Approaches

Art and Agency

When the original formulations of living presence responses are compared to their present-day treatments, a few things stand out. First, the responses hardly ever used the theological, aesthetic or semiotic terminology that is used today by authors such as Freedberg. Secondly, viewers report instead that they experience an overwhelming sense of presence during which the representation is transformed into the living being represented. In perceiving the work of art to be alive, it ceases to be a representation, but instead it becomes the living being it represents. In other words, the spectator no longer thinks of it in terms of signs and signifieds, or images and what they depict, even though viewers are often at the same time, and paradoxically, aware that what they are looking at is in fact inanimate matter. Viewers react as if they are in the presence not of inanimate matter but a living and acting person.

In accordance with these features the first aim of this programme is to add to existing collections of such responses by focussing on early modern Italy; to extend the corpus to include architecture; and to describe and analyse these responses closely and carefully. Until now this has hardly been done for early modern Italy, and certainly not for such responses involving architecture. The case studies will compare what people saw to what they said and how they reacted; which features of art works they reacted to, and which were ignored; and what terms they used to formulate their response. To understand these responses, the programme builds on the conspicuous feature that during living presence responses the representation ceases to be perceived as such. It will therefore analyse works of art and the responses they elicit not in terms of representation, but in terms of agency. That is, it considers them not as signs, images, codes or depictions referring to something outside themselves, but as agents acting upon the viewer. It will do so in two, related, ways. The first is by using the theories about living presence developed in classical rhetoric, both because that discipline played a major role in shaping the response to art in early modern Italy and because living presence plays a central role in classical rhetoric. Classical rhetoric developed very influential strategies and techniques to reach the effect of living presence as one of its most important means of persuasion. But it did not develop a general account of living presence response. For that we have to turn to the anthropological theory of art as agency recently developed by Alfred Gell. Unlike many other recent anthropological theories it does not consider art in semiotic terms; thereby it is able to accomodate the conflation of representation and what is represented. Nor is it an anthropological aesthetics of non-Western art. Instead, it considers the impact of art on its viewers, and their response, in terms of agency. In this respect it closely resembles rhetoric, because persuasion is a variety of agency. But its scope is much wider than that of rhetoric, because it offers a model with which to articulate living presence response and several ways of accounting for the effect of living presence. Gell's theory also has heuristic value because it raises questions about the interaction between works of art, their makers, patrons and viewers which traditional art-historical inquiry with its focus on attribution, formal or iconographic analysis does not ask.