[Vision and Rationality: A Seminar in Art and Culture]
Temple University Rome Campus, Summer 2000

Leslie K. Cronin
Upper School English

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I applied for a Kast Grant to help me advance on my course work for a Ph.D. in English Literature. Temple University offers a summer program in Rome in which students can earn six credits in one month. Though that seemed like a lot of credit for a four-week course, I quickly discovered how so much is earned in so short a time. What follows is a distillation of my experience in Rome.

Why Humans Make Images

In the first week the conceptual foundations of the course were laid. The seminar leaders asked us: why do human beings like, want, or need images? After some discussion we seemed to intuit that visual art did not exist just to satisfy the desire for visual pleasure-visual art, we learned, fulfilled the important psychological function of shoring up humanity's shaky sense of itself. Humans are, after all, creatures of contingency: we plan, and accidents thwart our plans. Contingency became a buzzword from this moment on, a blanket concept that covered every mishap humans might experience, from missing the bus to dying of old age. The seminar leaders suggested that, in psychological terms, death was by far the most anxiety-provoking contingency for most subjects. We learned that image making, from the earliest times, was a panacea for the speculative aspects of our existence. Pictures secure for us a lasting survival by providing records that endure for centuries and sometimes millennia beyond the natural life span of their makers. Image making, we learned, grows out of the drive for self-preservation.

After establishing the impetus for image making, we started to examine the effects that different kinds of images have upon viewing subjects. We looked at medieval paintings and noticed that, prior to the 14th-century, picture planes were flat, that they deployed nothing like what we think of as true perspective, and that the figures were not proportioned like real humans, nor did they seem to gaze at one another or at the viewer. Instead the figures in the paintings seemed to be wooden or paper dolls, gazing out upon nothingness, with beatific or severe expressions upon their faces. All of these effects have been explained by art historians and critics as reflections of the medieval cultural emphasis on things spiritual. But looked at in psychological terms, medieval paintings were alienating for viewing subjects. The figures' fixed and distant gazes denied the viewer's existence, causing a sensation that many psychologists and philosophers view as significantly discomfiting to human subjects. The lack of realism in Medieval paintings drew emphasis away from the physical world of the senses and toward the conceptual world of spirituality.

This lack of satisfaction with medieval forms of image making led to the development of Renaissance modes of painting, which incorporate single point perspective and the effects of realism. Paintings by Giotto, Masaccio, and Cimabue broke ground by exhibiting architectural and three-dimensional space in the picture plane. In Giotto's work, the human and divine figures look very much alike, and, in one "Madonna and Child" painting, the virgin is humanized, appearing to caress the child in her arms. In the early 15th-century, Filippo Brunelleschi perfected a technique for rendering single point perspective, and Leon Battista Alberti put the theory into writing in his tract On Painting, a book that exemplified the Renaissance endeavor to incorporate science into all aspects of life. Alberti believed that a painting should be like a window. Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin, a masterpiece of Renaissance image making, epitomizes all that is right (and wrong) with Albertian perspective. In keeping with the window theory of painting, the viewer of Raphael's 'Marriage' has command over the whole view, foreground and background. Sacred personages mingle with ordinary people, and Raphael himself is in the picture on the left, a testament to the closure of the gap between the realms of humanity and divinity.

Vision Weighed Against Rationality as the Ultimate Source of Truth

This is not to say that Renaissance art is superior to medieval art. Brunelleschi's and Alberti's shared invention of single point perspective (and the effects that we call realism) solved some of the psychological problems of alienation posed to the viewing subject by medieval pictures, but Renaissance art also produced other more serious problems for the viewing subject to grapple with. The most troublesome development in Renaissance art was the vanishing point, which according to Jacque Lacan and Martin Jay, signified fresh anxieties for apprehensive and unstable viewing subjects. Further complicating matters is the revival of Platonism in the Renaissance. Platonic lessons, like that of the "Parable of the Cave," call the reliability of the senses into question. From this point on in history, there is debate about which faculty humans should rely upon to obtain the truth: the senses, predominantly their eyes, or reason, thought to be transcendent over sense.

