Transcript
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MIMESIS AND ICONOCLASM

K E I T H M O X E Y

[. . .] to represent signifies to present oneself as representing something, and every repre-

sentation, every sign or representational process, includes a dual dimension – a reflexive

dimension, presenting oneself; a transitive dimension, representing something – a dual effect –

the subject effect and the object effect.1

Louis Marin, 2001

Mimesis: that unending record of our continuing beguilement with the appear-ance of the world around us. Why have artists throughout the ages striven tocapture the enduring poetry and power of what we call reality? What is theabiding need to find pictorial means to capture the fleeting appearance and

1 Thomas Demand, Window, 1998. Chromogenic print on Diasec, 183� 286.5 cm. Private collection.

Photo: r 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8365.2008.00648.xART HISTORY . ISSN 0141–6790 . VOL 32 NO 1 . FEBRUARY 2009 pp 52-77

52 & Association of Art Historians 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing,9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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transient sensations that constitute perceptual experience? Such questions raisedeep and enduring philosophical issues. How do we relate to the world thatappears to pre-exist and surround us? To what extent is that world distinct fromour involvement in it? Can we separate ourselves enough from its embrace toknow it with any degree of ‘objectivity’? What is the nature of our entanglementwith objects – found or created? Do we give them life by developing ways to valueand understand them or do they call us into being? Who ventriloquizes whom?Do we make objects speak by speaking and representing them, or do they promptand shape our response to their presence?2 Why, once again, try to articulate thefascination held by the mimetic encounter?3 This essay addresses the complextransactions inaugurated between the work of art and its beholder both now andin the past. With Hans Holbein’s portraits as its anchor, the purpose of thisexercise is twofold: to confront the poetic appeal of this sixteenth-century Germanartist’s skills at capturing the qualities of perception, and to address the role thathis portraits, with their intense observations of the texture of everyday life, mighthave played in an age in which the Reformation engendered a deep suspicion andopen hostility to the traditional functions of late-medieval naturalism.

Instead of looking at the ideological agendas inscribed in the material fabricof the image, or analysing the ways in which the apparently transparent surfaceof the illusionistic rhetoric of Renaissance painting serves both to articulate andto conceal the interests of those responsible for its creation, I want to look at theother side of the mimetic impulse. Stepping through the looking glass, as it were,

2 Thomas Demand, Glass, 2002. Chromogenic print on Diasec, 58 � 40 cm. Private collection.

Photo: r 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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I consider its reception as much as its production. Holbein’s painstakingnegotiations with the real have a continuing interest that matches the fascina-tion it held for those who first witnessed his pictures. There is a hauntinglyaffective dimension to his portraits, for they address us as much as we addressthem. The searing quality of their realism makes us ponder the very nature ofmimesis. Where does the agency of the mimetic image lie: in its representationalcapacity to record and thus interpret experience in such a way as to triggerinvoluntary memory; in its presentational power to create an entirely newexperience – a substitute for the ‘real’ thing; or in its ability to do both simul-taneously? I will argue that Holbein’s mimesis contains an unconscious dimen-sion whose eruption in what is perhaps his most famous painting, TheAmbassadors, offers us an insight into the preternatural sense of presence withwhich his portraits continue to beguile us.

Let us approach the paintings of Hans Holbein by going backwards in time –by looking at the way the concept of mimesis is currently being interrogated bycontemporary artists. Consider two photographs by the German artist ThomasDemand called Window, which dates from 1998, and Glass from 2002 (plates 1 and2).4 Neither of these photographs is taken of the objects from which they taketheir titles; that is, they do not record the actual appearance of either a window ora pane of glass, but rather they are trick photographs, carefully constructed paperand cardboard models that resemble a shaded window and a piece of brokenglass. Nothing in these photographs serves a referential function. The linkbetween the most indexical of artistic media and the world to which it was once

3 Hiroshi Sugimoto, Henry VIII,

1999. Photograph,

149.2 � 119.4 cm. Berlin:

Solomon R. Guggenheim

Museum. Photo: r Courtesy

Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin.

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thought to be attached, has been deliberately broken. Photography has, of course,been susceptible to such manipulation since its invention, but Demand hasmethodically called into question qualities, such as the immediacy and reliabilityof perception, often regarded as the medium’s quintessential characteristics. Hispictures also constitute an assault on the Renaissance idea of perspective –literally representation’s capacity to look through a window onto the world. Notonly is Demand’s window obscured by drawn blinds, but the glass is opaque. Thetraditional theory of mimetic representation that identifies it with the imitationof nature – important, by the way, for Holbein’s reception, as well as his self-understanding – is confronted with evidence of its inadequacy. If lifelike effectscan be constructed, then the game of mimesis no longer requires the imitation ofnature – the rules have been changed. While these photographs do not depend onobjects in the real world for their existence, the fact that they resemble suchobjects suggests that there might be a connection after all. What is it about ourexperience of the world that continues to intrigue us even when we look atrepresentations of that world that we know have been artfully fabricated?

Holbein’s work, and its status as one of the greatest documents of themimetic impulse in Western art, has drawn the attention of several othercontemporary photographers impressed with both his fact and his fiction:his apparent record of the real and the means by which he persuades usof its authenticity. The Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, for example,has done a series of works that refer to Holbein’s paintings, but whichdo so indirectly (plates 3 and 4).5 Rather than photograph Holbein’s pictures,

4 Circle of Hans Holbein,

Henry VIII, c. 1540. Oil on

panel, 82.55 � 73.66 cm.

Rome: Galleria Nazionale

d’Art Antica. Photo: r Scala/

Art Resource, NY.

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Sugimoto photographed the waxworks based on his paintings in MadameTussaud’s museum in London. Deeply indebted to Holbein’s characterizations ofphysiognomy and costume, these figures alter his poses so as to suggest animation.Instead of being posed frontally or in three-quarter profile, as in Holbein’sportraits, the effigies assume casual poses so that they appear to be in the midst ofaction. Sugimoto’s photographs use the referential traditions associated withphotography – its links to documentation and the archive – to capture the qualityof Holbein’s mimesis at one remove. The wax figures allow Sugimoto to add ‘life’to Holbein’s canonical documents of the life of his own time, thus animatingimages usually considered inert. Reversing Roland Barthes’s conclusion thatphotography is the ally of death, a medium that mortifies the living by arrestingtheir movement,6 Sugimoto’s achievement lies in bringing at least their effigiesto life.

