surrealism and manierism

310 ČLÁNKY ARTICLES umění art 4 lxI 2013

dALIbOR VESELÝ unIVErSItY OF CamBrIDGE

Surrealism, Mannerism and Disegno Interno

‘The world always looks straight ahead; as for me,I turn my gaze inward, I fix it there and keep it active.’(Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays)

Modern movements, including Surrealism, are treated too often as homogenous and isolated, ignoring their historical background, transformation and internal diff erentiation. In the case of Surrealism, there is a tendency to define the movement using one of its aspects, automatism or objective chance, for instance, as a sufficient characteristic of its whole history. This is problematic particularly in relation to a movement that lasted for several decades and went through important changes in its long duration. It is true that Breton himself considered automatic writing a permanent source of creativity to the end of his life, but his notion of automatism was always qualified and modified by historical circumstances and changing tasks of the movement.1 However, Breton’s understanding of automatism was not generally shared.

The ambiguity of the inner model

The Surrealist movement was treated by many as coherent and dominated most often by the spontane‑ity of automatism, described sometimes as ‘inner model’. A good example of such understanding was in Prague, the most important centre of Surrealist activity after Paris and Brussels.2 There the main protagonist and voice of the movement, Karel Teige, saw Surrealism as imaginative art and the spontaneity of automatism as inner model. [1] In his view: ‘inner model emerges from the darkness of the unconscious… and we are dealing here with the self ‑portrait of the psyche’.3

Teige’s understanding of the creative process is based on the assumption that the inner model is a result of psychic automatism, as a completed image, which is fixed in a particular medium, canvas for instance. ‘The aim is to fix with utmost accuracy a faithful picture of the inner model onto the canvas: the craftsman paints the vision of the poet’s mind.’4 In Teige’s opinion, the painting should be a faithful copy of the inner model. Any external intervention, he believes, arrests the process of psychic automatism, removes the result from its source and turns it into a ‘stylised mask’.5 The authenticity of the work of art depends entirely, in his view, on its proximity to the spontaneous life and inner world of the artist.

This rather narrow and problematic understanding of creativity is based on a deeply introverted identity of the modern self, a result of a long development in which the anomaly of individualism became a norm. The identity of the modern self is the main dilemma of modernity, but its origins are deeply rooted in Christian tradition.

The identity of the modern self

In Christian tradition, the reference to self is related to personal will, responsibility and salvation, but it remains situated in the field of culture dominated, until modern times, by something which is always above the human self.6 ‘The activity which is mine is grounded on and presupposes something higher than I, something which I should look up to and revere.’7 This changed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Augustinian path and spirituality became a critical influence on the generation of Descartes and continued into the Enlightenment. The changing nature of individual identity is revealed in the changing nature of the subject (subjectum). ‘The subjectum

umění art 4 lxI 2013 ČLÁNKY ARTICLES 311

DALIBOR VESELÝSuRREALISm, mAnnERISm AnD Disegno interno

in the traditional understanding does not yet mean “ego” or self in modern sense. It is not yet men and not at all the I.’ What happens between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries is that ‘men become the subjectum as my ‑self, to which all that exists is related and depends on. Men become the first and real subjectum, the first and real ground’.8

What it means to be a ‘real ground’ and what are the consequences is well illustrated in the writings of Michel de Montaigne,9 whose aim to ‘stay and settle’ in himself does not lead to peace, but to a state of fantasy and monstrous hallucinations, as he himself acknowledges: ‘It seemed to me I could do my mind no greater favor than to let it entertain itself in full idleness and stay and settle in itself, which I hoped it might do more easily now, having become weightier and riper with time. But I find that, on the contrary, like a runaway horse, it gives itself a hundred times more trouble than it took for others, and gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose.’10 [2]

The state of disengaged fantasy is a result of a sep aration from the natural conditions and order of existence. ‘Disengagement from the natural (cosmic) order meant that the human agent was no longer to be understood as an element in a larger, meaningful order. His paradigm purposes are to be discovered within. He is on his own. What goes for the larger cosmic order will eventually be applied also to political society. And this yields a picture of a sovereign individual, who is “by nature” not bound to any authority. The condition of being under authority is something which has to be created.’11

The disengagement (emancipation) of the modern self from the traditional cultural context and author‑ity led to a search for a new form of identity through novelty, originality and self ‑expression. Among many tendencies that contributed to the emancipation of the modern self, the most important was the tendency towards a perspectival transformation of reality.

Perspective and lineamenti

The formation of perspective in the fifteenth century was a culmination of a process of change that included culture as a whole.12 The change took place on all levels of culture, from ideas and explicit intentions to the implicit forms of embodiment. On the level of explicit intentions, the emerging pictorial perspective (perspectiva artificialis) is an integration of medieval optics (based on the pyramidal radiation of light) and geometrical interpretation of visual reality. This was described by Leonardo as a principle of two pyramids, the pyramid of vision and pyramid of representation.13 [3]

The central axis of the two pyramids links the human eye with the vanishing point representing potential infinity, the Neo ‑Platonic one and possibly God.14 Perspectival representation became a powerful setting for the cultivation of self ‑identity and for artificial mental constructions (experimentum mentis).

This new creative freedom was articulated very clearly by Leon Battista Alberti in his discussion of line‑amenti, the abstract (eidetic), geometrical structure of buildings. ‘The appropriate place, exact numbers, proper scale and graceful order for whole buildings can be determined by lines and angles only.’ In fact, Alberti goes one step further when he says ‘it is quite possible to project whole forms in the mind without any recourse to the material, by designating and determining a fixed orientation and conjunction of the various lines and angles.’15 Alberti’s imaginary vision of a possible ‘form’ of a building anticipates the ‘disegno interno’ of the Mannerists and the ‘internal model’ of the Surrealists.

