 |
Representations 1 (February 1983)
In 1525, determined to set his country’s
art on a rational footing by instructing its youth in the skills of applied
geometry and perspective, Albrecht Dürer published his Painter’s Manual,
“A Manual of Measurement of Lines, Areas, and Solids by Means of Compass and
Ruler.” Among the detailed instructions—for the determination of the center of
a circle, the construction of spirals and egg-shaped lines, the design of tile
patterns, the building of a sundial, and so forth—I would like to dwell upon
Dürer’s plans for several civic monuments, for, as I hope to show, these plans
provide a suggestive introduction to the problematic relation in the
Renaissance between genre and historical experience.
.
. .
Let us recall that in the Painter’s
Manual the monument we have been considering is situated between the high
heroic tribute to military victory and the mock-heroic celebration of the
drunkard, the former suited to tragedy and the latter to comedy. What does the
intermediate position signify? I suggest that a monument to celebrate a victory
over rebellious peasants created a genre problem, a problem to which Dürer was
particularly sensitive since he had already, as we have seen, entertained
playful doubts about the more conventional victory monument. Indeed Dürer may
have thought up the problem as well as undertaken a solution to it because his
was a book about problem-solving: the design takes its place alongside such
questions as how to interlace two solids of the same size so that in each case
one point pierces the corresponding surface of the second solid.
A victory over rebellious peasants calls
for a commemorative column—after all, the fate of worldly rule, that is human
civilization itself, depends upon this struggle—and yet the enemy is an object
of contempt and derision. The princes and nobles for whom such monuments were
built could derive no dignity from the triumph, any more than they could derive
dignity from killing a mad dog. A heroic encounter is a struggle for honor and
must conform to the code which requires that the combatants be of roughly equal
station. This requirement does not originate in some rudimentary sense of “fair
play” but rather in the symbolic economies of appropriation suggested by the
Church of England hymn: “Conquering Kings their titles take / From the foes
they captive make.” “I better brook the loss of brittle life,” gasps the
defeated Hotspur to Hal, “than those proud titles thou hast won of me” (I Henry
IV, 5.4.78–79). But the peasants, of course, have no titles to seize, and can
yield up no trophies fit to adorn the victor’s monument. Indeed, in the economy
of honor they are not simply a cipher but a deficit, since even a defeat at the
hands of a prince threatens to confer upon them some of the prince’s store of
honor, while what remains of the victorious prince’s store can be tarnished by
the unworthy encounter.
Dürer then cannot dignify the peasants in
his design by representing them as worthy enemies, nor can he include an image
of the triumphant nobleman, for the image could only be tarnished by such a
base encounter. He could, I suppose, have chosen more symbolic modes of
representation, such as Hercules slaying the Hydra, but by doing so he would
have robbed his design of its wit, its sense of problem-solving. Dürer had in
the surrounding monuments committed himself to a kind of commemorative realism:
the victory column composed of cannons, the drunkard’s of food and drink. To
have abandoned the mode in the peasant’s column would, in effect, have signaled
the defeat of his art at the hands of history itself.
Instead Dürer depicts a peasant, but one
utterly without signs of honor; he has been killed in battle perhaps, but it
may as well have been in an abattoir. The victor is spared representation, and
even his sword is untainted, for it has not encountered a base adversary
(which would imply face-to-face combat) but has overtaken him from
behind. In a culture sensitive to the semiotics of execution, the weapon’s
position would not have gone unnoticed.
So extreme a humiliation of a single,
unarmed man is difficult to represent, however, without evoking Christ and
hence risking semiotic contamination of the entire commemorative exercise.
Dürer heightens this risk, as we have seen, by directly modeling his defeated
peasant on the iconographic type of Christ in Distress. This aesthetic decision
may signal a deep ambivalence on Dürer’s part, a secret, subversive sympathy
with the vanquished encoded at the very pinnacle of the victor’s monument. I do
not think we can rule out this possibility, one that satisfies a perennial
longing since Romanticism to discover that all great artists have allied
themselves, if only indirectly or unconsciously, with the oppressed and
revolutionary masses. What is poignant and powerful about Dürer’s design is
that the identical signs can be interpreted as signifying both the radical
irony of personal dissent and the harsh celebration of official order. This
uncanny convergence is not, I would suggest, the theoretical condition of all
signs, but the contingent condition of certain signs at particular historical
moments, moments in which the ruling elite, deeply threatened, conjure up images
of repression so harsh that they can double as images of protest.
