Holly Mourning and Method

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Mourning and MethodAuthor(s): Michael Ann HollySource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 84, No. 4 (Dec., 2002), pp. 660-669Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177289

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Mourning and MethodMichael Ann Holly

In the sight of an old pair of shoes there is somethingprofoundly melancholy.-attributed to Gustave Flaubert

Why do we write about works of visual art in the first place?Why do subjects (us) need to talk about objects? What kind ofa dialogue, even game, is taking place? In the past, I havetried to make a case for the variety of ways that works of artboth literally and metaphorically prefigure their subsequenthistorical and interpretative understandings.' It had longbeen a commonplace of poststructuralist thinking that all theenergy for interpretation emanates from the "subjective" sideof the equation, and I wanted to restore a certain agency tothe objects themselves.In the following essay, however, I want to address thecharacter of the field between: the magnetism that perpetu-ally binds subjects and objects, an exchange enacted underthe pall of mourning. I am haunted by some memorable,melancholic sentences by two fellow art historians, long dead,with whom I have spent considerable scholarly time commun-ing. First of all, Erwin Panofsky, writing in 1955: "The human-ities are not faced by the task of arresting what would other-wise slip away, but enlivening what would otherwise remaindead."2 And then, over a century before, Jacob Burckhardt,writing in 1844: "I feel at times as though I were alreadystanding in the evening light, as though nothing much wereto come of me.... I think that a man of my age can rarelyhave experienced such a vivid sense of the insignificance andfrailty of human things.... I'm a fool, am I not?"3In his letters, Burckhardt is always the nostalgic observeron the other side of history, the outsider looking in, thespectator who admires but can never inhabit the sunny vistasfrom which he is separated in time. "This," he exclaims, "iswhere I stand on the shore of the world-stretching out myarms towards the fons et origo of all things, and that is whyhistory to me is sheer poetry."4 He saw the "'culture of oldEurope' ... as a ruin," and he doubted that historical events,especially contemporary ones, had any meaning at all.5 Thecrucial paradox of history writing, as Burckhardt knew acentury and a half ago, is that it validates death in the presentwhile preserving the life of the past. My question arises fromthat conundrum: How might melancholy, regarded as atrope, help art historians to come to terms with what I see asthe elegiac nature of our disciplinary transactions with thepast?I begin with Burckhardt's and Panofsky's lamentations inorder to set the tone for considering a certain paradigm ofRenaissance art historical scholarship in terms of the themeof melancholy-not the iconography of the humor (fairlystandard), but rather its translation into a historiographicpoint of view. A political or intellectual history that is rootedin written documents is difficult enough to execute; a narra-tive written out of a loyalty to visual objects frequently proves

to be an assignment in exasperation. The very materiality ofobjects that have survived the ravages of time in order to existin the present frequently confounds the cultural historian,who retroactively sets out to turn them back into past ideas,social constructs, documents of personality, whatever. Worksof art metonymically, like links on a chain, express the lostpresence.6 Images are so often what we "depend on in orderto take note of what has passed away."7The contemplativeparalysis that arises from recognizing one's inability to makecontemporary words connect with historical images-that is,to write a definitive history of art-was for Burckhardt, as itwas over half a century later for Walter Benjamin, that pre-scient theologian of melancholy, an essential trait of themournful sensibility.8On its sunny surface, the practice of connoisseurship inRenaissance studies would seem to be about as far fromsharing such shadowy sentiments as one could go, but in thiscontext I would prefer to regard it as just a different kind ofhistorical performance provoked by a sense of loss. Burck-hardt and Bernard Berenson, by this reckoning, might be twosides of the same coin.9 The connoisseur locates certainmotifs in which the hand of the artist is relaxed and thereforemost revealing of self, such as the insignificant details re-vealed in drapery folds, thumbs, and earlobes. From there itis a rather short step to identifying artists and authenticatingmasterpieces. The mental tools required for such an under-taking, however, are daunting. Not only must the connoisseurbe possessed of a prodigious visual memory, he or she mustalso have the culturally acquired confidence and inborn sen-sitivity to assess quality.I am far less interested in the psychobiography of eitherBurckhardt or Berenson than I am in their pressing desire toconnect with the past by way of an authentic aesthetic expe-rience, a desire (although unnamed) that seems to be asobvious in Berenson's labors of attribution as it is in Burck-hardt's "ruined" project. Both sought that moment of contactthat is forever foreclosed: the material site where history andthe immediacy of aesthetic appreciation become one. In thispsychic scenario, the tactile values Berenson admired in quat-trocento painting become an allegory for his yearning toreach across time and touch the hand of the master painter(something akin to Benjamin's fabled "act of friendship to-ward the dead"). Locating provenance and authenticatinghistorical presences may indeed be standard protocol forcareful connoisseurship, but the melancholic disposition thatchoreographs such a commitment also merits recognition.The performance of art history as a disciplinary practicedraws its energy from the lure of the unknown. A good arthistorical tale can be as provocative as a mystery story. Some-thing has gotten lost, someone has gone missing, a visual clueremains unseen. From connoisseurs to iconographers to so-cial historians, the quest for clarity within the shadowy realms


