Ray, line, vision and trace in Renaissance art PAUL HILLS A distinguishing feature of the Western artistic tradition from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century is that the image signals that it exists to be looked at, Although it has roots in Greek culture, this reflexive character of visual art became established in Renaissance Italy. At the opening of his treatise on painting, Della pittura, Leon Battista Alberti introduces his concept of the sign, in the Latin text signum, in the Halian, segno. ‘The first thing to know is that a point is a sign which one might say is not divisible into pars. I calla sign anything {hat exists on a surface so that itis visible tothe eye. Noone will deny thar things which are not visible do not concern the painter, for he strives to represeit only che things that are seen. Points joined together continuously in a row constitute a line. So for usa line will bea sign whose length can be divided into parts, but it will be so slender in width that it cannot be split. Some lines are called straight, others curved. A straight line is a sign extended lengthyays directly from one point to another.! (On first reading, Alberti’s definition of sign seems so all-inclusive as to be useless, and certainly far removed from our current understanding of the term. After closer consideration of this paragraph and the rest of Albe! text, the strangeness begins to recede. For Alberti the line is not constituted on the basis of resemblance to things seen in the world, rather it is a sign belonging to the surface on which it is inscribed by the artist. When the artist sees a line itis the line that he has just drawn. Thus the line belongs to the performance of delineating with the hhand what has been conceived by the mind — Albei text makes this clear. The line is conceptual before itis phenomenal; it becomes subject to the judgement of sense only when itis inseribed. Alberti’s definition of the line as sign derives from the same culture as Paolo Uccello's drawing ofan urn or vase (figure 1), where the lines mark the changes of plane at the edges of the facets. The position of such lines is plotted by geometry rather than by empirical observation, Following earlier writers on optics, Alberti distinguishes between three types of rays that constitute the pyramid of vision that has its apex in the eye and its base on the things seen. Of these three types of ray — which he terms extrinsic, median and centric ~ only the median and centric are explicitly described as carrying the colours of things. The function of the extrinsic rays is WORD & IMAGE, VOL. 6, NO. 3, JULY-SEPTEMBER 1990 Figure 1 Peulo Uccllo, 4x Ur, pen and ink, Florence, Ui to carry information about size rather than colour. Alberti does not specify whether or not they are coloured but the implication of his text is that unlike median rays, they are unchanging in colour. What is made clear is that, the extrinsic rays carry the outlines of things? In terms of the artist’s performance, this division between outline and infill is re-enacted in the separate processes of circumscription and colouring, Albert's, account of the line as a sign inscribed on a surface — what we call the picture plane and Alberti the intersection of the visual pyramid depends upon his conception of lines Of sight or rays that link the thing seen to the eye. The ‘outline is sign of the eye’s conceptual purchase on the 217 asin 08 © we Tye & FracFigure 2. Domenico Veneslano, Madone and CHld wih Saint (St. Lucy altarpiece), tempera on panel, 109 * 203 em. Florence, Ui things seen. The outline on the inscribed surface is a token of power. What must be stressed here ~ and Domenico Vene- ziano’s St Lucy altarpiece (figure 2) may serve as cexemplification of the point —is that Alberti’s conception of the line effectively disassociates the mark-making activity from anything that is personal to the artist. The line as sign is seemingly split off from the agent that inscribes it. As Lyotard has observed in his discussion of Alberti’s castruzzione legittima, this masking of human agency is essential to the project of constructing surfaces as appearance. ‘To construct surfaces as appearance’, ‘writes Lyotard, ‘is to construct: to produce actions that will be taken as effects of something else, of an Other, not as event, not as what happens’.’ A parallel might be drawn between the Albertian construction of appearance upon a surface, and Niccol® Machiavell’s (1469-1527) construction of statecraft upon an acknowledged split between appearance and reality. The Prince manipulates his own appearances before the public. Machiavelli the playwright understood that politics was a theatrical art of presentation, Alberti rarely uses the term ‘sign’. Its application to the ‘mathematical construction known as a line is characteris- tic of Florence. It foreshadows the split between disegno and colore ~ the intellectual concept of design and the material process of applying colours — that came to dominate central Italian art theory in the sixteenth century. Alberti’s line is at the opposite pole to the stroke for trace that is the fundamental constituent of Chinese 218 pauL minis Figure 3. Pisunello, Fos, pen and tempera on parchment, x6: X 2274 Louvre (Cabinet