Symmetry’s generative side
2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 67-68; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/691600
ISSN2327-9621
Autores Tópico(s)Architecture and Art History Studies
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeSymmetry’s generative sideShira BrismanShira Brisman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes recounts that the human figure was once spherical, until the indignant Zeus severed it down the middle and instructed Apollo to turn the face and genitals around. The god’s anger explains the body’s bilateralism. “If they show any more insolence,” the immortal threatened, “I will cut them up in half again, so they shall go about hopping on one leg.”1* * *What form does a generative image take? What is the look of a picture that inspires appropriations and improvisations? In the sixteenth century, patterns organized with respect to a central axis communicated fecundity and provoked more iterations of making. Theorists committed to the description of well-made pictures, such as Albrecht Dürer, had little to say about this structural principle of a dividing line with mirroring sides. Dürer’s discussion of proportion, which is how the Latin symmetria was understood in his day, referred to the commensuration of parts with regard to the whole.2 The term had not yet come to apply to the principle of imitative sides, as it would only in the eighteenth century.3 But this compositional arrangement—symmetry—spawned creativity during the early modern period and with particular effectiveness through the medium of prints. Impressions drew from antique sources such as the painted decorations of once-buried Roman walls or the carved narratives of sculpted tombs. Catalyzing the classical as a point of origin for ornament permitted artists an unbridled approach to the body. The general realm of the mythological gave license to lascivious couplings, compromising positions, and recombinant beings, part man and part beast. Heinrich Aldegrever’s engravings—used by book designers and craftsmen of stone, metal, embroidery and leather—balance Dionysian fauns, fruits, and flora around an attention-summoning head.4 In one configuration (B.274), the visage funnels into a female torso, and then into roots. The frontal hybrid serves as the middle of a layout that opposes and combines bearded and breasted forms. A highly organized spatial principle gives way to wild permutations of sexual associations between man, woman, beast, seeds, stems, and shoots.In the essay that follows, the central vertical alignments of Aldegrever, the Beham brothers, and Dürer will serve as axes around which a number of turns take place: bodies rotate toward or away from each other, figures pivot around midpoints in suggestions of circular motion, and artistic “turns” upend or pry open representational conventions established by predecessors.* * *By the sixteenth century, the reproductive medium of prints was catalyzing a potential that had once been mostly restricted to the realm of drawing: the ability to share designs—be they figural studies, compositional arrangements, or geometrically based patterns—among members of the same profession or interrelated trades. Prints offered artists an opportunity to speak to one another. Sheets dedicated to ornament pronounced most clearly the imperative to make, and did so most audibly and with a self-reflexive flair, when they combined the fecund imagery of male and female counterparts with floriated motifs and naked youths. Thus the elements of these symmetrical patterns, which could also be observed in architectural adornment and elsewhere, carry a particular conceit when transmitted through the medium of the ornament print. The engraved design acts as a proposal. Whether it stimulates transference to another medium or an improvisation in the form of another engraved design, the ornament engraving instigates another instance of making. As surviving evidence of interartistic communiqués, these prints allow any viewer, even those outside of craft trades, to perform some of the mental operations that artists enacted in the process of generating variant forms.Symmetry stimulates this effect. A frontal face summons ocular attention and corporeal awareness. With its analogous appearance to the reproductive organs of the human body (nose as navel, eyes as nipples, and mouth in the genital realm), a visage addresses the facing stance required of viewership and arrests the beholder with the recognition that he or she is symmetrically structured and sexed.5 In Aldegrever’s ornament prints, frontal visages metonymically invoke the reproductive organs. A staring skull in the midpoint of the lower third of a design from 1549 conjures a uterine shape (B.277; fig. 1), a resemblance that startles when compared with Leonardo’s anatomical study of a woman’s body, whose lower portion screams and glares like a horned beast (fig. 2). Leonardo’s sheet shows evidence of prick marks, indicating that the artist