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of origins, meanings, contexts has long been of compulsiveimportance.10 But when all is said and done, when all theloose ends of the story are tied up, something inevitablyappears to be left over. Who has not felt it? What might wecall it? The compelling visuality of the work of art resistsappropriation by either the cleverness of historical explana-tions or the eloquence of descriptive language. Somethingremains;something gets left over.Consequently, I want to argue,the discipline is constitutionally fated to suffer from a quietmelancholic malaise. The distance between present and past,the gap between words and images can never be closed. InSigmund Freud's formulation, it is melancholy, or unresolvedmourning, that keeps the wound open.llThe yearning for the past that poets and painters oftenevince is also latent in the longings of scholars who havedevoted their intellectual lives to history writing, to invokingthat which came before but is no longer. The poignancy isespecially acute for historians of art. In the sight of oldobjects that continue to exist materially in the present, butwhose once noisy and busy existence has long since beensilenced, there is something profoundly melancholy. Such astate of mind is easier to feel than to define. Many psychoan-alysts, from Freud to object-relations theorists who have takenup the legacy of Melanie Klein, have explored this quiet,brooding aspect of the psychic life.l2 Several, in fact, haveeven linked it to the uncanny phenomenological experienceof being enveloped by a work of art, what Christopher Bollashas called falling under the "shadow of the object. . thesense of being reminded of something never cognitively ap-prehended but existentially known."'3Of course, I am far from the first to emphasize what hasbeen regarded by many as our quintessential postmodernistpredicament. The "rhetoric of mourning" that has engen-dered and connected so many late twentieth-century studiesin the humanities is one devoted to the incomplete and themissing: fragments, allegories, ruins, retreats from definitivemeanings. Yet the practice of art history provides an oxymo-ronic twist on this by now common characterization. The verymateriality of objects with which we deal presents historiansof art with an interpretative paradox absent in other histori-cal inquiries, for works of art are at the same time lost andfound, past and present. As Martin Heidegger once put it,"World-withdrawal and world-decay can never be undone.The works are no longer the same as they once were. It is theythemselves, to be sure, that we encounter there, but theythemselves are gone by."14Attending to this rhetorics of lossin critical writings about art could certainly take us in manydirections.

The quest for lost origins, for example, has lain at the heartof the history of art ever since the discipline itself originated.On this ground alone, the typical art historical enterpriseseems predestined to be a melancholic one. It is not just amatter of trying to retrieve forgotten historical meanings orneglected artists. Seeking to situate provenance, identify in-dividual intentions, relocate physical settings, decipher un-derdrawings, and situate works of art back into their culturaland ideological contexts are all commonplace indications ofa compulsion to recover a certainsomething ong since forgot-ten or abandoned. The concept of "melancholy writing," ofwhich Julia Kristeva speaks so evocatively in Black Sun, is

especially apposite for reflecting on this underside of the arthistorical enterprise.15 "The Thing, the unnameably, irre-trievably withheld," as Max Pensky puts it, "establishes theimpossibility and necessity of melancholy writing by its abso-lute absence."'6 What are the implications of this buriedrhetoric of privation for the sundry practices of art history,both new and old? What is the connection between thisdeeply philosophical recognition of loss-functioning almostas the latent unconscious of the discipline-and the manifest,even rather prosaic, projects of historical recovery so para-mount in art historical discourse? Finding, as Freud re-minded us in BeyondthePleasurePrinciple,is very often just theprelude to losing yet again.'7 An example, actually the com-parison of two historiographic events-ostensibly two verydissimilar exercises in the history of art-is in order.One fine spring day in 1998 many distinguished scholars ofEarly Netherlandish art from both Europe and the UnitedStates gathered at the Philadelphia Museum of Art to con-template two nearly identical paintings of the mystic SaintFrancis accompanied by his confessor Brother Leo, bothreputedly painted by Jan van Eyck in the 1430s, one nowresiding in Turin, the other in Philadelphia, and therebrought together for the first time in an exhibition (Figs. 1,2). The task of the hour was voiced in the accompanyingcatalogue: "That both works belong to van Eyck's circle isindisputable, but are they both by the master's hand? Or isone-and which one-a slightly later copy of the other,which would then constitute a single authentic work? Or doboth derive from a lost original?" This enigma was not a newone. Ever since the late nineteenth century-the great age ofhistorical science-the two pictures have been compared inearnest, establishing the issue of "the precedence of one orthe other and their mutual (or independent) relation toJanvan Eyck, his workshop, and followers-as one of the thorn-iest conundrums in the study of early Netherlandish art,"18asa quick survey of the major scholars of twentieth-centuryNetherlandish studies can attest.19 After the day-long sympo-sium in Philadelphia, although no deciding vote was taken,the tentative opinion of most of the contemporary connois-seurs seemed to be that the smaller painting in the Philadel-phia collection possessed many of the earmarks of an originalwork by Jan van Eyck.In declaring at the start which one the experts seem to havepreferred, I hope I am not robbing the reader of the thrill ofjoining the investigation, like someone who divulges "whodunit" before others have even begun the mystery novel.What interests me here is not the resolution to the story(there actually isn't one) but the disciplinary protocols thatare deployed in the well-funded international effort at dis-covering origins. Archival research, iconographic compari-sons, stylistic analysis, microscopy, infrared reflectography,dendrochronological analysis, even the geological history ofthe garden of LaVerna in which the mystical vision suppos-edly took place (which proved that it was "geologically un-likely" that these were Alpine rocks20 [it's only paint afterall!]), all became potential instruments of discovery. Themethodological capability of art historical science was trium-phantly on display, with full confidence in its possibilities.And even though my greater intent here is eventually to turnthis particular episode in Philadelphia into one of two para-