des Desi) brush painting. But these Western and Oriental polari- ties should not be identified with the impersonal and the personal, The Western academic construction of the line as sign did not entirely preclude the element of personal handwriting. Indeed the potential conflict between the objective construction of the sign and the subjective clement of the artists handling is never far from the surface in Renaissance art, Consider the drawing ofa fox by Pisanello (figure 3) Albertian mimesis. The artist, drawing in watercolour with a fine brush, has taken pains to render the texture, the lie and colouring of the animals fur ~ notably its, typical natural camouflage or counter-shading. Ambient, and fall of light are irrelevant here. One hundred years later, Parmigianino had to make some very deliberate choices when describing three goats in a sunlit ambient (figure 4). To describe the brilliance of light as well as the shaggy coats of the kids the cinquecento draughtsman used two conventions of line, one offering indicative samples of texture and the other employing cross-hatch- ing to render shadow. For this to work, itis vital that the cross-hatching is treated as sign in such a way that it could not be mistaken for a naturalistic lie of fur. Parmigianino constructed a surface as appearance; he used line as sign. Pisanello did not do this. Yet Parmigianino’s line indicates a personal handwriting. ‘To return to the Albertian conception of vision, and the relation between the seer and the thing seen that is posited by the Renaissance painting. In a number of passages Alberti discusses beauty. He asserts that beau is distinct from lifelikeness, and that ‘in painting, beauty is as pleasing as it is necessary’. Beauty is connected to pleasure in the act of seeing, it cannot arise purely out of mimesis, To understand this theory of pleasure, we must turn to the treatise On Pleasure, De voluptate, by a near contemporary of Alberti, Lorenzo Valla. which may stand for pias scams Figure 4. Parmighnino, The Gi ‘Musée Condé, Chantilly pen and ink, 147 % 19:4 em. lysis of vlupias Valla stresses a two-way flow of giving and receiving: All things that are loved, ate loved for one of two reasons either because they bring us j hear, and the like, or because they receive joy lke the eye, Which is made in order to delight in receiving colour. Both elements are necessary... What is seen dies fom what sees; and the entity that does the secing is not the same as the seen one, God. like the things we see Both these elements concur in And a page later, Valla explains the nexus of pleasure that cathects creator and created: ‘because it is God who creates pleasure, he who receives it loves, and what is received is loved. .. The receiver and the received are Doth necessary’! Without wishing to press the analogy too far, we may say that in Filippo Lippi's tondo in the Pitti (figure 5) the viewer receives pleasure in the eye from the beauty of the image, in this case, the Madonna, whose birth is presented in the background. The Madonna’s eye coincides with the vanishing point; it is the centre of the perspective, The Madonna's eye meets our eye ~ which is the subjective cause of the perspective: for the painting Figure 5. Filippo Lippi, Madoena and Cid with Se fom the Life of te Virgin, 145 cm diameter. Florence, Pit Figure 6. Filippo Lipp, Virgin Adoring the Chi, 127 % 116 cm, Berlin Dahlem Gemaldegaerie posits that we are stationed on the axis of the vanishing. point. The insistent orthogonals of the perspective and the equally inescapable gaze of the Madonna need our presence to explain their appearance. Receiver and received are both necessary: one mirrors the other. (At this date, incidentally, mirrors were round, though nowhere as large as this painting, which is 132 cm in diameter.) What is inscribed on the surface is not what 219Alberts optical account of the picture plane as intersec- tion of the visual pyramid would lead us to believe namely the record or copy of a perception. On the contrary, itis the sign of a relationship. It is by virtue of that relationship — that essential addressing of the beholder — that many ‘times’ may justifiably be presented within one place; many events within one structure. A mirror has no memory. This is where the mirror analogy is deficient. The spectator at a play, on the other hand, can hold in mind a suecession of events performed upon a single stage. Valla’s humanist theory of seeing as an act of loving has classical sources, but it is also strongly tinged with Christian theology and liturgical practice.® His elevation (of the sensory contemplato oculis to an eminence on a par ‘with the intellectual contemplatio ments is striking. In fact his sense of the efficacy of contemplatio oculis was antici pated by the Florentine ecclesiastical hierarchy when Florence was placed under Papal interdict for a brief period in the late 1370s. As a result of the interdict the Clergy were not allowed to celebrate Mass, and Floren- tines were thereby debarred from receiving the Eucharis- - ewe” & Figure 8. Raphael, Disp, fresco, 770 cm at bate. Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, tic Body of Christ. For some, particularly those in need of the Last Rites, this was a frightening deprivation. It is highly indicative of attitudes towards the act of secing that the Florentine theologians succeeded in comforting their flock by arguing that it was sufficient to gaze upon the consecrated host, for by such contemplatio oculis the faithful did indeed receive the body of Christ.® The act of looking with love was placed on a par with physically consuming. To see devoutly is to devour. To gaze is t0 consume.” The Western notion of the gaze as instrument of identification with what is gazed upon, and ultimately ‘of possession, has roots in Christian doctrines of eucharis- tic communion as well as in Classical theories of pleasure. Italian painters ofthe fifteenth century were well aware Filippo Lippi’s, Virgin Adoring the Child (figure 6), painted for the altar of the chapel in the Medici Palace, is the goal of the processions of the three Magi, frescoed on the walls by Benozzo Gozzoli. What the Magi will behold is the Word made flesh, the agnus dei, indicated by the young St John the Baptist. From God the Father and the Holy Ghost a golden dart descends, a rapier thrust, a divine thunder that to gaze devoutly is to devouFigure, Raphacl, Mas at ulna, fresco, 660 cm at base. Stanza di Heliodor, Vat bolt that links heaven to earth, igniting tongues of flame, tokens of love and reminders that the Christian Mass replaces the burnt offerings of the Old Covenant, Christ's ‘mortal flesh is displayed in the position of the Host at its clevation by the priest during Mass. By placing his finger in his mouth while looking out at the beholder, Lippi’s Christ Child, like Masaccio's in the Pisa altarpiece reminds those receiving the Blessed Sacrament that they are consuming the Body of Christ.® Itis obvious that since the altarpiece would have often been viewed in the context of the Mass, the words of the Mass and the symbolic gestures of the priest furnish a discourse that enriches responses to the pictorial image, This is not to say that the verbal discourse of the Mass. and the pictorial discourse of the altarpiece can be conflated. There is a sense in which the Mass is important in enforcing a time-scale for contemplation, a period of sociability when two or three are gathered together in the presence of altar and altarpiece. By the mid-sixteenth century, when Ludovico Dolce is writing his Aretino, the dialogue on art will partially usurp the function of the religious rite by providing a rhythm and time-scale for sociable looking.? The relationship between the contemplation of the eye, performed with the aid of the pictorial image, and the contemplation of the mind, performed with the aid of the written word needs further consideration here. Raphael's Ansidei Madonna (figure 7) tells us about the ‘wwo-fold nature of seeing and reading. It shows how the two kinds of looking function within the economy of religious devotion. The painting is illuminated by light of. almost practernatural clarity. It strikes the wood of the Madonna's throne, particularly the niche, transmuting. its brown hue into the golden — reminding early-six- teenth-century viewers of the fields of gold leaf that were now replaced by painted illusion. On the right St Nicholas reads by this light, angling his head and book to, reccive its rays to best advantage. Many earlier altarpieces had shown saints carying a book or scrol: few offer such a. penetrating portrayal of the very act of reading. ‘The Mother and her Child also read by this light. Here, then, light illuminates the written word, which in turn offers an inward illumination to the mind. On the right, the ardent St John the Baptist ~ the forerunner who was not the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the ‘world bur the one who came to bear witness to the light — gazes past the transparent crystal cross to the source of light, while performing his historic role of indicating its human avatar, the Word made Flesh. In this altarpiece the presence of the beholder ~ the congregation at Mass —is everywhere posited by pictorial structure: by its absolute symmetry, by the horizon on the level of the eyes of someone standing at the altar, and by the invitation to humble access furnished by the steps ascending the throne. This fulfilling presence of the spectator is made explicit by the words inscribed in humanist majuscules on the Madonna's throne ‘Salve ‘Mater Christ. These words do not label the throne, as an inscription might label a canon’s stall; they voice the silent address made by every devout viewer of the altarpiece, ‘Hail, Mother of Christ’. And they teasingly announce the paradox (elsewhere implicit rather than exposed) that what is offered to God in veneration is, necessarily addressed to the eyes of man who is made in the image of God. The Ansidei Madonna demonstrates with unusual clarity that Raphael's artis more than simply anthropocentric: it is emphatically logocenttic. It assumes the centrality of the Word as embodiment ofan order of meaning of which the pictorial is a reflection. Bodily images point beyond themselves to a prior and transcendent wiscom/power embodied in the word. This logocentrism demands and engenders presence: the co-presence of beholder and Ibcheld. The figures inthe painting read, look, and think, thereby cueing the