On the level of embodiment, the perspective transformation took place in late Renaissance gardens, in the fabric of cities, in the nature of individual buildings and in the tangible aspects of everyday life. The most tangible perspectival transformation of reality is visible in architecture, and for the first time in the works of Filippo Brunelleschi. Alberti’s concept of lineamenti, expressed in the statement that ‘it is quite possible to project whole forms in the mind without any recourse to the material’, throws an interesting light on Brunelleschi’s treatment of architectural space, where he anticipates not only

1 / Karel Teige, cover for André Breton’s book What is Surrealism?, Brno 1937Photo: Institute of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague


Alberti’s lineamenti, but also the Mannerists’ disegno interno. Brunelleschi’s choice of dark stone instead of light marble as a material for the main architectural elements illustrates his intention to emphasise the abstract nature of the elements.16 This is very clearly demonstrated in San Lorenzo, for instance, where the main nave is structured as a precise perspectival projection. [4] It is the transformation of the three ‑dimensional elements (arches) of the nave into their two ‑dimensional equiva‑lents on the wall of the aisle that follow the principles of the perspectival relation. The main elements, columns, pillars, arches, entablatures, architraves and frames of the openings, all appear like lineamenti, clearly defined on the background of the white surface of the walls.17

It is in relation to the white background that we can appreciate better the meaning of Brunelleschi’s primary

architectural elements, their relation to Alberti’s line‑amenti, but also to the Mannerists’ disegno interno. These relations are supported by the Neo ‑Platonic way of thinking, in which the source of light is also the source of intelligibility. For the Mannerists the disegno interno was a supreme form of intelligibility, since the human intellect, by virtue of its participation in God’s ideational ability and its similarity to the divine mind as such, can produce in itself the intelligible forms of all created things and can transfer these forms to matter. In the Mannerist understanding of art the critical term was disegno.

Mannerism and disegno

In most of the Mannerist treatises disegno is divided into disegno naturale (produced by nature), artificiale

2 / Max Ernst, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1945oil on canvas, 108 × 128 cmWilhelm ‑Lehmbruck ‑Museum DuisburgPhoto ©ADAGP, Paris — Bernd Kirtz



3 / Leonardo da Vinci, manuscript A 37r, 1492, pyramids of vision and perspectival representationReproduction: Dalibor Veselý, Architektura ve věku rozdělené reprezentace, Praha 2008

4 / Filippo Brunelleschi, San Lorenzo, Florence, interiorPhoto: Institute of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague


exemplare (inventions, historical and poetic concetti), and artificiale fantastico (capricci, inventioni). Federigo Zuccaro, whose interpretation of the nature of disegno is the most complete, makes a distinction between the disegno interno and externo.18 The disegno interno brings together imagination and intelligibility. It is the source of all artificial things, this is its speculative side; the practical side is bringing the knowledge of artificial things into the reality of painting, sculpture or architecture. Disegno interno is a participation in the divine image impressed in us, it is an Idea, impressive and formative spirit of all things impressed in us, concetto of all concetti, form of all forms, Idea of all thoughts, through which all things are in our mind. Zuccaro sees the similarity of man and God in the nature of the disegno interno, and describes the similarity as a ‘sign of God in us’ (segno di Dio in noi).19 The difference between the disegno interno

and externo is defined by the different nature of imita‑tion. Instead of imitating nature, the artist creates like nature and thus does not imitate nature, but art.20 [5]

The relation between Surrealism and Mannerism can be traced on several levels, mainly on the level of dream, Hermeticism and the principle of analogies (poetics). In Surrealism the boundary between dream and reality disappears. There is a close link between dream, daydreaming and fantasy, based on imagination, which transcends into the sphere of the imaginary. In psychoanalytic terms, this process can be seen as emancipation from the reality principle.

The role of dreams

For the Surrealists, the world of dreams was a substitute for the outside world. It had the richness of spontaneous

5 / Rosso Fiorentino, Moses Defending the Daughters of Jethro, c. 1523oil on canvas, 160 × 117 cmGalleria degli Uffizi, FlorencePhoto © 2013 Scala, Florence — courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturaliw



associations but most of all the ability to transform conventional reality into fantastic reality. It also opened up the possibility of an encounter with the cosmic symbols, sky, earth, water, trees and stones and with the origins of things anticipated in myths. The best ‑known technique, which was a key to a dream ‑like state of mind, was that of pure psychic automatism, which promised the elimination of contradictions, temporal‑ity and the substitution of external reality by psychic reality.21 [6] This promise was based on the belief that the mystery of life is revealed in the content of dreams.22

Louis Aragon wrote a short but important com‑mentary on dreams a few months before the publication of the ‘First Surrealist Manifesto’.23 Max Ernst was one of the Surrealists who took Freud’s interpretation of dreams as the main source of inspiration for most of his works. Ernst’s understanding of dreams was influenced by his knowledge and studies of psychiatry and madness, as well as by romantic art and literature and esoteric writings. This made him move, quite early, away from the spontaneity of automatism to the level of a critical interpretation of creative fantasy.24 Dreams also play their role in the background of what Salvador Dalí defines as the ‘paranoiac ‑critical method’ — ‘a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon the critical interpretative association of delirious phenomena’.25 There is a close proximity of delirium to dream ‑like reverie, which opens the possibility of a critical interpretation of what may appear to be, but is not, spontaneous.26