It is all too easy for us to perceive the
possibility of ironic dissent in Dürer’s sketch; the difficult task is to
perceive the celebration of order. Thus the allusion to Christ in Distress at
first seems unambiguously sympathetic to the peasants, but Dürer may have
chosen the incongraphic type because it conveyed more powerfully than any other
image of the body available in his culture a mood of utter forsakenness,
desolation, and helplessness. He may have expected his audience to register
this mood without concluding that the peasants were Christlike in innocence or
ultimately destined to triumph over their tormentors. More precisely, he may
have felt that the manifest purpose of the monument itself, the peasant dress,
and above all the sword in the back would abruptly check any drift toward a
perception of the vanquished as the scourged Christ and would leave the viewer
with only the potent representation of defeat.
This strategy depends, to be sure, upon
the drastic splitting of a traditional representation—the leaching-out of the
sublime innocence of Christ from the imagery of the battered, weary mourning.
But it is by comparable strategies that the whole design is governed: thus, as we
have seen, Dürer sustains the honor code paradoxically by reversing or
canceling its principle elements. Here too there is a risk: the reversal or
cancellation of the monument’s genre. Far from avoiding this consequence,
Dürer’s strategy is to embrace it: insofar as the victory monument suggests
epic and tragedy, he endows it, by composing the column of livestock, farm
produce, and tools, with the signs of pastoral and georgic and the implications
of comedy. The compositional elements have in addition a probable topical
reference, for the peasant’s labor was a principle issue in the revolt. With
the dead rebel at the top of the column, the grain may suggest the violent
reaffirmation of the corvée system, while the cattle at the base may
imply something akin to Luther’s observation that instead of rising up in
revolt, the peasants hereafter should thank God if they have to give up only
one cow to enjoy the other cow in peace.
The broader generic implications here are
as important as any topical reference. The pastoral and georgic elements from
which the column is composed function as signs of the pacification of the
peasants, a pacification whose principal means is graphically depicted at the
topic, and of their vulnerability and lowliness, their social distance from the
armed defenders of order. (I am reminded of the Fascist inscription still—or
once again—visible beneath the whitewash in Italian villages: “The plough
furrows the land, but the sword defends it.”) The comic implications arise from
the incongruous inclusion of pastoral and georgic elements on a victory column,
just as the humor of the drunkard’s memorial consists in the solemn public
representation of the board game, drinking bowls, and bread basket. The lard
tub, butter churn, chicken basket and the like do not in this context suggest
the centrality and importance of agricultural production but rather the
producer’s outlandishness, a marginality that insures that no honor will accrue
to the defeated peasant.
If pastoral, georgic, and comedy are both
the logical outcome and the cancellation of the monument’s heroic and tragic
codes when they are applied to rebellious peasants, Dürer’s design provokes a
reciprocal cancellation: neither the celebration of leisure nor the celebration
of labor survives the sword thrust in the peasant’s back, and the laughter that
the monument generates is baffled in the instant it bursts forth. For, even as
the occasion banishes the normal symbolism of heroic commemoration, the very
form of the monument precludes genuinely comic treatment by continuing to
insist upon the tragic and epic dimensions of the victory.
Such then are the interlocking pressures
of history on genre and of generic conventions on historical representation: a
victory thought to be of world-historical importance is commemorated in a
column in which the enemy is reduced to impotent absurdity, while the victor is
entirely effaced. Dürer cleverly solves the generic problems posed by the
historical circumstances of the representation only by creating a design that
risks collapse into its own antithesis. That collapse has, in fact, by now
fully occurred, so that we can recover Dürer’s probable intentions only by
setting aside the manifest and “self-evident” imagery of betrayal. That imagery
does not vanish altogether; instead, it is self-consciously repressed, in an
interpretive strategy comparable to the repression for which Luther called,
when he advised his readers to set aside all sympathy for the peasants: “There
is no place for patience or mercy. This is the time of the sword, not the day
of grace.”
|
|