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1 Jan van Eyck, Saint Francis ReceivingtheStigmata.Philadelphia Museum ofArt, the John C.Johnson Collection

bles about disciplinary suffering and melancholic revelation,I cannot help but take delight in the art historical ingenuityof this particular quest.The historical tale, as much as can be reconstructed, is anintriguing one. It originates with Anselme Adornes, a mid-fifteenth-century member of the Genoese merchant familyactive in the economy and politics of the Burgundian court,who journeyed at least twice to the Holy Land, perhaps ondiplomatic missions for Charles the Bold. Anselme modeledhis memorial chapel in Bruges on Christ's tomb at the HolySepulchre in Jerusalem, of which Saint Francis was consid-ered to be the caretaker. Although the portrayal of Franciswas rare in northern art, Anselme's will of 1470 leaves his twodaughters (somewhat ambiguously) a picture of the nature-worshiping saint by van Eyck.2' The sources give no hint ofwhich came first and, since one is considerably smaller thanthe other, some have speculated that the large Turin workwas an original and the delicate Philadelphia painting arevered copy, small and portable enough to be carried byAnselme on his pilgrimages, or even perhaps commissionedlater for the second daughter. Until they resurfaced in thenineteenth century, if indeed these are the two named in thetestament, their locales and ownership were unknown. Sincethey reappeared, the works have been subjected to analysis bya number of instruments in the formidable art historicalarsenal.

Many and diverse are the "facts" that are mustered indefense of one or the other claimant; dendochronologicalanalysis, for example, reveals that the Philadelphia version,painted in oils on parchment and attached to a woodenpanel, was cut from the same tree as two authenticated por-traits by van Eyck. While there are some subtle differences,

the two Saint Francis paintings are practically identical. Thebrushwork, for example, is strikingly similar, whether in themodeling of the rims of the eyes or in the depiction of"wrinkles on the brow or stubble on the chin."22 If there arediscrepancies, they are explained by the Philadelphia paint-ing's diminutive size.

It is, however, in the anomalies-as though they were cluesleft behind at a crime scene-that the real art historicalsuspense begins. And, as in a mystery story, the nature ofSaint Francis's wounds-how he suffered them and when-assumes a critical importance. In many paintings of the hum-ble saint, the stigmata on his side, hands, and feet (mimick-ing those that Christ suffered on the cross) are visibly present,as are the agents of their appearance, the piercing rays oflight descending from the seraphic vision. The concealmentof these standard iconographic details, as in his side, then,becomes highly significant.And then there's the real clincher. The autopsy of the bodyin Turin-in art historical science it is known as infraredreflectography-has revealed a secret of perhaps mystery-solving proportions. The feet of Saint Francis were first un-derdrawn with some kind of footwear covering them-socksor close-fitting pointed shoes, with rims at the ankles (Figs. 3,4). In recognizing this iconographic error, or perhaps inchanging his mind about what moment in the story to depict,van Eyck corrected the telling secret detail in the overpaint-ing, while also adjusting the position of the right foot to makeit more anatomically acceptable. Yet the question then arisesas to howJoseph Rishel, the senior curator who organized thewonderful and perplexing exhibition, and many of the otherart historical detectives could go on from there to suggestthat the Philadelphia painting, which reveals no sandals in


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2 Van Eyck, Saint FrancisReceiving heStigmata.Turin, Galleria Sabauda

the preparatory drawing, might be thought to come "first."Should it not be the other way round? The intrigue contin-ues, but we will leave it there in order to attempt some criticaldistance and return to my principal theme: the role of themissing and absent in the deep structure of art historicaldiscourse. This particular van Eyck mystery I am incapable ofand uninterested in solving.I guess what I'm asking is this: Are Whodunit? Or Whatisit? theonly kind of questions that art historians can be asking? Is therenothing else we can say? Is thepoint of art historyto nail the caseshut; topin down artists,original works, conography Yes, in largepart. But I'm sympathetico othermorecritical orphilosophicalkindsof questioning,and I'll give you an example.

Naturally, any reference to the enigma of painted shoes isbound, in certain critical circles, to invoke the spirit ofJacques Derrida and his dense but ludic essay in The Truth inPainting on the debate between Martin Heidegger and MeyerSchapiro over van Gogh's haunting paintings of work bootsdone in the 1880s (Fig. 5).23 The quarrel between the phi-losopher (Heidegger) and the art historian (Schapiro) overthe ownership of these old shoes (they are, after all, onlypaint) poses "a delirious dramaturgy" and an excuse forDerrida to play with two of his favorite themes: the inade-quacy of words to come to terms with images, and the inabil-ity of aesthetic discourse to keep concerns extrinsic to thework of art separate from those that are intrinsic. "Let usposit as an axiom," Derrida first of all asserts, "that the desirefor attribution is a desire for appropriation."24 As well knownas this art historical drama is, I want to recount it briefly inorder to stage an occasion for reviewing the comparable

