Visual worlds chapter 4, the gaze (different forms of the theory of the gaze

the in-between Zwischen en-soi and pour-soi chiasmatic seeingmale gazescreenplane of projectionanamorphosisto-be-looked-at-nesslooker meta-subjectmeta-signpainter-beholder The theory of

the in-between

(Zwischen)

en-soi and pour-soi

chiasmatic seeingmale gazescreenplane of projectionanamorphosisto-be-looked-at-nesslooker

meta-subjectmeta-signpainter-beholder

The theory of the gaze remains the principal conceptualization

of seeing and being seen, spectatorship, and visual identity in the

fine arts It has been developed as an indigenously visual way of

thinking about visual art, one that responds to the acts of seeing

that constitute every work, and is attentive to the political,

gen-dered, and social dimensions of visuality

In this chapter we focus on six themes:

• the word “gaze” itself (section 4.1)

• the precursors of the current theory (section 4.2)

• Lacan’s theory (psychoanalytic discourse) (section 4.3)

• contemporary gender and identity theory (section 4.4)

• positional or spatial discourse that does not use

psychoanaly-sis (section 4.5)

• other ways to describe gazes (section 4.6)

We advance two arguments: first, that the theory of the gaze

is actually multiple, and depends on a wide variety of texts and

readings; and second, art objects readily escape the theory simply

by showing structural complexity

4.1 The Word “Gaze”

Consider two Dutch paintings: Emanuel de Witte’s (1617–1692)

Inte-rior (Figure 4.1), and Vermeer’s (1632–1675) Woman Asleep at a Table

(Figure 4.2) from the same period

In de Witte’s painting a woman is watched, perhaps, by a man in a

canopy bed (You can see his head, resting on his hand.) We know he is

a man because his coat, shirt, and sword are on the chair What words

should we use to describe how we look at this scene, or how the man

looks at the woman? Is “gaze” right, or is the man staring, watching,

peering, or simply looking?

theory of the gaze a reference to several models

of the relationship between

a subject who gazes and the object that is gazed upon See male gaze.

This is an excerpt from the book Visual Worlds, co-authored by James Elkins and Erna Fioren>ni The book is available on Amazon Please send

comments, ques>ons, and sugges>ons to jelkins@saic.edu.

The art historian Margaret Olin points out that “there is usually something negative about the gaze as used in art theory”:

It is rather like the word “stare” in everyday usage After all, parents instruct their children to stop staring, but not to stop gazing A typical strategy of art theory is to unmask gazing as something like staring, the publicly sanctioned actions of a peeping Tom.

In saying this, Olin counterbalances the received notion of the

“male gaze,” which was originally described by the film theorist Laura

Mulvey as “a charged kind of looking: an intense, perhaps ant act.” Olin points to various efforts to widen the scope of the gaze

unpleas-so that, for example, representations of women are not understood mainly as objects of male viewer’s gazes She proposes dialogic models, which would make the seer and the seen more equal

Another way to make theories of the gaze more flexible is to sider acts of looking other than the male gaze and its responses In this painting the woman doesn’t look at the man any more than she looks at us, even though she could see in our direction if she looked into

con-the tilted mirror over her head The picture seems very scopophilic: in

love with seeing and being seen The long perspective corridor gives a

Figure 4.1 Emanuel de

Witte, Interior 1665–1770

Museum Boijmans Van

Beuningen, Rotterdam.

male gaze a model of the

gaze in which an active

male subject dominates

a passive female object;

the model has been

generalized and extended

to other relationships See

theory of the gaze.

scopophilia deriving

pleasure from seeing;

sometimes used to refer

to the predominantly male

gaze in Hollywood cinema.

