georges didi huberman, confronti... - lensbased.net

Image as Rend 205ern liturgy of the Eucharist, where the priest himself reenacted thegesture of the soldier Longinus piercing the ‘‘side’’ of the consecratedHost with the aid of a miniature ‘‘holy spear,’’ known exactly as theagia longchè. 137 This is also what happened—but on a completely differentlevel, of course—when a Gothic painter wasn’t satisfied withapplying threads of red paint to represent the blood of Christ spurtingfrom his side, but used some blunt instrument to wound the surface ofthe gilded sheet, and make the crimson undercoating of Armenianbole surge forth again . . . Such a way of proceeding doubled* theappearance of a process, and constituted the icon—in the religioussense as well as the semiotic sense of the term—through an act by itsnature indexical: an act in which the violent relation to the subjectile(that is, to the support) went far beyond the reproduction of a wound.For it was indeed the production of a wound in the image, an injuryto the image, that was then in question. The opening and the cuttingbecame concrete, and the actual wound presented itself frontally, cutdirectly facing us into the gold sheet—even if, as is often the case, thewound in the picture is represented in profile.One last example merits discussion, so much does its power—immediate as much as virtual—manifest the incarnational requirementthat we are trying to sketch in the world of images. It is anisolated sheet from the Schnütgen Museum in Cologne, painted in thefirst half of the fourteenth century in a Cistercian milieu 138 (Fig. 11).Here the representation comes to identify with its own crisis effect inan utterly radical way, as if consumed by the partial effect of itsbloody effusion. The artist—a monk, I imagine, and why not a nun?—first drew a body, a body of Christ with its head slumped so far ontoits chest that the silhouette almost suggests the idea of a headless god.A sharp angle oddly bars the top of the torso, as if the result of a largeenergetic incision. And at the foot of the cross two religious figuresare kneeling, Saint Bernard and a nun, rapidly but less violently circumscribedby the artist—an artist doubtless in a hurry to get to whatwas essential.Here, then, is what was essential: to invade this body by the event*doublait.