Between Figure and Ground

Between Figure and Ground:
Seeing in Premodernity
Edited by Saskia C. Quené

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Table of Contents
Sharing Ground: An Introduction
in Conversation with David Young Kim
Saskia C. Quené
11
Selected Bibliography
35
Acknowledgements
47
5

Table of Contents
Part 1
Staging Figures
In the Round: Master WA’s Figureless Prints
and Fifteenth-Century Painted Grounds
Noa Turel
49
Tableau-vivant Curtains as Mediators between Figure and
Ground: Petrus Christus, the Salzburg Master, and Jean Fouquet
Claudia Blümle
85
Miracles of Mediation:
Staging the Sacred in the Annunciation by Pedro da Córdoba
Beate Fricke
131
6

Table of Contents
Part 2
Describing and Translating
Iconic Difference
Gottfried Boehm
169
Campus as Locus and Narrative Stained Glass
Bruno Haas
179
Lineage of a Paradigm:
“Figure and Ground” in Encyclopedic Sources
Veronica Peselmann
227
7

Table of Contents
Part 3
Beyond the Surface
A Foray of Stained Glass: Color, Grisaille, Transparency
Marion Gartenmeister
255
Between Figure and Ground: Lorenzetti’s Gold
Christopher Lakey & Saskia C. Quené
291
Leonardos Untergrund: Zur Gedächtniskunst des Pausens
Nicola Suthor
323
8

Table of Contents
Part 4
Navigating Dichotomies
Zwischen Gestaltpsychologie und Kunstwissenschaft:
Zur Ideen- und Begriffsgeschichte von ‚Figur und Grund‘
Tom Steinert
373
Zwei Meta-Physiken des Bildes?
Zur Figur/Grund-Relation in der Vormoderne
aus der Perspektive dreistelliger Bildbegriffe
Christoph Poetsch
441
What Guides the Beholder’s Eye:
Figures, Ground, or Perspective?
Raphael Rosenberg
471
9

Table of Contents
Part 5
Transgressing Depth
Painting Shadows in the Middle Ages
Aden Kumler
497
Smoke and Mirrors? The (In)visible Worlds of David Bailly
Karin Leonhard
545
Embedded Space in Early Renaissance Painting
Péter Bokody
581
Zeit als Figur ohne Grund
Jürgen Müller
615
Image Credits
650
10

Between Figure and Ground
Sharing Ground: An Introduction
in Conversation with David Young Kim
Saskia C. Quené
11
11

Saskia C. Quené
During the final dinner of our conference Between Figure and
Ground: Seeing in Premodernity in June 2022 at eikones – Center
for the Theory and History of the Image in Basel, Switzerland,
we moved aside our plates and glasses and started drawing charts
on the paper placemats in front of us. In the left column, we
collected terms for “figure” in different languages, like “figure” and
“imago,” “image,” “Bild,” “Abbild,” “figura,” and “Figur.” In the right,
we added “Grund” and “campo,” “Feld” and “field,” “plane” and
“piano.” In the middle column, references to phenomena, artifacts,
and concepts that subversively undermined the stated dichotomy
soon covered surfaces. Lines and arrows started to connect terms
and ideas across languages, delineating an interdisciplinary network
of backgrounds, heritages, and presumptions. After three
days of challenging paper presentations and intense discussions,
we stared puzzled at the dense diagrams in our midst. Because
only moments before, we had thought that we could solve the riddle
once and for all and provide the next generation with a clear
display of how to employ these terms in their historical, phenomenological,
and philosophical settings. Instead, we realized,
as so often, that the conference had shed light on a barren field
of land that was deeper and more complex than we could have
envisioned three days prior.
In the following months, however, I still aimed at writing
an introduction in which I would explain what the terms “figure”
and “ground” in their different configurations and historical contexts
mean, what they refer to, how they were used, and why
they became fundamental to art critique, art-historical scholarship,
and academic writing over the course of the twentieth century.
Then, I would argue to what extent the figure/ground dichotomy
is unsuited to describe premodern art, referring to articles in this
volume that exemplify, critique, and expand vocabularies used to
describe, analyze, and interpret artifacts. In that way, I would have
laid the ground to productively revise anachronistic attachments
to paradigms, drawing attention to what can be seen and described
between picture planes and pictorial spaces and thus between
figure and ground. But then I did not write that introduction.
First of all, my introduction would have awkwardly questioned
the very purpose of this volume. It would have contradicted
everything I had discovered about figures and grounds. Edgar
12