These were the concerns and issues set forth in the beginning of the course. Our classroom discussions gained visual support, as my classmates and I visited the churches and museums of Rome. During the first week, I also saw The Draughtsman's Contract, a film directed by Peter Greenaway that critiques the hegemony of single point perspectivalism. On another afternoon the class took a tour that effectively mapped the development of single point perspective trompe l'oeil painting in Roman churches. We surveyed Medieval and early Renaissance frescoes in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere and at Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, a Christian church founded in the 8th-century on the site of a temple to the Roman goddess Minerva. Santa Maria Sopra Minverva contains the Fillipino Lippi frescoes of Thomas Aquinas' life, which are noted for the architectural spaces they contain. At Sant'Ignazio di Loyola we saw the famous trompe l'oeil cupola painted by Fra Pozzo. This painting is designed to be viewed from a single point beneath the cupola. A bronze medallion on the floor marks the spot from which the perspective of the painting will appear correct. When one wanders off the medallion, the pillars and figures begin to distort wildly. Most of us on the tour spent our time wandering around the church with our eyes on the ceiling, astonished by the nauseating and grotesque effects we could achieve simply by walking around. The Pozzo trompe'oeil is an effective metaphor for the limitations of singlepoint perpsective. In the presence of it, one sees how single point perspective is not simply realism or a photo-real picture of the way the world is. It is, indeed, a world laid out for the viewing pleasure of one or a few, who happen to occupy the right vantage point; from other viewpoints, its claims of realism ring false.

Another image that proved to be important to the investigation of vision and rationality was Hans Holbrook's The Ambassadors, a painting that simultaneously appeals to and undermines our sense of sight. This picture contains two portly gentlemen in finery, surrounded by all the instruments of the sciences and arts: globes, models of the universe, compasses, and an Albertian grid, a tool painters used to draft single point perspective paintings. All the accomplishments of human learning seem to be represented in the painting, each object and figure perfectly visible, except for one thing: on the floor between the ambassadors, there is an anamorphosistic element, an object that can't be deciphered, something shaped like a surf board or a cuttlebone. The object is meant to defy recognition when looked at straight on, but the picture's lack of resolution beckons the viewer to look upon it one last time before he exits the room. When he does so, he gets the picture's message. Looked at from the side, the ambassadors themselves and their instruments of learning are distorted, and the surfboard has come into focus as a skull. The picture preaches of the illusory nature of human accomplishment and the illusory nature of the realism of single point perspective. Its visual trick or anamorphosis teaches this lesson by withholding the viewer's resolution of the skull until he casts a backward glance at the picture. This painting rigorously contests the reliability of single point perspective as a source of truth.

Jacque Lacan's and Martin Jay's Notions of the Effects of Renaissance Image Making Upon Viewing Subjects

Both Jacque Lacan and Martin Jay posited theoretical disadvantages to the construction of single point perspective paintings. These two theorists lead a drive to embrace anamorphosistic, baroque and modern art as the more productive and enhancing experiences for the viewing subject. According to Lacan, what the subject desires most is to be recognized as a distinct individual, unlike any other. The subject wants others to see her as she sees herself. This fundamental lack of true or real subjectivity drives the subject to work ceaselessly to shore up her constantly dissipating sense of selfhood. The subject ardently wants to establish her identity as a fixed thing, something constitutive of her being, but she simultaneously intuits that her subjectivity is not fixed. So she makes or acquires pictures, purchases objects and property, espouses or rejects values and ideals all in the name of "who she is"; all the while, the subject never consciously realizes how fragile, unstable and derivative her subjectivity truly is.

