Giotto’s Joy Holbein’s Dead Christ
Julia Kristeva was born in 1941 in Bulgaria but left the Soviet-dominated state in 1965 and settled in Paris, where she continues to work as a psychoanalyst and academic at the University of Paris VII. She was a member of the leftist intellectual group associated with the literary journal Tel Quel in the 1960s and 1970s, when she developed a poststructuralist approach to semiology as a radical challenge to patriarchal notions of identity and representation.
In much of her work, including the accompanying passages of writing, “Giotto’s Joy,”1 Kristeva investigates experience beyond patriarchal representation—“something that is more-than-speech”—through Barthes’s and Lacan’s idea of a sublime conjoining of pain and plea sure termed jouissance. In French, jouissance means, variously ecstasy, orgasm, and an extreme, even violent kind of joy; Kristeva’s use of the term encompasses these meanings while also indicating an experience of loss in excess of the subject. Kristeva situates the origins of jouissance in the child’s formative sentient experiences in the womb and in the relationship of the mother and child prior to the Freudian “law of the Father,” imparted through the acquisition of language and the dialectical position of the subject as outlined by Jacques Lacan in his essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” (chapter 8). As a way of indicating a new understanding of semiology, Kristeva refers to the constitutive space of experience beyond patriarchal law as a semiotic space.
In the visual arts, Giotto’s fresco cycles of the lives of the Virgin Mary and Christ at Padua (ca. 1306) exemplify Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic and, as such, offer a reading that contrasts with standard art historical interpretations of the artist’s work. The overlapping, fragmented blocks of the frescoes’ scenery at Padua (fields, landscape, architecture) creates an antagonistic space. The dominant color in the chapel is blue, but it is mixed with subtle complementary tones that create harmony and transition across the fragmented scenery. Kristeva describes how a sense of depth is achieved through the “treatment and juxtapositions of masses of color” that ultimately exceed any basis in perspective (the invention of which Giotto is often credited). Kristeva associates perspective and the idea of a centered viewing subject situated outside the image with a patriarchal desire to circumscribe space. However, in Giotto’s frescoes, “color tears these figures away from the wall’s plane, giving them a depth related to, but also distinct from, a search for perspective.” Jouissance characterizes the overthrow of paternal authority through fragmentation and dissolution conveyed in the color and rhythm of Giotto’s art as this merges with the viewing subject in the chapel.
In other writings, Kristeva’s exploration of jouissance gives way to different kinds of experience beyond patriarchal representation: for instance, that of abjection in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980)2 and, in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1987), an abyssal melancholy encountered in writers such as Dostoyevsky and Marguerite Duras and the artist Hans Holbein. Utterly austere and lacking in any sense of Christian hope for life after death, Holbein’s painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1522), Kristeva argues, is unrelated to contemporary pictorial traditions and is not even comparable to the artist’s own ironic images of the danse macabre. The painting is not a representation, as such, more a blank or discontinuity: “the deepest abyss of severance,” says Kristeva, quoting Hegel. Kristeva believes that the void exemplified by Holbein’s painting is derived from the unconscious, where language and sense are overwhelmed by a profound sorrow originating from the child’s conflicts with, and separation from, the Mother.
GIOTTO’S JOY
How can we find our way through what separates words from what is both without a name and more than a name: a painting? What is it that we are trying to go through? The space of the very act of naming? At any rate, it is not the space of “first naming,” or of the incipient naming of the infans; nor is it the one that arranges into signs what the subject perceives as separate reality. In the present instance, the painting is already there. A particular “sign” has already come into being. It has organized “something” into a painting with no hopelessly separate referent; or rather, the painting is its own reality. There is also an “I” speaking, and any number of “I’s” speaking differently before the “same” painting. The question, then, is to insert the signs of language into this already-produced reality-sign—the painting; we must open out, release, and set side by side what is compact, condensed, and meshed. We must then find our way through what separates the place where “I” speak, reason, and understand from the one where something functions in addition to my speech: something that is more-than-speech, a meaning to which space and color have been added. We must develop, then, a second-stage naming in order to name an excess of names, a more-than-name become space and color—a painting. We must retrace the speaking thread, put back into words that from which words have withdrawn.
