'Drawing Blood'

70 RES 63/64 SPRING/AUTUMN 2013 Figure 1. Andrea del Castagno, The Vision of Saint Jerome, ca. 1453. Detached fresco, 279 x 179 cm. Santissima Annunziata, Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY. Reprinted from ReS: Anthropology & Aesthetics, Vol. 63/64, Wet/Dry, Spring/Autumn 2013. Copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Drawing blood Anne Dunlop The moment of arising is objective and subjective at the same time and is indeed situated on a threshold of undecidability between object and subject. It is never the emergence of the fact without at the same time being the emergence of the knowing subject itself: the operation on the origin is at the same time an operation on the subject. —Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things, p. 89. The subject is a vision brought on by bloodshed. The old man in the middle is Saint Jerome (ca. 345–420), scholar and translator of the Christian Bible (fig. 1). Jerome has withdrawn to the desert to fast and pray, and his body is skin and bones. To atone for his sins, he has been striking himself with the rock in his right hand. His act of penitence has been rewarded: The Trinity has appeared to sustain him. Violently foreshortened, perpendicular to the picture surface, it emerges in a gush of red cherubim that seems to burst from the saint’s straining white head. God the Father looks down toward us, but the crucified Christ has only half emerged from the picture plane (fig. 2). His body is missing below the waist as if he has been cut in half, the resulting blood erupting upward to form the red cherubim and the Father’s heavy scarlet-orange and crimson garments. More scarlet red is present at Jerome’s feet, in the form of a bright (though entirely repainted) cardinal’s hat—a traditional symbol used to identify the saint—which reads like a pool of blood collecting from the vision above. Even the mouth of the miniature lion at Jerome’s right hand—another attribute—is an open red gash echoing and eclipsing the much more muted form of the grey stone beside it. The thin trickles at the edge of Jerome’s bare chest—the blood that produced the vision—are lost in these intense reds suffusing the rest of the picture. Jerome’s hands are still, but his self-inflicted blows are suggested by a tension—a percussion—that flows out from his emaciated ribs at the center of the image. This same percussion has twisted his white shift into a kind of halter around his neck and arms, knotted with ropey veins; it also makes deep horizontal pleats in the clothes of the two female figures on either side. They are probably the Roman patrician Paula (d. 404) I began this essay as Tropical Storm Lee made the space between wet and dry something more pressing than a scholarly metaphor, in a city which rises and falls on the shifting margin between them. I thank Jean Campbell for her thoughts and help. —A.D. and her daughter Eustochium (d. 419/420), Jerome’s followers and financial supporters, witnesses here to his ascetic success. But they also carry tension in the folds of the agitated cloth that shrouds them, so heavily draped that they are essentially bodiless. Paula’s shawl creases into waves that echo the ribs of Jerome’s chest, and Eustochium’s draperies are caught in strange twisted knots not unlike Jerome’s own skin or the tendons of his neck. Blood flows here as color and disturbance, but not much as a substance. Yet for an image of the vision of God that others would only receive in Heaven, the socalled Beatific Vision that theologians claimed awaited the blessed, the painting is bizarrely unquiet. Nothing in the commission seems to account for this agitation. The fresco was done in the early 1450s for a family chapel in the Santissima Annunziata in Florence, an important church then being rebuilt with Medici backing.1 The chapel was dedicated to Saint Jerome, and it belonged to a man called Girolamo Corboli (1407/8– 1478). Girolamo began paying for the annual celebration of his name saint no later than 1453, and this date is generally taken as a rough ante quem for the painter’s work.2 From early sources, we learn that the fresco was framed by an arched tabernacle, and that Andrea del Castagno painted two other nave chapels as well as several other commissions in the church.3 1. W. Paatz and E. V. Paatz, Die Kirchen von Florenz: ein kunstgeschichteliches Handbuch (Frankfurt, 1955), vol. 1, pp. 62–196. 2. On the chapel and painting: J. R. Spencer, Andrea del Castagno and His patrons (Durham, NC, 1991), pp. 56–61; M. Horster, Andrea del Castagno: Complete edition with a Critical Catalogue (Ithaca, NY, 1980), pp. 34–35, 181–182. 3. There are three early sources on Andrea’s chapels. The first is the 1510 Memoriale di molte statue e pitture della città di Firenze fatto da Francesco Albertini prete a Baccio da Montelupo Scultore, ed. L. Mussini and L. Piaggio (Florence, 1863), pp. 12–13. Albertini wrote: “le due [i.e., cappelle] verso il claustro per mano di Andreino, sono in tabernacoli a mezo tondo: et quelle che sono in cappella di S. Maria Magdalena de’Medici, e in altri lochi in decta chiesa, nella quale fu sepulto.” The next source is the notebook of Antonio Billi, who was writing some time between 1506 and 1530. His text exists in two Florentine manuscripts, both in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence. The first is Magliabechiano XXV 636, ff. 75r–85v, known as the “Codex Strozziano” and dated to the mid-cinquecento. The other is Magliabechiano XIII 89, ff. 38v–51v, transcribed by Antonio Petrei before 1563. The reference is slightly different in each. The Strozziano reads: “Nella chiesa della Nunziata di Firenze, nella cappella di messer Orlando de Medici, 3 figure, tra le quali è la moglie di detto Andrea. 