R e becc a Z or ach

Without Fear of Border Guards.

he Renaissance of Visual Culture
In his 1952 essay, On Subject and Not-Subject in Italian Renaissance Pictures, Creighton
Gilbert puts forward Giorgione’s Tempest as an example of a painting in which subject
matter was secondary. his might seem a perverse claim, since the iconography of
this painting has been the subject of multiple interpretations, vigorous debate and
discussion. But, Gilbert asks, is it really iconography that matters, here? Formalism,
he suggests (in, it must be said, an even-handed way), ofers two distinct challenges to
iconography. First, the challenge of works that do not contain iconography; and second,
the charge that iconography, in treating all works equally, neglects to teach proper hier-
archies of value. To the iconographer, he writes, ‘the weakest engraving that exhibits 23
some complex cosmology is as fascinating as the masterpieces where the cosmology is
given breath by the artist’s imaginative understanding’ (Gilbert, 1952, 202).1
In the case of the Giorgione, Gilbert points out that X-rays have revealed that the
clothed male igure at the lower right of the painting replaced an earlier composition’s
seated female nude. If the igures were changed ater the landscape was already planned
out, therefore, the landscape was primary in the painter’s mind and the igures were
secondary. What if, in fact, there were no subject – what if the igures meant nothing
at all? Gilbert goes further: ‘Still the idea that there might be no subject at all has been
avoided, evidently because of a premise that there is no “pure painting” in this period’
(Gilbert, 1952, 211). What he implies thereby is that the Tempest would qualify as a work
of ‘pure painting’ – in the modernist sense.
Gilbert’s proposal is clearly inspired by modernist preoccupations. In his classic
work of modernist criticism, Toward a Newer Laocoön, Clement Greenberg states
the case against iconography: for Greenberg (who, it might be noted, constantly uses
language of war, resistance, and struggle), literature had come to be the dominant art
form in the seventeenth century and had thereupon become the pattern for all the arts.
he avant-garde visual arts are in the process of freeing themselves from this literary
hegemony. he process requires return to crat, to the physical and the sensorial, and
to the resources speciic to each art form (Greenberg, 1986a, 32). Avant-garde artists
‘surrender’ to the ‘resistance’ of the medium, abandoning such practices as illusionistic
perspective (Greenberg, 1986a, 32).
It was not only medium-speciicity that was at stake in modern art’s rejection of
what it called ‘Renaissance space’. For modernism, the Renaissance serves as both
a negative foil and a point of origin for the modern notion of art, artists, and the

1 Many thanks to Barbara Baert, Agnès Guiderdoni-Bruslé, Ralph Dekoninck, Martina Bagnoli,
Herbert Kessler, Robert Schindler, and Roger Wieck for their generosity (of various kinds!)
with this project; thanks to Kate Aguirre for research assistance.

W i t hou t F e a r of B or de r G ua r d s . T h e R e n a i s s a nc e of V i s ua l C u lt u r e
 | 1 | Master E.S., Ornament with foliage and six birds, ca. 1450–67,
British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum.
24

aesthetic. Renaissance space was associated with its illusionism, with a conception of
space as a container for narrative. And Renaissance visuality was also (it was believed)
imbued with ideology. Take Robert Motherwell, writing in 1950: ‘he rejection of the
lies and falsiications of modern Christian, feudal aristocratic, and bourgeois society,
of the property-loving world that the Renaissance expressed, has led us, like many
other modern artists, to ainities with the art of other cultures: Egypt and the ancient
Mediterranean, Africa, the South Seas, and above all the Orient […] Conventional
painting [in the West] is a lie – not an imposture, but the product of a man who is a
living lie’. Modernism’s ‘Renaissance’ was not just wrong in formal ways, but bad, for
some at any rate, in ideological terms (Motherwell, 1992, 72-81).
Renaissance images that eschew ‘ideology’ and narrative thus, present an attractive
answer to this problem – a foretaste of modernist values – at least to those interested
in the Renaissance. Giorgione has been a favorite of modernists precisely because he
so oten seems to withhold the promised narrative (Greenberg, 1986b, 263). But there
are many other Renaissance objects that present us with narrativeless images – for
example, this ‘ornament’ print attributed to the Master E.S., from the second half
of the iteenth century (ig. 1). In sixteenth-century prints it was not uncommon for
spaces to appear devoid of igures – or to appear indiferently with or without them in
sequences of copies. For instance, artists made etchings of empty ornamental frames
derived from the frescoes at Fontainebleau; sometimes they surround a placid, appar-
ently narrativeless landscape (igs. 2 and 3). In a late sixteenth-century series of etchings
of ancient Rome, the Prospettivi of Mario Cartaro, the settings seem entirely indifer-
ent to the igures: some ancient courtyards exist without any igures at all; other views
show a motley catalogue of genre scenes against the backdrop (as in ig. 4) of the Porta
Maggiore in Rome; while others contain substantial iconographies, like the vision of
the Virgin and Child shown to the Emperor Augustus by the Tiburtine Sibyl. In such
images it seems to be the space that matters, not the story. Jean Gourmont’s print of