performance in Philadelphia-using the portrayal of shoes asthe hinge that connects the two episodes.In 1935, during the rise of National Socialism, Heidegger(he of problematic sympathies) wrote an essay entitled "TheOrigin of the Work of Art."2' It was a critique, in part, ofImmanuel Kant's CritiqueofJudgmentand the Enlightenmentthinker's concept of the aesthetic. For both philosophers, awork of art has the capacity to achieve something larger thanthe sum of its individual parts. Yet Heidegger, in emphasizingthe strangeness and thickness of art, regarded a meaningfulwork less as an object (and thereby subject to stable concep-tual aesthetic categories) than as an event in the world.26 Thecrux of his phenomenology rested on the work's extraordi-nary address to its viewers and their ability to put it "to work,"transforming mere material into meaningful form ("earth"becoming "world,"a place of unveiling, unconcealing, light-ing up). Take the primal example of van Gogh's painting ofshoes, where, Heidegger claims, "truth sets itself to work."27The reverie provoked by the shoes yields unto him theiressential being-in-the-worldness, the equipmentality of com-mon equipment. And hereI will quote one of the mostfamouspassages in contemporaryritical theory:

A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more. And yet-From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoesthe toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stifflyrugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulatedtenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading andever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. Onthe leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil.


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4 Van Eyck, Saint FrancisReceiving heStigmata,GalleriaSabauda, detail, infrared reflectogram of the feet ofSaint Francis

3 Detail of Fig. 2 with the feet of Saint Francis

Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path asevening falls.... This equipment is pervaded by uncom-plaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordlessjoy of having once more withstood want, the tremblingbefore the impending childbed and shivering at the sur-rounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to theearth,and it is protected in the worldof the peasant woman.From out of this protected belonging the equipment itselfrises to its resting-within-itself.28There is nothing in this evocative description to reveal that

Heidegger is talking about a painting of shoes rather than theshoes themselves. Nothing, that is, except for his subsequentstepping outside of the lyricism of his reverie and remarking,"but perhaps it is only in the picture that we notice all thisabout the shoes."29 The work of art, in other words, does nothave its origin in the "real thing"-quite the reverse. Thematerial thing in the world has its origin-only comes into itsown-in its visual representation. Talking about an imagefrom the vantage point of art history, it follows, is anathemato the phenomenologist: "Art-historical study makes theworks the objects of a science.... in all this busy activity dowe encounter the work itself?"30 (This is certainly a questionwe might provocatively ask of the van Eyck investigators.) ForHeidegger, something will inevitably go missing in the paint-ing's art historical reception, and it is not only the peasantwoman herself.

For the scholar Meyer Schapiro, what went astray in Hei-degger's prose was not just art historical knowledge, althoughthe philosopher's iconographic ignorance did pose a prob-

lem. Had Heidegger sought out the literary sources, includ-ing van Gogh's letters, he would have quickly recognized thatthe shoes belonged to van Gogh-painted as a kind of psy-chological self-portrait of the creative individual himself-and thus would have been appropriately arrested in hissearch for all sorts of pious volkischaffirmations. Instead, theNational Socialist Heidegger substituted nationalist "projec-tion" for "a close and true attention to the work of art."31Asked to contribute an essay to a 1968 commemorative vol-ume for the German Jewish refugee and fellow ColumbiaUniversity professor Kurt Goldstein, Schapiro chose to con-front the insidious political and social context of Heidegger'ssupposedly ahistorical meditations through the discourse ofart historical correctness: "The essential fact [is that] for vanGogh the shoes were a piece of his own life .... This conceptof the metaphysical power of art remains here a theoreticalidea. The example on which [Heidegger] elaborates withstrong conviction does not support that idea."32ForJacques Derrida, who actually "staged" a mythical cor-respondence between Heidegger and Schapiro at Columbiain October 1977, Schapiro's recourse to professional rhetoricwas itself symptomatic: "One is surprised that an expertshould use all this dogmatic and precritical language. It alllooks as though the hammering of the notions of self-evi-dence, clarity, and property was meant to resound very loudlyto prevent us from hearing that nothing here is clear, orself-evident, or proper to anything or anyone whatsoever."33Asking repeatedly if anyone can actually prove that there isindeed a pair of shoes represented in the picture, Derridaproffers the verdict (as if anything could be final in decon-struction) that neither thinker is innocent: "one claim," hesays, is "more naive, more excessive... than the other....One attribution exceeds the other.... Where do they... gettheir certainty?"34In asserting a "specialist's" authority over adomain (art history) "whose frontiers he thought were deter-


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5 Vincent van Gogh, A Pair of Shoes.Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum(Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

minable," Schapiro neglected to see beyond those bound-aries, to the realm where Heidegger had dared to ventureand return art historically ignorant but not so devoid ofinsight: to the philosophical worldprovoked by the thought of thepainting. 3' "Is it enough for Heidegger to be wrong to makeSchapiro right?"3' Derrida provocatively asks. The interlacingof the two meditations on shoes has only underscored ametaphorics of loss endemic to all attempts at reconstruction:"in both directions, making come back, making go away,making come back again, inside, outside, down there, here,fort, da."37The rhythm is breathless, the questions unceasing:

Whose are the shoes? [257]What is one doing when one attributes a painting?[266]Who is going to believe that this episode is merely atheoretical or philosophical dispute for the inter-pretation of a work? [272]Is it a matter of rendering justice to Heidegger, ofrestituting what is his due, his truth? [301]What is reference in a painting? [322]Are we reading? Are we looking? [326][Is the point] to make ghosts come back? Or on thecontrary to stop them from coming back? [339]38

