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

Home , Condottiero, Paolo Uccello, Pisanello

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 historical 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

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 historical 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 function. 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 cultural 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 across” from its original conventions into its future. Such a motion avoids the value of mimesis as re-presentation and attestation of that which is universally natural, a notion that has stubbornly and reductively defined Renaissance art.13 This is not to say that mimesis plays no role, but I am concerned with a more attentive approach to mimesis that stresses the creative and fundamental value of artistic invention. Instead of a traditional reduction in which the painting is measured against the value of geometric correctness, scientific accuracy, or compositional consistency, the Monument to Hawk- wood calls into question the spatial conditions of possibility articulated by painting and viewer, which expose the negotiations involved in the act of viewing the fresco atten- tively. The very engagement with the painting, I will argue, prevents a final resolution.

>> A Horse and a Rider: A Question of Presence

Walking into the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, we see the Monument to Hawkwood on the left internal wall, though this is likely not its original location.14 The painting presents a familiar enough object: a sculpture of a rider atop a plinth, one that recalls many equestrian figures we have all seen elsewhere. Its painted pedestal and the pervasive use of terra verde quickly lead the viewer to understand that the monument depicts an equestrian sculpture. At the same time, neither the figures nor the pedestal fulfill the expectations of three-dimensionality that we have regarding sculptures. The eye is not fooled. The longer one stands in front of the fresco, the less it looks like a volu- metric object. The figures are not earnestly presented as a simulacrum of either vital or sculptural form. In sum, Uccello’s cenotaph remains a painting of a three-dimensional object seemingly without attempting to enforce the illusion of volume. Uccello’s Fluttering Monument to Hawkwood, with Schwob and Artaud >> Javier Berzal de Dios 91

The horse is strikingly artificial. Was Uccello not versed in equine anatomy? This is a question that has been posed since the Renaissance. Giorgio Vasari argued that The Mon- ument to Hawkwood would have been perfect, if only Uccello had known how horses actually moved; Vasari’s criticism is that in Uccello’s fresco the horse was depicted rais- ing both right hooves simultaneously.15 This criticism, quaint if not passé, has led others to wonder if Uccello was inspired or informed by the bronze horses of San Marco in Venice rather than by actual horses he undoubtedly saw in everyday life.16 The horse in the Monument to Hawkwood is noticeably different from another draw- ing that Uccello made of a rider and a horse, perhaps for the Battle of San Romano (fig. 2). The latter leads us to conclude that Uccello understood the physical qualities of horses as well as their movement, and that, despite this, he depicted Hawkwood’s horse in a blatantly geometric style. These are the seemingly unavoidable inquiries required in order to evaluate an artwork in relation to the oeuvre of an artist, but they are also questions that direct a study into a resolute though endless path toward artistic intention. What remains important here is that Hawkwood’s horse is presented to us as an ersatz form with a tangential relationship to empirical observation. The horse, at odds with early modern anatomical knowledge of animals and their representation,17 is forced to conform to a stylized structure. Unlike Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, to use a well-known example, Uccello’s fresco does not present an idealized framework. The Monument to Hawkwood embodies principles of stylized geometric distortion—a pictorial choice consistent with his depictions of horses elsewhere.18 Yet these distortions are neither systematically unified nor dependent on mathematical grids enforcing ideal proportions. Uccello’s paintings present an experience in which lines of force multiply Figure 2. through dividing angles and shapes. Schwob’s account is relevant here: “But the Bird Paolo Uccello MOUNTED KNIGHT, c1430s–40s continued on with his patient work, and he assembled the circles, and he divided the Pen with white heightening on green angles” reducing figures and their movement “to simple lines.” Like an alchemist, he washed paper, 30 x 33 cm “joined them together, he combined them, he melted them down, all in his quest to Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli obtain their transmutation into pure form” in order to see a divine revelation where “all Uffizi, no. 14502F, Florence, Italy figures spring forth out of a complex center.”19 Hawkwood’s horse, through its process Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY of deformation, calls attention to the fact that its coming-to-be involves different rules and factors than those that create an actual, anatomical horse. Kenneth Clark writes that Uccello’s paintings “are not convincing as imitations of the visible world.”20 This is true: in the Monument to Hawkwood, the painted horse is almost devoid of bones, fibers, 92 DIACRITICS >> 2016 >> 44.2