IC ONOL O G Y A N D V I S UA L S T U DI E S
 25

| 2 | Master IΦV, Coastal scene in ornament frame with term adorned with sphinxes
and putti, ca. 1540–45, British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum.
| 3 | Master IΦV, Ornament with landscape within square frame,
f lanked by male figures in Roman armor, ca. 1540–45, British
Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Laocoön in a ruined landscape next to a reversed copy that removes the igure shows
the separability of site from story (igs. 5 and 6). Perhaps part of the point was to create
a backdrop that could be copied and reused in diferent contexts; prints were widely
copied both in their entirety and in a piecemeal way, and oten by many generations of
printmakers.
Of course, these objects cannot fall within the realm of Gilbert’s concerns – with
‘pure painting’ – because of their medium. he mid-twentieth century American

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26

| 4 | Mario Cartaro, Porta Maggiore, 1578, University of Chicago Library,

Chicago. University of Chicago Library Special Collections Research Center.

context gave primacy to painting; but since Vasari, and again since Hegel, it was in
the three major media, painting, sculpture, and architecture, that major accomplish-
ments in artistic progress could occur. ‘Ornamental’ images, in general, are a curious
blind spot in the modernist discourse on the desirability of purging narrative from art.
Perhaps this is because the shedding of narrative content is itself a necessary narrative
within the modernist project – at least in its mid-century American, Greenbergian
form. Painting, initially designed to convey narrative, sacriicially sheds it. A medium
or mode never intended for the portrayal of narrative – a parergon – cannot operate the
same sacriice (Derrida, 1987).

IC ONOL O G Y A N D V I S UA L S T U DI E S
 27

| 5 | Jean Gourmont I, Laocoön and his two sons attacked by snakes,

ca. 1520–30, British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum.
| 6 | Monogrammist BF, after Jean Gourmont I, Portico with burning altar (setting of Laocoön),
mid-16th century, British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum.

W i t hou t F e a r of B or de r G ua r d s . T h e R e n a i s s a nc e of V i s ua l C u lt u r e
 he problematic status of Renaissance images that present themselves as overtly
empty, lacking in iconography, seems an apt test of ideas contained in the encounter of
iconology and Visual Studies. At irst blush – and this is part of Gilbert’s argument – it
might seem that iconology would have diiculty handling such works ‘without subject
matter’. Jumping to the methods of the present, it might seem that Visual Studies or
visual culture, on the other hand, would promise some solutions to this problem, yet as
it turns out they raise new questions. Before I proceed I must make an admission vis-à-
vis the program of this volume: I have shited my focus from iconology to iconography
and from Visual Studies to visual culture. he reason I do this is partly that both ico-
nography and visual culture indicate an object (or set of objects) as well as a method for
approaching the object or objects, and partly that, although the term visual culture has
been in use for some time, the approach labeled Visual Studies is still quite undeined.
While refraining from forging new deinitions may imply a reduced set of ambitions, I
also return in the end to a more ambitious recuperation of iconology in the Warburgian
sense. But even the more limited scope of ‘iconography vs. visual culture’ throws into
stark relief the encounter between modernity and the Renaissance.
28
Iconography meets visual culture?

As irst adumbrated by Aby Warburg, iconology was a wide-ranging, intellectually

voracious, boundary-crossing approach; but as practiced in Anglo-American art history
of the postwar period, iconology tended to devolve into ‘iconography’, in other words,
an approach in which authoritative texts controlled unruly images. In this mode
iconology-as-iconography became heavily invested in demonstrations of literary subject
matter in art. Complaints about this development are oten laid at the feet of Erwin
Panofsky, the most powerful exponent of iconology/iconography in the mid-twentieth
century. Certainly, his rationalism deeply inlected the ways methods changed. But the
pedagogical demands of the growing discipline of art history also tended to depsy-
chologize the approach and to reduce its methodological ambitions. Iconography – as
opposed to iconology, the increasingly vexed ‘third level’ of Panofsky’s methodologi-
cal schema – was a practical approach that sidestepped totalizing philosophies; it was
pedagogically efective in its more limited, teachable claims.
One could argue that when iconology meets Visual Studies it inds a part of itself
anew. As a method, visual culture studies highlights biases and gaps in the range of
possibilities present for art historical scholarship in the postwar period and beyond – in
part, a vacuum let by the atrophying of some of the more ambitious elements of iconol-
ogy as envisaged by Warburg. Although many would argue that visual culture too has
been compromised, we might view this approach, at least as it was irst used by art histo-
rians, as a return to some components of Warburgian iconology. When, in his lecture
on the astrological frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Warburg explains the reasoning
behind what he calls ‘critical iconology’, it is a ‘plea for an extension of the methodologi-
cal borders of our study of art, in both material and spatial terms’ (Warburg, 1999, 585).
Ranging ‘without fear of border guards’ (a phrase he also used elsewhere to mark the
hostility of art history to ‘low’ visual materials) between East and West, from antiquity
to the Renaissance, and signiicantly viewing ‘the purest and the most utilitarian of

