Fra Angelico at San Marco. - book reviews

The Life of Fra Angelico provoked Giorgio Vasari to make one of his most pointed interventions in the Counter-Reformation debate over the religious and aesthetic vocations of art: "Whenever [works of religious art] are produced by men of little belief who do not highly value religion," he says, "they frequently excite dishonorable appetites and lascivious desires, so that the work is blamed for what is disreputable, while praise is accorded to its artistic qualities." On the other hand, Vasari adds, this does not mean that only an "awkward, clumsy thing" can be devout. 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 nudes of Vasari's own day, "fine and good work" though it may be on aesthetic grounds.(1) Vasari was only the first in a long line of historians to make Fra Angelico a touchstone for reflections on the relation between medieval traditions of religious art and modern aesthetic ideals -- a concern which already informs Fra Angelico's reception in the work of historically minded artists such 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 development of the modern discipline of art history, the way in which books approach Fra Angelico says a good deal about the standing and direction of the discipline.

The discipline, in that case, appears to be at something of a crossroads. Both books under review accept and work within the format of the single-artist monograph, itself a legacy of the Vasarian tradition, but in their framing and argumentation they resist its premises. They do so by forcefully demonstrating Fra Angelico's embeddedness in medieval traditions: Hood places the artist within Dominican artistic and institutional conventions, and Didi-Huberman reads him as an exponent of a primarily scholastic tradition of exegetical practice and thought. For Hood, Fra Angelico's art was "nourished by roots sunk deep in the middle ages" (p. x), and for Did-Huberman it participated "in those long Middle Ages that Florence in the fifteenth century was far from repudiating" (p. 10). In adopting this thematic approach both authors abandon the effort to give a comprehensive treatment of the artist's corpus; they do not, however, go 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 sets this artist's work apart -- and which justifies his being made the subject of a "modern" single-artist monograph -- despite his participation in premodern institutions and modes of discourse. This internal tension is, one 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, one might argue, is itself characteristic of the period. The solution is a neat one, respecting both the novelty of the work and its corporate commitments. But even so, the fact that it moves into many diverse areas -- Dominican traditions, Fra Angelico problems, early 15th-century Florentine art - raises the question of where the natural limits of such a study lie. The result is a rich book, but something in between a period study 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 a thoroughgoing critique of the traditional procedures of art history. The original French edition of his study. 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 proposes an alternative native history of art to challenge the humanist tradition formed by Vasari, Kant, and Panofsky. As the Fra Angelico book is an extended practical application of the theoretical proposals of Devant l'image, it is worth summarizing them. Humanist art history, Didi-Huberman argues, employs a semiotics of the image which privileges its readability, and thus its availability to efforts of decipherment and interpretation. This understanding is in turn served by an emphasis on 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 offer resistance to this conception -- not to replace it so much as to supplement it in the Derridean sense, 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, but of a rupture (dechirure) in the visual field, a breach in the coded operations of the sign, a vulnerability (in all senses of the word) by which it is opened onto a dizzying series of associations well beyond the logic of "simple reason." It is an understanding of the image better served by the Freudian concepts of the symptom and of dream-work than by the procedures of iconography/iconology.