Lacan's notion of why we look at pictures starts with the gaze. The gaze is desire. Rather, the gaze is the tool of the desiring subject, what she sends out into the world to secure a sense of self or at least shore up her deficit of subjectivity. Lacan says that a subject's recognition of herself is dependent upon "misrecognition" or "meconnaissance" because the subject assumes its own concreteness and uniqueness. Prior to Lacan, the gaze was characterized as something a subject does to the objects in the world around her. Lacan, however, changes the terms entirely and speaks of visuality, which is something quite different from subjects gazing upon objects; Lacan's view of visuality and the gaze is much more complex--he speaks of gazing as a chiasmic function. He uses a diagram of two triangles superimposed upon one another to illustrate how the picture and the subject are both held within the matrix of the gaze and the subject of representation. Put more simply, when a subject masters a picture by gazing upon it, she is at the same time formulated by the picture. In other words, to achieve the goal of being recognized, the subject must become an object, seen and recognized by the very things she makes objects of.

Lacan believes that the subject gazing upon a single-point perspective painting, such as Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin (mentioned earlier in this essay), starts to see herself as the center of the universe. She regards the world and its objects from a choice vantage point; everything in her line of vision conforms to Brunelleschi's mathematics of sight. Mathematically-plotted pictures enable a way of seeing that seems at first to support the subject's notions of distinct and masterful selfhood. This rationalist perspective satisfies the subject's urge to see herself as fixed and complete until she contemplates the vanishing point. When, in her perusal of the picture, she encounters the vanishing point, she becomes troubled by the reciprocal relationship between subject and object. If her object recognizes her, as she indeed wishes it to, then it becomes unclear to her, symbolically speaking, whether she still occupies the vantage point or has become the vanishing point.

From Lacan's point of view, rationalist or scientifically informed painting, despite the fact that it is apparently easy to see and digest, menaces the subject, forcing her into an endless series of psychological maneuvers to avoid confronting the nothingness that the picture's vanishing point shows her she is. Rationalist paintings provide the viewer with only two alternatives of being: master of the universe (at the vantage point) or cipher (at the vanishing point.) Each alternative fails to accurately encapsulate who the subject is. Lacan seems to propose that innovations to single-point perspectivalism, may offer the viewing subject an escape from the master/cipher straight jacket. Lacan says that paintings are a trap for the gaze, and once trapped, the gaze is temporarily calmed and pacified. This tamed gaze or "dompte regard" gives the viewer rest from the athletics of the master/cipher dichotomy. Caravagio presented innovative art to his patrons in the church five hundred years ago when he created paintings that broke with single point perspective in favor of picture planes containing foreshortened space and subtly engineered multiple perspectives. Gazing upon a Caravaggio, the subject is no longer forced into the inherently false role of master of the universe, nor does identification with the vanishing point annihilate her. Instead, she may adopt any or many of the positions that the picture plane offers. In this respect, art that departs from Renaissance notions of single point perspective constitute a constructive difficulty for the viewer, one that allows the viewer to see herself more honestly, as a split and multiple subject.

Martin Jay, too, finds innovative art to be difficult in a way that pleases and enhances the viewing subject. Though in the end of "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," Jay agitates for maintaining all three scopic regimes (regimented way of constructing the deciphering images), in the beginning of the essay, Jay clearly finds a great deal of fault with what he calls Cartesian perspectivalist painting, what I have referred to in this essay as single point perspective. Jay thinks Renaissance or Albertian notions of perspective are rational to the point of disembodying both the viewer and the painter. Jay writes that "the bodies of the painter and the viewer were forgotten in the name of an allegedly disincarnated, absolute eye." Jay notes that the science of perspective "de-eroticizes" art because it appeals to, and therefore privileges, the mind over the body. He also says that Albertian perspective "denarrativizes" or "detextualizes" art because the paintings' gestures toward storytelling are a pretense. In fact, they freeze the narrative at a single point. Jay charges that "as abstract quantitatively conceptualized space became more interesting to the artist than the qualitatively differentiated subjects painted within it, the rendering of the scene became an end in itself." He dismisses scientifically informed painting as excessively "high altitude thinking."
Though Jay is suspicious of Cartesian perspectivalism, he seems to be thoroughly enamored with Baroque art, which he lauds for its "contradictions between surface and depth and its multiplicity of visual spaces." Jay admires the Baroque's attempt to "represent the unrepresentable." He applauds the way the Baroque, which Christine Buci-Glucksmann calls "the madness of vision," scraps the Renaissance's flat mirror reflection of the world and, instead, reflects the world through wavy and convex mirrors. Jay clearly enjoys the complexity and contradiction that results from the Baroque's aim to be both erotic and metaphysical.