72 RES 63/64 SPRING/AUTUMN 2013 Figure 2. Andrea del Castagno, The Vision of Saint Jerome. Detail of the Trinity. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY. Vasari would have blamed the violence of the image on the temperament of the artist.4 Andrea was probably E in un’altra cappella di detta chiesa uno san Girolamo. E in un’altra uno san Giuliano con l’istoria sua.” The Petrei copy has the subjects confused: “E nella Nunziata di Firenze, nella cappella di Orlando de’ Medici, tre fiure, infra le quali vi e la moglie di detto maestro Andreino; e in un’altra cappella in detta chiesa uno san Giovanni, e in un’altra uno san Gregorio con la storia sua.” See Il libro di Antonio Billi, ed. F. Benedettucci (Rome, 1991), pp. 84 and 131. The last source is found in the manuscript called the “Anonimo Magliabechiano.” The writercompiler has recently been identified as Bernardo Vecchietti, writing around 1540: “Dipinse anchora nella chiesa de fratj della Nunziata nella cappella di messer Orlando de Medici le tre fiure dell’altare, ch’al naturale ui ritrasse la donna sua. Et dipinse anchora in detta chiesa in un altra cappella Santo Girolamo et anchora in detta chiesa acanto alla detta cappella et acanto alla cappella della Nunziata Santo Giuliano con la sua historia. Et in detta chiesa è di suo mano anchora un San born around 1419, and his family came from Castagno in the Mugello hills above Florence. He matriculated in the painters’ guild in 1444, and died in August 1457. He seems to have led a quiet life—his only brush with the law was as a witness to an assault on a Florentine tax Bernardino, che è nel pilastro della cappella di Santa Barbara, opera molto mirabile.” Il Codice Magliabechiano, ed. C. Frey (Berlin, 1892; reprint Farnborough, UK, 1969), p. 98. 4. G. Vasari, le vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti. edizione integrale (Rome, 1993), pp. 416–421. All citations are from Vasari’s second edition, published in 1568. For a discussion of the biography: J. Graul, “Einleitung zum Leben des Andrea del Castagno und des Domenico Veneziano,” in G. Vasari, Das leben des Filippo lippi, des pesello und pesellino, des Andrea del Castagno und Domenico Veneziano und des Fra Angelico, ed. J. Graul and H. Damm, trans. V. Lorini (Berlin, 2011), pp. 44–51. I thank Jana Graul for giving me a copy of her work. Dunlop: Drawing blood official, and even this is not certain.5 Yet Andrea is the greatest villain in Vasari’s lives of the Artists, an assassin who drew his first pictures with a blade and who killed his fellow painter Domenico Veneziano because of vicious professional jealousy. Vasari tells us that the young Andrea, tending his uncle’s flocks, began drawing in imitation of a mediocre painter. His first drawing tools were rough charcoal and the point of a knife, but his animals and figures were still marvelous. Yet he was a violent and bestial man, beset by envy. Domenico Veneziano had brought the secret of oil painting to Florence, and Andrea del Castagno wanted to eliminate the competition. He pretended to befriend Domenico, gaining his trust and learning his habits and the secrets of oil. He then bludgeoned him to death on a dark street, smashing out his guts and his brains with lead weights (certi piombi), and slipped back to his room, resuming the drawings that he had been making before the attack. Vasari tells us that Castagno left a self-portrait as Judas Iscariot, done not long before the murder. Since 1862, when Gaetano Milanesi pointed out that Domenico Veneziano actually outlived Andrea del Castagno by four years, most art historians have shied away from Vasari’s account, though at least one suggested that there must be a murder concealed somewhere in the artist’s past.6 Modern writers generally dislike attempts to explain the artwork by taking the biography of the maker as its source. Some of our heuristic models are even based in the impossibility of bridging this gap. In one aspect of Alfred Gell’s work, for instance, it is the interpreter’s inability to imagine any maker capable of generating the object at hand that determines that object’s status as art. In such a model, the turn to biography is above all a symptom of the impossibility of accounting for a creative source, an indication that the object has been classified as an artwork as much as any real hermeneutical act. Leon Battista Alberti got to this point well before us, making it clear that it was dangerous to conflate the maker and the made. Famously, he began his account of painting’s 5. For the record of an “Andrea pictor” as witness to a 1449 assault, see: A. Fortuna, “Alcune note su Andrea dal Castagno,” L’arte 232 (1958): 345–355. For the other documents on the artist, see A. M. Fortuna, Andrea dal Castagno (Florence, 1957); F. Hartt and G. Corti, “Andrea del Castagno: Three Disputed Dates,” Art Bulletin 48 (1966): 228–234. 6. H. von Einem, “Castagno ein Mörder?” in Der Mensch und die Künste: Festschrift für Heinrich lützeler zum 60. Geburtstage (Dusseldorf, 1962), pp. 433–442. Vasari took the tale from the works of Billi and Vecchietti. See C. Nicholl, “Death in Florence,” london Review of Books 34/4 (23 February 2012): 9–10. 