folded one side over, thus generating a symmetrical image through self-copying. He then traced the entire contour he had created and inscribed a message to repeat the transfer over again.6 These words prod the image-making hand to draw the female reproductive organ once more, even as this form seems to threaten with a terrifying stare. In Aldegrever’s prints, the frontal face does not astonish like the gorgon’s immobilizing gaze; instead it gives way to male and female forms whose corporeal interchange deepens the space of the image. The two satyrs pull their tails through their legs. In the foreground their hooves cross in a visual metaphor for sex.7Figure 1. Heinrich Aldegrever, ornament design with two couples of satyrs, 1549. Engraving, 8.8 × 4.2 cm. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.Figure 2. Leonardo da Vinci, anatomical study of the principal organs and arterial system of a female torso, 1508. Black and red chalk with ink and wash on pricked paper, 18.9 × 33.3 cm. The Royal Borough Museum Collection, RL 12281R. Photo: © DeA Picture Library / Art Resource, NY.In transmitting the impression of bilateral sameness, a frontal face slows the ability to apprehend difference. Designers of ornament prints utilized the left and right registers flanking the centralizing element to explore sexual possibilities. A scheme favored by Aldegrever involved stacking forms on either side of a beastly countenance with enough mirroring to lend the overall impression of lateral mimicry, yet allowing some rows to diverge. In one such arrangement (B.273), he establishes a fulcrum of vertically aligned grotesque masks topped by a thigh-spreading satyr with an erect phallus. At the upper register are two horned heads in profile. At the center, two men in contemporary dress clasp the central mask’s horns while facing opposite directions (one peers out toward the viewer, the other turns his gaze away). At the bottom, a child on either side mounts a female (left) and a male (right) triton. The print is representative of a compositional type by Aldegrever in which the motifs on either side may be either imitative reflections, forms that turn with different orientations from the axis, or sexually dimorphic beings. This variety lends the sense that different modes of creation are happening within the print. In the middle row of another engraving of this type (B.281; fig. 3), the tails of the female beasts sprout from beneath the bearded mask as if self-replicating, recalling the Latin root of that verb (plicare); they seem to fold out from the center.8 Yet the gender differentiation of the two figures just below them exerts an alternate impact.9 A female hybrid seduces her male counterpart, who swivels to her song. Their tails conjoin to support a saucière mounted by weaponry. Immediately above the weaponry appears the frontal face at the center of the composition that is framed by the pair of bilaterally symmetrical hybrid beasts. Rather than splitting apart from the center, their tails may be coming together to create the scene above. The motions implied by the print engage the possibility of multiple directions: Forms sprout from other forms, or merge to yield new forms. At the top of the print, two putti lunge in a rotationally symmetrical configuration: one is displayed from the front, the other from the back. Their positions offer a further possibility: that the process of turning might be generating the creative energies at play in the print’s reproductive realm.Figure 3. Heinrich Aldegrever, ornament design with music-making satyrs, 1550. Engraving, 6.7 × 4.9 cm. Washington, DC: The National Gallery of Art.* * *Engravers of ornament prints extended this defiance of symmetry to figures that do not face but flip, presenting circular motion as part of the creative process. David Summers has argued that the transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional symmetry apparent in Italian painting at the turn of the sixteenth century emerged as an effort to perfect a new visual order.10 On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, as Michelangelo’s God calls into being the sun and the moon, the artist displays his anterior and posterior sides. Together the two depictions of the deity announce the artist’s solution to the problem of how to show an entire figure.11 Aldegrever evokes a Michelangelesque twist of bodies rotating around a center in a print that uses back and front to explore the dynamic between the sexes (B.260; fig. 4). Both the facing female hybrid and the dorsal male swerve toward a vertically erect plant. This central sprout splits two wavelike motions at either side, formed by stems that are being bent by the forward motion of the two putti who run in either direction, mimicking the central dialectic of adult bodies that reveal and conceal. The plant in the middle divides left from right, female from male, at the same time that it lends the apprehension that the figures on one side are semi-elliptical rotations of those on the other. Divorced from the biblical narrative of creation that provides the context for the Italian master’s figuration of the divine turn, Aldegrever establishes an energetic force by coupling a flip-flop with a gender swap. By virtue of an association that has been elegantly explicated by Ittai Weinryb between silva, primordial matter, and arboreal ornament, the foliage that bends backward, as though yielding to the “parents” within the print, also summons intimations of genesis.12Figure 4. Heinrich Aldegrever, ornament design with two hybrids and two putti, 1537. Engraving, 4.5 × 15.1 cm. British Museum, 1853,0312.262. Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum.Through the diminutive format of the miniature ornament print, engravers experimented with spatial suggestiveness by creating compositions whose dynamics involved not only a left and a right, but also a front and a back side. While they are not based on precise mathematical calculations, Aldegrever’s exercises in rotational symmetry designate the realm of the print as a place for play. If the representation of vessels may have served as actual designs to be executed in another medium, the expressive energies of the print seem dedicated to conveying the kinds of processes involved in the execution of a three-dimensional form: turning around, conceiving of another side. An engraving of Aldegrever’s dated to 1529 (B.230; fig. 5) is inspired by Hans Sebald Beham’s arrangement of three years earlier (B.238; fig. 6). Though no portion is so morphologically similar as to repeat with exactitude the elements of his predecessor’s, Aldegrever’s print includes similar components. Both engravings set two putti at the bottom of a double goblet, the upper portion of which is flanked by two tendrils. Beham’s image suggests a degree of spatial dimensionality: in the lower register, the arms of the putti overlap, while in the upper register, two blossoms are turned away to reveal their undersides, fostering the viewer’s awareness that the elaborate vessel possesses a backside.13 The implication is that, for the flowers to yield their full petalwork, the putti would have to reveal their rears. Both symbols associated with fecundity, the blossoms and the companions of Eros, instigate a kind of visual chase scene, where the genitalia of the boys and stamens of the plants are either hidden or exposed.14 Beham effectively activates in the mind of his viewer the ability to imagine the fullness of the seed-bearing bodies of blossoms and boys.Figure 5. Heinrich Aldegrever, ornament design with two putti at the base of a vase, 1529. Engraving, 6.5 × 4 cm. British Museum, 1853,0709.216. Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum.Figure 6. Hans Sebald Beham, ornament design with two putti riding dolphins, 1526. Engraving, 5.4 × 3 cm. Washington, DC: The National Gallery of Art.Aldegrever enriches the spatial suggestiveness of Beham’s print by conveying a sense of spin. Two putti seem to be whirling the chalice around by its neck: one places his hand in front of the spherical joiner, the other behind it. They themselves, through their bodily position, present the notion of semicircular rotation; together, they manifest the same pose turned 180 degrees. The diagonally sweeping lines at the vessel’s top and the light that falls to the lower left assist in evoking a sense of carouseling motion. The right foot of each putto rests atop the engraver’s monogram plate. As they project out into the falling light, the winged figure’s toes cast a shadow over the maker’s initials, obscuring his claim to the image’s conception.Comparing Beham’s and Aldegrever’s engravings enriches our understanding of the generative nature of ornament prints. On one level, the components of Beham’s design gave way to a new construction: Aldegrever was inspired by, but did not copy, his predecessor. Beham’s engraving might be seen as originally serving the purpose of setting forth a model to be executed in metalwork, in which case the artist receiving the delineation would recognize the need to supply the alternate views of the flowers and figures on the vessel’s other side. The imaginative act that it prompts—the conception of the ulterior view—might be seen as a directive from the engraver to the vessel’s executor, who must give form to the undisplayed side. Yet the image’s size, 5 1/2 by 3 centimeters, complicates the question of whether to classify the print as a proposition for something to be executed in another medium. Some of Beham’s engraved prototypes can more clearly be seen to have served as models for metalsmiths, such as those that include dividing lines to designate where the top cover disengages from the goblet below, or textual instructions about manufacture (B.239–240).15 These blueprints tend to be somewhat larger (just over 9 by 5 centimeters) than the Beham and Aldegrever examples discussed here.16 Aldegrever’s engraving could be seen as an alternative proposal to the model, another