Cindy Sherman’s ‘History Portraits’ series, based mainly on Italian Renais-sance prototypes but with quotations that are often generic, also betrays afascination with Holbein’s reputation as a master of mimesis (plate 5). TheAmerican artist has photographed herself in the guise of the sitters for some ofthe most famous portraits of the past. Transparently fake, her disguises serve notso much to conceal her identity as to reveal it. By inserting herself into theseworks, Sherman simultaneously mocks their canonical status and their extra-ordinary verisimilitude. These venerable objects of the art-historical traditionbecome the object of a well-aimed parody. Unlike Sugimoto, whose photographsof waxworks serve to endow Holbein’s practice of mimesis with uncanny life,Sherman uses her chameleon powers of impersonation to reduce the canon to aparodic series of fancy-dress costumes.7

The work of these contemporary artists, who both admire and ridiculeHolbein’s mimetic achievement, encourages us to see and think about his paint-ings anew. What is it about his art that prompts this kind of response? The art-historical literature on the artist tends to emphasize the reception of his paintingsin the historical horizon in which the artist lived. Recent studies, such as those ofOskar B.atschmann and Pascal Griener, or even Mark Roskill and Craig Harbison,use the historical record to emphasize the role played by Pliny the Elder’s praise ofApelles in his Natural History.8 They argue, convincingly, that Holbein’s work wasdominated by allusions to this ancient text, and that it was crucial to Holbein’s ownconception of his talent. They claim that Holbein’s art was understood bycontemporary humanists through the terms of the praise heaped on verisimilitudeby the ancient author, whose authority had been endorsed by a Renaissance eliteanxious to legitimate the art of their own time. These are important iconologicalcontributions to the study of these works; but our analyses of art need not berestricted to the ideological programmes that may have inspired it. Let us lookelsewhere in order to draw closer to our prey – the lure of mimesis. In a remarkablelittle text written in 1939, Walter Benjamin argued that the capacity for imitationwas one of the most important aspects of human experience:

Nature creates similarities; one need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing

similarities, however, is man’s. His gift of seeing similarity is nothing but a rudiment of the

once powerful compulsion to become similar and to behave mimetically. There is perhaps not a

single one of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.9

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According to this fundamental insight, pictorial mimesis is a two-way street inwhich human beings not only imitate the world around them but also respond tothe very means by which they do so. W. J. T. Mitchell has recently posed thestriking question: ‘What do pictures want?’10 Believing that we tend to investworks of art with a life of their own, and that they, in turn, play an important rolein our cultural lives, he insists that in animating them we grant them a form of‘secondary agency’.11 Rather than try to establish what images mean – asconnoisseurship, stylistic analysis, iconography, social history, Marxism,feminism, queer theory, ethnic studies, post-colonialism and other forms of art-historical interpretation seek to accomplish – Mitchell is interested in what theydo. He argues that even if we do not believe that images possess powers of theirown, we gain much insight from approaching them as if they might.12 Rather thanview nature as inert, a passive ground against which the active figure of ‘man’makes an appearance, anthropologists have also become increasingly sensitive topatterns of human behaviour that appear to mimic, or analogize, aspects of theworld around them. Alfred Gell, for example, develops a most suggestive theory of

5 Cindy Sherman, Untitled #213, 1989. Colour photograph, 105.41 �83.82 cm. Edition of 6. Photo: Courtesy of Artist and Metro Pictures.

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art that depends on a consonance between itand culture. Humans tend to project into theirvisual art the forms of social organization thatstructure their everyday interactions:

Artworks, in other words, come in families, lineages,

tribes, whole populations, just like people. They have

relations with one another as well as with the people

who create and circulate them as individual objects.

They marry, so to speak, and beget offspring which

bear the stamp of their antecedents. Artworks are

manifestations of ‘culture’ as a collective phenom-

enon, they are, like people, enculturated beings.13

If pictures indeed ‘do’ as much as ‘mean,’ itmight be worthwhile taking a careful look atsome individual examples. Several ofHolbein’s portraits play explicitly with Pliny’spraise of Apelles. The inscription beneath theledge on which Derich Born rests his arm in aportrait of 1533 (plate 6), reads: ‘When you addthe voice, here is Derich himself, in such a waythat you wonder whether the painter or theCreator has made him.’14 In drawing ananalogy between the divine power of theCreator and that of the artist, the inscriptionechoes sentiments expressed by Leonardo andD .urer, among others. Joseph Koerner hasargued that D .urer’s Self-Portrait of 1500 wasspecifically intended to invoke the tradition ofthe Vera Icon, the so-called portraits of Christhimself, which depend on literary traditionsallegedly dating to antiquity, or to devotionalimages in which his features were miracu-lously transferred to a material support, suchas the cloth with which St Veronica wiped Hisface on the way to Calvary.15 The power of theicon, once worshipped because it was thoughtto have been made without hands and thus tohave been able to render present the absent,translates into the power – the aura – of theimage in the age of ‘art’. The substitutionalstatus of the image, that once guaranteed thesacred quality of the icon by identifyingrepresentation with what was being repre-sented, is transformed by virtue of themimesis advocated in humanist art theoryinto an attribute – the ‘genius’ – of the

6 Hans Holbein, Derich Born, 1533. Oil

on panel, 60.3 � 45.1 cm. Windsor:

Royal Collection. Photo: The Royal

Collection r2008 Her Majesty

Queen Elizabeth II.

7 Anonymous, The Zen Master Wuzhun

Shifan, 1238. Hanging scroll, ink and

colours on silk, 124.8 � 55.2 cm. Tokyo:

Tofukuji Monastery. Photo: Wakayama

Prefecture.

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uniquely gifted artist. The potential of illu-sionism to act as both presentation andrepresentation – as both presence andsubstitute for presence – renders visible andaccessible the hidden God of Christianity andproclaims the exalted status of the artist andthe elevation of the age in which he lived.

And yet, I want to argue that Holbein’sportraits are not exclusively motivated withasserting the ‘art-like’ stature of his work.Holbein’s mimesis cannot be equated withD .urer’s. Not merely exhibiting a Renaissancedesire to establish his paintings as ‘art’,Holbein’s portraits exploit verisimilitude foranthropological purposes that are mucholder and deeper, and which are associatedwith the kind of power attributed to imagesin spiritual practice. Consider a genre ofportraiture that appears at first to havenothing to do with our artist: the anonymousChinese portrait of the Zen master Wu-chunShifan, dated 1238, in the Tofukuji monas-tery, Kyoto, executed in ink and watercolouron silk (plate 7). Like other portraits of itskind, this one was probably brought to Japanfrom China by Buddhist pilgrims visiting themainland. The painting was commissionedby one of his pupils, and it bears a colophonin which the master dedicates the work to hisdisciple. Originally intended for mortuaryceremonies, the dead abbot’s dharma (orenlightenment), legitimated the religiousstatus of the monastery in which it waslocated. Treated as a living substitute, andoffered food and drink, and with incenseburned before it on anniversaries, thepainting was also worshipped by thoseseeking enlightenment of their own.16 Evenmore striking, perhaps, is the portrait ofShinchi Kakushin also known as HattoKokushi (National Master of the DharmaFlame), by his pupil Kaku’e, dated 1315, in theKokokuji monastery in Wakayana Prefecture,Japan (plate 8). In this case, the colophonexpresses the respect and admiration inwhich the subject was held by anotherChinese abbot of the same period. Twowooden portrait sculptures of this master are

8 Kaku’e, Shinchi Kokushin, 1315. Hanging

scroll, ink and colours on silk, 174.8 �84.2 cm. Tokyo: Kokokuji Monastery.

Photo: Wakayama Prefecture.

9 Hans Pleydenwurff, Man of Sorrows,

c. 1455. Oil and tempera on limewood,

40 � 33 cm. Basel: Kunstmuseum. Photo:

Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. B .uhler.

