Between Figure and Ground: Seeing in Premodernity
Edited by Saskia C. Quené
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Sharing Ground: An Introduction in Conversation with David Young Kim Saskia C. Quené
Acknowledgements
Staging Figures
In the Round: Master WA’s Figureless Prints and Fifteenth-Century Painted Grounds
Noa Turel 49
Tableau-vivant Curtains as Mediators between Figure and Ground: Petrus Christus, the Salzburg Master, and Jean Fouquet
Claudia Blümle 85
Miracles of Mediation: Staging the Sacred in the Annunciation by Pedro da Córdoba
Beate Fricke
131
Part 2
Describing and Translating
Iconic Difference
Gottfried Boehm 169
Campus as Locus and Narrative Stained Glass
Bruno Haas 179
Lineage of a Paradigm:
“Figure and Ground” in Encyclopedic Sources
Veronica Peselmann 227
Beyond the Surface
A Foray of Stained Glass: Color, Grisaille, Transparency
Marion Gartenmeister 255
Between Figure and Ground: Lorenzetti’s Gold
Christopher Lakey & Saskia C. Quené 291
Leonardos Untergrund: Zur Gedächtniskunst des Pausens
Nicola Suthor 323
Navigating Dichotomies
Zwischen Gestaltpsychologie und Kunstwissenschaft: Zur Ideen- und Begriffsgeschichte von ‚Figur und Grund‘
Tom Steinert 373
Zwei Meta-Physiken des Bildes?
Zur Figur/Grund-Relation in der Vormoderne aus der Perspektive dreistelliger Bildbegriffe
Christoph Poetsch 441
What Guides the Beholder’s Eye: Figures, Ground, or Perspective?
Raphael Rosenberg 471
Transgressing Depth
Painting Shadows in the Middle Ages
Aden Kumler
497
Smoke and Mirrors? The (In)visible Worlds of David Bailly
Karin Leonhard
545
Embedded Space in Early Renaissance Painting
Péter Bokody
581
Zeit als Figur ohne Grund
Jürgen Müller
615
Image Credits
650
Sharing Ground: An Introduction in Conversation with David Young Kim Saskia C. Quené 11
C. Quené
During the final dinner of our conference Between Figure and Ground: Seeing in Premodernity in June 2022 at eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image in Basel, Switzerland, we moved aside our plates and glasses and started drawing charts on the paper placemats in front of us. In the left column, we collected terms for “figure” in different languages, like “figure” and “imago,” “image,” “Bild,” “Abbild,” “figura,” and “Figur.” In the right, we added “Grund” and “campo,” “Feld” and “field,” “plane” and “piano.” In the middle column, references to phenomena, artifacts, and concepts that subversively undermined the stated dichotomy soon covered surfaces. Lines and arrows started to connect terms and ideas across languages, delineating an interdisciplinary network of backgrounds, heritages, and presumptions. After three days of challenging paper presentations and intense discussions, we stared puzzled at the dense diagrams in our midst. Because only moments before, we had thought that we could solve the riddle once and for all and provide the next generation with a clear display of how to employ these terms in their historical, phenomenological, and philosophical settings. Instead, we realized, as so often, that the conference had shed light on a barren field of land that was deeper and more complex than we could have envisioned three days prior.
In the following months, however, I still aimed at writing an introduction in which I would explain what the terms “figure” and “ground” in their different configurations and historical contexts mean, what they refer to, how they were used, and why they became fundamental to art critique, art-historical scholarship, and academic writing over the course of the twentieth century. Then, I would argue to what extent the figure/ground dichotomy is unsuited to describe premodern art, referring to articles in this volume that exemplify, critique, and expand vocabularies used to describe, analyze, and interpret artifacts. In that way, I would have laid the ground to productively revise anachronistic attachments to paradigms, drawing attention to what can be seen and described between picture planes and pictorial spaces and thus between figure and ground. But then I did not write that introduction.
First of all, my introduction would have awkwardly questioned the very purpose of this volume. It would have contradicted everything I had discovered about figures and grounds. Edgar
Rubin’s famous vase can be perceived as two profiles facing each other and relies on its sharp black-and-white contrasts [fig. 380]. But this contrast between figure and ground does not map neatly onto any premodern artifact within my scope. My undertaking to find a blueprint with more shades of gray, which would have merely replaced Rubin’s gestalt, would have defeated our efforts. The clarity I aimed to gain by emphasizing differences and contrasts became as appealing as it unveiled itself as dangerously simplifying and void.
So why not get rid of “figure” and “ground” altogether? Why not leave it all behind to go beyond figure and ground? Why still look for what can be explored in that narrow place between figures and grounds? Why still try to detangle that web of lines and arrows on that placemat in front of us? Why do we have to talk about “figure and ground,” despite all good reasons not to?
When David Young Kim and I started tackling this question in our post-conference online conversations in January 2023, we sourced answers to questions that had been hiding under the surface of our visible scholarly interests. Why were we looking at that narrow place between figures and grounds?