spectator to do the same. For here everything that is visible is intelligible to the human mind, and by the reduction of the phenomenal to the conceptual the merely phenomenal is thereby excluded. In Raphael's paintings appearance is dependent upon intelligibility, the ordering of design upon the separation and naming of parts; and such appearance and designa- tion necessarily implies an authorizing and regarding presence. Yet like the source of ight toward whieh John the Baptist yearns, significance is ultimately hidden, removed. Paradoxically, then, presence points towards absence. The pictorial does not invite or reward dwelling ‘within oF upon things for their own sake. Since they point beyond themselves, the merely visible words of bodies and things are mute. This humanist conceit, so damaging for our access to the language of things, is Raphac!’s legacy to the academic wadition. In this tradition things in themselves possess no perfection until ordered by mind ~a view in keeping with Kant’s declaration in his Critique of Judgement, ‘only man, among all objects in the world, admits therefore, of an ideal of beauty, just as humanity in his person, as intelligence, alone admits of the ideal of perfection’ Raphael's pictorial presentation presupposes in a self-conscious manner that looking is an act, just as the utterance ofa greeting is an act. Ifpainting is an analogue of a stage performance, so the beholder is moved, that is to say, responds, Raphacl’s altarpiece allows no prevari- cation about this relationship. If the twentieth-century viewer finds something faintly irksome about this, it may have less to do with the ideality of form and expression, and more to do with the way in which the viewer’s position and response are conditioned from the start Given his artistic gifts, itis not surprising that Raphael should have been sought out by the highest power in the land at the ideological fulerum of Christendom. The Papacy had a use for Raphael’s most delicate control of pictorial artifice. Within a culture well drilled in the notion that seeing is believing, Raphael's seemingly natural fictions were more potent than any verbal discourse, In the Disputd, or Disputation on the Blessed. Sacrament (figure 8), Raphael gives bodily form to theological abstraction. The hierarchical power structure that subordinates earth to heaven is made manifest —and naturalized — by the spatial means proper to visual art. Dominating the central axis is the three-fold presence of the Christian logos: Christ as bodily theophany, the Word made flesh in the Eucharist, and the Word made text in the Gospels The Mass at Bolvena (figure 9), in the same papal apartments in the Vatican, again exemplifies the doctrine that seeing is believing. What the artist is called upon to create is an outright fiction: a marriage of thirteenth- century legend and contemporary adoration. The patron, Pope Julius IT, is placed in a position where he can witness the miracle of the host that bled before the eyes of the doubting celebrant. We witness the witness, and marvel at Raphael’s power to remake history to his ppatron’s command, How did people in the Renaissance verbalize their cognitive processes? How did they represent to them- selves what was going on when they looked at a work of art?!2 The accounts of vision in Valla’s Deroluptate and in Alberti’s Della pittura offer some clues. Alberti’s discrin nations between ray, line and outline, circumscription and coloured in-fill, and Valla’s notion of reciprocity between receiver and received are important because the verbal concepts aflect the painter’s construction as well as the viewer's reception of the work of art. Alberti instructs painters to attend to what he calls ‘the reception of light’. To the emission of light from a source he makes scant reference. In this stress upon reception he 223Figure 10, Raphael, Madonna dal Sofa, ol on panel diameter 71cm. Fhrenee, Pit departs from tradition, for the image of the beautiful face emitting its own radiance, an elffulgent gras ‘commonplace of poetic discourse.1® In Petrarch’s sonnets, the glance that bears love, the sguardo, is often a ray of light. By Petrarch’s time it was generally understood that vision functioned by means of light. The widely dissemi- nated treatises on optics, or Perspectia, written in the thirteenth century by Roger Bacon and John Pecham, deseribed how light carried the visual species from the thing seen to the eye. Thus in both scientific and poetic discourse, light is privileged as agent of communication land transmitter of information. In the fifteenth century the communicative significance of light was temporarily masked: in Filippo Lippi’s Pitti ondo light is treated Allbertian terms as a necessary adjunct to pictorial space. Itis the reception of light elfulgence or emission of light, that tells. Sixty years later, in Raphael's Madonna della Sedia (figure 10) light is inseparable from a pictorial structure that depends for its, very being upon reciprocal relations between viewer and. surfaces and planes, not their viewed. If we may regard these reciprocal relations as analogous to those which link speaker and listener, then What has taken the place of sound as medium of communication is light. Iti light