Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration. - book reviews

The Life of Fra Angelico provok Giorgio Vasari to make individual of his most pointed interventions in the Counter-Reformation debate above the religious and aesthetic vocations of art: "Whenever [works of religious art] are produc by dint of men of little belief who do not highly value religion," he says, "they not seldom excite dishonorable appetites and lascivious desires, in the way that that the work is blamed for what is disreputable, while praise is accorded to its artistic qualities." upon the other hand, Vasari adds, this does not mean that solitary an "awkward, clumsy thing" can be saint-like Fra Angelico's historical position and personal virtues give him a special place in Vasari's scheme, between the artistic deficiencies of "devout" medieval art and the religious indecorousness of the exposeds of Vasari's own day, "fine and useful work" though it may be upon aesthetic grounds.(1) Vasari was solitary the first in a drawn out line of historians to make Fra Angelico a touchstone for reflections upon the relation between medieval traditions of religious art and present aesthetic ideals -- a be of importance to which already informs Fra Angelico's reception in the work of historically minded artists similar as Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Michelangelo. Since this order of historical reflection -- which views individual artists within an "epochal" scheme of the history of art -- formed the basis for the unravelling of the modern discipline of art history, the way in which works approach Fra Angelico says a beneficial deal about the standing and direction of the discipline.

The discipline, in that case, appears to be at something of a crossroads. the one and the other books under review accept and work within the format of the single-artist monograph, itself a legacy of the Vasarian tradition, on the contrary in their framing and argumentation they resist its premises. They do for a like reason by forcefully demonstrating Fra Angelico's embeddedness in medieval traditions: cowl places the artist within Dominican artistic and institutional conventions, and Didi-Huberman reads him as an illustration of a primarily scholastic tradition of exegetical practice and meditation For Hood, Fra Angelico's art was "nourished by means of roots sunk deep in the middle ages" (p x) and for Did-Huberman it participated "in those drawn out Middle Ages that Florence in the fifteenth hundred was far from repudiating" (p 10) In adopting this thematic approach one as well as the other authors abandon the effort to give a comprehensive treatment of the artist's corpus; they do not, however, move so far as to give up the institution of the single-artist monograph itself. They still believe, in other words, that there is a coherence, an authorial integrity which plants this artist's work apart -- and which justifies his being made the subdue of a "modern" single-artist monograph -- despite his participation in premodern institutions and fashions of discourse. This internal tension is, single might argue, a tacit acknowledgment of the special historical position that Fra Angelico has occupied at least since Vasari. Hood's solution is to take advantage of the rather unusual coincidence of this artistic personality with a defined institutional and patronal program, a situation which, single might argue, is itself characteristic of the period. The solution is a neat individual respecting both the novelty of the work and its corporate commitments. on the contrary even so, the fact that it propels into many diverse areas -- Dominican traditions, Fra Angelico question s early 15th-century Florentine art - raises the question of where the natural limits of like a study lie. The rise is a rich book, on the other hand something in between a period close attention and a single-artist monograph, and without the "generic" coherence that either format provides.

The question of framing is more pointed in Didi-Huberman's case, since his entire approach to the artist is motivated by means of a thoroughgoing critique of the traditional courses of art history. The original French edition of his investigation appeared in the same year as his Devant l'image: Question posee aux fins de l'histoire de l'art (Paris: Editions du Minuit, 1990) in which he moves an alternative native history of art to challenge the humanist tradition formed through Vasari, Kant, and Panofsky. As the Fra Angelico work is an extended practical application of the theoretical proposals of Devant l'image, it is worth summarizing them. Humanist art history, Didi-Huberman argues, busys a semiotics of the image which privileges its readability, and thus its availability to efforts of decipherment and interpretation. This understanding is in move round served by an emphasis upon the image's mimetic function, its subjection to what Didi-Huberman calls the "tyrannie du visible." The lisible and the visible are, for Didi-Huberman, the "notions-totems" of a logical and metaphysical attitude whose implicit motto could be savoir pour voir, voir pour savoir. He aims to proffer resistance to this conception -- not to replace it with equal reason much as to supplement it in the Derridean faculty of perception to see it in dialectical relation to what it represses: the image's "unconscious," its opacity, its resistance to clarity and legible form. In this history, the image would be the site not of adequation, mastery, and intelligibility, on the other hand of a rupture (dechirure) in the visual field, a breach in the codfished operations of the sign, a vulnerability (in all faculty of perceptions of the word) by which it is render free of accessed onto a dizzying series of associations well beyond the logic of "simple reason." It is an understanding of the image better serv by dint of the Freudian concepts of the symptom and of dream-work than by the agency of the procedures of iconography/iconology.