elkins, james - on monstrously ambiguous paintings

Wesleyan University

On Monstrously Ambiguous PaintingsAuthor(s): James ElkinsReviewed work(s):Source: History and Theory, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Oct., 1993), pp. 227-247Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505524 .

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ON MONSTROUSLY AMBIGUOUS PAINTINGS

JAMES ELKINS

ABSTRACT

Certain artworks appear to have multiple meanings that are also contradictory. In some instances they have attracted so much attention that they are effectively out of the reach of individual monographs. These artworks are monstrous.

One reason paintings may become monstrous is that they make unexpected use of ambiguation. Modern and postmodern works of all sorts are understood to be potentially ambiguous ab ovo, but earlier -Renaissance and Baroque -works were constrained to declare relatively stable primary meanings. An older work may have many "layers" of meaning, but it is normally expected to declare its principal message or subject matter, together with its allegiance to one idea or theme. Contemporary historical interpretation expects those stable starting meanings, even as it relishes the exfoliating ambiguities that may come afterward. So when the interpretive apparatus of art history runs up against premodern paintings that intentionally work against unambiguous primary meanings, it can generate a potentially incoherent literature.

Some of the most monstrous pictures are Leonardo's Last Supper, Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, Watteau's fete galante paintings, Botticelli's Primavera, and Giorgione's Tempesta. The interpretive trichotomy of "Subject," "Not-Subject," and "Anti-Subject" is employed to talk about the (intentional) ambiguity and polysemy of these monstrous works.

This interpretive trichotomy helps order unruly accounts of the most complex artworks. In so doing it illuminates not only some monstrous pictures but a general area of historical interpretation: how to speak of the meaning(s) of a created work in a way that does justice to its complexity and internal tensions.

My subject here is the problematic paintings whose literature has grown too large to be fruitfully discussed within the normal bounds of disciplinary art history.' They are "monstrous" -too much has been written about them to be read in a year-long seminar, and yet they are too narrow to be divided into separate courses. So they become partly invisible: the literature is shrunken, first to summaries, then to brief "positions" and "claims," and finally to lines in a bibliography. Discussions become schematic, and eventually the conversation shifts and the paintings are known in different ways.

In this paper I will consider briefly - my brevity being an intentional contrast with the outline narratives in our universities and with the unmanageable corpus

1. My related essay, "An Ambilogy of Painted Meanings," appeared in Art Criticism (8, no. 2 [1992], 26-35) and deals with problems of contemporary art.



228 JAMES ELKINS

of writing that actually forms the sum total of these questions2 - Giorgione's Tempesta, Botticelli's Primavera, Watteau's fetes galantes, Michelangelo's Sis- tine Ceiling, and Leonardo's Last Supper. There are other such monstrous topics, though I would contend that there are no more than a half-dozen that are so large they can no longer get a hearing in ordinary art historical formats. One might mention the Brancacci Chapel, the Mona Lisa, and Velazquez's Las Meninas.3 Each has generated something over 2,000 pages of literature on the question of meanings alone, aside from the footnotes that must be counted as required reading, and apart from matters of provenance, style, and other art historical preoccupations.

This phenomenon is structurally different from the inexorable growth in publications of all sorts, since the monstrous topics concentrate around a particular methodological problem: the possibility that the artists may have been attempting to make intentionally ambiguous pictures. In each case there is evidence -discovered and interpreted according to the standard machinery of art history - indicating the artists may have wanted their works not to be understood in any single manner, as having a single overt meaning, message, theme, or purpose, regardless of the nuances that they might have also intended. Instead they appear to have been occupied with orchestrating multiple meanings.

It may bear emphasis that in past centuries, single declared meanings were the norm, and ambiguities beyond the double register of allegory or neo-platonic metaphor were rare. A painting was first and foremost an object in a particular genre (religion, allegory, history, and so forth down to landscapes and scenes of animals) that declared a particular theme (The Healing of the Blind Man, La Fornarina, and so on). After those determinations came the mixture of meanings we now take to be painting's primary mode of signification. The entire machinery of traditional art history is constructed in order to conform to that structure: to trace, fix, and confirm unitary intentional meaning, and to place it before the nebulae of meanings that are ancillary, anecdotal, personal, or (to use the language of contemporary theory) parasitic, non-serious, and marginal. When the primary meaning is multiplied according to the rule of allegory, there need be no problem; but when it is elided, erased, deferred, or otherwise called into question (again, regardless of the range of secondary meanings that were the traditional accompaniments of declared subjects), art historical interpretations lose their foothold: hence the troublesome nature of these pictures.

Like infected wounds, these topics fester in art history, irritating the sur- rounding scholarship, spreading their inflammations to neighboring works and texts. They originally attracted attention precisely because they seemed like

2. The question of the rhetorical position of that brevity is discussed in relation to Derrida in my essay "The Avaricious Snap of Rhetoric: A Catechism for Art History," SubStance 68 (1992), 3-16.

3. A good general source for these is the work of David Carrier, though his bibliographies are often only partial. See for example Principles of Art History Writing (University Park, Pa., 1991). There are also borderline cases, fast approaching the monstrous; see for example Lida ven Mengden, Vermeers De Schilderconst in den Interpretationen von Kurt Badt und Hans Sedelmayr (Frankfurt am Main, 1984).



ON MONSTROUSLY AMBIGUOUS PAINTINGS 229

blemishes, imperfections that art history had failed to control. Inevitably, the attention has taken the form of ever more extensive attempts to demonstrate primary meaning; and though I cannot explore this here, the problem is only exacerbated by the experimental methods of the "new art history" with its infusions of theories and methodologies, because "history" in art history continues to enjoin the primary importance of primary meanings. The infection, in this allegory, arises from a conflict of prescriptions, proceeding from an endemic disagreement about how the injury should be treated.

