Subjective vision and fragmentation in late medieval France, Burgundy, and Flanders

Description

This project examines subjectivity, vision, and empiricism in late medieval France, Burgundy, and Flanders in four contexts: treatises on optics and artificial perspective from the late medieval period and the early Renaissance; devotional images, particularly the arma Christi (arms of Christ), in which Christ is depicted surrounded by decontextualized objects associated with the Passion narrative; the 1460/61 Burgundian tale collection, the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles; and two works produced at the of René d'Anjou, the Mortifiement de Vaine Plaisance (1455) and the Livre du Cuer d'Amours espris (1457). In northern perspective and in these three latter contexts, the eye is deployed as a mobile, fragmenting, epistemophilic instrument, caught between an empirical and empathetic relation to external reality. Jacques Lacan indicates that Albertian perspective nourishes the narcissistic fantasy of the subject's centrality in space, a subject who thereby imagines that his or her field of vision constitutes the totality of the real. Many analyses that associate perspective with subjectivity are teleological to the extent that they look ahead to the construction of the modern subject, and geographically blind in that they only consider the technique as it developed in Italy. By positing the fifteenth century as an origin, and Italy as a privileged site, they efface the fifteenth-century North as a field of study in its own right. I shift the focus to discourses produced in this time and place, and postulate that, in the period when perspective was becoming entrenched, the position of the subject in the field of vision was in a state of flux. Various traits associated with the modern subject (most frequently defined in this project as a Cartesian subject) are evident: a metaphysics of inside and outside (as opposed to the pure exteriority of psychomachy); the fiction of the mind as an interior space; the centered subject exerting visual mastery over space and objects; the body as individuated, bounded from the external environment; and an empirical and detached as opposed to empathetic and identificatory model of perception.