Dictates of Distance
For academic art history, fifteenth-century Italy has long been privileged as a ‘place’ in which to discover authentic examples, precedents, origins. Indeed, cued by the rhetoric of Italian humanists such as Leon Battista Alberti and later Giorgio Vasari, art historical literature has persistently invoked a certain ‘classical’ ideal for making pictures—that ideal of paintings by educated men; of paintings that have been geometrically organised, and unified as illusionistic stages for ‘lifelike’ figures.
In the Italian renaissance, this model for praiseworthy images accorded with a widespread confidence in the didactic power and presence of two-dimensional images. Analytical perspective was investigated and theorised as a strategy for promoting the cultural authority of paintings, and artists. Through adherence to the rules of mathematical projection, the monumental, sacred world depicted in a large-scale altarpiece, for example, might appear altogether connected and continuous with the real space occupied by viewers. The ‘real space’, or proper context for such an image was a specific church or chapel, in which, ideally, patrons and beholders were arrayed in a worshipful relation to the altar.
Quattrocento altarpieces are amongst canonical art history’s most indispensable and inexhaustible images. The same Madonnas and biblical scenes have been endlessly reproduced also as secular ‘masterpieces’ by ‘master-painters’ that duly captivate the tourist gaze in modern Italy. Appropriating small-scale, cropped reproductions of these images as a basis for her own work, Liliana Barbieri addresses at once the disciplinary heritage of academic art history, and her own cultural heritage, as it has been popularised and mythified by cultural tourism. Barbieri’s desire for a kind of conceptual and emotional distance from these received pasts is both pursued and guarded using contemporary technologies of projection.
With slides, photography and digital imaging, Barbieri has constructed her own, abstract tableaux of coloured banners and shadows across the ‘transparent windows’ of historical paintings. In this very formal way her work neatly undoes the centralised and graduated perspective of the quoted images. Although the ‘quotations’ have retained their basic frontality, the fictive space of each has been actively disrupted, or contradicted, as well as flattened and reframed. In some cases, the effect of Barbieri’s interventions has been to split a scene into luminous ‘pleats’, which ‘reveal’ the pictorial world as thin, starched surfaces variously saturated with colour. Even while relying on the studied forms and detail of the historical paintings, the new images displace this content into precarious compositions that appear still immobile, yet suddenly fragile—eerie, improbable settings made of so many playing cards.
So if the lure of certain renaissance paintings remains in Barbieri’s work, it is much more the lure of such precariousness and ambiguity than that of a singularly prescriptive order and ‘truth’
© Cynthia Troup 2001
For academic art history, fifteenth-century Italy has long been privileged as a ‘place’ in which to discover authentic examples, precedents, origins. Indeed, cued by the rhetoric of Italian humanists such as Leon Battista Alberti and later Giorgio Vasari, art historical literature has persistently invoked a certain ‘classical’ ideal for making pictures—that ideal of paintings by educated men; of paintings that have been geometrically organised, and unified as illusionistic stages for ‘lifelike’ figures.
In the Italian renaissance, this model for praiseworthy images accorded with a widespread confidence in the didactic power and presence of two-dimensional images. Analytical perspective was investigated and theorised as a strategy for promoting the cultural authority of paintings, and artists. Through adherence to the rules of mathematical projection, the monumental, sacred world depicted in a large-scale altarpiece, for example, might appear altogether connected and continuous with the real space occupied by viewers. The ‘real space’, or proper context for such an image was a specific church or chapel, in which, ideally, patrons and beholders were arrayed in a worshipful relation to the altar.
Quattrocento altarpieces are amongst canonical art history’s most indispensable and inexhaustible images. The same Madonnas and biblical scenes have been endlessly reproduced also as secular ‘masterpieces’ by ‘master-painters’ that duly captivate the tourist gaze in modern Italy. Appropriating small-scale, cropped reproductions of these images as a basis for her own work, Liliana Barbieri addresses at once the disciplinary heritage of academic art history, and her own cultural heritage, as it has been popularised and mythified by cultural tourism. Barbieri’s desire for a kind of conceptual and emotional distance from these received pasts is both pursued and guarded using contemporary technologies of projection.
With slides, photography and digital imaging, Barbieri has constructed her own, abstract tableaux of coloured banners and shadows across the ‘transparent windows’ of historical paintings. In this very formal way her work neatly undoes the centralised and graduated perspective of the quoted images. Although the ‘quotations’ have retained their basic frontality, the fictive space of each has been actively disrupted, or contradicted, as well as flattened and reframed. In some cases, the effect of Barbieri’s interventions has been to split a scene into luminous ‘pleats’, which ‘reveal’ the pictorial world as thin, starched surfaces variously saturated with colour. Even while relying on the studied forms and detail of the historical paintings, the new images displace this content into precarious compositions that appear still immobile, yet suddenly fragile—eerie, improbable settings made of so many playing cards.
So if the lure of certain renaissance paintings remains in Barbieri’s work, it is much more the lure of such precariousness and ambiguity than that of a singularly prescriptive order and ‘truth’
© Cynthia Troup 2001