view of another woman, and the man,

from his vantage in the bed, can also

see out the windows that we can just

glimpse There is more happening here

than a man gazing at a woman

De Witte’s painting can thus

be seen as a nuanced depiction of a

number of intersecting acts of seeing

Given de Witte’s care with

perspec-tive, it is not unambiguously the case

that the man is meant to be looking at

the woman He could be intended to

be looking behind her, into the room;

and he could be asleep In that case

the woman might be thought of as the

one who sees, instead of the one seen:

she could keep an eye on the man, look

out the window, and even see us in the

mirror

Vermeer’s Woman Asleep at a Table

also shows how gazes might also be

al-legorical or imaginary

The wine glass and an overturned carafe (the faded brown

translu-cent vessel in the foreground) suggest that the woman in the painting

may be drunk, or perhaps she’s just dozing Either way, the painting of the

cupid on the wall behind her (Figure 4.3; only his leg is visible, but viewers

would have recognized the theme) and the man’s coat hung next to the

4.1 The Word “Gaze” | 3 5

Figure 4.2 Vermeer, Woman Asleep at a Table 1656–1657 Metropolitan Museum, New York.

Figure 4.3 Vermeer, Woman Asleep at a Table, detail of the painting within the painting.

door introduce the possibility of a love story (For a seventeenth-century viewer, the luxurious carpet and still life would also have suggested sensu-ous pleasures, with moralizing undertones.)

X-rays reveal that in the original version of Vermeer’s picture there was a man standing beyond the doorway A dog stood where the chair

is now, apparently watching the woman In that state, the painting could well have been a love story: the man might have been leaving, or just coming back, and about to discover the woman napping Knowing about those figures makes the painting more difficult to interpret as a straightforward example of a painting made for the male gaze

Even in its final state, the painting represents a daunting number

of gazes The open doorway promises a visitor, but there is none The emptiness itself has presence, but it’s a painting, so we don’t keep look-ing back at the space thinking someone might appear—or do we? And the chair that replaces the dog also has some claim on our attention:

it blocks the way to the hallway, and like the woman it is also turned away from the entrance to the house It also reminds us that some-one has left—someone who had been sitting there, perhaps Martha Hollander says that even though the dog is gone, the chair still refers

to “animal life, as if suggesting an alternative consciousness to that

of the young woman,” because it has gilded finials shaped like lions’ heads Those two lions look blankly out of the frame And there are other ghostly gazes as well: a theatrical mask in the corner of the paint-ing of the cupid, its eyes closed, also facing out of the picture; and the mirror in the hallway, which is dark but would perhaps reflect our own faces Counting the cupid and the lions, that is eight gazes in a mixture

of modes: real, inner, imaginary, erased, and allegorical

4.2 Nineteenth- and Early twentieth-Century Theories of the Gaze

The current theory of the gaze retains elements of several late teenth- and early twentieth-century conceptualizations, and cannot be adequately understood without them

nine-The art historian Konrad Fiedler’s (1841–1895) concept of

Sichtbarkeit (visibility) was formulated in 1887 in order to stress

that vision and the other senses cannot be compared In that respect

he is a crucial forerunner of the theory of the gaze, with its ambition

to present an intrinsically visual theorization appropriate to film and other media While scientists might compare what they saw with the thing itself, artists, he argued, should limit themselves to visual im-pressions, and proceed by comparing one visual impression to another

As Moshe Barasch has pointed out, a comparable idea can be found in

the philosopher Edmund Husserl’s (1859–1938) Logical Investigations

(1900–1901), which makes the famous claim that the abstract concepts

by which we understand the world should be “bracketed” (German

eingeklammert) while considering objects of our consciousness This

interest in visual experience, and the turn away from objective

verifi-cation, were preconditions for twentieth-century theories of the gaze

A second crucial ingredient in the current theory of the gaze is

German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) concept of human

existence, which takes its place as part of his distinction between

sub-ject and obsub-ject in lectures such as What is a Thing? (1935–1936) Just

as the concept of the object should be replaced with the concept thing

(das Ding)—conjuring a world in which all things appear to us in regard

to their uses or meanings, and never simply in objective opposition to

ourselves—so the idea of another person, separate from us, should be

replaced by the idea of a relationship between two subjectivities Not

only am I changed by my relationship to another person; I find my own

identity neither in myself nor in the other but in the relationship itself,

the in-between (Zwischen).

