Fra Angelico at San Marco. - 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 rarely excite dishonorable appetites and lascivious desires, thus 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 sole an "awkward, clumsy thing" can be holy 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 profitable work" though it may be upon aesthetic grounds.(1) Vasari was sole 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 relate 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 volumes approach Fra Angelico says a useful 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 in the way that by forcefully demonstrating Fra Angelico's embeddedness in medieval traditions: padded bonnet places the artist within Dominican artistic and institutional conventions, and Didi-Huberman reads him as an index of a primarily scholastic tradition of exegetical practice and meditation For Hood, Fra Angelico's art was "nourished by the agency of roots sunk deep in the middle ages" (p x) and for Did-Huberman it participated "in those lengthy Middle Ages that Florence in the fifteenth hundred was far from repudiating" (p 10) In adopting this thematic approach the pair authors abandon the effort to give a comprehensive treatment of the artist's corpus; they do not, however, proceed 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 make submissive of a "modern" single-artist monograph -- despite his participation in premodern institutions and way s 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, individual might argue, is itself characteristic of the period. The solution is a neat single respecting both the novelty of the work and its corporate commitments. on the other hand even so, the fact that it impels into many diverse areas -- Dominican traditions, Fra Angelico question at issues early 15th-century Florentine art - raises the question of where the natural limits of like a study lie. The issue 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 the agency of a thoroughgoing critique of the traditional manner of proceedings of art history. The original French edition of his inquiry 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 suggests an alternative native history of art to challenge the humanist tradition formed by means of 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 make go 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 present resistance to this conception -- not to replace it in the way that 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 lay opened 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 through the procedures of iconography/iconology.