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known. One of these, dated 1276, when Hatto Kokushi was about seventy years old,contained a reliquary representing the bodily essence of the Buddha, along withscriptures proclaiming his doctrine and documents referring to his followers; whilethe other contained another symbolic reliquary, Buddhist texts and the names ofthe sixty-eight disciples who commissioned the work on his eightieth birthday in1286.17 The function of both painted and sculpted portraits was very similar: theyserved as a way of preserving the physical and spiritual presence of the departedreligious leader after his death. Such Zen portraits thus use verisimilitude to investthemselves with the power of agency and to facilitate, as well as legitimate, thetransmission of enlightenment from one generation to another.

Needless to say, I am not suggesting that the religious function of Zenportraiture has anything to do with Holbein’s work. Benjamin himself, in fact,insisted that ‘neither mimetic powers nor mimetic objects remain the same inthe course of thousands of years.’18 Nor, I would add, from culture to culture. Onthe other hand, the pictures of Zen sages do provide us with telling examples ofhow the impulse towards representational verisimilitude serves to endow objectswith ‘secondary agency’. While there is no precise equivalent to Zen portraits inthe European Middle Ages, medieval religious portraiture often functioned inresonant ways. The so-called ‘devotional portrait’, for example, a characteristic ofboth illuminated manuscripts and panel paintings of the late Middle Ages, placedthe donor before the deity in an intimate and unmediated relationship, designedto manifest the individual’s spiritual piety and desire for salvation.19 Suchdevices were extremely popular among those who could afford them in an agethat saw an increasing importance attributed to the concept of purgatory and thegrowing reliance of the faithful on mechanical forms of religious observance.20 Adiptych, such as that of Georg Graf von Lowenstein facing the Man of Sorrows by HansPleydenwurff (plates 9 and 10), records the count’s features as well as his dedi-cation to the Saviour.21 His pious gaze and the prayerbook in his hand intimatethe eternal quality of his devotion. On the other hand, the back of the Man ofSorrows panel, bearing his coat of arms, serves also to establish his worldly statusand power. In Jan Gossaert’s diptych of Jean Carondelet facing the Virgin and Child(plates 11 and 12) several strands of Christian thinking come together.22 Whilethe back of the Carondelet panel bears a skull, a reminder of the inevitability ofdeath that accounts for the diptych’s role in preparing a place for this man in thelife to come, that of the Virgin and Child bears Carondelet’s coat of arms, thusestablishing his importance as a spiritual and temporal leader. Such devotionalmechanisms perpetuate and exalt the agency of those who commissioned themby presenting them in poses of eternal adoration and by encouraging others toidentify with them and do the same.

The intimate relation in these diptychs between the portraits of Pleydenwurffand Carondelet and their coats of arms – which are literally attached to the backof the objects of their devotion – is illuminated by Hans Belting’s argument aboutthe historical development of the portrait in the late Middle Ages. He claims thatthe genealogical function of the coat of arms, its role as a legal place-holder formembers of aristocratic or princely families, served as the ancestor of the laterbourgeois portrait. Where the portrait once functioned as the ‘face’ of the coat ofarms, a way in which the temporal existence of a particular subject might berecognized within the diachronic narrative of the history of a distinguished house,

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it was transformed, in the course of time, into the ‘coat of arms’ of the self, a meansof describing, through heightened naturalism, the specificity of an individualbourgeois sitter.23 Coats of arms thus reinforce the rhetoric of presence with whichthese pictures are invested.

In Holbein’s time, of course, the portrait served a variety of different functions,many of them represented in his own oeuvre.24 Princely collections includedportraits of genealogical importance, and during the Renaissance in Italy evenprofessionals, such as lawyers and jurists, formed collections of so-called ‘famousmen’.25 In addition, the middle classes regularly commissioned portraits as recordsof their existence and social status. Nevertheless, donor portraits in altarpieces,devotional diptychs, ex votos and tomb sculpture all suggest that the history of theportrait in the early sixteenth century was still haunted by its role in religiouspractice. Indeed, Aby Warburg’s famous study of portraiture in fifteenth-centuryFlorentine religious frescoes argues that it was possible for portraits to combineapparently incompatible secular and religious functions at one and the sametime.26 The portraits of the Sassetti family in Ghirlandaio’s religious narrative TheConfirmation of the Franciscan Rule in Santa Trinita are analogous to donors in the

10 Hans Pleydenwurff,

Georg Graf von Lowenstein,

c. 1460. Oil on wood,

34 � 25 cm. Nuremberg:

Germanisches Natio-

nalmuseum. Photo:

Germanisches Natio-

nalmuseum, N .urnberg.

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wings of altarpieces. Their presence both calls attention to the intensity of thespiritual bond that ties them to the scene and asserts their prominence inFlorentine society. In England, where so many of Holbein’s portraits foundtheir home, Margaret Aston has shown that the distinction between the religiousand secular veneration of images was exceedingly fine well into the seventeenthcentury. Speaking of the defence of portraiture as a spur to moral improvementthrough emulation by the Earl of Arundel’s librarian, Franciscus Junius, shewrites:

Was this moral vindication of the secular portrait so very different in effect from that time-

honoured justification of the imagery in Christian churches, propounded by Pope Gregory the

11 Jan Gossaert, Jean Carondelet, 1517. Oil on wood, 42.5 � 27 cm. Paris:

Musee du Louvre. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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Great, on which reformers had studiously turned their backs? After all, this medieval theory

was based on the premise that holy pictures presented examples for Christians to follow, and

inspiration would come from seeing depictions of Christ and the saints. In both cases the

portrayal moved memory towards moral instruction.27

There is more, however. Presence is embedded in the very fibre of Holbein’s worksthemselves. Holbein’s pictorial rhetoric, his style, depends upon surface ratherthan depth. His sitters dominate the locations in which they are placed on thebasis of their two-, rather than three-dimensionality. His working method calledfor the use of full-size outline drawings which were then transferred to panel.28

However much it seems necessary to extol Holbein’s mimetic skills when

12 Jan Gossaert, Virgin and Child, 1517. Oil on wood, 42.5 � 27 cm. Paris:

Musee du Louvre. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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speaking of our visceral reaction to them, much of their effect depends on theway in which his powers of observation are dedicated to the plane. For Otto P.achtplanarity, or the ‘pictorial pattern’ of a work, was a more important characteristicof late medieval Netherlandish art than the illusionistic representation of space.His analysis is worth quoting:

Thus the pictorial world is subjected to two heteronomous ordering principles. The realm of

one extends beyond the pictorial boundary, allowing the spatial context to continue across the

edges of the picture; at the same time, the surface cohesiveness of the silhouette values creates

a closed unity of its own. One rule system, valid only within the pictorial frame, merges with

another obtaining even beyond it.29

The coherence of the two-dimensional pattern on the surface of the image concealsthe spatial distortions it depends on. As P.acht puts it, ‘the contours of the silhouettesmust be fitted firmly against each other’, with the result that the image is endowedwith a peculiar formal tension as the artist’s principles of representation struggleto create a substitute for the sitters who confront him.30 The perceptual conse-quences of this tension serve to enhance, rather than diminish, the illusion ofreality:

