Notes

Introduction

1. Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

2. Ibid., 141.

3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). For a discussion of Heidegger’s general metaphysic of knowledge, see Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). For Husserl’s phenomenology of perception, see Edmund Husserl, “Ideas Pertaining to Pure Phenomenology,” in General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1982), especially sections 41 and 43.

4. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 5.

5. The three primary texts in question being Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); and Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith (London: Routledge, 2002).

6. De Certeau, Heterologies, 179.

7. Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 11.

8. Walter Benjamin, “Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso, 1997), 159.

Chapter 1

1. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977), 60.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., 61.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., 67.

6. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 152.

7. Ibid.

8. Bruce Robertson and Mark Meadow, “Microcosms: Objects of Knowledge,”AI and Society 14 (2000): 223.

9. Ibid.

10. Robertson and Meadow, “Microcosms: Objects of Knowledge,” <http://microcosms.ihc.ucsb.edu/intro.html>. Date first accessed: 7 January 2006. Almost as if to illustrate the very point and purpose of this book, when returning recently to this website with editorial due diligence firmly in mind, the promise of the Internet to function as an unfettered storehouse of knowledge was proved illusory: “Forbidden. You don’t have permission to access.” But in a book attempting (among other things) to restore the epistemological validity of the fragment to our notions of what should constitute “proper” modes of knowledge creation, many of the items and historical artifacts we will encounter no longer exist. But just as the destruction of the thirteenth-century Ebstorf mappamundi, or the nineteenth-century Galerie des Machines, does not militate against them being objects of contemplation, so too with this most contemporary of losses, erasure should not deter us. In fact, this absence, if anything, is revealing precisely of how far the “monumentalization” of our present academic ventures can go. It is for this reason that I let these references stand, and seek to pursue their remaining traces.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Robertson and Meadow, “Microcosms: Objects of Knowledge,” 226.

14. Ibid.

15. Bruce Robertson and Mark Meadow, “The Pangolin-and-Pinecone Effect,” <http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/publications/lectures/98-99/microcosms/essays/001.html>. Date last accessed: 9 June 2010.

16. Ibid.

17. Robertson and Meadow, “Microcosms: Objects of Knowledge,” 227.

18. Ibid., 228. I am intentionally not fleshing out the background, nature, or composition of Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones, as they, along with Camillo’s theatrum mundi, will be dealt with in further detail shortly. At this moment I merely wish to let the “Microcosms” narrative play its course.

19. Ibid.

20. The veritable “industry” of critical literature concerning the nineteenth-century museum project is as variable in quality as it is vast in scope; too vast to survey here. Of the less essentialist or positivist approaches to this discipline, the influence of new historicism (with its proclivity for “micro-histories” of colorful, yet often obscure, individual collectors) has been felt far more than the influence of critical or discourse theory. Often proceeding from the margins of museology rather from within its folds, the literature that I have employed throughout this chapter represents what I consider to be productive alternatives to the otherwise straight narratives of museology. Although Tony Bennett’s The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995) remains an invaluable critical history from within the folds of museum studies for its encyclopedic playfulness Hillel Schwartz’s The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996) is suggestive of alternative approaches to issues central to, but strangely omitted from, museology. Of particular note is the way Schwartz’s bibliographic and archival flair seems to activate otherwise seemingly improbable associations, bringing to life disparate material in a manner not dissimilar to early modern natural histories with their penchant for allegory and similitude.

21. This scholarly disdain for baroque art was, for the most part, an attribute of English- speaking academic scholarship right throughout the nineteenth century and continuing into the early twentieth. Heinrich Wölfflin’s Renaissance and Baroque (1888) is considered to be the first theorization of the baroque, which until that time had been seen as a corrupt, diseased, and impudent form of art. However, it was not until the 1940s that authors such as Rudolf Wittkower were to retrieve baroque art fully from its languishing state in the canon of art history (Robert Harbison, Reflections on Baroque [London: Reaktion Books, 2000], 217–220). In both Germany and Italy, in particular, such prejudices were nowhere near as prevalent, and to this day the great bulk of scholarly work on the curiosity cabinets comes from these two regions, though generally it remains untranslated into English. It is for this reason that the essays in Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor’s The Origins of Museum: The Cabinets of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) enjoy such continuing popularity, in spite of the positivistic tenor of most of the entries.

22. Although not the place for such an excursion, one would not have to confine this observation to the realm of museum studies alone. Popular fiction has appropriated this very same marker of “curiosity cabinet as embodied and collected uncanniness” with great vigor: from historical fiction to New York murder mystery, the curiosity cabinet seems to have captured a certain popular (and decidedly “dark”) imagination. Two recent examples would be Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, The Cabinet of Curiosities (New York: Warner Books, 2002), and Catherine Czerkawska, The Curiosity Cabinet (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005). We can see the general tenor of this popular appropriation most clearly in the first of these two titles, which equates the curiosity cabinet with a serial killer’s “collection” of victims’ bodies.

23. The number of museums projecting the structural composition of the curiosity cabinets onto the Internet is too large to list here. Two significant projects of this type are the Metropolitan Museum’s “Collecting for the Kunstkammer,” <http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/kuns/hd_kuns.htm> and the Walker Art Center’s “Wonderwalker a Global Online Wunderkammer,” <http://209.32.200.23/gallery9/wunderkammer/>.

24. The Getty Museum, “Devices of Wonder,” <http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/devices/html/>. I say young virtual visitor, as the “new museum” seems to have all but given up on its pedagogic aims and claims of a century ago, appealing instead to the fancies and fantasies of a youthful audience through the prioritization of the strange, distant, and bizarre qualities of its material objects, increasingly framed, as they are, by the near- Tantric catchphrase of “interaction.”

25. Jeanne Bornstein, Meg Maher, and Holland Goss, The Public’s Treasures:A Cabinet of Curiosities Brochure (New York: New York Public Library, 2002), 4.

26. Any number of instances of the overt statement of this narrative could be cited here; one will probably suffice: “The modern museum effectively dates from the Renaissance. … Even at that time, however, one can already see the dual role of museums: to exhibit objects and to provide a working collection for scholars.” Paul Whitehead, The British Museum (Natural History) (London: Scala, 1981), 7.

27. The Getty Museum, “Devices of Wonder.”

28. Bornstein, Maher, and Goss, The Public’s Treasures, 4.

29. Robertson and Meadow, “Microcosms: Objects of Knowledge,” 226.

30. Robertson and Meadow, “Microcosms: Objects of Knowledge.”

31. Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).

32. David Murray, Museums: Their History and Their Use, vol. 1 (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, Publishers to the University, 1904), 41.

33. Ibid., 40.

34. Ibid., 12.

35. Of course there is a simple logic behind this: particularly in the Protestant North, most church reliquaries were seized and broken down; their constituent parts ended up in princely and royal collections, and later still in museums, and the relics themselves were invariably thrown away as mere dross. In reference to Thomas Cromwell’s “visitations” of English religious houses at the behest of Henry viii to eradicate all traces of “the abomination of idolatry,” Richard Altick suggests: “it was these settings [reliquaries], rather than the relics themselves, which led to their being sent up to the Tower of London, the national collection point.” The logic in operation here is the logic of the treasure hoard. See Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 6. A curious inversion of this can be seen in the prolonged disregard Anglo-American art history had for the study of reliquaries as objects of art. That the gem-encrusted silver plate work of the cranial reliquary of Saint Yrieix in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, was removed from its wooden core, so that the latter could be put on display as a fine example of Gothic sculpture, speaks not only of the disdain for “minor arts” of metalsmithing, but also of the ambivalent relationship modern museums have with the “preciousness” of much of their material collections. The silverwork in this instance was seen as too gauche or too associated with mere “treasure” to be the object of serious art-historical contemplation. See Barbara Drake Boehm, “Body-Part Reliquaries: The State of Research,” GESTA 36, no. 1 (1997): 11.

36. Altick, The Shows of London, 5.

37. The following account of the Christian cult of the saints is, for the most part, taken from Peter Brown’s seminal text The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). I am aware that the literature of late antiquity is vast, yet I am not concerned with exploring the cult of the saints for its own sake, nor am I particularly interested in testing the veracity of Brown’s thesis against those of other authors. Essentially, I merely wish to provide an indication of the extent to which the cult of the saints underpinned the medieval collection of specific liturgical and sacramental objects, and how these objects then functioned within a regime of wonderment that lifted people up into communion with the sacred.

38. Brown’s characterization of the bodies of saints or martyrs as “very special dead” stems from their ability to rise above the facts of death: “They died in a special way; they lay in the grave in a special way; this fact was shown by the manner in which all that was delightful and most alive in late antique life could be thought of as concentrated in their tombs and even in the detached fragments of their dead bodies.” Ibid., 70.

39. Quoted in Ernst Kitzinger, “The Cult of Images in the Age before Iconoclasm,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8 (1954): 116. What is most significant here, in Gregory of Nyssa’s words, is the tactile nature of visually beholding a relic, which speaks of nothing so much as the mimetic qualities of the overriding medieval metaphysic of representation; a metaphysic I am in the midst of describing as a regime of wonderment.

40. With regard to the praesentia of contact relics, the following story of the shrine to St. Peter in Rome, as related by the sixth-century Bishop Gregory of Tours, is suitably illuminating of their production:

Whoever wishes to pray there must unlock the gates which encircle the spot, pass to where he is above the grave and, opening a little window, push his head through and there make the supplication that he needs.

Alternatively, pilgrims could lower small pieces of cloth, brandea, down into the tomb: “drawing them up heavy with the blessing of Saint Peter” (Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 87).

41. Daston and Park, for instance, note the way that the abbots of Saint-Denis would periodically sell off parts of the abbey’s collection in order to “weather famines, ransom vassals, buy off foreign occupiers, or defray their own expenses.” Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 74. The point here, though, is that a unicorn horn might fetch enough money to ransom a vassal, precisely because it circulated within a magical economy first and foremost.

42. For a fascinating discussion of how the various alterations and extensions during the twelfth century to the cathedral at Canterbury were predicated upon the direct need to accommodate the various sacred objects of the cult of Becket, see Millard F. Hearn, “Canterbury Cathedral and the Cult of Becket,” Art Bulletin 74, no. 1 (1994).

43. Stephen Bann, “Shrines, Curiosities and the Rhetoric of Display,” in Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen, eds., Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 21. Bann’s description of the “demonstration” derives from the contemporary (albeit somewhat skeptical) account offered by Erasmus in his Colloquies, published in 1526. In a further curious conflation of church and theater, it should be noted that we will encounter the practice of demonstration with the aid of a radius again. In chapter 2, the radius will be the instrument by which textual authority will be demonstrated upon the splayed and opened bodies dissected within the early anatomy theaters of Europe.

44. I am aware that a relic is not a reliquary, is not a marvel, is not a window, is not a church. Yet the impulse to diligence, to separate them out neatly and expound upon their differences, is one I am attempting to resist at every turn. It is how these objects circulated collectively within an economy geared toward largely singular ends—the generation of wonder—that interests me here. And isn’t it the point that in many ways the relic is the reliquary, is the marvel, is the window, is the church? It is in the movement of sympathies and resonances that often we catch glimpses of the heterogeneous.

45. Erwin Panofsky, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 73–81. For a catalog of extant treasures, see Bibliothèque Nationale, Le Trésor de Saint-Denis: Musée du Louvre, Paris, 12 mars–17 juin 1991 (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1991). For the mythic origins of many of the Saint-Denis marvels, see Murray, Museums, 3.

46. I will return in chapter 3 to the theory of ideal proportion as it pertained to a shift from the “technology” of perspective as a tool for the production of certain “pious” subjectivities to a “technology” for their normalization in the guise of scientific cartography. For now it is more important to stress the relationship between light and color, which saw beauty manifest in the splendor of brilliant and unadulterated colors. However, unlike the theory of ideal proportion, which existed as a more or less discrete theoretical position independent of its practices and experiences, medieval writings on light and color had much less consistency to them. This is not so much the product of poor modern scholarship unable to adequately re-present a medieval “theory” of light and color, but rather an indication of the experiential, not theoretical, nature of medieval light and color in the first place: color was a “lived,” everyday experience, being both sensual and tactile (quite literally, as we will see). My own protracted frustration with the at times seemingly contradictory material on medieval light and color has, in the end, proved remarkably instructive insofar as the understanding that was eluding me was the realization that medieval experiences of light and color were just that: experiences and not theories. Further to this, my frustrations represented precisely that encounter with a different Order of Things, the study of which formed the generative logic of this very book. Upon realizing this, the tack I subsequently took with this material was not to attempt to reconcile conflicting accounts, but rather to select the words of a particular medieval person as my guide: Abbot Suger was my choice. Where I do make general theoretical claims regarding the state of “perception” in the Middle Ages (as in the note immediately following this one), I have allowed myself to be guided by the “collection” of ideas assembled by Umberto Eco in Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).