My choice, my desire to speak of Giotto (1267–1336)—if justification be needed—relates to his experiments in architecture and color (his translation of instinctual drives into colored surface) as much as to his place within the history of Western painting. (He lived at a time when the die had not yet been cast, when it was far from sure that all lines would lead toward the unifying, fixed center of perspective.)
Padua’s Blue
Blue is the first color to strike the visitor as he enters into the semidarkness of the Arena Chapel. Unusual in Giotto’s time because of its brilliance, it contrasts strongly with the somber coloring of Byzantine mosaics as well as with the colors of Cimabue or the Sienese frescoes.3
The delicate, chromatic nuances of the Padua frescoes barely stand out against this luminous blue. One’s first impression of Giotto’s painting is of a colored substance, rather than form or architecture; one is struck by the light that is generated, catching the eye because of the color blue. Such a blue takes hold of the viewer at the extreme limit of visual perception.
In fact, Johannes Purkinje’s law states that in dim light, short wavelengths prevail over long ones; thus, before sunrise, blue is the first color to appear. Under these conditions, one perceives the color blue through the rods of the retina’s periphery (the serrated margin), while the central element containing the cones (the fovea) fixes the object’s image and identifies its form. A possible hypothesis, following André Broca’s paradox,4 would be that the perception of blue entails not identifying the object; that blue is, precisely, on this side of or beyond the object’s fixed form; that it is the zone where phenomenal identity vanishes. It has also been shown that the fovea is indeed that part of the eye developed latest in human beings (sixteen months after birth)5 This most likely indicates that centered vision—the identification of objects, including one’s own image (the “self” perceived at the mirror stage between the sixth and eighteenth month)—comes into play after color perceptions. The earliest appear to be those with short wavelengths, and therefore the color blue. Thus all colors, but blue in particular, would have a noncentered or decentering effect, lessening both object identification and phenomenal fixation. They thereby return the subject to the archaic moment of its dialectic, that is, before the fixed, specular “I,” but while in the pro cess of becoming this “I” by breaking away from instinctual, biological (and also maternal) dependence. On the other hand, the chromatic experience can then be interpreted as a repetition of the specular subject’s emergence in the already constructed space of the understanding (speaking) subject; as a reminder of the subject’s conflictual constitution, not yet alienated into the set image facing him, not yet able to distinguish the contours of others or his own other in the mirror. Rather, the subject is caught in the acute contradiction between the instincts of self-preservation and the destructive ones, within a limitless pseudoself, the conflictual scene of primary narcissism and autoerotism6 whose clashes could follow any concatenation of phonic, visual, or spectral differences.
Oblique Constructions and Chromatic Harmony
The massive irruption of bright color into the Arena Chapel frescoes, arranged in soft but contrasting hues, gives a sculptural volume to Giotto’s figures, often leading to comparisons with Andrea Pisano. That is, color tears these figures away from the wall’s plane, giving them a depth related to, but also distinct from, a search for perspective. The treatment and juxtaposition of masses of color, transforming surface into volume, is of capital importance to the architectonics of the Padua frescoes; the surface is cut into prisms whose edges clash but, avoiding the axial point of perspective, are articulated as obliquely positioned, suspended blocks.
This conflictual aspect of Giotto’s pictorial space has already been noted.7 In fact, 75 percent of the Padua frescoes display obliquely set blocks: a room viewed from an angle, a building depicted from outside at a given angle, a profile of a mountain, the diagonal arrangement of characters, and so on. These examples attest to Giotto’s geometric investigations on the properties of squares and rectangles. Frontal settings are relatively rare, whereas oblique spatial constructions dominate the entire narrative cycle, although to varying degrees, frequently tending to merge with the plane of the wall (as in The Last Supper).