IC ONOL O G Y A N D V I S UA L S T U DI E S
 arts as equivalent documents of expression’, this approach would allow for the stylistic
achievements of the Renaissance to be viewed as part of a ‘conscious dialectical energy’
– even a ‘battle’ (Warburg, 1999, 319 and 386). his is the Nietzschean Warburg: to
understand the dynamism of Renaissance culture – that is, to view Renaissance classi-
cism as something other than a passive sponge for superior motifs – requires seeing how
the Apollonian depends upon its engagement with and overcoming of the Dionysian.
One cannot, therefore, understand the Renaissance without reckoning with the super-
stitious (and oten ‘Eastern’) practices of frankly pagan character – astrology, in this
case – that traveled with the motifs of classical antiquity as the Renaissance received
them.
If the ideal aspirations of the Renaissance remain a beacon of historical optimism
in Warburg’s view, they cannot remain an unexamined ideal or template. A broader,
more ecumenical approach to the constitution of art history’s disciplinary objects
is required: Warburg makes a strong statement when he declares that a painting by
Francesco del Cossa and an astrological manuscript are ‘equivalent documents of
expression’. In Warburg’s Mnemosyne atlas, a compilation of the result of voracious col-
lecting of imagery, the ‘conscious dialectical energy’ of the Renaissance is materialized 29
as a montage in which juxtaposed images – both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, photographs,
newspaper clippings, book illustrations from diferent times and places – produce
meaning dialectically, through visual analogy, comparison, dialogue (Warburg and
Warnke, 2004). As Philippe-Alain Michaud suggests, Mnemosyne was ‘based on a
cinematic mode of thought, one that […] aims not at articulating meanings but at pro-
ducing efects’ (Michaud, 2004, 278).
his notion of documentary equivalency – a notion to which Gilbert speciically
objects – is shared by Visual Studies. Indeed, it is implied by the very notion of visual
culture itself. Warburg does not, certainly, go as far as some of its practitioners. Given
his areas of focus, we must conclude that he implicitly worked with a notion, like
Panofsky’s, of some objects as monuments and others as documents (Panofsky, 1982). But
Warburg’s ‘equivalence’ suggests a suspension, at least, of preconceptions about value in
order to facilitate interpretation.
I came to this conjunction of iconology and Visual Studies with concerns about the
way visual culture has addressed the Renaissance (or really, art from the late middle
ages to the seventeenth century). But the discourse of modernism is also crucial to our
understanding of the constitution of visual culture as a discipline and method. In the
United States, ‘visual culture’ came to be recognized as an independent force in the
1990’s. he term both claims a status as a new discipline and serves as a method within
art history. By 1996, when the journal October published a questionnaire and largely
critical series of essays on the phenomenon, it had clearly put its stamp on the intel-
lectual discourse of art history. Around the same time authors and publishers began
using the term widely in the titles of books – introductions to visual culture, surveys
of visual culture, and so on. he terms ‘visual culture’ and ‘Visual Studies’ were used
more or less interchangeably in many of the responses to the October questionnaire. By
that point in their institutionalization, doctoral programs already existed, sometimes
combining the two terms (for instance in the University of Rochester’s program in
‘Visual and Cultural Studies’, now joined, for instance, by programs at Duke University,

W i t hou t F e a r of B or de r G ua r d s . T h e R e n a i s s a nc e of V i s ua l C u lt u r e
 the University of Wisconsin, and the University of California at Irvine). In the 1996
October questionnaire, it was largely modernists who viewed the notion with suspi-
cion, as something that did not merely respond to commodity culture, but cheered it
on, taking no critical distance from the lurry of undiferentiated images of consumer
culture – rather luxuriating in them. he existence of ‘non-art’ objects of study for art
history has not seemed to worry scholars working outside the modern. On the other
hand, in his response to the questionnaire, homas Crow suggested that visual culture
‘accepts without question the view that art is to be deined by its working exclusively
through the optical faculties’, which is, as he also noted, one of the cherished views
of modernism of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Crow’s statement assumes that visual culture
concerns itself with art – as opposed to concerning itself merely with the visual. But the
larger point holds: many characteristics of art are excluded if one takes as deinitional
the visual character of ‘visual culture’, and this emphasis certainly resonates with the
preoccupations of modernism.

he Renaissance of visual culture

30
As I suggested above, non-modern ields of study within art history – premodern and
non-Western – have not experienced the same sense of crisis over the term ‘visual
culture’ or the ield ‘Visual Studies’ because they were never as invested in the modern
aesthetic notion of the art object. But what about the Renaissance, which once was
central to the disciplinary constitution of the category of art – in which, it is oten
argued, the modern notion of art came to be deined? he Renaissance has been
strangely central to the constitution of the notion of visual culture. Michael Baxandall
has sometimes been credited with the invention of the term, in his 1972 book Painting
and Experience in Fiteenth-Century Italy: Svetlana Alpers cites his inluence in her
own book, the Art of Describing, in which she particularizes the notion of visual culture
as the culture of vision.2 In Painting and Experience, Baxandall attempted to recon-
struct what he called the ‘period eye’ and proposed a view of painting as ‘the deposit of a
social relationship’. He asks us to recognize that art of the Quattrocento was seen with
the ‘eye’ of a particular moment rather than from a universal and transcendent vantage
point.
his is thus a relativist argument. In historicizing the Renaissance Baxandall shited
the view of what the Renaissance was; in his hands it was no longer a model of ageless
beauty in a Western tradition of continuous revival and response. Baxandall’s work
drew inspiration from anthropological research on cross-cultural perception in a
non-European context. One of these studies, a research project entitled he Inluence
of Culture on Visual Perception (undertaken by two psychologists working with
an anthropologist of Africa, Melville Herkovits), was one of the very few scholarly
works Baxandall cites in his notes (Baxandall, 1988, 160). his cross-cultural study on

2 Since then there has been a mild controversy: in the infamous October questionnaire, Thomas
Dacosta Kaufmann wrote that as far as he could find, Baxandall had not used the phrase ‘visual
culture’ in Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy. This is actually not true (he did
on p. 141) but on Kaufmann’s authority at least one other scholar has made the sweeping claim
that Baxandall ‘never used the phrase.’ (Castañeda, 2009, 43).