The idea that there is neither self nor other, but a relationship that

defines both, was decisive for Jean Paul Sartre He first formulated the

theory of le regard (the gaze) in Being and Nothingness: An Essay on

Phe-nomenological Ontology (1943) Initially Sartre uses the example of a

mannequin to make the point that when we see another person, we are

immediately drawn to think of ourselves as we are seen When we realize

what we are seeing is a mannequin, we return to a “prereflective” form

of being; but as long as we are seeing another person, seeing is always

being seen When we become an object for another, we are ourselves

de-centered We lose our inherent freedom—our unconscious being, which

exists only in itself (en-soi)—and become a conscious being living for itself

(pour-soi) In Sartre’s account, the gaze is hardly neutral: “The Other,” he

writes, “is for me simultaneously the one who has stolen my being from

me and the one who causes there to be a being which is my being.” The

current theory of the gaze owes a great deal to Heidegger and Sartre

4.3 Psychoanalytic Discourse

Jacques Lacan’s (1901–1981) description of the gaze is embedded in

the seminars collected as Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis,

where it figures within the section later titled “Of the Gaze as Objet

petit a,” and specifically in the single lecture on “The Line and Light.”

The lecture, first given in January 1964 and published in English in

1977, begins with the Sartrean idea of the annihilation of the seeing

subject in the act of seeing, and elaborates a theory of the crossed or

chiasmatic nature of vision.

However, there is a fundamental difficulty in the way Lacan

reasons At first, he says, it seemed as if vision could be adequately

described as a triangle, with the “geometral point” at the viewer’s eye,

and the object on the other side—as in many Renaissance treatises on

linear perspective (Figure 4.4)

4.3 Psychoanalytic Discourse | 3 7

Ding Das Ding (Germ “the thing”) refers to what is in the world, all objects and things, which become true when we see their uses or meanings.

Zwischen [Germ.] a word used by Heidegger to name the mixture of identities that is the result of any relationship between two people, or between a visual subject and object.

chiasmatic seeing in the theory of the gaze as discussed by Lacan, a way

of thinking about seeing that includes the gaze

of the subject looking at

an object as well as the (sometimes theoretical) gaze of the object regarding the subject See also optic chiasm.

en-soi in Sarte’s philosophy, the mode of being of something (such

as a tree or an animal) that has an essence but

no consciousness See pour-soi.

pour-soi in Sartre’s philosophy, the mode

of being of something (especially a human) that

is conscious of its own existence, and therefore also conscious of lacking the en-soi See en-soi.

In Figure 4.4, the middle vertical line is the image or plane of

projection, usually understood as the perspective drawing or

paint-ing produced by the viewer (Beginner’s exercises in linear perspective, from the Renaissance to the present, often picture this as a grid or a glass pane, on which the object is traced.)

For Lacan, the gaze proceeds from the subject (the person who is ing), but it also comes to the subject from the object at which she looks Lacan describes this by using a story of a sardine can floating in the ocean, which glints in the sun and seems to be “looking at me at the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated.”Lacan then proposes a second triangle, reversed and superimposed

look-on the first In this chiasmatic diagram, the subject—Lacan—is

trans-formed into a “picture” when it is looked at by a “point of light” (see Figure 4.5) As Kaja Silverman and other theorists of the gaze have emphasized, the diagram also depicts the mutual gazes of two people, each implicated in the other’s subjectivity

Lacan calls the vertical line in the middle of this new diagram the

screen It looks structurally similar to the image or plane of projection

in the Renaissance-style schema The paragraphs surrounding the

Figure 4.4 Perspective

schema compatible with

Renaissance texts.