I. FINDING INTENTION'S PLACE

It may be helpful here to look briefly at the contributions of contemporary literary theory, in order to see why they have been of so little help to an art history brimming with curiosity about strategies for considering meaning. The questions of intentionality and intentionalism are arguably among the most important in the current state of visual theory, and must be considered both unresolved and in many instances threatening if not debilitating to conventional narratives.4 There are many accounts within philosophy and literary criticism that open the question of the place of intention.5 It can be argued that Derrida's remains the most careful and vigilant, and therefore also the most difficult to "use," since it does not specify a place for intention except to unseat it from the central position it once had.6 But there are many other approaches, most recently Paul Ricoeur's excellent and sober Oneself as Another.7

There are two reasons why this literature has not been able to elicit a nuanced dialogue with art history. First, because the activity we know as art history continues to require that intentional meanings be primary, it cannot make nuanced use of developments within literary criticism regarding the displace- ment of intention in various regimens of reading. Second, to the extent that contemporary philosophy of meaning relishes indeterminacy, rupture, dissemi- nation, polysemy, and whatever is multivalent, iterative, and unbounded, and

4. The best account is Whitney Davis, review of Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, in The Art Bulletin 72 (1990), 156-166. See my discussion, "The Unease in Art History," Qui Parle 6 (Fall/Winter 1992), 113-133.

5. An especially reflective account may be developed from Lacan's concept of the unavoidable multivalence of the "full word," for example in P. C. Hogan, "Structure and Ambiguity in the Symbolic Order: Some Prolegomena to the Understanding and Criticism of Lacan," in Criticism and Lacan, ed. P. C. Hogan (Athens, Ga., 1990), 22-23.

6. Derrida, "Signature Event Context," in Margins of Philosophy, transl. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1982), 317, 320, 326 respectively. The essay is also translated by S. Weber and J. Mehlman, Glyph: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies 7 (1977). The entire debate is well worth following, though it does not add substantially to this question. Unfortunately it cannot be followed in the recent book (J. Derrida, Limited Inc. [Chicago, 1989]), since the book omits the following essential antecedent texts: Condillac, Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines (Paris, 1973), with an introduction by Derrida, and J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words (New York, 1962), as well as an element of the debate itself, J. R. Searle, "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida'," Glyph: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies 1 (1977), 198ff. The book does, however, include an added "Afterword" that is-as of this writing-the last word.

7. Oneself as Another, transl. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago, 1992).



230 JAMES ELKINS

especially when unboundedness is not itself thematized as a bounded term, the literature can be disconnected from art historical concerns that need to continue to address the structure formed by contrasting primary against secondary meanings.8 Many contemporary philosophers have things to say about indeterminacy, but few have theories of meaning that are involved in sorting species of indeterminacy in normative contexts.9 Art history is a kind of writing that embraces an "unhappy consciousness" by declining to do without either the primacy of intentionality or the critiques of that primacy, and the philosophical literature has largely declined to address that state. Like anthropology, art history is in chronic need of a thoroughgoing, fundamental critique of its concept of subjectivity; but unlike anthropology, art history continues to decline that route in large part because historians want to occupy an inconsistent position between naive reportage and philosophical rigor.

This is not to say that there are no texts that negotiate the problems of bounded, self-contradictory meanings. William Empson's tattered classic, Seven Types of Ambiguity, has been revived in recent years, not as an encyclo- pedic reference - indeed, his seven types have been rejected in many more than seven ways -but as a pathbreaking attempt to show readers just how compli- cated meanings can be.'0 Because of Empson's myopic concern with registers of meaning, the book can be read in such a way as to yield productive accounts of pictures as well as poems." And it seems to me art historians should not shrink from other, more abstruse sources: both medieval scholasticism and Talmudic literature contain regimens for the detection and control of intended meanings within strictly delimited interpretive programs. But here I have in mind something less exotic: I want to show how the field of monstrous problems is not itself monstrous, and to do so I will make heuristic use of an interpretive tool developed within art history itself, one designed specifically to respond to the problem of primary intentional meanings.

8. I am not claiming there are not exceptions. Michael Fried is perhaps the most prominent one; his project largely avoids questions of intentionality by exploring structures of meaning that are located both in the interpreter's desires and the artist's unconscious. A critique of Fried from this point of view could ask whether his project does not often need to rely on the prior existence of a more or less canonical art historical interpretation. See for example Courbet's Realism (Chi- cago, 1990).

9. This is Ted Cohen's remark; see Cohen, "Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy," in On Metaphor, ed. S. Sacks (Chicago, 1979), 4.

10. See P. de Man, "The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism," [1956] in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis, 1971), 229-245, and Christopher Norris, "Some Versions of Rhetoric: Empson and de Man," in Rhetoric and Form: Deconstruction at Yale, ed. R. C. Davis et al. (Norman, 1985), 191-214. A recent dissertation on Empson is J. D. McCoy, "The Middle Way: Seven Types of Ambiguity and the Critics," Dissertation Abstracts International 42 nr. 7 (January 1982), 3156A. Important early criticisms (which in general attack Empson for being overly strict about separating meanings that should be fluid) include J. C. Ransom, "Mr. Empson's Muddles," Southern Review 4 (1938), 334ff., and P. Wheelwright, "On the Semantics of Poetry," Kenyon Review 2 (1940), 264-287. Appreciations include M. C. Bradbrook, "Sir William Empson (1906-1984): A Memoir," Kenyon Review n.s. 7 (1985), 106-115 and J. Lucas, "William Empson: An Appreciation," Poetry Review 74 (June, 1984), 21-22.