that has become a sign of a particular quality of attention, a particular kind of love, that is being brought to bear on the picture. From. Raphael through to the nineteenth century, pictorial light in the Western tradition will be the sign of communicative intent not discourse itself, not words, but sound; asignal that communication is proposed. In Raphael's paintings the Albertian obsession with the reception of light has given way to a more balanced 224 PAUL HILLS interplay between reception and emission. Our impres- sion in the presence of the Madonna della Sedia that the light is gently reflected, bounced back to us by the surfaces which receive it, creates an essential intimacy, a bond. Modelling is an index of a point of view. The sfumato, the blurring of edges achieved by overlapping of glazes in the oil medium, creates an effect of halation —an ‘aura, And as Walter Benjamin has reminded us, the aura isa sign of the capacity of the work of art to look back, t0 return the beholder’s gaze.!? The aura is a sign of the temporal inscribed within or upon the spatial. The auras aa sign that the gaze has extended in time. Just as the long, exposures of early photography and the softsfocus lenses, of the 1930s, by spreading the highlight, convey duration = a sense that the subject is living, ever-so-slightly changing before our eyes ~ so in Raphael the aura registers a pulse of light emitted not in an instant but over a period of time, Thus the aura is a sign that the viewer tgives the picture more than a cursory look. It invites us to sive ita gaze thatis long and loving, Interestingly, Italian has a word for the activity of fondly gazing: it is ragheggiare. By its very nature the pictorial light of Raphael and of the Wi indicative.'® It directs the gaze, extends the gaze, yet finally it denies the gaze a resting place. Coming from afar, entering pictorial space and reflecting back off surfaces, such discourse of light continually frustrates our desire to dwell within the world. It moves away the ground of reality beyond the visible to the word. By reducing the visible to the intelligible, Raphael's Iogocentrism and Alberti’ line as sign, denies us access 10 the language of things, and deafens us to the rustle of contingencies, the murmur of accidents. Our task now is, to rediscover that access. By what means shall we tern tradition points beyond itself, eternally ‘question the reduction of the visual to the verbal? 1-1. B. Alberti; In C. Grayson od.) Dalla pture (London: Phaidon, to7a), p31: BEI, para 2 Ibid p43, Bk I, para 7. $~ Driftwoks (New York, 1984), P- 97 4}— Lorenzo Valla, De Flat, tans. A. Kent-Hiett and M, Lorch New Vork: Abaris Books, 1977), Bk XIT, 1 5 Eg, St Augustine’ dtcurson of how an object of delight alects Sind mobilize the felings ee Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Wondon: Faber, 1967), PP. 154-155 “RG. Treser, ‘The Spiritual Power: Republican Florence under Tntedice. In H, O. Oberman (ed), Studs te Metical end Reformation That, Vol. IX (Leiden: Beil, 1974), pp. 126-127 J This is emarkably clove tothe argument of M. Merleau-Ponty in ‘The Phenology of Peraption (Londo, 1062), , 212, that ‘sensation is literally a form f communion’ comparable to sacramental communion in the evehaest.{8 For further references othe extensive leratre onthe altar and ‘the Body of Chit se: BG, Lane, Thea andthe Aarpie Sucamental Themes in Early Nethronih Paning (New York: Harper & Row, 1984): P. Browe, Die Veen der Eucharist im Mitelalir (Rome, 1967). L. Steinberg, he Stuaiy of Christin Renisrance At end Maden OBlsion (New York: Panthcon/October Book, 198), should be readin conjunction with C. W. Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg Rene Qua XXXIX (1985), pp. 309-149, 9M. Baxandall, Paterno Into (New Haven & London: Yale Univesity Press, 185). 10 On the Mediaeval pera see the discussion by Michael Casille ‘Seeing and reading: some visual implications of medieval itera and leracy’, rt Hisry, WIM (1983), pp. 25-49; "The Book of Signs: weting and visual diference in Gothic manuscript ‘luminaton’, Ward and Image, (1985), pp. 193-48: The Language of Images in Medieval England, 1200-1400. In Jonathan Alexander and Paul Bias, (ds), Tle Age of kar (London, +987), pp. 33-40 or bibliography on the change fom srt to prin see. isenstcin, The Printing Relation in Es Cambridge University Press, 198). 11 ~E. Kant, Grtqn of Judgement, BL 1, para. «75 ane J. M Meredith (Orford: Oxford University Pres, 1928), p. 7). For Aiscussion of this passage see J. Dervis, The Tah in Painting, tans G. Bennington and I. MeLeod (Chicago, 1), p. 109. 12 For bibliography see D. Summers, The Judrant of Save (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1487) ‘On mediaeval aesthetics se U. Reo, An and Best nthe Midile Ages (New Haven & Londoa: Yale University Pres, 19) 14P. Hills, The Light of Barly alan Paitin (New Haven & London: Vale University Press, 1987), Chaps. and IV 15 ~"The work of Art inthe Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ taiaairs (London, 1970), pp. 219-255, For comment see Andrew Benjamin, ‘The decline f art: Benjamin's aus’, Oxford Art Journal S85), Bp 30-35 16—On the indicative character of light sce y Modern Berspe (Cambridge: Merleau-Ponty it, p 3 295