and muscles—its tail is a fixed, carefully arranged ornament of echoing curves. But neither is the animal a believable representation of an equestrian sculpture. Even the tackle and saddle convey a sense of artificiality with their malleable red material instead of oxidized or gilded bronze, which would be the suitable choice for a sculpture. “For the Bird did not understand the joy of limiting oneself to the individual,” wrote Schwob.21 His image of a Uccello concerned not with the “reality of things” but with “their multiplicity and the infinitude of lines” articulates a riposte against the framework of correspondence and imitation. It is in this sense that Hawkwood’s horse resists being judged for its correctness of resemblance. Rather, it offers a multiplication that springs not from a single concept (e.g., “this horse I see”) but from a complex one, demanding an active engagement. Schwob’s transition from “Paolo di Dono,” Uccello’s given name, to “Paul of the Birds” (Paul les oiseaux), John Stout writes, moves Uccello “from the plane of the real” to that of the Lacanian imaginary, as “the referential world is replaced by an unreal substitute.22 I would argue that Schwob’s text pres- Hawkwood’s horse, through its process ents a careful attentiveness to Uccello’s own detachment from mimesis as direct of deformation, calls attention to the fact and univocal correspondence or, at least, invites us to interpret the painter’s oeu- that its coming-to-be involves different vre through such a prism. In other words, Schwob begins a hermeneutical maneuver rules and factors than those that create that continues beyond his text. However concerned with the hallucinatory one an actual, anatomical horse. may find it, Schwob’s text is ultimately grounded in the pictorial, material reality, and indeed it is most successful when operating alongside Uccello’s paintings. Schwob’s vibrant and inventive tone (much like Artaud’s) creates not an idiosyncratic interpretation, but a mode to understand the pictorial aesthetics that reflects on the paintings’ own qualities. Uccello’s approaches to geometric lines and reductive forms, assumed to be stable and immovable, are presented as they appear in his paintings, namely as dynamic lines within heterogeneous spaces. In this way, these modern commentators invite us to actively engage with Uccello—to not take his work at face value. It is impossible for viewers to remain passive when they look upward to perceive the effigy of John Hawkwood. The geometric lines of his armor parallel those of the horse, and their solidity contrasts with Hawkwood’s gaunt face. With focused eyes sunken into his withered, glabrous skin, the rider looks onward. Though haggard and even cadav- erous, his profile remains sharp and distinct—his aquiline nose has even been seen to summon echoes of falconry.23 It is an elderly visage that calls to mind Artaud’s words: “Wrinkles are traps (lacets), Paolo Uccello.”24 These are the wrinkles on the faces of the dead, which in turn articulate a decisive sense of vitality: “the long patience of wrinkles is what saved you from a premature death.”25 Schwob had also referred to Uccello’s wrinkles with great élan: “His face was radiant with the lines of age.”26 An interlaced Uccello’s Fluttering Monument to Hawkwood, with Schwob and Artaud >> Javier Berzal de Dios 93