IC ONOL O G Y A N D V I S UA L S T U DI E S
perceptual reponses to optical illusions made it clear that the way people see is condi-
tioned by their environment. In other words, vision is not simply an innate biological
function: visual culture means that vision is cultural. It cannot be underestimated, too,
as an early study that showed clearly that inhabitants of the plains of Africa, taken as
a group, were better at certain perceptual tasks than inhabitants of cities of Europe or
North America, taken as a group (and vice versa): that these diferences were produced
by the visual and spatial environment in which individuals grew up, as opposed to
being innate. One might not guess without reading Baxandall’s notes that his now-clas-
sic text on Renaissance art was inluenced by anthropological ieldwork done in Africa.
But it suggests that one might view his work as a strong statement, not just a subtle or
implicit one, in favor of ‘relativizing’ the value of Italian Renaissance art by analyzing
why certain elements (such as materials or skill) were viewed as valuable in particular
places and times.
How does Baxandall’s ‘period eye’ with its particular understanding of visual
culture stand in relation to iconography or iconology more generally? It shares with
iconology a certain omnivorousness, its ‘documentary equivalency’. he Gilbert essay
I cited at the outset takes iconography to task for this – that ‘weakest engraving’ that 31
fascinates the iconographer (Gilbert, 1952, 202). By contrast Gilbert asserts that ‘it can
be strongly argued that the only raison d’être for art history is that works of art create
values in objects, and that the scholar’s duty is mainly to analyze this process’. Here, I
want to signal the parallelism between iconology and Visual Studies, or visual culture,
in this regard. his same critique – of a method that lattens everything out, makes no
aesthetic distinctions, considers all visual materials, however trivial, indiferently as
potential objects of its analyses – has been leveled at both.
For Gilbert, the basic opposition is between the valuing and the decoding of works
of art; formalists do the irst and iconographers the second. Baxandall addresses both
these approaches as problems to be examined, not as simply given. It might be argued
that his concern is still with the ‘reading’ of images, how contemporary viewers received
and interpreted a visual image: not necessarily how we read them, but how their con-
temporaries did; or, rather, how we might fashion ourselves a period eye to see through
their eyes. Baxandall, too, suggests that subject matter was not of primary interest to
the client who commissioned works of art: in many cases, other qualities – the value of
materials, the skill of the artist – were primary.
Iconology (as iconography) is opposed on the one hand by connoisseurship and
formalism, approaches that stress the determination and communication of aesthetic
value, but might be challenged, in other ways, by visual culture (which more or less
shares its approach to value). If iconography privileged art as the visualization of nar-
rative, the ‘new art history’ of the 1970’s (to which Baxandall is generally assumed to
belong) explicitly required other kinds of cultural knowledge. Baxandall wanted to
understand how people saw, not simply what it meant to them. He suggested implicitly
that the concern with deciphering subject matter is a historically situated concern.
If he enables us to see alternative forms of iconography in the gesture of the Virgin
Annunciate, he also shows the shiting priorities of buyers in the iteenth century
who were usually more concerned with materials or labor or both than they were with
the speciics of depiction. Rather than seeking out obscure literary sources to explain

W i t hou t F e a r of B or de r G ua r d s . T h e R e n a i s s a nc e of V i s ua l C u lt u r e
 unusual iconographic details that illustrate them, Baxandall attempted to provide a
reading of codes of gesture, emotion, economic imperatives, or mathematical thinking,
as a way of building up a sense of the broader culture in which a certain form of art
emerged.
If Baxandall’s approach resonated to some extent with iconology’s ‘documen-
tary equivalency’, resistance to iconology-as-iconography is far more pronounced in
Svetlana Alpers’s sense of the term ‘visual culture’ in her Art of Describing. Where
Baxandall asserted that vision is cultural, Alpers examined the culture of vision. But
if Baxandall implicitly shits the ground of iconology by using texts in very difer-
ent ways, as keys to visual properties and to response rather than to the intricacies of
textual meaning, Alpers situates herself much more explicitly in opposition to icono-
graphy. For her this takes on a geographic character: the Italian Renaissance art that
has served as the model for much of the writing of art history is invested in narrative,
while seventeenth-century Dutch art, she suggested, was concerned rather with what
she called ‘picturing’. Dutch painting – at least the type that interests Alpers – depicts,
or reconstructs, the process of seeing itself, as a central function of the construction of
32 knowledge about the world. Alpers contrasts this with Italian art in which, she assumes,
the paint surface denies its own existence as paint in order to provide a transparent
view on a ictive, narrative world. What’s more obvious in Alpers’s account than in
Baxandall’s is how very much the oppositions she sets up derive from the discourse of
modernism. Greenbergian modernism, too, rejects ‘iconography’, insists on truth to
materials, and concerns itself with optical experience. he overcoming of iconography
is the key move, and with it the overcoming of the ‘Albertian’ mode of perspective (a
topic on which I will say more in a moment). How do the ainities between Alpers’s
‘visual culture’ and modernism relect the term’s history up until that point?

