Vision and Touch in the Allegory of Marriage

FINAL DRAFT Vision and Touch in the Allegory of Marriage Geoff Lehman Titian, Allegory of Marriage, oil on canvas, c. 1530-33. 1 FINAL DRAFT 2 I. Intimacy Vision and touch are the terms of a dialectic that lies at the foundations of modern art history, in the optical and haptic values of Riegl and the painterly/linear opposition of Wölfflin.1 This dialectic was already prominent in Renaissance art theory, however, and was frequently thematized in Renaissance pictures. Nowhere is the relationship between the tactile and the visual elaborated more movingly, or its deepest implications explored more eloquently, than in Titian’s Allegory of Marriage.2 The visual and tactile interactions that define the picture’s figural composition—an interpersonal dynamic among five figures that is articulated by a circuit of expressive, receptive, withdrawn, or isolating gestures—is accompanied by a more direct appeal to the viewer in its evocation of embodied experiences and their accompanying states of mind. Attention to the interplay of vision and touch in the Allegory of Marriage provides the basis for an understanding of the painting that is attuned to its phenomenological and affective dimensions, a mode of interpretation distinct from iconographic or allegorical approaches, not to mention historical or contextual ones—indeed, coexistent with them, but more responsive to the work’s pictorial specificity. On one level, the depiction of tactile and optical experiences in Titian’s painting is a means to express an ambivalent moment of intimacy shared by a couple, in which those around them also participate, articulating the emotional complexity of their relationship in pictorial terms. At the same time, however, appeals to vision and touch provoke reflection on the character of Titian’s painterly practice itself in relation to the subject matter it creates—and beyond this, they inform our understanding of the dynamic between the viewer and the work of art as a whole. The structural and gestural centre of Titian’s painting is the crystal sphere. Although offset from the picture’s geometric centre, it is multiply enframed and thus presented to us as central: the female figure, often identified as a portrait of Maria d’Aragona,3 grasps the sphere 1 See Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie and Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. 2 For provenance and bibliography up to 1975, see Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, vol. 3, cat. 1 (pp. 127-29). 3 Although the two principal figures have traditionally been identified with Maria d’Aragona and her husband Alfonso d’Avalos, Marchese del Vasto, this identification is problematic (See Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, vol. 3, pp. 127-28). For convenience’s sake, I will refer to the figures by these names FINAL DRAFT 3 from both above and below, a framing that is echoed on a larger scale by the encircling forms of the two principal figures—even the band around her right arm and her carefully braided hair, intertwined with a string of pearls, subtly reinforce the feeling of enclosure. Furthermore, the way the sphere interacts visually with the bundle of sticks held by Cupid— with, among other possible readings, its metaphoric allusion to sexual intercourse—calls attention to the principal compositional division of the picture, its dialogue of left and right sections. Still more importantly perhaps, the sphere is centred gesturally, since Maria’s cradling of the sphere with both hands is an intensification of similar gestures that evoke touch elsewhere in the picture: those of the man in armour, of Cupid, and of the female figure facing Maria. Likewise, its reflective and refractive surface, receptive to light and projecting luminosity in all directions, universalizes the prominence of gazes, reflections, and illumination that characterizes the Allegory of Marriage as fully as gestures of touch do. Indeed, the cooperation and conflict between vision and touch provide the basis for the painting’s affective power and its spiritual—if not allegorical—meaning. In Erwin Panofsky’s reading of the picture, first presented in a chapter of Studies in Iconology, the sphere represents harmony and even alludes, more specifically, to the goddess without intending to resolve the question of their identity, or even the question of whether these figures are portraits at all, since neither point is essential for the development of my interpretation. FINAL DRAFT 4 Harmonia, daughter of Venus and Mars, with whom Panofsky identifies the two principal figures.4 Without discussing the merits of this iconography—which seems plausible enough, though hardly conclusive and unsatisfyingly limiting for such an enigmatic picture—there is another sense, a phenomenological one, in which harmony may be embodied in the sphere: it crystallizes a harmony between the two distinct, and even opposed, senses of vision and touch.5 In its reflecting and refracting of light, as well as in its eye-like form, the glass sphere evokes vision—and more specifically, in calling our attention to the trajectories of light rays, it alludes to the gazes that criss-cross the space of the picture. In the precise rendering of its surface, however, as well as through our bodily empathy with Maria’s gentle but firm gesture of grasping, the sphere simultaneously evokes touch. And just as the spherical form of the eye gives a metaphorical resonance to this embodiment of the visual, so too is the experience of touch concretized and itself made visible in Maria’s gesture, touching its surface delicately but resolutely with all ten of her fingers. Maria’s cradling of a sphere that reflects everything around it seems to connote a desire to see and to know more fully, even the desire for a universalizing vision: indeed, Gustav Hartlaub has argued that she is an allegory of Prudence, with the sphere substituting for the mirror in which Prudence, according to her traditional iconography, contemplates her own reflection.6 And although one can imagine Maria contemplating the images reflected on its surface, perhaps just before or after the pregnant moment we are given to see here, her principal relationship to the sphere in this very moment is in fact tactile. Associations with vision and with touch coexist harmoniously in this charged interaction, joined together in the depiction of embodiment and yet proposing irreducibly different modes of interacting with the world. However, this sensory harmony in a moment of embodied experience has a more profound significance as well: both vision and touch contribute to an articulation of intimacy—an intimacy that is palpable, no matter how melancholic or ambivalent it may be. 4 Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, pp. 160-64. Panofsky attributes the identification of the sphere with harmony to Otto Brendel (see the later publication: Brendel, Symbolism of the Sphere). 5 Here and throughout, I have in mind harmony in the ancient Greek sense: harmonia being the joining of irreducibly different things into a single whole, like the rim and spokes of a wheel. See Ilievski, ‘The Origin and Semantic Development of the Term Harmony’, on this notion of harmony and its pre-musical origins in the Greek tradition—most notably, with respect to shipbuilding in Homer. 6 See Hartlaub, Zauber des Spiegels. Cf. Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (1603), cxxxvii (‘Prudenza’). FINAL DRAFT 5 A sense of harmonics—an interplay between two contrasting terms to create a unity— pervades every part of the Allegory of Marriage. And it is in the harmonic articulation of the pictorial surface as a whole that the painting’s elaboration and problematizing of intimacy begins. Its division by a notional vertical axis into unequal sections in a proportion of 2:17—in musical terms, the ratio of the octave—articulates a dialogue between the expressive extroversion of the right section, concretized in a trio of intense gazes, and the melancholic introversion embodied by the (perhaps conjugal) pair on the left. 7 Dividing the canvas horizontally just above the crystal sphere and Maria’s upper hand also creates a musical ratio—this time of 3:2 (a fifth)—between the upper and lower parts (see figure 3), with the grasping of the sphere and the sexual metaphor of Cupid and his arrows below and the circuit of gazes, gestures, and human interaction above. However, the importance of this compositional division is less evident than the vertical division of 2:1, and there is a danger of imposing too much geometry on a picture whose harmonies are more intuitive than mathematical. FINAL DRAFT 6 The relatively greater compression of the right section contributes to its heightened dramatic energy, just as the more ample left section accommodates the contemplative psychological space of its pair of figures. The painting’s mood arises primarily from that couple’s inwardness, which is in fact a shared introversion—shared in that the two of them are together in this feeling even if, ironically, it constitutes a withdrawal from togetherness. The picture conveys, subtly and intuitively, the intimate experience of a shared psychological and emotional space between two people who neither speak nor make eye contact with each other. This is, however, an unstable or uncertain intimacy. Is the gentle touching of Maria’s breast—or more precisely, and more subtly, of the drapery just covering it—by the man in armour, usually identified as her husband Alfonso d’Avalos, received by her as sexual intimacy or as invasiveness? Is her inwardly directed subjectivity a withdrawal from him, or a reflective attentiveness on this moment of sensation and the tender feeling accompanying it? The introversion of this ambiguous moment is also reflected in the gazes of the two figures, which not only diverge but seem, indeed, not to focus entirely on any outside object at all: in contrast to the trio on the right, here the eyes of both figures convey an inwardly directed state of mind and subtly suggest an imaginative withdrawal that does not, however, entirely lose visual contact with other figures (Maria with Cupid, Alfonso with the viewer). Thus, the coexistence of vision and touch in an affectively—and indeed sexually— charged moment of interaction between these two figures conveys the co-presence of emotional engagement and psychic withdrawal, the former associated primarily with touch and the latter with vision. The common associations of touch with proximity and vision with distance arise naturally, of course, from the specific experiences to which each of these senses gives rise.8 These are associations that are well grounded in phenomenological terms. Vision provides the most compelling experience of action at a distance. In the Renaissance, vision is thoroughly associated both with scientific knowledge and with the perception of an intuitive infinity: the farthest possible extension beyond the body is achieved by Cf. the following passage from Machiavelli’s Prince: ‘Men in general judge more by their eyes than by their hands because seeing is given to everyone, touching to few. Everyone sees how you appear, few touch what you are’ (Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 71). Here the suggestion is that the proximity of touch leads to knowledge while the distance implicit in visual perception is conducive to deception. Note that the dedicatory letter that opens The Prince offers a pictorial metaphor—specifically a perspectivist one— for this game of perceptions (The Prince, p. 4), indicating the possible role representation plays in this understanding of the senses for Machiavelli. 8 FINAL DRAFT 7 the disembodied, perspectival gaze.9 Perspective frames the gaze as a metaphor for unbounded (scientific, imaginative, or erotic) curiosity but also founds an epistemology that goes beyond the metaphorical, as it provides the basis for observation of a potentially infinite physical world.10 Touch, however, as an experience that by its nature simultaneously involves exploratory engagement and active receptivity—the sensation of being touched necessarily accompanying the activity of touching—brings embodiment to the fore. This experience of touch is one of the defining characteristics of flesh.11 Thus, Maria’s withdrawn and melancholic expression may equally indicate a thoughtful detachment or a full embodiment—in the latter case, withdrawing from the distractions of vision, and of the more remote objects it brings to awareness, to live within the sensation of touch, of touching and being touched. 9 On infinity and perspective, see Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, pp. 377-89. On the gaze, perspective, and disembodiment, see Belting, Florence and Baghdad, Chapter 6 (pp. 211-61). 10 See Lehman, ‘Leonardo, Van Eyck, and the Epistemology of Landscape’. 11 See Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, pp. 106-50. FINAL DRAFT 8 It is the picture’s depiction of embodied experience, particularly in the person of Maria d’Aragona, that engages the complexity of the vision / touch dialectic. Touch creates intimacy, but vision contributes to it in turn: Maria’s unfocused gaze reinforces the intensity of the experience of touch she shares with her husband, whether that be a sensitivity to the warmth of erotic contact or a recoil from a moment, however subtle, of sexual aggression. Likewise, her gesture of reaching out to touch the sphere accompanies the inwardness in her eyes to indicate a state of distracted contemplation. In other words, there is also an exchange of the usual associations, with touch accompanying psychological distance and vision indicating interpersonal closeness. Considering the larger dialogue between the left and right figural groups, Maria is in perfect counterpoint with the young woman facing her whose gaze, fixed longingly—even reverently—on Maria, is fully absorbed in an external object while her right hand touching her heart conversely signifies withdrawal into herself. In the affective register this gesture indicates devotion,12 but it also associates inwardness with touch rather than with vision. In other words, Maria’s outwardly directed gesture of touch and inwardly directed gaze are placed in dialogue with a reversal of these roles in her counterpart, who gazes reverently outward while gesturing to her heart (her inner being) with her hand. Here a dialectical interplay is at work in which the different associative possibilities of vision and touch are explored in the context of embodied experience. What is really at stake here, though, are the affective associations of these ephemeral embodied states. Although this discussion of ‘dialectical interplay’ may suggest the analytical precision of a diagram, the interaction feels extraordinarily natural: it is an emotional relationship between two women expressed in gestures that operate just below the level of conscious intention. Indeed, this counterpoint of gestures is also a counterpoint of emotions, with contemplative melancholy encountering passionate devotion. The roles each of these emotions can play in intimacy make this dialogue integral to the mood of the picture as a whole. In the case of Alfonso, intimacy with his female counterpart is revealed in his gesture of touch, and yet his body language and contemplative expression suggest immanent separation—a 12 Panofsky cites this gesture along with the expression of devotion on her face in support of his interpretation of the figure as Faith, more specifically as Marital Faith (Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, pp. 161). FINAL DRAFT 9 transient moment of farewell.13 His gaze, like Maria’s, seems primarily inward in nature, but there is also a suggestion of attention to the viewer there: he seems almost to look in our direction and yet somehow not quite connect. This inflects the subtle dynamic of intimacy and separation in our direction and across the picture plane, as his gaze suggests a (psychological) departure into our space, while the hint of a reciprocal visual connection with the viewer helps draw us, affectively, into their circle. Indeed, necessarily invisible within the world of the picture, we are also its principal visual interlocutor, the one for whose eyes it offers itself up as something to be seen.14 Alfonso’s armour, however, creates distance in its very tactility— reflective of light and mirroring the faces of the two women who flank him—ironically reinscribing the active gaze and a distancing self-reflexivity, for which the mirror stands as metaphor, at precisely this spot of heightened haptic evocation. Furthermore, the tactile vividness of the armour’s impenetrable surface further reinforces the feeling of distance, in counterpoint