In short, Giotto avoids frontal settings as well as vanishing points: conflicting oblique lines indicate that the central viewpoint is not in any fresco, but rather in the space of the building where the painter or viewer is standing. These frescoes, with evanescent or exterior centers, articulated by means of the orthogonals’ aggressive patterns, reveal a spatial organization very unlike the one adopted by perspective-dominated “realist” art. According to John White, this conflictual organization of pictorial space appears only in Islamic or Chinese art—and there only rarely—in the form of “carpets” or “tables” seen from above, the normal viewpoint being avoided within such “spatial” organizations.8 On the other hand, Giotto’s oblique compositions are sustained by the subject’s axial point outside of the image. The fresco is thus without autonomy, impossible to isolate from the narrative series; but neither can it be separated from the building’s volume, or severed from the hand tracing it. Each fresco, therefore, is the transposition of this volume and subject into an act that is not yet alienated to the facing facet, within the image in perspective….
How do colors participate in this both antagonistic and harmonized space?
Two workings of color may easily be distinguished at Padua: first, in the scenery (field, landscape, architecture); and second, in the make up of human figures and interiors.
The blue field dominates the scenery. The oblique or frontal planes of the blocks stand out from this background either through the use of col-ors close to blue (green, grayish-green: for example, in The Annunciation to Anna) or contrasting with it (rose and pinkish gray, for example, in The Meeting at the Golden Gate; or gold and golden-rose in The Betrothal of the Virgin). Interiors that are set frontally are surrounded by square or lateral planes painted rose or yellow (The Mocking of Christ). The blue-green relation dominates the upper frescoes, whereas the blue-rose or blue-gold one appears more frequently in the lower registers. Once again, Giotto seemingly wants to facilitate the natural perception of a viewer standing at the center of the somber church. The less visible upper registers are consequently done in blue-green, while the lower ones, more accessible to daylight, accentuate gilded-rose colors, which are, in fact, the first perceived under increased lighting.
In every case, however, the antagonistic space of the overlapping, fragmented blocks is achieved through the confrontation of colored surfaces: either through colors of the same hue with the addition of complementary tones (for example, the pink roof in The Annunciation to Anna), or directly through complementary chromatic scales.
What is important is that, except for the basic blues, all other hues are particularly refined and very light. It seems as if the distribution of colored masses reflected a search for the smallest possible difference capable of shattering a homogeneous background. Such a difference is precisely what causes spatial conflictivity to be perceived without violence—as harmony and transition.
This becomes even more evident in the treatment of human figures.
On the one hand, each mass of color is unfolded into its variants. For example, the colors of clothing are opened out through the realistic effect of drapery folds into variations of pink absorbing gray, white, and green, thus molding a cape. These variants are infinitesimal differentials within the already subtly different light hues of Giotto’s palette. In some instances they recall the subdued colorings of Chinese prints, where a text supports the signified, while color seeks out barely perceptible differences, minute retinal sensations charged with the least “semantic latency.” These “folds of color” are confrontations between one color and the complete chromatic scale: while each color remains dominant in its various mixtures, it is also differently and indefinitely attenuated. The conflict within a color moving toward white—an effect of pure brilliance—provides each color and, therefore, each framed surface, with a sense of volume. This rounded, sculptural aspect of Giotto’s figures strikes one immediately. The curves of the drawing (oval shape of the heads, rounded fullness of the bodies) repeat the oval-shaped, colored masses (deformed and drawn out spheres and cylinders). Roundness becomes chromatic and in de pen dent of the curved drawing itself. The line seems guided by unfolding color and merely follows it, accentuates it, settles it, identifies it when color defies fixed objects, and in short, distinguishes it from adjoining spheres and colors. These masses of color become spherical through their own self-differentiation; set within an angular space of blocks and squares, they serve as transition between clashing surfaces. In fact, and more effectively than the clashing surfaces, these masses of color generate the volume of the painted surface. The colors of colliding surfaces thus delineate the edges of such cubed space, while the colors of each figure give volume to and round out this conflict between blocks. Color thus succeeds in shaping a space of conflicts, a space of noncentered, unbordered and unfixed transitions, but a space turned inward.
