Fra Angelico. Dissemblance et figuration

by Georges Didi-Huberman

Une analyse d'un détail de la Sainte-conversation peinte par l'artiste pour le couvent San Marco à Florence qui permet de reconsidérer les conceptions de figure et de ressemblance dans l'art italien de la fin du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance.

Genres: Art, Art History, Criticism

263 pages, Pocket Book

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Georges Didi-Huberman, a philosopher and art historian based in Paris, teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Recipient of the 2015 Adorno Prize, he is the author of more than fifty books on the history and theory of images, including Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (MIT Press), Bark (MIT Press), Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, and The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg's History of Art.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book explores the philosophical rationale for a few blotches marring the surface of a painting, marks which at first glance seem to be blunders, mistakes. Fra Angelico's monastery fresco, The Madonna of the Shadows (nicknamed for the shadows cast by columns depicted above the Madonna and the saints) is “mounted” on what appears to be a four-paneled marble structure—an altar, perhaps a tomb?--but which is actually part of the fresco itself, a trompe l'oeil illusion, down to each precisely limned marble vein. The illusion, however, is dispelled by blotches of paint, scores of them, which appear to have dripped—or to have been dropped--on the surface of the four marble “panels”.

What could possibly be the reason for this iconoclastic act, for the foregrounding of mere pigment displayed and presented in itself? This is the question that Didi-Huberman sets out to answer. His journey takes him through the writings of a thousand years: the mystical reflections of the Pseudo-Dionysius, the Summa and Marian treatises of Albertus Magnus, and the later synthesis of Thomas Aquinas (all books almost literally “at hand,” in Fra Angelico's monastery library, down the corridor, only a few steps away.). Our author examines a wealth of quattrocento paintings—many by Fra Angelico, mostly annunciations—and illuminates them through the application of symbolic scriptural exegesis, scholastic philosophical terminology, medieval mnemonic practices, and a characteristically French post-structural analysis.

Didi-Huberman's thesis is sophisticated, his analysis subtle. It is often too sophisticated and subtle for me, and, sometimes—I suspect—too subtle for clarity, too subtle for its own good. He does, however, do an excellent job in demonstrating that the early Renaissance painter—unlike the artist of the high Renaissance—was not primarily concerned with narrative and objective representation. On the contrary, this early artist was surrounded by a theological wealth of signs and figurations, and he often chose the striking and unusual, precisely because the unusual would be remembered and therefore provide the most useful ground for meditation. Of all important theological truths, perhaps the most powerful was the Incarnation, God becoming man, which was suggested most powerfully by the many paintings of the Annunciation, which depicted the moment when the Word of God became present in the womb of a virgin. Didi-Huberman demonstrates how many elements of the typical annunciation—the garden,, the threshold, the half-opened windows' the angel's gaze, the folds of Mary's garment—suggest the marvelous reality of the Incarnation.

Is it possible—Didi-Huberman implicitly asks concerning The Madonna of the Shadows—that those blotches of color thrown on a faux marble surface are meant to act as a shock, a shock designed to disrupt the complacent gaze content with the traditional iconography of the image before it? May this disruption in turn lead the mind inward, beyond the distractions of representation, to meditate on the hyper-reality of the Incarnate Word?

[Hana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fra Angelico was born Guido di Pietro in the late 14th century and was already well known as a painter when he entered a Dominican community. In 1436, at the urging of Cosimo di Medici, Fra Angelico was chosen to decorate the order's new friary in Florence, The Convent of San Marco.


Fra Angelico paints The Madonna of the Shadows; Knille

For Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico's work is both devout and subtle. This was particularly true of the San Marco frescoes, painted as meditation aides for those who had no need to be reminded of the basic doctrine and no desire for the sumptuous gold and rich blues demanded by wealthy patrons.

Didi-Huberman was led to a radical reexamination of Fra Angelico's work by a startling observation: the surfaces of some of the San Marco frescoes were strangely blotched (tache in the original and difficult to translate French). Didi-Huberman describes this process of splattering paint on the surface of otherwise pristine scenes as dissemblance, a French term that I never fully understood, but which he seems to be using to mean “deconstruction” or perhaps “fragmentation.”

