Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and FigurationThe traditional story of Renaissance painting is one of inexorable progress toward the exact representation of the real and visible. Georges Didi-Huberman disrupts this story with a new look—and a new way of looking—at the fifteenth-century painter Fra Angelico. In doing so, he alters our understanding of both early Renaissance art and the processes of art history. A Florentine painter who took Dominican vows, Fra Angelico (1400-1455) approached his work as a largely theological project. For him, the problems of representing the unrepresentable, of portraying the divine and the spiritual, mitigated the more secular breakthroughs in imitative technique. Didi-Huberman explores Fra Angelico's solutions to these problems—his use of color to signal approaching visibility, of marble to recall Christ's tomb, of paint drippings to simulate (or stimulate) holy anointing. He shows how the painter employed emptiness, visual transformation, and displacement to give form to the mystery of faith. In the work of Fra Angelico, an alternate strain of Renaissance painting emerges to challenge rather than reinforce verisimilitude. Didi-Huberman traces this disruptive impulse through theological writings and iconographic evidence and identifies a widespread tradition in Renaissance art that ranges from Giotto's break with Byzantine image-making well into the sixteenth century. He reveals how the techniques that served this ultimately religious impulse may have anticipated the more abstract characteristics of modern art, such as color fields, paint spatterings, and the absence of color. |
Contents
Introduction I | 1 |
PART | 13 |
The Subtlety of Images | 22 |
The Four Senses of Scripture | 34 |
The Dialectic of Dissemblance | 45 |
Memoria or the Implicit of Figures | 60 |
Praefiguratio or the Destiny of Figures | 76 |
Praesentia or the Virtual of Figures | 87 |
How to Figure the Unfigurable? | 114 |
The Figure Is Time | 124 |
The Figure Is the Place | 154 |
In the Light of the Word | 178 |
In the Shadow of the Earth | 192 |
In the Bosom of Colors | 217 |
Notes | 237 |
Credits | 267 |
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Common terms and phrases
affirm Albertus Magnus allegory altar anagogical Angelico Annunciation art of memory aspect Baxandall beauty blotches body called cell Christ Christian color column constitutes convent of San corridor Crucifixion devotion dissemblance divine Word Dominican entire evokes example exegesis exegetical fifteenth century figure finally flesh Florence flowers four senses Fra Angelico fresco garden gaze Giotto Giovanni hence human Ibid Iconographie idem Incarnation Jacobus de Voragine Jesus laudibus locus Lubac Madonna marble Mary Mary's meaning medieval médiévale Middle Ages multicolored Museo di San mystery notion painter paradox Paris patch pictorial Pietro Lorenzetti Pinacoteca play precisely prefiguration present Pseudo-Dionysius Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite quattrocento relation Renaissance representation represented resemblance retable Saint Antoninus San Gimignano San Marco Scrovegni chapel shadow Siena signifies similitude space spiritual stone story Summa theologica surface Tempera theological things Thomas Aquinas tion tradition tropological Virgin virtual virtue visible visual wall
References to this book
La religion de près: l'activité religieuse en train de se faire Albert Piette No preview available - 1999 |