinci's "Paragone": A Critical Interpretation with a New Edition of the Text in
the "Codex Urbinas" (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 186-90.
13. Marcantonio Michiel, Notizia d'opere di disegno, ed. Gustavo Frizzoni (Bo
logna, 1884), 231, noted a "statua de '1 Cristo, de bronzo, sopra l'altar"
in the "capella del Salvatore" in the church of the Carita in Venice,
and it is virtually certain that the statue corresponds to the one in Mi
lan. For the extremely active reception of the statue among Venetian
artists besides Carpaccio, see below.
14. The chapel was gutted, together with the rest of the church, in 1807.
Francesco Sansovino, Venetia citt? nobilissima et singolare, descritta in XIIII
libri. . . . (Venice, 1581), 94v, declared the chapel "notabilissima fra
tutte d?lia citt?, edificata da domenico di Pietro gioielliero ricchissimo,
& antiquario, con marmi, con porfidi, & con serpentini molto alia
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414 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2005 VOLUME LXXXVII NUMBER 3
grande." Tommaso Temanza, Vite dei pi? celebri architetti e scultori venezi
ani (Venice: Palese, 1778), 96, described it as "rich in marbles, por
phyry, and serpentine, as was common in those times." Some sense of
Domenico di Piero's tastes can be gained from the facade of the
Scuola di S. Marco, commissioned from the Lombardi at his behest
and under his direction during his tenure as guardian grande of the
Scuola; see Philip Sohm, The Scuola Grande di San Marco 1437-1550: The
Architecture of a Venetian Lay Confraternity (New York: Garland, 1982),
118-22. A 1548 document states that the chapel was finished in 1489;
see Pietro Paoletti, L 'architettura e la scultura del Rinascimento in Venezia:
Ricerche storico-artistiche, vol. 1 (Venice: Ongania-Naya, 1893), 184. A re
cently discovered document shows that in April 1494 the chapel was
still "almost finished"; see Rosella Lauber, "'Ornamento lodevole' e
'ornatissima di pi?tre': Marcantonio Michiel della chiesa veneziana di
Santa Maria della Carita," Arte Veneta 55 (1999): 147. Nonetheless, it
was sufficiently finished in 1493 to be noted by the diarist Marin Sa
?udo among the notable things in Venetian churches. See Wendy Sted
man Sheard, "Sa?udo's List of Notable Things in Venetian Churches
and the Date of the Vendramin Tomb," Yale Italian Studies 1, no. 3
(1977): 256.
15. The statue has not been clearly connected to an author. The Poldi Pez
zoli catalogue, Museo Poldi Pezzoli: Tessuti?Sculture?Metalli islamici (Mi
lan: Electa, 1987), cat. no. 24, offers an unconvincing attribution to
Severo da Ravenna.
16. Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica, 7.18, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Arthur
Cushman McGiffert (New York: Christian Literature, 1890), quoted in
Christian Classics Ethereal Library, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/
npnf201.iii.xii.xix.html: "Since I have mentioned this city [Paneas] I do
not think it proper to omit an account which is worthy of record for
posterity. For they say that the woman with an issue of blood, who, as
we learn from the sacred Gospel, received from our Saviour deliver
ance from her affliction, came from this place, and that her house is
shown in the city, and that remarkable memorials of the kindness of
the Saviour to her remain there. For there stands upon an elevated
stone, by the gates of her house, a bronze image of a woman kneeling,
with her hands stretched out, as if she were praying. Opposite this is
another upright image of a man, made of the same material, clothed
decently in a double cloak, and extending his hand toward the woman.
At his feet, beside the statue itself, is a certain strange plant, which
climbs up to the hem of the bronze cloak, and is a remedy for all
kinds of diseases.
"They say that this statue is an image of Jesus. It has remained to our
day, so that we ourselves also saw it when we were staying in the city.