Introduction
Rubin’s famous vase can be perceived as two profiles facing each
other and relies on its sharp black-and-white contrasts [fig. 380].
But this contrast between figure and ground does not map neatly
onto any premodern artifact within my scope. My undertaking
to find a blueprint with more shades of gray, which would have
merely replaced Rubin’s gestalt, would have defeated our efforts.
The clarity I aimed to gain by emphasizing differences and
contrasts became as appealing as it unveiled itself as dangerously
simplifying and void.
So why not get rid of “figure” and “ground” altogether?
Why not leave it all behind to go beyond figure and ground? Why
still look for what can be explored in that narrow place between
figures and grounds? Why still try to detangle that web of lines
and arrows on that placemat in front of us? Why do we have to
talk about “figure and ground,” despite all good reasons not to?
When David Young Kim and I started tackling this question in
our post-conference online conversations in January 2023, we
sourced answers to questions that had been hiding under the
surface of our visible scholarly interests. Why were we looking
at that narrow place between figures and grounds?
Around the same time, the articles for this volume started
arriving in my email inbox, and they felt more relevant than ever
before. Focusing on singular images and examples, every close
reading or material analysis coping with figure and ground proved
that there were plenty of alternatives to simply erasing these
terms. Artifacts shifted their power and meaning dramatically
because we had started looking more consciously and had resisted
being fooled by language’s implications, tackling modern Begriffsgeschichten.
These texts didn’t address a mere art-historiographical
or methodological problem: Simply by asking what could be seen
and described “between figure and ground,” they revised anachronisms
as much as they solved theoretical problems lying at the
heart of medieval, (early) modern, and contemporary discourses.
Along those lines and apart from “figure and ground,” two
more pairs of terms pushed to the forefront during the preparation
of this volume: “Fläche und Raum,” and “space and plane.”
In reading through first drafts of papers, I noticed how figures
started to shift from being described as shapes or forms on surfaces
to elements within pictorial, virtual, or real spaces, and back again.
13

Saskia C. Quené
Walking through the Getty Museum in Los Angeles a few months
earlier, I was struck by a painting by Gerolamo Savoldo depicting
Mary Magdalene [fig. 15]. She was looking at me from the
opposite wall, curious and startled, self-consciously mourning
her loss while hiding in a most precious golden silk fabric. I was
stunned, not in the first place by the so-called aesthetic experience
but by the idea that this figure that had taken off the gilded cloth
of honor from behind her and had wrapped herself into a gold
ground. When I walked closer, I observed that even the squares
of gold leaf that can be seen in panel paintings had become neat,
squared creases in the depicted silk [fig. 16]. Excited because
this painting would be a nice addition to the very problematic narrative
that tries to tell the story of the disappearance of the gold
ground in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, merely treating
it as a static ground in the most modern sense of the word, I was
even more stunned by the fact that, most literally, the ground had
become the figure.
The question of what can be seen between figure and
ground challenges the distinction between the modernist picture
plane and pictorial space. Medieval theories of the image since
at least Athanasius of Alexandria’s Third Discourse against the
Arians written in the fourth century discuss the status of the
image as, for example, being identical, similar, or different to or
from the depicted subject, precisely because the image appears
to be an artifact. Accordingly, artifacts had to negotiate their
relationship toward experience as well as toward the imaginative
throughout the centuries. Considering premodern space as
neither infinite nor empty, geometrical exercises on surfaces (which
can be perspectival) visualize distances between marks or figures.
The place of ground is, therefore, necessarily ambivalent and
relates to spatial configurations as well as to the surface on which
marks are placed. However, the premodern ground can never
be equivalent to the picture plane or Bildfläche, nor to space in
the modern sense of the word, neither within the depicted
pictorial space or the Bildraum. The premodern image is, at last,
present and represented between figure and ground.
Gerolamo Savoldo painted at least three more versions
of his Mary Magdalene, which are now in Berlin, Florence, and
London [fig. 18–21]. Making use of the possibility to compare
14