The object, or the world,

or the person who is seen

The image, or the plane of projection

Lines of sight (flowing to

or from the eye, or static)

The eye (yours; the subject itself)

plane of projection a

two-dimensional plane

in which projected rays

from a three-dimensional

object intersect If you

look through a window,

and trace what you see,

the window is the plane of

projection.

screen in the theory of the

gaze, an interface between

a seeing subject and an

object being seen; appears

introduction of the screen are the most difficult in “The Line and Light,”

partly because the screen is neither Renaissance perspectival geometry

nor Cartesian geometry, according to which the observer has a

sub-jective point in space and is confronted with a wide obsub-jective world;

nor does it correlate with metaphysical dualism, according to which the

very objects of the world affect perception; or in any straightforward

way with Sartrean reciprocal seeing

4.3 Psychoanalytic Discourse | 3 9

Lacan’s only example of visual art in the section

“Of the Gaze as Objet petit a” is Hans Holbein’s

French Ambassadors (1553) The painting has

an odd-looking streak in the lower foreground,

which turns out to be an anamorphic

(per-spectivally distorted) skull You have to move

away from the “geometral point” in front of

the painting and stand close to the wall in the

museum, or put your face close to the page, to

see it When you see the skull, the rest of the

painting becomes a smear An informed viewer

may understand the world depicted in the

picture—which is an elaborate assemblage of

political, mathematical, and geographical signs,

decoded by historians of art and science such

as Jennifer Nelson—but such a viewer will not

see the essence Only by standing off to one

side, and peering along the wall or page, can the

viewer see the skull in an undistorted form At

that moment the skull becomes a memento mori,

a reminder of transience and death In Lacan’s

idea of the gaze, the world and our sense of

others in it is contingent on a partial erasure of

our sense of ourselves, and vice versa.

However, things are even more complex

than Lacan, or his many commentators, have

yet noted in Holbein’s painting In the far upper

left, the curtains part to reveal a view of the

Crucifixion A steely Christ is there in grisaille,

with the INRI sign above It was presumably

part of Holbein’s intention to say that eternity

and salvation lie behind the veil of earthly

plea-sures (symbolized by the astronomical, musical,

and geographical instruments) But when life is

seen sub specie aeternitatis (from the perspective

of the eternal), in Spinoza’s phrase, everything earthly vanishes—paradoxically, and appar- ently unintentionally, including the Crucifixion.

TEXT BOX 4.1

Lacan and Holbein’s French Ambassadors

anamorphosis an image that appears distorted unless viewed from a particular point or with a suitable device, such as a mirror or lens.

As Craig Saper says, psychoanalytically informed

fi lm theorists in the 1970s “wanted to explain

how Hollywood films hid the sociopolitical

con-text of production,” making films seem as if they

were made by anyone, for anyone Moreover, this

fi lm theory tried “to understand how the

film-maker's (and by extension the culture's) view of

the world became confused with, or displaced by,

the spectator's view; that is, they asked, how does

‘their view’ become ‘your view’ without

provok-ing any protests?” The question, in other words,

was: Who sees what while watching a movie and

why does the film open up the world in front of

the spectator “as if seen through a window?”

Th is critique of ideology with its feminist

context differed from Lacan’s own examples,

which ranged from bryozoans to television (film

theory, by contrast, has generally kept to visual

art) This fundamental disjunction between

La-can’s project and the aesthetic choices and

pur-poses of film and media theory is characteristic

of the theory of the gaze Symptomatic for the

discussion is Mats Carlsson’s critique of

contem-porary Lacanian film theory: he takes Richard

Stanley’s violent film Dust Devil (1992) as an

example of “Lacan’s ruthless Gaze” as it appears

in the “uncanny manifestation of a double” in a

mirror In a mirror, Carlsson says, “I am the Other

and the Other is me . .  I come to realize the worst

of apprehensions, that which confirms the uitous nothingness . .  through the insight of the temporary obliteration of the self” in front of the mirror If the mirror image is me, in fact, I am no longer on this side of the mirror; but when I am not there, the Other in the mirror ceases to exist.

ubiq-Th is annihilation of the gazing subject through her mirror image is put in terms of in-

terpersonal relationships in this unserious Nancy

cartoon from 1964 Read in Carlsson’s terms, the cartoon also shows how subjects “desire the secret enjoyment of the Other, but … pursue in the Other more than the Other has to offer,”

hence experiencing their own nothingness.