Caravaggio's work epitomizes this Baroque urge toward both the erotic and metaphysical. On one afternoon in mid June my classmates and I went on a tour of churches containing Carravagio paintings. At Santa Maria del Popolo, located near the gates of Piazza del Popolo, we saw the Crucifixion of St. Peter and the Conversion of St. Paul. Then at St. Louise de France, we looked at the St. Mathew Tryptich, which consists of The Calling of St. Mathew, St. Mathew Writing the Gospels, and the Martyrdom of St. Mathew. Finally, at St. Augustine, we saw one of my favorite paintings, the Madonna di Loretto (tr. The Madonna of the Pilgrims). Carravagio's work was intensely controversial early in his career, and later became quite popular. Paradoxically, he gestured toward the divine by rendering the ordinary and everyday. So the observer of Carravagio's spiritual subject matter sees the grubby foot soles of weary pilgrims, and the backsides of the soldiers who nail St. Peter upside down on his cross. St. Matthew's Martyrdom divulges all the skullduggery of assassination, as a man, dressed in a loincloth for baptism, knifes Matthew in the church knave. More abundantly than all of these, the Conversion of St. Paul manifests the Baroque's characteristic visual negotiation between the sacred and the profane.
This well-known work depicts the moment in which Saul, persecutor of Christians, has a divine vision, falls from his horse and instantly converts. Emerging from the opaque background, we see two foreshortened figures bathed in light: Paul's horse, of which the viewer sees mostly the hindquarters, and Paul, himself, lying supine beneath the horse, arms raised as if in worship. Ironically, Paul seems to be taking in the vision with his eyes closed. Though the picture refers to a supernatural event, there is nothing in it that speaks of the metaphysical or the miraculous. Paul's body and the horse's, rendered in Caravaggio's characteristic naturalism, are nothing if not purely flesh. Paul's cheeks are flushed; his arms and legs pale and weak. A thin tunic lies across Paul's chest revealing the decidedly fragile contours of his body. The horse's coat gives off a satiny sheen, as a lowly groom tries to quiet the animal. The horse's body occupies fully one half of the picture, a fact that seems to contradict the painting's spiritual subject matter. The only element in the picture that could represent the divine is the light, but it is a rather ordinary light that washes over the figures, and its source is not apparent or identifiable. Finally, one notices that the depth of field in the painting is unclear because the figures seem to be aligned along different trajectories in the space, and because they ultimately meet and mingle in a tangle of human and animal limbs at the center of the painting. St. Paul's vulnerable position, lying beneath his horse's feet, conveys the message that a life-altering conversion is not a too far from being crushed under the hooves of a horse. All these facets of the painting show how the Conversion of St. Paul attempts to represent the unrepresentable: a moment of spiritual awakening.

In the final weeks of the course I saw many other works that effectively demonstrated the virtues of Baroque and of anamorphosistic art. In two strokes of rare luck the class was admitted to two sites that tourists in Rome seldom see. The first was the Order of the Sacred Heart at Trinita dei Monti, a nunnery and school that houses the anamorphosistic mural of Saint Francis of Paola painted by Emmanuel Maignan. This mural is perhaps the most well known anamorphosistic painting. It is immense, covering most of a corridor, and the picture, a portrait of St. Francis, is only resolved by looking at it from a distance down the hall. Surveyed straight on, the painting is a vast and enigmatic landscape. The second masterpiece that we were fortunate enough to see was at the French Embassy, housed in the Pallazzo Farnese. This Palazzo is famous for a ceiling fresco, painted by Annibale and Agostino Carracci between 1597 and 1604. The Carracci Brothers chose secular subject matter, the pagan gods and their loves, to adorn the party room ceiling in what was once an elegant private home. They also sought to combine all the arts, so the fresco consists of narrative scenes from mythology that incorporate single point perspective and are bounded by architectural and sculptural elements-- frames, pillars and statuary. Outside of the mythological scenes, painted figures, reminiscent of the prophets in the Sistine Chapel, lounge about the bases of trompe l'oeil statuary. The result is a dizzying riot of illusionistic painting. One gazes and gazes, struggling to grasp how architecture, sculpture, figure painting and single point perspective landscapes can all fit together in one fresco.