The understanding of dream, its nature and role in the drama of human life in Mannerism, has its source in the cryptic, but very influential Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.27 Written almost certainly in Florence, in the circle of Marsiglio Ficino, and not in Venice, where it was only published, this text represents the journey and ascent of the human soul to the Neo ‑Platonic One, the equivalent of the divine mind. 28 [7] The journey of Poliphilo is treated as a dream, based on the Neo ‑platonic reference to the human soul, which shows that all things human are nothing but a dream. Within Poliphilo’s dream, the images presented to the reader are the contents of the narrator’s imagination, and the trajectory of these, mostly architectural, images traces the journey of his soul. Ficino’s concept of theology is not founded on supernatural revelation but on one’s rational powers

6 / Jindřich Štyrský, Omnipresent Eye III, 1936pencil, red chalk and pastel on paper, 41 × 27.5 cm, private collection, PraguePhoto: Jan Malý

7 / The Ruins of the Polyandrion Temple, 1499woodcut illustration of Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Venice (Aldus Manutius) 1499Reproduction: Dalibor Veselý, Architektura ve věku rozdělené reprezentace, Praha 2008


to reach the divine itself.29 The main inspiration for the role of the dream in the Hypnerotomachia was the treatise On Dreams by Synesius.30 The role of dream in the culture of Mannerism is felt on all its levels, and is more or less universal.31 The second most important link between Surrealism and Mannerism is that of the esoteric disciplines belonging to the tradition of Hermeticism.

The recurrence of Hermeticism

In the ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’, Breton writes: ‘I think we would not be wasting our time by probing seriously into those sciences, which for various reasons are today completely discredited. I am speaking of astrology, among the oldest of these sciences, metapsychics… among the moderns. It is merely a question of approaching these sciences with a minimum of mistrust and for that it suf‑fices, in both cases, to have precise and positive idea of the calculus of probabilities.’32 However, of all the ‘discredited sciences’, the discipline with the greatest influence on the Surrealists’ experience was alchemy. [8]

It began with the reference to the famous phrase from Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer, the ‘Alchemy of the Word’.33 The phrase ‘can be considered to be only a beginning of a difficult undertaking which Surrealism is alone in pursu‑ing today… I would appreciate your noting the remarkable analogy, as far as their goals are concerned, between the Surrealists’ efforts and those of the alchemists.’34 A good example of the link between the Surrealist efforts and alchemy is the art of Max Ernst: ‘His child spirit identifies itself clearly, at a distance of four centuries, with that of another native of the same city, the great arch ‑sorcerer himself, Cornelius Agrippa. A single trait suffices to distinguish the mental concepts they share from those of anyone else.’35

Among the artists with close links to Mannerism and alchemy, the work of Salvador Dalí stands out. [9] Apart from his deep interest in the work of Arcimboldo and his contemporaries, which he shares with the other Surrealists, Dalí takes a very decisive inspiration from the paintings and drawings of Jacopo Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, the writings of the sixteenth ‑century magus Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), and the polymath Giambattista Della

8 / Pieter Brueghel the Elder Alchemist, c. 1558engraving by Philips GalleReproduction: Dalibor Veselý, Architektura ve věku rozdělené reprezentace, Praha 2008



Porta (1535–1615). It was not only the content, but also the syncretic and handbook ‑like nature of Agrippa’s main work, De Occulta Philosophia, that contributed to its influence not only on him, but also on later generations, particularly in the epoch of Romanticism and Surrealism.36

The influence of Agrippa’s text in the time of the late Renaissance and Mannerism is particularly conspicuous in Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514). The engraving is based on a passage on melancholy from Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia.37 Melancholy was in a perfect resonance with the troublesome nature and insecurity of Mannerism.38 Melancholy is not only an attribute of ingenious people; it belongs more to the constitution of the modern individuum and to the essence of modern existence generally.39 Melancholy became in Mannerism a result (syndrome) of the emancipation of the self in its search for the participation in the divine inspiration and doubts about the relevance of traditional knowledge. The hermetic disciplines dominated Mannerist culture to such an extent that it would be more difficult to say who was not influenced or involved than who was.40

The common ground of all hermetic disciplines was magic. Its role and appeal became the main link between Mannerism and Surrealism.41 However the nature of magic and its role in culture is rather ambiguous. Magic differs from other forms of religious activities in that the desire to dominate and control reality is inherent in its essential nature. The separation of magic from the traditional ritual (liturgy) became a significant phenom‑enon only under certain historical conditions because ‘the domination by will has one essential condition: before the reality can be thus controlled it must be transferred inwards and man must take it into himself. He can actually dominate it only when it has in this way become an inner realm. For this reason all magic is a form of autism, or living within oneself.’42 Historically, this became possible for the first time in the Hellenistic period, when the disintegration of the cultural and political institutions of the polis led to the disintegra‑tion of traditional corporate rituals and left people to their own resources and in relative isolation. The second time that magic became part of mainstream culture was during the Mannerism of the sixteenth century, following

9 / Salvador Dalí, The Endless Enigma, 1938oil on canvas, 114.3 × 144 cmMuseo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, MadridPhoto: Photographic Archives of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía© Salvador Dalí Foundation Gala – Salvador Dalí, OOA‑S 2013


the disintegration of the Medieval ‑Renaissance world. In times of crisis, ‘magic is commonly the last resort of the personally desperate, of those whom man and God have alike failed.’43 The persuasive power of magic was closely linked to the growing interest in other esoteric disciplines such as astrology, alchemy and theurgy, as well as to the new interest in mechanics and technicity.

