The Multi-Sensory Image from Antiquity to the Renaissance

Heather Hunter-Crawley, Erica O'Brien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315519838
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Ancient Art

This volume responds to calls in visual and material cultural studies to move beyond the visual and to explore the multi-sensory impact of the image, across a wide range of cultural and historical contexts. What does it mean to practise art history after the material and sensory turns? What is an image, if not a purely visual phenomenon, and how does it prompt non-visual sensory experiences? The multi-sensoriality of the image was a less challenging concept before the ocularcentric modern age, and so this volume brings together a global array of scholars from multiple disciplines to ask these questions of imagery in premodern or non-western contexts, ranging from Minoan palace frescoes, to Roman statues, early church sermons, tombs of Byzantine saints, museum displays of Islamic artefacts of scent, medieval depictions of the voice, and Stuart court masques. Each chapter presents a means of appreciating images beyond the visual, demonstrating the new information and understanding that consequently can be gleaned from their material.

As a collection, these chapters offer the student and scholar of art history and visual culture an array of exciting new approaches that can be applied to appreciate the multi-sensoriality of images in any context, as well as prompts for reflection on future directions in the study of imagery. The Multi-Sensory Image thus illustrates that it is not only possible to explore the non-visual impact of images, but imperative.

1 Introduction

The image and the senses

Heather Hunter-Crawley and Erica O’Brien

Abstract

The editors introduce the themes of the volume by exploring the history and meaning of multi-sensory images in historical and contemporary contexts. This introductory chapter addresses the concept of a multi-sensory image and the modern re-turn to embodiment and the senses that makes the topic of the volume ripe for exploration. Illustrative examples of multi-sensory images are presented from ancient Roman and medieval contexts, which segue with themes developed throughout the volume. The chapter concludes with an overview of the contents of the ensuing chapters.

Oliver Sacks, the well-known twentieth-century neurologist, once treated a patient who was learning to see at the age of fifty.¹ “Virgil,” as he called the patient, had lost his sight aged three and had lived blind ever since, but, due to advances in medicine, his vision had been recently reinstated by cataract surgery. The problem was that, as in the rare previous instances of such cases, Virgil was still unable to “see.” Light was entering his retinas, but Virgil was unable to interpret these shifting colours, shadows, and shapes as visual images, as faces, persons, animals, and trees. The only exceptions were objects and symbols that Virgil already knew or could become acquainted with through touch. For example, he could identify the letter “A” by sight because he had learned the alphabet at school by tracing the shape of tactile blocks, while on a trip to the zoo he was unable to pick out a gorilla by sight until he had the opportunity to learn its shape by tracing the zoo’s life-size bronze gorilla statue with his hands.

Virgil’s blindness without his hands was especially apparent when it came to distinguishing two- from three-dimensional objects and appreciating perspective; pictures eluded him completely. Two decades before Virgil’s operation, the psychologist Jan Deregowski had published his study of cultural differences in pictorial perception, arguing that only Western cultures conditioned people to be able to see two-dimensional images as representations of three-dimensional objects.² The study required participants to identify and interpret a series of line drawings on paper that depicted objects according to Western aesthetics of perspective, concluding that African participants were deficient in appreciating pictorial depth. The project’s ethnocentrism was clarified by the fact that African participants gave more “correct” answers when drawings were made on cloth rather than paper, demonstrating that cultural familiarity with the picture’s medium and context were highly influential on seeing. Deregowski’s tests presumed Western sensibilities and only those conditioned by these sensibilities were able to give “correct” answers. In fact, the role of textural unfamiliarity with the pictorial surface in these acts of seeing challenges Western ocularcentric assumptions, questioning whether, in truth, an image is ever a purely optical, two-dimensional phenomenon. What Deregowski uncovered was a cultural difference in sensory regimes and contexts rather than in perceptual ability, as well the difficulty in thinking outside of Western sensory conditioning in order to appreciate that seeing involves more than just sight. This was perhaps obvious to Virgil and lay at the root of his difficulty with the concept of a purely visual image and when, due to illness, he lost his vision again a couple of years later he was not wholly disappointed to return to the more familiar world of touch.