11. See my essay "An Ambilogy of Painted Meanings."




II. SUBJECT, NOT-SUBJECT, ANTI-SUBJECT

The debate concerning the Subject began in art history over the possibility that certain Renaissance painters may have been intentionally avoiding nameable subjects by painting in the newly-developed genre of landscape. Landscape, so it was claimed, escaped from the very category of subjects by being "meaningless." In the current state of this debate there are three terms that purport to describe a complete field of possibilities:'2

1. A painting that has a Subject is one that declares a single theme and an identifiable genre. The term entails both the declaration of the work's primary meaning and the repression of ancillary meanings. To recognize a picture as Subject is to understand it in such a way that its genre or theme (most often privileged and set apart in the work's title, printed on a label) is situated at the beginning of interpretation, and other genres and themes are deferred or repressed. Thus a painting titled Rape of the Sabines may ultimately be of interest because of its muted use of landscape or still-life elements, or its allegorical pronouncements about heroism, fate, and fame, but a reading of the painting as Subject must begin by acknowledging the hierarchical disposition of meanings. (In analytic terms, "Subject" denotes this arrangement of meanings, and "subject" with a lowercase s is a synonym for theme or genre. "Subject" with a capital s has no plural in this account.)

2. Since the Renaissance it has also been possible for a painting to be Not- Subject, meaning the painter has left signs indicating that the work is to be understood as not having a primary meaning, message, theme, or genre. E. H. Gombrich has pointed out that landscape painting did not initially appear as Not-Subject when it was introduced in the Renaissance.13 At first it signified ownership and wealth (since the landscapes in question were often lands owned by the patron), and so landscape paintings worked as a kind of documentation, in part the way a deed or contract might function. Later it appears that landscape paintings became a way of avoiding Subject, since they were perceived as an absence of determinate meaning rather than the newest entry into the list of genres. 14

3. An Anti-Subject painting is also conceivable, if a painter begins with Subject and attempts to obliterate it in whole or in part. When a painting succeeds in obscuring its subject, either by combining references to many subjects or by erasing the markers of a single originary subject, it can become a Not-Subject, a painting without discernible subject. But it is helpful to distin- guish between the Not-Subject, which was originally a blank, from the Anti-

12. Salvatore Settis, Giorgione's Tempest, Interpreting the Hidden Subject [1978] (Chicago, 1990), chapter 1, "Subject and Not-Subject."

13. Gombrich, "The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape," Norm and Form (Oxford, 1966), 107-121.

14. There is an unresolved debate on this point, and not all historians agree that landscapes were perceived as Not-Subject before romanticism. See first Creighton Gilbert, "On Subject and Not-Subject in Italian Renaissance Pictures,"ArtBulletin 34(1952), 202-216, and further references in S. Settis, 161, notes 6, 7.



232 JAMES ELKINS

Subject, which was originally determinate and then became a cipher. Anti- Subject paintings show traces of the effort to efface them - they are palimpsestic, both literally and figuratively. At times what is at stake here is the evidence of x-rays or archival documents, and in other cases the painting itself shows its multiplicity-a possibility that is not open in the same way to printed texts.

(Though I will not be exploring it here, these categories are a useful way to describe much of contemporary art, which eschews Subject and vacillates between the twin lures of absolute Not-Subject-especially in more dogmatic strains of "nonobjective" art - and reticent Anti-Subject. Contemporary artists often begin with nameable subjects and then try to erase them in order to arrive at a suitably ambiguous position "between" the declaration of univocal meaning and the disinterest generated by an ideally perfect illegibility. Works that achieve that position are meant to give a "feeling of meaning": a sense that there is a theme, or a group of themes, together with the awareness that they are not entirely legible. Often that "feeling of meaning" is then taken as a sign of something genuinely non-verbal and therefore properly visual. 15)

III. ANTOINE WATTEAU'S ESCAPE FROM MEANING

With these possibilities as our guide I want to turn to the works themselves. The first example, of Watteau's invented "genre" of thefete galante, exemplifies the kind of rearrangement and clarification that the trichotomy of Subject, Not-Subject, and Anti-Subject can afford, even when each of the three may be present simultaneously or in succession. The later examples are arranged in ascending order according to the amount of trouble they pose for the trichotomy. The schema born within art history - and therefore, within the limits of the search for primary meaning - deliquesces in interesting ways when it encounters more radically disrupted meanings. I will conclude the essay with a short speculation on the place of an analysis such as this one amidst the ongoing "monstrous" growth of the art historical literature.

Ambiguity in Watteau is like a flame to the moths of scholarship: historians fly around it, fascinated with their own incomprehension. A medium-size moun- tain of art historical writing consists of attempts to identify the places, plays, people, and actors Watteau depicted, and most of it pays largely empty tribute to the magnetic attraction of the painter's polyvalent images before it rushes in with an interpretation. One nineteenth-century historian, awakening for a moment from the dream of art history, regretted "the time . . . lost in the past while seeking with an ill-starred zeal the names of the actors"; most do not live long enough to rethink their iconographic obsessions."6

In our terms, the first thing to consider is that Watteau may have been Anti- Subject: he may sometimes have felt that ambiguity was "the primary character-

15. See my "Impossibility of Stories: On the Non-Narrative and Anti-Narrative Impulse in Modern Painting," Word & Image 7 (1991), 348-364.

16. Reported in Antoine Watteau, 1684-1721, ed. M. M. Grasselli et al. (Washington, D.C., 1984), 433a. For Watteau see further L. Nochlin, "Watteau: Some Questions of Interpretation," Art in America 73 (1985), 73-80.




Antoin ......u . . c..1719. Oil on canvas. Pari .,e Lu

FIGURE 1

Antoine Watteau, Gilles. c. 1719. Oil on canvas. Paris: Muse'e du Louvre.

istic" of his painting, an ideal "deliberately chosen and knowingly nurtured." In that case he would have begun with an identifiable subject and then attempted to remove its crucial identifiers or multiply its references until it could no longer be named. Art of this kind is also coy: it would mean Watteau "invited discussion and explanation, but . . . then shied away," leaving "shadowy areas" in his pictures-hoping to inhabit what I called the "feeling of meaning. "17

17. This, I assume, is close to Grasselli and Rosenberg's position-as implied in Grasselli, ed., Antoine Watteau, 13, 242, et passim.



