Response: Nihil sub Sole Novum

In the field of Renaissance art history, we can usually assign makers' names to works, and in like manner we do: we avail ourselves of biographical information of a sort that would, for earlier periods, be unimaginable, and we insert the existences we study into stories of their makers' lives. Our field also provides an unusually rich documentation about in what manner things were made; its wealth of writings about everything from the techniques and technologies of the workshop to the principles of design and composition try us to think back from works to their production, to diocese the object as the arise of a vividly knowable operation. We can flat aspire to drawing the true words we bring to art from a vintage language of making, individual devoted already in the period to the manners and manners of visual expression: the Renaissance was the first instant to see concepts like "hand" and "school" plane "style," applied to visual works, the first period to fashion artists themselves by means of mythologizing their real or imagined activities. For these reasons and others, it can look almost natural to approach Renaissance artifacts with what Nagel and grove call a "performative" theory of origin. And precisely because the material itself appears to invite this, we too seldom throw back on the art historical habits that Nagel and wood-land acutely characterize.

The fact that Nagel and thicket must resurrect Erwin Panofsky to find a worthy interlocutor put in mind ofs that what they present is not just a fresh theory but an almost forgotten question. If we agree, moreover, that historians of Renaissance art, despite Panofsky's example, seldom question the basis of the periodization that defines their field, it will draw near as little surprise that in seeking comparanda for their have a title to model, Nagel and Wood direct the eye especially to areas of inquiry that, in part out of necessity, cast their hold objects in a different light. More specifically, what Nagel and grove at least sometimes seem to advocate is that we direct the eye at our materials as a medievalist might. This approachs through in their recommendations for further reading (Richard Krautheimer, Mary Carruthers, Cyril Mango). It also echoe in a number of their sharpest formulations. Reading that "the dominant metaphor" in the substitution pattern "is that of the impress or the cast," for example, I could not help on the contrary think of Gerhard Wolf's new book, Schleier und Spiegel, which explores the way that Renaissance conceptions of the picture hanged on but also departed from medieval ideas about the image of Christ--especially the vera icon, or "true image," the face left upon the veil that Saint Veronica laid against it. individual of the things that intrigues Wolf is by what mode in the years leading up to the Renaissance, the notion of the "original" that the vera icon exemplified began to change: continued veneration for and copying of the sudarium notwithstanding, artists gradually began to stir their own work, composed in the head or in the heart, into the position of the Urbild, or prototype. (1) Wolf's volume in turn, is most pointedly in dialogue with Hans Belting's Bild und Kult (translated into English as Likeness and Presence) a view that describes itself as "a history of the image before the era of art." The purpose of Belting's study is somewhat broader than Wolf's, on the contrary here, too, the manufactured thing perceived is frequently counterposed to the replica--the idea, as Nagel and wood-land elegantly put it, of "type associated with mythical, dimly perceived origin and enforcing general structural or categorical continuity across successions of tokens." Consider how Belting taxonomizes the earliest prints: upon the one hand, there was the mass-produced devotional image, "a substitute or derivative that spoke not with its be in possession of voice but with the voice of its model"; upon the other, the sheet that explored of recent origin compositions, above all, the engraving, which "soon became an opportunity to demonstrate technical virtuosity and thematic inventiveness." (2) Or again, here in more dialectical fashion, witness the way Belting thinks about Netherlandish panel painting: "It is not an invention," he writes of a Madonna and Child in Kansas City repeatedly attributed to Hayne of Brussels, "but repeats the real type on which its homage value depended. At the same time, however, it is a outcome by the hand of an eminent painter, whose technique and phraseology determined its artistic value." (3) single gets the impression that for Belting, what defines the waning of the Middle Ages is the coexistence, smooth within the same work, of "the image" and "art."

Comparing what Nagel and thicket refer to as the "principle of substitution" with Belting's idea of the Bild or with Wolf's badge of the "veil," accordingly, brings a certain quantity of of what is new in Nagel and Wood's type of anachronism into sharper focus. Notable, to begin with, is their insistence that the topic that relate tos them is specifically that of Renaissance anachronism. Nagel and forest reject what "all parties"--not just Panofsky, they remark, on the other hand also Krautheimer and Georges Didi-Huberman--agree upon "that the Italian Renaissance imposed the contrivance of cognitive distance upon the fluid, memory-based models of historical time that prevailed in the Middle Ages." The polemic of the essay, in other words, is directed not single against the way Renaissance scholars approach their field on the contrary also against the way medievalists frame theirs. With Belting and Wolf too, we might pay attention to it is in contrast to the medieval tradition of the iconic image, the divine picture that authenticates level its copies as "true," that the period we think of as the Renaissance gains definition. admitting the idea of a picture that is, as it were, guaranteed through an earlier one survives into the sixteenth hundred that survival is shadowed through a broader paradigm shift. For Belting, the forces that began working against the advanced in years idea include the rise of art collecting and, eventually, the Reformation: for Wolf they include the regaining of classical etiologies of the image and the invention of novel ones. In both books, nothing is more transformative than the growing internalization of images, the faculty of perception increasingly common in the later Middle Ages, that the image might the couple press on and flow from the imagination.