47. In general, it could be said that color was deemed visually pleasing when the inner light of things and beings coincided: luminosity being the equivalent to the light of the soul, which projected out from the body through the gaze. Medieval notions of visions suggested that light (or, more accurately, lumen) literally emanated from the eyes: perception resulted when this light struck objects and resonated with their color or their own luminosity. This explains the prevalence within both medieval art and everyday culture for brilliant displays of primary colors: it was the colorful object that shone most forcefully, and hence was most pleasing. Likewise, the translucent object was prized for its ability to magnify, and make splendid, the light of color as well as the invisible light of God’s sacredness, hence the prevalence and popularity of gems, rainbows, and stained-glass windows. St. Thomas’s third category of beauty (after integrity and symmetry) was clarity: “all things which have a lustrous (i.e. transparent) color are regarded as beautiful,” cited in W. S. Heckscher, “Relics of Pagan Antiquity in Mediaeval Settings,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 1, no. 3 (1938): 212. For a comprehensive treatment of the subject see Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, 68–69. There are two aspects of the medieval aesthetics of light and color that I find particularly interesting. First, visual perception was not uncoupled from the other senses; the aesthetics of light and color were never far away from the aesthetics of music and harmony. And second, unlike with modern theories of perception, the implication of the notion of lux and lumen was that objects in the physical or metaphysical world could not exist independently of vision.

48. Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, 14.

49. Ibid., 16.

50. Stephen Bann, “Shrines, Gardens, Utopias,” New Literary History 25, no. 4 (1994): 831.

51. Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 3. I am, of course misrepresenting Bryson here. For Bryson, the stained-glass window conspires toward an enunciation of the Word (of Scripture) rather than of light, or even the image. However, I feel this interpretation tells us as much about Bryson’s own preferred area (and era) of art history as about the function of so many light-bearing/light-transmitting vessels that formed an integral part of the physical structure of the Gothic cathedrals, as well as their collections. In this regard I tend to agree more with Stephen Bann in his efforts to let the qualities of the window speak of the transmutation of light and the production of “pure visibility.” See also Bann, “Shrines, Gardens, Utopias.”

52. Virginia C. Raguin, Stained Glass: From Its Origins to the Present (New York: Harry Abrams, 2003), 14.

53. Murray, Museums, 11.

54. Cited in Panofsky, Abbot Suger, 55.

55. Bann, “Shrines, Gardens, Utopias,” 20.

56. I am referring here, of course, to Foucault’s notion of Sovereign power; the type of power that is manifest through spectacular displays of bodily destruction, glorification, and stagecraft. The nature of this form of power and that of modern disciplinary power will be followed up in greater detail in chapters 2 and 3.

57. Manuel A. Vásquez and Marie F. Marquardt, “Globalizing the Rainbow Madonna: Old Time Religion in the Modern Age,” Theory, Culture and Society 17, no. 4 (2000): 120.

58. Miami Herald, 27 June 1997, cited at The Witches’ Voice Inc., “Arianhrod? Dianna? Mary? What Do You See?,” <http://www.witchvox.com/media/mary_shrine.html>

59. Jane Baker, Share International, June 1997, cited in ibid.

60. James Randi, “Busted Miracle,” Swift online newsletter of the jref, <http://www.randi.org/jr/031204busted.html>. Along with his newsletter Swift, James Randi has a permanent standing offer of one million dollars for anyone who can “demonstrate any psychic, supernatural or paranormal ability of any kind under mutually agreed upon scientific conditions.” And in a curious inversion of standard persecution narratives, the Foundation offers assistance in the form of a legal defense fund to people being attacked “as a result of their investigations and criticism of people who make paranormal claims.”

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid.

63. Bauman’s words act as a welcome tonic to the kind of academic treatment that the Rainbow Madonna has occasioned. Vásquez and Marquardt rehearse the explanation of “the global creation of the local,” suggesting that in an age of post-modern capital and “globalized” definitions of time and space, the Virgin of Clearwater represents the way that “local religious practices” (whatever they might be) are manifest through global circuits of communication. What is noteworthy about this approach is just how much it seems to miss the point, any point! With its utility-laden, social science language clearly originating from within, and taking sustenance from, the domain of those transparent rationalities of post-Enlightenment thought, Bauman is absolutely correct when he suggests that this logic is like “a pass-key meant to unlock the gates to all present and future mysteries.” Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 1.

64. I will explore the properties of transgression’s “animating” qualities more fully in chapter 2, with a discussion of medical anatomy’s efforts to animate corpses through their defacement.

65. I am aware of the essentializing pitfalls of any recourse to historical “ages” or “spirits”; however, such recourse is largely unavoidable in a genealogical approach to the history of collection, though there are a few things that need stressing. First, Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) is my primary point of departure in this regard: any reference to a classical or Renaissance episteme is a direct engagement with his work. Second, my own reference to a spirit or age of curiosity is a reference not merely to an historical “era,” but rather to a series of discursive formations that linked together certain ways of representing, visualizing, and producing knowledge through collection. For this reason the term “regime” will usually be employed to help resolve any ambiguity. Third, the relationship between this regime of curiosity and Foucault’s so-called epistemes is not a direct one. Although the regime of curiosity takes sustenance from the Renaissance episteme’s “metaphysic of representation” (which will be elaborated upon shortly), the regime of curiosity was not quite the totalizing discourse that an episteme claims to be, nor was it merely confined to the sixteenth century. Rather, as many of my examples will suggest, the spirit of curiosity extended well into the Enlightenment, or what Foucault describes as the “classical” age of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it needs to be stressed that when dealing with the broad historical brushstrokes of Foucault’s epistemes, exact times, places, and dates will never neatly match up. What is of importance in Foucault’s analysis (and, by extension, my own) is the epistemological shifts that occur and the order in which they occur: that curiosity was a latecomer to the Russian court, for instance, speaks more of Russia’s political isolation before the time of Peter the Great than it does of the failure of Foucault’s idea of the Renaissance episteme. In this instance, what is important to note is that regardless of the dates, the Renaissance episteme was followed by a classical one.

66. Quoted in Oleg Neverov, “‘His Majesty’s Cabinet’ and Peter I’s Kunstkammer,” in Impey and MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums, 55.

67. Although there were slight differences between the Northern European princely Kunstkammern and the British, French, and Italian cabinet of curiosities (as will become apparent throughout my discussion of them), at the level of discourse, these terms, essentially, are interchangeable. A central tenet of this chapter is the suggestion that the history of museums needs to move beyond the art-historical commonplace of “provenance.” Tracing the “lives” of individual objects as they pass from one form of collection to the next has the tendency to conflate various historical manifestations of collection. If we focus instead on the discourses of collection, we come to see how the same object can take on very different meanings depending on the form of collection it inhabits; meaning is not something intrinsic to objects, but rather is produced from the discourses that nourish and nurture them.

68. Quoted in Neverov, “‘His Majesty’s Cabinet’ and Peter I’s Kunstkammer,” 55.

69. Joy Kenseth, “A World in One Closet Shut,” in Kenseth, ed., The Age of the Marvelous (Hanover: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1991), 90. See also Anthony Anemone, “The Monsters of Peter the Great: The Culture of the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century,” Slavic and East European Journal 44, no. 4 (2000): 593.

70. For an elaboration of the Enlightenment encyclopedic project, particularly with regard to the ensuing problem of the need for a universal language to complement and transmit a universal knowledge, see Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (London: Fontana Press, 1997).

71. Paula Findlen, “The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy,” Journal of the History of Collections 1, no. 1 (1989): 68. I will return to the discursive roots of curiosity’s claim to universal knowledge and what this meant for the construction of a “knowing” subjectivity in the section entitled “The Renewal of Worlds.” For now I merely wish to flag these ideas so that we can move on to an understanding of curiosity as an epistemologically discrete category which would come to be actively challenged by the flat tables of difference of the Enlightenment episteme.

72. Both dictionary entries are reproduced in Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities, 54–58. With reference to my earlier note regarding the elusiveness of categories such as the Renaissance episteme, these two dictionary entries are a case in point.According to dates alone, both are firmly entrenched within Foucault’s classical episteme, yet clearly only one of them displays the characteristics Foucault suggests were endemic of that age. That these two illustrations point to the end of the seventeenth century rather than the beginning of that century as being the time of this shift in “the order of things” is of little importance compared to the occurrence of this shift itself. Speculation as to whether Furetière’s dictionary represents a new form of ordering knowledge, but with old content, becomes somewhat of a moot point to a genealogical exercise. What matters is the presence and veracity of the disjuncture between a regime that nurtured curiosity, on the one hand, and a regime that heralded its demise, on the other.

73. For an elaboration of the epistemological underpinnings of the knowledge claims of the classical age, see Foucault, The Order of Things, 50–76.

74. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 84.

75. Outside of this museological project, the “spirit” of curiosity has, at various times, been said to inhabit the general demeanor of scientific inquiry, the constitution of the nineteenth-century anthropologist/explorer, or more recently the indomitable will of the modern liberal individual. However, these represent little more than a nominal call to a half-articulated notion of inquisitiveness (the final instance of the liberal individual seems dubious even on this front). What separates present museological forays into the realm of the curious from these other calls to the spirit of curiosity is its concerted effort to appropriate an historical sense of curiosity as a discourse of representation / knowledge production. At the heart of the “Microcosms” project, for instance, was an effort (however flawed) to occupy the discursive structures of the Renaissance episteme or, to use their words, to explore “the habits of mind that would have been employed by a visitor to such a cabinet.” Robertson and Meadow, “Microcosms: Objects of Knowledge,” 228.

76. Far from being an obscure instance of the type of historiographical recuperation I am referring to, Olmi’s work is the lead article in the much-celebrated volume The Origins of the Museum, edited by Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor who, incidentally, are the chief editors of the Journal of the History of Collections. Both publications are considered standards for museum studies scholarship.

77. Giuseppe Olmi, “Science-Honour-Metaphor: Italian Cabinets of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Impey and MacGregor, The Origins of Museums, 8–9. The terms naturalia and artificialia represented the twin binding categories of all curiosity cabinets. That these categories were inextricably entwined is suggested by the priority accorded to ancient sculpture: part fossil, part work of art, sculpture signified nothing so much as the sympathetic resemblances between natural objects formed by the hand of God, and the same objects wrought by humans. In this way, collection was the ultimate expression of a humanist understanding of creation. For this Renaissance hierarchy of materials, see Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton: Markus Weiner Publishers, 1995), 11–19. The point I wish to make here is that given the raison d’être of Renaissance collection, a predominance of natural curiosities in a cabinet does not make a natural history museum. It merely indicates a different set of signs from which the collector is attempting, essentially, the same task as any other cabinet owner: the assemblage of the Book of the World.

78. Olmi, “Science-Honour-Metaphor,” 8.

79. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), 9.

80. F. H. Taylor, quoted in Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 79.

81. Niels von Holst, Creators, Collectors and Connoisseurs: The Anatomy of Artistic Taste from Antiquity to the Present Day (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967), 104.

82. Ibid.

83. Thomas Kaufmann, “Remarks on the Collections of Rudolf ii: The Kunstkammer as a Form of Representation,” Art Journal 38, no. 1 (1978): 22.

84. Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities, 59.

85. Isidore of Seville, quoted in ibid.

86. Quoted in ibid., 76.

87. Quoted in Foucault, The Order of Things, 32.

88. Findlen, “The Museum,” 61.

89. An indication of how widespread the specific influences of these particular fragments of ancient sculpture were can be seen in the frequency and diversity of their direct quotation: from the Promethean figures of Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling to the visceral anatomies of Andreas Vesalius’s anatomical atlas, the De fabrica, the Belvedere fragments had an unprecedented influence on the development of Renaissance art.

90. Kenseth, “A World in One Closet Shut,” 84.

91. The disciplines I have listed here are all ones which, to varying degrees, will be encountered throughout the course of this book: the revival of anatomical investigation of the inner recesses of the human body, and its association with new modes of visualizing that body, form the basis of chapter 2; the colonization of a narrativized and lived “space” by a technology of cartographic “place” is the focus of chapter 3.

92. Findlen, “The Museum,” 62.

93. Anthony Alan Shelton, “Cabinets of Transgression: Renaissance Collections and the Incorporation of the New World,” in John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, eds., The Cultures of Collecting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 179.

94. S. K. Heninger Jr., The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 2004), 144. I am aware of the potentially alarming speed with which I am moving through complex notions like Renaissance cosmology. My intention, however, is not to explicate each of these sizeable categories, but rather to get a sense of how the regime of curiosity was composed of a plethora of different discursive associations which culminated in the necessity of collection as an expression of divine celebration and temporal enlightenment (the two never being far apart).

95. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 68.

96. Johann Daniel Major, quoted in Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity, 40.

97. Johann Daniel Major, quoted in ibid.

98. Kenseth, “A World in One Closet Shut,” 86.

99. Foucault, The Order of Things, 36.

100. Ibid., 17.

101. Foucault elaborates upon four related notions of similitude: convenientia, aemulatio, analogy, and sympathy. Convenientia represented the relationship between two things that come close enough to one another to be in juxtaposition such that they resemble each other: body and soul being the quintessential “convenience.” Aemulatio functioned as a form of convenientia freed from the proximity of place, so that things or beings may resemble each other as if reflected in a mirror from afar: the human face is a reflection of the sky; the eyes are a mirror of the stars. Analogy was a complex interrelatedness between convenientia and aemulatio: like the latter, it made possible the marvelous confrontation of resemblances across space, but like the former it spoke of adjacencies, of bonds and joins. Thus, the relationship of proximity between the stars and the sky could be reflected in the relationship of proximity between a plant and the earth, or between the skin mole and the face of which they are a secret mark. Sympathy represented the free play of resemblances, the generative power that drives the root of the plant toward the stream of underground water; the mobility of attraction that allows the sunflower to turn its radiant surface to face and follow the curving path of the sun’s rays of light; it is what makes fire strive from the earth toward the air of the heavens, thereby losing its dryness and combining with humidity to become that air itself. The power of sympathy was matched by its opposite in antipathy, maintaining an isolation between things, preventing their assimilation and being responsible for why some things may grow, yet others may change and die. Ibid., 18–25.