Clearly, something momentous "happens, something takesplace when shoes are abandoned."3So now I've placed two pairs of shoes on the table: thosemissing in van Eyck's painting of Saint Francis and those ofvan Gogh's anonymous ghost, separated from each other bynearly half a millennium. What do they have to do with eachother, two pairs of shoes serving as the fulcrum of my own

memorializing aesthetics? Why, as Flaubert poignantly asked,does the sight of a pair of old shoes provoke such melan-choly? I proceed only with the sense that their connection-this serendipitous motif of the shoes- has less to do with thestark contrast of critical approaches between traditional andrevisionist art histories and more with the melancholicundertowthat these two episodes actually share: the similarity that con-nects rather than the confrontations that divide. Both arthistorical tales somehow are similarly caught up in a swirlingvortex of irrevocable loss, of unrecoverability-acknowledgedor not.

I'm not claiming that writings on art, of whatever persua-sion, are obsessed with what gets left out, or even that they areespecially attuned to their own submerged rhetoric of loss.Granted, the methodological procedures in our two exem-plary shoe parables are very different. The Philadelphia-Turin explorations burrow in, literally penetrate through thethickness of paint to uncover layer after layer of significance.In the end, the detectives are left with fragments of paint,scraps of scarlet borders, shady underdrawings, no firm solu-tion to their puzzles about authorship. Nevertheless, theseinvestigations have provided the occasion to mount a spar-kling exhibition of a small collection of van Eyck gems. TheHeidegger-Schapiro debates, on the other hand, as re-counted by Derrida, skim along the surface of interpretation,refusing to rest, fabricating comparisons, dissolving connec-tions in a kind of stream-of-consciousness recitation aboutthe impossibility of real discovery. And in the end we are leftwith no objects at all-no van Eycks, no van Goghs-butplenty of authors-as-subjects, subjects enmeshed in a conge-ries of ideological contexts.

My point is that the distinction between these two axes of


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exploration, one proceeding from surface to depth, onesliding over the surface, is perhaps not there at all when itcomes to the deep and common rhetorical structure thatunderlies each.40 In both cases, I would argue that the com-pulsion of the narrative derives its interpretative animationfrom the real threat of loss. (Remember Heidegger's aptquestion: "[I]n all this busy activity do we encounter the workitself?") With each passing word, the image recedes. Theexperience of the aesthetic (is there such a thing?) dimin-ishes.

The provocative predicament that art history finds itself intoday, epitomized by simultaneously performing dendro-chronological analysis and flirting with deconstruction,might be regarded as the effect of a collective disciplinarydesire to locate a plausible route around our incapacity toarticulate why works of art are meaningful on their ownterms-something that, despite his faults, Heidegger stroveto do. And, despite deconstruction's dismantling of the clas-sic yearning in Western metaphysics after some self-authen-ticating presence,41 even Derrida, to some extent, has beenseduced by aesthetic desire: "Even if [a work of art] isn'texhausted by the analysis of its meaning, by its thematics andsemantics," he claims, "it is there in addition to all that itmeans. And this excess obviously provokes discourse ad infi-nitum."42 Indeed, what Derrida draws attention to in hisrehearsal of the Heidegger-Schapiro debates is the likelihoodthat the birth of art histor; tolled the death knell for aesthet-ics, and the deconstructionist himself is not insensitive to thesentiment that his own ramblings depend on the repetitionof that dying.The invocation of the aesthetic, of course, conjures upanother haunting, that of Kant, whose specter hovers overnot only the philosophical musings of Derrida and Heideggerbut also the art historical projects of Schapiro and the Phil-adelphia crew. Permit me to walk down that rocky path forjust a moment. If we consider the intellectual history of ourfield of study, we would have to acknowledge that the active,but ultimately futile, search for the elusive originates in theaftermath of Kant's CritiqueofJudgment of 1790. Kant himselfwas not a seeker into the penumbral. If anything, his "Ana-lytic of the Beautiful" and "Analytic of the Sublime" togetherrepresent a supreme effort to bring principles of Enlighten-ment logic and reason to bear on the nature of humaninteraction with works of art.43 Paring away essentials, strip-ping down to minimal criteria, he worked at making manifestboth the sequence and the significance of a pure and univer-sal aesthetic experience. Kantian aesthetics is predicated on arefusal to succumb to the inexpressible, a reluctance to ac-knowledge the expulsion of a perceiving subject from theworld of objects. But in this conviction, it seems to me, hisCritiqueofJudgment can simultaneously be read as an elegantand sustained "apology" for what cannot be articulated,namely, the experience of the sublime in nature, the un-speakably beautiful in art.44Kant's "four moments of taste" are all negatively defined,which is to say that they are all positively based on principlesof appreciation that must be phenomenologically bracketedoff from other areas of experience. According to the order ofhis formal conditions, we find that aesthetic judgment, to becategorized as such, must be devoid of all interest, devoid of

any concepts that might subsume it, devoid of any purpose orend outside itself, and devoid of disagreement if it is to solicituniversal acceptance.45 Since "beauty is really a claim aboutthe subject ather than the object,"46one could even paradox-ically assert that his scheme is devoid of objects themselves. Italmost goes without saying that any considerations of contextare dispatched without ceremony. Ironically, then, art histo-rians by definition must be those viewers who are least sensi-tive to the attractions of art. The feeling of pleasure that abeautiful object can provoke "can occur only when our con-templation of an object is free of any antecedent interest."47So if we are attentive scholars of art's history, we suffer themost primal loss of all, the pure experience of beauty.