resonance: in Jacques Derrida’s language, the laces entrap us (in French, le lacet also meaning “snare”), passing between the living and the dead.27 Such theoretical interjec- tions divaricate interpretations. The Renaissance scholar may well refer to the period’s taste in Roman republican art, as the wrinkles and aged physiognomy may well signal wisdom and character. But the presence of an etiolated effigy endures. The striking pale, ghostly face reminds the viewer of the life Hawkwood lacks, which the funerary monument as such foregrounds.28 Artaud’s interpretation of Uccello’s lines as wrinkles take on a new valence in the funerary monument. Even Hawkwood himself, anticipating the erection of his funerary sculpture would have thought about his ceasing-to-be, “I will have died.” The desire to register one’s existence, to create a postmortem archive of one’s physical remains and accomplishments (even in an impossibly abridged form), as Der- rida points out, cannot exist without a “radical finitude” and the “possibility of a forget- fulness.”29 A funerary monument hopes for a remembering thought regarding social and historical significance, but it makes a compromise for the remembering of a few facts. Future thoughts are thus predicated on spatiotemporal negation, and they become especially intensified in mortuary contexts. Throughout the history of art, and harkening back to Egyptian and Roman practices, portraiture, funerary sculptures, and death masks have occupied a privileged position as a means to transcend death. Heads and faces have often enjoyed a special status for both artists and theorists, especially since Leon Bat- tista Alberti’s On Painting (1435) codified the importance of painted figures looking out at the viewer. The result of encountering a pictorial face, however, does not necessarily correlate to the desired intention of creating human connections. Portraits, as Maria Loh notes, “often give the impression of presence and haunt the space of the viewer. Portraits can also be creepy in that they are also material reminders of our own materiality and transience.”30 Because Hawkwood’s face does not confront us directly, the viewer experi- ences at once the face and its emplacement. When the artist models a head, Martin Hei- degger has noted, it seems as if he is simply reconfiguring the visible surfaces, when in actuality he is configuring what is invisible, that is, the way in which the head looks at the world and the way in which its motions interact with space.31 Hawkwood’s face is eerie not only because its elicits thoughts of our own demise, as Loh writes, but also because pictorially it remains detached from the abstracted body armor and horse, placed against an overpowering red backdrop. In this structure, death and lack of presence coexist in the Monument because the painting remains a signifier and never enacts a simulacrum. In this process, the thingness and presence of the painting dictate the disappearance of the monument and, perhaps more importantly, the swift disappearance of the subject, as the painting does not have Hawkwood the condottiero as a signified. Rather, the painting signals to a sculpture, but this is itself a reminder that the planned sculptural tomb Hawkwood expected to enclose his remains was never constructed. The history leading to Uccello’s fresco is circuitous. In 1393, a year before Hawk- wood’s death, a provision for a marble monument inside the Florence cathedral was made. However, this sculptural monument was never erected and, in 1395, Agnolo Gaddi and Giuliano Pesello painted a fresco in its place. In 1433, perhaps because of a change 94 DIACRITICS >> 2016 >> 44.2

in taste or water damage, a replacement was deemed necessary. Finally, in 1436, Uccello was commissioned to paint over the original fresco. Thus the painting is itself a ruse that entraps Hawkwood. His military prowess bestowed him access to a tomb in the cathedral, but his death circumscribed the limits of his power. Obviously it was important for the Tuscans to uphold their promise and give Hawkwood his monument, and one can only speculate, but I would imagine a few Tuscans chuckling at what is, for all intents and purposes, a rather elevated example of a switcheroo. (And this is not a unique case: the Venetians erected Bartolomeo Colleoni’s 1483 monument eight years after his death in a different location than his testament required, though they retained the general’s generous donation bound with the sculpture.) Hawkwood is remembered, but not the way he had planned—his own hopes articulated a “time of the non yet,” as Roland Barthes would put it, along with its limitations.32 The painting recalls a sculpture, which recalls the function of funerary sculpture in general, signaling to a series of conceptual constituents: a name, an occupation, and the quality of being worthy of memory. Bereft of an ethopoetic narrative of dynamic life or a postmortem rhetoric of transcription, the painting articulates a desire, even an imperative, to be animated: think of Hawkwood! We comply, assuming this figure actually depicts John Hawkwood riding his horse. But Hawkwood died in 1394, around three years before Uccello was born, and his remains had been shipped back to his native land at the English king’s request, a year after the condottiero’s death. The history of the image itself captures us, interlacing interpretations within a process of erasures and disappearances. Even Hawkwood’s face, seemingly intrinsic to our perception of Hawk- wood as a man, was a late addition. Lorenza Melli’s work with ultraviolet rays seems to indicate that there was dissatisfaction with the original painting, which depicted Hawkwood in full armor with a helmet covering his face, and which was subsequently altered by Uccello.33 This lack of presence, The painting recalls a sculpture, which this detachment from Hawkwood, is ultimately caused by death, and death is what recalls the function of funerary sculpture in the viewer meets in Hawkwood’s face. In his treatise on architecture, Alberti traces general, signaling to a series of conceptual the history of monuments not back to Egypt, as one may have expected, but to constituents: a name, an occupation, and Rome’s boundary markers; and it seems that funerary monuments are exceptional the quality of being worthy of memory. examples of those markers Alberti men- tions, heralding the boundary between two regions, that which exists and that which does not.34 In this sense, the Monument to Hawkwood resonates without denouement. It marks without demarcating: it exists between territories without defining them. The fresco’s space of alterity in turn calls for a mode of interpretation that breaks through its putative dialectic stand. Let us linger on Hawkwood’s effigy. As I have already discussed, Heidegger argues that the artist, modeling the head, presents the way in which its motions interact with space. Uccello’s Fluttering Monument to Hawkwood, with Schwob and Artaud >> Javier Berzal de Dios 95