102. Paracelsus, quoted in ibid., 26.

103. Ibid.

104. Ibid., 29.

105. Foucault, The Order of Things, 32.

106. Ibid., 36. For an elaboration of the narrative of the transparency of Adam’s act of naming and the subsequent state of confusio linguarum following the fall, see also Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, 7–24.

107. Foucault, The Order of Things, 33.

108. William B. Ashworth Jr., “Emblematic Natural History of the Renaissance,” in Nick Jardine, Jim Secord, and Emma Spray, eds., The Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 34.

109. Foucault, The Order of Things, 39.

110. Ashworth, “Emblematic Natural History of the Renaissance,” 19.

111. Foucault, “The Order of Things,” 40.

112. Stewart, On Longing, 152.

113. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, “Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England,” Past and Present 92 (1981): 25.

114. Georges Bataille, “The Deviations of Nature,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 55.

115. Shelton, “Cabinets of Transgression,” 185.

116. Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity, 67. I am aware that, as a living curiosity, Foma represents somewhat of an ambivalent example. As I suggested above, although inhabiting a cabinet that for the most part (in spite of its late formation of 1697–1699) functioned within the epistemological discourses of the age of curiosity, Foma’s presence in Peter’s Kunstkammer marks the beginning of a shift to an Enlightenment age of fixed signs. Foma’s service to Peter’s Kunstkammer in both life and death seems to resonate particularly well with the binary of malaise and seduction of Bataille’s modern pathological deformity. The point I wish to make concerns the general epistemological weight of the monstrous and anomalous object, not the specifics of Foma’s case. If time permitted, the specifics of Foma’s imprisonment in Peter’s Kunstkammer would be elaborated upon in terms of the inference I am making here that it was the age of fixed signs and medical pathology that gave birth to the “freak” as the shadowy underbelly of the scientific attraction and repulsion to the deformed product of nature, something that exists with us today in the fascinating horror that deformity carries with it. It is with the advent of the eighteenth century that the monstrous loses its reverential quality, becoming instead “a low, bumptious form of pleasure.” Patrick Mauriès, Cabinets of Curiosity (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 86.

Peter’s Kunstkammer is of further interest as it alerts us to the culturally specific nature of many of the practices underpinning the collector’s “spirit” in an age of curiosity. Unlike in Western Europe, where the incorruptibility of flesh was taken as the surest sign of saintliness, in Orthodox and Slavic folklore the refusal of a corpse to rot was most often associated with heresy, witchcraft, and vampirism. With his proclivity for keeping anatomical specimens (both living monsters and preserved bodies/parts), Peter’s collecting habits marked the St. Petersburg Kunstkammer not as a showcase of the new secular arts and sciences, but as a place the local inhabitants might fear and shun as the devil’s work. See Anemone, “The Monsters of Peter the Great,” 588–589.

117. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 79.

118. Ibid., 60.

119. Benvenuto Cellini, quoted in Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity, 1.

120. Benvenuto Cellini, quoted in ibid., 2.

121. Benvenuto Cellini, quoted in ibid.

122. Kaufmann, “Remarks on the Collections of Rudolf ii,” 23. For an account of the position of the alchemical and occult arts in Rudolf’s court, see chapter 6 in R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History 1576–1612 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

123. Foucault, The Order of Things, 32.

124. My use of the term “magic” and the form that I am suggesting it took in the curiosity cabinets is borrowed directly from modern opponents of the cabinets, like Neils von Holst. What is interesting in this regard is that some magical associations seem worthy of modern critical attention, while others do not. For instance, the magic of scale—synecdoche, allowing a part to stand in for the whole—does not seem to disturb the modern critic half as much as the idea of prescience or foresight, which was nothing more than an interpretation of how this magic of scale “worked.” This is due, no doubt, to the fact that the microcosmic collection of the macrocosm remained alive and well in the modern museum project. Of course other “forms” of magic could be discussed here, for instance the magic of mimesis; the magic that allowed the image of an icon to “stand in” for the saint or martyr depicted upon it—something endemic to the age of wonderment. However, for the purposes of viewing the magical associations underpinning the regime of curiosity, I will restrict my discussion to the prescience that accompanied the synecdochical relationship of microcosm and macrocosm (mimesis being related to the later more than the former; the latter being deemed less dangerous a magic). It would be interesting to chart why one form of magic (prescience) has attracted modern condemnation, while the other (which I am calling synecdoche) has not. Perhaps it is in the “predictive” nature of scientific transparency that we would find our answer.

125. We can see this same distinction at work in modern art-historical understandings of the power of iconic mimesis. Mimesis is invariably relegated to the status of “other” even when it is (improperly) displaced to a “primitive” past. Thus not only is the mimetic faculty almost never accorded a place in modern systems of representation; it is often excluded as “tolerated other” from accounts of the past as well. A sign of imminent change in this regard is the recent work of W. J. T. Mitchell in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Mitchell’s anthropomorphizing of the image in asking “what is it that they want?” has the type of playfulness that would see mimesis come alive as one of a number of modern magics of the image, not tolerated by modern ways of seeing, but as the modern way of seeing.

126. Von Holst, Creators, Collectors and Connoisseurs, 104.

127. I appreciate that in characterizing the magic of the curiosity cabinets in terms of a Foucauldian understanding of the hermeneutics and semiology of the sign I am running the risk of replicating exactly what modern critics of the curiosity cabinet (not to mention those museological exercises like “Microcosms” which began our discussion of collection) have consistently done: deny that certain je ne sais quoi that makes magic or the sacred what it is: heterogeneous. I have two things to say to this. First I must say, as someone employing Foucault: in some ways, isn’t this precisely the point? If one cannot be exterior to power and discourse, then to hope to occupy a different “Order of Things” brings with it the scent of that modern utopia of “authenticity”; of the “authentic native,” the “authentic subject position,” et cetera. Call them what you will—signs, marks, or signatures (all three were used by contemporaries of the curiosity cabinets)—the difficulty is in imagining, let alone occupying, an “Order of Things” where the sign is not in a one-to-one relationship to what it signifies. Perhaps magic is simple. Perhaps it is about hermeneutics and semiology: haven’t these very terms become somewhat talismanic themselves in a modern era? The second point I wish to make is, in many ways, the ultimate thesis of this present work: that, try as it might, the flat language of transparent rationality cannot fully expunge the heterogeneous from within its folds; the heterogeneous having a way of constantly erupting through the homogenized surfaces of modern rationality. Of course this is something that will be elaborated upon later; for now it is enough to suggest, as I did in the Introduction, that my use of narrative fragments represents one of the ways in which I am attempting to write about the heterogeneous while still allowing it the room to work its charms. And with regard to the act of collection, those charms are most evident in the renewal of worlds affected by collection’s “unpacking.”

128. Quiccheberg’s “classification system” consisted of five classes or groups, each with ten or eleven inscriptions in them. The “Borgesque” incongruity between these inscriptions prevents a general elaboration of them, as coins are placed with foreign textiles, and animal skeletons are placed with dyes and paints. Likewise I see no particular need to list his Inscriptiones in full, as the incessant search for modern order in Renaissance forms of collection is precisely the task I have been critical of in contemporary museology. Further to this, it is not in Quiccheberg’s descriptions that I find worth, which is in itself a form of museological criticism.

129. Elizabeth Hajos, “References to Giulio Camillo in Samuel Quiccheberg’s ‘Inscriptiones vel Tituli Theatri Amplissimi,’” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance 25 (1963): 208. See also Lorenz Seelig, “The Munich Kunstkammer, 1565–1807,” in Impey and MacGregor, The Origin of Museums, 87.

130. For more details of the “art of memory,” see Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 91–96; and Frances Amelia Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 130–159.

131. Vigilius Zuichemus, quoted in Yates, The Art of Memory, 132.

132. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 100.

133. Mauriès, Cabinets of Curiosity, 34.

134. Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity, 39.

135. Ibid., 49.

136. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 60.

137. Mauriès, Cabinets of Curiosity, 119.

138. Daston and Park, “Unnatural Conceptions,” 43.

139. Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity, 69.

140. Quoted in Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 39.

Chapter 2

1. Paul Turnbull, “Outlawed Subjects: The Procurement and Scientific Uses of Australian Aboriginal Heads, ca. 1803–1835,” Eighteenth Century Life 22, no. 1 (1998): 166.

2. Ibid.

3. Jay Maeder, “Raiders of the Lost Conk,” US News and World Report 8 (1997): 14. From the title of this piece it should come as no surprise that most media coverage of Colbung’s visit to the UK was overtly racist in character, constantly trivializing the importance of repatriation to both Yagan’s ancestors and his living descendants. In a strange, yet increasingly familiar, convergence of modern reportage and colonial paternalism, the ever-so-easily detected racism of years gone by is constantly being mirrored in, or mimicked by, today’s press when it comes to issues of indigeneity. Adam Shoemaker has pointed out how the mix of “journalistic excess with patronizing put-down” that characterized Maeder’s article was conspicuously absent from another article in the same paper on the work of International War Crimes inspectors in seeking out mass grave sites in the former Yugoslavia. It would seem that the correct and proper handling of some people’s dead holds far more political import than others. Adam Shoemaker, “Authenticity: Globalisation and Indigenous Culture” (unpublished manuscript, 2004).

4. It would seem that Dale never found a buyer for Yagan’s head and instead donated it to the Liverpool Royal Institution fairly soon after he received it back from Pettigrew. In 1894 the Institution’s collections were dispersed, and the head of Yagan found its way into the collection of the Liverpool City Museum. It is not known whether the head was ever placed on display at either institution.

5. Cited in Jay Maeder, “The Long and Winding Road,” New York Daily News, 4 September 1997.

6. For introductory, and fairly apologetically conservative, remarks on the issue of the repatriation of indigenous remains, see chapters 7, 8, and 9 of Moira Simpson, Making Representations: Museums in the Post-Colonial Era (London: Routledge, 2001). There is something disturbing and potentially trivializing about the surprisingly common use of puns and word plays in section or chapter headings used by many authors when discussing matters of repatriation. It would not be wildly overstating the point to suggest that there is little difference between such academically sanctioned titles and more wince-inducing journalistic excesses like Maeder’s “Raiders of the Lost Conk” cited above. “Bones of Contention” or “Spirited Away” may appear harmless enough and in accord with the present academic penchant for witty and clever chapter headings, but surely when it comes to matters of someone else’s dead, wit should be left as the exclusive domain of those whose dead it is! What makes “Bones of Contention” appear so suitable is precisely its ability, as a title, to slip seamlessly to something like “I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” which immediately summons to mind a whole array of puns and word plays based on racist fantasies about the primitive Other, like “pointing the bone.” The existence of this shared cultural archive of representations of the Other has led many indigenous leaders and authors to the claim that those calls to keep human remains in museums for scientific purposes are nothing short of a continuation of colonial methods for the subjugation and governance of indigenous peoples.

7. Any number of examples would suffice here. For instance, in 1971 an archaeological dig was disrupted in Minneapolis. An Indian skeleton had been discovered at the edge of a white pioneer cemetery, which was being relocated because of the construction of a highway. The remains of the white pioneers were promptly reburied, while the remains of the Indian were taken for further study. See ibid., 180.

8. The following account leading up till Yagan’s death in 1833 is taken from Turnbull, “Outlawed Subjects,” 160.

9. Ibid., 163.

10. Ibid., 166.

11. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Objects of Ethnography,” in Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 398.

12. Sander Gilman’s account and analysis of Saartjie Baartman’s life and her subsequent dissection by George Cuvier remains the most compelling of its kind: Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late-Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985).

13. C. Fforde, “English Collections of Human Remains: An Introduction,” World Archaeological Bulletin 6 (1992): 22.

14. Quoted in Charles D. O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels 1514–1564 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 64.

15. Like most histories that appeal to a “Renaissance” of thought somewhere in their heritage, the history of anatomical knowledge in the Christian West can best be described as “reclamative,” insofar as the study of anatomy was lost to Europe for nearly a thousand years before its eventual revival during the fifteenth century. According to this patrilineal narrative of loss and return, the study of anatomy had been in serious decline since the incorporation of Alexandria into the Roman Empire in AD 30, due to the Roman prohibition against the mutilation of the dead. With the death of Hellenic philosopher and physician Galen in AD 199, all serious study of anatomy in the West ceased. In a moment of bitter ambivalence for those who subscribe to this narrative, all textual knowledge of the Ancients might have been lost to Europe forever upon the fall of Alexandria to the Arabs in 642, were it not for the translation of these texts into Syriac and Arabic. All Greek medical knowledge became the sole preserve of the (condescendingly so-called) “Arabic commentators”who, so this Eurocentric narrative goes, made scant few advances upon Galen’s anatomical knowledge due to the Islamic prohibition against dissection. Latin translations of these Arabic “commentaries” began to trickle into Europe during the late Middle Ages through the Muslim-influenced South. It was not until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, with the subsequent influx of Greek scholars and texts into Europe, however, that the first translations of Galen’s texts from the original Greek were made available. Anatomy returned to the great medical schools of Paris, Padua, and Bologna in the form of a textually based Galenic lore, and would remain as such until Vesalius reinvigorated its practice in the sixteenth century. For a more detailed account of this narrative, see Jonathon Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 39–41. It should be obvious that the near-millenarian nature of this narrative is highly teleological in its characterization of knowledge (anatomy is the cumulative understanding of the structure of the human body), as well as highly Eurocentric in the place it accords to Arabic learning. To relegate Arabic medicine to the category of “interim custodians” or “trustees” of an otherwise unbroken European tradition that was to flower once again, after it had been liberated by physical conquest, tells us more about our own desire “to establish authority, precedent and certainty” than anything else. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 39.

