From Work to Frame

Reviews From Work to Frame Paul Duro Frame Work: Honour and Ornament in Italian Renaissance Art, by Alison Wright, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019, 352 pp., 211 illus., hardback, $65 Alison Wright’s impressive new book, Frame Work: Honour and Ornament in Italian Renaissance Art, is a welcome addition to a growing list of studies that focus on the role of the frame in the construction of the artwork.1 Its publication is timely. For too long art history has focused on what appears within the frame to the practical exclusion of what surrounds it. Art historians routinely discuss composition, subject, surface, texture – seemingly almost anything but the frame. Yet such inattention comes at a cost. Without undertaking an analysis of the work of the frame we limit our seeing to the pictorial or sculptural spaces defined by the frame – flagrantly ignoring even those cases, such as in the period covered by this book, that routinely integrated pictorial spaces into architectural surrounds that cannot, without doing violence to their original concept, be separated from the works that they enclose. It is against this occlusion that Wright takes aim, but it should be noted immediately that her book is not a general history of frames, nor even a history of Renaissance frames. Such studies do exist, and they are valuable, but Wright’s approach is somewhat different, and more ambitious. Instead of considering either frame or artwork in isolation, she explores the relationship between the two to investigate what she correctly believes to be their mutual dependency. But is it even possible to say what a frame does? Wright sensibly offers no potted definition. If she does not follow Jacques Derrida’s most extreme claim in arguing that the frame ‘gives rise’ to the artwork,2 neither is she willing to reduce the frame to a merely decorative function. Rather, her approach is to recognize the ineluctable historicity of the frame. Commenting in her first chapter, ‘Frame Work in Renaissance Art’, Wright laments, ‘The nineteenth-century art museum, in which many of my objects of study are now displayed, also worked with frames in a way that disguised the absence of an early Renaissance category of “art”, isolating painting and sculpture as autonomous and distinct objects’ [my emphasis] (15). Indeed, reframing a panel taken from © Association for Art History 2020 a predella radically alters not only its relationship to its original setting, but also elevates a painting designed as a subsidiary element to the main work into the realm of independent artwork – a historical and aesthetic rupture from its original setting that is rarely helped by its gallery presentation as an autonomous aesthetic object. In an age when the integral frame was the norm, it was not isolated from the painting or sculpture it enclosed in the manner, for example, of later easel paintings – a point that Wright makes in chapter two, ‘Sculpted Pedestals and Public Space’. With reference to the frames around tomb sculpture, she remarks, ‘a pedestal does not so much support or furnish a sculpture in situ, it lends the work its place of signification in the broader cultural field’ (55). Her use of ‘signification’, along with (elsewhere in the book) ‘symbolism’, ‘ontology’, ‘lack’, ‘honour’ and ‘ornament’, demonstrates that her analysis is not going to be restricted to the formal relationship between work and frame. Wright quotes the German traveller Felix Faber’s unease on seeing the tombs of the Doges of Venice ‘bedecked with different marbles and carvings and gold and silver, and decorated to excess’, prompting her to raise the question of ornament and its relation to convention and propriety: ‘Pagan deities and spirits, who might have been countenanced at the threshold of the church, tried the boundaries of decorum inside the sacred space itself’ (34). The issue of whether the frame ‘constituted appropriately honorific richness or dangerous, even idolatrous, excess’ – a perennial worry for Church authorities who saw in the marginal opulence of the frame an ornamentation that distracted the faithful from the truth of the sacred narratives depicted – underlies the question of artifice and ornatus in the embellishment of the artwork (34, 36). Wright addresses this question in chapter three, ‘Elevation and the Altarpiece’, in which the social practices of viewing are reconfigured around advances in the representation of pictorial space (105). In Giovanni Bellini’s Coronation of the Virgin, today in the Musei Civici, Pesaro (plate 1), Bellini doubles the altarpiece’s carved and gilded wooden frame with a passe-partout-like internal frame and a fictive marble frame that presents a framed painting within a framed painting, reproducing the proportions and richness of the altarpiece’s