In Fra Angelico’s San Marco masterpiece, Madonna of the Shadows, one has to look up to see the Madonna because what is at eye level are extremely large blocks of elaborately painted faux marble.



What is the point of the marble blocks staring you in the face?



And why is the marble so strangely blotchy?



As Annelise E. Ream explains it:

...the depiction of the marble is splattered with paint, applied by the artist after the surface of the fresco had dried. Didi-Huberman argues that Fra Angelico knew how to paint marble in a highly precise manner, suggesting that this portrayal is intended to be representative of more than just marble. Thus, the marble is not intended to be mimetic but figurative, representing the mystery of the incarnation of the word of God as described by Saint Bernardino as “the unfigurable in the figure."

The blotches can carry other meanings. Here, in a detail from the San Marco fresco showing Christ at the Tomb, red splashes and crosses dot the grass. Are these simply impressionistic flowers? Didi-Huberman thinks not and interprets them as symbols of the stigmata.



Is that making too 'much of a muchness' about a few splashes of paint?



Perhaps not, because it seems that Fra Angelico played with reality and unreality in all sorts of other interesting ways. For example, often Fra Angelico created surprising frames—positioning a fresco in an odd location or breaking one painting with another.

Sometimes the angle at which the viewer sees the painting helps him enter the scene in meditation. Here the fresco's frame mirrors the window and yet is depicted as larger and higher up, suggesting that the painting is a window into a Reality that is greater and loftier than the physical world beyond the monastery.



Sometimes the fresco is positioned so that the action (viewed from certain angles) actually seems to be taking place right there in San Marco itself.



In other cases, a break in positioning can be used as a foreshadowing device as in these three frescoes: the large one of the Adoration of the Magi interrupted by an Imago Pietatis—a figure of the crucified Christ entombed in marble yet standing unaided in yet another foreshadowing (note the third smallest fresco of a darkened window/empty tomb below).



It’s all very mysterious and to Didi-Huberman that seems to be exactly the point. To make a representation of a mystery is a conundrum. Fra Angelico steps away from realism in his paintings, or frames his images in ways that startle as if to say, 'I am painting this impenetrable mystery but I am also reminding you that it is a mystery and what I am painting cannot be understood through human rationality'.

Aquinas, the supposed champion of theological reason, will merely ask reason to bow down before this particular real, which he terms a mystery. If we admit that the real possesses the structure of a mystery, in the most radical sense of the word, then we have to admit that reality has lost its consistency; it is crumbling, exists only as an effect, as an illusion perhaps….Exegetical thinking does not save the “unity of the story”; on the contrary, it strips it bare and scatters the parts to the four winds of sense.

Having spent the last month exploring the world of Byzantium and admiring all the magnificent mosaics in which millions of tesserae refract a transcendent world in shimmering glory, all this seemed very familiar to me. So was Fra Angelico part of the “Renaissance” as it flowered in Italy in his day? Or had he turned away from the assumed “humanistic” values to return to an earlier spiritual aesthetic? As Didi-Huberman writes:

“It is…pointless to try to ascertain whether Fra Angelico was “of his time” or not. Painting disturbs chronological history because it is always a complex and sly play of anachronisms. Fra Angelico was “modern” in many ways, but he was constantly displacing his own stylistic innovations….The eminently “medieval” character of [Fra Angelico’s] painting should not be envisioned as a delay, a defect, a negativity, but rather as an index of those long Middle Ages that Florence in the fifteenth century was far from repudiating.”

Didi-Huberman's treatise was mostly over my head but the illustrations were magnificent. I found myself skimming the denser philosophical sections, but with the help of Bill Kerwin's excellent Goodreads review and some web resources, I did discover a whole new dimension to the works of a favorite artist.

For a tour of the inside of the monastery and a very helpful analysis of one of Fra Angelico’s Annunciations see this video: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanitie...

[Andrea Samorini]

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FROM BOOK: Simmetrie. Osservare l'arte di ieri con lo sguardo di oggi (Jacopo Veneziani)