Around the same time, the articles for this volume started arriving in my email inbox, and they felt more relevant than ever before. Focusing on singular images and examples, every close reading or material analysis coping with figure and ground proved that there were plenty of alternatives to simply erasing these terms. Artifacts shifted their power and meaning dramatically because we had started looking more consciously and had resisted being fooled by language’s implications, tackling modern Begriffsgeschichten. These texts didn’t address a mere art-historiographical or methodological problem: Simply by asking what could be seen and described “between figure and ground,” they revised anachronisms as much as they solved theoretical problems lying at the heart of medieval, (early) modern, and contemporary discourses. Along those lines and apart from “figure and ground,” two more pairs of terms pushed to the forefront during the preparation of this volume: “Fläche und Raum,” and “space and plane.”
In reading through first drafts of papers, I noticed how figures started to shift from being described as shapes or forms on surfaces to elements within pictorial, virtual, or real spaces, and back again.
Walking through the Getty Museum in Los Angeles a few months earlier, I was struck by a painting by Gerolamo Savoldo depicting Mary Magdalene [fig. 15]. She was looking at me from the opposite wall, curious and startled, self-consciously mourning her loss while hiding in a most precious golden silk fabric. I was stunned, not in the first place by the so-called aesthetic experience but by the idea that this figure that had taken off the gilded cloth of honor from behind her and had wrapped herself into a gold ground. When I walked closer, I observed that even the squares of gold leaf that can be seen in panel paintings had become neat, squared creases in the depicted silk [fig. 16]. Excited because this painting would be a nice addition to the very problematic narrative that tries to tell the story of the disappearance of the gold ground in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, merely treating it as a static ground in the most modern sense of the word, I was even more stunned by the fact that, most literally, the ground had become the figure.
The question of what can be seen between figure and ground challenges the distinction between the modernist picture plane and pictorial space. Medieval theories of the image since at least Athanasius of Alexandria’s Third Discourse against the Arians written in the fourth century discuss the status of the image as, for example, being identical, similar, or different to or from the depicted subject, precisely because the image appears to be an artifact. Accordingly, artifacts had to negotiate their relationship toward experience as well as toward the imaginative throughout the centuries. Considering premodern space as neither infinite nor empty, geometrical exercises on surfaces (which can be perspectival) visualize distances between marks or figures. The place of ground is, therefore, necessarily ambivalent and relates to spatial configurations as well as to the surface on which marks are placed. However, the premodern ground can never be equivalent to the picture plane or Bildfläche, nor to space in the modern sense of the word, neither within the depicted pictorial space or the Bildraum. The premodern image is, at last, present and represented between figure and ground.
Gerolamo Savoldo painted at least three more versions of his Mary Magdalene, which are now in Berlin, Florence, and London [fig. 18–21]. Making use of the possibility to compare
15
Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, Saint Mary Magdalene at the Sepulchre, ca. 1530–1540, oil on canvas, 92.7 × 79.4 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
digital reproductions of all four versions in one publication, the most significant difference between the paintings lies in Savoldo’s depiction of light and shade. The Los Angeles version shows a green meadow with a picturesque trail toward a church in front of a steep mountain reaching into an almost Californian-blue sky [fig. 16]. With sweeping brush strokes, a white swirling cloud presents itself like a peony, a Pfingstrose or a rose-of-Pentecost.
In the Berlin version, the figure of Magdalene is placed within a decaying architectural setting [fig. 18]. Standing in front of bricked-up arches, her dimly lit shawl casts a shadow over her daunted face. Savoldo captures the metamorphosing moment of Magdalene’s disbelief, while she turns toward the risen man himself, as Mary Pardo argues in her 1989 essay.1 This moment in time is emphasized in the painting preserved today in Florence, in which the rising morning sun lights up the sky, turning it into a fiery field of bold hues of color [fig. 19]. That is, if you catch her in the right moment and in the right angle [fig. 20]. In the London version, the sun still hides behind the horizon line, illuminating the lower edges of the slim clouds above the reflective surface of a lake. Mirroring the cold colors of early dawn, Savoldo has replaced Magdalene’s gold shawl by a silver one [fig. 21]. Here, more than in any other version, the “reflective envelope,” as Pardo calls it, “is both a magnet to the viewer’s eye and a shield blocking direct access to the image’s interior.”2 And further: “The viewer is effectively caught up in a triangular relationship with two fictive entities—the painted figure returning his glance and the imagined figure ensnaring it in a net of reflections.”3
These reflections are, nevertheless, dependent on the fact that Savoldo depicted either gold or silver fabrics, that, most exclusively, absorb, reflect, and refract light being cast from a source in front of the picture plane. As Michael Fried observed in more general terms: “The painting itself, the painting as artefact, emerges as a kind of transactional field belonging at once to both the virtual, depicted world situated ‘beyond’ the picture surface and the actual, physical world grounded ‘this’ side of that
1
Mary Pardo, “The Subject of Savoldo’s Magdalene,” The Art Bulletin 17, no. 1 (1989): 67–91.
2 Ibid., 69.
3 Ibid., 74.