234 JAMES ELKINS

Or we may say that Watteau's paintings are better described as strange Sub- ject, "simple pastoral entertainments, strewn with musical or erotic symbols," sensual allegories, or imaginary reconstitutions of the theater.'8 And that in turn opens the third possibility, that his works are Not-Subject, more or less successful escapes from Subject itself. There is at least some evidence that the Not-Subject was a possibility that was discussed at the time. Watteau's contemporary the Count Caylus said his paintings had "no object," so that they were similar to what we still call "pure painting."19

This is where the question of genre presses to the fore: Is the fete galante a genre (a Subject), the absence of genre (Not-Subject), or a concatenation of genres (Anti-Subject)? In practical terms, fete galante is the genre that Watteau had invented for himself, in order to give his paintings the genre classification that would enable him to be elected to the Academy. But in analytic terms, thefetegalante may signal the absence of genre, or a cobbled-together collection of genres. A third possibility-the most intriguing, because it is the hardest to understand-is that Watteau was a painter of the Not-Subject. Without implying that Watteau might not have been at different times on all three sides of this question, let us consider the potential and problematics of each.

A difficulty with imagining Watteau as an Anti-Subject painter lies in describing exactly how he moves away from an originary subject. His three paintings of Cythera are especially illuminating here. An early version of Le pelerinage a l'isle de Cithere, his set-piece for the Academy now in Frankfurt, has all the trappings of the stage: a copy of part of a garden at Saint-Cloud, costumes, parasol pines, a gondola, tents and other chinoiserie, and a backdrop with snowy mountains all conspire to signify a ludic theme. But the picture is seamless, and there is no shadow between backdrop and stage, no gulf between actors and audience. Watteau has dismantled their boundaries, and sewn up the rips between different portions. In later versions and other pictures he continued this erasure of the stage, moving from specific plays to theater in general, and from specific performances to an unspecifiably ludic atmosphere.

Yet his case would be a simple one if that was all he did to avoid declaring his subject. Other departures from Subject are evident in his work, and they can be listed one after another - tempting us to imagine a narrative of successive concealment. A second "step," after the mingling of actors and audience, in- volves the gentle but persistent neutralization of dramatic actions. The Louvre Gilles may or may not be a "nonverbal" moment in a particular kind of play, as Dora Panofsky maintained; but it certainly replaces action, movement, and gesture by a static tableau vivant. From a snapshot of a particular play it becomes an icon or emblem of the theater. Alternatively, action may be retained but rendered ambiguous; this is excellently demonstrated by the version of Le pelerinage a l'isle de Cithere in the Louvre. There the action has become so hard to read that one historian has said that the figures are actually leaving

18. Ibid., 13 and 264. 19. For Caylus's statement see ibid., 12 and 243; for the modern phrase, ibid., 13.




Cythera.20 That claim in turn has been softened by recent scholars, who prefer the idea that the figures are both coming and leaving, and the "place" is an allegory of site itself, a "non-place." At his highest level of abstraction, Watteau melted allusions to the theater into instances of theatrical behavior, especially including courtship and conversation. There are paintings - in modern eyes, among his best - whose figures may be actors, spectators, or "merely" aristocrats strolling in their gardens.2' It can seem that at the end of this path of erasures there will be the simple, nameless, and anonymous standing or conversing figure; Watteau painted several such pictures, though he seems to have rebounded each time toward the specifics of Subject.

On the other hand, if Watteau is better thought of as a painter of the Subject, then the nature of his subjects needs to be specified. Thefete galante, the subject "invented for Watteau," was not unambiguously recognized by Watteau's con- temporaries as a genre. In the Royal Academy records, Watteau's Le pelerinage a l'isle de Cithere is listed by name, but the name is crossed out, and "une feste galante" has been put in its place.22 This striking document shows that from the very beginning, Watteau could induce a vacillation on the subject of Subject. His position induced aporia then as now; and it is not extravagant to say that he painted the idea of Subject, rather than Subject itself.

What would it mean to think of Watteau's paintings as Not-Subject? It would entail not only finding a way to read his paintings outside of genres (outside history, allegory, religion, and even outside landscape, portraiture), including outside the genre of "genre painting," but also outside of genre itself-in a place somewhere apart from genre. To put it in terms indigenous to Baroque discussions of genre, we would have to refuse to read his paintings at all. I think that this alternative should be taken seriously, despite its extravagance and its historical failings, since something in the paintings impels us to return to it. Watteau is someone who is read, and then not read: like books, his paintings are continuously closing and showing us blank covers.

The various options formed by Subject, Not-Subject, and Anti-Subject form a complex field. It is probable that all three worked together, but it is also interesting that they seem adequate to characterize what Watteau accom- plished.23 Though it is difficult to see how and when the three trade places in a single work, it does not seem necessary to emend the categories themselves. Other paintings do not fit the tripartite schema as clearly; one of the ways that a picture can question the schema is by seeming initially to subscribe fully to one of its alternatives.

20. Michael Levey, "The Real Theme of Watteau's 'Embarkation for Cythera,"' Burlington Magazine 103 (1961), 180-185. See also Jutta Held, Antoine Watteau, Einschiftung nach Kythera (Frankfurt, 1985).

21. The Louvre Assemblke dans un parc is too indefinite to be confidently assigned to any one play, as the Frankfurt painting probably refers to Dancourt's Les Trois Cousines (1700).

22. For a facsimile see Grasselli, ed., 396. 23. It is often said that Watteau's work cannot be "enclosed within a single system." See ibid., 12.