Nor is it strange that those of the Gentiles who, of old, were benefited
by our Saviour, should have done such things, since we have learned
also that the likenesses of his apostles Paul and Peter, and of Christ
himself, are preserved in paintings, the ancients being accustomed, as
it is likely, according to a habit of the Gentiles, to pay this kind of
honor indiscriminately to those regarded by them as deliverers."
The double cloak here is the diplois, the pallium, doubled in length,
worn without the underlying tunic or any other undergarment by ascet
ics and Cynic philosophers. When Eusebius says the figure of Christ
was clothed decently {kosmios: decorously) in the diplois, he is perhaps
specifying that unlike other convention-bashing ascetics and philoso
phers who liked to go without undergarments, this figure wore it with
out looking half naked and indecent. In the statue now in Milan (Fig.
2), Christ is shown modestly wearing an ample diplois in the specific
form of an exomis, without a fibula, leaving the right shoulder free.
17. The association of the work with the hemorrhaging woman persisted,
however, and she came to be identified with Saint Martha. Jacobus de
Vor?gine, Legenda ?urea: Vulgo historia Lombardica dicta and optimorum
librorum fidem, ed. Theodor Graesse, (Leipzig: Arnold, 1846), 445, Life
of Saint Martha: "Refert Eusebius in libro hystoriae ecclesiasticae
quinto, quod mulier Emorroissa, postquam sanata fuit, in curia sive
viridario suo statuam fecit ad imaginem Christi cum veste et fimbria,
sicut ipsum viderai, et earn plurimum reverebatur, herbae vero sub ilia
statua crescentes, quae ante nullius erant virtutis, cum fimbriam atting
erent, tantae virtutis erant, ut multi infirmi inde sanarentur" (Eusebius
tells in book 5 of the Historia Ecclesiastica that the hemorrhaging
woman, after she was healed, made in her court or garden a statue in
the likeness of Christ, with cloth and hem, just as he had looked, and
it was most revered. In fact the herbs that grew under the statue, which
earlier were without virtue, when they came into contact with the [stat
ue's] hem, became so powerful that many sick people were thereby
healed).
18. As, very likely, was the small bronze Venus on the shelf. It, too, depicts
a modern work, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, by
Jacopo Bonacolsi, called Antico, as noted by Wazbinski, "Portrait d'un
amateur d'art," 25-26. This small bronze was itself a miniature copy of
an antique marble Venus, the so-called Venus felix, which had been re
cently discovered and set up in the Vatican. Thus, Carpaccio quotes a
modern work but not as a modern work.
19. Richard Krautheimer, "Introduction to an Iconography of Medieval
Architecture," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942):
1-33.
20. See the accounts by Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica, and Jabobus de Vo
r?gine, Legenda ?urea, quoted above.
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 Vor?gine, Legenda ?urea; 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, spo
lia in re," Prospettiva 31 (1982): 2-17. Salvatore Settis develops the con
cept in "Continuit?, distanza, conoscenza: Tre usi dell'antico," in Memo
ria 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 (Chi
cago: 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 promot
ing 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 an
cient. Robert Grigg, "Byzantine Credulity as an Impediment to Anti
quarianism," 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 Byz
antine 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 emer
gence 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).
30. See also Jack M. Greenstein's close reading of the marks of time in the
view of Jerusalem, a "diachronic urban fabric," in the background of
Mantegna's Agony in the Garden from the S. Zeno altarpiece, Mantegna
and Painting as Historical Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992), 64-70, and generally chap. 3.
31. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renais
sance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 42.
32. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the
Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
33. See the preliminary volume by Phyllis Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, with
contributions by Susan Woodford, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculp
ture: A Handbook of Sources (London: Harvey Miller, 1986). The project
has been expanded in the digital "Census of Antique Works of Art and
Architecture Known in the Renaissance" maintained by the Kunstge
schichtliches Seminar der Humboldt-Universit?t in Berlin, at http://
www.census.de.