physical surround, the whole surmounted by a tabernacle that echoes the proportions of the painted interior frame (113–114). Asserting a close affinity between the formal and symbolic realms of the painting, Wright argues that the altarpiece’s ‘sculpted 221 Reviews © Association for Art History 2020 222 Reviews 1 Giovanni Bellini, The Coronation of the Virgin, main panel from the Pesaro altarpiece, early-to-mid-1470s. Oil on panel, 262 × 240 cm. Pesaro: Musei Civici. and depicted frames demonstrate, by analogies of shape, proportion and function, the proper relation between Christ’s sacrifice, as a transcendent yet ever-present event, the Virgin’s intercession and the promise of access to Paradise for the devotee’ (116). Referencing the ‘honour’ of her title, Wright’s fourth chapter, ‘Cloths of Honour’, links the frame as ornament with the respect due to a sacred subject. The cloths in question were the rich fabrics used in rituals of presentation at court, in processions or in sacred settings as marks of distinction. As Wright recognizes here and at several other points in the book, the connection between frame and subject is one in which the ‘ornamento was neither superficial nor extraneous but rather served to complete and even characterise that which it ornamented’ (38) – a reminder that our present-day belief in the supplementarity of the frame is as historically conditioned as the indivisibility of frame and artwork was to the early Renaissance.3 As a device for focusing visual attention on the principal figures, the cloth of honour isolates the subject from subsidiary action and detail, blocking off the background and projecting the principal figures onto the picture plane. These questions resurface in Wright’s fifth chapter, ‘Staging the Annunciation’, where difference is articulated via ‘objects at the foreground of the image – and therefore close to the viewer – that seem to be incongruous or at best tangential, to the main representation’ (198). In Francesco del Cossa’s Annunciation (plate 2), a snail, a ‘memorable and meaningful distraction that playfully calls attention to the boundary’, draws attention away from Gabriel’s message to Mary, while God the Father remains remote from the sublime encounter (198). Wright explores these relationships with conviction and insight, identifying the snail as a mediating element between the painting and the beholder – just as Gabriel mediates between the Virgin Mary and God (199). The snail in fact is a parergon, a term that defines a subsidiary pictorial element to the main composition – in this case the Annunciation scene (ergon) and the peripatetic gastropod (parergon).4 This is fascinating and enlightening analysis, and if, as with previous chapters, the reader may well wish for yet more detail, more analysis, Wright could well reply (perhaps even a little tartly) that this already long and detailed book would thereby grow to unwieldy lengths. © Association for Art History 2020 Chapter six, ‘Framing, Tomb and Sacrament’, addresses questions of framing in relation to the tabernacle. Starting from the ‘complex ontological status of the Host’ that is both tangible wafer and the mystic Body of Christ, the tabernacle serves both to preserve and restrict access to the sacrament contained within. To explain this dual purpose, Wright ingeniously borrows the notion of ‘lack’ employed in critical theory to account for the frame’s paradoxical status as a necessary supplement to the artwork, one in which the work exhibits a ‘lack’ until framed.5 The analogy is, Wright claims, ‘imperfect’. Yet the dexterity of her analysis, along with her cogent comments on the autonomous artwork to which the frame is a mere addendum, goes a long way to present the tabernacle frame, and other material boundaries, as first and foremost vehicles for transformation – the host gains its mystical properties, the relic its jewel-encrusted casket, and the painting its surround (243). The final chapter, ‘Monuments as Miniatures’, focuses on frames in the presentation of textual material – in this case, that of the manuscript frontispiece, identified by Wright as a ‘prefatory text that addresses the reader and announces what is to follow without yet revealing it’ (255). The similarities of this formulation to that of the role of the tabernacle may be noted. As Wright recognizes, the framing mechanism of a book is hardly identical to that of painting, but she shows the value of considering the function of the frontispiece in relation to the monumental frames examined in earlier chapters in acknowledging their common parergonality and the ‘production of threshold spaces in the book in order to highlight the various kinds of cultural translation that frontispiece illumination could perform’ (256). This is an important aim, not least because