73 precepts by calling Narcissus the first creator of the art—the young man who died seeking his own image as it welled up before him. We agree among ourselves that Vasari was talking about objects when he talked about the lives of the artists who produced them, reaching for an author-function or agency through a series of descriptions and anecdotes. But his approach still goes against the grain, even as we struggle, as he did, to connect objects with forces that could account for them. And yet Vasari was claiming something bigger and stranger when he made Andrea del Castagno a murderer—something about the uncontrolled nature of creative making, and the difficulties of describing the traces of that act. He signals a real tension, a link between violence and visual practice echoed in one of the few facts we do have about the artist’s lifework. Andrea may not have been a murderer, but even for his contemporaries he was a marked man. Because of a commission for which he painted traitors hanging from their heels, he seems to have been known as Andreino degli Impiccati, or “Andy of the Hanged Men.”7 Like Vasari’s tale of artist assassination, the nickname places Andrea’s work at the limit between drawing and dying. Within Vasari’s life of the artist, this threshold is figured as color. It was Andreino’s crude color that drew Vasari’s condemnation of his art. Vasari admired the painter, calling his work eccellente e grande. He wrote that Andrea showed enormous understanding (grandissima intelligenza) of the most difficult artistic tropes, above all, disegno—Vasari’s one-word shorthand for that precious ability to give physical form to mental conception. Andrea’s figures are terrible and grave, and they mark a new threshold for painting as an artform; Vasari even praised the Vision of Jerome, especially Andrea’s use of foreshortening, which Vasari judged to be more convincing and modern than anything that had gone before it.8 Yet when he condemns quattrocento painting as “dry and crude and cutting” (secca e cruda e tagliente), he makes this criticism concrete in Andrea 7. See Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo zibaldone, vol. 1 (London, 1960), p. 24, where Rucellai calls him “Andreino dal Chastagno, detto degli’inpichati, pittore.” See also Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture, ed. and trans. J. R. Spencer (New Haven, 1965), vol. 2, f. 69r; and Luca Landucci, Diario fiorentino dal 1450 al 1516, ed. J. Del Badia (Florence, 1883), entry 1459. 8. Vasari, le vite (see note 4), p. 418: “nella cappella intitolata a S. Girolamo, dipinse quel Santo secco e raso, con buon disegno e molta fatica, e sopra vi fece una Trinità, con un Crocifisso che scorta, tanto ben fatto, che Andrea merita per ciò esser molto lodato, avendo condotto gli scorti con molto miglior e più moderna maniera, che gl’altri inanzi a lui fatto non avevano.” 74 RES 63/64 SPRING/AUTUMN 2013 del Castagno’s biography, where form and color never meet. Andreino’s first works are pure drawing, charcoal monochromes or the fully uncolored slices of a knife. When his color finally emerges in Vasari’s description, it is murderous—Domenico’s blood and brains, the lifeblood of an artist whose secret was a fluid and subtle command of color. For this, however, he does not use a knife—Andrea draws blood with a blunt instrument. The fifteenth century was concerned with blood in all its forms, as Caroline Walker Bynum has recently reminded us.9 It was in blood that devotion might be founded. By 1400, Christ’s blood had its own dual cult: the lifeblood of his heart, which might be drunk by mystics from his side, and the blood shed in the Passion, which persisted as blood relics in the churches of Europe. Jerome’s vision of the Trinity, a late-medieval elaboration of the saint’s biography, is a further sign of this development.10 Between 374 and 376, Jerome lived briefly as a hermit in Syria. In a letter to Eustochium, he described himself as weeping, emaciated, blackened by the sun, and constantly striking himself in penance: “[I] did not stop beating my breast until the Lord restored my peace of mind.”11 The popular thirteenth-century Golden legend, which quoted the statement from Jerome’s letter, explains his Latin name, Hieronymus, as meaning (among other things) “wet with blood through his meditation on the Lord’s passion.”12 In the later 9. C. W. Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and practice in late Medieval northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia, 2007). 10. E. F. Rice, Jr., Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1985), pp. 1–22, and idem, “St Jerome’s ‘Vision of the Trinity’: An iconographical note,” Burlington Magazine 125 (March 1983): 151–155. 11. Rice, “St Jerome’s ‘Vision of the Trinity’” (see note 10), p. 152, citing Epistle 22 to Eustochium: “I used to lie down at Jesus’s feet, watered them with my tears, and wiped them with my hair. . . . Filled with stiff anger against myself, I went out into the desert alone. Wherever I found a deep valley or rough mountainside or rocky precipice, I made it my place of prayer and of torture for my unhappy flesh. The Lord himself is my witness, after many tears I fixed my eyes on heaven and seemed to find myself among the angelic hosts. Then, full of joy and happiness, I would sing out: ‘I run after you in the fragrance of your perfumes’ [Song of Solomon 1, 3].” The Latin reads: “Ad Iesu iacebam pedes, rigabam lacrimis, crine iergebam et repugnantem carnem ebdomadarum inedia subiugabam…mihimet iratus et rigidus solus deserta penetrabam. Sicubi concaua uallium, aspera montium, rupium praerupta cernebam, ibi meae orationi locus, illud miserrimae carnis ergastulum; et, ut mihi ipse testis est Dominus, post multas lacrimas, post caelo oculos inhaerentes nonnumquam uidebar mihi interesse agminibus angelorum, et laetus gaudensque cantabam: ‘post te in odorem unguentorum tuorum currimus.’” 12. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. W. G. Ryan (Princeton, 1993), vol. 2, p. 211: “Jerome duecento, three other letters appeared, all by the same anonymous author.13 According to these sources, Jerome the hermit ate nothing but raw roots and vegetables, wore a hair shirt, slept on bare ground, and whipped himself three times a day until blood flowed down his body. As he whipped himself, he often saw the Trinity. Jerome lived to be ninety-six, and when his corpse was undressed to be washed, his body was so gaunt, scarred, and misshapen from a lifetime of such devotions that he looked like a leper. Jerome the biblical scholar was the patron of theologians. This apocryphal Jerome became the patron saint of flagellant men. In Italy after 1350, five new congregations were founded and named for Jerome.14 Their vocation was rooted in a willingness to flay themselves open to God in a penitential exercise based on Jerome’s supposed model. The images they commissioned combined Christ’s wounds and weapons (the arma christi), his dead flesh and blood, and often also the flagellant Jerome.15 There is no evidence that Andrea del Castagno or anyone else associated with the Santissima Annunziata had ties to the Hieronymite congregations, but Millard Meiss proposed that one of their confraternities, the Buca di San Girolamo, was located near the church, a link that might have shaped (Hieronymus in Latin) comes from gerar, holy, and nemus, a grove— hence a holy grove—or noma, a law. . . . He was holy, i.e., firm, or clean, or wet with blood . . . Jerome was holy, which is to say firm in doing good, by his long-suffering perseverance. He was clean in his mind through his purity, and wet with blood through his meditation on the Lord’s passion.” 13. Rice, Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (see note 10), p. 49. One letter posed as a report on Jerome’s death by Eusebius of Cremona, Jerome’s disciple at Bethlehem, to Damasus, Bishop of Portus, and to the Roman senator Theodosius. The second was a letter of praise from Augustine of Hippo to Cyril of Jerusalem. The third was ostensibly Cyril’s reply, a compilation of all Jerome’s miracles in life and death. 14. These orders were the Frati Gesuati di San Girolamo (founder Giovanni Colombini, 1304–1367), the Frati Eremiti di San Girolamo a Fiesole (founder Carlo da Montegranelli, ca. 1330–1417), the Pisan Girolamini or Poveri Eremiti di San Girolamo dell’Osservanza (founder Pietro Gambacorta, 1355–1435), and the Hieronymites, founded by Tommasuccio di Foligno, who traveled with his followers to Spain in nothing but shirts and rags to set up a new order that had been revealed to him in a vision. See Rice, Saint Jerome in the Renaissance, (see note 10), pp. 49–115. 15. For images, see B. Ridderbos, Saint and Symbol: Images of Saint Jerome in early Italian Art, trans. P. de Waard-Dekking (Groningen, 1984); D. Russo, Saint Jérôme en Italie: Étude d’iconographie et de spiritualité (XIIIe–XVe siècles) (Paris, 1987); C. Wiebel, Askese und endlichkeitsdemut in der italienischen Renaissance. Ikonologische Studien zum Bild des heiligen Hieronymus (Weinheim, 1988); M. W. Ainsworth, “Text and Image: How St Jerome Sees the Trinity,” Burlington Magazine 149 (2007): 95–96. Dunlop: Drawing blood the Corboli fresco.16 Yet the sense of unease created by Andrea’s fresco contrasts sharply with the only prior image of Jerome’s vision, which was done for one of these orders.17 It is a predella scene from an altarpiece painted by the Florentine Francesco d’Antonio around 1430. Here the Trinity floats in a round golden bubble of light and angels, at a safe distance from Jerome and two other monks, who are out taking a stroll. The men, fully clothed and apparently well fed, make placid rhetorical gestures of devotion and amazement. Andrea del Castagno offers instead an image of Jerome’s vision as an impossible flow. Fifteenth-century doctors defined old age as the drying out and cooling down of the life force of the body, that force found in blood. An old man’s body was considered desiccated and cold, losing heat and animation as it moved toward full stasis and dryness in death.18 The few trickles of blood on Jerome’s chest are consonant with his age, for his blood ought to have been thin and weak. Yet the sparse bloodshed of this dried-out body has given birth to Jerome’s vision of the Trinity, pictured as a lush flow of orange and crimson spreading out above his head. Where the visionary moves into and becomes the vision, Andrea has done something odd, inserting two bright red-orange putti heads in fresco secco—that is, with a mixture of egg tempera rather than buon fresco. Millard Meiss was made uneasy by them, suggesting that Andrea was unable to resolve the foreshortening of Christ’s body and added the putti to hide his failure (fig. 2).19 The effect is to mark the transition from saint to vision with color that is partly form—the putti heads—and partly a 16. M. Meiss, “Scholarship and Penitence in the Early Renaissance: The Image of St. Jerome,” pantheon 32 (1974): 134–140; and the same writer’s entries in The Great Age of Fresco: Discoveries, Recoveries and Survivals (New York, 1970), cat. 42 and 43, pp. 160–163. 