In the cartoon, the painter is the Other for Nancy: she seeks to observe him unnoticed, even against a prohibition However, she also seems to expect to be seen as the Other by the painter himself, as she ignores the urgent warn- ing pinned on the fence, peeping through the hole in spite of it The painter, however, cannot rise to this expectation, because the fence hides, annihilates the peeping girl: she does not exist in his eyes, even her eye in the peephole

is part of the fence for him—and so he paints over it He disappears from Nancy’s perception

as she does from his, in mutual annihilation.

TEXT BOX 4.2

Subjects of the Theory of the Gaze

Rather, Lacan’s screen is an interface, more opaque than

perme-able, between the seeing subject and the sources of the image visible on

it The viewer is attracted by the “depth of field” implicit in the image;

she assumes that there must be something else behind it, an “other”

corresponding to the “point of light” that brings it about, and strives to

gather its ultimate meaning

The idea of the screen can thus be read as an appeal not to be

blinded by the appearances of images, but to understand the grammar

that constitutes them Moreover, the screen is the place where both the

“other” (the physical world, other people, the artist, regimes of power)

and the viewer herself are inscribed like actors in a theatrical tableau

(an arrangement of static figures onstage) So Lacan identifies himself

not with the picture but with the screen: “And if I am anything in the

picture,” he says, “it is always in the form of the screen, which I earlier

called the stain, the spot.” In this way he brings his account into line

with Heidegger’s sense of the self as the in-between.

4.4 Gender and Identity Discourse

At least since Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”

(1975), the male gaze has dominated discussions of the theory of the

gaze The male gaze is the visible sign of the shaping of entire genres

of art in terms of male desire Mulvey’s definition remains the most

passionate In her view the “function of woman” as viewed object,

es-pecially in cinema, is to stand

in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by the

sym-bolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through

linguistic command, by imposing them on the silent image of woman still

tied to her place as a bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.

Narrative cinema, she says, is fundamentally about the human

form: “scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic.” Film “satisfies a

primordial wish for pleasureful looking”—principally looking at the

female form In this libidinal economy, “pleasure in looking has been

split between active/male and passive/female,” so that women in film

become particular kinds of objects whose significance is their

“to-be-looked-at-ness.” On the one hand is the spectator, in direct

“scopo-philic” contact (meaning he takes pleasure in the act of seeing) with

the female form displayed for his enjoyment, and on the other is the

spectator, again male, who is “fascinated with the image of his like set

in an illusion of natural space,” and gains a sense of “control and

pos-session” of the woman whom his screen surrogate sees

The entire apparatus of narrative cinema is structured to support

the dynamics of this kind of seeing: even the male cameramen, the

male stage hands, and the concept of the camera’s eye exemplify the

dynamic of seeing male and seen female The excision of female looking

is emblematized by the dissection of the iris in Un chien andalou (1929),

4.4 Gender and Identity Discourse | 41

to-be-looked-at-ness the suitability of an object for being seen by a gazing subject; used in the theory of the gaze and in particular, Mulvey’s critique

of narrative cinema.

and by that film’s visual prosections of female bodies (A prosection is

a dissection that demonstrates something, revealing it by separating

it from its surrounding tissue Films suture the difference between the spectator and the camera’s gaze, but they prosect women’s bodies.)

