Catalogues

The foundation of what we call Western art, the point of origin which is also the support of its ultimate development and decline, lies in the type of act which founds more than an artistic trend and explains at the same time why this and any art is inseparable from the society, culture, indeed civilization that it embodies and preserves, whether Buddhist, Egyptian, Hellenistic or Christian as here. What has proven to be the fertility of Western art derives from the fact that this act was not limited to an ethical command such as is common to all civilisations and which has always been cradled by a religion [1]. In Christianity something more was given than the rules of how to be good, call it a mystery or a logical impossibility, which ensured that humanity never had and perhaps never will again have experience of such sublimity [2]. For not only was one enjoined to act in His name, one was also provided with His likeness or image to imitate, one which was, after all, our very own, our simplest humanity. Thus did the Incarnation open up the possibility of a visual narrative together with its ethical justification denied to the older brother Judaism.

The divisions this introduced, between representations of divinity and humanity, and again between text and image, not to mention originals and copies have, until more or less a century ago, provided the weft and woof for the tapestry of Western art [3], regardless of the patterns introduced by the absorption of other cultures, starting with the Greeks, with highly developed cults of images.

Ad imaginem… (Genesis I, 26.)

It is as fruitless here to go into the power or indeed the nature of images, their physiology, psychology or philosophy, as it is necessary to have some definition of those images wrought by our artists we call pictures and to remember that it is pictures rather than images that have always provoked the periodic and predictable outbursts of iconoclasm, even in non-monotheistic cultures, that punctuate the history of art. In some civilisations certain pictures, reduced to, literally, a banner, have been used as much as the sword in the never-ending human endeavour to occupy the one place on earth, in each of its inhabitants, reserved for truth.

For a picture is indeed an image, - a "representation" [4], if one wants to include the auditory as well as the visual, - with very particular claims: whatever its subject, an aspect of hell or of heaven, it is always given to someone else to see, again irrespective of whether this audience is God [5], one man [6] or as many people as possible [7], the point being that what is said is entirely affected by whom it is said to, the second point being that art needs interpretation since no picture, even the most "objectively" medical, as a staged representation, is free from the desire of the artist as producer. Interpretation is needed to uncover what the artist or ymagier hoped we might see. During the middle ages this was as true of natural images, like dreams, which, being pages in God's book, were a link to His desire, as it was of any images made by them who were made in His image specifically in order to divine the grand design of their own salvation.

In the end, image and picture have this in common: our need to defend against both or either of them, the real pain of excessive stimulation and the subjective discomfort of the demands made by truth. The former is evident in the near universality in most cultures of some ritual to conjure the effects of an "evil eye". The latter is perhaps the main reason why most of us seek, not art, but something that lies between image and picture called decoration.

...et similitudinem nostram

The very act of allowing the idea of likeness, brought with it attempts to limit the differences, differentiations, indeed splits it provoked, if only because "likeness" extends along a chain of associations which, given the nature of language itself, is potentially endless, and hence endlessly divisive in its turn. This control was not only natural, as it is equivalent to giving meaning, and perhaps even easy, as the only likeness in play at first was that of Christ, but also vital because the other side of that basic chaining function of language called metonymy [8] is the poetic or picture making activity that gave it its name: denoting the whole by means of a part. It is not the same thing to venerate a cross while thinking of one's saviour as it is to capture, carry in procession, even pray to, the picture of a saint as if it were a living body.

If the theological fears concerning improper veneration accorded to pictures that might become idols which dominated the iconoclastic debates [9], and which the West escaped [10], did not find a natural limit in this metonymic activity of language itself, they might certainly have been calmed by the other activity isolated by Jakobson which gives us sense proper: metaphoric function, in which one term substitutes for another, Christ's death for our sins. Unfortunately, it is a misunderstanding of this function which is at the heart of an even greater rift, between the real presence of, and the symbolic reference to, the body of Christ in Catholic and Protestant rites respectively.

What the "likeness" of Christ's body might have been, found formulation early on in two elegant solutions, both, like Christ's message itself, having the structure of paradox. These are the idea of a "true likeness" and, conversely, the likeness of something that has no natural image, of something invisible. And here the fact that the origin of these concerns as of almost everything in Western art came from the East is less important than what was made of them there.