Thus the viewer transfers the sensation of the uninterrupted cohesiveness of the visible world

all the more spontaneously to the spatial order. The continuity of the surface connections

arouses the illusion of spatial unity. It does not, at any rate, allow us to become aware of the fact

that the spatial continuum we perceive is composed only of fragments.31

As in the Netherlands, fifteenth-century religious painting in Germany affirmsthe noumenal power of Christian deities and saints in the face of a growingnaturalism motivated by popular piety, by making them part of the surface of theimage – that aspect of the work that is most sensitive and most accessible to thedevout viewer. This strategy served to rescue their transcendental significance,while at the same time making the Christian narrative more available to apopular audience. It recuperates the divine status in the figures from anemotionally motivated naturalistic style that threatened to smother it in thebanal paraphernalia of everyday life. In the Holbein paintings that interest us, theartist is, of course, not concerned with religious imagery. The flatness of hissitters, however, the tensile strength of the drawing that establishes the terms bywhich we understand the nature of the illusion he offers us, remind us of thesacral purposes to which portraits had so long been dedicated. The imbrication ofhis sitters in the very structure of the painted panel serves to insist on theirimmanence.

In what is Holbein’s most famous and frequently discussed portrait, TheAmbassadors of 1533 (plate 13), both of the sitters, Jean de Dinteville and Georgesde Selve, look out of the composition at the spectator from a shallow but well-defined space. At first glance, their physical location appears to be a continuationof our own; the bearing and demeanour of figures, the quality of the metals andfabrics of the instruments and textiles all correspond to qualities of objectsidentifiable from our own immersion in the world of material things. Holbein’sconcern with the surface logic of the picture, the triumph of linear over spatial

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rhetoric, both enhances and transforms the mimetic effect. The artist’s achieve-ment in capturing the texture of reality, B.atschmann and Griener remind us, ischaracterized by the reconciliation of two very different impulses: fan-tastic invention and dedicated imitation.32 Mimesis, in other words, should notblind us to the selective and calculated nature of the whole impression, forwe cannot help but be aware that we are offered what Roland Barthes called an‘effect of the real’.33 Many authors have pointed out that the scene represents acarefully composed space whose brocaded drapery prevents the figures from fullyoccupying a space that might be considered autonomous from our own; that thefloor replicates the fourteenth-century mosaic that lies in the chancel of West-minster Abbey; that the astronomical instruments were borrowed from theastronomer Nicholas Kratzer, a fellow German at the court of Henry VIII; and soforth.34 Holbein’s construction serves a double purpose. On the one hand, thepicture persuades us of the presence of the figures; on the other, it serves as a

13 Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors, 1533. Oil on panel, 207 � 209.5 cm. London: National Gallery.

Photo: National Gallery, London.

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demonstration of the artist’s skill: the greater the degree of phenomenologicalpersuasion, the greater the artist’s talent in manipulating the pictorial codes at hisdisposal.

Acknowledging that the work might be nothing but a tissue of signs, however,and that such signs might be historically determined by the memory of earlierreligious functions of the image, does not inhibit the viewer from responding to itas if it were a record of reality. We find ourselves in a situation curiously similar tothat which arises when we confront a photograph by Demand. Our awareness of thethoroughly artificial nature of the optical illusion does not prevent it from workingas an effective duplicate of perception.35 The figures’ gaze, for example, asks to bereturned. The picture triggers an involuntary impulse to animate what we see – totreat the represented beings as if they possessed the powers of agency that weourselves enjoy. According to Benjamin, this impulse is characteristic of objectsendowed with the ‘aura’ of the work of art. No matter that it is we ourselves whomake the figures come to life by treating them as if we were in their exaltedpresence, the painting’s status as a work of art endows them with a socialpower that exceeds their status as painted images on a wooden support. Benjaminwrites:

Experience of the aura thus arises from the fact that a response characteristic of human rela-

tionships is transposed to the relationship between humans and inanimate or natural objects.

The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To experience the

aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us.36

The intimacy of the connection between the person represented and the personlooking at the representation – the way in which the representation acts as a kindof mediation between the ‘here and now’ and the ‘there and then’ – was no doubtrecognized by both Holbein and his sitters. So, why the need to include ananamorphic skull in this exhibition of social and intellectual achievement if notto play with, and even break, the spell of identification?37 Its anamorphicdistortion plays with the idea that death is there and not there simultaneously.Look askance and the world you think you know disappears. The shock of theskull’s presence lies both in the insertion of the symbolic, via a culturallyrecognized convention signifying death, into the phenomenological, and thuspsychologically inflected, experience of the work, and in tearing the illusion ofverisimilitude with its anti-mimetic presence. The dialogue that informs ourresponse as we become aware of the existence of these figures and our awarenessof being looked at by them, while attending to the visual feast offered by theexquisitely described objects on the table – not to mention the elaborate design ofthe floor – is dramatically interrupted by the skull placed there to remind us ofthe passage of time. The beautifully dressed figures in the prime of life are notactually present, they are long dead, and their accomplishments past. In themidst of what appears to be affirmation of the gravitas of human existence lies areminder of its vanitas. The presence of the skull, so intimately linked toportraiture in Holbein’s time, adds psychic resonance to our reception of thepainting. Jacques Lacan once argued that the skull makes us conscious of the‘gaze’ of the world; it makes us aware of being subject to light, of being ‘photo-graphed’, and consequently reminds us of that which we cannot see.38 The skull

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is there to insist that we viewers are as much the products of the world thatsurrounds us as agents in its production. The picture functions as a ‘screen’, theopaque meeting point between the ‘gaze’ that comes at us and our own capacityto look back.

But the skull is also a key to the power of Holbein’s practice of mimesis. Theviolence with which it tears the fabric of the picture – its enchantment withthe world shattered like Demand’s broken glass (see plate 2) – is a metaphor ofthe annihilating threat posed to mimesis by the iconoclastic outbreaks of theReformation. The presence of the skull, I suggest, is the trace of the cataclysm thatchallenged the artistic assumptions of the late Middle Ages and which Holbein’smimesis cannot entertain. It alludes to ideas that had to be rejected if painting’sbond to the real was to be sustained and our perceptual dependency acknowl-edged. It bespeaks a familiar history I must now briefly recount.

Beginning in the early 1520s reformed ideas regarding the dangers of idolatryinherent in the cult of images began circulating in Basel. Luther’s challenge tothe authority of the orthodox church, based on the idea that faith alone ratherthan good works was the guarantee of redemption, soon led to criticism of theveneration of images. The violent treatise of his follower Andreas Karlstadt, On theAbolition of Images, published in Wittenberg in 1522 and reprinted in Basel in thesame year, derives its condemnation of image worship from the secondcommandment:

You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make yourself a graven image, or any

likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the

water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them and serve them; for I the Lord your God

am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth

generation of those that hate me.39

Consequently, all ecclesiastical images, which he calls ‘idols’, are to bedestroyed.