with the intimate invitation of flesh. By bringing the viewer into the dialogue, our response to pictures is made analogous to the interpersonal relationships depicted within it: the encounter with art enriches our understanding of ordinary experience and, conversely, our remembered experiences of interpersonal interaction shape our interpretation of the work of art. Thus, in the Allegory of Marriage, the roles of vision and touch in interpersonal experience are addressed in a peculiarly pointed way, and there is a tension—or more precisely, a harmony—between vision and touch as acts of sensory perception that bring objective knowledge of both distant and proximate things, on the one hand, and these same senses as embodied experiences that give rise to carnal and psychological intimacy, or conversely to physical separation and psychological distance, on the other. This difference between the purely sensory and the fully embodied is articulated emblematically, but also quite viscerally, in the right third of the picture. For Panofsky, the three figures arranged vertically within this narrow 13 It is likely because of this valedictory mood, more than for any other reason, that a narrative involving Alfonso departing for war has sometimes been identified here, or even an allusion to his death (i.e., that the portrait is posthumous). 14 Cf. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 16, where, analysing Las Meninas and considering the determinative role of the viewer, painter, or sitter on our side of the picture plane, he refers to ‘the necessary disappearance of that which is [the picture’s] foundation—of the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance’. FINAL DRAFT 10 space represent the three theological virtues: hope, faith, and love.15 Iconographically this makes sense, given their attributes. However, the specific visual and tactile qualities of the paint surface itself, and the way these material qualities correspond to the subject matter they depict, suggest another possible dimension of Christian meaning. The blue and white of the sky above the upper figure echo the colours of Cupid’s wings, and at the same time there is a contrast between the diaphanous indeterminacy of the broadly painted cloudy sky, on the one hand, and the visceral tactility of the thick brushstrokes that form the feathery wings of Cupid, on the other. This is once again a dialogue between distance and proximity: the cloudy sky is the only part of the picture that represents unbounded space, a realm only available to vision, while the feathers on Cupid’s wings seem, of all the objects in the picture, the ones closest to the picture plane and to us. It is as if we could reach out and touch them, giving their tactility—as much that of the paint itself as of the depicted feathers—a surprisingly literal quality. The upper figure’s lifting of the basket, her heavenward gaze, and the dematerializing quality of the cloudy sky itself suggest a desire to transcend the earthly realm, with the roses, materially present yet delicate and ephemeral, poetically evoking an intermediary stage in this dematerialization. This upward spiritual movement suggests a Christianized eros, the yearning for the kingdom of heaven that is 15 Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, pp. 161-2. FINAL DRAFT 11 associated with the virtue of hope.16 By contrast, the earthbound and markedly human (yet still ultimately divine) Cupid—whose earthiness is reinforced, even overdetermined, by the heavy bunch of sticks he carries—invokes agape, even if obliquely and in a Neoplatonic register: agape as the Word made flesh, the embodiment of divine love in the incarnate human Christ. To be sure, there is a deep irony in the contrast between the playful and sexual character of Cupid and the compassionate and spiritual dimension of agape, and I have no intention of proposing a specific iconography here; rather, these are associations arising from the character of the respective figures and, with respect to the carnal aspect of agape, from the use of the medium itself. What is most essential about this contrast though, and a foundation for further interpretation, is its juxtaposition of disembodied sense perception (the imaginative power of pure opticality) and embodied experience (Cupid in the flesh), with all its phenomenological implications. Between these two figures stands Maria’s counterpart, the young woman with the yearning gaze and self-reflexive gesture, both contemplative and carnal, mediating between the extremes articulated by her companions. Before leaving this section of the picture, with its highly suggestive group of figures, it should be noted that erotic love of an earthly variety joins this dialogue as well: as alluded to above, the orientation of the bundle of sticks shouldered by the god of Love with respect to the yonic sphere Maria holds makes an allusion to sexual intercourse virtually unavoidable, even if the overall tone of the picture may not encourage this as a primary reading. (In this role, Cupid takes on a fully pagan significance, as opposed to the Neoplatonizing Christian one of ‘the Word made flesh’.) The inclusion of this form of love, however, does seem appropriate here—at least as a subtext, and one that is ultimately in harmony with the rest of the picture, given its exploration of an intimacy that is not only poignantly emotional but also markedly carnal. 16 Cf. I Corinthians 13:9-12. Cf. also the locus classicus for Platonic eros in the Renaissance: Symposium, 210a-212a (English translation in Plato, The Symposium, pp. 272-4). For a Christianizing reading of the eros of the Symposium, see Castiglione, The Book of The Courtier, Book 4, Sections 51-70. FINAL DRAFT 12 II. Invocation The passages of paint that mimetically depict the feathery texture of Cupid’s wings, in the lower right corner of the Allegory of Marriage, are at the same time an impasto of thick brushstrokes.17 The dialectic between visibility and tactility is thus also at work self-reflexively, rendering Titian’s painting technique itself an explicit object of interpretation. At the picture’s centre we find an emblem of painting’s mimetic power: the reflective surface of Alfonso’s polished armour with its reflections of the two flanking female figures.18 In Vasari’s famous story about Titian’s teacher, Giorgione makes a painting that outdoes sculpture by using reflection—including reflection in armour—to show all sides of a figure, as sculpture in the round does.19 If Vasari’s story is to be believed, the Allegory of Marriage, with 17 On this dual quality of Titian’s brushwork, in which the mimetic and the material (the literally tactile) are closely intertwined, see Rosand, The Meaning of the Mark, Chapter 1: ‘Stroke of the Brush’, esp. pp. 78-84. 18 Cf. Alberti, Della pittura, II, 26, where Alberti metaphorically defines painting as the (self-)reflection on the surface of the water upon which Narcissus gazes (English translation in Alberti, On Painting, p. 64). Here is the relevant passage from Vasari: ‘[Giorgione] painted a male nude with his back turned; on the ground there was an extremely limpid fountain of water in which Giorgione painted the reflection of a front view; on one side was a burnished breastplate that the man had removed in which his left profile was reflected, since the polished surface of that armour revealed everything; on the other side there was a mirror which contained the other profile of the nude figure; this was a most beautiful, clever, and fanciful 19 FINAL DRAFT 13 its reflections and its concomitant commentary on the art of painting, may even constitute a subtle response to Giorgione’s picture. The paragone between painting and sculpture, when marshalled to the defence of painting’s superiority, emphasises painting’s mimetic power, its capacity to create illusion. Consider how Leonardo da Vinci describes the paragone in a passage from his notebooks: ‘Sculpture reveals what it is with little effort; painting seems a thing miraculous, making things intangible appear tangible, presenting in relief things which are flat, in distance things near at hand.’20 Reflecting the faces of the two women—and specifically the parts of the face that are turned away from the viewer—Alfonso’s armour not only reinforces the picture’s emphasis on the power of vision but also, in the spirit of the paragone, invokes painting’s power to represent three dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface, not only through perspective but also, transcending the fixed viewpoint of perspective, in showing an object from multiple sides. The other reflective surface, the crystal sphere, suggests an optical experience that, in certain ways, is still closer to the spirit of Leonardo—for instance, when he describes the power of the eye: ‘Who would believe that so small a space could contain the images of all the universe?