Our visual culture

Michael Baxandall was not the irst person to use the phrase ‘visual culture’ in the
context of art, though he may have invented it independently. he usage of the phrase,
in fact, has a complex history that helps illuminate some of the directions taken by art
history during and ater modernism. In 1969, Caleb Gattegno published a book called
Towards a Visual Culture: Educating through Television, an argument for pedagogi-
cal uses of television. Gattegno believed that humans had barely begun to explore
the possibilities of visual communication embedded in the new medium, and that it
would facilitate the creation of an entirely new and utopian culture. Meanwhile, art
critic Hilton Kramer had begun using the term in his reviews in the New York Times.
‘No development’, he wrote, ‘in the popular visual culture of the 1960’s has been more
striking than the revival of the poster’ (Kramer, 1968). Elsewhere he wrote, explain-
ing that in his view art requires a ‘dialectic of innovation and conservation’ – that is,
both avant-garde and conservative elements – that ‘our visual culture would have a
good deal less resonance and size without it’ (Kramer, 1969). Mural artist John Pitman
Weber, a professor at Elmhurst College, taught a class in 1969 that examined ‘popular
visual culture, television, comics, popular magazines, city streets, and political art’
(Chicago Tribune, 1969). hese usages – hortatory for Gattegno, surprisingly neutral

IC ONOL O G Y A N D V I S UA L S T U DI E S
in the case of Kramer and avowedly populist in the case of Weber – may have derived
indirectly from the work of the Canadian media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, who
used the phrase in quite a diferent way. McLuhan became a pop culture igure in the
1960’s with his books Understanding Media and he Gutenberg Galaxy, in which he
argued that consciousness was fundamentally shaped not by the content conveyed – by
whatever medium – but by the characteristic features of the media themselves. he
1964 textbook Understanding Media was his irst work to use the term ‘visual culture’
(McLuhan, 1964, 45, 118, 121, 137 and 282). Visual culture is identiied with American
culture speciically, but more broadly Western culture since the Renaissance, governed
by the single-point perspective with its creation of a notion of mathematically uniform
space.
But by exactly 40 years, McLuhan was not the irst to use the term – at least if its
presence in the German language is considered. he Hungarian ilm theorist Béla
Balázs irst used the term ‘visuelle Kultur’ in German in his book Das sichtbare Mensch,
published in 1924 (Balázs, 1924, 16). he key chapter was reprinted in English in 1952
in heory of the Film (Balázs, 1952, 40). Both Balázs and McLuhan, who both used
the term ‘visual culture’ and both considered the Renaissance to have constituted the 33
chief historical break in visuality, understand that break in entirely opposite ways.
Balázs wrote:

‘he discovery of printing gradually rendered illegible the faces of men.

So much could be read from paper that the method of conveying meaning
by facial expression fell into desuetude. Victor Hugo once wrote that the
printed book took over the part played by the cathedral in the Middle Age
[…] he visual spirit was thus turned into a legible spirit and visual culture
into a culture of concepts’ (Balázs, 1952, 40).

For Balázs, it was ilm that brought visual culture back – that made culture visual
(and not just textual) again. With characteristically modernist optimism, he argued
that ilm restored possibilities of visual expression and created new possibilities for
visual literacy:

‘Now the ilm is about to inaugurate a new direction in our culture. Many
million people sit in the picture houses every evening and purely through
vision, experience happenings, characters, emotions, moods, even thoughts,
without the need for many words. For words do not touch the spiritual
content of the pictures and are merely passing instruments of as yet
undeveloped forms of art […] his is not a language of signs as a substitute
for words […] it is the visual means of communication’ (Balázs, 1952, 41).

he speciicity of the visual is in its capacity to express ‘inner experiences’ and ‘non-
rational emotions’, a superior form of expression to achieve the communication of the
inefable (Balázs, 1952, 40). Balázs also emphasizes the power of visual media to con-
struct subjectivity. While his utopianism is not as pronounced as Gattegno’s, he does
suggest that the visual culture wrought by ilm will bring about a ‘new man’.

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 Beyond this, the language of the close-up, facial features, gestures, and the inter-
pretive capacities produced by montage, also, he believed, had the potential to cross
linguistic (and hence ethnic) boundaries. his position resonates with the ambitions,
within certain sectors of modernism, to break down cultural boundaries. Modernist
primitivism had brought imagery derived from other places and times to the center of
art production in modern Europe (Flam and Deutch, 2003). Formalism was sometimes
held to promise a more universal visual language in which the contributions of difer-
ent times and places could be judged on their merits. Clement Greenberg wrote in an
essay on Paul Klee that the School of Paris made it ‘possible to ind valid art anywhere
in history and geography’ (Greenberg, 1995, 5). In this he echoes Ozenfant, Malraux,
and others.3 his is not Warburg’s ‘documentary equivalency’, but it suggests a certain
parallel with those wide-ranging visual interests. For Balázs, the forms of visual
expression in ilm are universal, and, he suggests, ‘ilm […] will greatly aid in levelling
physical diferences between the various races and nations and will thus be one of the
most useful pioneers in the development towards an international universal humanity’
(Balázs, 1952, 42).
34
he reduction of/to the visual