34. For positions close to this within the well-developed debate about me
dieval forgery, see Giles Constable, "Forgery and Plagiarism in the Mid
dle Ages," Archiv fur Diphmatik 29 (1983): 1-41; Horst Fuhrmann, "Die
F?lschungen im Mittelalter," Historische Zeitschrift 197 (1963): 529-54;
and idem, "Mundus vult decepi," Historische Zeitschrift 241 (1985). See
generally P. Herde and A. Gowlik, "F?lschungen," in Lexikon des Mittel
alters, by Robert Auty et al., vol. 4 (Munich: Artemis, 1988), col. 246ff.;
and F?lschungen im Mittelalter: Internationaler Kongress der Monumenta Ger
maniae Hist?rica, 1986, 6 vols. (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung,
1988-90).
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INTERVENTIONS: A NEW MODEL OF RENAISSANCE ANACHRONISM 415
35. Erich Auerbach, "Figura," in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature
(New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 11-76; and Henri de Lubac, Exegese
m?di?vale: Les quatre sens de l'?criture, 2 vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1959-64).
36. Manuel Chrysoloras, quoted in Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 81, app. 6, 148-49; translation modified
with the help of that of Settis, in Memoria dell 'antico, vol. 3, 456.
37. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the
Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 71
74, 217-27.
38. See Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993),
172-74.
39. Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps: Histoire de l'art et anachronisme
des images (Paris: Minuit, 2000); and idem, L'image survivante: Histoire de
l'art et temps des fant?mes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Minuit, 2002).
40. Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm:
Almqvist und Wiksels, Gebers Forlag, 1960), 38. Panofsky offered the
clearest and most economical account of this argument in "Renais
sance and Renascence," Kenyon Review 6 (1944): 201-36, as a response
to a symposium published in the American Historical Review on the valid
ity of the Renaissance as a period concept.
41. Erwin Panofsky, introduction to Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes
in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 28;
reprinted as "Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study
of Italian Renaissance Art," in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday Press, 1955), 51.
42. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, 202.
43. Ibid., 108.
44. Erwin Panofsky, "The First Page of Vasari's 'Libro': A Study on the
Gothic Style in the Judgment of the Italian Renaissance" (1930), in
Meaning in the Visual Arts, 169-235.
45. On Leonardo's only two references to antiquity, see Aby Warburg,
"Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Spring" in The Renewal of Pagan
Antiquity (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999), 140.
46. On the church designs, see James Ackerman, Origins, Imitation, Conven
tions: Representation in the Visual Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2002), 67-93.
47. Andrew Gregory, "Aspects of Collecting in Renaissance Padua: A Bust
of Socrates for Niccol? Leonico Torneo," Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 58 (1995): 252-65.
48. We cite the transcription of the Munich manuscript by Ingrid Rowland,
"Raphael, Angelo Colocci, and the Genesis of the Architectural Or
ders," Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 100-103; translations are ours.
49. Reported by Beatus Rhenanus, Rerum germanicarum libri tres (Basel,
1531), vol. 2, 107-8.
50. The three known versions of the letter agree in this wording; see John
Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources (1483-1602) (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2003), vol. 1, 503, 511, 520. Here is the text from
the first redaction in Mantua (503): "E perch? ad alchuno potrebbe
parer che difficil fosse el conoscere li edificii antichi dalli moderni, o li
piu antichi dalli meno antichi, per non lassare dubbio alchuno nella
mente de chi vorra haver questa cognitione, dico che questo con
pocha faticha far si po. Perch? de tre sorti di aedificii in Roma sola
mente si trovano, d?lie quali la una si ? tutti li antichi et antichissimi li
quali durorno fino al tempo che Roma fu ruinata e guasta dalli Gotti
et al tri barbari, l'ai tro tanto che Roma fu dominata da' Gotti et ancor
cento anni dippoi, l'altro da quello fino alii tempi nostri." Later in the
letter the time frame is even less defined; Raphael and Castiglione dis
tinguish between the good ancient architecture and those buildings
"che forno al tempo deli Gotti, et anchor molti anni di poi" (505).
