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308 Notesreproduces itself.’’ Oeuvres esthétiques (Paris: Garnier, 1968), 484. That this ‘‘magic’’ ofpainting should have preeminently manifested itself in representations of flesh, of theincarnate, already points to the crux of the problem: between body (its supposed depth)and color (its supposed surface). See Georges Didi-Huberman, La Peinture incarnée (Paris:Minuit, 1985), 20–62.9. Bachelard, Essai sur la connaissance approchée, 255.10. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book xi: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 212–13.11. Bachelard, Essai sur la connaissance approchée, 253, 257.12. These views are echoed, although on the basis of very different premises, in arecent article by René Thom articulating a critique of sorts of descriptive and experimentalreason: R. Thom, ‘‘La Méthode expérimental: Un Mythe des épistémologues (et des savants?),’’Le Débat 34 (March 1985): 11–20.13. Bachelard, Essai sur la connaissance approchée, 16.14. Aristotle, Physics, ii.3.194b [trans.: The Physics, with English trans. by Philip H.Wickstead and Francis M. Cornford (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957)].15. Ibid., 194b–195a. Furthermore, it is perhaps not by chance that Littré’s definition ofthe detail in painting focuses on ‘‘material effects,’’ all of which are related to problems ofsurface and texture: ‘‘Said, in painting, with regard to hair, small accidents of the skin,embroidery, the leaves of trees’’ (Il se dit, en peinture, des poils, des petits accidents de la peau,des draperies, des broderies, des feuilles des arbres).16. Aristotle, Physics, i.9.192a.17. I take this phrase from the beautiful pages that Ernst Bloch devoted to the ‘‘closeupgaze.’’ See Experimentum mundi: Question, catégories de l’élaboration, praxis, trans. G.Raulet (Paris: Payot, 1981), 14–15, 67, etc.18. On the jet, the sujet, and the subjectile, see Didi-Huberman, La Peinture incarnée,37–39. [N.B.: A set of terms extrapolated from the Latin subiectio to expound a radicallyinteractive, psychoanalytically inflected account of the relation between the viewer and(the surface of a) painting–trans.].19. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1939), 7 (my emphasis).20. Such as the troubling ‘‘corkscrew’’ in the Nativity by Lorenzo Lotto now in Siena,astutely analyzed by Daniel Arasse: ‘‘The new-born child retains his umbilical cord,attached to his belly and clearly knotted.’’ Daniel Arasse shows that the iconographicunicum here takes its meaning from three series: event-based (the sack of Rome), cultbased(the holy Umbilical Cord of Jesus), and theological (the notion of virginity). See‘‘Lorenzo Lotto dans ses bizarreries: le peintre et l’iconographe,’’ in Lorenzo Lotto, Atti delconvegno internzionale di studi per il v centenario della nascita (Asolo, 1981), 365–82.21. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1983), xvi.22. Ibid., xix–xx.23. Ibid., 27.24. Ibid., xxv.25. Ibid., 72–118.26. Ibid., xxiv.27. Ibid., 11–13, 27–33, 50–61, 73–74, 239–41.28. Ibid., 119–68.29. Ibid., 152–59, 222–23.30. Ibid., 156.