[...]Here the forms, here the colours, here all the images of every part of the universe are contracted to a point.’21 The image of a global reflection at the centre of the Allegory of Marriage invokes the depiction of a universe within a small space, a testament to the unlimited imaginative power of pictorial representation and an elaboration, in terms of subject matter, of the geometrical infinity that Renaissance perspective offers—a striking affirmation of painting’s unlimited mimetic power.22 At the same time that it suggests this Leonardesque work, by which he hoped to demonstrate that painting actually requires more skill and effort and can show more of nature in a single scene than sculpture’ (Vasari, Lives of the Artists, p. 303). Cf. Pater, ‘The School of Giorgione’, p. 99, and the nuance that Pater brings to the retelling of this story, emphasizing the ephemerality of the passing moment evoked by such a picture, with its shimmering and insubstantial reflections—a nuance relevant to the visual character and valedictory melancholy of the Allegory of Marriage. 20 Ashburnham II, 24, 25 (Institut de France, Paris). The English translation above is from Leonardo, Notebooks, p. 196. 21 Codex Atlanticus 345v / 949v (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan). The English translation above is from Leonardo, Notebooks, p. 105. 22 With respect to the infinity of potential objects afforded to vision, with its limitless extension, and to the infinite range of potential subject matter painting can likewise depict, the following passage from Leonardo’s Codex Urbinus (Urb. 40 [Vatican Library, Rome]) is also relevant: ‘The art of painting includes in its domain all visible things[...the painter] can depict mists through which the shapes of things FINAL DRAFT 14 optical universe in miniature, however, the sphere also reflects and refracts light rays in all directions, a dispersal of light that counteracts the stable Gestalt of images produced mimetically in a mirror, like those visible in the armour above and emblematized by Alberti’s Narcissus metaphor—a challenge to the conventions of Renaissance art theory to which we will return below. However, as David Rosand has argued, even paintings within the Renaissance perspectival tradition, in which the picture is conceived as a transparent opening into a fictive three-dimensional space, inevitably invite a doubled form of perception, as imaginative engagement with the depicted space is accompanied by an awareness of the literal painted surface.23 In the case of Titian’s approach to painting, the dialogue between these coexistent modes of perception is exceptionally charged, given its emphasis on the visible brushstroke and the thick layering of oil paint. Not only can we read Cupid’s wings either as feathers or as paint, as mimetic illusion or as literal surface; the materiality of the paint itself appeals to the sense of touch as fully as does the illusion of solid objects. Indeed, the simultaneous appeal to vision and to touch that appears everywhere in the Allegory of Marriage creates another kind of intimacy in which both these senses play a part: that of the viewer with the painting, as picture and as painted surface. And here too, in the realm of the medium itself and its relationship to the subject matter it depicts, there is a constant dialogue between the haptic and the optical: just as vision, through the power of illusion, gives us access to imagined experiences of tactility and texture (flesh, crystal sphere, armour, feathery wings), so too, conversely, does the literal tactility of paint reveal itself as the basis of this visual experience. Rhyming with its subject matter, in which gestures of looking and touching play such a central role, the picture’s medium invites us to engage with this dialectic of space and surface, encouraging reflection on the role optical and can only be discerned with difficulty; rain with cloud-capped mountains and valleys showing through; clouds of dust whirling about the combatants who raise them; streams of varying transparency, and fishes at play between the surface of the water and its bottom; and polished pebbles of many colours deposited on the clean sand of the river bed surrounded by green plants seen underneath the water’s surface. He will represent the stars at varying heights above us and innumerable other effects whereto sculpture cannot aspire’ (Leonardo, Notebooks, p. 194). 23 Rosand, The Meaning of the Mark, p. 51. On this issue with respect to (representational) painting more generally, see also Wollheim, Art and its Objects, Essay V: ‘Seeing-as, seeing-in, and pictorial representation’. FINAL DRAFT 15 haptic values play in Titian’s painterly practice—making explicit, in other words, the interplay between the picture as window and the brushstroke as touch. Perhaps the most eloquent and magisterial response to Titian’s painterly style is Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas (or Fable of Arachne) of c. 1656-7.24 Since the mid-twentieth century, the subject matter of the painting has generally been recognized as the story of Arachne, the human tapestry weaver of humble origins who engages in a contest with Minerva, the divine patron of the art herself.25 With Titian’s Rape of Europa, which Velázquez knew from the Spanish royal collection, standing in for Arachne’s tapestry at its 24 For recent discussions of Las Hilanderas, and bibliography on the painting, see Alpers, The Vexations of Art, pp. 133-262, and Knox, The Late Paintings of Velázquez, pp. 59-117. 25 The story of Arachne appears in Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, 1-145 (English translation in Ovid, Metamorphoses, Loeb ed., vol. 1, pp. 288-99). The identification of the picture’s subject matter with Arachne was first made in print by Harris in The Prado, Treasure House of the Spanish Royal Collections, p. 8, and further elaborated in Angulo Iñiguez, ‘Las Hilanderas’. FINAL DRAFT 16 centre, Las Hilanderas makes its engagement with Titian’s art explicit, and its profound reflection on the art of painting is thus framed, at least partially, as a response to Titian.26 Velázquez’s picture, structured by a movement into depth that is also—literally and metaphorically—an elevation, brings two distinct pictorial worlds into meaningful interaction.27 And the relationship between these two tightly interwoven pictorial realms generates a wealth of interpretive possibilities. This is equally true whether we understand this relation as a narrative progression (the foreground depicting the beginning of the weaving contest between Arachne and Minerva and the background its climax);28 as a scene of storytelling in a tapestry workshop, with the story being told (that of Arachne) enframed by the world of the storytellers reciting it; or as a depiction of painting itself as the fusion of craft and art. Interpreting the subject as a scene of storytelling, the background would be an imaginative projection on the part of the storyteller, her audience, or both. One might even imagine the five figures in the background scene as 26 See Knox, The Late Paintings of Velázquez, pp. 61-65. 27 Note that while the principal structural division of the pictorial space in the Allegory of Marriage is between left and right sections, in Las Hilanderas it is between foreground and background. Indeed, depth—and thus perspective space—plays a much more important role in the creation of meaning in Velázquez’s picture, whose means of dividing the two sections also makes the self-reflexive principle of reframing central to the picture’s interpretation. 