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“To See Clearly” – The Place of Relief in Medieval Visual Culture 121
Figure 23. SS. Vin-
cent, Dennis, Piat, and
George, Martyr’s Por-
tal, South Porch,
Chartres Cathedral
(c. 1225).
Duccio a comprehensible spatial setting emerges in which bodies occupy space in a mod-
ern sense. What he calls a projection of the “space box” seen in Naumburg appears in the
frescos at the Arena Chapel, for example, where “closed interior spaces reappear for the
first time”12 since antiquity. This, in his words signified “a revolution in the formal as-
sessment of the representational surface.”13 These achievements mark the beginning of
the evolution of perspectival space, a familiar story, from the more or less correct experi-
ments of the Trecento to the construction of a geometrically sound perspectival space in-
vented in the fifteenth century.
Despite its importance in Panofsky’s teleology of perspective, relief sculpture
plays an uneasy role. As Christopher Wood has argued, the passages about sculpture in
Perspective as Symbolic Form are not really about perspective at all, at least as defined by
“To See Clearly” – The Place of Relief in Medieval Visual Culture 123
Panofsky at the beginning of the text.14 There, he considers the concept of perspective to
be the representation of a spatial continuum on a two-dimensional plane of projection,
building from Albrecht Dürer’s definition of perspective as “seeing through.” Panofsky
opens the essay explaining that,
“Item Perspectiva ist ein lateinisch Wort, bedeutt ein Durchsehung” (“Perspectiva is a Latin
word which means ‘seeing through.’”). This is how Dürer sought to explain the con-
cept of perspective. And although this lateinisch Wort was already used by Boethius,
and did not originally bear so precise a meaning, we shall nevertheless adopt in essence
Dürer’s definition.15
Dürer’s definition was based on Leon Battista Alberti’s notion of the negation of a surface
in favor of a window-like picture plane beholders could see through to a representation con-
structed with a high degree of optical veridicality.16 This definition is a thoroughly Renais-
sance one that privileges the art of painting above all other media, and is still current today.17
Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that relief sculpture from the tenth through the
fourteenth centuries does not fit comfortably into this model of perspective. As a medium,
medieval relief does not present a surface through which we see. Rather, relief’s representa-
tional status as an illusionistic hybrid of painting and sculpture depends on the degree of
depth of carving and the interplay of multiple surface levels to allow for the play of light and
shadow to create figures that appear truly in-the-round and fully embodied.
In Perspective as Symbolic Form Panofsky understands that another conception of
perspective existed, one that was more expansive than Alberti’s window and one, I argue,
that could comfortably include medieval sculpture. However, he relegates this alternate
definition to a footnote where he admits that Dürer’s understanding of perspective was
based on philological sleight of hand, explaining that the Latin term perspectiva should
derive from the verb perspicere, meaning “to see clearly” (“a literal translation of the Greek
term optikē”), not “to see through.”18 While these two concepts of perspective do not op-
erate side-by-side, in a later work Panofsky again offers a curious definition of perspec-
tive while maintaining the primacy of Alberti’s window. In Gothic Architecture and
Scholasticism, first delivered as the Wimmer Memorial Lecture in 1948 at Saint Vincent
College (Latrobe, PA), Panofsky, still speaking about the metamorphosis of surface into
window, argued that perspective “renders account, not only of what is seen but also of the
way it is seen under particular conditions.”19 Here, and in the footnotes of the perspective
essay, Panofsky leaves open the possibility that different concepts of perspective existed
before the Renaissance, though he would never flesh these possibilities out.
One way to consider these differences is in the language Panofsky chose to de-
fine perspective. To see something clearly and under certain, “particular” viewing condi-
It should be noted that such cases of “optical illusions” in high-medieval art ... are not a
matter of projecting a design upon a painted surface but a matter of directly manipulat-
ing the elements that constitute the visual experience of the beholder.25
All of this raises questions about what an account of medieval perspective might look like
and what sculpture’s relationship to the history of perspective more broadly might be,
questions Panofsky gestured toward but never fully embraced, and questions this pres-
ent essay will provide answers to (however brief). Medieval sculptors manipulated forms
“To See Clearly” – The Place of Relief in Medieval Visual Culture 125
and surfaces in a variety of ways in order to present specific aspects and views of sculptured
figures and objects to beholders.
Take the use of isolated foreshortened forms via optical corrections, or optical re-
finements. Artists and architects have used this technique since antiquity to heighten the
illusion of certain figures or forms appearing correctly or more natural if seen from certain
standpoints typically from the ground.26 Though there are a few exceptions that I will dis-
cuss below, most studies of this type of perspective have focused on the work of Renais-
sance sculptors, like Donatello’s figures of St John the Evangelist (1408) and St Mark (c.
1411) designed for the façades of the cathedral of Florence and church of Orsanmichele,
Florence, respectively.27 However, an important example of this can be found at the cathe-
dral of Ferrara, in the relief of St George Killing the Dragon.