236 JAMES ELKINS

IV. GIORGIONE'S "MEANINGLESS" POESIE, BOTTICELLI'S "POETIC" MEANINGS

At first it appears that Giorgione is best described as an Anti-Subject painter.2 The Tempesta, which has produced as many theories as Kafka's Metamor- phosis, also appears to be an attenuated or hidden Subject-though it is still far from clear what the subject might have been. Among the hundred-odd interpretations, the Tempesta has been identified as Deucalion and Pyrrha; Adrastus and Hypsipyle nursing Opheltes (from Statius's Thebiad); the finding of Paris; Baal and Astarte; Moses discovered by Bithia (or Moses, Bithia, and Hermes Trismegistus); Venus Genetrix and Poliphilo from the Hypneroto- machia poliphili; and St. Theodore and the Christian widow. Some historians have proposed that the painting has a subject of a more allegorical sort: Forti- tude, Charity and Fortune, Harmonia est discordia concors, Active and Passive, Male and Female, or Nature and Culture.

An x-ray of the Tempesta revealed a second woman where the "soldier" now stands. That discovery was originally used to argue that the painting could not have had an original subject (that it was, in our terms, Not-Subject), since it was held that a painting with two women and an infant could not have a theme. It then becomes a pure poesia, a particular kind of picture intended to mean nothing concrete. More specific proposals about the Not-Subject always risk sounding like esoteric subjects; in this case, the Tempesta has been identified as Enigma and Music.

In his monograph La Tempesta interpretata, Salvatore Settis has gathered most of the interpretations and anti-interpretations, and added one of his own (a typical art historian's procedure). In his view the Subject is Adam and Eve outside the Garden of Eden, with Adam leaning on a suspiciously slender garden tool, Paradise in the background (paradoxically rendered inaccessible by an "uncrossable bridge"25), God as a thunderbolt, and the diminished snake creeping into a hole in the ground.

Inevitably, both Settis's interpretation and his methodology have problems; here I want to emphasize two that bear on our question of the nature of mon- strosity. First there is the strange insistence with which interpreters like Settis propose their criteria. Settis emphasizes that a correct reading of the Tempesta must be complete - it must provide an explanation for every element of the painting. In his enumeration, those elements include the man, woman, and child, the bridge, the snake, the storm, and a half-dozen tiny elements such as a crane perched on a distant building and a griffin emblazoned over a portal.

24. The so-called Three Philosophers in Vienna, depicting three exotic-looking men in front of a cave, demonstrably began as the Three Magi. (An x-ray revealed that one "philosopher" was black, in accord with the conventions of the Magi.) The cave, which was more prominent before the painting was cut down, connects it with a myth about the Magi, according to which they waited near a cave on the Mons Victorialis for the advent of Jesus. Their astronomical instruments and notations signify their astronomical purpose: they waited for the Star of Bethlehem, whose reflection once could be seen gleaming on the cave wall. Settis, 37ff.

25. Settis, 113 and 118. Settis sees a small blade on Adam's staff.




FiouRE 2

Giorgione, The Tempest. c. 1505. Oil on canvas. Venice: Galleria dell'Accademia.

Aside from the critical naivete of this enumeration (Who is to say what an "element" is? Why not a single leaf? And why account for all elements with a single interpretation?), there is the rhetorical harshness of its deployment in Settis's text. Because the interpretation knows itself to be forced, its armature needs to be particularly robust. That in itself is evidence of the competing pressure of open-ended Anti-Subject explanations that would countenance Gi- orgione's act of erasure rather than treating it as a code concealing a univocal message.

When the act of veiling is seen this way, the long list of previous interpretations takes on a peculiar cast. Even though they occupy a number of pages in Settis's text, the reader is asked to ignore them when Settis presents his own interpreta-



23 8 JAMES ELKINS

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tion toward the end. But inevitably, they continue to resonate for us as they undoubtedly do for Settis (who, I would assume, continues to mention them in his lectures). Even though we may not choose to take more than a few of them seriously, they comprise an intricate penumbra around our experience of the painting. After reading through an interpretive historiography like Settis's, the Tempesta becomes a remarkably complex object: it is an Anti-Subject, with a range of more or less probable identifications of the original Subject, together with an array of misguided or unconvincing hypotheses, each of which testifies to the painting's power to entrance and confuse. Eve, Bithia, Astarte, Hypsipyle, and Fortuna cohabit in our minds. Even supposing the painting is unarguably Adam and Eve outside the Garden of Eden, it is precisely for that reason also not Adam and Eve outside the Garden of Eden. Settis's book, and the iconological tradition as a whole, is untrue to our experience of pictures, though the book itself unwittingly forms an eloquent record of the way such an experience might be ordered in a mind intent on Subject and solution.

In this cloud of unknowing still other possibilities present themselves. Anti- Subject paintings might well begin without subjects, and veer aside whenever a Subject threatens. What if Giorgione had begun with a pure poesia, a picture without a subject, and then found himself at one point perilously close to Adam and Eve outside the Garden of Eden, or Baal and Astarte, or St. Theodore and the Christian Widow? He may then have altered details until his painting was again almost Not-Subject. This possibility is an inversion of the way I have been describing Anti-Subject: instead of beginning in a known place, and discarding symbolic clues, Giorgione could have started nowhere, and added signs while at the same time trying not to arrive back at a Subject. This is not the place to explore the myriad strategies of the Anti-Subject; my point is rather that by acknowledging such possibilities we can avoid the harsh hermeneutics that set aside whatever is partial, veiled, superseded, and even incorrect in favor of the single answer.

A complement to "meaningless"poesie are "poetic" meanings - Subject paintings by nature so diaphanous that they appear as Not-Subject. Calling the Tempesta a painting of music is an example of this, and several of Botticelli's pictures are built around especially silky primary meanings. The principal theories regarding Botticelli's sources are fewer but no less embattled than the alleged sources for Giorgione's poesie.26 Since Neoplatonism-an undoubted source, among others that are less widely accepted - is syncretic and synthetic, its meanings tend not to contradict one another; but neither do they reliably add to produce a single central meaning. In the same way, the proposed sources for the Primavera do not conflict or build, but blend and alternate. They tell a story of commingling meaning.

