Daniel Arasse

"Nata per sostituire alla violenza fisica l’efficacia della comunicazione, la retorica è oggi molto conosciuta per le scuole che hanno fatto la sua storia e studiata dal punto di vista della classificazione delle figure, ma svilita nella sua specificità, quella di essere il dominio delle strategie del discorso. Argomentare il visibile è un’antologia che raccoglie i contributi di semiologi, storici dell’arte, filosofi, linguisti, teorici delle culture e si propone di mostrare il volto empirico della disciplina, territorio di contratti e di conflitti tra istanze che manipolano forze e soggetti pensati per essere trasformati: nei saperi, nei comportamenti e nelle passioni.
Tropi e tattiche trasmigrano da un sistema espressivo all’altro: non solo metafora e metonimia, ma anche chiasmo, ossimoro, ellissi, citazione, sono dispositivi rintracciabili tanto nel verbale quanto nel visivo. Può l’esplorazione della loro presenza in pittura – molto meno praticata che in letteratura – costringerci a rivedere la nostra concezione di retorica e di figure?
La prima parte del libro contiene saggi teorici sulle ragioni e sulle modalità dell’argomentazione per immagini. La seconda è un approfondimento su alcune figure alla frontiera tra parola e immagine, finora trascurate. Osservarne i principi di funzionamento serve a comprendere le dinamiche delle culture contemporanee, a nostro avviso più di quanto non facciano le abusate metafora e metonimia. Nella terza sezione, analitica, si indagano, infine, singole opere, generi, cicli, stili e motivi, intrecciandone la significazione con lo strato che riguarda la costruzione dell’interlocutore. Va ristabilito un nesso tra ciò che si apprende del contenuto dell’immagine e le strategie che essa usa per creare complicità, per farsi ricordare, per non passare indifferente."

In der topologischen Wende der Kulturwissenschaften sowie der aktuellen Konjunktur der »Raum«-Diskussion kommt meist eine Betrachtung der Handlungsdimension und des prozessualen Moments von Raum zu kurz. Der vorliegende zweisprachige Band zielt auf die Entwicklung eines »dynamischen« Raum-Verständnisses, indem er »Raum« als Element ästhetischer Theorie und symbolischer Ordnungen in den Blick nimmt. Konkret wird »Raum« in seiner Medien- und Epochenspezifik, seiner Prozessualität im Diskurs dargestellt, indem er als symbolische Praxis in Malerei und Bildtheorie, Architektur, Architekturfotografie, Literatur, Literaturkritik und Philosophie untersucht wird.

A mundane snail makes its way across the front of Francesco del Cossa’s Annunciation, an altarpiece painted around 1470 for the church of the Osservanza in Bologna, but now in Dresden. Two contrasting interpretations have been offered of the gastropod: it draws an analogy between the Virgin’s pure conception and snails impregnated by dew (Ettlinger), or its overlarge scale and audacious visibility are a declaration of art’s ingenious deception (Arasse). My paper moves beyond this opposition between two very different approaches to visual evidence, of straightforward symbol on the one hand, or modernist sign of self-consciousness on the other. Instead, the snail is an allusive signifier that works more by visual than iconographic means. Rather than the illustration of a single meaning or “code,” the snail is a constitutive and polysemous element that spurs contemplative prayer and humility.
It travels exactly along the line where frame and paint meet so that it wittily stresses the liminal threshold between divine and human, a perfect theme for the Annunciation. This paper thus integrates a physical, material aspect of the altarpiece with its visual effect and religious meaning. Like the strolling dog and humans at a far off window, the snail is a thoroughly earthly creature that does not notice the astounding miracle taking place. Viewers are instead engaged by Gabriel’s arrival from their world and of the stone beam thrusting out over their heads. Alongside worldly surface, then, the altarpiece insists on salience, on fictive projection into the viewer’s space in order to assert the immanence of the divine. The snail exists on two planes, of actual paint and fabricated pavement, so that materiality and representation seem to merge, just as contemporaneous setting blends with universal history at the moment when the humanly physical and the divinely immaterial combine at the Incarnation.