28 See Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, 53-69 and 129-145. (English translation: Metamorphoses, Loeb ed., vol. 1, pp. 292-3 and 296-9.) FINAL DRAFT 17 projections of the analogous five figures in the foreground, a visual metaphor for the identification of both author and audience with the work of art and a figuration of immersive engagement. In this way, part of the complexity of the framed narrative structure in Las Hilanderas would be that it combines self-reflexivity—the frame calling attention to the central scene as a work of art—with immersive experience, the fullest possible affective participation in the artwork, emblematized in the figural doublings. In addition to defining the two poles of a spectrum that constitutes the possibilities of viewer / listener response, this also provides a meaningful commentary on the structure and the poetic mode of the painting’s narrative source, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with its multiple layers of framed tales and its elaborate scenes of storytelling. To return to the third possibility suggested above—the representation of craft and art as components of painting—references to the materiality of the artistic medium and to workshop practice are spun out copiously in the foreground, painted in a realist mode, while the illusionistic, imaginative, and even transcendent power of art appears in the visionary mode of the background scene, with Titian’s Rape of Europa as its focus. We may, following Charles de Tolnay, see an ascent from mundane craft to high art in the movement from foreground to background, with Titian affirmed as the representative of the latter—of an art that transcends craft.29 However, considering the character of Titian’s approach to the art of painting, as we have been discussing it with respect to the Allegory of Marriage, both of these realms, the material and the visionary, seem equally important for understanding Titian’s art—and Velázquez’s. The tactility of oil paint on canvas and the specific activity of a workshop practice in which Titian sometimes painted directly with his fingers30—the fullest realization of tactile intimacy between artist and painting—find their analogy here in the spinning of wool and winding of thread that occupy the foreground, as Giles Knox has argued.31 Likewise, painting’s relation to the 29 See Tolnay, ‘Velázquez’ Las Hilanderas and Las Meninas’, pp. 21-38. As Marco Boschini puts it: ‘ed il Palma mi attestava, per verità, che nei finimenti dipingeva più con le dita che co’ pennelli’ (Boschini, Le ricche miniere della pittura veneziana, p. 712). 30 31 In Knox’s reading, in contrast to that of Tolnay, it is the physical process of making that is in the ascendant, since he reads the picture as an affirmation of the artist’s hand as the source of creative power, a challenge to the emphasis on the idea and on intellect in Renaissance art theory, from Albertian istoria and Vasarian disegno up to the Spanish art theorists of Velázquez’s time: Vicente Carducho and Francisco Pacheco. See Knox, The Late Paintings of Velázquez, pp. 17-33 and 65-87. FINAL DRAFT 18 intangible and the spiritual—its power to signify and to evoke—is revealed in the background scene of a mythological painting (Titian’s) with its circle of viewers, an explicit depiction of attentive immersion in the presence of a work of art, with its potential for interpretive, affective, or imaginative response. This harmony between materiality and meaning, between immanence and transcendence, even finds expression in Velázquez’s painting technique—and, more intangibly, in the character of the world it depicts—since the whole painting, with its loose and quasi-impressionistic brushstrokes, suggests threads continuously weaving through space, while its luminosity, especially in the background, creates the impression of an ephemeral vision.32 With all its emphasis on the material conditions of the work of art, Las Hilanderas, in its visionary intensity, provokes a dreamlike immersion in the picture’s world that is both intimate and disembodied. This oneiric dimension emerges as if suspended between the opposite poles of craft and art, materiality and signification—engaged neither with interpretation in the intellectual sense nor with awareness of the picture’s literal materiality. Entering the realm of daydream, art here manifests an important aspect of its peculiar and unique power.33 The profound interdependence of the haptic and the optical in Velázquez’s picture contribute to its dreamlike character—witness the hanging threads being wound by the figure on the right, so vividly material yet resembling threads of pure light, or the solid wooden spinning wheel on the left whose movement generates such subtle and even ghostlike optical effects. Considered separately, the virtuosity of brushstrokes in these details, on the one hand, or the power of illusion they generate, on the other, can provoke reflective detachment and admiration; as a Unlike either Tolnay or Knox, I am inclined to see in the painting an equilibrium between the intangible and transcendent aspects of art, on the one hand, and its material presence born from manual process, on the other—an equilibrium that, among other factors, gives the picture its oneiric character. 32 This makes for an interesting comparison to Velázquez’s more or less contemporaneous and closely related picture Las Meninas, with its proliferation of rectangular forms, frames, and windows: if Las Meninas affirms the importance of the frame and the window metaphor for representation, Las Hilanderas by contrast emphasizes the thread-like and interwoven character of continuous brushwork in painting. Las Hilanderas thus foregrounds the material and the phenomenological, while Las Meninas focuses on the mimetic and the ontological. Given that these two pictures are so closely related (note that Rubens’s painting of Arachne appears dimly over the head of the painter in Las Meninas), this difference itself provokes reflection on the art of painting. 33 Cf. the understanding of daydreams in relation to art (specifically poetry), in the context of a phenomenology of the imagination, in Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. FINAL DRAFT 19 holistic experience they contribute to the representation of an intangible and elusive moment of lived experience, evoking in us a vivid feeling of embodied presence and a dreamlike disembodiment in equal measure. While this discussion of Velázquez’s painting may seem like a digression, Las Hilanderas in fact provides a unique commentary on the problems at stake in the dialectic of vision and touch that is so central to the Allegory of Marriage. In its sensitivity to the interplay of tactile and optical values, to their constitutive role in painting’s ontology, and to the part each of them plays in the connection—reflective, affective, embodied, or oneiric—between a work of art and its viewers, Las Hilanderas invokes concerns central to Titian’s painterly practice. These concerns are nowhere more important than in the Allegory of Marriage, whose exploration of the roles vision and touch play in human relationships, on the level of its subject matter, doubles its explicit appeal to both optical and haptic experiences as a means of forging an intimate relationship with the viewer. III. Implication34 Offering a global reflection—an allusion to the sphere of vision and an assertion of vision’s power—the glass sphere at the gestural centre of the Allegory of Marriage unites the worlds on both sides of the picture plane within the purview of its reflective opticality. However, unlike the reflection on a flat mirror surface, or even on the convex surface of Alfonso’s armour, both of which provide vision with a mimetic double of the object reflected, the sphere does not show us a picture but instead glitters with luminous highlights, a translucent form suspended between transparency and reflectivity. Thus, we can also conceive of the sphere as an object receiving Much of this section of the essay is indebted to ideas developed by Anna Zakelj in her BA thesis, ‘The Sphere: Possibilities for Dissolution in Titian’s The Allegory of Marriage’, and shared with me, as her thesis advisor, over the course of numerous conversations. In particular, her thesis explores the interpretive possibilities of the sphere in Titian’s painting as an object that scatters light rays rather than as a reflecting surface producing a coherent image—specifically its implications, through empathetic identification, for an understanding of the body in relation to space that radically challenges the mode of self-awareness defined by Gestalt. Thus, the general orientation of the pages that follow and significant aspects of the reading I propose here are inspired in large measure by her insights and by her highly original interpretation of Titian’s picture. 