16. O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1. Perhaps the simplest indication of the veracity of this narrative is the almost universal description of anatomy in two discrete eras: pre- and post-Vesalian.

17. Ibid. There are numerous suggestions as to the origin of this taboo restricting the dissection of the body: from Roman funerary practices, to St. Augustine’s admonitions in the seventh century against disturbing the house of the soul (Glen Harcourt, “Andreas Vesalius and the Anatomy of Antique Sculpture,” Representations 17 [1987]: 37), to Pope Boniface viii’s papal bull of 1300 prohibiting the boiling of the body for easy transportation (Elizabeth Brown, “Death and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of Boniface viii on the Division of the Corpse,” Viator 12 [1981]: 221–270) and the simple argument that there has always been something anthropologically risky about the cutting open of a cadaver and the delay to its burial that this would bring (Andrea Carlino, Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999], 5–6). The historical specificity of these prohibitions is rarely, if ever, considered. The teleological nature of most histories of science would rather see Ancient Roman practices of handling the dead as equivalent to, and interchangeable with, fourteenth-century papal decree. Again, the unpacking of such narrative is a task largely ancillary to my present concerns.

18. Carlino, Books of the Body, 1.

19. Ancient manuscripts were “instruments of recitation,” designed to be read aloud. Visual adornment existed only insofar as it assisted in this task. Humanist texts allowed for illustrative frontispieces to lend cachet to a publication, but it was not until Vesalius’s De fabrica that such resistance to elucidative illustrations showed the first signs of being overcome. William Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp: An Iconographical Study (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 62.

20. Andreas Vesalius quoted in O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 355–356.

21. After receiving church sanction, the rector of the university would grant a permit to the professor of practical medicine (surgery) to procure a cadaver from the appropriate city authorities at the professor’s (and his students’) expense. The subject of the anatomy was invariably a recently executed criminal whose place of birth, the statutes of 1442 onward clearly stipulate, must have been at least thirty miles from Bologna. The subsequent demonstration of the anatomy could be attended by up to twenty students for a male corpse, or thirty for a female corpse; the maximum number of lessons any student could attend throughout their degree being three (two male, one female). Monies were also set aside by the professor (again with the help of students) for equipment, the venue, and for the recital of prayers in a nearby chapel for the souls of those dissected. These details are taken from Giovanna Ferrari, “Public Anatomy Lessons and the Carnival: The Anatomy Theatre of Bologna,” Past and Present 117 (1989): 51, 53–54.

22. Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy, 46. As we will see shortly, Heckscher’s description will, over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, become more than just an apt one; it will become quite a literal one. By the middle of the seventeenth century the public anatomies would be open to a more general, lay audience, while their conduct would come to be associated not only with the season of carnival, but also with the carnivalesque associations with sacrifice and atonement.

23. Carlino, Books of the Body, 11.

24. Harcourt, “The Anatomy of Antique Sculpture,” 36.

25. Jonathon Sawday, “The Fate of Marsyas: Dissecting the Renaissance Body,” in Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn, eds., Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540–1660 (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), 48.

26. Luke Wilson, “William Harvey’s Prelectiones: The Performance of the Body in the Renaissance Theatre of Anatomy,” Representations 17 (1987): 64. Extant statutes from the University of Padua dating from 1465 give us a clear indication as to the role of the ostensor in this regard: “The rector and the consilari are to depute … one of the doctores ordinarii, either of practice, or of theory, who will explain the aforesaid text line by line, and what he has explained according to text and letter, let him demonstrate by visual testimony, and verify in the cadaver itself.” Quoted in Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1999), 44.

27. Andreas Vesalius, Preface to the De fabrica, quoted in O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 356.

28. Vesalius, Preface to the De fabrica, quoted in ibid. With such contemporary criticism of the practice of anatomy, one can almost empathize with modern historians of science who are so nonplussed by the practical and “scientific” worth of these demonstrations. Since they were conducted with the professor so far away from the cadaver, and the barber so ignorant of proceedings, what chance was there of discrepancies between text and body being discovered? As one author states it: “from a strictly scientific point of view they led practically nowhere” (Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy, 46). Yet this is positivism, to be sure: that direct observation of a corpse did not produce corrections to Galen’s anatomical knowledge (based as it was for the most part on dissections of apes) and that this scene typified anatomy for over two hundred and fifty years cannot, and should not, be dismissed essentially as a dead-end. For the object of these anatomy lessons was not the cumulative accretion of knowledge (in itself a decidedly teleological and modern notion) but rather the demonstration of anatomical knowledge, that is, the verification of the authority of the Ancients.

29. H. Jansen, “Titian’s Laocoon Caricature and the Vesalius-Galenist Controversy,” Art Bulletin 28 (1946): 50.

30. Wilson, “William Harvey’s Prelectiones,” 68, 70.

31. Andreas Vesalius quoted in O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 356–357.

32. Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy, 52. Although Fabrica is the standard abbreviation used in the literature, for this book the more grammatically accurate De fabrica will be used.

33. Sylvius quoted in ibid., 63.

34. The “riot” of Renaissance geographical and cartographic metaphors, of which my own is illustrative, will be discussed and eventually critically recuperated in chapter 3.

35. There is one exception to this general rule of naming, or rather, sometimes one: “Occasionally a supernumerary or accessory bone called vesalium pedis (Vesalius’s bone) appears near the base of the fifth metatarsal.” Keith Moore, Clinically Oriented Anatomy, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1985), 473.

36. Original Dutch manuscript entry: “Adriaan adriaansz anders genaamt het Kindt. Was kokermaamer geboren tot leijden in hollant int 28 Jaar is voor sijn moetwil met de koorde gestraft an. 1632 den 31 Januarij bij die vant gilt ontleet.” Thanks to M. J. Martin for the translation.

37. Michel Foucault, “The Life of Infamous Men,” in Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, ed. Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (Sydney: Feral Press, 1979), 77.

38. Ibid., 79.

39. Ibid., 80.

40. Ibid., 84.

41. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 191.

42. Ibid.

43. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Biographical Illusion,” Actes de la recherche 62, no. 3 (1986): 69–72.

44. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Parthenon Books, 1984).

45. We can see this clearly at play in the preface to the “Body Worlds” exhibition catalog, where individual triumph over the taboo of viewing the dead is celebrated as not only liberating but somehow constitutive of good Being: “For each visitor, this was ultimately a personal victory. They had overcome the taboos that surround human corpses. They were able to look at these specimens quietly and with interest in anatomical details. … This transition from expecting revulsion to looking at specimens freely and uninhibitedly amounts to a personal break with these taboos. Many visitors to körperwelten have spoken about this and thus encouraged family and friends and acquaintances to have the same experience.” Wilhelm Kriz, foreword to Prof. Gunther von Hagens’ Bodyworlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies: Catalogue on the Exhibition (Heidelberg: Institut für Plastination, 2002), 6.

46. There has always been something oracle-like in the ability of the eye so trained to augur disease and malignancy in the smudges and smears of X-ray film. To this we may add the sheer weightiness of more contemporary medical imaging technologies. The monolithic nature of cat scan and mri machines only enhances the magical vision they perform: their sentinel-like nature transforming hospital rooms and corridors into places bordering on hallowed; the depth of their penetrations ensuring that beings are inculcated into a life reduced to traces in a file from a time before birth itself.

47. Foucault’s description of the “examination” in Discipline and Punish (188) coincides with his description of the military “review” of Louis xiv and focuses, for the most part, on its more disciplinary effects. But as with most of Foucault’s descriptions of power, one cannot be too rigid with the epistemological shifts that he traces. It is often precisely in the lingering of supposedly “outdated” modes of power that we get a hint of how different discursive formations can radically change the meaning of a particular practice (like the collections of the previous chapter) as they produce radically jarring effects. Essentially, it is my aim with this section to trace the persistence of more “sovereign” modes of identification, even within the dominant “disciplinary” discursive manifestations of power that arose during the seventeenth century.

48. The roll call is actually a later addition to the panel. Originally the folio sheet held by Hartman Hartmansz depicted an anatomical illustration of a hand, the significance of which will be discussed below. For a detailed examination of the condition of, and additions to, the canvas, including the additional figure on the far left, see William Schupbach, The Paradox of Rembrandt’s “Anatomy of Dr. Tulp” (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1982).

49. Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy, 26. If the year 1543 is retrospectively seenas one of great portent for the history of science (the year of publication of both Vesalius’s De fabrica and Copernicus’s De revolutionibus), then 31 January 1632 stands equally as another: René Descartes is believed to have been in the audience at Dr. Tulp’s dissection.

50. Sawday, “The Fate of Marsyas,” 114.

51. Ferrari, “Public Anatomy Lessons,” 83. The sale of tickets to public anatomies predates the sale of tickets to other theatrical performances, and anatomy theaters were most likely the first purpose-built theaters of their kind; often hosting operas or musical dramas when not staging public exercises in anatomy. The earliest plan for a permanent anatomical theater dates from 1493, while the first amphitheater backdrop used on a Renaissance stage dates from 1533. See Ferrari, “Public Anatomy Lessons,” 87. See also Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy, 32, 135 n 59.

52. Sawday, “The Fate of Marsyas,” 135.

53. According to Foucault, the public execution served a juridico-political function in that it was conceived as a ceremony to restore or reconstitute a momentarily injured sovereign, through a display of the dissymmetry of force brought to bear upon the body of the criminal. With a mimetic quality reminiscent of the icon, to break the law was to touch the very person of the sovereign, and it is this sovereign which in turn marks the body of the criminal in a pageant of excess. Breaking and displaying that body in an emphatic exercise of physical strength functioned to affirm the power of the sovereign and the superiority of that power. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 48–49.

54. See in particular ibid., 3–6.

55. Sawday, “The Fate of Marsyas,” 116.

56. Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy, 105.

57. Katherine Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1994): 20.

58. Contemporary commentary quoted in Ferrari, “Public Anatomy Lessons,” 88.

59. Rembrandt has depicted a most unorthodox initial act of dissection. Since the early fourteenth century, there had existed a strict order in which anatomists proceeded through the body: from the abdomen, through to the chest, to the head, and finally to the extremities. This order was initially thought to have been predicated upon the rate that flesh would naturally corrupt; it is now believed that it was in fact predicated upon a hierarchy of the location of the soul within the body: the dissection proceeding from the nutritive (the liver), to the spiritual (the heart), to the animal (the brain). See Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance, 52. That Rembrandt would depict the anatomy as commencing with the extremities tends to indicate that a specific reading of the canvas was envisaged in this regard.

60. Francis Barker, “Into the Vault,” in The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 66.

61. Ibid.

62. Ferrari, “Public Anatomy Lessons,” 60.

63. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 188.

64. Carlino, Books of the Body, 5. Although Carlino is merely using the term “excess” to connote “knowledge that pertain[s] to a discipline that pursue[s] its objectives regardless of clinical benefit,” thereby suggesting a degree of superfluousness which carries with it the hint of modern utilitarian science, I will return to this notion of “excess” shortly to critically recuperate it. For what we are dealing with here is a knowledge that, throughout its history and to the present day, has been associated with a sensual revelry of and in the flesh.

65. Wilson, “William Harvey’s Prelectiones,” 62.

66. Ibid.

67. Carlino, Books of the Body, 11.

68. Sawday, “The Fate of Marsyas,” 118.

69. Wilson, “William Harvey’s Prelectiones,” 88.

70. Sawday, “The Fate of Marsyas,” 123.

71. Baldasar Heseler quoted in Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 131–132.

72. Wilson, “William Harvey’s Prelectiones,” 63.

73. Ibid., 79.

74. Sawday, “The Fate of Marsyas,” 127.

75. William M. Ivans Jr., “What about the ‘Fabrica’ of Vesalius?” in Archibald Malloch, ed., Three Vesalian Essays to Accompany the “Icones Anatomicae” of 1934 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 91.

76. Sawday, “The Fate of Marsyas,” 123.

77. Ibid., 126.

78. Barker, “Into the Vault,” 68.

79. Ferrari, “Public Anatomy Lessons,” 58.

80. Ibid., 68–69.

81. An obvious reason for presenting anatomical information not as it would be found on a dissecting table, but as it would be found in a living body, has to do with the construction of a normative description of the body that is to be utilized by surgeons upon the living. Knowledge is structured, and hence represented, with an eye to its deployment in the medical examination where the physician is face to face with a living body. As I have just suggested, however, the regime of complicity that characterizes the medical gaze is such that this mapping of the normative description onto the living body marks it as part of the armature of disciplinary power; producing docile, recordable, deployable, hence “known” subjects/patients.