Space here is room, where the dweller endures. Endurance is not purely the perpetuation of physiological processes. It obtains a qualitative significance. The mass of this dweller is not static. As John Dewey wrote, “[mass] contracts and expands, asserts itself and yields, according to its relations to other spatial and enduring things.”35 The word “endurance” brings us closer to the world as an environment and not as an adequate dwelling, that is, it takes us further from the notions of topological delimitation, and also further from the illusion of a transparent, pure, and neutral space. What endures of Hawkwood? Certainly his name—Alberti would have approved of this. Nevertheless, Hawkwood was more than a name, and it is the image of his face that we visually use to explore beyond the nominal ele- ments of his being. To turn to his face is, in Heideggerian terms, to turn-towards-the-end, even if his decrepit face is also a testament to his character and personality. In either case, it is the viewer who carries the name, who brings the name and the fame of Hawkwood into his or her space, and not vice versa. “Think of Hawkwood!” the painting demands, but it cannot limit the responses. The condottiero’s memory rests in the hands of those who engage with the painting. The exhortation stipulates a visual exchange in which the viewer endures in relationship to the painting, which itself at once seeks to perpetuate its message while dissolving in an ebbing and flowing of erasures and displacements.

>> No Space

The contrast between the figures and the background against which they are arranged challenges the possibility of Hawkwood being emplaced. The statue exists nowhere. Space is the location where actions take place, the stage. Where is this place? It is the Cathedral of Florence, of course, where the painting rests, but neither Hawkwood the man nor his painted image dwell in the church’s space. In contrast to Masaccio’s Holy Trinity, to use a famous example that Uccello knew well, the Monument is not depicted as being placed within the cathedral. In fact, horse, rider, and pedestal float, surrounded by a red, flat space. A conceptualization of this red flatness could lead to Hawkwood paradoxically being seen as having either all the space or none. Considering the former leads us to see an unbounded space: the red background’s absolute reduction of actuality. Dewey, for example, wrote about the background in Titian’s portraits: “infinite space, not just the canvas, is behind the figure.”36 A question here is whether infinity and the negation of all possibility coexist, and if this paradoxical situation leads to a moment of transcendence.37 The flatness could suggest a space of freedom, even of life (a notion that would later prolifer- ate).38 And if it is not space or room in itself, perhaps the background articulates a type of contrast though which Hawkwood’s personhood is invoked (much like Marat’s presence is perhaps conjured from the dead in Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting).39 Yet the dark, wine-red persists, and we cannot truly argue for either Hawkwood’s vitality or his presence being conjured—not even for the presence of his statue. It is not vital air that surrounds Hawkwood, who has been reduced to lines and pictorial traces that remain unable to uphold any illusion. The viewer perceives the background as a staggering disappearance of space in which the wall is palpable, not as a backdrop, but as a surface 96 DIACRITICS >> 2016 >> 44.2

