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Uccello's Fluttering Monument to Hawkwood, with Schwob and Artaud

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Uccello's Fluttering Monument to Hawkwood, with Schwob and Artaud Uccello’s Fluttering Monument to Hawkwood , with Schwob and Artaud Javier Berzal De Dios diacritics, Volume 44, Number 2, 2016, pp. 86-103 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2016.0009 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/655254 Access provided by your local institution (9 Jun 2017 10:01 GMT) UCCELLO’S FLUTTERING MONUMENT TO HAWKWOOD, WITH SCHWOB AND ARTAUD JAVIER BERZAL DE DIOS Anachronism is not, in history, something that must be absolutely banished . but rather something that must be negotiated, debated, and perhaps even turned to advantage. —Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images At the waning of the nineteenth century, the French symbolist writer Marcel Schwob Javier Berzal de Dios is an assistant portrayed the painter Paolo Uccello (c. 1397–1475) in his Vies imaginaires (Imaginary professor at Western Washington University. He holds a PhD in art history Lives): “he could never remain in a single place; he wanted to glide, in his flight, over from the Ohio State University and an the tops of all places.”1 Schwob’s book purposefully departs from historically rigorous MA in philosophy from the City Univer- inquiries, presenting a motley collection of fictionalized biographies of real and imagi- sity of New York, Queens College. His research has been featured in Sixteenth nary characters that encompasses Lucretius, Pocahontas, William Kidd, and Sufrah, who Century Journal, SubStance, and Renais- he claims is a sorcerer in the story of Aladdin. In his chapter on Uccello (notably the sance and Reformation/Renaissance et only visual artist in the book), Schwob neglects common biographical remarks. That the Réforme. painter allegedly received his nickname as a result of his interest in painting birds is glossed over. The sobriquet Uccello, attached to the given name Paolo di Dono, obtains a literal meaning in Schwob’s essay: “Uccello, the Bird.” In Schwob’s account, the painter is unhinged and liberated from the constraints of pictorial unity, geometry, and naturalism: “For Uccello was not the least bit concerned with the reality of things, but instead with their multiplicity and the infinitude of lines.”2 Schwob’s fantastic approach to Uccello was later embraced by Antonin Artaud in his 1926 “Uccello le poil” (“Uccello the Hair”). Published in La révolution surréaliste, Artaud’s short text concentrates on Uccello’s aesthetics through the metaphoric trope of hair (le poil), which comes to denote “the medium of an obscure pictorial language peculiar to Uccello.”3 An unstable signifier in “Uccello the Hair,” the image of a vibratile hair oscillates, invoking bristles of a brush, eyelashes, wrinkles, and painted lines: “From one hair to the next, how many secrets and how many surfaces.”4 Given their fantastic and surreal tone, it is hardly surprising that Schwob’s and Artaud’s portrayals of the Tuscan painter have largely been neglected by the art his- torical scholarship. The historian likely finds in Schwob and Artaud anachronistic and incorrect fabulations, however intriguing or evocative at a literary level. The search for artistic intentionality and period responses has traditionally motivated art historians to bracket out such modern resonances and poetic interpretations. At the same time, these modern recognitions retain a sense of intuitive validity that goes beyond what some may reduce to rhetorical flourishes. At a historiographical level, the question has been asked: “what happens if instead of denying or discounting the materiality of the work, we take our experience of it explicitly into account?”5 And diverse future anterior approaches have begun to enter the current discourse through authors like Mieke Bal and Georges Didi-Huberman. Within accounts that incorporate historical slippages and resonances, Uccello has often occupied a difficult position: even Gilles Deleuze, committed to foster- ing atemporalities over historical linearity, backed away from Schwob’s interpretation of a free-flying Uccello, concluding that the painter ultimately remained anchored in the strict regulations of geometry.6 Yet a modern eye, engaging with Uccello’s artworks, can easily discover an appealing dynamic aesthetic sensibility, or even a compulsive sense DIACRITICS Volume 44, number 2 (2016) 86–103 ©2017 Cornell University 88 DIACRITICS >> 2016 >> 44.2 of vitality. Such an eye, looking through the rearview mirror, may discover in Uccello permission to revel in the hermeneutics of contingency, to borrow a notion from T. J. Clark. For when contingency enters and invades the process of artistic creation, it is able to muster or even conscript dormant allies from its past.7 Indeed, Schwob