82. Sawday, “The Fate of Marsyas,” 117.

83. Harcourt, “The Anatomy of Antique Sculpture,” 42.

84. I will pursue this line of argument more fully in chapter 3, where cartography serves as an entry point into discussions concerning the relationship between ways of seeing and modes of representation, and certain “technologies of power” that distribute and arrange bodies in space. In this way, vision, representation, and knowledge structures tend to circulate as “assemblages.”

85. Essentially this is a paraphrasing of Harcourt when he states: “The point here is simply that a single representational tactic may be at once programmatically scientific and practically evasive” (Harcourt, “The Anatomy of Antique Sculpture,” 42). However, where Harcourt tends to write from the perspective of “authorial intent” (hence it is a “representational tactic”), I wish to follow this otherwise suggestive claim through its more discursive possibilities; something that is absent from all literature on this matter.

86. Leonardo da Vinci, quoted in Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 111.

87. Leonardo da Vinci, quoted in ibid.

88. Ferrari, “Public Anatomy Lessons,” 42.

89. Ibid.

90. Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy, 28.

91. Ferrari, “Public Anatomy Lessons,” 99.

92. Ibid.

93. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 40.

94. One of the few authors to have commented on this association between carnival and anatomy is Andrea Carlino. What is interesting about his account, however, is the way this association has been configured, essentially, as an opportunistic one: “Even if dissection was to be considered a transgressive and profane act, it was tolerated because it took place at a time when every form of subversion and inversion was concealed under the guise of performance.” Carlino, Books of the Body, 81. The inference here is that, apart from a shared sense of “transgressiveness,” carnival and anatomy were essentially two unrelated enterprises. This, I wish to suggest, was not the case: the association is a much more vital connection based on sacrifice and atonement.

95. For most authors the answer is deemed so obvious that the question is not worthy of being asked in the first place. Yet even if we only begrudgingly acknowledge that late Renaissance culture was structured with all manner of symbolic and religious associations, then surely the utilitarian answer “because they were there”—because they were already condemned, were not to be buried on hallowed ground, and so forth—seems woefully inadequate. Why seek answers from corrupt bodies? Yes, the discursive links to the scaffold were close, but we cannot see anatomy as merely another tool of retributive justice—as I have already pointed out: the figure of Dr. Tulp is the agent of a retributive justice, yet he is also the procurer of surgical information. There remains, then, the need to answer the question: why criminal bodies? And it is through a notion of carnival that an answer presents itself.

96. Barker, “Into the Vault,” 66.

97. Ferrari, “Public Anatomy Lessons,” 100.

98. Suggestive of this connection between anatomy, sacrifice, and feasting, Bakhtin’s Rabelais, who was praised on at least one occasion for his skill as an anatomist, describes victims of torture in a language bordering on the anatomic and the gastronomic. See Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 354–367. It should also be noted that Bakhtin’s grotesque body has striking similarities to the anatomized body, with its openness and connection to the generation of living matter.

99. Edgar Wind, “The Criminal-God,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 1, no. 3 (1938). The following account of the criminal-god is taken exclusively from Wind’s article. Frazer’s somewhat different take on the matter in his essay on the Scapegoat (volume 9 of The Golden Bough) will not be employed here. This is because I am less concerned with testing the veracity of Wind’s claims than I am with employing the narrative of the criminal-god as a motif to be read alongside another such notion, the criminal-saint, in order to explore the possibility of the continuance of certain elements of the sacred within the discourses of science.

100. Ibid., 243.

101. Ibid., 244.

102. Ibid.

103. Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy, 84.

104. Ibid., 87. Justice pictures developed in the second half of the fifteenth century in the Netherlands. Depicting scenes of the tortures and punishments described in the myths of the Ancients, these moralizing panels served as contemporary commentaries or warnings regarding crimes committed and virtues rewarded.

105. Ibid., 88.

106. Ibid., 87.

107. Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution During the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 217. Other authors have been keen to draw an iconographical connection between Becerra’s écorché and the Ovidian myth of Apollo flaying Marsyas. Pictorial renditions of the brutal bodily destruction of the satyr who dared to challenge a god to a contest of skill became decidedly popular during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (along with any number of other tales from the Metamorphoses). Vesalius’s De fabrica has a representation of the myth in the prominent historiated letter “V,” elevating the myth in the process (at least in the eyes of modern commentators) to the level of a general motif for the profession of anatomy itself. What is interesting in this regard is the aptness in this association precisely because of the brutal, retributive nature of Ovid’s tale. See Sawday, “The Fate of Marsyas,” 111–113.

108. Art historians have been most active in their efforts to delineate a clear connection between Becerra’s écorché and Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. It is not particularly difficult: Becerra was a student of Giorgio Vasari, who was a student of Michelangelo; Valverde (whose atlas Becerra was illustrating) was a student of Realdo Colombo, who was Michelangelo’s collaborator and personal physician. It seems likely, therefore, that Becerra would have seen Michelangelo’s controversial work in the Sistine Chapel (Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, 217–219, n 52).

109. Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy, 87, emphasis added.

110. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, 172–173.

111. The confraternities of the Catholic South were officially sanctioned organizations of laypeople tending to the needs and comfort of condemned criminals in return for “spiritual reward.” Recently discovered manuals of conduct of the Confraternity of San Giovanni Decollato suggest that the comforter’s words should address the following three prime concerns of the condemned: first, an assurance that their condemnation would not stain the reputation of their family; second, offering hope that a repentant and contrite soul would be given a place in Paradise; and third, the guarantee that the confraternity would attend to the body’s proper burial. It is interesting to note that the confraternities were responsible for the “loan” of bodies to the universities for their anatomies. They were delivered under the cover of night; fees would be paid for the use of the body, for prayers to be said for its soul, and for its return and burial after the dissection. For further details of the work of the confraternities, see Carlino, Books of the Body, 99–115. Although the tavolette were a strictly Catholic invention, we can see, in the justice panels of the Protestant North, similar equations being drawn between the choice of execution technique and the crime committed.

112. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, 131.

113. Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body,” 23.

114. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, 135.

115. Apart from the partition of the body for purposes of beatification and subsequent veneration, there existed a not unrelated practice of the dispersal of the remains of the nobility for burial purposes. Promulgated in 1300, the bull of Boniface viii against the partition and dispersal of the body was aimed at the practice of nobles, and in particular the English monarchy, whose penchant for such practices was based on the popular belief that the dead would derive satisfaction from such an arrangement. For more details, see Brown, “The Legislation of Boniface viii on the Division of the Corpse.”

116. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 99.

117. Account of Sr. Francesca of Filigno, quoted in Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body,” 2.

118. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 100.

119. Ferrari, “Public Anatomy Lessons,” 101; David Murray, Museums: Their History and Their Use, vol. 1 (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, Publishers to the University, 1904), 57, 56.

120. Peter Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons,” in Douglas Hay, ed., Albion’s Fatal Tree (London: Pantheon Books, 1975), 109.

121. See chapter head for Vasari’s full description of the deed.

122. Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body,” 26.

123. The public nature of these moralizing collections (as opposed to the largely private princely collections) has led at least one modern author to make the assertion that these anatomy theaters represent the first truly public museums. There is nothing in this hastily made suggestion that would discredit the general argument of my first chapter regarding Renaissance discourses of collection and display being completely dissimilar to the modern museum. The reference in question is Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy, 97–98.

124. Schupbach has identified two discrete meanings behind the motto Nosce te ipsum: the first being the somewhat pessimistic tradition of the medieval memento mori, referring to the mortality of the flesh; the second being related to the underlying principle of the curiosity cabinet (cognitio Dei), referring to the divinity of the flesh. The dual meaning of this phrase indicates that anatomy was at once a moralizing lesson concerned with the frailty or transience of human life, as well as a search for the traces and fragments of God’s creation in that most perfect of creations: the microcosm of humankind.

125. Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy, 99.

126. Ibid., 164 n 79.

127. Ibid., 105.

128. For further details of this narrative, see Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 66–78.

129. Harcourt, “The Anatomy of Antique Sculpture,” 30.

130. Jansen, “Titian’s Laocoon Caricature and the Vesalius-Galenist Controversy,” 51.

131. Harcourt, “The Anatomy of Antique Sculpture,” 29.

132. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 47.

133. Robert Musil, “Monuments,” in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author (Colombia: Eridanos Press, 1987), 62.

134. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 43.

135. Ibid., 52.

136. Ibid., 1, 32.

137. Ibid., 1, 52.

138. Peter Stewart, “The Destruction of Statues in Late Antiquity,” in Richard Miles, ed., Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1999), 162.

Chapter 3

1. Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600–1750 (Suffolk: Penguin, 1990), 139–140.

2. Martin Kemp, “Perspective and Meaning: Illusion, Allusion and Collusion,” in Andrew Harrison, ed., Philosophy and the Visual Arts: Seeing and Abstracting (Boston: Riedel, 1987), 256.

3. I wish to leave the details of geometric perspective for later, and even then I do not wish to dwell excessively on the history of the Western “discovery” of perspective, but to say that Filippo Brunelleschi was the first artist to conduct a perspective “experiment” (which was a demonstration of the principle of the vanishing point) on the steps of the Duomo in Florence in 1425—nor do I wish to dwell on the mechanics of single-point perspective, which, like art-historical theories regarding color or naturalism, have a tendency to be overly turgid. As it is my ultimate desire to explore perspective in terms of it being a discursively structured mode of rendering the world to the view of particular (though not necessarily fixed) subjectivities, all I require of the reader is the most rudimentary understanding of the optics of perspective: that linear perspective renders the illusion of depth by depicting all compositional orthogonals as converging upon a single point (often in relation to a horizon) known as a vanishing point, thereby forming a receding grid within which compositional elements may be placed; and that if this vanishing point were reflected back through the picture plane, as if it were a mirror, then it would have a mathematically equidistant corollary in the so-called viewing point. Innumerable sources exist for both the history and the mathematics of perspective; however, for its use of contemporary Renaissance treatises and its conciseness in both these matters, see Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975). For an accessible account of the mathematics of perspective as it pertains to the visual arts, see Martin Kemp, “The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 342–345.

4. Maurice Henri Pirenne, Optics, Painting and Photography (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 84.

5. A velo or “veil” was a device for transferring scale drawings, often associated with a window-like aperture across which was suspended a grid of fine woven thread. Jonathan Crary has suggested that the “interiority” of image production associated with the camera obscura stands as a perfect metaphor for the late Renaissance production of an individuated, observing subject (Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994], 22–66). While I do not wish to refute the aptness of this association, it is the velo that, I wish to suggest, should be seen as the quintessence of Renaissance ocular technologies insofar as its gridlike structure represented nothing short of the dominant mode of visualizing and capturing a “world picture”; something that, according to Heidegger, underpins and precedes the formulation of such a subject position. I will return to the implications of this statement shortly; for now I merely wish to flag a wider association between Western single-point perspective and the means for organizing the visible world as a geometric composition, structured on an evenly spaced grid.

6. Published in two volumes (1693 and 1700), the Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum went through fifteen editions before 1800. Although not as seminal a work as Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura (1435), which was the first treatise to explain the merits of linear perspective for artistic composition and enjoyed steady republication right up till 1970, Pozzo’s literary work clearly was as influential as his quadratura was controversial.

7. Andrea Pozzo, quoted in Kemp, “The Science of Art,” 139.

8. Andrea Pozzo, quoted in ibid.

9. It also gives us an indication as to why baroque art proved so unpopular with nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art historians: this was an art that subordinated intellectual and literary associations to sensual and physical responses. The supposed “playfulness” of baroque art that raised the ire of a century’s worth of art critics can be seen here to be a certain kind of self-consciousness (something usually reserved for modern art), in that baroque art expressly sought to manipulate its own modes of production to affect its viewer’s physicality with regard to the painting/sculpture proper.

10. Walter Benjamin quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 130–131.

11. Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 59.

12. Walter Benjamin, “Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso, 1997), 165.

13. Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 42.

14. John W. Stamper, “The Galerie des Machines of the 1889 Paris World’s Fair,” Technology and Culture 30, no. 2 (1989).

15. Williams, Dream Worlds, 84–85.

16. Benjamin, “Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 165.

17. Zeynip Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World’s Fairs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 72.

18. It is not my intention to leave the vantage point of Eiffel’s tower to provide an exhaustive description of exhibition practices as they happened “on the ground,” nor even a critique of the various imperial and sexual metanarratives that underpinned them: such “legwork” has been exhaustively conducted by numerous other authors. Rather, my intention is to deploy the expositions as a device for opening up an analysis of modern spatial practices, in much the same way that Timothy Mitchell deploys them to open up issues of representation. Hence the significance of my narrativized view from atop the Eiffel Tower, which I am presenting as a kind of de Certeauian “spatial story” (the meaning of which will be explained later).

Regarding the “legwork” conducted by others, it should be noted that almost without exception this wealth of material is descriptive in nature (postcolonial theory being a conspicuous absence) and generally concerned either with “representations of race” (Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994], esp. 187–216) or “the commodi- fication of cultures” (Meg Armstrong, “A Jumble of Foreignness: The Sublime Musayums of Nineteenth-Century Fairs and Expositions,” Cultural Critique 23 [1992–1993]). Two (partial) exceptions to this rule would be Tony Bennett’s (somewhat overly) Foucauldian analysis of the “Exhibitionary Complex” (Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics [London: Routledge, 1995]) and Curtis Hinsley’s underdeveloped allusions to flânerie (Curtis M. Hinsley, “Strolling through the Colonies,” in Michael P. Steinberg, ed., Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996]). For a specific analysis of the gendered nature of exposition practice, see Zeynep Çelik and Leila Kinney, “Ethnography and Exhibitionism at the Expositions Universelles,”Assemblage 13 (1990).