This suggests that the expression "cento anni" of the earlier sentence is
not a reference to a specific number of years but rather a placeholder
for a substantial period of time.
51. Robert Williams, "Vincenzo Borghini and Vasari's Lives" (PhD diss.,
Princeton University, 1988), 96-99; and Zygmunt Wazbinski, "Le po
lemiche intorno al battistero florentino nel '500," in Filippo Brunelleschi,
la sua opera e il suo tempo, Atti del Convegno di Studi, 2 vols. (Florence:
Centro Di, 1980), vol. 2, 933-50.
52. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, 24 n. 1.
53. Ibid., 40.
54. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cam
bridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1979), 187, and generally on Pa
nofsky's disjunction thesis, 181-225. Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbe
lief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (1942; reprint, Cam
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 393-400.
55. Frank L. Borchardt, German Antiquity in Renaissance Myth (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 1971); Walter Stephens, "Berosus Chaldeus:
Counterfeit and Fictive Editors of the Early Sixteenth Century" (PhD
diss., Cornell University, 1979); idem, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, An
cient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1989); Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in
Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); and
idem, "Traditions of Invention and Inventions of Tradition in Renais
sance Italy: Annius of Viterbo," in Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of
Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1991), 76-103.
56. See William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance 1550-1640 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), chap. 13, who can see this only as
a regrettable falling off from the clarity of the early sixteenth century.
57. Jorge Luis Borges, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, in Labyrinths, ed.
Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964),
39.
58. Richard Krautheimer, postscript to "Introduction to an Iconography of
Medieval Architecture," in Studies in Early Christian, Medieval, and Re
naissance Art (New York: New York University Press; London: University
of London Press, 1969), 149-50.
59. Marvin Trachtenberg, foreword (1995) to Rome: Profile of a City, 312
1308, by Richard Krautheimer (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2000),xix-xx.
60. Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant l'image: Question pos?e aux fins de
l'histoire de l'art (Paris: ?ditions du Minuit, 1990). The schema is drama
tized at the historical juncture of the early Renaissance in idem, Fra
Ang?lico: Dissemblance et figuration (Paris: Flammarion, 1990).
61. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books,
1991), 67.
62. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, 70-71.
63. Even the 1982 Supplement to The Oxford English Dictionary lists only min
eralogical usages of the term. Webster's Third International (1963), how
ever, quotes Lewis Mumford on "the concept of the cultural pseudo
morph."
64. Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West (1918-22; reprint, New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1957), vol. 1, 209; see also vol. 2, 189-90.
65. Thomas Greene picked up on it, though; see The Light in Troy, 42. In
effect, Greene was using Panofsky against the Spenglerian "tragic" view,
whereas in fact Panofsky's view may have been closer to Spengler's
than to Greene's.
66. Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 207-20.
67. Giorgio Vasari, Vite de' pi?t eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori, ed. Ro
sanna Bettarini (Florence: Sansoni, 1966-), vol. 2, 96: "Onde andando
un giorno Cimabue per sue bisogne da Fiorenza a Vespignano, trov?
Giotto che, mentre le sue p?core pascevano, sopra una lastra pia?a e
pulita con un sasso un poco apuntato ritraeva una p?cora di naturale,
senza aver imparato modo nessuno di ci? fare da altri che dalla na
tura."
68. There is no indisputable example of an art forgery, that is, a stylistic
anachronism condemned by society as deceitful, before the late fif
teenth century. The intentions behind many of the earliest alleged
cases are ambiguous, including the Cupid by Michelangelo sold to Raf
faele Riario as an antiquity. For this and other cases, see Paul Eber
hard, "Falsificazioni di antichit? dal Rinascimento al XVIII sec?lo,"
Memoria dell'antico nelVarte italiana, ed. Salvatore Settis, vol. 2 (Turin:
Einaudi, 1985), 413-39.
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