Introduction
Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, Saint Mary Magdalene at the Sepulchre,
ca. 1530–1540, oil on canvas, 92.7 × 79.4 cm.
J. Paul Getty Museum, inv. 97.PA.55, Los Angeles.
Fig. 15

Saskia C. Quené
Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, Saint Mary Magdalene at the Sepulchre,
ca. 1530–1540, oil on canvas, 92.7 × 79.4 cm.
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Fig. 16

Introduction
digital reproductions of all four versions in one publication, the
most significant difference between the paintings lies in Savoldo’s
depiction of light and shade. The Los Angeles version shows a
green meadow with a picturesque trail toward a church in front of
a steep mountain reaching into an almost Californian-blue sky
[fig. 16]. With sweeping brush strokes, a white swirling cloud
presents itself like a peony, a Pfingstrose or a rose-of-Pentecost.
In the Berlin version, the figure of Magdalene is placed within a
decaying architectural setting [fig. 18]. Standing in front of
bricked-up arches, her dimly lit shawl casts a shadow over her
daunted face. Savoldo captures the metamorphosing moment of
Magdalene’s disbelief, while she turns toward the risen man
himself, as Mary Pardo argues in her 1989 essay.1 This moment in
time is emphasized in the painting preserved today in Florence,
in which the rising morning sun lights up the sky, turning it into a
fiery field of bold hues of color [fig. 19]. That is, if you catch her
in the right moment and in the right angle [fig. 20]. In the London
version, the sun still hides behind the horizon line, illuminating
the lower edges of the slim clouds above the reflective surface of a
lake. Mirroring the cold colors of early dawn, Savoldo has replaced
Magdalene’s gold shawl by a silver one [fig. 21]. Here, more than
in any other version, the “reflective envelope,” as Pardo calls it, “is
both a magnet to the viewer’s eye and a shield blocking direct
access to the image’s interior.”2 And further: “The viewer is effectively
caught up in a triangular relationship with two fictive
entities—the painted figure returning his glance and the imagined
figure ensnaring it in a net of reflections.”3
These reflections are, nevertheless, dependent on the fact
that Savoldo depicted either gold or silver fabrics, that, most
exclusively, absorb, reflect, and refract light being cast from a
source in front of the picture plane. As Michael Fried observed in
more general terms: “The painting itself, the painting as artefact,
emerges as a kind of transactional field belonging at once to
both the virtual, depicted world situated ‘beyond’ the picture
surface and the actual, physical world grounded ‘this’ side of that
1
Mary Pardo, “The Subject of Savoldo’s
Magdalene,” The Art Bulletin 17, no. 1 (1989):
67–91.
17
2
Ibid., 69.
3
Ibid., 74.

Saskia C. Quené
Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, Die Venezianierin (heilige Maria Magdalena),
ca. 1530–1540, oil on canvas, ca. 92 × 73 cm.
Gemäldegalerie, Ident-Nr. 307, Berlin.
Fig. 18

Introduction
Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, Santa Maria Maddalena,
ca. 1530–1540, oil on canvas, 84 × 77.5 cm.
Gallerie degli Uffizi, collezione Contini Bonacossi, Florence.
Fig. 19

Saskia C. Quené
Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, Santa Maria Maddalena,
ca. 1530–1540, oil on canvas, 84 × 77.5 cm.
Gallerie degli Uffizi, collezione Contini Bonacossi, Florence.
Fig. 20