A Different Mode of Disjunction

Abstract

Modern narratives of art's disenchantment mandate a plotline of loss. The story of the cult image transformed to ‘artwork’ – so lucidly told by scholars from Max Weber to Hans Belting – invariably becomes the story of mysticism shed in the Renaissance. A distrust of (or at least a distance on) art's ritual efficacy there signalled new, secularist roles for the image: commodity, societal banner, authored masterpiece, original. These are the roles defining the modern work of art. They were concretised by the great, German-speaking theorists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, many of whom were steeped in Protestantism's iconophobic critique. Vested in the secular modernity of their own day, these thinkers needed a Renaissance culture that broke with a liminal dark age, and which prefigured their own moment's nascent avant-gardes. Their Renaissance adhered to a rationalised, post-Enlightenment concept of time. It became not just a historical break with what came before, but also an era peopled by scholars who, like them, arrayed antique artefacts in a chronological framework and analysed them from afar, stripping them of ritualised, uncertain magic, pinning them to texts or discourses. Italian humanists had first supplanted the supernatural with the informational where objects were concerned; and after Jacob Burkhardt's Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860), culture itself, as for Hegel, became a symbol; the Florentine altarpiece mattered not for its transcendent faculties, but for what it could index about a past life world, about beauty, about aesthetic experience.