on which the “statue” of Hawkwood is affixed. This lack of room appears as a denial of potentiality.40 The solid color background is a non-locus. The Latin word locus, meaning “place,” comes from the Old Latin stlocus, “where something is placed.” The word traces back to the Proto-Indo-European base stel-, “to cause to stand, to place.” What does this mean vis-à-vis the Monument to Hawk- The background is intensified at the cost of wood? The rider is placed on a pedestal. The pedestal rests on a projected plinth the figure; it challenges the projection of where three thin corbels uphold the entire weight of the rider, the horse, and the ped- the figures, flattening the overall estal (indeed the weight of Hawkwood’s fame as expressed in the inscription). And composition, such that only the viewers’ it is the inscription that seeks to make of Hawkwood more than a mere image. engagement upholds Hawkwood. “Ioannes Acutus eques Britannicus dux aetatis suae cautissimus et rei militaris peritissimus habitus est.” As we translate these words, it is important not to overlook the passive verbal form, habitus est. The inscription does not solely read, “John Hawk- wood, British knight, most prudent leader of his age and most expert in the military art.” It adds, “habitus est,” that Hawkwood “was regarded to be” and “upheld as” “the most prudent leader of his age and most expert in the military art.” Even Hawkwood’s fame and qualities are presented as negotiated through others’ eyes and opinions. The viewer gets caught in a series of triangulations that impede the immediacy that may be desired. Place stands in relation to those who animate it. In David Morris’s words, “even a bur- ied body is in place only through those who mourn it.”41 Hawkwood’s space is ours, the viewers who contemplate a painting. Hawkwood borrows our space in order to ensure that his name continues to be upheld. We grant him our space by engaging with it. Move- ment and displacement belong to the viewer, not to Hawkwood. Because of the striking lack of visual or narrative context, it is the inscription, not the image, that provides much of the work’s gravity and meaning. In pictorial terms, nothing seems to uphold the sculpture and its pedestal, which per- plexingly hover affixed to the burgundy swath—a choice that challenges the notion of perspective as an illusionistic tool. The background is thus intensified at the cost of the figure; it challenges the projection of the figures, flattening the overall composition, such that only the viewers’ engagement upholds Hawkwood. The red plane, which should be the background, instead surrounds the sculpture. As a result, there is no “over there” in the Monument to Hawkwood, no nearness, remoteness, or fixed orientation. Its lack of a geography of the beyond hinders a narrative in which the event of death is part of a continuous process. The fresco creates an atopographical space, unmapped and unwrit- ten. We would expect linear perspective, a tool Uccello held in high regard, to control the space, both in pictorial terms and for the viewers. Because perspective here fails to project onto the barren background, the relationships in the work are unbounded. Uccello’s Fluttering Monument to Hawkwood, with Schwob and Artaud >> Javier Berzal de Dios 97

Linear perspective, in Uccello’s paintings, simply does not do what it is commonly assumed to do. And even among his various works, he does not seem to have a fixed perspectival approach; he appears unconcerned with spatiotemporal unity. Without horizon or room, Hawkwood is isolated from us. Within this absolute displacement, Hawkwood has no home or dwelling—much less the Heimat that Zürcher sought to assign Hawkwood.42 If we extrapolate Hans-Georg Gadamer’s linguistic reconstitution of Heidegger’s notion of Heimat, one would say that the painting embodies a lack of spatial grammar, or that it requests the emplacement of a visual dialect beyond geometric axioms.43 “He could never remain in a single place,” wrote Schwob, “he wanted to glide, in his flight, over the tops of all places.”44 Uccello flies, but does not engage in reconnais- sance, hovering across territories and boundaries without mapping them.