Objective chance and the poetics of analogies

In the later history of Surrealism, the period of dreams was followed by a period very often referred to as ‘objective chance’ (or objet trouvé), characterised by the play of imagination (desire) and the unpredictable, chance encounters with the objects of everyday reality. The unpredictable encounters were gradually transformed into an intentional discovery of poetic (marvellous) phenomena and their relationships in the structure of the given world. The main key to the discovery was the principle of analogy, rooted in the metaphoricity of language and experience.44 ‘The analogical method, though held in honor in antiquity and the Middle Ages, was thereafter grossly

supplanted by the logical method which has led us to our well ‑known impasse. The first duty of poets and artists is to re ‑establish analogy in all its prerogatives.’45

The role of metaphor in Surrealism is very closely linked with the role of metaphor in sixteenth ‑century Mannerism, where it was a central issue under the name of ‘argutezza’ (sometimes acutezza or agutezza). This term illustrates the difference in understanding the nature of metaphor, which for the Surrealists was a pure poetic device, while for the Mannerists it was a tool revealing the hidden structure of the universe. Argutezza has its source in the mapping of experience, described in Mannerist texts as ingegno, which can be translated as ingenuity, intelligence, gift, or in its introverted form (disegno interno) as talent or genius. Argutezza is an activity based on the gift and richness of the ingegno, where fantasy and judgement meet. In the Mannerist literature we usually find the following sources of argutezza: disbelief, double meaning, contradiction, darkness of metaphor, allusion, sharp wit and soph‑ism. What makes argutezza a true creative activity is metaphor. In metaphor is revealed not only the potential of argutezza but also the transparent power of ingegno.46

Metaphor has its source in the complexity of as‑sociations as well as in all the phenomena of the world.47 We can therefore understand why the metaphor was for the Mannerist poets the queen of verbal figures.48 It contributes to the continuity of reference, as a precondi‑tion of communication, source of orientation, identity, situatedness and meaning. Metaphor can discover new relations of words, can create sentences, which Emanuele Tesauro describes as continuous metaphors (metaphore continuate), and finally form schemata or figures (concetti).49 [10] In its essential sense, concetto is a concept which, in the sixteenth century, is closely linked to Idea.50 As a consequence, the idea, a witty conceit, can mirror the whole of God’s creation and help us to discover that and how the cosmos speaks to us. Using wit (argutezza) we know the universe by means of the coupling of things in different categories. In a similar way as the Surrealists, the Mannerists saw that the quality of metaphor depends on the distance of the second reference and on what is unusual, and that the alchemy of words should be seen as a paralogical configuration.51

In late Mannerism the unlimited play of metaphor‑ical transformations reached a point that resembles the mirror of the world. The chaos of phenomena is artificially structured by the ingenious dance of metaphors. However, ‘metaphoricity creates only an illusory certainty of the artificially harmonized world. This under‑mines the conventional vision of the optimistically organized traditional world and using highly artificial paradoxes

10 / Domenico Piola — Georges Tasnière, frontispiece of Emanuele Tesauro, Il cannocchiale aristotelico, 1670Reproduction: Dalibor Veselý, Architektura ve věku rozdělené reprezentace, Praha 2008



creates a magical world of non ‑relative magical unity.’52 There is a link and similarity, but also an important difference, between Mannerism, where metaphor comes from God, and Surrealism, where it comes from Man.

The dialogue of Surrealism and Mannerism

The creation of the artificial world as an introverted projection (disegno interno) was permanently challenged by the latent presence of cultural reality constituted as a long tradition and norm. The result was an oscillation between the natural and artificial, divine and human worlds, apparent in Mannerist literature and painting but most clearly in music. I am thinking, as an example, of Gesualdo da Venosa and his use of wild chromatic scales, dramatic changes of rhythm, and unorthodox harmonies in contrast to the well ‑established tradition of tonality. The oscillation (dialogue) between the natural and artificial worlds in Mannerism has its analogy in the relation of Surrealism to its historical background, which had a great influence on its development. In Mannerism the sense of cultural uncertainty was compensated by originality, novelty and individual maniera;53 in Surrealism by dreams, spontaneity of automatism and the search for a new myth.

In its later stages, mainly during and after the Second World War, Surrealism went a long way from the poetic automatism of the dream period. In the Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto (1942) Breton

writes: ‘Man is perhaps not the center, the cynosure of the universe. One can go so far as to believe that there exists above him, on the animal scale, beings whose behavior is as strange to him as his may be to the mayfly or the whale.’ 54 The changes in the nature of Surrealism became visible in the years that coincide with the publication of the new magazine Minotaure (1933–1939). In contrast to the earlier areas of interest, the individual issues of Minotaure addressed very different new topics. Apart from poetry, literature and visual art the magazine included articles on architecture, anthropology, ethnography, mythology, African, Oceanic and primitive art, etc.55 On the whole, the content of the magazine illustrates a shift from the introverted personal experience to the areas of cultural history and natural world. The shift is demonstrated even more clearly on the first pages of Breton’s Mad Love (L’ Amour fou) where he writes: ‘Moving from force to fragility, I see myself now in a grotto in the Vaucluse , contemplating a little limestone deposit upon the very dark earth, looking just like an egg in an eggcup. From the ceiling of the grotto, drops fell with regularity against its delicate upper surface, of a blinding white.’56

Breton’s appreciation of natural phenomena culminates in his eulogy to the crystal: ‘There could be no higher artistic teaching than that of the crystal. The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal. I have never stopped advocating creation, spontaneous action, insofar as

11 / Mikuláš Medek, Infantile Landscape I, 1947oil on canvas, 45 × 85 cmGASK‑Gallery of the Central Bohemian RegionPhoto: Gallery of the Central Bohemian Region — Zdeněk Matyásko


the crystal, nonperfectible by definition, is the perfect example of it [creativity]. The house where I live, my life, what I write: I dream that all that might appear from far of like the cubes of rock salt.’57 The search for the ultimate source of creativity in nature revealed the vision of creativity representing the latest development of Surrealism. ‘In crystal’, Breton writes, ‘the inanimate is so close to the animate that the imagination is free to play infinitely with these apparently mineral forms, reproducing their procedure of recognizing a nest, a cluster drawn from a petrifying fountain.’58