The same dynamics, with different content, characterize accounts

of gazes informed by ethnicity, class, and other forms of power Yinka Shonibare’s photographs of the late 1990s play with western European con-

ventions of painting and film In his Diary of a Victorian Dandy (Figure 4.6),

a “Victorian dandy” is telling a captivating story; everyone around listens and admires In this case the quality of to-be-looked-at-ness is possessed

by the putatively impossible figure of the black Victorian dandy He is a signifier of the visitor’s gaze, which is supposedly unexpectedly shocked by the appearance of a black man where only a white man “should” be

Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992–1993; Figure 4.7) included

paintings from the collection of the Maryland Historical Society, which were installed with motion detectors and spotlights When visitors stepped in front of the paintings, the spotlights shone on the slaves and servants, and a recorded voice asked things like, “Am I your friend?

Am I your pet? Who comforts me when I’m afraid?” As in Shonibare’s

Figure 4.6 Yinka

Shonibare, Diary of a Victorian

Dandy 1998.

photograph, the privileged figure looks away,

not acknowledging the stares of the

subordi-nate figures

The foundation of such critiques of power,

as literary historian and psychiatrist Sander

Gilman has noted, is the model of agency,

con-sciousness, and struggle for freedom in Hegel’s

master-slave dialectic Hegel’s Phenomenology

of Spirit (1807) includes an analysis of the way

that “absolute knowledge” (absolutes Wissen,

what Hegel also called “Spirit”) requires the

exchange between two consciousnesses, which

both struggle for freedom, and in doing so

become self-aware—one of the crucial

con-ditions for the achievement of “absolute

knowledge.” The other condition is that both

consciousnesses, or self- consciousnesses,

sur-vive: one may descend to slavery, but that is in

order to avoid death A realized consciousness

requires the dialectic of unequal struggle for

freedom Thinking of Mulvey’s critique in the

more abstract context of Hegel’s text suggests readings of the gaze that

depend more on ongoing exchanges of power, consciousness, and agency

One way to develop a critique of Mulvey’s theory, for example, is

to consider the recuperation of the pleasure of seeing for female

view-ers Edward Snow’s “Theorizing the Male Gaze: Some Problems” (1989)

cites Tintoretto’s painting Susanna and the Elders in Vienna in order

to describe a “gendering process”: what the painting offers, he says, is

woman’s erotic allure The pleasure it affords men—and women, too,

if differently—is supplemented by and even modulates into the inner

pleasure that becoming the subject in and of representation always

enables

A different development of Mulvey’s original position is explored in

Mary Anne Doane’s “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female

Spectator” (1982) Doane argues for the pictorial nature of the

repre-sented female figure “For the female spectator,” she writes, “there is a

certain over-presence of the image—she is the image.” This means that

for a female viewer, voyeurism becomes a kind of narcissism when the

female viewer identifies with the depicted female figure rather than

seeing it as an object of desire There is also a more radical possibility,

only partly developed by Doane: the female viewer can identify with

the depicted female figure as a picture The representation of gender

would then become a meditation on representation itself

The theory of gaze in relation to gender, ethnicity, and identity

has mainly been discussed in respect to film and its antecedents in

European painting before modernism Gazes on the Internet can be

more fragmentary and changeable The site Chatroulette, launched in

Figure 4.7 Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum, detail of installation 1992–1993.

4.4 Gender and Identity Discourse | 4 3

December 2009, presented a random sequence of images from cams, under precarious conditions of anonymity (there is an explicit warning against scammers recording webcams and blackmailing the owner, and the urgent appeal “Don't do anything on webcam that can

web-be used against you”) Many of the interactions had to do with gender, ethnicity, and identity, but they were evanescent and unpredictable Chatroulette normally staged encounters between individuals In Figure 4.8 a user was surprised by being projected onscreen, creating a new kind of social interaction in which the public exposure was also un-expectedly private (Chatroulette is also discussed as self-surveillance

in Chapter 22.)