possibility for the craftsman to consider. Yet his use of shading and his placement of the feet of the putti on the monogram tablet also indicate the cognitive process involved in apprehending the design. By suggesting rotational movement within the print, Aldegrever acknowledges that to consider a model of a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface requires turning the object over in the space of the mind. Through the ludic motion of cherubic spinning, the miniaturist engravers offer a meta-commentary on what it means to behold, which is articulated in Beham’s and Aldegrever’s prints not through an Albertian perspectival geometry of seeing through, but through a process of imaginatively supplying a full circumference when only half is shown. This explication of the relationship between visual apprehension and cognitive consideration is achieved within a pictorial space smaller than the palm of a human hand.* * *By the start of the sixteenth century, semicircular rotations had already become part of the conversational exchange about creation and reproduction that artists articulated through the visual language of prints. The medium of the print—which lends itself to the sharing of copies because it can produce multiple impressions with ease—itself involves the process of a horizontal flip. As plate and page meet face to face, the resulting inked sheet inverts the composition delineated by the artist. In order to retain the orientation of an imitated object or image, the engraver must think in reverse. Swapping sides, which began as a procedural effect, became a means by which artists could comment on what they were doing when they drew from one another. They accomplished this by situating rotations within derivative compositions or in conjunction with proclamations of authorship.Grounding a half-soldier at the bottom of a design from 1529 (B.232; fig. 7), Aldegrever turns on the convention of a centralized, forward-oriented face. The soldier, whose torso is frontal but face is in profile, holds in his hands two foliate spirals, each incised with a different texture. Perhaps one is the front and the other the back, a notion supported by the alternately facing flowers at the top: the left flower emerges from the background, while that on the right retreats to show its rear where the pedicel and sepal meet. The suggestion of rotational symmetry fixes the soldier’s torso as an axis, while the profile head gives the composition a sense of direction, a distinctive left and right.17 The outline of his helmeted head and open mouth echoes the G of the artist’s monogram below, calling attention to how, in the realm of printed images, a maker’s signature lends orientation to a page. For Albrecht Dürer, who popularized the practice, this might have been otherwise. In sixteenth-century written German, the D and the T were frequently exchanged (documents from the period begin the artist’s name with either majuscule).18 Dürer secured his early letters with a seal that bore the initials “AT.”19 Had he chosen to mark his artworks in this manner, the resulting monogram would likely have been symmetrical, and therefore he might have avoided including a sure indicator of directionality in his pictures. Instead, Dürer chose the deliberately directional D, whose commensuration with the body’s own “handedness” he elucidates in a drawing from the Dresden Sketchbook, which combines manus and monogram.20 On the top of the page he studies the proportions of the right hand; at the bottom he offers the left. In between the two studies, the sideways-facing D tucks under the lintel of the A, pronouncing the favoritism of rightward orientation. Dürer often placed his monogram in coordination with his compositions, sometimes intentionally pivoting the D, as in the Witch Riding Backwards (B.67), where the switch accentuates the discombobulation of a world gone awry.21 The steering of animals was an activity socially prescribed for men, but here the sagging-breasted rider mounts the beast and grips the handle of her spinning distaff between her legs, coaxing herself to climax, arousing herself to “flight.” Dürer reverses his D at the bottom of an image that convolutes the designations of coming and going, dexter and sinister. Witch and goat are oppositionally oriented while the twisting putti form an O at the center of the page that lends a sense of ritualistic, circular motion to the whole.Figure 7. Heinrich Aldegrever, ornament design with the torso of an armored man, 1529. Engraving, 8.1 × 5.6 cm. British Museum, 1853,0709.217. Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum.Dürer’s mounted witch exemplifies how, outside the realm of the ornament print and therefore without the organizing principle of a central axis between two mutually responsive sides, artists had been experimenting with directional reversals. Sometimes such turns involved the reorientation of classical prototypes. Through pivots, artists could make new pronouncements characterized by sexual directness. In the process of examining the Venus Pudica of Praxiteles, Giulio Campagnola lays the figure down horizontally and turns her on her side, hinting through concealment that the modest gesture of covering might allow for self-pleasure (B.8; fig. 8). In a daring drawing, Hans Baldung Grien flips the figure over and changes her sex, transforming the goddess of rapture into the divine being who, in his human form, knew of spiritual, not sensual, love (fig. 9). With one hand disappearing beneath the cloth at his groin, and a face that turns back to an empty sky, Baldung’s Christ puns on the ecstasy of the Passion as a matter of both spirit and body. The visible hand displays the stigmata, locating the moment of Christ’s exploratory onanism in between his death and resurrection.Figure 8. Giulio Campagnola, Nude Reclining in a Landscape, ca. 1510–15. Engraving, 12.1 × 18.2 cm. British Museum, 1846,0509.136. Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum.Figure 9. Hans Baldung Grien, Ecstatic Christ, ca. 1510–11. Pen and two shades of carbon black ink, traces of black chalk underdrawing, 16.9 × 24 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975.1.855. Photo: www.metmuseum.org.Artists also depicted erotic fantasies involving figures of the same sex turning toward each other. Raimondi doubles the reclining figure in a print that at some point was given the title The Dream of Raphael, under the supposition that it was based on a lost prototype by the master from Urbino (B.359).22 The name of this work is probably erroneously—but also perhaps poetically—applied; it intimates that an artist’s dream produces a doubling of the female figure and that this dream can be replicated by another.23 Dürer also related the nude to dreams in an engraving depicting a man slumbering by a stove while an undressed woman—Venus, judging by her winged companion—stands watchful at his side (B.76; fig. 10). Just where the idler’s hands disappear into his swallowing sleeves, the goddess’s palm opens and her finger points. Her hand appears in the place where his hiding hand would be, and she becomes the one who gesticulates in his stead. Their arms overlap at the wrist, and the curve of his elbow nests in the crescent of her upper arm. These points of contact between the slumbering man and the open-eyed goddess anticipate the even bolder sharing of limbs of Picasso’s sleeper and sleepwatcher of 1931, where the reposing dreamer and vigilant gazer “share a single long contour: a line that begins as hers becomes his.”24 What the sixteenth-century artist explored through bodily overlapping—a metonymy for sexual or psychosexual exchange—the twentieth-century artist abbreviated into a linear shorthand by collapsing the shared space into a single stroke. In one of Picasso’s drawings of Nessus and Dejanira, the sloping back of the centaur who plucks the princess from the ground is also the angle that forms the neck and chin of her slung-back head.25 An artist attains the perfection of the nude’s form through both the labor of the rational mind and a desire that stirs during slumber.26 In his state of compromised consciousness, the somnolent doctor, perhaps a proxy for the artist, is “lent a hand” by the goddess of beauty herself. Here it is she who does the work that artists do—the work of showing.Figure 10. Albrecht Dürer, The Dream of the Doctor (also known as The Idler), ca. 1498. Engraving, 18.3 × 11.9 cm. Washington, DC: The National Gallery of Art.The female nude of Dürer’s Dream was later replicated and reversed by a copyist who signed his version with the monogram “W.” Venus confronts her double in a diagram from Moriz Thausing’s monograph on Dürer, devised for the purposes of comparing original to copy (fig. 11).27 The vertical line that divides the two Venuses crops her gesticulating hands, so that her now-fragmented arms unite in a V at the center of the composition. Two diagonal lines, vestiges of the concealing drapery in the original, cut both Venuses off at the crotch. Truncated thus, in a manner that omits from the picture the loci associated with creation—the pointing hands and the reproductive regions—the two nudes are brought together to elucidate the places where they diverge. Thausing dwells on the tendril of hair beneath the left armpit of W’s figure—a detail he decides that Dürer must have omitted, and one that he utilizes to “prove” that W’s composition was the original, as no imitator would have added an extraneous lock. Opposing two female forms across an axis that evokes bilateral symmetry, and for the purpose of gauging difference, Thausing recasts Dürer as the copyist of a print that he ascribes to Michael Wolgemut.28 The illustration of the facing profiles in Thausing’s book stands for the historiographic process that prints engender of uniting two versions that appear as mirror images for the purpose of distinguishing maker from mimic. Much of the early connoisseurship dedicated to prints involved the activity of establishing