19. Charles Garnier quoted in Çelik, Displaying the Orient, 72. The tradition of portraying subject peoples in pavilions that were themselves summaries of cultures would become a mainstay of expositions for years to come. An indication of the imbricated nature of this vision of scientific transparency and commodity consumption can be seen in the ethnographic “experiments” of Franz Boas at the Chicago world’s fair of 1893. Before a white sheet in a facsimile village, Boas recorded his observations of the ceremonial dances of a group of Kwakiutl Indians from Fort Rupert, British Columbia. In many instances Boas urged his Kwakiutl performers to reproduce rituals that they had ceased to practice; Boas, it would seem, was equally struck by the idea of “truth, truer than true.” These proceedings were carefully recorded by photographer John Grabill, and were subsequently sold as souvenir postcards to curious fairgoers. See Curtis M. Hinsley, “The World as Marketplace: Commodification of the Exotic at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893,” in Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 350.

20. Charles Garnier quoted in Çelik, Displaying the Orient, 70–71.

21. Jean-Claude Vigato, “The Architecture of the Colonial Exhibitions in France,” Daedalus 19 (1986): 28.

22. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 6.

23. Jean Baudrillard, “The Orders of Simulacra,” in Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 87. A potential point of confusion arises in Baudrillard’s use of terminology here, as he has a tendency to alternate between a conception of baroque art being discursively allied to a Renaissance episteme, and being a characteristic of the Enlightenment’s “classical” episteme. However, this is easily enough resolved: as we saw in chapter 1, baroque art commences at the turn of the seventeenth century, and can thereby be seen as flourishing at precisely that moment when a Renaissance “Order of Things” is about to give way to the homogenizing influences of the Enlightenment. Baudrillard’s own example of stucco as the homogenizing substance par excellence is intended to illustrate an early instance whereby something we normally associate with the Renaissance begins to acquire the discursive qualities of the coming Enlightenment. In my brief rendition of Baudrillard’s “order of simulations” I have, therefore, taken the liberty of using the phrase “early classical” rather than “late Renaissance” to avoid such confusion. This is an important distinction given Baudrillard’s use of the term “counterfeit,” which, when discussing Renaissance art, should not be confused with a notion of the “fake.” As we saw in chapter 1, the notion of the fake was epistemologically vacuous in an age where signs were not locked into binary relationships with signifiers. This, however, is precisely what is happening with Baudrillard’s metaphysic of stucco: its homogenizing tendencies are actually a mark of the Enlightenment’s locking-down of signs into the flat tables of difference of an emerging scientific discourse. It is with the Enlightenment that the notion of the fake takes on its scandalous qualities. With regard to Renaissance art, “imitation” (of divine creation), therefore, is a more fitting term than “counterfeiting.”

24. Michael Gane, Baudrillard’s Bestiary: Baudrillard and Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), 95.

25. Baudrillard, “The Orders of Simulacra,” 88–89.

26. Benjamin, “Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 161.

27. Ibid., 162.

28. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 8.

29. Thomas Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types (London: Routledge, 1991), 215. In the case of the 1889 Parisian diorama this feature was not included, quite probably because it was deemed superfluous in the face of Eiffel’s tower.

30. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 9–10.

31. For details of the painting’s provenance, see Robert Koch, Joachim Patinir (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 32.

32. It seems quite remarkable to the modern observer that, as an independent genre, landscape painting did not exist before the sixteenth century. Prior to this time, if landscape elements were included in paintings then it was merely as a stage setting for the more sanctified themes of history painting (istoria). When landscape did begin to emerge from the background of history painting, it did so primarily within a group of Flemish artists, Joachim Patinir being first among them.

33. Walter S. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth: The World Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 5.

34. Ibid., 8.

35. Reindert L. Falkenburg, Joachim Patinir: Landscape as an Image of the Pilgrimage of Life, trans. Michael Hoyle (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1988), 66.

36. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 6.

37. For instance, although the fastidious “Alpine studies” of early Germanic Renaissance artists like Albrecht Dürer could not be considered an autonomous landscape genre in themselves (as they were more akin to an encyclopedic census of local flora and fauna), art history would find in the majestic battle scenes of Albrecht Altdorfer a worthy heir to this tradition of nature studies; one that would see Dürer as the antecedent, and Altdorfer as the direct descendant, of a “naturalistic” portrayal of landscape views. See Keith Moxey, “A New Look at Netherlandish Landscape and Still-Life Painting,” Arts in Virginia 26, no. 2 (1986): 22. The problem with the Weltlandschaft was that this neat teleology of landscape’s progression could not be so easily charted. It was, in effect, an aesthetic with seemingly little or no artistic precedent.

38. Ernst Gombrich, “The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape,” in Norm and Form (London: Phaidon, 1966), 108–110.

39. In his desire to read Patinir’s landscapes as a metaphor for the “Pilgrimage of Life,” Falkenburg, for instance, takes the didactic motifs of Bosch (torture wheels, pagan images, ruined bridges, and highway bandits) and transposes them to his description of Patinir’s paintings to suggest that the landscape elements of Patinir’s paintings also represent a “world in sin” (Falkenburg, The Pilgrimage of Life, 67–69). The tenuous nature of this argument is of little concern to us here. What should be noted, however, is the extent to which Falkenburg is prepared to go in seeing Bosch as an “influence” on Patinir’s iconography. This lies in sharp contrast to his lack of discussion regarding the nature and meaning of Patinir’s use of the Weltlandschaft aesthetic.

40. Charles Talbot, “Topography as Landscape in Early Printed Books,” in Sandra Hindman, ed., The Early Illustrated Book: Essays in Honor of Lessing J. Rosenwald (Washington: Library of Congress, 1982), 113.

41. This was certainly the impression the publishers of the Civitates wanted to cultivate. In the editor’s introduction, Braun cited the following list of professions his book was aimed at satisfying (quoted in Lucia Nutti, “The Perspective Plan in the Sixteenth Century,” Art Bulletin 74, no. 1 [1994]: 107):

the traveler in search of a guide for the places he is going to visit; the merchant keen to find out about commercial sites and trading customs; the military man eager to become familiar with the defense system of his immanent objectives; the citizen hungry for deeper knowledge of his own country; and finally the scholar wishing for a round-the-world trip, while comfortably ensconced in his chair, and free of the costs and risks of a real journey.

Although it is easily dismissed as mere self-promotion, two things can be taken from this passage: first, the idea that viewing a precise topographical study was deemed equivalent to standing before the city itself (as in the case of the so-called “military man” sizing up a city’s defenses); and second the related notion that images may serve as a vicarious form of travel. The latter, in particular, has obvious modern resonances with certain aspects of the tourism and publishing industries. In light of our previous discussion concerning the power of images in an age of wonderment, it is interesting to note the ways in which such adherence to an understanding of the power of images during the Renaissance can be dismissed as naïve magic by modern commentators, yet our own modern calls to the transparent accuracy of scientific imaging systems, or for that matter, capitalism’s ability to effect its own forms of vicarious travel through desire and imagery, are completely overlooked.

42. Isaac Massa’s story is taken from Johannes Keuning, “Isaac Massa, 1586–43,” Imago Mundi 10 (1953): 66–67.

43. As a final indication of both the “prized” nature of these topographical studies and their perceived utility, especially in matters of political espionage, we turn once again to the publishers of the Civitates, Braun and Hogenberg. They claimed that they included prominent figures in the foreground of their topographical views just in case one of their volumes fell into the hands of the Turks—the inference being that the presence of figural depictions would render the view unusable in matters of warfare (Svetlana Alpers, “The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art,” in David Woodward, ed., Art and Cartography [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], 67).

44. This, of course, is a direct reference to Michel de Certeau’s notion of a “spatial practice”; one of the “micro-techniques” of everyday engagement with the normative spatial strategies of contemporary discourse. Although I will return to this in greater detail shortly, I raise de Certeau at this point to acknowledge my debt to his notion that it is the everyday “lived” narrations of a city that transform place into space. In many ways this present section on the world landscape represents my effort to prefigure de Certeau’s comments on space and place: Patinir’s Weltlandschaft represents that historical moment when map and landscape were still very much fused.

45. As an aside, we are also now in a position to respond to Gombrich’s narrative regarding the rise of landscape as an independent genre being the result of a desire to provide the pictorial equivalent of a theoretical ideal inherited from the Ancients. While the Renaissance rediscovery of pastoral poetry may, indeed, have helped landscape to assert itself in the face of the dominance of history painting in Italy, Patinir’s Weltlandschaft points to a decidedly cartographic tradition of depicting the politicized nature of territorial Landschaft. In this regard, it is interesting to reflect upon Dürer’s oft-quoted opinion of Patinir as “the good landscape painter.” Although it is usually taken to mean that Patinir was the first landscape artist in the modern sense of the word, it is equally interesting to entertain the possibility that Dürer was referring to the word’s original meaning as a politicized topography.

46. Nicholas of Cusa quoted in Michel de Certeau, “The Gaze of Nicholas of Cusa,” Diacritics 17, no. 3 (1987): 2.

47. The Cusan method of the De icona is premised on participants being witness to an “absolute” in the form of a “point of view,” unfettering their being from the ontologically hierarchical cosmos that defined Christian Creation. Such witnessing is at once singular, total, and irreplaceable, hence replete with infinite potentiality with regard to other beings. This, de Certeau speculates, is an early mystical rendition of the modern individual (ibid., 6).

48. Nicholas of Cusa quoted in ibid., 11.

49. Nicholas of Cusa quoted in ibid.

50. Here, yet again, is an instance of the epistemological certainty of the copy during the Renaissance. Nicholas of Cusa lists a handful of images that he has seen with the “all-seer” quality, including a painting of St. Veronica in his own chapel at Koblenz. He makes little mention of the image that he sends to the abbey at Tegernsee but for the following: “So that you should lack for nothing in an exercise that requires the perceptible figure that was at my disposal, I am sending you a painting that shows that figure of an all-seer, which I call the icon of God” (ibid.). What is interesting is that there is no question, here, that Nicholas of Cusa can employ a copyist to repaint his “all-seer” icon, and its attributes will remain intact. The language is most revealing in this regard: he is sending “a painting that shows that figure of an all-seer.” The logical inference is that the figure “exists” or “resides” within his icon; in sending a copy of it he sends with it its ability to see all.

51. Nicholas of Cusa quoted in ibid., 12.

52. Nicholas of Cusa quoted in ibid.

53. Ibid., 14.

54. Ibid., 18.

55. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, 16.

56. These arguments bring us back to the medieval theories of light discussed in chapter 1, as it was light, in the form of lux, which was the means through which the divine grace of God was propagated, and it was light that came to be regarded as an intimate manifestation of God’s rational presence in nature’s design. Hence the importance to Renaissance theologians of studying the ways in which light was seen to reflect, refract, and transmit—all three being seen as issues of spiritual importance. See Kemp, “The Science of Art,” 26.

57. Interestingly enough, apart from the Alexandrian Greek Ptolemy, one of the first exponents of the centric ray theorem was the Hellenic physician Galen, whose anatomical studies (as we saw in chapter 2) dominated knowledge of the body for a thousand years.

58. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, 69.

59. Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., “Florentine Interest in Ptolemaic Cartography as Background for Renaissance Painting, Architecture, and the Discovery of America,” Architectural Forum 56 (1976): 178.

60. Paul Hirst, Foucault and Architecture (Sydney: Local Consumption, 1984), 8.

61. The influence of the moralizing geometry of linear perspective on the Renaissance built environment was in no way limited to its ideally proportioned, centrally planned churches. Yet clearly it also constitutes a book unto itself. Although it is somewhat subsidiary to our present narrative regarding the technologies employed for picturing the world, it is not without its relevance, as we will see when discussion turns to the technology of cartographic mapping which, I wish to claim, works above all through its ability to transform landscape itself into the image of the map. However, at this point I merely wish to touch on two aspects of Renaissance architecture that are relevant to our more immediate concerns; the first regarding modern narratives of disciplinary technologies, the second, a recapitulation of the epistemic nature of discourse.

In the writings of Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci we can find the curious preemption of the nineteenth century’s wholesale leveling of city blocks in the colonial cities of Cairo and Calcutta, and the implementation of Haussmannesque boulevards to open these cities up to a controlling gaze. Transposing the moralizing influence of the centric ray theorem to town planning, both authors suggested that straight and wide avenues radiating from a centralized piazza, with either gates or bastions capping each axis, would serve to infuse a city with divine grace and raise the moral level of the inhabitants. What is otherwise seen as the “functionality” of the nineteenth-century colonial practice is hereby preempted as “spiritually functional” (Martha Pollak, Military Architecture: Cartography and the Early Modern European City [Chicago: Newberry Library, 1991], xx). For a discussion of the leveling of Cairo as part of a strategy for the disciplining and control of its inhabitants, see Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 63–65. For the way similar techniques were deployed in European cities as part of a strategy to educate and make docile the working classes, see Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 17–24. What strikes me about this literature on the modern disciplinary effects of town planning, whether at home or abroad, is how far removed its discussion is from notions of the sacred. Particularly in the case of the disciplining of the working classes through an attempt to raise their moral fiber in the mechanics’ institutes and museums of the nineteenth century, it is as if it is the sacred, not the working classes themselves, which is being disciplined.