In stark opposition to Balázs’s optimism about the visual – a position with which he
was familiar – McLuhan sees ‘visual culture’ as a distinctly negative state of afairs
(Nyíri and Fleissner, 1999, 8). ‘Visual culture’ speciically described Western culture
since the Renaissance – the now banal ‘we live in a visual culture’ – and was the result
of pictorial perspective, which created a culture and a set of perceptual assumptions
that privileged the visual over the other senses. his was the inal result, he argues, of
phonetic writing: ‘the phonetic alphabet had […] invaded the discontinuous cultures
of the barbarians, and translated their sinuosities and obtusities into the uniformi-
ties of the ‘visual culture’ of the Western world’ (McLuhan, 1964, 118). McLuhan is a
primitivist in the fullest sense of the term, both condescending and admiring. Non-
Western cultures, in their very unselfconsciousness, are (for him) paradigms of a future
toward which the ‘civilized’ West tends, and for which is should prepare itself. Phonetic
writing, he argues, produced the possibility of Euclidean space. How does writing
create a spatial mode? he notion is counterintuitive. For McLuhan, phonetic writing,
‘a drastic visual abstraction’, made language a matter of visual convention (McLuhan,
1964, 141). hese quotes are from McLuhan’s text Understanding Media, which derived
from his work on a 1960 study, funded by the National Association of Educational
Broadcasters, and submitted as a report to the federal government of the United States.
In Report on Project in Understanding New Media, he writes: ‘he phonetic alphabet
alone, of all forms of writing, translates the audible and the tactile into the visible and
the abstract. Letters, the language of civilization, have the power of translating all of
our senses into visual and pictorial space’ (McLuhan, 1960, 4). One might imagine that

3 (Ozenfant, 1929): passim (his procedure in using photography is to create formal parallels
between imagery from different times and places; note especially p. 205, ‘Voilà les nuances de
races, peu de chose: essayez de leur prendre leur femme et vous verrez si leur fond est divers’),
(Malraux, 1956, 126).

IC ONOL O G Y A N D V I S UA L S T U DI E S
Chinese characters do more to turn sounds into images, but for McLuhan they do not
operate by the same process of abstraction and translation because they remain visual
adaptations of visible things: iconic signs (to borrow Peirce’s term), rather than the
symbolic signs of phonetic writing, universally applicable and translatable, separable,
conventional. Geometric space, commensurable and completely mappable, derives
from the same way of thinking.
he Renaissance, for McLuhan, furthered the process begun by phonetic writing.
Perspectival pictorial representation produces our ‘visual culture’. he Renaissance,
and the primacy of the visual sense that it brought about, ‘creates the forms of space
and time that are uniform, continuous, and connected’ (McLuhan and McLuhan,
1995, 347). By contrast, when not subsumed into the visual, the other senses encounter
the world by accretion, building up perception in a fragmentary, ‘mosaic-like’ way
that does not assume a uniied ield. With ‘the Gutenberg teaching machines and the
Renaissance explosion in learning’ there was a ‘swit decline of dialogue and the seeking
of an exclusively visual order’ (McLuhan, 1960, xv). he ‘decline of dialogue’, notably,
inds an echo in the title Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, the book by Walter
Ong – a student of McLuhan – which focused on the pedagogical and epistemological 35
changes wrought by Peter Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée) in the late sixteenth-century
universities of Paris and beyond; Ong argues Ramus’s spatialization of knowledge was
an important force in the loss of dialogue as pedagogical and scholarly method.
McLuhan’s emphases, and his grounding in the work of art historians, can be
illuminated by looking at the Report, a document especially interesting in what it
reveals about the genealogy of McLuhan’s ideas. McLuhan’s notion of the efects of
perspectival painting was shaped by the claims made by art historians: for instance,
Heinrich Wöllin has what for McLuhan is a key insight in stating (in his Principles of
Art History) that ‘the efect is the thing that counts, not the sensuous facts’ (Wöllin,
1932, 62). What is a bit strange is that Wöllin states this as part of an argument that his
stylistic categories (such as the linear and the painterly) transcend the various artistic
media – a view at odds with McLuhan’s understanding of the power of the medium.
But for McLuhan the key is the point about ‘efects’: the efect is more important than
any sort of inherent content.
McLuhan believed the ‘visuality’ of twentieth-century culture was changing rapidly.
He argues that art since Cézanne had moved more in the direction of the mosaic-like
qualities of ‘aural’ culture – what he called ‘all-at-once-ness’ over and above ‘one-at-a-
timeness’. Given all this it seems strange that in the Report’s list of media, McLuhan
entirely omits the historically deined ine arts – painting, sculpture, and architec-
ture – from his survey of the diferent media (speech, writing, printing, pictorial
prints, television, ilm, the telephone, etc.). Painting seems to pose a distinct problem:
McLuhan wants to argue that the forms of the media structure human experience
and sociality. his structuring depends on the media being mass media, shared across
a broad swath of society. Pictorial perspective, for McLuhan, has an overwhelmingly
powerful role. And yet this role is in decline almost as soon as it begins to hold sway:
pictorial perspective can hardly be said to have been a mass phenomenon before the
seventeenth century, and yet ever since then it has been dissolving: ‘the Western world
since Newton has steadily dissolved Euclidean space and pictorial illusion’ (McLuhan,