17. Rinieri Altarpiece, Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon, inventory number M431. The altarpiece was probably done for the Hieronymite Gesuati community of Santa Trinità Vecchia in Florence. The left end of the predella has a figure of the blessed Giovanni Colombini, founder of the order; the figure at the right end, stripped to the waist, is a flagellant whipping himself. The only other possible example is roughly contemporary, but not clearly Jerome’s vision. Filippo Lippi showed the death of Jerome and the Trinity in a circle of angels above his head, with a small figure of the saint in prayer in the space between them. The panel (268 x 165 cm) is now in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo of Prato; dates vary from ca. 1453 to after 1457. See J. Ruda, Fra Filippo lippi: life and Work with a Complete Catalogue (London, 1993), cat. 52 and pp. 206–208. 18. T. Parkin, “The Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds,” in A History of old Age, ed. P. Thane (Los Angeles, 2005), pp. 30–69 and notes, esp. 58–60. 19. Meiss, Great Age of Fresco (see note 16), p. 160. 75 formless smear; it is hard to say where the one becomes the other. Color is where words go to die. It elides the distinction between the materiality of the work and the fiction put forward by it, and is easily made into an allegory of the chasm between life and language, speech and subjectivity. Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636) seemed to struggle with this lack of boundaries in his attempt to define painting. He described paintings as bodies made up of smudged matter, and he stressed the stain or smear of color as a mark of ill-defined deceit: A painting is an image expressing the species of some thing, which when it is seen creates a memory of it. Painting can almost be called faking, as it is a fictive image, not the truth. For painting is artificially colored, that is composed of stained [fucata] colors, with nothing of faith or truth. It follows that there are also some paintings which by studied use of color surpass truthful bodies, and, as they strive to augment belief, they bring falsehood.20 Jacqueline Lichtenstein suggests that painting haunts philosophy as a murder victim haunts its murderer, and that it is color that forms the ghost.21 Painting has been condemned since Plato for its falseness, though as Nietzsche noted, this makes no sense: Art’s illusions are not false, because they have never tried to pass for truth; they simply present themselves as what they are. It is this that makes painting unbearable: Painting elides the fundamental ontological categories of truth and falsehood. Worse, it escapes language and description.22 Lichtenstein notes that the “impotence of words to explain color and the emotions that it provokes—the commonplace of all discourse on painting—betrays a more fundamental disarray in the face of this visible reality that baffles the usual procedures of language.”23 Color’s labile quality provided thought-games for Wittgenstein, himself an amateur painter, as he abandoned the idea of a total philosophical system. He stressed that color has no boundaries, that conceptually it is never a consistent category—we can think of a 20. etymologies 19, 16: “Pictura autem est imago exprimens speciem rei alicuius, quae dum visa fuerit ad recordationem mentem reducit. Pictura autem dicta quasi fictura; est enim imago ficta, non veritas. Hinc et fucata, id est ficto quodam colore inlita, nihil fidei et veritatis habentia. Unde et sunt quaedam picturae quae corpora veritatis studio coloris excedunt et fidem, dum augere contendunt, ad mendacium provehunt” [translation mine]. 21. J. Lichtenstein, The eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and painting in the French Classical Age, trans. E. McVarish (Berkeley, 1993), p. 1. 22. Ibid., p. 187. 23. Ibid., p. 4. 76 RES 63/64 SPRING/AUTUMN 2013 transparent blue, for instance, but not a transparent white. Further, we can never share or describe even our own imperfect understanding through language.24 Color is a constant physical reminder of our inability to know the consciousness of others, or to be fully descriptive of our own. In this linguistic failure, color joins God and the highest concepts of theology.25 Julia Kristeva saw pure color as a space where perception, individual drives, and social power met and clashed, the place where the prelinguistic self might escape the censorship of power and the symbolic law of language, and where “the unconscious erupts into a culturally coded pictorial distribution.” In a traditional visual language system, color would be the drive and flow of the maker into the made, a lingering trace of the biographical source. Kristeva draws on Hegel to link color’s excess to the bodily and burlesque, the subaltern and grotesque that escapes boundaries, categories, closure.26 “Color is the shattering of unity,” the place where the life drive and death drive flow out and compete.27 Kristeva’s words recall Vasari’s image of Domenico Veneziano’s lifeblood drawn out by Andrea del Castagno’s hand. An image not unlike Andrea’s Vision of Jerome, a small fourteenth-century painting of the adoration of the Crucified Christ where God’s body has been entirely covered by a blood-red stain, prompted Georges Didi-Huberman to speak of “color-subject.” This smear that both covers Christ’s body and spurts from the pictured flesh is the symptom, he claims, of an entire visual system: the paradox, justified