Concepts of the Sublime

While Martin Jay's and Jacque Lacan's desires for complexity in Art seem to be satisfied by what the Baroque has to offer, in the third week of class my comrades and I learned that the 18th-century philosophers, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant seemed to have different expectations for what might qualify as a truly meaningful or psychologically beneficial art experience. With slight differences in their definitions of the term, Burke and Kant both looked to the sublime as the most powerful and moving experience that life has to offer. Burke's sublime is located in nature, or wherever there is a source of terror. Burke declares that imminent dangers bring no pleasure to the subject, "but at certain distances and with certain modifications, they may be delightful." Burke writes that the sublime's chief effect upon the viewer is that of "astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror." Burke adds that the concomitant (but subordinate) effects of the sublime are "admiration, reverence and respect." Burke differentiates the sublime from the beautiful, noting that the beautiful is endearing and affectionately regarded, but never the least bit challenging.

Kant's notion of the sublime breaks with Burke's to a certain degree. Kant thinks of the sublime as that which is "absolutely large," but never found in nature. When the viewer encounters such an object, one that defies comparison to any other object, she fails to conceptualize it. Put more simply, an experience is said to be sublime when the viewing subject's faculty of understanding fails to make sense of its "percepts" (a word coined by Kant meaning "perceptions"), a failure which in turn causes the subject's judgment to fail in its endeavor to categorize the sensory information into a recognizable concept ( for Kant, the word concept refers to a recognizable category in the mind's library). Judgment fails for it is beyond the imagination's power to recognize what is seen. The inability of understanding, imagination and judgment to bring the percept to conceptual resolution leaves the subject's faculties in a state of suspension, what Kant calls "agitation." Kant writes, "This agitation (above all its inception) can be compared to a vibration, i.e. with a rapid alternation of repulsion from, and attraction to, one and the same object." Kant points out that sublimity is a property of the mind; something in nature can create the effect of the sublime, but to say that the sublime occurs in nature is contrary to Kant's notion of it. Kant insists upon the mind's superiority over nature. Though the experience of the sublime might not be pleasurable, Kant stresses that the sublime has an overall positive effect on the subject because it gives rise to the faculty of reason. He writes, "this is precisely what makes the aesthetic judgment itself subjectively purposive for reason (my emphasis), as the source of ideas, i.e., as the source of an intellectual comprehension [compared] to which all aesthetic comprehension is small, and the object is apprehended as sublime with a pleasure that is possible only by means of a displeasure." Hence, Kant defines a visual experience that is at first difficult and unpleasant, but which leads to greater rewards when reason is deployed.