These examples—Snow, Doane, and Chatroulette—are just three

of many developments of the gender and identity discourse of the gaze Even now, 40 years after Mulvey’s text, the field is developing and has not coalesced into a single theory

4.5 Spatial Discourse

Not all versions of the theory of the gaze have developed from the line

of thinking that began with Fiedler, Husserl, and Heidegger, and led to LAcan, Mulvey, and Silverman In particular, the gaze has been theo-rized in terms of spatial relations

Brian Rotman’s inventive book Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of

Zero (1987) begins a discussion of the phenomenon he calls the “closure

of the vanishing point” with an excerpt from Norman Bryson’s Vision

and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1983) Bryson asserted that the “first

geological age of perspective” saw the gradual clarification of the tion of the observer and the eventual confinement of the observer to

posi-Figure 4.8 Screen shot of

Chatroulette, 2011.

“the Gaze, a transcendent point of vision that has discarded the body.”

Rotman’s historical sequence of subjects is as follows:

• The “Gothic subject … whose mode of seeing is dominated by the

iconic,” made up of what Bryson calls “diffuse non-localised

nebu-la[e] of imaginary definitions.”

• The perspectival subject, “coded by the meta-sign of the

vanish-ing point,” situated outside the frame in an imagined

identifica-tion with the artist’s viewpoint

• The looker, “the figure of internal vision in Dutch art, an

internal-ization of the perspectival subject, whose interior presence calls into

question, and so suggests the absence of, any exterior point of view.”

• The meta-subject, “able to signify what the presence of the

‘looker’ can only raise as an interpretive possibility, namely the

necessary absence of any externally situated, perspectival seeing.”

Taddeo Gaddi’s drawing for his fresco The Presentation of the Virgin

(Figure 4.9) could be taken as an example of the first or Gothic stage

The stairs were drawn in groups, each observed from a slightly

differ-ent vantage; they do not align with a vanishing point the way they

would in a photograph Geometrically, that means the drawing implies

a number of viewers, each at slightly different, but “diffuse” or

impre-cise, positions in front of the image

Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin (Figure 4.10) is an example

of Rotman’s first and second stages The top portion of the scene takes

place in heaven; Fra Angelico paints flattened figures that look like

overlapping playing cards They are painted in a pre- perspectival, early

Renaissance style, which Fra Angelico adopted intentionally

If pre-perspectival conventions are proper to

heaven, then worship on earth must take place

ac-cording to the stricter regimen of mundane space

Fra Angelico places his human worshippers in

strong relief (rilievo), on a perspective pavement

For Rotman, the pavement’s vanishing point is a

meta-sign of the viewer of the painting Before the

meta-sign, there was only vagueness: a negative

condition, awaiting the focus of perspective

In the third stage the looker stands within

the fictive space and sees things we cannot see

In Pieter Jansz Saenredam’s Interior of the Church

of St Bavo in Haarlem (Figure 4.11), the looker

gazes at the image on the altar, an invisible

pic-ture within the picpic-ture The fact that he is inside

the space, looking “elsewhere” in it, makes makes

it seem as if we do not exist: as Rotman says, the

looker suggests our absence

The idea of the looker was introduced by

Svet-lana Alpers in the Art of Describing (1983) She got

4.5 Spatial Discourse | 4 5

Figure 4.9 Taddeo Gaddi, The Presentation of the Virgin, drawing, 1328–1338.

meta-sign in Rotman’s account, an aspect of an image that acknowledges the presence of an external viewer, such as the vanishing point of a perspective representation The term is analogous to metafiction, in which the author addresses the reader

or otherwise acknowledges the work is fiction.

looker in Alpers’s account, a figure within

an image, most often a painting, that sees parts of the image from a different perspective than that of the external viewer.

meta-subject in Rotman’s account, a sign that tells

us a picture does not imply any external viewer in the way that perspective pictures do.