Among Tzvetan Todorov's different fields of research, images play a small but highly meaningful theoretical role. The work on visuality of the Bulgarian scholar is mainly confined within the apologetic diptych about Northern painting – namely Éloge du quotidien about Dutch painting of XVIIth Century and Éloge de l'individu about Flemish painting of Renaissance – and it shows a strong relationship with the interdisciplinary approach of French theory of art, a branch of the structuralist thought born during the Seventies under the influence of Hermeneutics and Anthropology. The importance of such an approach for contemporary research on images is constantly growing, since it focuses on the discursive level – by considering the picture as an apparatus of creation of meaning – rather than the thematic or stylistic levels, typical of the classical Art History, or the pure formal one. This paper aims at tracing a survey of the inputs springing from the aforementioned books, highlighting both the links with some of the most important scholars of this disciplinary field and the personal proposals of this unique research course. We will therefore take into consideration conceptual tangles such as the notions of text and theoretical object, as well as matters of methodological nature. Through Todorov's work, it is possible to point out some guidelines within the present time iconosphere, overwhelming the hesitations of a static and stiff approach to the processes of visual signification.

Abstract A careful examination of Diana and Callisto, painted by Titian (London, National Gallery and Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland), its copy by Rubens (Knowsley Hall, Earl of Derby) and the version by Titian’s workshop in Vienna (Kunsthistorisches
Museum) reveals details hitherto unrecognised by scholars. Although marginal, these take on extraordinary iconographic and communicative value, and it is precisely through these details that Titian evokes the mutations of the nymph Callisto narrated by Ovid in the
Metamorphoses (2.401-530). The way in which the details are depicted and coordinated within the composition allows the beholder to
experience the ‘graduality of discovery’. This is useful not only for lending the fixed image a temporality similar to that of literary narration (consisting of a ‘before’ and an ‘after’) but above all to induce, within the process of visual-perceptual discovery and its subsequent
iconographic comprehension, the sequence of ‘desire-surprise-reward’ theorised by Daniel Arasse with regard to the revelatory power
of detail, here applied to the polarity punctum/studium.
Keywords Titian. Rubens. Diana and Callisto. Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Details. Copy/original. Punctum/studium. Theory of art. Visual semiotics. Daniel Arasse.

In the present article, I discuss the concept of 'the illusion of materials' (die Stoffillusion) as it was elaborated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the German aesthetician and art historian Konrad Lange (1855-1921). Here I intend to revisit a remarkable theory of the psychological mechanisms that underlie the aesthetic experience of mimesis in painting and, more generally speaking, in visual arts. First, I deal with the historical background of Lange's contribution by saying a word about the German-speaking psychoaesthetic paradigm as it developed between the mid-19th century and WWI. Second, I discuss the basic tenets of Lange's 'illusionistic aesthetics' (Illusionsästhetik), the view according to which the experience of the beautiful lies in a process of 'conscious self-delusion' (bewußte Selbsttäuschung) by which means the contemplating subject mentally oscillates between 'semblance' and 'reality'. Third, I analyze Lange's theoretical way of conceiving the illusion of materials by showing that he identified it as one of the seven chief categories of aesthetic illusions and by insisting on his distinction between the 'subjective' non-aesthetic illusion and the 'objective' aesthetic illusion of materials. Fourth, I show how Lange conceived the place of the illusion of materials in aesthetic experience in general and in the contemplation of painting and sculpture in particular. In a fifth, concluding part, I deal with the significance of Lange's ideas on the illusion of materials today by highlighting their close relation to Daniel Arasse's conception of painting contemplation as a dialectics of 'the pictorial' and 'the iconic', while also suggesting that they may be very fruitful within the context of current experimental psycho- and neuroaesthetic research.