by Christ’s own incarnation, of transmuting colored matter into embodied Logos, the Word that secures all other language and meaning.28 Yet even this idea of the “color-subject” may reify language as the marker of subjectivity, privileging it over the painter’s material act. When instead Giorgio Agamben speaks of a “moment of arising,” and of a “threshold of undecidability between object and subject,” he seems to come closer to the force of color as simultaneously both created fictive form and real matter to be worked and shaped.29 A painter’s sense of color is first as a material, a body other than his own. It is something he transmutes into other bodies. This is peculiarly true for fresco painting, which is itself a kind of transmutation. True fresco, “good” [buon] fresco as it was called by Vasari and others, is the transformation, through water, of color into stone. Pigments are mixed with water or limewater and brushed onto wet plaster. The plaster dries from the outside in as the water evaporates into the surrounding air; as the wall surface hardens, the painted image is caught in a thin layer of calcium carbonate—limestone—formed in the reaction. The outside surface of a fresco is therefore the most inviolate. But water can also undo the process, just as stone is eroded by water, and as the Vision of Jerome attests. At some point the bottom was damaged, and in the 1966 flood, which affected so many artworks in Florence, the outer layer with the paint film was removed from the wall and the damaged area was repainted. A tidal mark is now visible along the bottom of the painting. Painting in “pure” or “good” fresco, color in water, is thus as close as one can come to the dream of color without body, which is perhaps one reason why those like Vasari, who sought form as an ideal, praised fresco as the highest achievement of the painter’s art.30 True 24. L. Wittgenstein, Bemerkungen über die Farben = Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. L. L. McAlister and M. Schättle (Berkeley, 1977), p. 11 (book I, section 68): Auf die Frage “Was bedeuten die Wörter ‘rot,’ ‘blau,’ ‘schwarz,’ ‘weiß,’” können wir freilich gleich auf Dinge zeigen, die so gefärbt sind,—aber weiter geht unsre [sic] Fähigheit die Bedeutungen dieser Worte zu erklären nicht! Im übrigen machen wir uns von ihrer Verwendung keine, oder eine ganz rohe, zum Teil falsche, Vorstellung. 25. Ibid., p. 58–59. 26. J. Kristeva, “Giotto’s Joy,” in Calligram: essays in new Art History from France, ed. N. Bryson (Cambridge, 1988), p. 40, citing Hegel, The philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F. P. Osmaston (New York, 1975), vol. 3, pp. 322–324. 27. Kristeva (see note 26), p. 37. 28. G. Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. J. Goodman (University Park, PA, 2005), pp. 205–212; and for an earlier discussion of some of the same themes, idem, la peinture incarnée (Paris, 1985), pp. 9–12. There are a few errors in this discussion, which identifies the image as an anonymous German painting on parchment, Crucifixion with Saint Bernard and a Monk, first half of the fourteenth century, Cologne, S[ch] nütgen Museum. It is, however, a drawing, now dated to the early fifteenth century (25 x 18 cm), and the second figure is a nun. See J. F. Hamburger, nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 1–5. 29. G. Agamben, The Signature of All Things: on Method, trans. L. D’Isanto with K. Attell (New York, 2009), p. 89. See also idem, “Nymphs,” in Releasing the Image: From literature to new Media, ed. J. Khalip and R. Mitchell (Stanford, CA, 2011), pp. 60–80 and notes. 30. Vasari, le vite (see note 4), p. 80: “Della Pittura, chapter XIX: Del dipingere in muro: come si fa e perchè si chiama lavorare in fresco.” When Vasari defines disegno in the first sentence of this section, he in fact speaks of “universal judgment,” the Last Judgment as it is usually termed, Michelangelo’s other great monument in that space, and the work of the soul within it: “[disegno] procedendo dall’intelletto, cava di molte cose un giudizio universale, simile a una forma o vero idea di tutte le cose della natura . . . una apparente espressione e dichiarazione del concetto che si ha nell’animo” (p. 73). Dunlop: Drawing blood fresco demanded a “virile” and steady right hand, without any cloying matter: Vasari specifically warned against retouching with substances like egg tempera or glue.31 Fresco binds color, and fixes its flow and limits; few things are as dry and static as stone. In practice, however, most fresco pigments remained stubbornly substantial, and they were untrustworthy, as Vasari himself noted in the same discussion. In the purifying of color through water, pigments were not always willing to leave their initial states. Not only did tones change as they dried, but they might also change over time. They could become unfixed. The pigments of the Saint Jerome have not been analyzed. But those of another work by Andrea del Castagno, a fresco of Saint Julian the Hospitaller in the chapel beside the Jerome, are stony and stannous, mired in matter: ground-up malachite for green; blues made of layers of the mineral azurite, the gem lapis lazuli, and white; and reds from intensely colored vermilion, also called cinnabar.32 The saturated red-orange explosion of Jerome’s Trinity vision is almost certainly the same material. It is a peculiarly embodied one. Chemically, vermilion is HgS, mercuric sulfide, the main ore of mercury.33 It is not entirely stable in the “wet” medium of tempera, particularly if it has been inadequately ground, as Cennino Cennini noted around 1400.34 For reasons that are still not entirely understood, the pigment will blacken into metacinnabar, possibly encouraged by exposure to light or by the breakdown of particles caused by grinding. Metacinnabar is a chemically identical form, but black rather than intense red-orange.35 Yet 31. Vasari, le vite (see note 4), p. 80. 