In addition and at the same time, these voluminous colors, as they come into being by intermixing and detaching themselves from the entire spectrum, become articulated with one another either by close contrast (at the same end of the spectrum) or by truly diverging contrast (complementary colors). Thus, in The Massacre of the Innocents at Assisi we have the following sequence: brick red–pink–bordeaux–green–white–lavender–white–green–red–pink–lavender–blue (like the field) –red–gold. To simplify, if we designate red by A, blue by B, and yellow by C, the following arrangement may be seen.
Relatively limited differences appear at the beginning (red–pink): A; there is then a jump to the other end of the spectrum (green): B; an echo of the beginning (lavender): A1; again, a return to the opposite side (green): B1; its opposite (red): A2 will be varied until it reaches only a slight difference in hue (pink-lavender): A3 = B3 before another return to the opposite (blue): B4 (= field) opposed in turn by red: A4 before the final C.
Thus, we have: A–B–A1–B2–A2–A3 = B3–B4–A4–C.
The arrangement, whose “model” could very well be a multi-faceted gem, is both conflictual and serial. In fact, the geometry represented in the same fresco includes two prismatic towers with their facets obliquely set.
The chromatic treatment of characters produces a plastic effect con-firming this geometry. It also adds a harmonization of delineated surfaces and an impression of volume within the colored surfaces themselves. This is done solely by virtue of the colors’ own resources, without recourse to geometric determination. Volume is produced by juxtaposing unfolding chromatic differences alone without the assistance of rigid contours. The painter uses drawings and lines, but he coats them, suffuses them with colored matter so that they break away from strictly chromatic differentiation.
By overflowing, softening, and dialecticizing lines, color emerges inevitably as the “device” by which painting gets away from identification of objects and therefore from realism. As a consequence, Giotto’s chromatic experiments prefigure a pictorial practice that his immediate followers did not pursue. This practice aspires not to figural representation, but rather, to the resources of the chromatic scale, which then extrapolate, as we have suggested, the instinctual and signifying resources of the speaking subject. For this chromatic system—so crowded with figures, landscape, and mythical scenes—appears void of figuration if viewed at length and attentively. It is like a setting side by side of chromatic differences that throb into a third dimension. Such a chromatic working, therefore, erases angles, contours, limits, placements, and figurations, but reproduces the movement of their confrontation.
Color, arranged in this manner, is a compact and plurifunctional element, not conforming to the localization-identification-placement of phenomena and/or their (or any) ultimate meaning; it acts upon the subject’s station point outside of the painting rather than projecting him into it. This painting, then, reaches completion within the viewer. It steers the subject towards a systematic cutting through its foreclosure, because it has been set in motion starting from “retinal sensation,” their instinctual basis, and the superimposed signifying apparatus. Is this not precisely the “mechanism” of jouissance whose economy Freud locates in the pro cess of removing prohibition by making one’s way through it (in his studies on another phenomenon of “bewilderment”: witticism, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious)?
Let me emphasize, in summing up, that this working one’s way through is rigorously regulated by a juxtaposition of differences in volume that operates along two converging paths. On the one hand, it brings into play the geometric possibilities of squares and blocks (their conflict); on the other, it explores the infinitesimal chromatic difference that produces a three-dimensional effect from a colored surface and the opposing or serial alternation of such volumes due to an “element” already indicating volume: the triple register of color (as suggested above) in relation to the sign.
—Translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez
HOLBEIN’S DEAD CHRIST
A Composition in Loneliness
Italian iconography embellishes, or at least ennobles, Christ’s face during the Passion but especially surrounds it with figures that are immersed in grief as well as in the certainty of the Resurrection, as if to suggest the attitude we should ourselves adopt facing the Passion. Holbein, on the contrary, leaves the corpse strangely alone. It is perhaps that isolation—an act of composition—that endows the painting with its major melancholy burden, more so than delineation and coloring. To be sure, Christ’s suffering is expressed through three components inherent in lines and colors: the head bent backwards, the contortion of the right hand bearing the stigmata, the position of the feet—the whole being bonded by means of a dark palette of grays, greens, and browns. Nevertheless, such realism, harrowing on account of its very parsimony, is emphasized to the utmost through the painting’s composition and location: a body stretched out alone, situated above the viewers, and separated from them.