These sentiments were echoed in the thought of the Swiss reformer UlrichZwingli, who also invoked the second commandment in his diatribe against thereligious use of images. By 1524 he had persuaded the town council of Z .urich tosupervise the systematic destruction of all religious imagery in the city. Unlikethe authorities in Z .urich, those in Basel only reluctantly accepted the Reforma-tion. Rather than enforce a sweeping religious change, they elected to permitboth catholic and reformed services to be offered in different churches. Thisecumenical response, however, was inadequate for the more radical wing ofreformed opinion, and in 1528 it prompted one of the most violent outbursts oficonoclasm during this period. The rage visited on images is worth calling tomind. The author of a standard history of Reformation iconoclasm, Carl Chris-tensen, describes what took place on that day:

The altars in the Munster [cathedral] – including the high altar with its great alabaster retable

depicting the crucified Christ and the twelve apostles – were hastily pulled down and demol-

ished, statues knocked from their pedestals and smashed into pieces, painted panels slashed

and hacked, lamps and candelabra dashed to the ground, stained glass broken from the

windows, and even the murals or wall paintings defaced with knives. Several contemporary

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accounts state specifically that a huge crucifix was pulled down from the rood screen and

tumultuously dragged by a rope through the streets of the city with an accompanying chorus of

derision and mockery. It was finally burned in the market place.40

The violence of the animosity directed at images directly reflects the religious poweronce ascribed to them. As Bruno Latour reminded us not so long ago, in an exhibitionentitled Iconoclash, it takes an iconodule to become an iconoclast – one must endowimages with power to think them worth destroying.41 The iconoclast Karlstadt, forexample, revealingly acknowledges his own past addiction to images when he writes:

My heart from childhood has been brought up in the veneration of images, and a harmful

fear has entered me which I would gladly rid myself of, and cannot . . . When someone

pulls someone by the hair, then one notices how firmly his hair is rooted. If I had not heard

the spirit of God crying out against idols, and had not read His Word, I would have

thought thus: ‘‘I do not love images.’’ ‘‘I do not fear images.’’ But now I know how I stand in this

matter in relation to God and the images, and how firmly and deeply images are seated in my

heart.42

The controversy over sixteenth-century iconoclasm is inseparable, not only fromHolbein’s fate (his move from Basel to London as the prospect of furthercommissions of religious painting disappeared), but from the issue of mimesisitself. One of the most striking developments associated with the creation ofLutheran imagery in the wake of iconoclasm is the systematic attenuation anddestruction of late-medieval naturalism. If images were not to be smashed, asLuther, the most conservative of the reformers on this issue, advocated, they mustat least acknowledge their status as mere signifiers in a system of significationthat has no bearing on the real. Working for the Lutheran court of Saxony, oncommissions for Lutheran religious altarpieces and devotional images, LucasCranach and his son achieved a remarkable stylistic revolution, one that deliber-ately countered Holbein’s contemporary mimetic impulse. Cranach sought to makethe imagery of the new religion transparent to the biblical texts on which it wasbased. If salvation was to be achieved by faith alone – if the spiritual life wasdecisively cut off from the worldly context of human existence – then pictures mustsever their dependence on perception. Cranach’s rejection of the ‘reality effects’of late-medieval and Renaissance naturalism draws attention to the arbitrarynature of the pictorial sign. Rather than gesture at a hidden God in termsthat render Him accessible and intelligible, Cranach strips the visual sign ofanything that might obscure its pedagogical function. In Koerner’s words: ‘Thedrastically formulaic character of the painting as painting thus suits a religionwhere the real truth, by definition, lies not in faithfulness to a world but in faith inwords.’43

Where D .urer had once deliberately confused the picture’s role as a substitutefor the deity with the miracle of artistic creation by means of his extraordinaryillusionistic skill, Cranach ensures that such confusion is no longer possible.Cranach brings to a close the brief ‘age of art’ in the German Renaissance. Thereductive linearity of his style represents a double rupture with what had gonebefore: not only is the image no longer a masterful display of exceptional skill, butits poverty reminds the viewer that it cannot afford communion with the divine. If

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the schematic pictorial formulae of the high Middle Ages had once served as asatisfying substitute for the deities they represented, memory of the naturalismof the intervening period was too strong to be forgotten. A lingering nostalgia forthe emotional intensity afforded by the visual rhetoric of late-medieval paintingserved as a reminder of the dangers of idolatry lurking beneath the surface ofillusion.

The Crucifixion Altarpiece in Weimar, begun by Lucas Cranach the Elder andcompleted by his son in 1555 (plate 14), compared with a pre-Reformation Cruci-fixion in Munich by Lucas Cranach the Elder, dated 1503 (plate 15), is usuallyinvoked to make this point.44 In the later Reformation work Christ’s sacrifice hasbeen transformed from narrative into allegory, from story to symbol, and fromfiguration to abstraction. Rather than record an event in Christ’s life, the spec-tator is offered an account of its meaning within a scheme of salvation. Because ofthe doctrinal struggle about how redemption was to be achieved, narrative issubordinated to theological exposition. No attempt is made to render the naturalsetting in which the tragedy unfolded: only pared-down vestiges remain of thebiblical story. The beholder discerns the cross and Christ’s body to be sure, butsoon realizes that he/she must approach the image in terms other than mimeticones. Luther points to a Bible, the source of his conviction that salvation was to berealized by faith rather than works. Beside him, John the Baptist gestures towardsChrist, whom he had called the ‘lamb of God’ at his baptism, thereby offering theviewer a clue as to the sacrificial meaning of the lamb that stands at the foot ofthe cross, as well as that of the figure on the cross. Between them stands noneother than Cranach the Elder, whom a pious son paints as the recipient of thesaving stream of blood flowing from the Redeemer’s side. In the background,behind the cross, an unfortunate soul is chased into Hell by the skeletal figure ofDeath, while Moses, holding the tablets of the Law, looks on. The scene informsthe viewer that, in contrast to the figures in the foreground who are saved by theirfaith in Christ’s sacrifice, those who place their hope of salvation in worksthrough the fulfilment of the commandments – here equated with the teachingof the Catholic church – have no hope of salvation.

Just as important as the iconographic innovations of the Reformation isthe transformation of the pictorial vocabulary. Light and shade have disappeared.The viewer is not tempted to regard the scene as one that has any reference to theworld of experience. Any suggestion of presence is deliberately avoided. Lutheranpainting eschewed modelling in light and shade, and any other painterly effectthat might have suggested that its surface had more than two dimensions.Figures are crisply defined by means of line so that their role in the allegory maybe clearly deciphered. The lack of atmospheric perspective turns the landscapeinto a stage set, into which subsidiary scenes may be fitted without endangeringtheir intelligibility. The contrast with Cranach’s earlier work could not be greater.The pre-Reformation work makes use of radical foreshortening and a strong playof light and dark to suggest that its viewers witness a real event. Late-medievalnaturalism makes the experience of the image a vivid and memorable one. Inone painting the beholder is asked to relate phenomenologically to the event, asif he/she might actually be part of its spatial setting; in the other the Crucifixionis reduced to pictorial semiotics in order to relay the significance of acomplex allegory.