>> No Center

The painting exists as a reminder of the never-erected sculptural monument. Devoid of a unitary perspective, the painting is also devoid of an ideal vantage point. Or, more accu- rately, the perfect point of view is far away and it only exists for a brief moment, before the illusion of unity fragments as the viewer realizes that the perspective is not unitary. We can invert this reasoning: the closest thing to a perfect vantage point is as temporal as it is spatial: it is achieved when, up close, one realizes the paradoxes of the composition— i.e., when one realizes there is no one perfect point of view and the image subverts itself by playing with the viewer’s expectations of completion. Furthermore, the perspectival lines create two different vantage points, one for the pedestal and another for the horse and rider. If viewers face the center of the painting, the perspectival effect of the plinth appears dissonant. At the same time, to align with the fresco following the precepts of linear perspective means to stand in front of the far-left plinth support—that is, off- center in relation to the entire fresco. From that angle, the viewer looks up at a horse that cannot be visually reconciled with the base, as it appears to be impossibly prancing on its edge. The theoretical placement of a viewer is significant to the substance of the tribute. After all, as John White writes, “a worm’s eye panorama of a horse’s belly and a general’s feet can be at best a dubious tribute to [Hawkwood’s] memory.”45 Here we find, once again, room for a smile in confronting the Monument to Hawk- wood—a smile that awkwardly responds to a funerary monument commemorating the sanguinary career of a mercenary leader. A quiet sense of soberness or solemnity would have been more befitting. The smile is the product of the artistic engagement that involves a type of philosophical play predicated on irony and wit. It is not a mere “visual joke” that describes Uccello’s “caprices,” but an ambiguous interference that undermines the apparent foundations that upheld the otherwise witless artwork, in turn hindering a categorical division between the serious and the unserious, as James Elkins has deftly noted.46 We may recall Vasari’s portrayal of Uccello when he humorously states that the painter paid so much attention to solving problems of perspective that he would ignore his wife’s calls to come to bed.47 An “earthy preoccupation with depth,” Artaud called it.48 98 DIACRITICS >> 2016 >> 44.2

In Vasari’s narrative, perspective became Uccello’s reclusive mistress after Donatello’s criticism that Uccello “abandon[ed] the subject for the shadow,” which Hubert Damisch calls “an irony of fate.”49 Uccello hid in his home, rejecting a world that did not understand him. Or, as Schwob writes, “The Bird grew old, and no one understood his paintings any longer. All they saw was a confusion of curves. No longer did they recognize the Earth, or the plants, or the animals, or men.”50 In Vasari’s telling, a defeated Uccello dedicated the rest of his life, poor and secluded, to his love of perspective. And it is this passion that makes it difficult not to understand his deviations from unitary spaces as premeditated. At the same time, love and desire, as Leonardo points out, are not tantamount to knowledge: “Those who are in love with prac- tice without science are like the sailor who boards a ship without rudder and compass, who is never certain where he is going.”51 Uccello has received polarized responses, and it is significant that artists, more than art historians, have traditionally been more receptive to his aesthetics. Taking these artistic reactions seriously, I would say that Uccello may be lost at sea, but he is not Michel Foucault’s Renaissance madman, confined in a boat and thus “prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes.”52 The addition of lines and dimensions in Uccello’s paintings evinces a series of liberating maneuvers, even if unintentionally so: perhaps Uccello, in his determined flight, never knew where he was going, but was committed to the journey. Nonetheless, as Elkins points out, if Uccello truly wanted to stress the shortcoming of perspective, or to boldly experiment with the new technique, he chose to do it in a subtle way. If Uccello’s use of perspective was revolution- ary, Elkins writes, his was a muted revolution.53 Artaud too presents the painter’s force as a quiet, secluded resonance: “You, Uccello, are learning to be only a line and the heightened level of a secret.”54 In modern parlance, we could instead propose that Uccello’s approach to space indicates an experimental framework, one concerned with the artistic possibilities of linear perspective rather than the logical conclusion of the technique. Schwob reinterprets the meeting between Uccello and Donatello; the latter looks at a canvas by Uccello, sees nothing but a confused amalgam of lines, and refuses to talk about it. It is at that point, Schwob writes, that Uccello understood that he had created a mira- cle. Even then, Uccello’s triumph remains faint, covered, and private. If we see Uccello’s spatial depiction not as antagonistic to perspective, but as developing from it, we find a use of perspective in which assumed notions of pictorial space become unsound. In this sense, perspective becomes a foreign language that is negotiated not by following fixed rules and meanings, but through usage. Hawkwood’s space hesitates, continually con- joining possibilities. This raises a temporal proposition, and one may say, cautiously, that space constitutes Uccello’s time, or that the articulation of space seeks to liberate, to give room to the rider. Lived temporalities remain outside the picture. Or, better, they remain about the picture: one can imagine Uccello slowly painting the figure of Hawkwood on wet plaster, and as the fresco process imposed its material temporality, each small sec- tion irrevocably hardened throughout a day. From living military leader to potential funerary sculpture to a repainted cenotaph: again, Hawkwood himself is not summoned. Was the decision to paint a sculpture a way to invoke the memory of Hawkwood from a Uccello’s Fluttering Monument to Hawkwood, with Schwob and Artaud >> Javier Berzal de Dios 99