In connection with our discussions of the sublime, my classmates and I looked at several sculptures by Bernini. The class compared Kant's notions of the sublime to St. Teresa of Avila's accounts of a revery that she would fall into, in which she often understood herself to be lifted up and held by God. One particularly poignant passage in St. Teresa's autobiography speaks of an angel coming to stab her with a flaming arrow and thereby lighting in her heart the flame of God's love. The Baroque sculptor, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, sculpted a scene from this story, the Ecstasy of St. Teresa, and this work can be found in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, a high baroque church, just two blocks from the National Museum of Rome. In the sculpture, Teresa's small form is shrouded and obscured by her flowing robes. The angel stands above her in a shower of golden light poised to ignite the devout woman's heart with God's love. There is another sculpture like this one in a small church, San Francesco a Ripa, located in Trastevere, a small neighorhood in the southwest of Rome that maintains its Medieval character even today. The other sculpture, the Blessed Lodovica Albertoni, memorializes another woman subject to divinely inspired visions. These two works aptly illustrate the horror, helplessness, rapture and suspension that Kant and Burke attribute to the sublime.
Though Kant's notion of the sublime does not pertain specifically to art, one can see how avant-garde art might fit into his scheme. When the viewing subject confronts an art object that cannot be adequately grasped and conceptualized, the subject's faculties become suspended or agitated. The sensation of pain mixed with pleasure that the sublime inspires explains much about the way people experience the avant-garde. As a foray into modern day avant garde art, the seminar invited two cutting edge filmakers to Rome to screen several of their films for our class and respond to our questions. The Quay brothers, identical twins born in Norristown, PA and now living in London, create animated films that have a kind of sublime effect upon a viewer. In their films, the Quays construct decrepit worlds and people them with cast-off antique dolls. Gazing upon The Comb, Street of Crocodiles or Little Songs of the Chief Officer of Hunar Louse (also entitled The Epic of Gilgamesh or This Unnamable Little Broom), the viewer struggles to decipher the significance of the dolls' actions as they negotiate their surreal environments. The dream textures in these films further stymie the viewers' efforts to bring the images under some kind of conceptual control.

The filmmakers use many strategies to hinder the viewer from arriving at an easy understanding of their work. The Quays will conceal images in darkness or flood them with too much light; they also play with the focus, blurring images or changing the focus from one object to another at a different point in the field of depth. They animate the inanimate, screws and dust, for example. The Quays cinematic connections between scenes are loose and bear a closer relationship to poetry than to narrative. Though the films have different content, one theme they all seem to share is an inquiry into vision itself. Countless scenes display puppets that seem to be looking at something and thinking about it. The idea of the connection between vision and frames permeates their work. In The Comb, an empty frame hangs above the sleeper's bed, and the busy disembodied hands of her dream climb a ladder through numerous frames. At one point the ladder pokes through the "frame" of the sleeper's own body. The Quay's animation technique, setting up and shooting stills that later become animated film (something like 24 frames per second), also points to framing as a significant part of vision. In addition to framing, these filmmakers also stretch and distort images to achieve the effects of anamorphosis. In one project that the Quays completed for Art on Film, De Artificialia Perspectiva or Anamorphosis, the narrator of the film explains how the perfect geometrical relationships of Albertian perspective beg to be subverted. The narrator later explains that the "nonsensical forms and misleading diversions" of anamorphosistic art purposely delay the viewer's "access to a deeper understanding." The satisfaction of a delayed understanding, one acquired by patient and careful consideration of the art, far surpasses that derived from the easily digested image. Herein lies the Quay Brothers' modus operandi; they create images that the viewer must grapple with over time, images that cannot ever be entirely resolved. I wondered if perhaps this suspension of understanding that seems inevitable in viewing their work engenders in the viewer something akin to Kant's notion of the sublime.

These thoughts on subjectivity, the sublime, and the relation of these things to Renaissance, Baroque and avant garde art are really just a part of what I was able to assimilate during my month in Rome. I think the most important thing I took with me from the experience is my knowledge of the city. Walking around for about four hours every day, I felt as if I made the place my own. I was able to form habits- I frequented a family-run trattoria in Trastevere. I took nightly visits to the watermelon and coconut stand outside the Cipro metro station. I returned often to a favorite park bench near the bronze satyr in the Borghese Gardens where I would catch up on my reading. I bought literally dozens of cones of that chocolate gelati with the macadamia nuts. I must have taken a dozen twighlight strolls to jot off a quick letter home from the email café off Piazza di Firenze. All told, I was enlightened by the books I read and was moved by the art I saw, but I will savor the memory of inhabiting this place for years to come. Already, I plot my return.