If we compare it with the fellow notion of liberty, equality has an ambivalent place in modern political thinking. Whilst it counts as one of the fundamental norms, many think that equality is valuable only as a way to realise some features of liberty. I take a historical perspective on this issue, and try to identify some of the pre-modern roots of such an ambivalent attitude towards equality. I do this by using Jacques Rancière’s political model as an analytical framework and by taking a visual route, focusing on classical iconographic representations in which equality was present in the images’ subtexts. Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s allegory of good government is one iconic exposition of equality as a positive condition of civil peace. Already there, however, the positive value of equality is counterposed to the figure of violent retributive justice. Similarly, in the Christian narrative, equality is endorsed as the original condition of creatures under God, but is also associated with violent death. This signals one pre-modern root behind the ambivalence towards equality, particularly when the latter is understood dynamically, as levelling. Such a reversal of value finds an apotheosis, I suggest, in the revolutionary icon of the guillotine, a dramatic representation of equalisation that had a strong influence on modern political thinking. In J. E. Millais’ first painting, of Jesus in the House of his Parents, I find a more positive legacy of Christian equality in modern political thinking.

Un microcosmo di piccole cose, di minuscoli dettagli e particolari ri-empie i romanzi di Verne, quei Voyages Extraordinaires che avevano la ben più grandiosa ambizione di raccontare di un cosmo senza limiti e dei suoi paesaggi più lontani e inaccessibili, maestosi orizzonti di mare, aria, fuoco, terra. Attenzione al dettaglio e ampiezza di vedute sono i due poli entro cui oscilla uno stile che riesce a unire in felice simbiosi arte e scienza, e quei due modi diversi ma complementari di osservare il mondo: lo sguardo d'insieme dell'una e lo scrutare esatto, analitico dell'altra. Se da un lato l'importanza che il dettaglio assume nell'opera di Verne è sempre stata sottolineata, in essa la critica vi ha più che altro riconosciuto la prova di quella tendenza positivistica alla classificazione, all'elenco, a organizzare e comprimere il sapere entro i comparti dell'enciclopedia. Elemento istruttivo più che narrativo, il dettaglio verniano avrebbe, dunque, prima di tutto un fine educativo estraneo all'incal-zare degli eventi: il particolare seziona, interrompe, mette in pausa la trama invece di innescarne le svolte e intrecciarne le scene. Gli elenchi di dettagli, di nomi, di specie vegetali e animali, di luoghi, di longitudini e latitudini, di ore, di oggetti, resti, rovine, strumenti, vesti, ingranaggi, minerali, servono a spiegare il mondo, a divulgare la verità oggettiva conquistata dal progresso in tutti i campi della ricerca scientifica. Sarebbero pertanto la parte vera e statica accanto alla quale procede il flusso incessante, inverosimile, dinamico dell'avventura. L'obiettivo del presente studio sarà, invece, quello di rivelare il dettaglio come ingranaggio dinamico e propulsore del racconto, come seme dell'invenzione e della vena poetica di Verne, piuttosto che segno di un arresto del ritmo sussultorio della narrazione. In Les Enfants du capitaine Grant c'è un personaggio nel quale arte del racconto, della divagazione, e curiosità-esattezza scientifica si fondono in perfetta armonia. Si tratta del geografo Paganel, scienziato 'distratto' e nictalopico, ovverossia portato o a vedere 'altro' o a vedere troppo, anche di notte.

"...Les corps ne sont fait que pour les esprits seuls capables d’entrer en société avec Dieu, et de célébrer sa gloire" Leibniz

http://www.implications-philosophiques.org/le-double-corps-du-roi-dans-les-menines-de-velasquez-ou-le-corps-de-societe/

L'ouvrage vise à analyser les conditions de possibilité d'une philosophie de l'art à l'aide de la spéculation hégélienne, en dégageant une approche plastique de la peinture : espace, dessin, lumière, coloris. Les théories y sont testées par l'étude précise et formelle des oeuvres de Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Léonard de Vinci et Michel-Ange.
Le premier volume est exclusivement philosophique et analyse les thèses de Platon, Hume, Kant, Hegel et Panofsky concernant la philosophie de l'art. Le second constitue l'étude proprement dite des oeuvres picturales de la Renaissance.