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More relevant to this discussion of Holbein’s art, perhaps, is a consideration ofthe consequences of this stylistic transformation for the way in which he andCranach approached portraiture. A comparison of Cranach’s portrait of MartinLuther (plate 16) and Holbein’s portrait of Desiderius Erasmus (plate 17), paintedin 1533 and 1523 respectively, enables us to make some pertinent observations.Cranach’s printed and painted portraits of Luther were created for disseminationto his followers, as a form of religious propaganda, while Holbein’s portraits ofErasmus were destined for a few close friends. Cranach renders the religiousleader as a two-dimensional outline against a monochrome background, whileHolbein uses the full panoply of his mimetic powers to add texture to thecircumstances in which his scholar is located. Cranach’s image brings to mind therole of line in late-medieval art as a means of asserting the immanence ofsupernatural power; but in this case, instead of invoking an absent presence,it is used to simplify the complexity of the reformer’s features, thereby robbinghim of unique signs of individuality and reducing his face to a mask. Rather than

14 Lucas Cranach the Elder and Lucas Cranach the Younger, Crucifixion and

Allegory of Redemption, 1555. Oil on panel, 3.6 � 3.11 m (central panel). Weimar:

Church of Saints Peter and Paul. Photo: r Constantine Beyer.

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trigger in the viewer an emotional response analogous to the experience of realperson, it serves merely as a prompt to memory. Hanna Kolind Poulsen, forexample, argues that it was important that Cranach’s portraits were not toorealistic precisely in order to prevent them from being subjected to the kind of‘abuse’, or worship, that Luther regarded as the unfortunate fate of traditionalreligious images:

For each portrait has a fixed iconography, a specific ‘mask’ Luther, Melancthon, Electors and

their ladies always look the same in the various portraits. Luther’s ‘mask,’ for instance, was

fixed at the end of the 1520’s and only changed once, from a ‘young’ to an ‘older’ version

around 1540.45

15 Lucas Cranach the Elder, Lamentation Under the Cross, 1503. Oil on wood,

138 � 99 cm. Munich: Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgem.alde-

sammlungen. Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbestiz/Art Resource, NY.

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In Cranach’s picture, presence is deliberately suppressed. The image invokesits referent by means of signs whose complexity has been systematicallysimplified to ensure their legibility. Holbein’s portrait, on the other hand, isspecifically intended to suggest an absent presence. In a letter to Sir ThomasMore concerning the gift of his own portrait by Quentin Massys, Erasmusexplicitly states that it is to stand in his stead. Unable to visit England himself,the portrait is to act as his substitute.46 In one the painting as a physical objectis bound to its meaning; in the other the link between object and referent isbroken.

16 Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther, 1533. Oil on wood, 20.5 � 14.5 cm.

Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum. Photo: Germanisches

Nationalmuseum, N .urnberg.

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Cranach’s anti-illusionistic art not only sweeps away the innovations, such asone-point perspective and classical anatomical proportions, earlier introducedinto late-medieval German painting by Albrecht D .urer as a means of endowing itwith the status of ‘art’, but also deprives sacred pictures of the power ascribed tothem by their religious function as aids to devotion. Let us then list some aspectsof what religious representation lost when deprived of mimesis: it cannot beregarded as something that possesses a life of its own – it is no longer meant tocome alive in the mind’s eye; it no longer acts as a vehicle that enables thosehumans represented in the image to be redeemed from purgatory; it no longerinvites the identification of the worshipper with what is worshipped; it no longermakes the Christian narrative perceptually accessible in naturalistic terms; and

17 Hans Holbein the Elder, Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1523. Oil on wood, 42 � 32 cm.

Paris: Musee du Louvre. Photo: Reunion des musees nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

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last, but by no means least, it refuses the painted image the aesthetic interestrecently attributed to it by a cultured humanist elite.

Although Holbein escaped the iconoclasm of the Reformation in the German-speaking lands, he lived long enough to see it become a reality in his adopted home.Reformed challenges to orthodox teaching on images from Erasmus to Luther foundwidespread response from a population that had been exposed to sustained debateon this topic from the time of the heretical teaching of John Wycliffe and theLollards in the fourteenth century.47 Beginning in the mid 1530s, isolated acts ofimage-smashing were transformed into systematic strategy, when iconoclasmbecame associated with government policy in the wake in of Henry VIII’s strugglewith the papacy over the direction of English church.48 The dissolution of themonasteries and the gradual and often contradictory reforms of religious teachingand ritual practice allowed ample scope for acts of official and unofficial violenceagainst religious imagery. The image controversy, so much a part of English, as wellas German, life in the years that preceded Holbein’s death in 1543, makes theintensity with which he engages in the play of mimesis, the subtle to and frobetween object and subject, constructed representation and experienced percep-tion, particularly striking. While the leading German artist of the age, LucasCranach, appears to have rejected mimesis on doctrinal grounds, Holbein’s Englishcontemporaries and successors continued working in the late-medieval style inwhich his own art was anchored. Rather than aspire to the observational power andimaginative invention that characterizes Holbein’s humanistically inspiredmimesis, such artists maintained a version of the two-dimensional naturalism thatwas the achievement of Netherlandish art in the fifteenth century.49 Instead ofequating the iconic ‘presence’ of the image with artistic skill, as humanist theoryand practice tended to do, these artists belonged to a prior moment in the history ofstyle. It was not necessary for them to deprive the image of its ‘art’, as had Cranach,because the pictorial tradition in which they worked never aspired to that status inthe first place. Their portraits, nevertheless, play with the substitutionality of imageand depicted sitter. These circumstances, I argue, ensure that Holbein’s portraits,conventionally classified as secular rather than religious in subject, continue to behaunted by the iconic function they once performed. As Belting indicates, theyserve as much as a record of the dead as a means by which to conjure their presence:

Images traditionally live from the body’s absence, which is either temporary (that is, spatial) or, in

the case of death, final. . . . Iconic presence still maintains a body’s absence and turns it into what

must be called visible absence. Images live from the paradox that they perform the presence of an

absence or vice-versa . . . .50

The anti-mimetic presence of the skull in The Ambassadors is indeed a reminder ofdeath’s threat, not only to human life but to the capacity of illusionism to containthat which the eye cannot see. Holbein’s mimesis affirms the work of art’s status assomething independent of language in the face of the Lutheran attempt to reduceit to a form of instruction transparent and dependent on the word. Holbeincontinued to traffic in an art committed to an idea of the image that maintainedthis imaginative and imaginary exchange with its viewers at a time when Cranachand his followers were intent on eliminating all traces of illusionism from theirwork. The contrast between the death, the ‘execution’ of mimesis at the hands of

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Lucas Cranach, and the ‘execution’ of mimesis by Holbein – the vital sense ofpresence with which he invests the surface of his paintings – could not be moreforceful. Its decline in one location is countered by its apotheosis in another.