26. For Botticelli's Primavera see especially E. H. Gombrich, "Botticelli's Mythologies: A Study in the Neo-Platonic Symbolism of his Circle," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 8 (1945), 7ff., reprinted in Symbolic Images (Ithaca, 1972), 31-81.



240 JAMES ELKINS

The painting is monovocal Subject (the spring, Primavera), even while its blending of ancient and Renaissance texts blocks it from being unequivocal. The sources themselves (among others there are Neoplatonist educational philosophy, Apuleius's Golden Ass, and a poem by Botticelli's contemporary Poli- ziano) soften the Subject, and they are not at odds with one another. Yet the negotiations between these subsidiary meanings do not issue in a simple hier- archy of leading Subject and trailing references. Instead the choices among meanings that blend and alternate produce a higher-order conflict, and that conflict continuously speaks of the possibility of resolution - it reminds an unhurried observer that there is a resolved Subject after all, even though it becomes increasingly difficult to specify.

The same dynamic can be read in the painting's colors and forms. The Prima- vera is almost symmetrical: the central Venus and flying Cupid are flanked by three Graces on the left, and three figures on the right -but there is an "extra" figure, Mercury, on the left margin. As we look, Mercury seems almost to complement a blue Zephyr flying in from the right. The slight departure from heraldic balance announces that the play of meaning will be subtle. It says, in effect: Meanings will not be determinate here, but they will overlap, slide back and forth and almost coincide. Botticelli's typical figural distortions and his gentle residues of "Gothic tip-toe" have an analogous relation to meaning, since they are neither firmly within the Renaissance orthodoxy of contrapposto nor indulgently nostalgic and anachronistic. That theme is provocatively disconnected from the problems of Subject, since a given figural attenuation neither bolsters, contradicts, distracts, nor clarifies the proposed meanings. Instead carefully chosen figural proportions signify the presence of allegory as a whole (they give the picture a symbolic look, setting the stage for allegorical readings), and so their idiosyncrasies signify a freer play of meaning than we might otherwise anticipate.

This is where the distinction between Subject and Anti-Subject begins to break down: a single meaning can be so gently articulated and so bewilderingly rich that it can be difficult to name, as in Botticelli; and conversely, a flight from meaning can produce a nebula of partly cognized possibilities, as in Gior- gione. But I would suggest that even in the shimmering interpretations of works like these there is the lingering presence of the strict Subject, invisible Not- Subject, and ghostly Anti-Subject.

V. THE AMBILOQUY OF THE SISTINE CEILING

The Sistine is another monstrous painting, and it is likely that the recent cleaning has only temporarily distracted historians from their ongoing debates about its meaning. The depths and radical divisions of the proposed readings are not widely known outside of Renaissance art history, both because the general outlines of Michelangelo's intentions are clear, and because the alternate read-




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242 JAMES ELKINS

ings have tended to appear in unusually lengthy articles.27 But the disputes are far-reaching. The nine scenes on the spine of the chapel are primarily chronolog- ical, but since there are exceptions to strict chronology (for example, the Sacri- fice of Noah comes before the Flood, instead of in thanksgiving for salvation from it), there may be other principles at work. The many other figures and kinds of figures ("living" nudes, "bronzes," "marbles," "painted" figures) do not have a simple relation to the chronology. Soteriological, anagogical, ecclesi- astical, and aesthetic interpretive programs have been proposed, although it is typical of the literature that the arguments are not made on this theoretical level, but proceed more directly by developing conflicting accounts of specific figures and details.

An "ambiloquy" is a discourse on ambiguity, and it is possible that the Sistine is also this, in addition to its necessary Subject. A work that harbors or exemplifies ambiguities may become an ambiloquy by placing its meanings under a general heading, and in this case one is provided by the overt narrative spanning all of history from the Creation to the succession of Popes. One sign that it may be apposite to conceive the Sistine Ceiling as an ambiloquy is that those who have attempted to see it as a single painting have fallen into self- contradiction when it comes to details. Charles de Tolnay's reading has it that the Ceiling represents the Neoplatonic progress of the soul: along the spine, the soul moves upward from a degenerate state (the Drunkenness of Noah, the first scene) to perfection (the Division ofLightfrom Darkness). Reading upward in any place from the walls to the spine, one first sees a realm of "darkness and death" in the lunettes and severies of the ancestors of Christ (the darkness has been mended by the cleaning, but not the figurative death): "a world without meaning, without history, without hope and aim," where "generation after generation of men pass by in [the] shadowy sphere," perceiving nothing of the "true reality" of the superior world.28 The bronze-colored nudes in the spandrels are, in the words of another writer, "unillumined captives of ancient igno- rance."29 Higher up, the prophets and sibyls "share" in the Divine, and the

27. Among the primary sources for this subject are the following: Esther Dotson, "An Au- gustinian Interpretation of Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling," Art Bulletin 41 (1979), 223-256, 405- 409; Frederick Hartt, "Lignum vitae in medio paradise, The Stanze d'Eliodoro and the Sistine Ceiling," Art Bulletin 22 (1950), 115-145, 181-123; Sinding-Larsen, "A Re-reading of the Sistine Ceiling," Acta ad Archaeologiam (Institutum Romanum Norvegiae) 4 (1969); Johannes Wilde, "The Decoration of the Sistine Chapel," Proceedings of the British Academy 44 (1958); E. Wind, "Maccabean Histories on the Sistine Ceiling," in Italian Renaissance Studies, ed. E. F. Jacob (London, 1960), 312ff.; H. B. Gutman, "Jonah and Zachariah on the Sistine Ceiling," Franciscan Studies 13 (1953), 159-177; Gutman, "Religi6ser Symbolismus in Michelangelos Sintflutfresco," Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 18 (1955), 74-76; Gutman, "Michelangelos Botschaft in der sixtin- ischen Kapelle," Archivium Franciscanum Historicum 56 (1963), 258-283; Edgar Wind, "Typology in the Sistine Ceiling: A Critical Statement," Art Bulletin 33 (1951), 41-47.

