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Windows and Mirrors, Portals and
Doors: Openings to Early
Netherlandish Painting
Heike Schlie, Universität Dortmund
Early Netherlandish artists
concentrated highly on the border
between the space of the spectator
and the fictional space of the
painting itself. Their efforts
might be compared to Leon Battista
Alberti’s invention of the central
perspective and show quite clearly
the theoretical consciousness about
the conditions of their art and the
demands of a new asthetic. In the
North, written treatises on art and
the nature of images do not exist
from this period, but the paintings
themselves, I contend, employ a
variety of self-referential
strategies that are much more
complex, diverse, fruitful, and
intellectually ambitious than has
been discussed up until now.
Moreover, I suggest that some of
these works were intentionally
commenting upon that art theory
that turns out to be a very modern
image critique within the image
(Bildkritik), which bears
surprising parallels to the theory
of modern art at the beginning of
the 20th century.
The problem of a lack of art
theoretical writing in the North in
the 15th century is not merely the
absence of art theory itself, but a
lack of a source of contemporary
speech of the 15th century which
would allow historians to speak
adequately about the achievements
and innovations of early
Netherlandish art. The Albertian
treatise tells art historians not
only what Alberti thought the image
to be and to look like, but also
gives them a sense of the criteria
for talking about pictures of that
time. Recent research on concepts
of the image in the 15th and 16th
century show that such criteria
exist not exclusively in written
art theory, even when Italian art
is concerned; there are concepts
which can only be grasped by
investigating the pictures very
intensely, without looking through
Albertian lenses or the Albertian
window.
I tried to show in my lecture that
throughout the middle ages, long
before Alberti, the window has been
the device and metaphor for the
border between the real and the
fictional, as the opening to what I
call the medial space. All visual
media and even books could have
this special notion of medial space
through which the eye and thought
has to move. Early Netherlandsh
artists stick to this notion of the
window or door and the performance
of seeing through it. Even in cases
where these „openings“ don’t define
the border of the painting in which
they occur, they are very often
used as veritable metaphors of „
painting“ or „picture“ in the
paintings themselves. When the
artists began to strive for a more
naturalistic looking image, still
needing to make the non-visible
perceptible, it was now also a
product of the perspective of the
beholder, created with and
confronted by another concept of
cognition as well as another form
of imaginative experience and
performance of seeing. The beholder
again had to go literally with
active eyes through portals and
windows, but it was much more
suggestive and effective as
imaginative experience than older
concepts because the portal or
window was now related to the real
space of the beholder, so that
there was necessarily an increased
awareness of where the eyes are, an
awareness of the own body. The new
tension between the “real space”
and the “pictorial transcendent”
raised new questions and theorems
that were also semiotic in nature.
There are parallels between the
Albertian concept of linear
perspective and the pictorial
strategies the early Netherlandish
painters developed in order to
define the threshold between real
and pictorial space. However, their
purpose was different. Alberti didn’i
t plead for an ambiguous painting
but for a perfect mimesis based on
rhetoric and other principles of
the artes liberales. The
early Netherlandish window is an
ambiguous one which oscillates
between seeing and veiling. There
is always a tension between the
potential to grasp into the
painting and the holy scene, and
the perception of the image being
just out of reach; in short a
tension between accessibility and
inaccessibility. The early
Netherlandish painting says that a
picture can never be what it shows,
can never grant accessibility, but
is able to communicate this
limitation and its reasons in a
visible way.
Nevertheless, it can be shown that
the Netherlandish artists,
especially Jan van Eyck, were also
interested in defining their art as
being close to the artes
liberales. This discourse did
not include notions of space based
on geometry but merely a complex
idea of painting being a
scientia litteralis. One of
the most obvious examples is the
drawing of St. Barbara by van Eyck,
in which he compares his work as
painter, his conceiving of a
painting with the work of an
architect. Jan van Eyck based his
complex idea on metaphors of
building used by Aristotle and
Thomas Aquinas for the explanation
of knowledge and cognition. He
signs the drawing on the threshold,
on the “Wasserschlag” of one of the
first frames which imitates a
gothic window. “Entering” the image
is compared to entering the
ecclesiastical building under
construction behind the Saint – and
the artist is the one who “built”
our threshold to the heavenly
realm.
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