Secondly, this commandment of disinterestedness, whichweaves its way throughout The Critique of Judgment, seemsdesigned to provoke a kind of personal aesthetic melancholy.If one finds an object "beautiful," Kant would insist that he orshe is judging it solely under the aegis of its aesthetic pres-ence in the present. An invocation of any sort of memorywould taint the purity of the reaction. Referring the beautiful"form" of an object of art back to either its real embodimentin nature, for example, or to its significance in the life of theobserver, or even to another work of art would be a stepbackward in both time and discriminating judgment. In fact,all of his "four moments" resolutely resist reference to any-thing that has come before the moment when the shadow ofthe object falls across the consciousness of the viewer. Thisinjunction to cast off anything that does not partake in theimmediacy of the perception cannot help but have conse-quences for the subject, who has presumably exercised his orher other critical faculties, in other contexts, before thismoment of pure disinterested contemplation. One of theseconsequences, I would argue, would have to be a melancholicone: what has been excluded, namely, the memories andsensations of the individual-especially one with scholarlyintent-returns to unsettle. To call something "art" is toignore not only its past, but our own as well.

By extension, then, both of these Kantian claims about thesubject require a profound degree of abstinence and aban-donment on his or her part. The first "professional" mandatemakes the viewer choose between poetic engagement andhistorical understanding, phenomenological apprehensionand intellectual commitment, and the second demands thathe or she forswear a lifetime of personal memories andexperience. This may be characterizing the ideal Kantiansubject rather crudely, but the psychic toll exacted in theseprescriptions, it seems to me, has had lasting effects on justwhat transpires in aesthetic discourses about art. In the inter-est of either finding something out (authorship, for exam-ple) or in proving that indeed nothing can be found out at all(such as "meaning"), the discipline of art history, new ortraditional, necessarily papers over an undercurrent of re-nunciation.

I guess I would argue that in some way each of our fetish-ized "shoe" projects, thanks in part to Kant, derives its inter-pretative urgency from a sense of missing or missed origins,both literal and figural: about what cannot be uttered, whatcannot be found, what cannot be thought. It is this sub-merged sensitivity toward the lost and forgotten that givesthese diverse writings their melancholic edge, acknowledged


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or not. My justification for talking about Derrida in thecontext of van Eyck, even Kant in the context of infraredreflectography, is not as absurd as it might at first seem. Onthe one hand, I am convinced that their shifting interdepen-dencies can challenge, or at the very least provoke us todefend, the secure epistemological foundations on which wescurry about fulfilling our professional engagement with res-toration and recovery. And on the other, the constitutionalinability of the discipline to possess objective meanings, tomake contemporary words say something definitive abouthistorical images- however much its practitioners might gen-uinely try-is what I imagine to be the source of its institu-tional melancholy.-t'So, then, by way of conclusion, I offer three or fourthoughts about the nature of mourning and method in arthistorical investigations. I take it as axiomatic that historywriting is a psychic activity; that both its traditional andrevisionist tales are always narratives of desire, doomedsearches after lost origins. The urge to recover meaning,context, precedents, whatever, presses on the scholar, but so,too, does the recognition of the futility of the search, thusconverting her or him into a melancholic subject who none-theless often possesses an ethical commitment to the past.Quite a quandary. Given that the works of art with which wedeal professionally can themselves be metaphorical expres-sions of a lost presence, art historians, in their attempts tomake words match images, are doubly fated to experienceloss, twice removed from originary meanings. Like a souvenir,an object of art is regarded as standing in place of a past eventto which it was once metonymically related. `9 Paradoxically, itis writing that gets in the way:

... that which cannot return, that which cannot againbecome present.... The image indeed returns, but itemerges from a past whose pastness, adhering to it likesome dark shadow, accompanies it into the present....Loss is the precondition of interpretation. But much writ-ing represses that truth, and the will of much interpreta-tion is a will to forget loss.'0"

The past is precisely that which is beyond resurrection,possibly even recognition, as Johann Joachim Winckelmannwell knew: "[We] have... nothing but the shadowy outlineleft of the object of our wishes, but that very indistinctnessawakens only a more earnest longing for what we havelost.... we must not shrink from seeking after the truth, eventhough its discovery wounds our self-esteem."51Let me venture a final pictorial parable by returning to ourtwo monks in the mystical garden, especially since BrotherLeo, off to the side, shares the slothful, contemplative de-meanor of Albrecht Durer's well-known portrait of Melan-cholia (Fig. 6). Panofsky, who regarded this figure as a spir-itual self-portrait of Durer himself, says of her: "Winged, yetcowering on the ground-wreathed, yet beclouded by shad-ows-equipped with the tools of art and science, yet brood-ing in idleness, she gives the impression of a creative beingreduced to despair by an awareness of insurmountable bar-riers which separate her from a higher realm of thought."'2

