The Madness of Vision

On Baroque Aesthetics

Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Dorothy Z. Baker

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780821444375
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Christine Buci-Glucksmann's The Madness of Vision is one of the most influential studies in phenomenological aesthetics of the baroque. Integrating the work of Merleau-Ponty with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Renaissance studies in optics, and twentieth-century mathematics, the author asserts the materiality of the body and world in her aesthetic theory. All vision is embodied vision, with the body and the emotions continually at play on the visual field. Thus vision, once considered a clear, uniform, and totalizing way of understanding the material world, actually dazzles and distorts the perception of reality.

In each of the nine essays that form The Madness of Vision Buci-Glucksmann develops her theoretical argument via a study of a major painting, sculpture, or influential visual image—Arabic script, Bettini's "The Eye of Cardinal Colonna, " Bernini's Saint Teresa and his 1661 fireworks display to celebrate the birth of the French dauphin, Caravaggio's Judith Beheading Holofernes, the Paris arcades, and Arnulf Rainer's self-portrait, among others—and deftly crosses historical, national, and artistic boundaries to address Gracián's El Criticón; Monteverdi's opera Orfeo; the poetry of Hafiz, John Donne, and Baudelaire; as well as baroque architecture and Anselm Kiefer's Holocaust paintings. In doing so, Buci-Glucksmann makes the case for the pervasive influence of the baroque throughout history and the continuing importance of the baroque in contemporary arts.

CHAPTER 1

THE STAGE OF VISION

To sing as you teach song needs no desire,

no courtship of something the heart

in its own time might finally acquire.

Singing is being.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

With these words, Rilke made Orpheus speak as the very Voice of music, his “canto” and his “incanto” “enchanting” the sirens. Monteverdi’s Orfeo, which premiered in Mantua in 1607, is undeniably useful here as a musical prelude to the creation of a code—a rhetoric—of opera and all of baroque aesthetics.

Pindar called Orpheus the “Father of Songs.”¹ Sun worshipper and patron of musicians, he is the god who charmed rocks and pacified wild beasts. The poet with the golden lyre who calmed the waves and put dragons to sleep, Orpheus is the dominant metaphor of the Allegory of Music that opens Monteverdi’s opera and introduces its rhythm and structure. Yet, this Orfeo is positioned in a type of “allegorical knot,” caught between the tragedy of seeing and the tragedy of music, hearing, between his memory and his Voice.

Orfeo, as we know, searches for the dead Eurydice, who is in Hades. Searching for her out of his great love, he will recover her only if he abides by a divine imperative: you are not to turn around, you are not to look at her. In a dizzying moment of doubt, losing all hope, he fails: “But while I am singing, alas, who can assure me that she is following me?”² Nothing. No one. Orfeo chooses the “visibility” of love over the invisibility of Hearing, the invisibility of his own evocative and enchanted hearing. His voice capsizes in a tidal wave of “madness of vision.” Monteverdi’s Orpheus becomes the prisoner of two forms, vision and the feminine, which correspond to the two conclusions to the opera.

A solar vision and a feminine impulse of sublimated love in its Apollonian form. In the version of the opera that we are familiar with, Orpheus regains Eurydice in the ultimate metaphor of beauty, “the gentle light of her beloved eyes,” sparkling with the sun and the stars that Apollo sings of (Orfeo, xxvii). But in the original Orpheus in Mantua, according to the myth, Orpheus dies, the Maenads tearing him to pieces. His body rent by a Dionysian love that preferred Vision over Knowledge, that gave itself over to a re-created phantasm of its love rather than listening to Mnemosyne. The invisible vanishes in the dark, chaotic, and Dionysian vision of a body that is lost and transformed.

In returning to the Greek prephilosophical myths for his musical Orfeo, which would then inspire other baroque operas, Monteverdi located the music and the voices at the very border of the visible and the invisible, as a “language” passageway toward the land of the non-seen. And, unquestionably, one can discern from this the actual genealogy of vision that characterizes this hybrid genre, drama in musica. It is hybrid because the Voice must actually represent the text, “make it visible” by hearing it, staging it, and embodying it. So much so that opera immediately gives evidence of the great axiom of the baroque: “To Be Is to See.” To such an extent that love itself would be an “optical system” by which phantasm’s eye comes to life.