Cut off from us by its base but without any prospect toward heaven, for the ceiling in the recess comes down low, Holbein’s Dead Christ is inaccessible, distant, but without a beyond. It is a way of looking at mankind from afar, even in death—just as Erasmus saw folly from a distance. It is a vision that opens out not on glory but on endurance. Another, a new morality resides in this painting.
Christ’s dereliction is here at its worst: forsaken by the Father, he is apart from all of us. Unless Holbein, whose mind, pungent as it was, does not appear to have lead him across the threshold of atheism, wanted to include us, humans, foreigners, spectators that we are, forthrightly in this crucial moment of Christ’s life. With no intermediary, suggestion, or indoctrination, whether pictorial or theological, other than our ability to imagine death, we are led to collapse in the horror of the caesura constituted by death or to dream of an invisible beyond. Does Holbein forsake us, as Christ, for an instant, had imagined himself forsaken? Or does he, on the contrary, invite us to change the Christly tomb into a living tomb, to participate in the painted death and thus include it in our own life, in order to live with it and make it live? For if the living body, in opposition to the rigid corpse, is a dancing body, doesn’t our life, through identification with death, become a “danse macabre,” in keeping with Holbein’s other well-known depiction?
This enclosed recess, this well-isolated coffin simultaneously rejects us and invites us. Indeed, the corpse fills the entire field of the painting, without any labored reference to the Passion. Our gaze follows the slightest physical detail, it is, as it were, nailed, crucified, and is riveted to the hand placed at the center of the composition. Should it attempt to flee it quickly stops, locked in at the distressed face or the feet propped against the black stone. And yet such walling in allows two prospects.
On the one hand, there is the insertion of date and signature, MDXXII H.H., at Christ’s feet. Placing the painter’s name, to which was often added that of the donor, in that position was common at the time. It is nevertheless possible that in abiding by that code Holbein inserted himself into the drama of the Dead body. A sign of humility: the artist throwing himself at God’s feet? or a sign of equality? The painter’s name is not lower than Christ’s body—they are both at the same level, jammed into the recess, united in man’s death, in death as the essential sign of humanity, of which the only surviving evidence is the ephemeral creation of a picture drawn here and now in 1521 and 1522!
We have, on the other hand, this hair and this hand that extend beyond the base as if they might slide over toward us, as if the frame could not hold back the corpse. The frame, precisely, dates from the end of the sixteenth century and includes a narrow edging bearing the inscription Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judaeorum, which encroaches upon the painting. The edging, which seems nonetheless always to have been part of Holbein’s painting, includes, between the words of the inscription, five angels bearing the instruments of the martyrdom: the shaft, the crown of thorns, the scourge, the flogging column, the cross. Integrated afterwards in that symbolic framework, Holbein’s painting recovers the evangelical meaning that it did not insistently contain in itself, and which probably legitimized it in the eyes of its purchasers.
Even if Holbein’s painting had originally been conceived as a predella for an altarpiece, it remained alone; no other panel was added to it. Such isolation, as splendid as it is gloomy, avoided Christian symbolism as much as the surfeit of German Gothic style, which would combine painting and sculpture but also add wings to altarpieces, aiming for syncretism and the imparting of motion to figures. In the face of that tradition, which directly preceded him, Holbein isolated, pruned, condensed, reduced.
Holbein’s originality lies then in a vision of Christly death devoid of pathos and Intimist on account of its very banality. Humanization thus reached its highest point: the point at which glory is obliterated by means of graphics. When the dismal brushes against the nondescript, the most disturbing sign is the most ordinary one. Contrasting with Gothic enthusiasm, humanism and parsimony were the inverted products of melancholia….