W i t hou t F e a r of B or de r G ua r d s . T h e R e n a i s s a nc e of V i s ua l C u lt u r e
 1960, 4-5). his tension may be resolved by another claim McLuhan makes: that artists
are media experimenters. Artists, McLuhan feels, are the irst to test out new ideas
before the media to support them are truly in place. he ‘ine’ arts may thus be relevant
as illustrations of concepts later tried out in mass media, but are not themselves forma-
tive of the contemporary world. his may also explain the usefulness of the insights of
art historians for McLuhan: they have a head start on the study of media.4
With McLuhan’s focus on pictorial perspective, ‘visual culture’ makes a statement
about the reduction of spatiality and multisensory experience to the visual. his is
relected, too, in the challenge Svetlana Alpers posed to historiography in her book he
Art of Describing. If iconography and Albertian perspective are typically Italian modes
of art viewing and art making, their inluence on the ield (she suggests) has been perni-
cious in the ways that they exclude phenomena of Northern art from consideration. In
her terse reply to the October questionnaire, Alpers described her use of ‘visual culture’
as a focus on ‘notions about vision (the mechanism of the eye), on image-making
devices (the microscope, the camera obscura), and on visual skills (map-making, but
also experimenting) as cultural resources related to the practice of painting’ (Alpers,
36 1996, 26). Alpers’s understanding of seventeenth-century Dutch visuality has much in
common with the modernist rejection of iconography. She critiques Italian perspective,
which, she argues, since Alberti, creates a transparent ‘window’ looking onto a space
in which narrative is to be deployed. She concerns herself with ofering an alternative
approach to the work of painters who sought to record the experience of vision – under-
stood in this context as a more tactile and empirical mode of seeing than its Italian
counterpart.
McLuhan’s notion of visual hegemony appears to contradict, implicitly, Balázs’s
– and perhaps Alpers’s – sense of the pernicious domination of the literary over the
visual. A certain undecidability remains between two positions: the visual is hegemonic
(McLuhan’s visual culture) or the visual needs to be defended rom the depredations
of narrative (modernist discourses, including Alpers’s). When Alpers uses the term
‘visual culture’, in opposition to the iconographic emphasis of art historical methodol-
ogy, is she in fact asserting the very same hegemony of the visual that McLuhan argues
against?
Balázs may be able to help us here. For him, the visual precisely harbors sensory,
sensual, information that has been suppressed by the emphasis placed on the textual
in the modern world since the Renaissance. In a debate with Sergei Eisenstein, Balázs
had argued strenuously against the reduction of the visual in ilm to a system of signs
modeled on verbal language.5 McLuhan, decades later, awash in a visual culture

4 McLuhan’s reading of art and cultural historians includes Malraux, Gilson, Arnheim,
Gombrich, Wölfflin, Ivins, Panofsky, Giedion, Berenson and Huizinga.
5 P. Michaud, in his Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, 282-3, addresses this debate, suggesting
that it illuminates the affinity between Eisenstein and Warburg, but, I think, misses a potential
point of conflict between them. Balázs emphasizes the specificity of the visual, seeing Eisenstein as
overly preoccupied with creating a language of film in which images correspond to verbal concepts
in a one-to-one manner; Eisenstein sees Balázs as a bourgeois individualist who focuses on the work
of the cameraman as the work of art, promoting aesthetic properties of shots (as if they were paint-
ings) without giving sufficient attention to the relationships between shots created by montage
(and the structural parallel in the collective work of creating a film), (Eisenstein, 1988, 77-81).

IC ONOL O G Y A N D V I S UA L S T U DI E S
rendered abstract, sees the same break but in an opposite way. In fact, Alpers is pro-
moting a diferent model of visuality. Her Keplerian perspective is a non-hierarchical
description of things seen, much like McLuhan’s ‘mosaic’: vision rendered more tactile,
technical, and sensory. One might suggest that, with Greenberg and Balázs, Alpers
brings the visual back to its own speciic resources as a way of detaching it from the
ideological baggage of its subjection to narrative. his would be a visual sense that
McLuhan could approve. He, too, is arguing for form over content, for the incommen-
surability of the diferent senses: medium-speciicity; accumulation, not translation.6
Both McLuhan and Alpers appeal to an anti-rational thread in modernism and moder-
nity, an attempt to recover sensation that cannot be verbalized. Diferent thinkers may
place their boundaries in diferent time periods, diferent media, and diferent ields
of sense, but both McLuhan and Alpers react explicitly against models that derive
from a particular understanding of Italian Renaissance perspective. If the modern age
since the Renaissance is blamed for its rationalism, its primacy of concept over sensory
experience, the postmodern that beckoned ofered little comfort: McLuhan himself
wrote: ‘Personally, I feel quite helpless and panicky as I contemplate the range of new
assumptions and frames and parameters which our new technology has imposed upon 37
us’ (McLuhan, 1960, 8).