34 FINAL DRAFT 20 luminous signals from every side and reflecting them in turn, omnidirectionally—irrespective of the separation between worlds defined by the picture plane. In this sense, in its optical relationship to the world, the sphere does not just reinforce, through reflection, the conditions of figure against ground and of bodies within space—that is, of Gestalt. It also calls attention to the conditions of light itself: light as the convergence and scattering of rays rather than as the source of images on the retina or on the surface of a mirror. In this relationship to light, reinforced by Maria’s surrounding tactile embrace, the sphere crystalizes the phenomenological character of the pictorial world it reflects, a world in which vision and touch are unified within a phenomenology of embodiment that transcends the reflective self-awareness of the body as an object in space, an awareness reinforced—even, according to psychoanalytic theory, established—by a glance at one’s image in a mirror.35 This phenomenology speaks to the experience the picture evokes for subjects on both sides of the picture plane. As the emblem of an embodied subjectivity, the sphere thus implicates a different kind of viewer than mimetic mirror reflection does, which (understood in perspectival terms) emphasizes the plastic forms of bodies and the measurable distances between them. There is indeed an irony in the fact that precisely in calling attention to the disembodied and omnipresent qualities of light, the reflecting globe at the picture’s centre implicates a more fully embodied and phenomenologically focused experience of painting—and, for those within the picture as well as for its viewers, of the world. The spherical reflection is a motif familiar from other works of Titian’s and of his circle. In the Annunciation Titian made for the church of San Salvatore in the 1540s (see image below), the vase with flowers in the lower right corner offers just such a reflection. Here we find a detail highly charged, and even overburdened, with meaning: a distillation of the Virgin’s theological significance and of the human drama in which she is caught up, as well as an emphatic juxtaposition of linear and painterly styles, placed conspicuously between the Virgin and the picture’s framing edge as the closest object to the viewer.36 35 36 Cf. Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function’. The vase opens itself to multiple iconographic possibilities. As part of the Virgin’s iconography, the vase symbolizes her chastity. Given the inscription below the vase (‘ignis ardens non combvrens’), this motif also likely refers to the burning bush in which God appears to Moses as an Old Testament figure for the Virgin. On this iconography, and its relationship to Titian’s handling of paint, see Rosand, Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice, pp. 51-56 and Rosand, ‘Titian and the Eloquence of the Brush’. FINAL DRAFT 21 In this position, the vase appears as the final stage in a downward and rightward compression from the heavenly splendour of the Holy Spirit and angels descending through the clouds (an invasion reinforced by the rather domineering Gabriel) to the ambivalently receptive Virgin, and then to her iconographic emblem: the vase with flowers. The juxtaposition of styles in this emblem—the Flemish precision and clarity of the vase contrasted with the painterly exuberance of the flowers37—crystalizes her conflicted response: a coexistence of lucid receptivity with fear, 37 In addition, invoking the Flemish painters of the early Renaissance and in stylistic contrast to the rest of the canvas, the vase engages the dialectic of tactile and optical values, expressed in terms of the FINAL DRAFT 22 of innocent chastity with passion, and of humility before the transcendent with ecstatic sexual intimacy.38 The uncertainty of the Virgin’s feelings at this moment is reminiscent of Maria’s similar ambivalence in the Allegory of Marriage, albeit dramatically magnified in its intensity with respect to the couple’s nuanced emotional relationship in the Allegory. The fact that this ambivalence cannot be resolved in either picture—normative theological readings notwithstanding in the case of the Annunciation—contributes substantially to the affective power each exerts upon a responsive viewer. In an abstracted form, the double nature of the reflecting sphere (or spherical vase) visualizes that emotional contradiction: it is a compact form, appealing to touch, that brings the entire world together into a single reflection on its surface; at the same time, it scatters light in all directions in a way suggestive of ecstatic expansion. Thus, the dialectic of inward and outward, of emotional recoil and openness to an Other—whether that be gentle receptivity or ecstatic submission—finds subtle expression in the character of the reflecting sphere or vase itself. In the Annunciation, the contrast between the closed reflective form of the vase and the flamboyant flowers above that seem almost literally to burst into flame, as if charged with sexual passion, articulates this dialectic in emphatic form—but this opposition is, in fact, already present, albeit more subtly, in the double orientation of the vase’s own relationship to light. In its omnidirectional reflectivity, the vase in Titian’s Annunciation implicates the viewer or worshipper standing before the altar, witness to this human and cosmic drama. The affective and theological implications of this moment of the Incarnation touch us directly—it is to our materiality of paint and the transparency of pictorial representation, that is so central to the Allegory of Marriage. Here the dialectic is at play in an emphatically stylistic register, in the contrast between what Wölfflin would describe as linear versus painterly styles, the former associated with the haptic and the latter with the optical (though Wölfflin probably would not conceded that Titian’s work, made in the Renaissance rather than the Baroque period, could be truly painterly). Reinforcing the self-reflexivity of this explicit juxtaposition of styles is the presence of Titian’s signature on the stairs just below. Cf. the similar pairing of exuberant brushstrokes, depicting fire, and artist’s signature on the grill in the San Lorenzo altarpiece. 38 Cf. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, pp. 49-56, on the different kinds of affective response displayed by the Virgin in Renaissance Annunciations, considering them in relation to categories established in sermons of the time. Although by displacing meaning to a verbal / textual source, Baxandall’s reading, however illuminating in other ways, may not fully do justice to the nuances of interpretation, and of affective response on the part of the viewer, that arise from the phenomenological aspect of the direct encounter between viewer and picture in a painting such as Titian’s. FINAL DRAFT 23 lives that the picture speaks. And we participate multiply in a harmony of contrasting terms: psychologically, in the ambivalence of humble receptivity and passionate intensity; phenomenologically, in the interplay between tactile and visual appeal; and ontologically, in the necessary co-presence of viewer and picture in a shared dialogue. In the Concert Champêtre, probably a late work of Giorgione’s though now often attributed to the young Titian,39 the reflection on the glass pitcher of light from our space suggests the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of the viewer within a harmony whose fragile stability threatens to come apart at any moment. 