The Surrealists’ vision of creativity is similar to the visions of other movements, as the following text, refer‑ring to cubist paintings, illustrates: ‘The crystal in nature is one of the phenomena that touch us most, because it clearly exemplifies its movement towards geometrical organization. Nature sometimes reveals to us how its forms are built up by the interplay of internal and external forces… Nature and the human mind find common ground in the crystal as they do in the cell and as they do wherever order is so perceptible to

the human senses that it confirms those laws which human reason loves to propound in order to explain nature.’59

Breton’s fascination with the crystal shows how the radicalisation of the introverted orientation of creativity reached the point where it is dissolved in the anonymity of the creative process and in that anonymity discovers the world. To discover the world means that ‘all the will of the artist is powerless to reduce the opposition which nature’s unknown ends set against his own aims. The feeling of being set in motion, not to say being played with by forces which exceed ours, will not, in poetry and in art, cease to become more acute or overwhelming: It is false to say: I think. One ought to say: I am thought. Since then, ample room has been given to the question: What we create—is it ours?’60

There is a close analogy between the development of Surrealism and modern philosophy. The transcendental egoism of Descartes, Kant and Husserl, challenged by Heidegger’s discovery of the embodiment of

12 / Mikuláš Medek, Iron Cross I, 1961oil on canvas, 130 × 162 cmAleš South Bohemian Gallery, Hluboká nad VltavouPhoto: Aleš South Bohemian Gallery, Hluboká nad Vltavou



consciousness in the world, can be compared with a similar discovery in the development of Surrealism.61

The discovery of the world

The development of Surrealism from its dream period to the discovery of the world brings us back to our question about the nature of the inner model and the spontaneity of automatism. After the Second World War the future of Surrealism became an open and hotly debated issue. The debate took place mostly in countries where Surrealism had established itself as a movement with the expectations of a possible continuity. One such place was Prague. In Prague it was difficult to ignore the role and influence of Teige and his vision of Surrealism. The vision he propagated and finally left behind became a source of debate between those who closely followed him and those who felt that Surrealism had its own history that might preserve its continuity, but should be a movement with a distinct orientation and identity, due to changing historical circumstances. In the ongoing debate the position of Teige’s followers, believing in the universality of the inner model, was challenged by a growing number of sceptics. Among the latter was the representative voice of Mikuláš Medek, who started as a Surrealist [11] but moved very soon beyond the orthodox boundary of the movement, illustrated by the following judgement: ‘I believe that Surrealism is dead. Perhaps not entirely dead as far as the quantity of artifacts are concerned. In them the surrealist world will continue to vegetate as a bizarre, slightly humorous iconography. I have no doubts about its artificially prolonged agony.’62

This rather negative judgement was to a great extent a response to those who dogmatically defended the doctrine of the inner model. Against their argument he con‑tended: ‘The inner model is not an autonomous product of our unconscious experience, but is a project of the movement of the objective reality in us.’63 ‘The work of art is not an illustration or transcript of the world of mental situations or images, but is, or is trying to be, a full and unlimited realisation of the state of the world.’64 The relation between reality and its representa‑tion is not a relation between two independent realities, but a reciprocity, where the corporeality of the painting is an extension of our own corporeality. Medek’s own work represents a continuity with his earlier Surrealist period, but the work is elevated to a new level. [12] What makes the level new is an intimate engagement with the material of the paintings, where a figuration that comes into existence is not just a result of personal experience or the work of the hand, but of the whole of the author’s existence and the world in which he is situated. His world was not represent‑ed only by paintings, but also by literature, theatre, music and philosophy. The radical materiality, concreteness and the world of his paintings are linked with the work of some of his contemporaries at home and abroad (Burri, Tàpies), but most of all with the tendencies in European culture to move from the introverted representation of reality to the

discovery and acceptance of the world and its embodiment in the work of art. These tendencies coincide with the his‑tory and transformation of Surrealism, which reached its point of fulfilment and opened the possibility to overcome itself. The development of its background in Mannerism, mediated by Romanticism and Symbolism, anticipates its new stage, which does not have a name yet. We do not know its name, but we know that it will have to be based on different foundations than Surrealism has been.

For the laying of the new foundations it will be necessary that the one ‑dimensional emphasis on the pre ‑reflective experience will have to be reconciled with the humanistic form of intelligibility in order to be compatible with the current state of authentic culture. This will also change the wrong association of intelligibil‑ity with instrumental reason that so many Surrealists make. The main task will be to choose and develop a way of thinking that would help us to understand as best as possible the cultural nature and role of art.

The time may come when somebody will be able to write the fourth manifesto of Surrealism, but under different name.

notes1 In one of his later and most complete statements about the nature

of automatism, Breton writes: ‘The term “automatic writing” has always seemed to me the limit towards which the Surrealist poet must tend, but without losing sight of the fact that, contrary to what spiritualism proposes — that is the dissociation of the subject’s psychological personality — Surrealism proposes nothing less than the unification of that personality.’ André Breton, Le message automatique, in: idem, Point du Jour, Paris 1970, p. 181 (originally published in 1934).

2 Lenka Bydžovská — Karel Srp (eds), Český surrealismus 1929–1953, Praha 1996. — Vratislav Effenberger, Výtvarné projevy surrealismu, Praha 1969. — Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century. A Surrealist History, Princeton — Oxford 2013.

3 Karel Teige, The Inner Model, in: Eric Dluhosch — Rostislav Švácha (eds), Karel Teige / 1900–1951: L’ Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant ‑Garde, Cambridge, Mass. — London 1999, p. 342. ‘By “imaginative” or “poetic” painting we understand mainly surrealism.’ Ibidem, p. 346, n. 1. Originally published as ‘Vnitřní model’, Kvart 4, 1945, no. 2, pp. 149–154.