Prompted by Dfirer's visual allegory, I wonder if Freud'sdistinction between mourning and melancholy, which I have

6 Albrecht Dfirer, iVelencolia I. Williamstown, Mass., Sterlingand Francine Clark Art Institute

almost avoided until now, might not be relevant here after all.In mourning, Freud claims, loss is conscious; in melancholy(what he characterized as "unresolved molurning"), loss isunconscious because the sufferer intr-ojects the emptiness ashis own. "The distinguishing mental features of melancho-lia," according to Freud, "are a profoundly painful dejection,abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capac-ity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of theself-regarding feelings."" The melancholic, in his words,keeps the wounds open.'4Back to our van Eyck. Even though Saint Francis is thepossessor of the wounds, he actually represents a more salu-tary emblem of healing and empowerment than Brother Leo,who is mired, like Melancholia, in either sleep or paralyticsadness. Francis is the one with the visions, the one who, inthe denial of suffering, finds consolation. Surely there's amoral here. As Walter Benjamin both hoped and anticipated,a historian's labor is never devoid of redemrptive possibilities:"an appreciation of the transience of things, and the concernto rescue them for eternity" can also yield their own scholarlyconsolations; "pensiveness," Benjamin moralized, "is charac-teristic above all of the mournful."'.' The only way to "re-cover" the meanings of objects that always already exist, evenin part, is through language, for "the humanities," as ErwinPanofsky (w\hom I quoted at the beginning) said, "are notfaced by the task of arresting what would otherwise slip away,but enlivening what would otherwise remain dead."


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668 ARr BULL.ETIN DEClEMBER 2002 \VO.LUME 1.XXXIV NUMBER 4

I am tempted to argue in general that the discipline of arthistor) is eternally fated to be a melancholic one, primarilybecause the objects it appropriates as its own always andforever keep the wound open (the cut between present andpast, word and image)-resistant to interpretation, theseworks of art nonetheless insistently provoke it. Writing nevercures, but healing comes in degrees. Positivistic art history, ofthe sort manifested in the Philadelphia allegory, may bebased on loss, but it has also lost the capacity for pain; tradi-tional art historical practice, such as that of connoisseurship,has come to terms too easily with its psychic tears. As bothHeidegger and Derrida recognized, the aesthetic capacity ofa work of art to wound, to pierce, has been anesthetized by thepursuit of origins, the confidence in endings. Why shouldn'twe want to suffer the sting of loss? Isn't that where the mostprofound philosophical questioning comes from? If the cus-tomary routes to understanding offer little more than thecomfort and familiarity of fossilized procedures, then, to mymind, fresh incisions must always be made.

Michael Ann Holly is director of research and academic programsat the Clark Art Institute and a cofounder of the Visual andCultural Studies Graduate Program at the University of Rochester.Her many publications on historiography and contemporary theoriesof art history include Panofsky and the Foundations of ArtHistory (1984), Past Looking (1996), and Art History, Aesthet-ics, Visual Studies (2002) [Clark Art Institute, Williamstown,Mass. 01267].

Frequently Cited SourcesDerrida, Jacques, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian

McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press,1957-74).Heidegger, Martin, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language,

Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (NeswYork: Harper and Row, 1971).Jan van Eyck: Two Painitings of Saint Francis Receiving the Stingata, exh. cat.,

Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1997.

Notes1. Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoricofthe Image (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996).2. Erwin Panofsky, "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline," inMeaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 24.3. Jacob Burckhardt to Hermann Schauenburg, June 10, 1844, in TheLetters

ofJacobBurckhardt,ed. and trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Pantheon Books,1955). See also chaps. 2 and 3 on Burckhardt's vision of history in Holly (asin n. 1).4. Burckhardt to Karl Fresenius,June 19, 1842, in Burckhardt (as in n. 3).5. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-CenturyEurope (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 234.6. See Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, theSouvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).7. Richard Stamelman, Lost beyondTelling:RepresentationsofDeath and Absencein Modern FrenchPoetry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 7.8. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of GermanTragicDrama, trans.John Osborne(1925; reprint, London: Verso, 1977).9. The literature on Berenson and connoisseurship is vast. A few historio-graphic texts that should be cited here are S. J. Freedberg, "Berenson,Connoisseurship, and the History of Art," New Criterion7 (Feb. 1989): 7-16;David Alan Brown, Berenson and the Connoisseurship of Italian Painting: AHandbook to theExhibition, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, WAashington,D.C.,