and Artaud, along with visual artists like Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) and Fernando Botero (b. 1932), found something radically modern in the quattrocento painter. Attunement to such alli- ances seems pertinent and productive, chronological instabilities notwithstanding. In contrast to the art historical gap, a number of literary texts address the polysemic vitality ignited by the fictive biographies of Imaginary Lives: scholarly articles on Schwob and Artaud, creative non-fiction, and even a book-length reimagining of Uccello’s life, Jean-Philippe Antoine’s La chair de l’oiseau. Such discourses have been traditionally pre- occupied with the literary appropriation of the painter as a protean persona—an approach rooted in the noted dramaturgical framework established by Artaud’s masquerading as Uccello.8 But in elevating the character of A reticent monument, the flattened surface the (largely fictive) individual, knighted by Paul Barolsky as “the Don Quixote and paradoxical space in Uccello’s of painters,”9 the pictorial and material qualities of Uccello’s artworks have been Hawkwood present a series of dislocations, routinely overlooked, and his paintings often play the ancillary role of illustrating traces, and erasures that disclose the artifice textual interpretations.10 Reclaiming the attentiveness toward pictorial choices in of the painting and bring Hawkwood forth, Imaginary Lives and “Uccello the Hair,” I propose that the insights found in those not as a living being or vestigial presence, texts can productively inform art histori- cal interpretations of Uccello’s art. It is but as a vanishing artifice. not the construction of a distant cultural consciousness, much less an individual one, that concerns me. Neither is the purpose to evaluate or expand the body of lyric encomia that has adorned Uccello’s character since the publication of Schwob’s text. This essay is modest in scope: to probe the possibilities that emerge through an encounter with one of his works, the 1436 Funerary Monument to Sir John Hawkwood (fig. 1), a cenotaph painted to memorialize the famous fourteenth- century English condottiero. The intent here is to think-with Uccello’s aesthetics, engage with their resonating pulse, and explore their reverberations as a mode of thought.11 In this way, I incorporate the afterlife of an unusual work of art that traditionally has itself been seen as exemplifying Uccello’s artistic deficiencies in its lack of unified space and its illusionistic volume. By contrast, I propose that the artwork presents a never- fulfilled visual experience in which resonating negations—of centrality, spatiality, and existence—negotiate the spatial relationship between the artwork and its viewers. My intent is to explore, rather than criticize, the ersatz nature of a unique painting with an intriguing story: Uccello’s fresco replaced a previous painting of Hawkwood, which was itself created as a substitute for the sculpted monument Hawkwood had actually Uccello’s Fluttering Monument to Hawkwood, with Schwob and Artaud >> Javier Berzal de Dios 89 Figure 1. Paolo Uccello FUNERARY MONUMENT TO SIR JOHN HAWKWOOD, 1436 Fresco, 732 x 404 cm Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, Italy Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY 90 DIACRITICS >> 2016 >> 44.2 negotiated before his death. A reticent monument, the flattened surface and paradoxical space in Uccello’s Hawkwood present a series of dislocations, traces, and erasures that disclose the artifice of the painting and bring Hawkwood forth, not as a living being or vestigial presence, but as a vanishing artifice. There is something deliberately tactical about my engagement: the Monument to Hawkwood is here studied as it operates in a heterogeneous system where the viewer negotiates with the painting, and where practices of expression are in dialogue with practices of viewership. As a funerary monument the fresco itself invites the active engagement of the viewers to come. It is this exchange that activates the memorial func- tion. We may bear in mind Alois Riegl’s notion of “intentional commemorative value,” which is precisely intrinsic to a monument’s goal of memory preservation in future cir- cumstances:12 to request a future engagement is to be open to foreign sensibilities. This future “period eye” may bring with it its own aesthetic awareness (palpable in Schwob and Artaud), but also our individual, academic, and cultural approaches to visual lit- eracy. Even if phenomenology and critical theory, for example, are alien to Uccello’s cul- tural milieu, they are not alien to our understanding of his Monument to Hawkwood. The fresco thus emerges not as a transitional artwork in the chronological sense (e.g., a manifestation of an early quattrocento), but rather as a moment of transition in the etymo- logical sense of “going
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