4 Ibidem, p. 342.5 Ibidem, p. 345. In his last statement about the nature of the ‘inner

model’, Teige chose slightly more flexible language: ‘In the same way as psychic automatism, the inner model is a concept, which cannot be taken absolutely or dogmatically…. The inner model is, during the painters’ work exposed to certain changes, that, as far as they preserve the character, similar to what Freud, in reference to the life of dreams, describes as “secondary transformation”, do not disturb the psychic reality and the truth of the result.’ Karel Teige, Osvobozování života a poezie. Studie ze čtyřicátých let. Výbor z díla III, ed. Jiří Brabec — Vratislav Effenberger — Květoslav Chvatík — Robert Kalivoda, Praha 1994, p. 412.

6 ‘St. Augustine’s turn to the self was a turn to radical reflexivity, and that is what made the language of inwardness irresistible. It was Augustine who introduced the inwardness of radical reflexivity and bequeathed it to


the Western tradition of thought. The step was a fateful one, because we have certainly made a big thing of the first person standpoint.’ Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge 1996, p. 131.

7 Ibidem, p. 134.8 Paul Ricoeur, The Question of the Subject, in: idem, The Conflict of

Interpretation. Essays in Hermeneutics, Evanston 1974, p. 228.9 In his Essays, he described the new sense of identity more clearly

than many of his contemporaries: ‘The world always looks straight ahead; as for me, I turn my gaze inward, I fix it there and keep it active. Everyone looks in front of him, as for me, I look inside of me; I have no business but with myself; I continually observe myself. Others always go elsewhere, if they stop to think about it, they always go forward, as for me, I roll about in myself.’ Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame, Stanford 1976, p. 499.

10 Ibidem, p. 21.11 Taylor (see note 6), pp. 193–194.12 The change that included culture as a whole should be seen

as a process of a perspectivisaton of culture, or simply as cultural perspectivity. For an outline interpretation of the change, see Dalibor Veselý, The Perspective Transformation of the Medieval World, in: idem, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, Cambridge, Mass. — London 2004, pp. 109–175.

13 ‘In the practice of perspective the same rules apply to light and to the eye.’ Jean Paul Richter, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, New York 1970, vol. 1, p. 45. ‘Perspective, in dealing with distances, makes use of two opposite pyramids, one of which has its apex in the eye and the base as distant as the horizon. The other has the base towards the eye and the apex on the horizon. Now the first includes the visible universe, embracing all the mass of the objects that lie in front of the eye; as it might be a vast landscape seen through a very small opening… The second pyramid is extended to a spot which is smaller in proportion as it is further from the eye; and this second perspective (pyramid) results from the first.’ Ibidem, p. 56.

14 There is a hidden sense of power attached to perspective, which in its capacity to be represented mathematically, which was believed to be the representation of divine order of reality, made man feel like a God. As Alberti writes, ‘the virtues of painting therefore are that its masters see their work admired and feel themselves to be almost like the Creator’. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. C. Greyson, London 1991, p. 6.

15 Leon Battista Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria, trans. Joseph Rykwert — Neil Leach — Robert Tavernor, Cambridge, Mass. — London 1988, Chapter I.4–4v, p. 7.

16 The novelty of Brunelleschi’s treatment of the main architectural elements was recognized already by his first biographer, Antonio Manetti, who describes the elements as ‘members and bones’. Brunelleschi ‘seemed to recognize very clearly a certain arrangement of members and bones (il conoscere un cierto ordine di membri e d’ossa) just as if God had enlightened him about great matters.’ Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, The Life of Brunelleschi, introduction by Howard Saalman, trans. Catherine Enggass, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970, p. 51 (line 317).

17 Brunelleschi’s choice of neutral white walls can be explained by Alberti’s reference to Cicero and Plato, who ‘reject the variety and frivolity in the ornament of their temples and value purity above all else’. There is, however, also a different possible explanation. The vanishing point in perspective designates the ultimate depth in relation to infinity. This is not easy to visualize, as it is quite clear from the variety of solutions in the Quattrocento paintings that most often situate the vanishing point in some zone of indeterminacy. The zone of indeterminacy can be

seen as a zone of transcendence, as a source of transcendental light in a similar way as the white or gold background in mediaeval paintings and manuscripts.

18 Federigo Zuccaro, L’Idea de’ Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti, divisa in due libri, Torino 1607, in: Scritti d’arte di Federico Zuccaro, Firenze 1961. In his treatise Zuccaro closely follows Aristotle’s De Anima (431b–432a).

19 Ibidem, p. 196.20 ‘So great and such is the faculty (disegno interno) and its authority

to traverse, to see and penetrate the whole, and to give complete satisfaction to this same soul, to the very intellect, that is very clearly comprehended to be truly its clear light, and the food and life of all thoughts, and of our opera‑tions. The image and similitude of God in us, is infused in our soul as rector and governor of our senses, of the intellect, and of all our human operations.’ Ibidem, p. 293.

21 One of the most important contributions to the understanding of the essence of dreams is the work of Jindřich Štyrský, particularly his publication Sny (Dreams), where the poetic narrative and interpretation of dreams is combined with their visual representation. Jindřich Štyrský, Sny, ed. František Šmejkal, Praha 1970.