To Be Is to See: with this, the baroque eye positions itself from its very beginning within a new category of seeing that ascribes an epistemological and aesthetic capacity, an ontological optikon, to the gaze. Because the eye is truly the miembro divino that Gracián spoke of, a “member” that “allows a certain universality that resembles omnipotence.”³

Central physical organ of the baroque system, this eye-world is illustrated in the many Allegories of Sight throughout sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings, from anonymous works to those of Miguel March, Brueghel de Velours, Ribera, and Rubens. The splendor and omnipotence of sight: such as in an anonymous painting from the middle of the seventeenth century in Valencia in which the allegory of sight is a woman before a mirror, the painting filled with attributes and objects symbolic of sight, an eagle, glasses, a miniature, a painter’s palette, a catalog. The painting is self-reflexive, intensified by its background in which paintings are reflected in mirrors, which, in turn, replicate the woman and her image in the mirror. A painting of a painting, mirrors of images, allegorical sight stages Vision itself, the eye of the painter, as in Velásquez’s Las Meninas. A painting by Brueghel exhibits this ocular power in a similar fashion: the female-gaze reveals the intensely baroque space of a collection of paintings and sculpture, already objects of prestige and power but also artifacts of memory and culture, of collection and a library-world.⁴ Vision becomes an inventory of multiples, repetition of ordered profusion, metaphor of a representable universe.

In order to make the abstraction of vision concrete in this way, these “seeing” allegories symbolize a theater that legitimates the infinite multiplying of what is seen, its scientific exploration and its poetic phantasmagoria—the “omnipotence” of Graciánesque vision. Thus, in El Criticón (1667), that compendium of baroque fiction, “the great theatre of the universe with ‘its’ balcony of vision and life” is a drama and labyrinth of “riches” and “wonders” (Criticón, 527, 528, 533). Andrenio, natural man, learns about the world, its reality and its illusions through “the great variety of colors” (536). And praising “the most noble of senses,” he cries, “Had I one hundred eyes and one hundred hands to satisfy the curiosity of my soul, I would still be unable to do so” (535, 534). He celebrates vision as the sense of plurality, infinite multitudes, profusion, and differences—beauty. Every object is a “new wonder” and sight “the most noble of senses,” this anticipating Leibniz’s law of the Identity of Indiscernibles.⁵ Despite the greatest diversity, “each leaf of each plant, each feather is distinct from those of different species” (534). Nonetheless, as Critilio, man of reason, quickly teaches Andrenio, vision that offers such pleasure is also the site of entrapment and illusion.⁶ “Everything in the universe is composed of opposites and of harmonious discord…. Everything is weapons and war” (538, 539). Vision is double, and if one focuses exclusively on appearance, pygmies could be magnificent giants, stout creatures, but devoid of any substance….

Such is the glory of vision, but also its unremitting ambiguity: the baroque eye of the marvelous, of multiple pleasures, of difference is also the eye of disillusion (desengaño), a fatal spectacle, a theater of affliction and mourning. As if total immersion in the image would destroy all vision, as if the distance of the eye and the Gaze would be part of this. Baroque vision will not exhaust itself in a simple phenomenal element, in the jubilant rapture of appearances, in the naive enjoyment of spectacle and trompe-l’oeil taken at face value, as when one believes in it a little too quickly.⁷

From Vision to Gaze, visual value reflects on itself and is played out in shadow and light, in knowledge and in its impulses toward objects of desire and misery. Thus, within the context of opera, baroque music reclaims the great Greek myths of the hubris and danger of vision—Orpheus, Narcissus, Actaeon, Medusa…. The Gaze, brought to its incandescent state, always holds the power of distortion. Controlling the gaze is a sort of deadly seduction that oscillates between the brilliance of appearance and the “petrified” and “petrifying” gaze,⁸ this mutilation or petrifaction of the lover’s body that Pierre du Barch and Flaminio de Birague, among many others, praise in their poetry.⁹

Loving and mystical, always in desperate search of the “most beautiful of the beautiful,” baroque Eros sees “through the mist a loving flame,” is enraptured by the “ravishing shadow” of the Beloved,” is consumed by flaming sight of “the radiant face,” is shattered within the “hazy mirror.”¹⁰ Vision dispossesses the seer, positions the seer “outside the self,” and brings the seer to ecstasy, to the noisy silence of language, or to the madness of love:

I live, but outside myself,

I live, but without living within.¹¹

Or even:

Alas! I die of love! I want his kiss and the touch

Of the ravishing kiss from his divine mouth!