chronological order. To engage fully with the creative process by which makers devised and commented upon the production of prints, it is necessary to consider the processes of repetition, inversion, and rotation by which forms transform across different iterations.Figure 11. Details from Albrecht Dürer and Master W, The Dream of the Doctor, from Moriz Thausing, Dürer: Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Kunst, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1884), vol. 1, 214. Photo: author.The image of two women facing each other delighted not only the nineteenth-century historian but also the sixteenth-century engraver. Setting two allegorical nudes in confrontation with one another, Jacopo de’ Barbari used rotational symmetry to repeat the contrapposto hips, sloped shoulders, and tilted heads, while allowing the differing arm positions to intimate the dorsal figure’s self-exploration and the frontal figure’s curious outreach (B.18). As in Campagnola’s reclining figure and Raimondi’s Dream, here the Venus Pudica’s gesture of modesty—which had been appropriated by Renaissance artists to portray Eve’s postlapsarian shame—is viewed from behind, suggesting through concealment a more pleasurable purpose to the placement of her hand. The positioning of her silhouette also hides the precise location and intent of her partner’s approaching touch. Through the motif of the turn and the near mirroring that is broken by differing gestures, the engraver relegates the sensual moments to the ulterior in-between.* * *As sixteenth-century artists considered the vertical axis as both the division between bilaterally symmetrical planar shapes and the centering pole around which a form could rotate, they also pried into the body’s inclinations toward coupling and regeneration. The artist whose sexual imagination was the most restrained was also the one whose mathematics was the most useful.29 Dürer’s successors played with the combination of his didactic generosity and his decorous approach to the body.In his treatise Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion, Dürer describes the transfer of ratios from one viewpoint to another. He begins with the figure in profile and then recommends the carrying over (Übertrag) of features across the parallel lines of a grid to formulate the frontal and rear positions.30 Dürer consistently places the side view to the left, the frontal body at the center, and the back view to the right. Across the pages of his manual, the body regenerates. In the third book, where he introduces a new gauge (Meßstab) for measuring the body by dividing it into six equal parts, he illustrates eighteen figures according to the established pattern—profile, front, and back—in each case with a dividing line down the center.31 Across this line, Dürer measures the distance between the two nipples, the breadth of the forehead, the span of the thigh. The written components of his treatise do not describe the human figure’s composition in terms of a mirroring across the dividing axis, nor does he mention drawing the line as part of his process.32 If the Renaissance artists who authored mathematical treatises were coy about the “secrets” of perspective and proportion, on the principle of imitative sides—which sired countless visual studies of the human form—they were silent.33 Yet where written language fails, the visual provides. The illustrations in Dürer’s treatise, which repeat again and again the splicing line, make manifest the body’s bilateral symmetry.Dürer also conceived of the edge of his drafting page as an axis around which to turn.34 Beginning around 1500, he studied the human figure by laying down the proportions of the body and then flipping the sheet, tracing the figure through to the other side. The recto bears the geometer’s marks; the verso allows him to see the ideally constructed physique as the point of origin for a composition. On a process-revealing sheet in London, Dürer runs a vertical line down the center, boxes the figure’s torso to calculate the cant of ribs that shift the shoulders from the hips, and repeatedly attempts the position of the non-weight-bearing leg (fig. 12).35 On the page’s reverse, the proportional aids and anatomical uncertainties are left behind. Dürer uses hatching to darken the right side of the woman’s body, surrounds her in a wash of shadow, lends her ground to stand on, and adorns her with fluttering hair. But evidence of the geometer’s device is not completely gone, for he has included a foreshortened circle surrounded by numbers, a point within which the woman—whose gesture on the reverse side has no purpose—pricks lightly with her bent finger. Or she may be tipping the shape, slanting it to form the ellipse, thereby calling attention to this numerically derived form that separates the otherwise invisible foreground of the image from the background, where she stands. The circle gives meaning to the action of her hand. I
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