22 The first survey of dreams was published in La Revolution surréaliste (1924); the second most complete in 1938: Trajectoire du rêve / Cahier G.L.M (Septième cahier de Mars 1938 consacré au rêve). Textes inédits: Documents de Paracelse, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Carl Philipp Moritz, Albrecht Dürer, Jerome Cardan, etc., André Breton, Michel Leiris, Benjamin Péret, Pierre Mabille, Paul Eluard, Georges Hugnet, Gisèle Prassinos, Freud, Armel Guerne, Ferdinand Alquié, Gui Rosey, Maurice Blanchard, Marcel Leconte, Guy Lévis ‑Mano, Georges Mouton, Henri Pastoureau, J. M. Bellaval. 18 illustrations dont 4 hors ‑texte par: Chirico, Ernst, Tanguy, Man Ray, Dalí, Masson, Magritte, Dominguez, Maurice Henry.

23 ‘Nothing can make people understand the true nature of reality, that it is just an experience like any other, that the essence of things is not at all linked to their reality, that there are other experiences that the mind can embrace which are equally fundamental such as chance, illusion, the fantastic, dreams. These different types of experience are brought together and reconciled in one genre, surreality.’ Louis Aragon, A Wave of Dreams, trans. Susan de Muth, London 2010, p. 3; first published as Une vague de rêves in 1924.

24 Carlo Sala, Max Ernst et la demarche onirique, Paris 1970. — Elisabeth M. Legge, Max Ernst. The Psychoanalytic Sources, Ann Arbor 1989.

25 André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor, New York 1972, p. 134.

26 Dawn Ades, Dalí’s Optical Illusions, New Haven 2000.27 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Ubi Humana Omnia Non Nisi Somnium

Esse Docet. Atque Obiter Plurima Scitu Quam Digna Commemorate, Aldus Manutius, Venice 1499.

28 For a more detailed new and interpretation of the Hypneromachia, its genesis and meaning, see Tracy Eve Winton, A Skeleton Key to Poliphilo’s Dream: the Architecture of the Imagination in the Hypnerotomachia, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge 2002.

29 Poliphilo’s transformation during the journey is self ‑effected; his task is self ‑knowledge and self ‑perfection. Creative thought, characteristic of human nature’s participation in the divine, is set to work in two ways: to develop one’s creative faculty to the fullness of its potential, thereby fulfilling one’s human or personal destiny; and to use this power to work on and transform the self. This activity draws on models of divinity in which creative powers are key attributes. Hence the dream environment displays motifs of modern creation mythology.



30 ‘The life in question [dream life] is founded on imagination or on that intellect which makes use of imagination. This envelope of soul ‑matter which the happy have called the enveloping soul, is in turn god, demon of every sort, and phantom, and in it the soul pays its penalties, for the oracles are agreed about this, to wit, the similarity of the soul’s way of life in another world to the imaginings of the dream condition; and philosophy concludes that our first lives are but the preparation for second lives, and that the best conduct in the case of souls lightens it [pneuma], whereas the worst imparts a stain to them. Through the attractive forces of nature, therefore, the soul is drawn upwards by reason of its own warmth and dryness. This is the winged flight of the soul.’ Synesius of Cyrene (Bishop of Ptolemais), On Dreams, Nabu Press, 2012, bk. 5. The other sources of inspiration were the treatises on dreams by Artemidorus and Macrobius. Daniel E. Harris ‑McCoy, Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica: Text, Translation, and Commentary, Oxford 2012. — Macrobius, Commentary on the ‘Dream of Scipio’, New York 1990.

31 The following selection illustrates the role of dream in visual arts: Gian Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1592), The Book of Dreams (Libro dei sogni, ms., 1563; ed. a cura di R. p. Ciardi, Firenze 1974); in poetry and literature: Frederick Alfred De Armas, Life as Dream and the Philosophy of Disillusionment, in: idem (ed.), The Prince in the Tower: Perceptions of La vida es sueño, Lewisburg 1993, pp. 118–131; and in theatre: Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), Life is a Dream (1636; London 2009). There is a close link between dream and fantasy (fantastic form of imagination). They seem to share the same structure of space, which in dreams does not have any perspective and is indeterminate in its extent because it does not have definable borders. Nor does it have any distances that can be measured; they change according to the motivation and nature of the situation. The indeterminate character of space is not always a limitation, but can also be the source of unusual possibilities for movement and spatial configurations. This may be seen as a key to the manneristic treatment of space, particularly in painting, where bodies are juxtaposed and very often intertwined, their shapes modified and twisted (figura serpentinata) and colors follow dream ‑like (fantastic) or personal emotional associations.

32 André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism, in: idem, Manifestoes of Surrealism, Ann Arbor 1972, p. 178.

33 Breton’s understanding of the Word in this phrase is ‘more and, for the cabbalists, it is nothing less, for example, than that in the image of which the human soul is created; we know that it has been traced to the point of being the initial example of the cause of causes, it is, therefore, as much in what we fear as in what we write, as in what we love’. Ibidem p. 176.

34 Ibidem pp. 173–174.35 André Breton, Surrealism and Painting (see note 25), p. 159. An

interesting case of reference to alchemy is Max Ernst’s mural in Paul Eluard’s house (1923) titled: You may as well dream of opening the doors to the sea, inspired by alchemical literature. ‘The painting alludes to an alchemical imagery; the heavenly twins are ruled by Mercury, and, the fish are a symbol of a stage of the alchemical process.’ Legge (see note 24), p. 126.

36 Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia libri tres, Paris 1531 and Cologne 1533, modern edition Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. James Freake, ed. Donald Tyson, St. Paul 2003. — Giambattista della Porta, Magia Naturalis, sive de miraculis rerum naturalium, Napoli 1558.

37 Agrippa, Three Books… (see note 36), p. 731. — Raymond Klibansky — Erwin Panofsky — Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, London 1964. — Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy and Melancholy: Dürer and Agrippa, in: eadem, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, London 1979, pp. 49–61.