32. G. Botticelli, “Il restauro del S. Giuliano di Andrea del Castagno nella Chiesa della SS. Annunziata a Firenze,” Critica d’arte 42/1 (1999): 62–74. 33. For an overview, see S. Bucklow, “Paradigms and Pigment Recipes: Vermilion, Synthetic Yellows and the Nature of the Egg,” Zeitschrift für Kunsttechnologie und Konservierung 13 (1999): 140–149; F. Brachert and T. Brachert, “Zinnober,” Maltechnik:Restauro 3 (July 1980): 145–158; R. J. Gettens, R. L. Feller, and W. T. Chase, “Vermilion and Cinnabar,” Studies in Conservation 17 (1972): 45–69; and D. V. Thompson, “Artificial Vermilion in the Middle Ages,” Technical Studies in the Field of the Fine Arts 2 (1933): 62–70. 34. C. Cennini, Il libro dell’arte, ed. F. Frezzato (Vicenza, 2003), pp. 88–107. Frezzato’s edition is based on the two early manuscripts of the treatise, the Codex Mediceo Laurenziano P.78.23 and Codex Riccardiano 2190. 35. V. Daniels, “The Blackening of Vermilion by Light,” in Recent Advances in the Conservation and Analysis of Artifacts, ed. J. Black (London, 1987), pp. 280–282; J. Kirby, D. Saunders, and J. Cupitt, “Colorants and Colour Change,” in early Italian paintings: Techniques and Analysis, ed. T. Bakkenist, R. Hoppenbrouwers, and H. Dubois (Maastricht, 1997), pp. 65–66. 77 because of vermilion’s power and its intense color, this mixture of mercury and sulfur remained the major red pigment of Eurasian painting until the modern age. Vermilion occurs naturally in small amounts throughout the world, and in European antiquity was mined at Sisapo (modern Almadén) in Spain, still the most important global source.36 But it is also one of the oldest artificially produced compounds, made with much effort by combining sulfur and mercury.37 Until the early modern period, vermilion was produced by the so-called dry method, possibly discovered in ancient China and carried into Europe by Arabic science. In the simplest version of the dry method, the mercury and sulfur were ground together in a mortar. In more sophisticated forms, mercury (quicksilver) might be combined with molten sulfur. The result was ground and heated to sublimation (above 580 degrees Celsius) and then condensed on a cold surface. Red crystals formed, which were then washed with an alkaline solution to remove the excess sulfur, ground in water, and dried. The earliest Western reference to this method comes in the eighth-century Mappae clavicula, and by the quattrocento there were many recipes; typically a mixture of two parts mercury to one part sulfur was proposed.38 The mixing of sulfur and quicksilver that produced vermilion was an overdetermined act. Throughout much of premodern Eurasia, scholarly consensus held that all metals were combinations of the two ur-metals mercury and sulfur, vermilion in its constituent parts. In making vermilion, human beings mimicked God’s greater work by “generating” a new being. Albertus Magnus described the process as a kind of sexual union of sulfur and mercury, an act of animation transforming the two parent metals: Sulphur . . . is not the “Father” except [in the sense] that the male, out of his own substance, produces [offspring] in something else—that is, in menstrual blood—and that is the way Sulphur acts upon Quicksilver, but does not produce anything at all in itself. . . . Quicksilver is to the material 36. Gettens, Feller, and Chase (see note 33), p. 46. 37. See P. H. Smith, “In the Workshop of History: Making, Writing, and Meaning,” W86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 19 (Spring–Summer 2012): 4–31; and idem, “Vermilion, Mercury, Blood, and Lizards: Matter and Meaning in Metalworking,” in Materials and expertise in early Modern europe: Between Market and laboratory, ed. U. Klein and E. C. Spary (Chicago, 2010), pp. 29–49. Some writers prefer to use the term “cinnabar” for the natural compound, and “vermilion” for the artificial one. 38. Modern vermilion is produced by the so-called “wet process,” discovered in 1687. This takes the black product and introduces a solution of ammonium or potassium sulfide into the heating process. 78 RES 63/64 SPRING/AUTUMN 2013 substance of metals as the menstrual fluid is to the embryo: out of it, by the force of the Sulphur that digests and burns it, all metals are produced. And when it begins to be changed into a specific form, at first it becomes lumpy, and then gradually it begins to solidify and be changed.39 As a kind of protean substance, vermilion was basic matter transmuted, and it was fundamental to alchemy throughout the premodern world, both in experiments to purify other metals into gold, and in the quest to prolong human life. In medieval and early modern China, gold and vermilion were together the “Great Medicines” for extending life and increasing energy. Vermilion was even superior to gold, at least according to one writer, because it embodied the essences of all other materials.40 Its color may have encouraged its association with blood, the fluid that carried life in the body. Pamela Smith has noted that vermilion was often included—uselessly—in recipes for making mosaic gold and other pigments, and