28. See Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo, vol. II, The Sistine Ceiling (Princeton, 1945), con- densed in Michelangelo, The Sistine Chapel Ceiling . . ., ed. C. Seymour (New York, 1972), 221ff. See further M. Bull, "The Iconography of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling," Burlington Magazine 130 (1988), 599ff.

29. Sydney Freedberg, quoted in Seymour, 192.




nudes (ignudi) serve as "prototypes" of man in their direct relation with God. Frederick Hartt has pointed out rudimentary logical contradictions in this reading. To begin, it is not clear that there is a higher and lower realm at all. How do we know that the "trancelike" lower figures "are not absorbed . . . in the meaning of the scenes that take place above them?"30 And the horizontal and vertical schemata contradict one another. If the first scene, of the Drunken- ness of Noah, is "the lowest stage of the soul," then how can it be above the prophets? And is the entire Holy Family to be plunged into the "zone of shadow and death"9?31

On another level, the Ceiling may be an ambiloquy on account of the peculiar attitude its interpreters take to contradictions between their accounts and rival interpretations. Recent writers have not so much tolerated such contradictions as they have ignored them, on the double assumption that the Ceiling must have a single Subject and that its details, rich as they may be, must all bend to that single Subject. In that frame of mind the many conflicting readings of individual passages have to be assigned to external forces. But surely we do not need to presume that Michelangelo would proceed independently of holy texts, or that he would order his scenes randomly, or that he would suffer lapses of attention, in order to explain such contradictions, and we may well ask why there is such insistence on homogeneous interpretations. Esther Dotson's reading, which is an examination of Augustinian meanings, and Hartt's pro- posal that the Ceiling is a Tree of Life, are cases in point. Why should the City of God or the Tree of Life provide the reason for all the figures, for each scene, and for its ordering? And why should the principle (soteriological, anagogic, and so on) be the same throughout? I would suggest that the sometimes pro- grammatic mentality of these exercises, entirely apart from their persuasiveness or historical grounding, might give pause for thought. One of the things that could give rise to a corpus of relatively self-sufficient and determinedly self- consistent monographs is an ambiloquy: a work that declares a single Subject, and then dissolves into a partly illegible orchestration of multiple meanings, provoking and then confounding determined interpretation.

To pursue the claim that the Sistine Ceiling is an ambiloquy it would be necessary to find ways to describe how and where Subject yields to Anti-Subject. Part of the problem is that those transitions are effected in a number of ways: Michelangelo might have had shifting criteria for the decision to introduce ambiguations. There is indisputably a break between the trumpeted unambigu- ousness of the Ceiling's central aim (to cover the period from Genesis to the Flood, and to compare it to the ancestors of Christ) and the shifting meanings of the ignudi (they have been seen as simply "nudes," as the human soul, as the cherubim of the Temple of Solomon, as angels, as prototypes of man). It is the suddenness of this diffusion of meaning that has prompted historians to

30. Hartt, review of Tolnay, Michelangelo, in Art Bulletin 32 (1950), 245. 31. In addition Tolnay's vertical progression is divided into five steps, and Hartt objects that

the names of those steps are cobbled from very different sources, and forced to "sort of" correspond. The steps are: 1 ignudi (the large ignudi, above the seers) = demoni buoni; 2putti (below, holding the seers' names) = demoni cattivi; 3 spiritelli (beside the seers) = amore divino; 4putti (marble-colored



244 JAMES ELKINS

try to be systematic; but in order to build a fuller reading of the Ceiling, we would have to say why that dispersion seems too rapid. What rules govern the relation between subjects and the looseness of their meaning? What are the relevant dynamics of primary and subsidiary meanings? These are not easy questions, but they are unavoidable if we are to begin to see the Sistine Ceiling with the complexity that our accounts have traditionally attempted to restrict.

VI. LEONARDO'S POSTMODERN LAST SUPPER

These issues are symptoms, signs of the irritation generated by a program based (however loosely and inadvertently) on the interpretive trichotomy I have been sketching here. Aside from their individual difficulties, the works we have been considering so far remain within the field of possibilities articulated by the Subject and its opposites. Giorgione's Tempesta and Botticelli's Primavera may be understood as works that embrace vacillation and nuance as governing principles (perhaps, as we saw, setting Nuance itself as a subject), and the Sistine Ceiling raises the possibility that a work might seek to control a wide range of distinct and indistinct meanings. We can bring this heuristic account to a provisional close by considering the possibility that a work might have what amounts to a working control of this entire thematic, so that it might become simultaneously a critique of the Subject (rejecting its univocality), the Not- Subject (rejecting its claims to avoid meaning), and the Anti-Subject (by prefer- ring to speak about many subjects rather than avoiding all subjects). Though he does not use these categories, to my knowledge Leo Steinberg is the only art historian who has set out to claim certain works are initially and finally intentionally ambiguous, and then to go on and pry apart individual acts of ambiguation. Both the claim and the list are essential: without the claim, the list would be failed iconography, and without the list, the claim would replay the common promise of unbridled meaning.