Thus, firstly, the paradox of a True image, in the face of Plato's condemnation of pictures as copies of copies, which as image of Truth, redeems an image from its inherent falsehood, the Truth here being, of course, Christ, and through which a mere likeness of a likeness (a painting of an image of the invisible Father) could stand in for the true face of Christ, especially as its origin, the "original", lay in what was not made by human hands [11] but by direct impression or direct testimony, the cloth imprint that was the Mandylion and St Luke's portait of the Virgin respectively. For a long time in the West, the True likeness or vera icon was the anagrammatic Veronica held in the Vatican, mentioned by Dante [12], and lost during the sack of Rome by Lutheran Germans in 1527, perhaps not coincidentally, of which now only the frame survives. This precursor of the Turin shroud shows the overwhelming desire to put a face to Christ.

Thus also, the "likeness" of the Word [13], ie. the paradox of an image of Logos, of Christ as Word, which was at the source of the care lavished on the writing and illumination of, at first the Gospels (for Gregory the Great, the only text which was allowed to be sung), and later all Biblical and secular texts, which in turn are the source for Western painting as we know it today.

Omnis scriptura divinitus inspirata is the adage attributed to St Augustine which best captures the concerns of those who took seriously their functions as shepherds of the souls whose life depended on the Book [14]. In the truly dark ages of the 6th century, when it came so very close to being cut altogether, this flow of ink in the scriptoria of the insular monks on the confines of the then known world was perhaps the last lifeline of Western history itself.

Both these solutions were a way of getting round the central problem, which is not itself a paradox, of how anyone can make a likeness of something that he is himself the likeness of [15], and this was possible because of the Incarnation in a way which was forbidden under the OT where it would be presumptuous to say the least to make a likeness of Him in whose likeness we were made. It was the astonishing feat of Christ's reversal, in which God presents Himself in the image of man while saying "who has seen me has seen the Father" [16]. Since the Renaissance tentatively, and since the Revolution irrevocably, we have looped this loop in the opposite direction by divinising the image of man himself, of man's body [17] reconstructed from a Classical Greek model as microcosm.

Body

However, both these solutions to the challenges posed by the concept of Incarnation could not prevent a third solution from emerging as the most resilient and enduring, the one that stays in the register of what is called "fascination". This basic effect of an image on the animal eye which is captured by it was provided by the image of the body as such, first living then dead, with the added level of mystery of where the life was that this dead body had supposedly found again and promised us we would find too. This is the consequence of "The Word made flesh" the first moment of which has provided perhaps the best-loved ymage of all medieval art: the Annunciation [18].

For if early Christian pictures were still bound to the Word, whether metonymically, taking the first two letters of His name [19] and drawing a fish [20], or, after the 5th century, metaphorically by drawing a lamb, object of sacrifice as well as a key in the Book of Revelation, the first truly pictorial likeness of a likeness or ymage, regardless of medium, was the Crucifixion.

In the ongoing debate of the role of the Crucifixion in Western art J. Elkins recently put forward the argument that it constitutes the ultimate (body) image, insofar as any image always refers to the body anyway [21]. The 'natural' or spontaneous image, and therefore also any picture made from it, however abstract, is ultimately an image of the body, or parts of it, and of those parts, the face is paramount, corresponding to our earliest impressions/perceptions as newly living beings.

What has not yet been explored in this central role of the Crucifixion is that it "embodies" the difference, indeed the ambiguity, the borderline, the shadow zone in which floats the key question of any "body" confronted with another, which is whether it is alive or dead, capable of enjoyment or not. Here the prodding lance of Longinus is not that different from a bear's paw on a hedgehog.

Generally, up to the 12th century, pictures of the crucifixion were joyous affairs insofar as Christ was alive, eyes open, fully clothed, and triumphant on His cross. This was wholly in keeping with the concept of Incarnation, and with Christianity itself, that His suffering was exchanged for our happiness, as it is still today with the Gospels which show the Christ whose withering irony puts even Socrates to shame for what he is, a Lord and Master. Thereafter we find a greater division between pictures of Christ in Majesty, already back in Heaven, and Christ dying on His cross. And with the latter come to the fore, first His suffering and nakedness - crown of thorns, the intense anguish of Mary at His side, gradual shortening of loincloth, - and finally His all-too-human death. One can gauge the importance of this shift from the fact that, as late as 1054, the papal legate in Constantinople could adduce precisely this Greek habit of depicting a dead man on the Cross as one more reason for promoting the schism between Eastern and Western Church still with us today.