safe distance? Ultimately, the challenge posited by the Monument lies here. Because of the Monument’s artifice, the viewer needs to confront what is visually given and engage with the painting, either consciously or subconsciously, in an act of creation. The results do not enforce a unified epistemic infrastructure or request propositional mastering or resolution. Writing broadly about space and spatiality, John Dewey notes that perspective creates a visual mode of “spacing,” which is determined by distribution of intervals in space. “Spacing” is the outcome of recurrences and relations, not of isolated events; things “dis- posed at the wrong angle in relation to one another” result in awkwardness.55 Spacing is here understood to be a type of logos, a coherent and unified principle of organization whose outcome are pictorially unified images. But spacing, especially in pictorial terms, neither requires nor generates a fully coherent system.56 In this sense, if perspective is a consistent system in which individual things are conditioned by the structure as a whole,57 the Monument to Hawkwood stipulates a disruption within a system where the whole is not perpetually imposed, but in which the engagement with the viewer creates a transitory, vanishing resolution. The relationship between the parts and the whole of perspective need not be exhaustive or mutually exclusive. Because of the material conditions of the object and the viewing prevent, the logic of space remains partial, becoming logistics in which negotiations are developed through interactions. They do not follow one unified rule of coherence and equilibrium. Artaud wrote of Uccello’s art that “every- thing is vibratile.58 Indeed, the Monument vacillates. Or rather, it forces the viewer’s perceptions to do so. The Monument’s disarticulation of spatiotemporal logic prevents a visual recon- ciliation either through the materiality of the painted sculpture or the martial gravity expected from such a commission. The rhythm of the visual exchange hardly seems a triumph, much less a military one. The image of Hawkwood is not one that alludes to parades or battlefields. An interest in response endures, a request for the remembrance of the man, even if the recollection takes place through an interlacing of images and signs, through erasure and displacement. Perceptions are rerouted by a series of divi- sions from material to immaterial. Ratios and relationships multiply rapidly: the rider to the horse, the horse to the pedestal, the figures to the background, the background to the wall, the background to the viewer, the rider to the viewer . . . There is a lack of absolute positions or resolution points. This is what Schwob and Artaud found in Uccello: a logic of addition and perpetual resonances. Looking at the Monument to Hawkwood, each step involves a series of ever-expanding negotiations. Each line is confronted by another line and brought back by the uncompromising intensity of the red background. Each stroke remains a stroke as the figure dismantles itself. Uccello thus takes flight sotto voce, leav- ing a trace of his muted revolution as he swung over (and became part of ) what Artaud fittingly called “a formidable abyss.”59 100 DIACRITICS >> 2016 >> 44.2

Notes

1 Schwob, “Paolo Uccello.” All translations of some essential way by its relation to nature” (Robert Schwob’s “Paolo Uccello” are by Christopher Clarke, Williams, “Italian Renaissance Art and the System from the forthcoming edition of Imaginary Lives, pub- aticity of Representation,” 160). lished by Wakefield Press. The author and the editors 14 See Millard Meiss, “The Original Position of of diacritics thank Christopher Clarke for making his Uccello’s John Hawkwood,” 231. translation available prior to publication. 15 “If Paolo had not made that horse move its legs 2 Ibid. on one side only, which naturally horses do not do, 3 John Stout, Antonin Artaud’s Alternate or they would fall . . . this work would be absolutely Genealogies, 37. perfect” (Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 2:137; Vasari-Milanesi, 2:212). 4 Artaud, “Uccello the Hair,” 135. 16 John Pope-Hennessy, Paolo Uccello, 8. 5 Robert Zwijnenberg and Claire Farago, “Art History after Aesthetics,” x. 17 Knowledge of anatomy in the early modern period is apparent, for example, in artworks like 6 Deleuze, The Fold, 38. Deleuze’s encounter with Pisanello’s St. George and the Princess or his horse the Renaissance is complex and notably affected by studies, in Benozzo Gozzoli’s Magi Chapel in the twentieth-century art historical scholarship. I discuss Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence, as well as in this topic in “A Note on Deleuze and Renaissance Art.” treatises like Alberti’s De equo animante. 7 Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 18. 18 Pope-Hennessy, Paolo Uccello, 20. 8 See Agnès Lhermitte, “Paul les oiseaux”; and 19 Schwob, “Paolo Uccello.” Leslie Boldt-Irons, “Crossing over into Painted Space.” 20 Clark, The Art of Humanism, 54. 9 Barolsky, “The Painter Who Almost Became a Cheese,” 113. 21 Schwob, “Paolo Uccello.”