39 The attribution of the picture, with its provenance from the seventeenth century, remains a highly contested issue. On stylistic grounds, I incline towards an attribution to Giorgione; however, we can lay this question aside for the present, given that the interpretive issues that are my focus would remain more or less the same whether the picture was painted by Giorgione, by a young Titian, as a collaborative effort between them, by Sebastiano del Piombo, or by another artist from the same milieu. On the attribution of the picture, see Brown, Ferino-Pagden, et al., Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, cat. 31, pp. 168-70. FINAL DRAFT 24 The woman holding the pitcher is part of a group of four figures that defines a structural equivalent to musical harmony, as four irreducibly different parts are here joined together to make a unity, their differences defined by opposition: stringed instrument versus wind instrument, singing versus (instrumental) playing, female versus male, standing versus seated, urban versus rural, noble versus common, etc. Like the Allegory of Marriage, with its similar dialectical unity, this is a picture about harmony that is defined by a visual harmonics—that is, its subject matter (musical performance) and its pictorial means (a dynamic structural harmony) reinforce each other.40 However, the woman with the pitcher also partially separates herself, literally and thematically, from the group: pouring water into the fountain, her gesture opens up the experience of music to natural sounds—sounds that, nevertheless, are ultimately irreducible to music—just as the landscape behind her expands the intimate locus amoenus of the emergent genre of pastoral to include the unbounded perspectival space suggested by the horizon. As in the Allegory of Marriage, the spherical object’s reflection of a seemingly specific light source coming from our space is embedded within an omnidirectional relationship to light and thus its implied inclusion of the viewer through reflection carries an equivalent complexity of address. As in the Annunciation, the reflecting globe seems to sit right at the picture plane and situate us, through the laws of reflection, on the other side of that plane, even as it implicates us, and our act of looking, in the omnidirectional network of light rays that transcends such separation. Although this may be a relatively innocuous detail, it rhymes with the analogous implication of the viewer—a simultaneous inclusion and exclusion—in the far more thematically and phenomenologically significant musical concert itself, a circle opened out towards us by the position and gestures of the standing nude. This is an opening that threatens to shatter the fragile harmony of the circle it defines in its receptivity to the scattered sounds and sights of nature’s boundless realm—and of the viewer’s world. 40 The picture has often been interpreted in an iconographic, and specifically, allegorical register: as an allegory of poetry (Egan, ‘Poesia and the Fête Champêtre’), an allegory of painting (Bardon, Le Concert champêtre, vol. 2, pp. 101 and 126-35), or as an allegory of musical inspiration (Frings, Giorgiones Landliches Konzert, pp. 97-101). See also Brown, Ferino-Pagden, et al., Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, pp. 168-70, on these allegorical readings. In my view, however, the visual character, mood, and spirit of the picture, as with the Allegory of Marriage, suggest something quite different from the specificity and relative detachment (that is, reliance on an external text or cultural tradition) of an iconographic approach—it seems rather to invite us to participate in the improvisatory, relational, and musical mode of its pictorial universe in a more open-ended process of meaning creation. FINAL DRAFT 25 In the Allegory of Marriage, the gestures of inclusion embodied in both reflections— sphere and armour—not only establish a dialogue between viewer and picture but also invite us to join the group of figures on the other side of the picture plane, to become a part of their interconnected dialogue of glances and gestures. If the picture establishes a transient intimacy among its five figures, one always threatened with the shadow of detachment, departure, and loss—that is, one open-ended enough to allow (self-)reflection and withdrawal to enter as part of the collective experience—it is also one shared with the viewer. We participate affectively in the experience of warmth, detachment, desire, and melancholy that we see depicted among the figures through our reception of subtle cues to join their circle. As in the Concert Champêtre, this appeal to the viewer is compositional as well as emotional: indeed, the structural openness of the figural grouping reinforces its appeal to empathy. Above the sphere, and near the painting’s literal centre, lies the triple reflection in Alfonso’s armour: the faces of the two principal female figures—whose gestures, gazes, and states of mind form a counterpoint—are joined by the brightest patch of light in the entire painting, nonspecific and brilliant, which is evidently coming from our space. The power of art to represent the world mimetically is made manifest in the pictorial surface of the armour that reflects the two faces, but that surface also bends outward in the middle to suggest something more abstract in the glowing white light of the central reflection: the relation of painting to light itself. Or perhaps even here we could say: the relation of painting to visuality and tactility themselves, given the armour’s tactile presence and power, and the appeal of both the armour and its reflections to an embodied viewer. Indeed, what this detail concretizes, in its implication of light on our side of the picture plane, is the manner in which the intimacy at work throughout the picture, grounded in a network of visual and tactile interactions, implicates the relationship between picture and viewer—and between the experience of art and a broader field of life experience, within which the encounter with art forms a small but significant part. However, it is in the second reflection—that of the sphere— that a markedly different kind of relationship between figures and their environment is implied. In Francesca Woodman’s Untitled, a black and white photograph of 1976 (see image below)—one among many she took that year in a dilapidated house in Providence, Rhode Island—we see a woman whose bodily disposition, like that of Maria d’Aragona, centres on the graceful, centripetal gestures of her arms, each curving back towards her own body in a way that suggests a specific nuance of embodied experience. FINAL DRAFT 26 While her left hand stretches out to touch her leg but actually makes contact with wallpaper— like Alfonso d’Avalos’s left hand touching the drapery covering Maria’s breast—indicating an ambivalent tactile awareness of the contours of her own body, her curled right arm grips an object with all five fingers just as Maria’s does. While the sphere in Titian’s painting inflects that gesture, through a scattering of light, into the surrounding space on all sides, in Woodman’s photograph the object—a conch shell—continues and intensifies the centripetal spiral of the figure’s arm. Nevertheless, the relationship of the figure with the surrounding space is analogous to Maria d’Aragona’s with her spatial realm: a counterpoint of outwards expansion, FINAL DRAFT 27 imaginatively merging with the environment, on the one hand, and intimate closure through tactile interaction with an object, on the other. In the case of Woodman’s photograph, however, the fusing of the figure with the surrounding space emerges from a much more pervasive disintegration of the Gestalt of figural form. As is characteristic of many of Woodman’s photographs from this series, the ambiguous placement of the figure in the marginal space between the torn wallpaper and the rough wall surface thoroughly breaks down the contours of the body.41 The occlusion of the head by the upper framing edge contributes to this effect, suggesting not so much a decapitation as a disintegration of form, through the interplay of hair, shadow, and uncertainty of contour—precisely at the site where identity is normally established and where we might seek an expression of the figure’s subjectivity. Furthermore, the throughgoing ambiguity, to the point of abstraction, of the lower part of the photograph contributes markedly—in the spatial disorientation it creates—to the erosion of any distinction between figure and ground, undermining perspectival space itself.42 The combined effect of the head’s occlusion, the spatial ambiguity of the image’s lower section, and the interplay between figure, wallpaper, and wall, in its radical deconstruction of Gestalt, suggests an intuitive experience of embodiment that is emancipated from a conception of the body as a bounded three-dimensional form. Indeed, here we perceive—and participate in—a phenomenology of embodiment that imaginatively expands beyond the limitations of plastic contour to fill the room space like the wallpaper itself. On the one hand, this characteristic of Woodman’s work evokes a state of daydreaming like the one we might recognize in Maria d’Aragona: a disembodied oneiric freedom to occupy space from any and every point one can imagine. At the same time, however, this conversely speaks to a thoroughly embodied attentiveness, a sensitivity to touch that even inflects vision towards the condition of the haptic: a form of perception active equally in all directions and from any site on the body, and one whose activity produces a feeling of intimate contact with all of one’s surroundings at once. This is an identification with one’s environment 41 For other contemporaneous photographs by Woodman that depict a similarly ambiguous relationship between the body and room space, see Townsend, Francesca Woodman, pp. 88, 105, 107-109, 113, and 135. 