The extent to which Renaissance architectural discourse was underpinned by a moralized geometry of ideal and harmonious proportions can be clearly seen in the otherwise secular domains of architecture; military architecture being a case in point. The Renaissance preoccupation with perspective and magnificence surfaced in the form of the bastion trace, a pentagonally shaped fortification, which was at once aesthetic, moral, and designed to inspire awe among the citizens of the cities it protected. Most standard military histories refute the claim that a form of fortification deemed so practical well into the nineteenth century could have anything to do with symbolism (John Hale, Renaissance Fortification: Art or Engineering [London: Thames and Hudson, 1977], 46). Yet for architects working with a Renaissance episteme, the practicality of such a design would be no accident, but rather a function of the harmony and intrinsic superiority of certain forms (Hirst, Foucault and Architecture, 13). Both of these examples also help to illustrate the ease with which the visual regime underpinning the Cusan method slipped between the purely esoteric and the concrete: perspective being at once mathematical, theological, and practical. These examples also help to reinforce the idea that perspective operated at the level of discourse, and was seen very much as a tool for the transformation of people’s very being.

62. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, 30.

63. Ibid., 24, 30.

64. It is the complete lack of an artificial spatial recession, like single-point perspective, that has led to medieval art being labeled naïve. In medieval art, depth is suggested by overlaying compositional elements on top of one another, while compositional forms are generally rendered as if seen from different angles or viewpoints concurrently (buildings often showing three sides to the viewer). This lack of spatial homogeneity is quite telling for our present discussion, as what the medieval artist is displaying in rendering the world in this fashion is not a naïveté on their part, but rather a more subjectified way of viewing the world: it is as if the artist is absorbed within the world he or she is attempting to represent, rather than taking the detached viewpoint of the perspective painter. This will become particularly relevant shortly, when discussion moves to the de Certeauian notion of narrative through movement: the spatial practice.

65. John Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 67.

66. Edgerton, “Florentine Interest in Ptolemaic Cartography,” 278.

67. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, 119.

68. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 106.

69. Ibid., 107.

70. Jorge Luis Borges and Aldolfo Bioy Casares, A Universal History of Infamy, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 131.

71. Baudrillard, “The Orders of Simulacra,” 2.

72. David Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge (Singapore: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000), 92.

73. Ibid. The pervasiveness of the cartographic metaphor beyond geographical understanding, to include our very conception of how knowledge is both structured and ordered, has led Denis Wood to suggest that one of the prime characteristics of Western modernity is its “map-immersed” nature (Denis Wood, The Power of Maps [New York: Guilford Press, 1992], 34–38). In contrast to this, Turnbull has suggested that the relationship between cartography and scientific knowledge goes beyond mere metaphor, arguing instead that there is an especially powerful symbiotic and symbolic synergy between them (Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers, 95).

74. John Brian Harley, “Silences and Secrecies: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe,” Imago Mundi 40 (1988).

75. John Brian Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica 26, no. 2 (1989): 8. Although he invokes the names of both Derrida and Foucault, unfortunately a generally uncritical reading of both authors plagued Harley’s early writings. For instance, to speak of the hidden political agendas of the association between cartography and the nation-state is to evoke a concept of power (and subjectivity) at odds with a discursive reading of maps. As we have already seen from our discussion of Foucault’s Life of Infamous Men, if the author is conceived as a function of discourse, then texts must be examined independently of the people who write them. In the case of maps, to subscribe to a notion of either deliberate or subconscious censorship (Harley, “Silences and Secrecies,” 57), or even to posit a division between internal and external conceptions of power exercised by or through cartography (Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” 12), is to invest in a concept of power as a “commodity,” and a notion that subjects may be external to power—both of which Foucault would refute. In her critical evaluation of Harley’s work, Barbara Belyea puts it thus: “If there is no subtext, no internal/external distinction, if the subject is a part of the discourse rather than a force ‘behind’ it, then there can be no ‘mask,’ no ‘veil’ behind which the map functions, no ‘hidden agendas’ by which ‘human agents’ exercise ‘duplicity.’” (Barbara Belyea, “Images of Power: Derrida/ Foucault/Harley,” Cartographica 29, no. 2 [1992]: 3.)

76. An indication of just how long these teleological understandings of cartography persisted can be seen in any number of examples; the following will suffice as an illustration: “Mapmaking as a form of decorative art belongs to the informal, prescientific phase of cartography. When cartographers had neither the geographical knowledge nor the cartographic skill to make accurate maps, fancy and artistry had free range.” (Ronald Rees, “Historical Links between Cartography and Art,” Geographical Review 70, no. 1 [1980]: 62.)

77. Clearly it is not my intention to engage in any kind of extensive survey of the history of cartography. Rather, I merely wish to briefly sketch the general tenor of these early historiographical efforts, as we will shortly find that the more recent and critical forays into this domain have, in many ways, been shaped (much to their detriment) by the trajectories of these earlier concerns to “fill in the blanks,” as it were, of the history of cartography.

78. John Brian Harley and David Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, vol. 1, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), xvi.

79. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 259–313.

80. Ibid., 260.

81. Thongchai Winichakul, “Siam Mapped: Making of Thai Nationhood,” Ecologist 26, no. 5 (1996).

82. Ibid., 220–221.

83. What is noteworthy about this particular encounter between these different conceptions of territorial space is the appropriation, around 1880, of European techniques of mapping by the Siamese court, as a means of countering French incursions into the region. As Thongchai suggests: “They [the Siamese] came to believe that modern geography was the only language the West would hear; in particular, they considered that only a modern map would counter French claims to the areas along the Mekong river which Siam wanted for itself. To define their margins for exclusive sovereignty, the French and the Siamese fought with both force and maps” (ibid., 222).

84. For an excellent analysis of the division that existed between a masculine conception of reading abstract cartographies and its feminized counterpart of looking at landscape paintings, see Eileen Reeves, “Reading Maps,” Word and Image 9, no. 1 (1993). For a more general account of both the racial and gendered aspects of cartography, see Karen Piper, Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race and Identity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002).

85. Ricardo Padrón, “Mapping Plus Ultra: Cartography, Space and Hispanic Modernity,” Representations 79 (2002): 44.

86. Ibid.

87. Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power: Interview with Paul Rabinow,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 254.

88. Ibid., 255.

89. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

90. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 115–117.

91. Ibid., 117.

92. Ibid., 118. I will elaborate upon this movement later, as it relates to de Certeau’s dialectic of “strategies” and “tactics”: the discursive operators that situate both space and place within a wider critique of Foucault’s disciplinary power.

93. Paul D. A. Harvey, Medieval Maps (London: British Library, 1991), 7. One of the oldest surviving and most famous itinerary maps of this kind is the Tabula Peutingeriana. Depicting fourth-century Europe (from West Britain to East India, North Africa to the reaches of Scandinavia) the dimensions of the Peutinger map give us an indication of just how far from the spatial associations of the modern map these itineraries were. Rolled out, the map is nearly seven meters in length, yet only thirty centimeters in width; its function of depicting major travel routes throughout Europe clearly required only a rectilinear marking of roadways converging on Rome. See O. A. W. Dilke, “Itineraries and Geographical Maps in the Early and Late Roman Empire,” in Harley and Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, vol. 1.

94. For a comprehensive study of the compositional form of the medieval mappamundi, as well as an effort to locate its spatial and historical conceptualizations of the world with a broader “theology,” see Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (London: British Library, 1997), esp. 145–163.

95. David Woodward, “Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space in Medieval World Maps,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74, no. 4 (1985): 511.

96. David Turnbull has openly questioned the notion of a cartographic “revolution,” rightly pointing out that the idea that geometric cartography suddenly came to dominate Western spatial imaginations from the middle of the sixteenth century onward is an historical fancy; the product of modern historians writing over the persistence of other spatial depictions like the seafaring portolan chart (Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers, 101–105). Turnbull suggests that cartography would remain the exclusive concern of intellectuals until a means was devised to enable this particular form of spatial imagination to be “useful” as a tool of management and control, something that did not really happen until the General Ordnance Surveys of the nineteenth century enabled the standardization of previously separate local knowledge and practices. Although this is a cogent argument, de Certeau enables us to suggest (in much the same way that Foucault allowed us in the previous two chapters) that this supposedly “revolutionary” shift should in fact be sought in the epistemological certainty of the image as an “independent” product of direct observation rather than as an aid to, and an outcome of, an essentially textual “reading” of the narrative acts behind itinerary images. In a similar way to the images of Giulio Camillo’s “memory theater,” then, the graphic representations of medieval itinerary maps, and in particular the ecclesiastic mappamundi, would function textually—much like mnemonic devices for the elaboration of Scripture. With the coming of the Renaissance episteme, however, this textually based knowledge system would give way to the scopic realm of Vesalius, and, we may now add, the cartographer: images would come to be seen, as Isaac Massa would put it, as “placing before the eyes something truer than truth itself.”

97. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 121.

98. Ibid.

99. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), 73.

100. Edgerton, “Florentine Interest in Ptolemaic Cartography,” 278.

101. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, 98.

102. Ibid., 104. A debate has raged within the ranks of art historians and historians of cartography alike as to whether Ptolemy’s third method of cartographic projection was in fact an instance of the linear perspective enunciated by Renaissance artists, like Alberti. This is precisely the kind of art- historical and history-of-science commonplace that we have witnessed at work on numerous occasions already. Yet, although the search for a causal link between these two renditions of the perspectival grid would normally be of little concern to a discursive approach, from within this debate an interesting distinction is drawn that is worth mentioning; one regarding the viewpoints for whom these grids were constructed. Svetlana Alpers, in disagreeing with the general stance of Edgerton, suggests that “Although the grid Ptolemy proposed … share[s] the mathematical uniformity of the Renaissance perspective grid, [it] do[es] not share the positioned viewer, the frame, and the definition of the picture as a window through which an external viewer looks. … The projection is, one might say, a view from nowhere” (Alpers, “The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art,” 71). What Alpers is referring to here is the distinction between the embodied view that Albertian perspective presupposes and the somewhat disembodied view of a map. I will return to the significance of this shift in viewpoint (and its corresponding point of view) with regard to Foucault’s panoptic gaze in the final section of this chapter. For now, however, it is enough to suggest that whether strictly embodied or not, what we are referring to with the Ptolemaic grid is a geometrical rendering of the world to the view of a particular external gaze.

103. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, 114.

104. Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers, 105–113.

105. The portolan chart, with its dense array of coastal toponyms inviting the eye to trace itineraries across its surface, functioned through a technique of way-finding: locating a destination point along a linear projection of coastline, aligning the ship so that it will trace the straightest path between these two coastal points, and setting sail. During the Middle Ages such techniques would be exclusively coast-bound, the navigator tracing the path of coastal features and toponyms with both eye and vessel, allowing the spatiality of the voyage to proceed along a line of well-traversed names. However, during the Renaissance the skill of navigators in the art of “dead reckoning”— the art of estimating speed and distance—would enable the projection of such itinerary lines without the citations of proper place that would normally constitute the beginning and end points of a journey: “At once, then, the [portolan]chart [comes to] figure the spaciousness of the sea as well as its reduction to a network of itineraries” (Padrón, “Mapping Plus Ultra,” 52). Of course it must be acknowledged that the ability to conceptualize an itinerary with no proper-place citations was, itself, a function of a cartographic understanding of space. Thus we can suggest that, much like de Certeau’s description of the sixteenth-century map with the depiction of ships and sea monsters being pushed to the margins as all that remains of the spatial itineraries that authorized the production of the map, at the time of the Padrón Real map and itinerary are still very much entwined. As Ricardo Padrón puts it: “As a highly rationalized cartographic product that retains its connection with way-finding, as a map that figures space in and through that serve to experience and construct it, the [portolan] chart seems to internalize that opposition between plane and line, and to place the two in a creative tension” (Padrón, “Mapping Plus Ultra,” 54).

106. Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers, 110.

107. Piper, Cartographic Fictions, 41–42. For a detailed history of the trigonometric surveys of India, particularly with regard to cartography’s role in the production of a rationalized space of Imperial rule, see Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), esp. 236–261. For a critical evaluation of the ensuing technological organization of India that was to follow in the wake of such cartographic spatial rationalizations with the forging of irrigation and manufacturing networks, railways, telegraphs, and so forth, see Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), esp. 159–201.

108. Piper, Cartographic Fictions, 43. The British solution to this impasse was one with similar political overtones to the story of Isaac Massa and his efforts to procure a map of Moscow during the sixteenth century. In what were known as the Pundit Expeditions, Britain would send native Hindus into Tibet incognito to record latitudinal coordinates for collection and collation once their missions were complete. Taught merely to take measured recordings, not to construct or even carry anything that resembled a map, for fear that they might fabricate results, the pundits were essentially viewed as threats to the very maps they were creating. Piper reads this historical narrative and the desire for cartographic representations of the so-called “neutral zones” largely in terms of British racial fears and efforts to neutralize them: cartography being seen here, essentially, as “a white language” (Piper, Cartographic Fictions, 12–13, 49). In posing this historical narrative in this manner, Piper focuses on cartography as a means of eliminating racial identity (the pundits are denied their rightful claims to the authorship of these maps). Furthermore, Piper tends to read the British need for indigenous “informants” primarily in terms of their ability to carry out the physical labor or “legwork” of cartography. While I do not wish to deny these claims, Piper’s approach has a tendency to miss that aspect of cartographic practice that operates at the level of discourse, as expressed in the fears of those inhabitants of these so-called “neutral zones” who regarded cartography as a means of territorial conquest: the European appropriation of actual indigenous spatial narratives for their own mapping exercises.