Constructed for the west façade in 1135, the tympanum relief designed by the
sculptor Niccolò and his workshop is one of the earliest calculated examples of optical nat-
uralism in monumental sculpture during the Middle Ages (Fig. 25).28 When viewed from
“To See Clearly” – The Place of Relief in Medieval Visual Culture 127
Figure 26. Saint
George Killing the
Dragon, West Façade,
Ferrara Cathedral
(1135).
abstract geometric principles. Rather, he “opens his geometrical treatise ... by defining
measuring as the preliminary step for any inquiries into geometric principles.”34 Further-
“To See Clearly” – The Place of Relief in Medieval Visual Culture 129
Figure 28. Nicola
Pisano, Adoration of
the Magi, Pisa Baptis-
tery Pulpit (1260).
“To See Clearly” – The Place of Relief in Medieval Visual Culture 131
Figure 29. Arnolfo
Di Cambio, Monu-
ment of Cardinal De
Bray, San Domenico,
Orvieto (c. 1282).
beholders with signs of his aging. Nevertheless, on the left side, the marble was not worked
to indicate any aging and simply remains polished because it was never meant to be visi-
ble to beholders.45
The analytical concepts around which I have framed my discussion of the rela-
tionships between relief sculpture and perspective – illusionism and surface effects, frontal
and oblique standpoints, correct distance – all resonated with medieval writers. The type
of relief sculpture that Arnolfo produced in the monument to Cardinal de Bray was de-
scribed in terms that spoke to its illusionism. In his Rationale divinorum officiorum of 1284,
William Durand of Mende compares the variety of paintings, sculptures, and reliefs dis-
played in a church to the diversity of virtues and analogizes “sculptures that project, seem-
ing to emerge out of the walls of the church” (sculpture prominentes de parietibus egredientes
ecclesie uidentur) to the virtues implanted in the faithful.46 Durand adapted this passage
from the popular, late twelfth-century liturgical manual, the Mitralis de officiis of Bishop
Sicardus of Cremona.47 Sicardus, born in 1155, witnessed first-hand the revival of monu-
mental sculpture in Italy by the likes of Niccolò of Ferrara and his contemporaries. Sicar-
dus’ description of sculptures seeming to emerge from walls was, according to Antje
Middeldorf Kosegarten, his own contribution to a long tradition of descriptions of the
Temple of Solomon, beginning with Jerome’s Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible and
continuing with Bede’s De templo (c. 731), inter alia.48 This speaks to contemporary sculp-
tural practices and Sicardus’ desire to embed them within a longer history.
Middeldorf Kosegarten was the first to suggest that Sicardus was responding to
the abundance of relief sculptures – like St George Killing the Dragon in Ferrara – that cov-
“To See Clearly” – The Place of Relief in Medieval Visual Culture 133
ered the outside and inside of Italian Romanesque churches.49 By describing the sculp-
tures and their planar surfaces (i.e., the walls), he underscores the differences between
figure and ground, or figure and plane, and the illusionism built into this type of repre-
sentation. That medieval authors described relief in terms of surface differentiation be-
tween figure and plane is not difficult to understand. In the most famous artistic manual
from the Latin West during the Middle Ages, Theophilus speaks to this as well. In his
twelfth-century De diversis artibus, he described the process of making repoussé works in
terms of differences between raised images and the planar surface of the gold or silver
plate, saying: Percute tabulam auream sive argenteam, quantae longitudinis et latitudineis
velis ad elevandas imagines.50
The relationship of difference between forms and surface is evident in these ex-
amples and informs the binary of touch and sight: forms are raised from the surface and
project from a plane, inviting beholders to touch them. They are not fully in the round,
and their full corporeality can only be understood optically. As we have seen, the impor-
tance of oblique lines of sight was not lost on artists using relief. Nor were they lost on
commentators of images, particularly authors of optical treatises. We can see how relief
played a role in this history by understanding that we perceive relief as a rough surface
and apprehend it as an apparent three-dimensional form. This notion held since the
scholastic intervention in optical theory when it was believed that the materiality of a
known object could be apprehended through the sense of sight.
We can track this concept by understanding how asperitas (roughness of a sur-
face) expressed a “visible intention,” or a characteristic, of an object, a notion introduced
by Alhacen and commented upon by many authors from the thirteenth through the fif-
teenth century.51 Alhacen (c. 1040), the medieval Islamic philosopher and scientist, ex-
plicated this idea while describing an incident when an observer looked at a sculpture with
subtle engravings (sculpture subtiles).52 In his Kitāb al-Manāz.ir, translated in the twelfth
century as De aspectibus, he explained how the luminosity and the color issuing from a
sculpted body reached the interior of the eye, stating that one could only observe these
markings if the object was tilted or inclined in some way. He notes that “when light reaches
the depressed portions, it will also create shadows, so the raised portions will be exposed
to light and revealed. If shadows are formed in the depressed portions, but no shadows
exist on the raised portions, the form of light will vary on the surface of that body.”53 Here,
Alhacen demonstrated how the material differentiation between body and surface, or pos-
sibly figure and ground, could be perceived in accordance with a change in the object’s po-
sition in relation to the eye, provided the observer was in the correct viewing position.