38 This was rather pessimistically but persuasively expressed by John Donne in his well ‑known poem ‘An Anatomy of the World’: ‘And new philosophy calls all in doubt, the element of fire is quite put out, the sun is lost, and the earth, and no mans wit can well direct him where to look for it… It is all in pieces, all coherence gone, all just supply and relation… this is the worlds condition now.’ John Donne, The Works of John Donne, Ware 1994, pp. 177–178.

39 Ludger Heidbrink, Melancholie und Moderne. Zur Kritik der historischen Verzweiflung, München 1994, p. 30.

40 The degree of involvement in hermeticism is illustrated by the fate of Parmigianino, who stopped painting in the last years of his life and spent his time practicing alchemy. Sydney Joseph Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500 to 1600, London 1979, p. 263.

41 This is clearly demonstrated by the title L’ Art Magique, Breton’s last major publication, in which he brought together examples of visual art in accordance with his understanding of authenticity and Novalis’ principles (criteria) of ‘magic art’. ‘What attracts us to the conception Novalis had of “magic art” is that it is an assimilation of esoteric data which compose its definition , and at the same time a brilliant apprehension of a need for extrarationalist investigation and intervention (today called surrationalist)—a need which has grown only deeper and more persistently.’ Breton, L’Art Magique, Paris 1991, p. 23.

42 Gerardus van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, trans. Smith, P., Gloucester, Mass. 1967, p. 548.

43 Eric Robertson Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Los Angeles 1968, p. 288.

44 In Breton’s understanding the difference between metaphor and analogy is negligible. ‘Given the present state of poetic research, little should be made of the purely formal distinction which might be established between metaphor and comparison (analogy). It suffices to say that both (metaphor and analogy) constitute interchangeable vehicles of analogical thought and that if the first offers flashing resources, the second, which one must judge by Lautreamont’s “beauti‑ful as”, presents considerable advantages of suspension.’ André Breton, Signe Ascendant, in: idem, La Clé des champs, Paris 1979, p. 138.

45 Ibidem, p. 139.46 ‘Poetic analogy has in common with mystical analogy that it

transgresses the deductive laws in order to make the mind apprehend the interdependence of two objects of thought situated on different planes, between which the logical functioning of the mind is unlikely to throw a bridge, in fact opposes a priori any bridge which might be thrown.’ Ibidem, p. 137.

Klaus ‑Peter Lange, Theoretiker des Literarischen Manierismus Tesauros und Pellegrinis Lehre von der ‘Acutezza’ oder von der Macht der Sprache, München 1968, p. 90.

47 Ibidem, p. 129.48 Gustav René Hocke, Manierismus in der Literatur, Hamburg

1959, p. 69.49 Tesauro refers to the metafore continuate, as the secret of secrets.

Emanuele Tesauro, Cannocchiale Aristotelico, o sia, Idea dell’arguta et ingeniosa elocutione che serve à tutta l’Arte oratoria, lapidaria et simbolica. Esaminata co’ principi del Divino Aristotele, Torino 1655, p. 481.

50 Hocke (see note 48), p. 157; on the use of the term ‘idea’, see the titles of Zuccaro (see note 18), Lomazzo (Idea del Tempio della Pittura), Scamozzi (Idea del Architettura Universale) etc.

51 This is clearly expressed in Baltazar Gracian’s (1601–1658) Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio en que se explican todos los modos y diferencias de conceptos, Madrid 1642. ‘The witty use of logical fallacy may reveal a mystery, disclosing an order beyond the reach of the correct processes of logical reasoning.’ A. J. Smith, Metaphysical Wit, Cambridge 1991, p. 48.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&field-author=Daniel E. Harris-McCoy&search-alias=books-uk&sort=relevancerank


‘Wit (argutezza) is a godlike faculty in man which discovers a harmonious yet surprising order in the universe.’ s. L. Bethell, Gracian, Tesauro and the Nature of Metaphysical Wit, The Northern Miscellany of Literary Criticism, no. 1, Autumn 1953, pp. 19–40.

52 Hocke (see note 48), p. 68.53 For a detailed discussion of the cult of novelty (gusto per la

novita), see Matteo Pellegrini (1595–1675), Delle Acutezze che altrimenti Spiriti, Vivezze e Concetti volgarmente si appellano, Bologna 1639, p. 12. For the recommendation of deformations (deformita) see ibidem, p. 90. The deformation of language can be described as pararetorica — wrong figures of speech. What Aristotle considered as wrong figures of speech, the Mannerists adopted as positive option.

54 One of the meanings of cynosure is North Star or something that is the center of attention; an object that serves as a focal point of attraction and admiration.

55 André Breton, The Great Transparent Ones, in: idem, Manifestoes of Surrealism (see note 32), p. 293. A more detail description and interpretation of individual issues can be found in Dawn Ades, Minotaure, in: eadem, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, London 1978, pp. 279–289.

56 André Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws, Lincoln 1987, p. 10 (L’ Amour fou, Paris 1937).

57 Ibidem, p. 11.58 Ibidem.59 Amédée Ozenfant — Charles ‑Edouard Jeanneret, La Peinture

moderne, Paris 1925, pp. 137–138.60 Breton (see note 41), p. 50.61 In the interview with Dominique Arban in May 1947, Breton

answers the question about the relation between Surrealism and Existentialism: ‘I have already stressed the possibility of linking Surrealism with Heidegger’s thinking on myth. Such a link exists: the work of Hölderlin, which Heidegger has superbly analysed.’ André Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, New York 1993, pp. 211–212 (Paris 1969).

62 Mikuláš Medek, Texty, ed. Antonín Hartmann — Bohumír Mráz, Praha 1995, p. 87.

63 Ibidem, p. 101.64 Ibidem, p. 119.

Copyright of Umeni / Art is the property of Institute of Art History of the Academy ofSciences of the Czech Republic and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sitesor posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However,users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.