Arts

In the forward to his monumental study of the medieval icon, Bild und Kult, translated Likeness and Presence in the American edition, Hans Belting explains the book's rather curious subtitle—A History of the Image before the Era of Art—in terms that immediately focus on the issues surrounding the idea of the visual arts, especially just what they are and how they function in culture as a whole:

Art, as it is studied by the discipline of Art History today, existed in the Middle Ages no less than it did afterwards. After the Middle Ages, however, art took on a different meaning and became acknowledged for its own sake—art as invented by a famous artist and defined by a proper theory. While the images from olden times were destroyed by iconoclasts in the Reformation period, images of a new kind began to fill the art collections which were just then being formed. The era of art, which is rooted in these events, lasts until this present day. From the very beginning, it has been characterized by a particular kind of historiography which, although called the history of art, in fact deals with the history of artists. (p. xxi)

The historiography to which Belting refers is exemplified by the work of Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574). A painter in his own right, he was by all accounts the first serious collector of drawings—he believed that they revealed the very moment of artistic inspiration. His passion for drawing also led him to found the Accademia del Disegno (Academy of Design) in Florence in 1562. He theorized that disegno (meaning both "drawing" and "design") was superior to colorito ("painting in color") because the former was an exercise of the intellect, while the latter appealed only to the sensual appetites. At the Reliquary effigy of St. Foy (gold and silver over a wooden core, studded with precious stones and cameos), mostly 983–1013, with later additions. Created to contain the skull of a martyred child who was put to death for refuting pagan worship, the artistic power of the effigy lies not in its resemblance to the actual child, but in its purpose as the vessel that houses the sacred remains. © GIRAUDON / ART RESOURCE, NY Accademia he encouraged artists to develop their talents unfettered by the constraints of tradition and convention, arguing that genius was most readily realized in invention.

All of Vasari's preoccupations are reflected in his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, first published in 1550 and then greatly revised and expanded in 1568. Vasari's book marks the historical moment when what people today so readily think of as the visual arts were transformed from objects reflecting the manual skills of the individual craftsman to reflections of the intellectual and creative powers of the artist. Before the "era of art," the image, however artistically made, served specific cultural, religious, or political functions. It was required, quite literally, to perform. As Belting puts it, "Authentic images seemed capable of action, seemed to possess dynamis, or supernatural power" (p. 6). They performed miracles, warded off danger, and healed the sick. If in the "era of art" images lost this power, they gained a considerable expressive dimension. They became the medium through which artists—in the era of art, they are called "artists"—express their own ideas and feelings and make manifest their own individual talent or genius.

The difference between the image before the era of art and the image after is readily apparent if we compare the reliquary effigy of St. Foy at Conques in France and Leonardo da Vinci's (1452–1519) famous Mona Lisa. St. Foy was a pilgrimage church built in 1050–1120 to accommodate pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Campostela, in the northwest corner of present-day Spain, a favorite pilgrimage destination because the body of the apostle St. James the Greater, which lay at rest there, had a reputation for repeated miracles. St. Foy housed the relics of St. Foy ("Saint Faith" in English), a child who was martyred when she was burned to death in 303 for refusing to worship pagan gods. Her skull was contained in this elaborate jeweled reliquary, which stood in the choir of the church where pilgrims could view it from the ambulatory that circles the space. The head of the reliquary was salvaged from a late Roman face guard and parade helmet and reused here. Many of the precious stones that decorate the reliquary were the gifts of pilgrims themselves. The saint's actual skull was housed in a recess carved into the back of the reliquary, and below it, on the back of her throne, was an engraving of the Crucifixion, indicating the connection between St. Foy's martyrdom and Christ's own.