For Alhacen, asperitas was a visible characteristic that conveyed the material
make-up of the object to the eye and relayed a virtual image to the mind. We can easily un-
And just as moderate distance of the [visible] object is required for vision of that object
(thus the object must be viewed neither from an excessive nor from an insufficient dis-
tance), so the same thing is required spiritually, for remoteness from God through infi-
delity and a multitude of sins destroys spiritual vision, as do the presumption of excessive
familiarity with the divine and the [overly bold] investigation of divine majesty.56
“To See Clearly” – The Place of Relief in Medieval Visual Culture 135
Figure 31. Giotto, In- on distance, size, and scale and played a critical role in shaping the theory and practices of
justice, Arena Chapel,
Padua (c. 1305). late medieval and early Renaissance painting. Painters increasingly sought to adopted re-
lief’s aesthetic terms to their own practices and eventually would enfold these relation-
Figure 32. Giotto, ships into linear perspective demonstrations.
Feast at Cana, detail
of Christ’s halo, Arena By accounting for these relationships between relief sculptures and beholders on
Chapel, Padua (c. the ground we can also begin to clarify and redefine the emergence of perspective in paint-
1305).
ing in the early Renaissance. Again the picture is not as clear as Panofsky would have it.
Late medieval painting in Italy contained a version of material relief that incorporated
spatial and tactile refinements into their work adopted from the process of carving. Tre-
cento artists like Giotto used material relief to create tensions between perspective pro-
jection and surface effects. At the Arena Chapel, for example, Giotto uses material relief
in frescoes of both Justice and Injustice, the fictive niche sculptures projected onto the pic-
ture plane. Here, the scenes playing out underneath them project from the surface of the
wall. The surface is built up to such a degree that you can actually see its dimensionality
when you are standing in front of the painting or if you see them under certain lighting
conditions (Fig. 31). If this were the only example of Giotto’s use of material relief, we
might be able to write it off as pure decoration; however, his use of relief in the divine fig-
ures’ haloes created similar effects. The haloes here are sculptural forms that signify im-
material truths – divine light (Fig. 32). We should understand this as constitutive of
meaning, rather than purely decorative – and there are over 200 of these reliefs in the
Arena Chapel alone, and many other examples of this, including liturgical art such as
painted Crucifixions (Fig. 33). In this way, I believe we can understand how painters used
sculpture as a model, whether or not because of the medium’s “higher claim on reality,”
as Jeffrey Hamburger has recently argued, or for purely aesthetic purposes.57 Either way
– or perhaps taken together – the imitation of sculpture in late medieval Italian painting
cannot be denied, though it is rarely emphasized.58
Importantly, the relief used by Giotto and others painters of this period places
their work firmly in relation to artistic theories of the late Trecento and early Quattro-
“To See Clearly” – The Place of Relief in Medieval Visual Culture 137
cento. Relief here functions as the critical hinge joining the mediums of sculpture and
painting. Just prior to Alberti, the term rilievo was used to designate a kind of sculpted ob-
ject in a picture, a projected form from a surface.59 When Alberti codified linear perspec-
tive in 1435, he laid out a concept of rilievo in relation to perspective. The term rilievo,
however, was a transmutation of Latin terms, such as exsculptum, insculptum, and asperi-
tas, which all mean to physically extend from a surface. When Alberti translated these
terms, he also inverted their primary meaning. For rilievo came to signal not the three-di-
mensional jutting out of forms – forms that break the picture plane as in the works by
Giotto – but rather a two-dimensional system of representation to seem three-dimen-
sional via modeling in black and white. The degree of an object’s rilievo was one of the
markers of success of a linear perspective painting.60 This is of course an old technique
we can find in the earlier recipe books from the Middle Ages and one that even appeared
in scholastic commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima, such as those by Nicole Oresme
around 1350.61
To take seriously the advancement of spatial naturalism ascribed to Giotto and
his followers, we also need to find ways in which these sculptural processes can be a part
of the narrative. This is important because in the art historical account bequeathed to us
by Panofsky and others, Giotto’s legacy as a painter is of course tied to his mastery of nat-
uralism, that certain life-likeness of his figures in space, and to his mastery of relief. He
has long been praised as the harbinger of Renaissance painterly aesthetics, especially for
the plastic nature of his bodies in space, his imitation of nature, and his supposed com-
mitment to the plane of projection, or what Panofsky called the “revolution in the formal
assessment of the representational surface.”62 According to this account, it is beginning
with Giotto that we find the contours of bodies to follow a strictly “sculptural” trajectory,
as the degree of relief becomes more and more refined. What is too often overlooked in
this narrative is how material relief functioned in fresco work and panel painting, and why
these sculpted forms are there at all. These are not simply paintings, in the modern sense,
as in Panofsky’s definition. These are complex and multi-dimensional images that respond
dynamically to beholders in a particular space and participate in a broad definition of per-
spective, one that in many fruitful ways corresponds to the language and epistemological
stakes we find in the medieval Perspectivist tradition and its authors.