Zur Taktilität des Schattens

Abstract

Whereas previous examinations of the shadow have focused their attention on its visual features, it appears in pre-modern literature most frequently as a tactile phenomenon, namely as shade, which offers refuge from the excessive heat of the sun. The cooling aspects of the shadow as shade are central to pre-modern poetics, which are concerned with the literary construction of the most evocative mental images possible (imagines). In synaesthetic descriptions of places or settings, such as the locus amoenus, the shadow as shade serves as a means to evoke tactile sensations. Since the tactus occupies a unique position in the system of the five senses, we must question whether the shadow might not in part evoke a tactile feeling (such as temperature sensation) even in a position where we primarily interpret it as a visual phenomenon (such as the cast shadow in Renaissance paintings).