Mimesis manipulates the wealth of associations that our perception derivesfrom its encounter with the world. The intimacy of that process is one in which itis impossible to say where and how our capacity to know the world determinesour knowledge of it. Do we project a series of representations about its presence,or do we simply respond to it in ways that are predetermined? Is this the mysterywith which mimesis confronts us? Is this what illusionistic images do? WalterBenjamin’s definition of the ‘aura’ of the work of art in terms of experience, apoint where collective and personal perception coincide, where involuntarymemory is triggered by an object so as to ensure ‘a strange weave of space andtime’, seems relevant to what I want to say.51 The skull that so spectacularly fallsout of the construction of The Ambassadors, enhances the ‘effect of the real’ ratherthan disrupts it. It insists that we recognize the preternatural play between theseen and the unseen, between the artist’s perception and the artist’s hand.Awareness of the artificial and constructed quality of the versions of the realoffered us in pictorial mimesis does not prevent us from being seduced by oursenses. Demand’s photographs bring with them a heightened awareness of howthe process of artistic imitation is itself a response to perception – that in mimesisagency is doubly specular. Just as the artist creates a substitute for the world whiletracing his own presence, we marvel at the substitution’s hold on our perceptioneven as we recognize the ingenuity that realized it. Paradoxically enough, thereferential break on which these photographs depend dramatizes the strength oftheir attachment to the real. These twenty-first-century photographs may notintend to do so, but they nevertheless urge us to approach Holbein’s sixteenth-century portraits with a renewed sense of wonder.

Notes

Versions of this essay were presented as lectures at the Louvre in the series ‘Art etrealite: actualites d’un debat esthetique’, organized by Marcela Lista in May 2006; ata workshop on ‘The Representation of Violence’, directed by Susanna Burghartzand realized with Maike Christadler at the University of Basel in July of the sameyear; and at a symposium arranged in conjunction with the D.urer and Cranach: Artand Humanism in Renaissance Germany exhibition at the Thyssen-BornemiszaMuseum, Madrid, in November 2007. I am grateful to Mar Borobia for the invita-tion. The mysteries of the Zen portrait were revealed to me by Yukio Lippit and thetext benefited from the suggestions made Art History’s two anonymous readers.

1 Louis Marin, ‘Mimesis and Description’, in OnRepresentation, trans. Catherine Porter. Stanford,2001, 252–68, 256.

2 A concern with the ontological presence of theimage has acquired new prominence in discus-sions of art history and visual studies in recentyears. See W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays onVerbal and Visual Representation, Chicago, 1994,

and What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves ofImages, Chicago, 2005; James Elkins, The Domain ofImages, Ithaca, 1999; Gottfried Boehm, ed., Was istein Bild?, Munich, 1994; Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie. Entw .urfe f .ur eine Bildwissenschaft,Munich, 2001; Belting, ‘Image, Medium, Body: ANew Approach to Iconology’, Critical Inquiry, 31: 2,2005, 302–319; Horst Bredekamp, ‘A Neglected

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Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft’, CriticalInquiry, 29: 3, 2003, 418–28; Bredekamp, ‘Dreh-momente – Merkmale und Anspr .uche des IconicTurn’, in Christa Maar and Hubert Burda, eds,Iconic Turn: Die Neue Macht der Bilder, Cologne,2004; Bredekamp, Darwins Korallen. Die fr.uhenEvolutionsdiagramme und die Tradition der Natur-geschichte, Berlin, 2005.

3 For fascinating insights into the enduring powerof mimesis, see, among others, Ernst Gombrich,Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of PictorialRepresentation, Princeton, 1969; Norman Bryson,Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, London,1983; David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studiesin the History and Theory of Response, Chicago, 1989;and Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History ofthe Image Before the Era of Art, trans. EdmundJephcott, Chicago, 1994.

4 Roxana Marcoci, Thomas Demand, New York, 2005.Michael Fried, ‘Without a Trace’, Artforum, 43: 3,2005, 199–203. For a psychoanalytic interpreta-tion of his work, see Parveen Adams, ‘Out ofSight, Out of Body: The Sugimoto/DemandEffect’, Grey Room, 22, 2005, 86–104. I am gratefulto Branden Joseph for this reference.

5 See Kerry Brougher and David Elliott, HiroshiSugimoto, Washington, 2006; Michelle Legro,‘Wanted Dead or Alive: How We ExperienceSugimoto’s Portraits’, B.A. Thesis, BarnardCollege, 2005; Thomas Killein, Hiroshi Sugimoto:Time Exposed, London, 1995.

6 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photo-graphy, trans. Richard Howard, New York: 1981.

7 Rosalind Krauss, Cindy Sherman, 1975–1993, NewYork, 1993, 174. See also Norman Bryson, ‘Houseof Wax’, in Krauss, Cindy Sherman, 216–23, andArthur Danto, Cindy Sherman: History Portraits,New York, 1991, 5–13.

8 Oskar B.atschmann and Pascal Griener, ‘Holbein-Apelles. Wettbewerb und Definition des Kuns-tlers’, Zeitschrift f .ur Kunstgeschichte, 57: 4, 1994,625–50; Hans Holbein, trans. Cecilia Hurley andPascal Griener, Princeton, 1997, chap. 1; MarkRoskill and Craig Harbison, ‘On the Nature ofHolbein’s Portraits’, Word and Image, 3: 1, 1987, 1–26.

9 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, inSelected Writings, ed. Michael Jennings,Cambridge, 1999, vol. 2, 720–2, 720. See alsoSusan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: WalterBenjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, 1989,266–8.

10 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?. Similarquestions have been posed of sculpture byKenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue,Ithaca, 1992.

11 The phrase is Alfred Gell’s, see his Art and Agency:An Anthropological Theory, Oxford, 1998.

12 One of the most beautiful and moving demon-strations of the literary and artistic value ofwalking the tightrope of this paradox is RolandBarthes’s book Camera Lucida. While affirmingthat photography is the medium of death, henevertheless finds that there are certain photo-graphs in which a detail (he calls it the punctum)

allows the viewer phenomenological access to, orunmediated communication with, the subjectrepresented.

13 Gell, Art and Agency, 153. See also Michael Taussig,Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of theSenses, New York, 1993.

14 B.atschmann and Griener, Holbein, 31.

15 Joseph Koerner, Albrecht D.urer: The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, Chicago,1993.

16 T.Griffith Foulk and Robert H. Sharf, ‘On theRitual Use of Ch’An Portraiture in MedievalChina’, Cahiers d’Extreme Asie, 7, 1993-94, 149–219,197. See also their essay, ‘Religious Functions ofBuddhist Art in China’, in Cultural Intersections inLater Chinese Buddhism, Honolulu, 2001, 13–29.Further insights concerning this fascinatingportrait genre are found in Bernard Faure, TheRhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/ZenBuddhism, Princeton, 1991; Visions of Power:Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism, trans.Phyllis Brooks, Princeton, 1996; Helmut Brinkerand Hiroshi Kanazawa, Zen Masters of Meditation inImages and Writings, trans. Andreas Leisinger,Zurich, 1996; and Gregory Levine, Daitokuji: TheVisual Cultures of a Zen Monastery, Seattle, 2005. Iam grateful to Yukio Lippit for drawing myattention to these paintings in a lecture at theClark Art Institute, as well as for his help inobtaining illustrations. This talk has now beenpublished as ‘Negative Verisimilitude: The ZenPortrait in Medieval Japan’, in Vishaka Desai, ed.,Asian Art History in the Twenty-First Century,Williamstown, 2007, 64–95.