109. See in particular Bruno Latour’s account of cartography as action at a distance, wherein he expressly states (with a degree of condescension) that cartography relies on the translation of indigenous knowledge into “inscriptions” to be taken away to “centers of calculation”: “The implicit geography of the natives is made explicit by the geographers; the local knowledge of the savages becomes the universal knowledge of the cartographers; the fuzzy, approximate and ungrounded beliefs of the locals are turned into a precise, certain and justified knowledge” (Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society [Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987], 216; original emphasis).

110. Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 21. Of particular interest to our present discussion is Niranjana’s stress on the ontological capacities of translation to summon forth into discourse a romantic, primitivized “native” awaiting the civilizing influence of the West.

111. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1986).

112. Latour, Science in Action, 215–236.

113. Ibid., 251.

114. See also Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (Hong Kong: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. 101–127. Ryan makes a similar claim that as explorers increasingly valorized the verticality of maps over the horizontality of the land, this encouraged “the construction of the land as a system of signs” (Ryan, The Cartographic Eye, 121).

115. The inordinate number of references to de Certeau’s “spatial practices” as extradiscursive resistances (that is, resistance with a capital R) can be found in sources as diverse as Cultural Studies readers, urban geography texts, and performance art handbooks. These obvious references aside, a measure of the allure of this reading of de Certeau’s “spatial practices” is evident in the otherwise important critical work of Ian Buchanan, who places the interaction of de Certeau’s modern subject with the spatial formations of modernity in direct opposition to Jameson’s somewhat Foucauldian notion that space is the discursive precondition for the constitution of modern subjectivities. The effect of this is that de Certeau’s spatial practices come to be seen as oppositional to the discourses of the panoptic impulse. See Ian Buchanan, “Heterophenomenology, or De Certeau’s Theory of Space,” Social Semiotics 6, no. 1 (1996): 111–132.

116. One need only read the essay “The Laugh of Michel Foucault” to get an inkling of de Certeau’s engagement with Foucault both professionally and personally. As de Certeau recalls the occasion when Foucault responded to the question of how he would categorize his own work with: “No, no, I’m not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you,” the reader can almost make out the glimmer of pride in his eyes. Yet what I find fascinating about this essay is the uncanny resemblance between Foucault’s response on that occasion and de Certeau’s own approach to Foucauldian discourse: “do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing … a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself [?]” In many ways, this labyrinth of winding and sheltering passageways is a beautiful illustration of how de Certeau sees his own “spatial practices” in action. As a collection of “procedures” or “micro-techniques” enmeshed within the folds of disciplinary power, the spatial practice operates, above all, by traversing the normalized disciplinary grid, criss-crossing it with unseen itineraries, thereby providing us with a more nuanced understanding of the modern “disciplined” subject. See Michel de Certeau, “The Laugh of Michel Foucault,” in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).

117. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93.

118. On numerous occasions de Certeau stresses that the poem which each body traces upon the surface of the city in its daily movements is not only largely illegible to the panoptic eye, but also blind unto itself: “It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness” (ibid.). What is suggested by this is that the willful author/agent other writers would have de Certeau’s city practitioner be is actually more akin to the Foucauldian subject as a product of discourse; both authors largely reject the notion of extradiscursive subjectivities.

119. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 92.

120. Ken Hillis, “The Power of Disembodied Imagination: Perspective’s Role in Cartography,” Cartographica 31, no. 3 (1994): 4.

121. Ibid.

122. This dialectic is, of course, already expressed in de Certeau’s use of the terms “strategies” and “tactics,” which in turn correspond to the two related organizations of space discussed above: the proper “place” and the narrativized “space.” While it is suggestive of the kind of binary relationship between state-sanctioned discipline and resisting individual that I am in the midst of critiquing, de Certeau’s characterization of them actually accords with a conception of power in a constant state of flux: the strategic field of discursive operations being constantly traversed by the tactical, only to be incorporated back into the fold, invigorating those discourses in the process. What I am attempting to suggest is that corresponding to de Certeau’s understandings of the micro-techniques that operate within the folds of Foucauldian disciplinary power are different subject “embodiments.” Particularly because of the way disciplinary power tends to bring subjects into discourse through a crushing corporeality (as we saw with the discourses of medical anatomy in chapter 2), we tend to forget the existence of other modern subject embodiments, or rather, we tend to read even the micro-techniques of discourse in terms of strictly corporeal embodiments. I am trying to suggest that in the need to place the body back into conceptions and theorizations of space, we need to acknowledge the body’s less than bodily desires.

123. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 172.

124. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 48, 68.

125. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 28–33. At this point I should differentiate my argument from Mitchell’s rendition of the “world as exhibition.” In much the same way as I have argued that the “pictorialization” of the world preceded, or quite literally laid the ground for, Foucault’s cellular grid of disciplinary technologies by either inscribing power structures into the very ground itself or spilling a geometrically based visual ordering of the world out from the picture plane, I would argue the same in Mitchell’s case. Although this is not expressly acknowledged, Mitchell’s “world as exhibition” is a reconfiguration of Heidegger’s world picture. But in reducing a modern ordering of the world to a (very) Foucauldian understanding of the exhibitionary complex (one that precedes Tony Bennett’s coining of the phrase), a disjuncture is produced between the ontological effects of Mitchell’s modern “reality effect” of the exhibition and the nature of the view from atop the pyramids. For Mitchell, the desire to acquire this view is subsumed within the need to find the “real” Orient that exhibition suggested was to be found “out there.” But this has little to do with the actual privilege of such an elevated vantage point. What I am suggesting is that in staying closer to Heidegger’s original concept of a world picture (albeit a more inclusive one than Heidegger would have it), we return meaning (an ontological meaning) to the position atop the pyramids. In short, what Mitchell’s search for a “reality effect” is actually referring to is the search for a distinction between the geometry of the world behind the picture plane of the perspectival construction, and the now innate geometry of the world that has spilled out of the frame to colonize space on this side of the picture: the world picture preceding the exhibition. It is here that our previous spatial narrative atop the Eiffel Tower assumes its full significance: residing in the architectural achievements of modernity is the mechanical realization of the totalizing eye that painters of an earlier time could only image (to paraphrase de Certeau).

126. Ryan, The Cartographic Eye, 93.

127. Hillis, “Perspective’s Role in Cartography,” 7.

128. Wood, The Power of Maps, 66.

129. In fact, as early as 1654, Canon Jean-Baptiste Souchet saw in the labyrinth at Chartres nothing more than “a foolish amusement whereby those with little to do waste time twisting and turning” (Jean Villette, “L’énigme du labyrinthe de la cathédrale, Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Chartres,” undated pamphlet, 5). In the vicinity of Chartres alone, labyrinths were destroyed at Auxerre in 1690, Sens in 1768, Reims in 1778, Arras in 1795, and Amiens in 1825; these dates tend to indicate that the function of the church labyrinth was all but lost to the more “enlightened” age of the eighteenth century. It is believed that only twenty-three churches remain in Europe with an original pavement labyrinth, most of them in Britain and France (John James, “The Mystery of the Great Labyrinth, Chartres Cathedral,” Studies in Comparative Religion 11, no. 2 [1977]: 93). In recent years, however, the romantic appeal of the church labyrinth has brought about a resurgence of such designs not only in church imagery (particularly in the asphalt playgrounds of church schools), but also in a host of non-Christian settings paralleling the resurgence of interest in pre-Christian religious beliefs in the West.

130. Nigel Pennick, Mazes and Labyrinths (London: Robert Hale, 1990), 134.

131. Ibid., 112.

132. J. O. Ward, “Alexandria and Its Medieval Legacy: The Book, the Monk and the Rose,” in Roy Macleod, ed., The Library of Alexandria: Centre of Learning in the Ancient World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 172.

133. Gregory of Nyssa cited in Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 73–74.

134. Ibid., 102.

135. Ibid., 50.

136. Purely as an aside, note also with the labyrinth at Chartres the shape of the central “goal,” the figure of the rose, which can be found in the rose windows for which this cathedral is so famed; see James, “The Mystery of the Great Labyrinth,” 95–96. Clearly the labyrinth was initially constructed as one element among others in the harmonic order of the cathedral, making its “dropping out” of discourse all the more interesting. Although these are not necessarily grounds from which to mount a critique of Foucault’s at times unwieldy notion of the episteme (the dates seem to coincide with the coming of the Enlightenment), if time permitted, a study of such slippages within the discursive fold would be a challenging exercise, potentially productive of a less cumbersome way of characterizing such shifts. In many ways the curiosity cabinets of chapter 1 represented the potential for an “in-between” space of discourse with their continuance well into the age of the Enlightenment. The closest Foucault comes to a disruption of his own notion of the episteme is with the idea of the heterotopia.

137. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), 16. See also Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 187.

138. Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, trans. George Collins (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 12, 38.

139. Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 12.

140. Virilio suggests that the model for topographical amnesia lay in the so-called Elpenor’s Syndrome, where sufferers would display normal automatic motor functions in waking up in an unfamiliar place, but be unaware of their environment. A fortuitous disorder for Virilio’s general thesis regarding the optical speed of modernity being both one of its defining features as well as one of its most productive in terms of new subject effects, Elpenor’s Syndrome (named after a hero from the Odyssey who fell from the roof of Circe’s temple) was made famous by the death of the French President Deschanel, who fell from a train at the turn of the twentieth century.

141. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (New York: Verso, 1989), 14.

Conclusion

1. Bruno Schultz, “The Street of Crocodiles,” in The Collected Works of Bruno Schultz, ed. Jerzy Ficowski (London: Picador, 1988).

2. Arbuthnot Lane quoted in Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 31.

3. The two most well known of such artists were Francis Derwent Wood, whose Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department in the Third London General Hospital was euphemistically called the “tin noses shop,” and the American sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd working for the Red Cross and the Bureau for the Reduction of the Mutilated in France in Paris. For the former, see Caroline Alexander, “Faces of War,” Smithsonian Magazine 2007. For the latter, see Sharon Romm and Judith Zacher, “Anna Coleman Ladd: Maker of Masks for the Facially Wounded,” Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 70, no. 1 (1982).

4. See in particular Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (New York: Verso, 1989).

5. Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 189.

6. Ibid., 190.

7. We can see this ambivalence at work in the designs of a generation of so-called “Impressionist” architects returning from the war. Seen largely as a briefly lived “emotional” reaction to the horrors of trench warfare, the Impressionists’ use of glass stood in sharp contrast to the modernist tendency toward the sheer and unadorned surfaces of mass-produced “industrial” architecture. Whereas glass would become the ultimate modernist building material due to its ability to reveal structure and volume as the dominant function of building design, to the group of war-ravaged Impressionists, the use of glass would tend to be more polarized. On the one hand the fantastical glass sky-cities of Bruno Taut appear as utopian “visions” of glass’s democratizing transparency; yet on the other, the alien and nightmarish visions of Hermann Finsterlin’s designs, with their curved and opaque surfaces bristling with needles and spines of glass, mark two ends of an Impressionist response to the possibilities and limitations of vision in an age of industrial disenchantment. For an excellent introduction to the architecture of postwar Impressionism, particularly as it pertains to the experiences of trench warfare, see Allyson Booth, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), esp. 125–169.

8. Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy, 190.

9. Ibid., 188.

10. As an aside, Abbott Handerson Thayer, the American naturalist/artist most often accredited with the advancement of modern techniques of war camouflage, developed his notion of evolutionary protective coloration, interestingly enough for our purposes, through the characteristically scientific pursuit of collection: “The beauty of birds’ patterns, etc. simply thrills me and my immense color progress and decorator progress is greatly due to this passion in me and the hundreds of hours spent in looking at my birds’ skins” (quoted in ibid., 174). From the embodied nature of avian coloration to the dazzling and “ruptive” effects of war camouflage, we can witness a kind of modernist animism at work, projecting the protective spirit of these collected bird carcasses onto the uniforms of soldiers and weapons of war so that they may remain invisible to the mechanical eye of sighting devices. Similarly we can see something of a scientific theriomorphism in Thayer’s own artistic predilection for portraying winged angels with resplendently feathered bird wings, which, by his own admission, were inspired by his collection of bird skins. In the figure of Thayer, then, we can see the conflation of a number of modern “magics” at work behind the “left-handed” science of camouflage. For an account of Thayer’s camouflage that extends the reach of its masking to included issues of nineteenth-century American social ostentation, see Alexander Nemerov, “Vanishing Americans: Abbott Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Attraction of Camouflage,” American Art 11, no. 2 (1997).

11. Booth, Postcards from the Trenches, 22.

12. Vladislav Todorov, Red Square, Black Square: Organon for Revolutionary Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 94–95.

13. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 102.

14. István Rév, “Parallel Autopsies,” Representations 49 (1995).

15. Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, 108.

16. See in particular Jean and John Comaroff, “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony,” American Ethnologist 62, no. 2 (1999). And more recently, Jean and John Comaroff, “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigration and Millennial Capitalism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002).