Art Criticism - The State University of New York

image-world, the picture opens up an imaginary world within and in relation
to the lived environment in which one dwells. 29
This construal alters what it means for a style to be mimetic. Pictorial
mimesis is most often thought of in terms of the spectatorial stance, that a
mode of depiction looks "realistic" or "naturalistic" because it somehow captures
or corresponds to the way the world appears to the theoretic gaze. But
mimesis is most basically the exercise of taking up ways of being in the world,
the process of becoming other. Human practices are not "wired in" but require
miming the comportments of other people, with this propensity for "othering"
most intensive during childhood and continuing throughout one's life. 30
An image is mimetic, then, to the extent that it effecti vely styles a way
of being in the world. Unlike sculptural figures, picture-worlds withdraw from
existential space while still enveloped within and by that space; they open up
another space amiqst and in relation to the space of our existence, what we
might call a space of the imaginary. (By way of contrast, sculpture more
directly inserts itself into existential space, which does not mean that it can
have no mimetic force.) When the imaginary space of a picture is relatively
shallow and the figures non-volumetric, the image-world is "otherworldly";
but when the virtual space is comparatively deep and the figures more volumetric,
the image-world is more "thisworldly." In the latter case we are more
likely to assume an empathetic posture and identity with the certain figures
(who they are, what they do), incorporating this imaginary self-understanding
into our everyday being in the worldY
Renaissance paintings, then, are more imitative than medieval icons
less on account of some purportedly new perceptualist "realism" and more in
line with an epochal leap in the mimetic capacity of pictures. To give just one
example, dorsal figures emerged in paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth
century. Because the spatial orientation of such figures parallels that of a
beholder confronting the painting, one imaginatively takes up the action of
such dorsal characters within the virtual space of the historical narrative. This
instructs us how to conduct ourselves in the everyday world, a moral lesson
directed to our bodily being and underwritten by the sacred authority of the
religious taleY
Earlier medieval pictures in the Italian tradition do not have dorsal
figures, and in general are less forcibly mimetic. Such images typically iconicize
narrative actions and present holy figures in an "otherworldly" manner with
the effect that in the last instant such figures exemplify what we cannot become.
That is to say, we may all strive to imitate the life of Christ, but a Vita icon
of St. Francis presents the saint in his temporal and spatial transcendence,
locating his example beyond our mortal grasp. Such images project limit-ideals
of earthly existence; and, further, even as we emulate the saintly virtues, it is
left unspecified how to do so in the world, what would be a proper course of
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Art Criticism