Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

A CULTURAL HISTORY 27
enemies and other hexes with a symbol of the eye. Amulets, the precursors
to modern jewelry, served a symbolic function similar to Medusa’s head by
turning like against like in homeopathic fashion. Amulets work as remnants,
much like relics, containing concentrated and residual power. Plutarch says
amulets “engage the forces of attraction; they defeat fascination with fascination”
(Siebers 1983, 7). With the banishment of superstition and enchantment,
modern English has redefined words such as “fascinating” and
“charming.” But the linguistic remainder of the evil eye persists in the root
word “fascinate,” which comes from the Latin word fascinatus, meaning evil
spell. We have shifted our obsessions with staring from superstition to science,
but the force of the stare remains.
Vision was important to the medieval Church, delivering the Christian
story in visual form to illiterate masses. Religious practices such as the veneration
of images, the spectacle of mystery plays, the flood of stained-glasscolored
light in Gothic cathedrals, the cult of relics, and the illumination of
manuscripts depend on seeing for their didactic effect. A powerful force,
vision was also the vehicle of temptation, and this link between vision and
temptation developed during the Protestant Reformation into a widespread
iconophobia even while the Eastern Orthodox churches remained iconophile.
For Protestants, the observable world was evanescent and profane,
and it obscured the spiritual realm. The Reformation was deeply distrustful
of the extravagantly visual, elevating the spare word of God above the image
and emptying the Cross of the scene of the wounded Christ. In contrast, the
Counter-Reformation used the opulence and “aggrandizement of the eye”
of the Baroque in attempts to return the Catholic Church to dominance (Jay
1993, 46). Though Protestantism replaced the image with the word, it still
relied on sight to spread its religion. The inscribed and later printed Word
of God was made available to individual followers in the form of Protestant
Bibles, and Christian martyrdom as a form of witnessing and visions of a
resurrected Jesus restored to wholeness persisted.
As the seventeenth century took hold, seeing developed new forms in
a secularizing, democratizing world. Observation replaced witnessing with
the rise of rationalism and scientific inquiry. Literacy and the printed word
flourished. The modernizing world celebrated earthly rather than heavenly
sights in art and technology. The early modern period gave us perspective—
the artistic convention invented in Renaissance Italy that replicated human
vision in artistic representation and created the illusion of reality. The visual
technique of perspective both reflected and contributed to the development
of individualism by validating the single spectator whose point of view controls
the scene (Berger 1972). Thus perspective helps to transform the individual
viewer into a gatekeeper of knowledge regarding the scene depicted,
shutting down the possibility of competing knowledges that might emerge