Steinberg's essay on Leonardo's Last Supper proposes a long list of intentional ambiguities: the scale of the scene (there are, he says, "sfumati" of implied sizes, so that the room and its inhabitants cannot be precisely measured), the moment that is depicted (with four alternates), the subject (Eucharist or Last Supper), the fictive space (with six dilemmas), the hands of Christ (six antitheses and a synthesis), and the plans of the room (with two rivals, one rectangular and the other trapezoidal). To give a single example: it is probable that Leonardo painted bright orthogonal stripes on the fictive floor, which would have receded to the vanishing point. (As we have it now, the painting is too damaged to tell, but the stripes occur in an early copy.) If so, then it is also possible that Christ's outstretched hands and his position just over the central stripe would cause an apparition: from the decorous diminution of the perspective space would spring a sudden vision of the Crucifixion. Steinberg assumes that if the stripe existed, Leonardo would have intended an ambiguous position and meaning for his

caryatids) = amore humano; 5 ignudi (bronze-colored, on the level of the seers) = amoreferino. See Tolnay, Michelangelo, II, 159; discussed in Hartt's review, 255.



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246 JAMES ELKINS

Christ. To the monks in the refectory Jesus would have been both the Lord of the Last Supper and the Dread Figure itself.

Steinberg's essay is precisely reasoned, and he is aware of the fact that mod- ernism is in love with ambiguity and has a penchant for seeing it where it may not exist. "Ambiguity," he notes, comes from the Greek amphibolia, meaning a predicament, but modern taste enjoys indecision and now we seek it out.32 Now, nearly twenty years after Steinberg's essay, our infatuation with ambiguity has hypertrophied. We no longer like the word "ambiguity": it sounds danger- ously restrictive, it needs to be replaced by polysemy, the supplement, the "full word" and their cohorts. These are signs of a dangerous love. If multiple meanings are to be found everywhere, if they are the condition of consciousness and language itself, then how can we know when we hallucinate the objects of our desire?

To Steinberg, "the question is not either/or -not who is right," "but rather, what is it in Leonardo's presentment that allows this plurality of interpretations?" Which competing meanings shall we not take seriously? None, if they are "intelligent," proceed from "correct observations" and do not "contradict" one another: "it is assumed that intelligent reactions to the Last Supper consti- tute a source of insight into the work itself. Scholarly disagreements are not treated as true-or-false situations, occasions for taking sides, but as hints that Leonardo is doing more than one thing at a time."33 One might object that an artist may want to be self-contradictory, or partly to lose control over what he is making. It is also unclear whether we want to exclude "incorrect observations." Is a Tempesta set in Venice and ancient Phoenicia, populated by the God Baal and his consort Astarte, "unintelligent"? How is it not based on "correct observations"? The historian De Minerbi, who proposed that particular reading, did not go out of her way to "contradict" other meanings. Do we then accept it as one of Giorgione's intentions?

Steinberg's favorite artists are intelligent manipulators of ambiguities. A person like Leonardo, so eloquent and masterful in many other arenas, would not be apt to miss the fact that his Christ could appear to vault upward upon a painted orthogonal and propose himself as a Crucifixion. "For this writer there is one determining consideration: that it is methodologically unsound to imagine Leonardo insensitive to the implications of his inventions."34 Argu- ments of Steinberg's sort depend on artists and historians who are supremely aware; but as a general criterion this becomes problematic. This question was Freud's before it was Steinberg's. In "The Moses of Michelangelo" Freud won- ders: "What if we have taken too serious and profound a view" of the details of the Moses? "What if we have . . . thought to see quite clearly things the artist did not intend either consciously or unconsciously? I cannot tell. I cannot say whether it is reasonable to credit Michelangelo . .. with such an elementary

32. Steinberg, "Leonardo's Last Supper," Art Quarterly 36 (1973), 297-410, esp. 298. 33. Ibid., 298 and 310, closely paraphrased on 356. 34. Ibid., 369.




want of precision... ."3 Like Steinberg, Freud goes nowhere with this question, which really is not even a question. Freud's essay ends ten lines later.

VII. ENVOI

The field defined by Subject and its vicissitudes leads into problems that can only be negotiated in a different context - a hypothetical forum with the leisure to examine each argument in sequence. In the case of "monstrous" topics, that opportunity has largely ceased to exist and art history finds itself content either with abbreviated references to previous interpretations or, as in this essay, with schematic historiography. The schematic approach has several benefits: it helps explain why certain topics have gotten out of control; it lets us talk about the elided contexts without implying that abbreviated references might somehow be adequate references; and it reveals a pull or orientation among the many fragmented opinions that comprise art historical accounts. But it would be too hasty if I were to claim that the schemata of the Subject represents the larger debates. Their rhetorical, logical, and historical resources cannot be abstracted in that way, and there is nothing in the dialectic of Subject that can guide a fuller account.

So I would like to close the speculations on a note of pessimism. In one sense, art historians have written too much, and said too little, about what other historians think: they have produced unencompassable conglomerated bibliographies that are no longer legible as interpretations of art works. But in another sense, that is precisely what art history is about: the continuous stream of writing pushes older literature out of sight, or over the edge, so that interesting art history is what happens just above the waterfall. Behind it is the oncoming rush of contemporary voices, and in front - in the depths, at the bottom of the waterfall -there is nothing but a confusing mist, a dim rumble. Art history is about that difference, and there is neither sense nor purpose in trying to bring it all together as if it were one unbroken literature.

If we are to call that particular kind of conversation "art history" then we might well want to pay more attention to the ways we address monstrous works. The Sistine Ceiling, the Tempesta, Primavera, and the fete galante are objects that provoke peculiar conversations. We write long essays proposing full ency- clopedias of meaning, and we largely bypass rival accounts in order to do so. Historians are sometimes fascinated by ambiguities, but the protocols of art history continue to insist -and rightly so, when the majority of historical cases is taken into account-that there be a primary intentional meaning. A vigilant description of conversations about monstrous works could profitably begin from the schemata of the Subject, even if it would rapidly be compelled to dismantle them in favor of more radical uncertainties.

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

35. Freud, "The Moses of Michelangelo" [1914], for example in Collected Papers, ed. J. Riviere (New York, 1959), IV, 286.



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