42 This is especially striking since Woodman achieves this in a medium that, technically speaking, produces images in strict mathematical perspective. FINAL DRAFT 28 that would be elided by the awareness of bodily form and spatial situatedness given by a perceptual experience in which vision is ascendant. For sure, in the Allegory of Marriage, any implication of this more expansive relationship of subjectivity to its environment is counter-balanced by the harmonious forms that define both the picture’s surface composition and its subject matter of bodies disposed gracefully in space. It is this kind of harmonious and discrete form—figure against ground—that Woodman’s photograph so thoroughly and eloquently deconstructs. However, to return to the painterly aspect of Titian’s practice (the brushstroke as touch, or rather as the complex interaction of visible touches that Velázquez celebrates in Titian): perhaps its divergence from a more linear and bounded style suggests a transformed experience of the contours of form. The relatively open and painterly boundaries between objects in the Allegory of Marriage do not undermine coherent form in the emphatic manner of Woodman’s photograph, but they do suggest flesh rather than surface contour per se. What is at stake here is not flesh in the sense of its tactile appeal—that is, as experienced from the outside—but rather flesh as experienced from within, expanding outward from a vital centre of energy to interact with the world, emanating heat into the environment like a gradual evaporation. To return once again to Leonardo, we are in the realm of infinitesimal changes and continuous transitions that he theorized, in paint and in words, and that has come to be known as sfumato.43 (Although it is important to note that in the case of Titian, the artist’s interaction with his medium is very different, based as it is on a network of colour touches rather than an infinitesimal variation of tonal values.) This intuitive sense of a moment of lived experience, a feeling of oneness with one’s environment that is both immersive and reflective—felt through heightened attentiveness to sensation, epitomized by touch, just as it is realized imaginatively in a state of daydreaming inwardness—profoundly informs Maria’s humanity as an ensouled body. Must this not, inevitably, also shape the viewer’s relationship to the picture? Indeed, with a certain attentiveness on our part, it is possible to respond to the picture’s invitation more intimately than the Albertian metaphor of picture as window—a window through which we look, defined by our gaze from a certain distance—would allow. The reflection in a mirror, such as the one on the 43 Cf., for instance, Codex Atlanticus, fol. 278r and fol. 784v (Leonardo, Notebooks, pp. 115 and 260). For interpretations of sfumato, particularly in relation to the infinitesimal, see Nagel, ‘Leonardo and sfumato’, Arasse, Leonardo da Vinci, pp. 119–120, and Fehrenbach, ‘The Paradox of the Point’. FINAL DRAFT 29 back wall of Las Meninas or of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding, implicates the two realms, ours and the picture’s—divided by the picture plane and defined by perspective—within a spatial continuity. The phenomenological unity grounded in a feeling of connection with every part of one’s environment, however, implicates the viewer in a way that resonates more fully with Maria’s experience—a unity for which the picture plane as boundary is no more inviolable, ultimately, than the boundaries of form that define Gestalt. This is an imaginative participation, surely, but one that nevertheless gives a more embodied sense to the viewer’s encounter with the work of art than the one implied by the perspective paradigm ascendant in Renaissance art theory. The experience Titian’s Allegory of Marriage offers us is not only moving, evocative, and immersive—it also carries broad implications for our understanding of the power of art. The theoretical work the picture enacts is, in one sense, broadly relevant to Titian’s workshop practice in the latter part of his career; it emerges from the artist’s approach to paint as fully as Leonardo’s ideas about space, bodies, and the infinitesimal emerge from the hands-on practice of sfumato. In this picture, however, with the experience of a tactile attentiveness that constitutes an expansive sensitivity to one’s environment pictured at its very centre—in Maria’s relationship to the crystal sphere—the issue is made self-reflexively visible just as it is affectively intensified. Indeed, the sphere itself, in its relationship to the female figure that touches it, stands as a metaphor for the painting’s relationship to the viewer, and by extension for the power of the artwork to implicate us—imaginatively, affectively, and phenomenologically—in the specific universe it creates. Considering the veiled but powerful invitation offered to us by the figures themselves and by the human world they embody and enact, the connection the picture establishes with the viewer is more than sensual or theoretical. Indeed, there is a sense that, in the picture as a whole, we encounter a living presence—that the intimacy we see depicted also extends, by analogy, to an intimacy between the viewer and the work as part of a palpable and vital encounter.44 This operates, of course, on the level of the depicted subject, with the illusion that we are in the company of a group of living figures made alive for us, and thus immortal, by the art of Cf. Steinberg, ‘Velázquez’ Las Meninas’, p. 54, speaking of Las Meninas: ‘The picture conducts itself the way a vital presence behaves. It creates an encounter.’ 44 FINAL DRAFT 30 painting.45 However, the experience of encounter arises in a more viscerally phenomenological sense too, in the real presence of the work of art and the affective depth of its dialogue with us. This affective dialogue draws upon the emotional expressiveness of its human sitters and their interactions among each other and with us. More obliquely, however, in the mysterious crystal sphere that reflects the light around it but with which Maria, in her tactile response, establishes more than a merely visual relationship, we find the power of painting in microcosm, the visionary realm that is also a real object in our space, and a presence that implicates us in sympathetic response—whether embodied, oneiric, affective, or reflective. The ambivalence with respect to intimacy and detachment that holds among the figures in the Allegory of Marriage mirrors our ambivalence as responsive viewers, simultaneously immersed in its deeply human world and reflective about the picture as artifice and object of interpretation— daydreaming with it while perceiving the immediacy of its presence, in harmony with its embracing circle and unsettled by its instabilities. Painting here is in equal measure a visionary apparition and a touching co-presence within the world we inhabit. Cf. De Grummond, ‘VV and Related Inscriptions in Giorgione, Titian, and Dürer’, with its related discussion of art’s claim to living presence in portraits by Titian and other artists of the Venetian milieu. 45 FINAL DRAFT 31 Works Cited Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting. Trans. by John Spencer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966. Alpers, Svetlana. The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 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