What these stories reveal is that an image is more than a picture. Images are not flat, two-dimensional, natural, or purely optical conceptions, rather they are constructed through acts of seeing with the whole body, and this fully embodied seeing is informed by multi-sensory memory, experience, and the viewer’s cultural and social context. Indeed, the comprehension of images extends so far beyond the eye that it may not necessarily involve optics at all.³ For Virgil, the ever-morphing light and shadow of a face eluded cognition as an image, while the statue of a gorilla or the letter “A” were not optical or spatially configured objects, but rather functioned as tactile images encountered through the temporally sequential touch of the fingers. Thus, if images can be seen through fingers as well as eyes, then they can also be tasted, heard, smelled, and appreciated kinaesthetically, emotively, and even through proprioception and interoception. In this way, the image is always open to synaesthesia, the mingling of sensory experience.

The fiction of the image as “pure opticality” was a modernist construct, debunked in late twentieth-century art history, and most famously in W. J. T. Mitchell’s statement that “there are no visual media.”⁴ In recent decades the humanities have seen a substantial ideological shift, a turn, or perhaps better a “re-turn” to materiality and embodiment. This is perhaps an inevitable response to the increased sensory awareness and fetishism of consumerist culture and the multi-modal media of the digital age, as well as their counterpoint in post-consumerist environmentalism, prompted by indigenous cultural thought and anthropological comparativism.⁵ This is a re-turn because the segregation and isolation of sensory faculties depends on a modern philosophical concept that underpins liberal consumerism: Cartesian dualism, or the segregation of self and world which, when left unchecked, leads to solipsism. The “extended” reach of minds and thoughts in the digital age questions the degree to which we are truly isolated from the world around us, from each other, and from our bodies, and the extent to which sensory experience involves separate channels or whether, in fact, we are all synaesthetes.⁶ Increasingly, we recognize that sensing, doing, and thinking are inextricably interwoven components of human “being.”

This movement may be classed as a “re-turn” because such ideas about materiality and the senses are not new. Recent developments are rooted in non-Western cultural ideas, including the work of indigenous groups, anthropological studies, and Asian and Middle Eastern philosophical traditions (a consequence, perhaps, of a globalized world).⁷ Further to this, while Western philosophy of the ancient and medieval eras identified and classified the sensory faculties and components of the self (body, mind, and soul), the notion of their complete segregation would have seemed alien, especially in light of Aristotle’s theory of the “common sense,” the merging of sensory faculties within the body.⁸ There was no “pure opticality” before modernity, rather there were the competing theories of vision as intromission and extramission, the in- or ex-corporation of tactile rays of light and matter.⁹ Pre-modern sight was, in this way, synaesthetic.

In light of this, how should we conceive of the image in pre-modern cultures? The material turn calls for the image to be re-evaluated as a multi-sensory object, constituted by a complex network of sense, materiality, culture, and embodied politics. To do this, we must re-learn the ways in which we see as scholars, not just in our analyses of pre-modern images, but also in the ways in which we interpret and present them to others. Like Deregowski, we must unpick what David Freedberg termed our “intellectualized forms of response,” and see with both mind and body.¹⁰ Thus, in line with new directions in ways of seeing in their respective disciplines, the contributors to this volume have put readjusted sight into practice, exploring and applying sensory theories to the materiality of a range of multi-sensory images including scented frescoes, tactile statues, imaginary tableaux, edible icons, curated scents, audible illustrations, and dramatic performances, and ask what invitations these images make to the senses besides sight. These multiple permutations of images from a range of historical and cultural contexts spanning antiquity to the Renaissance offer a rich site for exploring the practices of art history and visual culture studies after the material turn.