17 Brinker and Kanazawa, 93–4.

18 Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Impulse’, SelectedWritings, vol. 2, 1927-34, 720–2, 720.

19 For a discussion of these beguiling images, seeLaura Gelfand and Walter Gibson, ‘Surrogateselves: the Rolin Madonna and the late-medievaldevotional portrait’, Simiolus, 29: 3/4, 2002, 119–38; and most recently, John Hand and RonSpronk, eds, Essays in Context: Unfolding the Neth-erlandish Diptych, Cambridge, Mass., 2006.

20 Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans.Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago, 1984; 1st edn,Paris, 1981; Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: TheEmergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13–18th Centu-ries, trans. Eric Nicholson, New York, 1983.

21 Angelica D .ulberg, Privatportr.ats: Geschichte undIkonologie einer Gattung im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert,Berlin, 1990, cat. no. 100.

22 D .ulberg, Privatportr.ats, cat. no. 16.

23 Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie, 115–42.

24 For a compelling meditation on the aesthetics ofearly modern portraiture, see Harry Berger Jr.,Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the ItalianRenaissance, Stanford, 2000.

25 Linda Klinger Aleci, ‘Images of Identity: ItalianPortrait Collections of the Fifteenth andSixteenth Centuries’, in The Image of the Indivi-dual: Portraits of the Renaissance, London, 1998,67–79.

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26 Aby Warburg, ‘The Art of Portraiture and theFlorentine Bourgeoisie’, (1902) in Aby Warburg,The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to theCultural History of the European Renaissance, trans.David Britt, Los Angeles, 1999, 185–221.Warburg’s approach to this subject has beenbrilliantly analysed by Georges Didi-Huberman,‘The Portrait, the Individual, and the Singular:Remarks on the Legacy of Aby Warburg’, in TheImage of the Individual, 165–85. See also Hugo vander Velden, ‘Medici Votive Images and the Scopeand Limits of Likeness’, in The Image of the Indivi-dual, 126–37.

27 Margaret Aston, ‘Gods, Saints, and Reformers’, inAlbion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1660, New Haven, 1995, 181–220, 201. Junius’sbook, The Painting of the Ancients, was published inLondon in 1638.

28 Maryan Ainsworth, ‘‘‘Paternes for phiosionea-myes’’: Holbein’s portraiture reconsidered’,Burlington Magazine, 132:1044, 1990, 173–86;Susan Foister, Holbein in England, London, 2006,103.

29 Otto P.acht, ‘Design Principles of Fifteenth-Century Northern Painting’, (1933) in Christo-pher Wood, ed., The Vienna School Reader: Politicsand Art Historical Method in the 1930s, New York,2003, 243–321, 250.

30 P.acht, ‘Design Principles of Fifteenth-CenturyNorthern Painting’, 254.

31 P.acht, ‘Design Principles of Fifteenth-CenturyNorthern Painting’, 259.

32 B.atschmann and Griener, ‘Holbein-Apelles’, 630.

33 Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, (1968) inTzvetan Todorov, ed., French Literary Theory Today:A Reader, trans. R. Carter, Cambridge, 1982, 11–17.

34 The bibliography on The Ambassadors is extensive.See, most recently, Susan Foister, Holbein inEngland, New Haven and London, 2004, 214–22.

35 Or, in the idiom of neuroaesthetics, the scenereveals the operation of the brain’s ‘mirrorneurons’ that cause humans to respond torepresentations in ways that are analogous tothe way they react to perceptual experience. SeeDavid Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, ‘Motion,Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience’,Trends in Cognitive Science, 11: 5, 2007, 197–203.

36 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baude-laire’, in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 313–55, 338. Forvaluable discussions of Benjamin’s concept of‘aura’ as an aesthetics of intersubjectivecommunication, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Ceque nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde, Paris, 1992, andDiarmuid Costello, ‘Aura, Face, and Photography:Re-Reading Benjamin Today’, in AndrewBenjamin, ed., Walter Benjamin and Art, London,2005, 164–84.

37 For a history of the development of anamorphic

perspective in the Renaissance and its use in

Holbein’s The Ambassadors, see Jurgis Baltrusaitis,

Anamorphic Art, trans. W. J. Strachan, Cambridge,

1977, 91–114.

38 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.Alan Sheridan, New York, 1981 (1st edn Paris,1973), 106.

39 Carl Christensen, Art and the Reformation inGermany, Athens, Ohio, 1979, 29 (quoting Karl-stadt quoting the Bible).

40 Christensen, Art and the Reformation in Germany,100. For a detailed analysis of the Basel icono-clasm, see Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols andViolent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich,Strasbourg, and Basel, New York, 1995, chap. 4,149–89.

41 Bruno Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash? Or is there aWorld Beyond the Image Wars?’, in Iconoclash:Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art,exhib. cat., eds Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel,Karlsruhe, 2002, 14–38.

42 Christensen, Art and the Reformation in Germany, 25.

43 Joseph Koerner, ‘The Icon as Iconoclash’, inIconoclash, 164–213, 212.

44 This comparison has become conventional sinceit was used by Charles Talbot in ‘An Interpreta-tion of Two Paintings by Cranach in the Artist’sLate Style’, Report and Studies in the History of Art,Washington, 1967, 67–88; also Joseph Koerner,Albrecht D.urer, chap. 16, 363–410. For Koerner’smost recent discussion of Lutheran painting, seeThe Reformation of the Image, Chicago, 2004.

45 Hanne Kolind Poulsen, Cranach, exhib. cat.,Copenhagen, 2002, 87. For a different inter-pretation of the role played by Cranach’s style inhis portraits of Luther, see Joseph Koerner,‘Confessional Portraits: Representation asRedundancy’, in Mark Roskill and John OliverHand, eds, Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints andReception Studies in the History of Art, 60,Washington, 2001, 125–39.

46 See B.atschmann and Griener, Holbein, 155–8;Aloıs Gerlo, Erasme et ses Portraitistes: Metsijs, Durer,Holbein, Brussels, 1950.

47 Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, Oxford,1988, vol. 1, chap. 4, 96–159.

48 Aston, 222–46. See also, Aston, ‘Iconoclasm inEngland: Official and Clandestine’, in Faith andFire: Popular and Unpopular Religion 1350–1600,London, 1993, 261–89; Eamon Duffy, The Strippingof the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580, New Haven, 1992, chaps 11 and 12, 379–447, and John Phillips, The Reformation of Images:Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660, Berkeley,1973, chap. 3, 41–81.

49 See Roy Strong, The English Icon: Elizabethan andJacobean Portraiture, London, 1969. He calls thestyle, ‘neo-medievalism’.

50 Hans Belting, ‘Image, Medium, Body’, 312.

51 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age ofIts Technological Reproducibility’, in HowardEiland and Michael Jennings, eds, WalterBenjamin: Selected Writings Cambridge, Mass.,2002, vol. 3, 101–133, 104–105. See also DiarmuidCostello, ‘Aura, Face, Photography’, 164–84.

77& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2009

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