she suggests that its inclusion was a means of infusing scarlet lifeblood into the alchemical process.41 Vermilion’s association with blood may also explain its widespread use in ritual contact between the living and the dead. According to Pliny’s natural History (Book 33, 117–122), ancient Romans used it to cover the faces of the cult statues of Jupiter on holidays, as well as the faces of those who made up the cultic processions. In China, Shang dynasty oracle bones from the Yin Xu site at Anyang, dating to 1400–1100 b.c.e., show traces of cinnabar both to highlight inscriptions and as an all-over varnish; the same bones also show traces of a black from a carbon source, possibly actual blood.42 More than a millennium later, the flesh of the terracotta soldiers buried in the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor, was rendered entirely with white derived from bones burned to a white ash and with red from cinnabar.43 Elena Phipps notes that red, and particularly 39. Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, trans. D. Wyckoff (Oxford, 1967), pp. 205 and 207. 40. J. C. Cooper, Chinese Alchemy: The Taoist Quest for Immortality (Wellingborough, UK, 1984), pp. 63–64. The writer is Ko Hung (ca. 260–340). 41. Smith, “Workshop of History” (see note 37). 42. R. S. Britten, “Oracle-Bone Color Pigments,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 2 (1937): 1–3; A. A. Benedetti-Pichler, “Microchemical Analysis of Pigments Used in the Fossae of the Incisions of Chinese Oracle Bones,” Industrial and engineering Chemistry, Analytical edition 9 (15 March 1937): 149–152. 43. C. Blänsdorf and Xia Yin, “A Colourful World for the Emperor’s Soul: The Polychromy of the Terracotta Sculptures at Qin Shihuang’s Burial Complex,” in The object in Context: Crossing Conservation vermilion, was also associated with the culture of death and commemoration in Olmec Mesoamerica (first millennium b.c.e.), and in ancient Peru from about 1000 b.c.e. She suggests that because the mercury of vermilion is poisonous to touch, the link to death and regeneration may have been especially poignant. More prosaically, it had insecticidal properties.44 Vermilion’s ritual negotiation between the living and the afterworld also occurred in Andrea del Castagno’s Italy, where a mixture of cinnabar, white lead, and green-tinted earth tones was proscribed to make the effigies of the saints, the dead who mediated for the living. Just as Adam had been created from earth and given an animating spark or spirit, Cennino Cennini, in his treatise on the arts, spoke of both this painting process and its outcome as incarnazione— incarnation, or, more actively, incarnating, animating, bringing flesh and blood into being.45 In bringing into being a new history of art, Vasari faced head-on the problem of origins, of the emergence of the work from tradition filtered through particular historical makers. He displaced it into a series of parable-narratives, figuring the “crude cutting dryness” of quattrocento painting as the actual murder of Domenico Veneziano, a painter who worked with soft color and flowing oil. Vasari even has Andrea use “certi piombi” to draw Domenico’s blood, not the iron club mentioned by earlier writers, a shift that brings the workshop forcibly back into the tale: Cennino, for instance, had recommended using lead to draw if burned bone were not available. Even as Andrea murders Domenico, he is still drawing. But Andrea del Castagno had himself figured such a moment of arising, of blurring of materials and forms, of one moment and subject into another, in the explosion of vermilion color that suggests blood displaced from Jerome’s desiccated body. This both is and pictures matter becoming something other than itself, a perpetual coming into being, with the emerging vision of Christ forever caught halfway between the painter’s image and the solid wall. This scarlet red was itself the product of transmutation before its further transformation under the painter’s watery brush. Boundaries, ed. D. Saunders, J. H. Townsend, and S. Woodcock (London, 2006), p. 179. 44. E. Phipps, “Cochineal Red: The Art History of a Color,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (Winter 2010): 4–48. I thank Elena Phipps for providing me with a copy of her work. 45. C. Kruse, “Fleisch werden—Fleisch malen: Malerei als ‘incarnazione.’ Mediale Verfahren des Bildwerdens im libro dell’Arte von Cennino Cennini,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 63 (2000): 305–325. Dunlop: Drawing blood 79 Figure 3. Andrea del Castagno, underdrawing of the Vision of Saint Jerome, ca. 1453. Detached from Santissima Annunziata, now at Cenacolo di Sant’Apollonia, Florence. Photo: author. So tied up in color was this process for Andrea that he did not figure it otherwise. When the petrified layer of color was peeled from the wall in the wake of the 1966 flood, a highly finished underdrawing was found (fig. 3). It had been sketched out with charcoal black and red, sometimes brushed for shading. But the clothing and drapery hang quietly on these figures. There has not yet been any sudden burst of energy to animate them, and where Jerome’s vision will later appear, there is nothing—only short, curved strokes suggesting something yet to come. Even here, however, only a liquid red, not the earthy black, has been used to mark the threshold between them. This is the bludgeoning of deadening boundaries between color and form, something welling up, uncontrolled, in Vasari’s ordered rise of art.