Now, the St. Foy effigy, fashioned out of the antique Roman mask, bears no real resemblance to the saint herself. Its value resides not in any likeness, but in its contiguity with the skull housed within. It literally "touches" the physical remains of a child burned to death, at least symbolically, by the soldier whose face this mask once guarded. The Roman artifact has thus been completely transformed—from the pagan to the Christian, from male ornament symbolic of war to a female form symbolic of faith. And it symbolizes, further, the transformation that awaits the faithful, from the physical confines of the body to the spiritual realm of the soul. Pilgrims decorated the reliquary not merely in penitence for their sins but because they felt, in its presence, the need to sacrifice their material wealth in symbolic repetition of the saint's sacrifice of her person. In one of the most important first-hand accounts of the relationship between the cult statue and the pilgrims who came to venerate it, Bernard of Angers, who made three trips to Conques beginning in 1013, describes how he was at first skeptical of the reliquary's power: "I looked with a mocking smile at [his companion] Bernier, since so many people were thoughtlessly directing their prayers at an object without language or soul, … and their senseless talk did not come from an enlightened mind." But he soon changed his mind:

Today I regret my foolishness toward this friend of God.… Her image is not an impure idol but a holy momento that invites pious devotion.… To be more precise, it is nothing but a casket that holds the venerable relics of the virgin. The goldsmith has given it a human form in his own way. The statue is as famous as once was the ark of the covenant but has a still more precious content in the form of the complete skull of the martyr. This is one of the finest pearls in the heavenly Jerusalem, and like no other person in our century it brings about the most astonishing miracles through its intercession with God.

It is as if, he says, "the people could read from the luster of these eyes whether their pleas had been heard" (pp. 536–537). It is the efficacy of the relics within that the people read into the statue's outward gaze.

The relationship between the image and its beholder is entirely different in Leonardo's Mona Lisa (1503–1506). In the first place, the image is, above all, a likeness. Vasari was the first to use the name by which the painting is now known, leading to speculation that the sitter is Lisa Gherardini, who married the Florentine merchant Francesco Bartolomeo del Giocondo in 1495, but other testimony contradicts this thesis, and her identity remains a mystery. This mystery, of course, lends the painting much of its fame, for without any relevant biographical knowledge, any clues as to what she might be thinking are pure speculation. As David Summers put it in his important contribution to global and intercultural art history, Real Spaces (2003), "She is the individual mask of her own inwardness, of the mind and heart suggested to us by her famous smile." Leonardo's purpose, Summers reminds us, was to make "the invisible (the movements of the soul) visible in the movements of the body," even in such a small movement as the upward turn of the sitter's lips. But Leonardo himself recognized

that artists run the risk of making images look like themselves because the same individual soul that shaped the artist's physical appearance also judges the beauty and rightness of the figures the artist makes. Leonardo recommended that artists study proportion, which will give them the means to counteract this distorting narcissistic tendency. His argument assumes coincidence between individual appearance and individual soul, outwardness and inwardness. It also suggests the difficulty of distinguishing the perception of another from oneself. (p. 331)

Thus the enduring myth that Mona Lisa is in fact a self-portrait, Leonardo's revelation of his "feminine side." But more important, Summers makes clear here the way in which the visual arts, in the era of art, are removed from the cultural dynamic that informs the medieval icon. Just as surely as the meaning of the reliquary statue at St. Foy resides "inside" its mask, so the meaning of the Mona Lisa resides beneath her Mona Lisa (1503–1506) by Leonardo da Vinci. Oil on wood. Da Vinci's masterpiece is a study in inwardness and what exists just below the surface, and admirers have spent centuries trying to decipher the subtle clues in the subject's face for an indication of what thoughts are in her head. © THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE superficial appearance. But her meaning is private, personal, immaterial. She is forever meditative, forever a mystery, a self-reflective soul. People visit the Louvre in the early twenty-first century, in a procession not so unlike that of the medieval pilgrims, because, in the space between image and beholder, the self-reflection that the image portrays is recreated in one's reflections upon it. As Denis Donoghue has put it, "The mysteriousness of art is in all art; … it suffuses the space between the image and its reference" (p. 32).