1979; Richard Wollheim, "Giovanni Morelli and the Origins of ScientificConnoisseurship," in On Art and the Mind: Essays and Lectures(London: AllenLane, 1973); and Meyer Schapiro, "Mr. Berenson's Values," in TheoryandPhilosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society:SelectedPapers (New York: GeorgeBraziller, 1994).10. See the classic essay on the subject by Carlo Ginzburg, "Morelli, Freud,and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method," History Workshop9(1980): 5-36.11. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), vol. 14 (1957), 239-58.Freud distinguishes between the two traits in terms of pathology. Mourning is"normal" grieving over a lost object; in melancholy the ego identifies with thelost object and becomes incapable of action.12. Melanie Klein, "Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States"(1940), in The SelectedMelanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York: Free Press,1987).13. Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object:Psychoanalysis of the Un-thought Unknown (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 16.14. Heidegger, 41. This essay was originally published as "Der Ursprung desKunstwerkes," in Holzwege (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klosterman, 1950).15. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S.Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 6, originally publishedas Soleil noir: Depressionet melancolie(Paris: Gallimard, 1987).16. Max Pensky, iMelancholyDialectics: WalterBenjamin and the Play of Mourn-ing (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 5.17. Freud, the wsell-known tale of fort/da, found in Beyond the PleasurePrinciple (1920), in Freud, vol. 18 (1955), 3-64.18. Jan van Eyck, 13, 5.19. Max Dvorak, for example, considered both to be copies of a lostoriginal; Panofsky (openly modeling his methods at detecting "disguisedsymbolism" on those of Sherlock Holmes) dismissed both as "heresy" to thevan Eyck canon and regarded them as conglomerations of Eyckian motifs,probably painted by Petrus Christus; Millard Meiss agreed with Panofsky thatthey certainly could not have been executed by van Eyck; Julius Held foundthe Turin painting superior and therefore perhaps the original masterpiece;and Charles Cuttler considered both to be replicas of a lost work by themaster. Ibid.; see the annotated bibliography by Katherine Crawford Luber.20. Ibid., 91.21. Ibid., 7; ibid., 4: "Igive to each of my dear daughters, to be theirs, to wit,Marguerite, Carthusian, and Louise, Sint-Truiden, a picture wherein SaintFrancis in portraiture from the hand of Master van Eyck, and make thecondition that in the shutters of the same little pictures be made my likeness,and that of my wife, as well as can be made" (note discrepancy betweensingular and plural of picture[s]); Testament of Adornes, Feb. 10, 1470,transcription, Bruges, Stadsarchief.22. Ibid., 39.23. Derrida, "Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing [pointure]," in Derrida,255-382.24. Ibid., 260.25. Heidegger.26. Gerald Bruns, "Martin Heidegger," in TheJohnsHopkins Guide to LiteraryTheoryand Criticism(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 374.27. Heidegger, 36.28. Ibid., 33-34.29. Ibid., 34. For a very provocative discussion of this whole episode, seeJohn A. Walker, "Art History versus Philosophy: The Enigma of the 'OldShoes,"' Block2 (1980): 14-23.30. Heidegger, 40.31. Meyer Schapiro, "The Still Life as a Personal Object: A Note on Hei-degger and Van Gogh," in The Reachof Mind: Essays in Memoryof Kurt Goldstein,ed. Marianne L. Simmel (New York: Springer, 1968), 206; reprinted withrevisions in Schapiro, 1994 (as in n. 9).32. Schapiro, 1968 (as in n. 31), 208, 206.33. Derrida, 313.34. Ibid., 318, 261.35. Ibid., 353.36. Ibid., 359.37. Ibid., 357.38. Most of this list of questions is provided by Michael Payne, "Derrida,Heidegger, and Van Gogh's 'Old Shoes,"' Textual Practice6 (spring 1992): 91.39. Derrida, 265.40. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Image, Music, Text, ed.and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 147, character-ized these two axes of interpretation so as to favor the metaphor of interpre-tative skimming: "In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled,nothing deciphered; he structure can be followed, run (like the thread of astocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: thespace of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced."41. See Christopher Norris, Deconstruction:Theoryand Practice,rev. ed. (1982;London: Routledge, 1991), 19.42. Jacques Derrida, quoted in Peter Brunette and David Wills, "The SpatialArts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida," in Deconstructionand the Visual Arts:Art, Mledia,Architecture, d. Brunette and Wills (New York: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1994), 17.


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43. Immanuel Kant, The CritiqueofJudgment, trans. James Creed Meredith(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).44. The sublime can only be found in nature, but that is not to say that itdoes not serve as "something like a cornerstone for the claim to aestheticjudgement in the beautiful"; Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Ro-manticism and the Aestheticsof Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 30.45. Kant (as in n. 44), "Analytic of the Beautiful," sec. 15.46. Salim Kemal, Kant's Aesthetic Theory:An Introduction, 2d ed. (New York:St. Martin's Press, 1997), 31.47. Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 2d ed. (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1997), xvii. As Salim Kemal points out, an "object cannot beconsidered both beautiful and a work of fine art. If we recognized it as a workof art, we would apply a concept to identify the end and so make an aestheticjudgement impossible." Yet "Kant can speak coherently of objects as bothbeautiful and art";Kemal, Kant and Fine Art:An Essay on Kant and thePhilosophyof Fine Art and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 36-37.

48. To cite Pensky again (as in n. 16), 22, "Melancholia is a discourse aboutthe necessity and impossibility of the discovery and possession of 'objective'meaning by the subjective investigator."49. See Stewart (as in n. 6).50. Stamelman (as in n. 7), 7, 9, 31.51.Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art, vol. 4, trans. Alex-ander Gode (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1968), 364-65. I thank JonathanGilmore for this reference.52. Erwin Panofsky, TheLife and Art of AlbrechtDirer (1943), 4th ed. (Prince-ton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 168.53. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), in GeneralPsycho-logical Theory: Papers on Metapsychology (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 165,quoted in Naomi Schor, One Hundred Yearsof Melancholy: The ZaharoffLecturefor 1996 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 2.54. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," vol. 14, passim.55. Benjamin (as in n. 8), 223, 139-40.

Holly Mourning and Method

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