Harmony, Anamorphosis and the “Conceptual Scheme”

Abstract

Une tache floue l'horizon de la pensee Terence Cave I In opening chapter of his early study, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Steven Greenblatt included now famous excursus on subject of Hans Holbein's double portrait, The Ambassadors (1533), and optical technique of anamorphosis. Hans Holbein's well known painting depicts two French envoys to Henry VIII of England, Georges de Selve and Jean de Dinteville, both young, wealthy aristocrats. Like most commentaries on Holbein's canvas, Greenblatt's discussion--a parenthesis in his chapter on Thomas More--places much emphasis on distorted skull, which occupies much of lower quarter of image. Greenblatt offers an extended, acute reading of Holbein portrait and of interpretive unease triggered by skull. Indeed uncanny death's head serves to undermine, for Greenblatt, the very concept of locatable reality upon which we conventionally rely in our mappings of world, to subordinate we so confidently use to larger doubt. (1) Greenblatt's reading makes extensive use of notions of and incompatibility. Speaking of one of figures portrayed in painting, Jean de Dinteville, Greenblatt writes: The incommensurability [between ornament and memento mori] is confirmed by fact that we must distort, and, in essence, efface figures in order to see skull. That this effacement is moving--that it is felt as kind of death--is function of Holbein's mastery of those representational techniques that pay tribute to world, that glorify surfaces and textures of things, that celebrate man's relatedness to objects of his making. The skull, slashing across pavement, intruding upon [its] complex harmonies and disrupting them, (18) is for Greenblatt an analogue for disquieting internal rupture (23) he detects as well in More's Utopia. Greenblatt continues: [The] sense within general frame of work of incompatible perspectives between which reader restlessly moves--is mirrored at virtually every level of text from its largest units of design to its smallest verbal details. [...] This restless shifting of perspective is, I would suggest, close equivalent at verbal level to technique of anamorphosis, whose etymology itself suggests back-and-forth movement, constant forming and reforming. (23) Ultimately, for Greenblatt, will stand as an analogue of textual ambiguity and uncanny shifts of perspective evinced in texts and other objects of cultural study. In broader critical discourse, anamorphosis has recently been very much province of readings informed by psychoanalytic theory. Greenblatt's reading of Holbein's canvas, characteristically, does not draw directly on Jacques Lacan's treatment of same work in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Seminar XI). (2) Nonetheless, in recent years, anamorphosis has often been exploited as an analogy for studying such networks as orders or conceptual schemes. Lacan's account of skull as a gaze imagined by me in field of Other [un regard par moi imagine au champ de l'Autre] (Lacan 1973: 79) has been enormously influential, all more so, perhaps, through Slavoj Zizek's rereading of Holbein and Lacan, and his reformulation of anamorphosis as theoretical paradigm for study of ideology and desire. Zizek emphasizes, after Lacan, unreadable blot of skull as necessarily absent object of interpretive desire intruding on inter-subjective symbolic order, both warping it and framing its possibility. (3) In all three readings of Holbein painting I have mentioned thus far, such entities as orders or sign systems are essential to critical project. …