In response to calls for new ways of seeing, this volume’s definition of the image is broad and inclusive of what lies beyond the visual. As with pre-modern philosophies of sense, the language of the image reflects blended, multi-sensory conceptions of embodiment. Latin terms such as imago; effigies; simulacrum; figura; and the Greek eikōn can be translated as “image” or “picture,” but also carry a sense of “apparition,” “likeness,” “form,” or sometimes “ghost.” There is an acknowledgment of material presence, of animism, of movement, not of a two-dimensional, abstract picture plane but of something so close to life that it deceives several or all of the senses, hence the “presence” of the pre-modern figural image has been explored extensively by Hans Belting.¹¹ In Aristotelian and Stoic philosophy, images were not just created through art but also were emitted by all material objects and perceived by tactile contact with the eye and other sensory organs (including ears and skin), being then incorporated into the soul as phantasia, like imprints in wax.¹² Building on this tradition, medieval thought did not distinguish between words and pictures as multi-sensory objects.¹³ Perhaps closer to these earlier, materialistic, and multi-sensory conceptions of the image is the English verb, also etymologically derived from imago, “to imitate,” an action which can involve materiality, embodiment, and all of the senses. The pre-modern image, it seems, was conceived as a multi-sensory entity by default of the language available to describe it.

The semantics of the image are also relevant to the recent history of our own academic fields. In scholarship of the past few decades, the move from the intellectualization and connoisseurship of art history to the socially inclusive model of visual culture has in part rested upon a semantic shift from the study of “art” to the study of the “image.”¹⁴ In tune with Marxist and psychoanalytical theory, the object of study thus also has shifted from the interiority of the purely optical picture (as painting, drawing, or sculpture), to the viewer’s response and the viewing context surrounding the visual products of both “high” and “low” culture.¹⁵ As this visual cultural movement meets the material turn, it prompts us to explore and expand our definition of the image not just beyond the pictorial surface, or beyond the elite, but also beyond the visual, towards something more closely approximating the multi-sensory, pre-modern imago. It prompts us to reach further into the space where viewer and image merge through embodied interaction.

In this volume, we therefore present the image as a cultural product that is invested with layers of meaning and is a nexus of shared memories and embodied experience, which evokes and prompts sensory encounters more than it illustrates or stores knowledge. It is a visual object in the sense that seeing is doing, a performance with the whole body that is not restricted to the ocular but instead spills over into synaesthesia. Images thus have the power to train as well as to reflect the embodied practices of a particular culture or community and learning to see them in a new light both reveals the worlds of historical peoples and enables us to reflect on our own multi-sensory relationships with images in the modern world. By way of introduction to such themes, examples from two very different cultural contexts serve to demonstrate the pre-modern multi-sensory image at work: in the accoutrements of the ancient Roman banquet, and the illuminated pages of medieval manuscripts.

The imago at the Roman banquet

The Roman banquet, or formal dinner, was an important social occasion which oiled the wheels of interaction between members of the elite. Dinner was an event at which elite identities could be both constructed and dissected, as famously illustrated by Petronius’s Satyricon, in which a banquet host, the wealthy freedman Trimalchio, is characterized by the scathing narrator as ill-bred through frequent faux pas.¹⁶ The lavish households of the wealthy acted as theatrical backdrops for the performance of elite Roman social status through the banquet as a multi-sensory event.¹⁷ Bodily comportment, speech, and the sensations that participants experienced and articulated had to be carefully stage-managed by both diners and hosts. This involved how one ate and drank, engaged with other guests, the host, and slaves, and responded to entertainment. The objective was refinement (though depict...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of table
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction: the image and the senses
• 2 Seeing is (not) believing: visual and non-visual interpretations of Aegean Bronze Age frescoes
• 3 Multi-sensory encounters: the aesthetic impact of Roman coloured statues
• 4 Painting as sermon: the role of the visual in catechism in late fourth-century Christian orations
• 5 Experiencing the miracle: animated images and the senses in the burial chapel of the Byzantine saint
• 6 Engaging the olfactory: scent in the arts, cultures, and museums of the Islamic world
• 7 The vocal in the visual: auditory issues and the potential of the voice in late medieval and early modern visual art
• 8 “Pictures with light and motion”: the language of the senses in The Masque of Flowers
• Afterword: the multi-sensory image between interdisciplinarity and multi-media
• Index