10 A recent example of an article seeking to 22 Stout, Antonin Artaud’s Alternate Genealogies, 27. integrate visual qualities is Sabine Mainberger, “Paolo 23 Antoine, La chair de l’oiseau, 22. Uccellos ‘mazzocchi,’ Marcel Schwob und die Grenzen der Euklidischen Geometrie,” though the means and 24 Artaud, “Uccello the Hair,” 136. goals of the essay remain concerned with the textual. 25 Ibid. 11 I am here adopting a notion from Walter Benjamin, found in “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and 26 Schwob, “Paolo Uccello.” Historian,” 262. 27 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 277.

12 Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” 21–51. 28 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, 246 13 “We no longer expect modern art to have any (bk. 8, §2). Alberti here refers to funerary monuments relation to nature, but we seem to need to believe all at a general level. the more strongly that Renaissance art is defined in 29 Derrida, Archive Fever, 19. Uccello’s Fluttering Monument to Hawkwood, with Schwob and Artaud >> Javier Berzal de Dios 101

30 Loh, “Renaissance Faciality,” 360. 45 White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 197. 31 “Wenn der Künstler einen Kopf modelliert, so scheint er nur die sichtbaren Oberflächen nachzu- 46 Elkins, “Uccello, Duchamp.” bilden; in Wahrheit bildet er das eigentlich Unsichtbare, 47 Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, nämlich die Weise, wie dieser Kopf in die Welt blickt, Sculptors and Architects, 2:140; Vasari-Milanesi, 2:217. wie er im Offenen des Raumes sich aufhält, darin von Menschen und Dingen angegangen wird” (Heidegger, 48 Artaud, “Uccello the Hair,” 136. Bemerkungen zu Kunst – Plastik – Raum, 14). 49 Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, 32 Barthes, The Neutral, 50. Sculptors and Architects, 2:133; Vasari-Milanesi, 2:205; Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/, 278n101. 33 Melli, “Nuove indagini sui disegni di Paolo Uccello agli Uffizi.” Exploring the political dynamics 50 Schwob, “Paolo Uccello.” of the period, Hugh Hudson suggests that Uccello reworked his composition in order to present a 51 Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo on Painting, 52. humanistic image of Hawkwood, “less imposing and 52 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 11. militaristic” (Hudson, “The Politics of War,” 19). 53 Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective, 233. 34 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, 238 (bk. 7, §16). 54 Artaud, “Uccello the Hair,” 136.

35 Dewey, Art as Experience, 212. 55 Dewey, Art as Experience, 21011.

36 Ibid., 209. 56 Ibid., 210.

37 Ibid. 57 Williams, “Italian Renaissance Art and the Systematicity of Representation,” 170. 38 Édouard Manet, for example, was taken aback by both the lack of space and the liveliness of the figure in 58 Artaud, “Uccello the Hair,” 135. Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Pablo de Valladolid. 59 Ibid., 136. 39 Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 48.

40 Dewey, Art as Experience, 209.

41 Morris, The Sense of Space, 181.

42 Zürcher, Italienische Wandmalerei, 206.

43 On this topic see Heidegger, “Sprache und Heimat”; Gadamer, “Heimat und Sprache”; Hammer- meister, “Heimat in Heidegger and Gadamer.”

44 Schwob “Paolo Uccello.” 102 DIACRITICS >> 2016 >> 44.2

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