Counterfeit Representations: Tragedy at the Stuart Court

Abstract

As the sound and fury of twentieth-century avant-garde movements recede into an almost infinite distance and the shock value of abstract art and absurd theatre is seemingly dissipated for ever, it becomes even harder to grasp the contrary: that in the Renaissance, representation was charged with anxiety and danger, precisely because it appeared so lifelike. Art undoubtedly proclaimed its pretensions to truth, but not so much in the sober spirit of the court-room as in the fabulous and flamboyant manner of the conjuror or magician. The highest art was endowed with all the power of magic. The counterfeit was charged with so much energy that it was not only able to usurp the place of reality, but to give the force of actuality to things purely imaginative. The spectator of sculpture, painting or spectacle would be so overwhelmed by the sheer presence of the representation, so transfixed by the vividness of the illusion before him, that he would respond to it as if it were utterly real. A story which Vasari tells of the buckler, which Leonardo da Vinci painted for his father, Piero, epitomises the ambitions of Renaissance art. Leonardo took the buckler, which Piero himself had made from a fig tree, and, after getting it straightened and the surface smoothed, decided to paint on it something that would be as terrifyingly real as the head of Medusa.