of the way the notion of frame is expanded to embrace formulations of pictorial space beyond the non-liminal. It is therefore somewhat surprising that Wright appears not to have made use of Gerard Genette’s groundbreaking Paratexts, a work that specifically deals with the question of threshold spaces – prefaces, margins, titles, dedications, epigraphs – in literature.6 This is quite a long book, and the breadth of material, even when limited to one period and place, is daunting, and so too is the number of potential questions that remain to be asked. But if her ambition to ‘approach the art and visual culture of the Renaissance via the frame’ has left some loose ends, it is hard to see how Wright could have done more (293). By their very nature frames have a history, and the lasting value of 223 Reviews © Association for Art History 2020 224 Reviews 2 Francseco del Cossa, Annunciation, main panel, and predella of the Osservanza altarpiece, c. 1470. Oil on panel, 137 × 113 cm (main panel). Dresden: Gemäldegalerie. this scholarly, thoughtful, and deeply innovative book lies not only in revealing the energy and agency, in short the work of the frame, in the social and material life of fifteenth-century Italy, but also in alerting us to the value of examining the role of the frame in other periods and contexts. Art history should take note. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 I borrow my title from Craig Owens, ‘From Work to Frame, or, Is There Life After “The Death of the Author”?’, in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, Berkeley, CA, 1994, 122–139. Jacques Derrida, ‘Parergon’, in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago and London, 1987, 9. Wright acknowledges Louis Marin’s identification of the ground as a ‘frame’ to the principal figures, but one might equally recognize Meyer Schapiro’s groundbreaking study of the semiotics of frame from 1972–73: see Louis Marin, ‘The Frame of Representation and Some of its Figures’, in Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, ed. Paul Duro, Cambridge, 1996, 79–95; and Meyer Schapiro, ‘On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in ImageSigns’, in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artists, and Society, New York, 1994, 1–32. For a recent study of the operation of the parergon, see Paul Duro, ‘What is a Parergon?’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 77: 1, Winter 2019, 23–33. Derrida, ‘Parergon’, 42–43. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Literature, Culture, Theory), Cambridge, 1997. © Association for Art History 2020 The Law of Circumstance Martha Buskirk After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation, by Erika Balsom, New York: Columbia University Press, 2017, 312 pp., 27 b. & w. illus., paperback, $35.00/£27.00; hardback, $105.00/£81.00; e-book $34.99/£27.00 Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America, by Joan Kee, Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019, 320 pp., 102 col. illus., hardback, $65.00/£50.00 Where does the work, as such, begin and end? Even for art identified with a relatively stable, portable object, this question is not easily answered. In many contemporary practices, fluid or hybrid possibilities are built into the basic structure. Yet the channels through which works are distributed and experienced often require some degree of certainty, including adherence to artificial limits as a prerequisite for making art desirable to collectors, or potentially even being understood as art in the first place. For film and video, pursuit of one type of licensing structure may preclude viewing in other contexts. Joan Kee and Erika Balsom approach these challenges from different perspectives, with Balsom emphasizing how methods of distribution are fundamental to the identity of film and video, while Kee looks at artists who engage with legal issues in the formation of their work. There are certain specific overlaps, around limited editions and copyright matters, but the more important parallel lies in their close examination of structures and conventions that some might dismiss as peripheral, yet they find core to a work’s identity. Both also proceed in a similar fashion, with certain specific case studies that open onto a wide range of contextual and comparative material. Balsom’s exceptionally nuanced consideration of the copy is grounded on a fairly straightforward premise: it is impossible to understand experimental film and its many offshoots without attention to methods of distribution, and these are inseparable from a work’s medium. In support of this proposition, she traces a number of interwoven histories. One is the many ways that film and video creators have attempted to establish distribution channels for their work, using the business 225