Representing “Severance”
Hegel brought to the fore the dual action of death in Christianity: on the one hand there is a natural death of the natural body; on the other, death is “infinite love,” the “supreme renunciation of self for the sake of the Other.” He sees in it a victory over the tomb, the sheol, a “death of death,” and emphasizes the dialectic that is peculiar to such a logic. “This negative movement, which belongs to Spirit only as Spirit, is inner conversion and change… the end being resolved in splendor, in the feast honoring the reception of the human being into the divine Idea.”9 Hegel stresses the consequences of this action for representation. Since death is represented as being natural but realized only on condition that it be identified with its otherness, that is, divine Idea, one witnesses “a marvellous union of these absolute extremes,” “a supreme alienation of the divine Idea…. ‘God is dead, God himself is dead’ is a marvellous, fearsome representation, which offers to representation the deepest abyss of severance.”10
Leading representation to the heart of that severance (natural death and divine love) is a wager that one could not make without slipping into one or the other of two tendencies: Gothic art, under Dominican influence, favored a pathetic representation of natural death; Italian art, under Franciscan influence, exalted, through the sexual beauty of luminous bodies and harmonious compositions, the glory of the beyond made visible through the glory of the sublime. Holbein’s Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb is one of the rare if not a unique realization located at the very place of the severance of representation of which Hegel spoke. The Gothic eroticism of paroxysmal pain is missing, just as the promise of the beyond or the renascent exaltation of nature are lacking. What remains is the tightrope—as the represented body—of an economical, sparing graphic rendition of pain held back within the solitary meditation of artist and viewer. To such a serene, disenchanted sadness, reading the limits of the insignificant, corresponds a painterly art of utmost sobriety and austerity. It presents no chromatic or compositional exultation but rather a mastery of harmony and measure.
Is it still possible to paint when the bonds that tie us to body and meaning are severed? Is it still possible to paint when desire, which is a bond, disintegrates? Is it still possible to paint when one identifies not with desire but with severance, which is the truth of human psychic life, a severance that is represented by death in the imagination and that melancholia conveys as symptom? Holbein’s answer is affirmative. Between classicism and mannerism his minimalism is the metaphor of severance: between life and death, meaning and nonmeaning, it is an intimate, slender response of our melancholia.
Pascal confirmed, before Hegel and Freud, the sepulchre’s invisibility. For him, the tomb would be Christ’s hidden abode. Everyone looks at him on the cross but in the tomb he hides from his enemies’ eyes, and the saints alone see him in order to keep him company in an agony that is peace.
Christ was dead, but seen on the cross. He is dead and hidden in the sepulchre.
Christ has been shrouded only by saints.
Christ did not perform a single miracle in the sepulchre.
Saints alone enter there.
That is where Christ assumes a new life, not on the cross.
It is the final mystery of the Passion and the Redemption.
On earth Christ was able to rest nowhere but in the sepulchre.
His enemies ceased working on him only in the sepulchre.11
Seeing the death of Christ is thus a way to give it meaning, to bring him back to life. But in the tomb at Basel Holbein’s Christ is alone. Who sees him? There are no saints. There is of course the painter. And ourselves. To be swallowed up by death, or perhaps to see it in its slightest, dreadful beauty, as the limit inherent in life. “Christ in grief… Christ being in agony and in the greatest sorrow, let us pray longer.”12
Painting as a substitute for prayer? Contemplating the painting might perhaps replace prayer at the critical place of its appearance—where the nonmeaning becomes significant, while death seems visible and livable.
Like Pascal’s invisible tomb, death is not representable in Freud’s unconscious. It is imprinted there, however, as noted earlier, by spacings, blanks, discontinuities, or destruction of representation. Consequently, death reveals itself as such to the imaginative ability of the self in the isolation of signs or in their becoming commonplace to the point of disappearing: such is Holbein’s minimalism.
—Translated by Leon S. Roudiez