In conclusion

he double modern heritage of the term ‘visual culture’ – celebratory and critical –
reveals itself in the preoccupations of art historians in the later twentieth and early
twenty-irst centuries. Oten we want to assert the independence of the visual from
the verbal, even as the work of art history, or ‘Visual Studies’, necessarily involves
words; and we oten, still, ind ourselves mapping ideological diferences onto the split
between historical periods, in particular the Renaissance. To return to the images I
began with, I would like to add one more example. Found in a tiny French book of
hours in a Washington, D.C. private collection, exhibited in 2009 in the Walters Art
Gallery’s Prayers in Code exhibition, it might be considered a limit case of ‘igureless’
space.7 For purposes of simplicity I will call the book the Oval Hours, ater the shape
into which the book was trimmed – at some moment in its history, probably in the
seventeenth century (ig. 7). Its six full-page miniatures have been attributed to Noel
Bellemare, a painter from Antwerp, and dated to the second quarter of the sixteenth
century (Bagnoli, 2009).8 he associated workshop appears to have produced, around
that time, a number of books of hours for Jean Lallemant le Jeune, a regional treasurer
and royal councilor who also served as mayor of the town of Bourges. Among these

6 He might certainly have assented to Greenberg’s statement that ‘painting and sculpture can
become completely nothing but what they do.’ (Greenberg, 1986, 34).
7 On manuscript illumination in France in the first half of the sixteenth century: (Orth, 1976 and
Crépin-Leblond and Orth, 1993). On Jean Lallemant le Jeune and manuscripts made for him:
(Orth, 1980 and Büttner, 2004).
8 In particular Robert Schindler, ‘Jean Lallemant’s Books of hours and French manuscript
illumination’.

W i t hou t F e a r of B or de r G ua r d s . T h e R e n a i s s a nc e of V i s ua l C u lt u r e
38 | 7 | Noel Bellemare (?),
The Annunciation, second
quarter 16th century, private
collection, Washington, D.C.
Copyright resides with owner.

is a closely related manuscript, a book of hours in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek at he

Hague in the Netherlands.9
his is an object that, if taken as a privileged moment of artistic innovation, is
destined to disappoint. It was made in a medium considered well past its prime, in the
presumed artistic backwater of sixteenth-century France. It is very tiny and its images
are intellectually challenging; at the same time, this book and its ilk seem to have gener-
ated few consequences in later art. One might associate such objects with the complex
intellectualism of mannerism – oten considered one of its negative qualities – yet they
seem to exist in a diferent, precious jewel-toned universe. One element of this distance
may be in the fact that the complexity of mannerist design is oten dependent on bodily
acrobatics, whereas this book’s illuminations dispense with bodies almost entirely. In
my example, in the scene of the Annunciation, which normally would show the Angel

9 The Morgan Library possesses three leaves from a somewhat earlier French manuscript in
which the primary subjects of the illuminations are flowers and insects – another instance of
unusual (and figureless) iconography. Morgan M.1051.1-3. (Brenninkmeijer-de Rooij, 1996, 7-8),
thanks to Roger Wieck for pointing this manuscript out to me.

IC ONOL O G Y A N D V I S UA L S T U DI E S
 conveying his message to the pious Virgin Mary, there are no igures. he setting is
recognizably one in which an Annunciation should take place, and indeed, a golden
burst of light, conveying the incarnation, does appear in the appropriate place. But the
scene is empty. More than the Cartaro prints, these diminutive paintings, to a modern
eye, suggest removal. heir environments and attributes allude to established icono-
graphies, but the spaces seem to have been purged of their igures. And in this notion
of the removal of the igure, it is tempting to see a parallel with modernist notions like
those that inspired Gilbert: paintings without subjects; small paintings conceived as
purely visual scenes.
But what invitation might such images extend to the viewer – to inhabit the space
imaginatively, to reconstitute the image? he prayer book confounds many of the
distinctions on which the discourses I have addressed here are based: visual vs. verbal
communication, the visual vs. the tactile sense; even high vs. low media. Iconography,
obviously, can get us only so far with these images. What about ‘visual culture’? With
the little book of hours we are forced to think about what’s not in the picture, and in a
sense this is always the trouble for art history – of the many things not in the picture,
how to determine which ones are relevant to it and which ones are not? In this case the 39
thing not in the picture and yet nonetheless invited into the picture is the viewer. If
Visual Studies expand upon iconology’s willingness to consider a broad range of media
without entirely leaving art behind, it must also expand the notion of what it means to
‘read’ an image. Some objects do not exist to deliver a meaning in the sense of ‘content’
but rather to prompt a practice. he tiny Oval Hours and many other objects like them
can be studied as visual culture, but presumably had little agency in the construction
of a hegemonic perspectival space. he space presented in the Oval Hours cannot be
considered ‘Euclidean’ space, even as the illuminator was fully aware of linear perspec-
tive. He created not sweeping perspectival view but rather a space that, on the one
hand, is tactile and painterly, and, on the other, is to be transcended through visionary
experience. While the scenes in this book are made to be viewed, they do not ofer a
magisterial view through a palace window, but a tiny, jewel-like, mirror. Instead, they
must be understood in terms of interior space, practices of visualization, and the close
intertwining of the visual, the textual, and the other senses. Can we hold together the
ambitions of the partisans of visual culture as a method with McLuhan’s critique of its
historical purchase on the West? Perhaps Warburg’s ‘historical psychology of human
expression’ could provide inspiration (Warburg, 1999, 585). Could visual culture
involve itself with attention to the imagination, mental images, forms of identiication
and projection, the invisible, the unseeable, the blank? It seems important to account
for the relationship of the visual not only to the material and to the other senses but
also to space as lived, touched, imagined, and constantly constructed both imagina-
tively and through the body. Visual Studies understood in its fullest form cannot be
only visual; it must understand, too, how the viewer can be called to perform actively
in the work, how spatial experience and the other senses shape and are shaped by visual
experience.

W i t hou t F e a r of B or de r G ua r d s . T h e R e n a i s s a nc e of V i s ua l C u lt u r e
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