[-empyre-] holbein's painting

eugenie <eugenies@onetel.net.uk> · Fri, 03 Oct 2003 19:17:35 +0100

hi...

as far as i'm aware 'the ambassadors' is the only example of an anamorphic
painting by holbein. he did loads of other work, however, so i wouldn't say
his genius was 'abandoned' per se. apart from the anamorphic skull, all of
the other objects in the painting (apart from the two human subjects) are
scientific/mathematical instruments (plus one musical instrument, the lute
at the bottom, significant because the lute was one of the standard objects
used to test aspiring artists' skill at perspectival rendering). i went to
see an amazing talk a few years ago, a sort of a kabbalistic interpretation
of the readings on all of the various instruments in the painting. i'd
suspect that his other work probably contains secret geometries as well -
unless he packed it all into this one....

later
e

on 3/10/03 6:00 AM, Alan Sondheim at sondheim@panix.com wrote:

> 
> 
> Can you say more about Holbein's scheme? It's almost as if his painting
> devours architecture and the situated body. Did he do other such work? Why
> was this brilliance abandoned, if it was? Could his other work contain
> secret geometries? (I realize not, but want to speculate.)
> 
> It reminds me, what you're saying, of the multiply perceived painting of
> Kuo Hsi -
> 
> Alan
> 
> On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, eugenie wrote:
> 
>> hi all,
>> 
>> big thank you to christina, melinda, michael and jim for inviting me to
>> participate in this month¹s discussion.
>> 
>> I¹ve just read troy¹s first post and it looks  interestingly  as though
>> we¹re approaching the issue of anamorphism from two distinct angles  the
>> discursive (troy) and the material (myself). my interest in anamorphosis is
>> historically based  I arrived in the digital realm by the somewhat
>> roundabout route of c18th landscape aesthetics  so I¹m going to begin by
>> giving a bit of historical background.
>> 
>> anamorphosis, for me, is a way of approaching the issue of ?embodied
>> vision¹. the argument is simple and probably highly self evident to most of
>> you posting to this list  vision and thought issue from an active body
>> rather than a disembodied eye  but it¹s also one that western philosophy
>> has traditionally had a great deal of trouble accepting.
>> 
>> Hans Holbein¹s Ambassadors (1533) is a well-known example of an anamorphic
>> picture and an excellent demonstration of the way that so called ?rational
>> perception¹ has always involved more than just the perspectival eye/I.  The
>> vanishing point and ?correct¹ viewing position in Holbein¹s picture are
>> clearly indicated by the precise rendering of the various perspectival
>> objects in the image. Looking from this position, the anamorphic skull in
>> the foreground appears as nothing more than a meaningless shape. In order to
>> see it properly, the viewer has to approach the painting and look obliquely,
>> from a position on the right, about halfway up the frame.
>> 
>> Viewing Holbein¹s picture was a sort of play in two acts. Holbein was quite
>> specific about the manner in which the picture should be hung: in a room
>> with two doors, each one corresponding to one of the picture¹s two viewing
>> positions. In the first act, the viewer enters the room and sees the picture
>> from the ?correct¹ point of view. Captivated by the realism of the painted
>> scene, the viewer is also perplexed by the indecipherable object at the
>> bottom of the picture. Leaving by the second door, the disconcerted viewer
>> casts a brief backward glance at the painting, and it is at this point that
>> the strange object resolves itself into an image.
>> 
>> Traditional theories of representation have paid a lot of attention to the
>> way the viewer is constructed as/at the ?correct¹ point of view  i.e. as a
>> distanced, disembodied, monocular eye. they have had much less to say about
>> the transient state(s) between points of view  what I¹m calling the
>> ?anamorphic moment¹. Holbein¹s picture calls attention to those moments in
>> the event of seeing where the viewer exceeds the Cartesianesque
>> configuration of the disembodied eye. It foregrounds the subject in its
>> environmental sense: a mobile, embodied agent that acts in the real world of
>> objects. As a concept of transformation, then, anamorphosis allows us to
>> understand subjectivity as a ?dynamic¹ condition, a matter of a constantly
>> changing body schema rather than a fixed body image. Holbein¹s little
>> theatre of representation, in other words, has a lot to tell us about the
>> way we interface with virtual environments in the present day? and this is
>> where it links up to my current interest in videogames, and affect, and the
>> way that we traditionally understand the history of virtuality.
>> 
>> wow, I¹ve run on and on. I¹ll leave it there for now.
>> 
>> bests
>> eugenie
>> 
>> 
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>> 
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