Who? I cannot see;

I see someone passing into a shadow,

But I do not know who it is, only seeing a face

In a mirror.¹²

Who and What and Where am I? Dramatizing sight in the theater of passionate gazes, reanimating a voiceless, petrifying, and fragmenting terror of an unexpected beauty that kills, the baroque transgresses forbidden desire, unable to renounce its image, be it deadly, be it Death. This is played out in the myth of Actaeon, who saw Diana bathing nude and then perished, devoured by his dogs. The promise of the visage already holds its loss and its flight: Orpheus “sees” Eurydice only when she is lost and invisible.

“I die of not dying”: such is the nature of vision carried to its extreme, to a grammar of drives riddled with ambivalence.¹³ On one hand, there is ostentation, the manipulation of appearances, “intense desire,” the admirable and the marvelous, an effect of presence where the real is invoked and composed by affect and glory in a series of dazzling tableaux. Yet, on the other hand, as Jean Starobinski has shown so well in his analysis of Corneille, this “effect of presence,” this quasi-magical “active presence” through which “being is expressed through its appearance,” “vanishes when the gaze turns from the dazzling being.”¹⁴ For this “Living Eye,” light, which is completely ephemeral, shifts toward nocturnal obscurity, toward eternal horror, the radiance being only a denied “obscurity,” an abyss.¹⁵ The “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s poems, the melancholic lady emerges….

As such, the philosophy of the glance and its visual instantaneousness—to capture, to fascinate, to penetrate, to undress, to petrify—is never sufficient. Vision becomes Gaze (Regard), in the etymological sense of the term, to guard, to place in safekeeping:

Regarder [to look at, to gaze upon] is a movement that aims to recapture, reprendre sous garde [to place in safekeeping once again]. The gaze does not exhaust itself immediately. It involves perseverance, doggedness, as if animated by the hope of adding to its discovery.¹⁶

By virtue of this scopic energy, Vision is an operation, an act that generates a multiplicity of perspectives, the division of the visible, the invention of an aesthetic within a rhetoric that will stage it and control its effects in order to better convince and seduce. This rhetoric, which is simultaneously glorious and dark, assumes a form that is alternately empty or excessive, yet promises infinite variation. It no longer refers to an Eidos, which is a dialectic and a Platonic type of knowing. The baroque is anti-Platonic.

Distinct from seventeenth-century, pre-baroque mannerism, which was still influenced by the Idea as Disegno interno (internal design), the baroque developed in the seventeenth century and in the first part of the eighteenth century in a world in which an understanding of seeing and the play of appearances arose from the science of perspective and optics within the discipline of the natural sciences. This science puts forth its theory of what is real, subjects it to its mathesis, establishes the uncertainty of its sensory existence, and constructs it in those forms that are visually possible. The baroque eye, with its attention to multiplicity and discontinuity, is distinguished precisely by its infinite production of images and appearances, and it emerges at the moment when the Counter-Reformation and modern science strangely intersect—as opposed to the Fifteenth-Century Eye, when optics and perspective were still tied to moral and religious interpretation, the “moral and spiritual eye” that Pierre de Limoges speaks of in De oculo morali et spirituali, translated into Italian in 1496. Within the allegorical context of the fifteenth century, “such a perspective is apprehended not just as a tour de force but also as a type of visual metaphor…. It is then open to interpretation first as an analogical emblem of moral certainty (The Moral and Spiritual Eye) and then as an eschatological glimpse of beatitude (The Delights of Heaven).”¹⁷ Allegory always governs within the baroque and even constitutes one of the major foundations of its aesthetic. But allegory has a sensual character. It is grounded in a realism of pathos and passion that fragments reality, exasperates it, and mortifies it by staging—in painting as in theater or opera—a veritable dramaturgy of passions. Stripped of its aura, of sublimation in the control over conclusions, and of a grace that pervades everything (as in Fra Angelico), baroque passions—even in religious drama—unveil a history that is secularized. According to Walter Benjamin’s analysis in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, the two contrasting figures of the tyrant and the martyr represent history. That is why “the baroque knows no eschatology; and for that very reason it possesses no mechanism by which all earthly things are gathered in together and exalted before being consigned to their end.”¹⁸

Positioned in this same vacuum of the otherworldly that is devoid of anything from this world, the baroque is able to appropriate “a profusion of things which customarily escaped the grasp of artistic formulation,” creating exaggerated forms to translate the irremediable tension between the world and transcendence, at the interior of a game in which that which exists is given over to a pleasur...