Jimena Berzal de Dios

Abstract. This essay theorizes madness as a chthonic emplacement to dishevel existentially insufficient and detached interpretations of disorder. Reflecting on Nietzsche’s emphasis on poetry over systematic thought, I take up Lorca and Baudelaire’s visceral language on death and the earthly to revisit chthonic myths as expressing an underworld uncontrollable sphere beyond systematicity. Written from the phenomenologically precarious position of my own mental illness, this essay develops a sincere rhetoric to approach the chthonic from within rather than at sterilized distance. This positioning retains the indexicality of the intense and disorganized as a critical facet, in turn exploring the nuances of the experience without discursive reductions or romantic musings, from the ground down.

At the twilight of the nineteenth century, the French symbolist writer Marcel Schwob assimilated Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) into modern sensibilities: “For Uccello did not care about the reality of things, but about their multiplicity and about the infinitude of lines.” Schwob’s consideration of Uccello (much like Antonin Artaud’s, who wrote the surrealist “Uccello le poil”) has been traditionally neglected by art historians. And yet, these literary encounters with the painter retain a sense of hermeneutical validity that, I argue, transcends the “merely” poetic. In this essay, I examine an unusual work of art, The Funerary Monument to John Hawkwood, which has been seen as exemplifying Uccello’s artistic deficiencies in its lack of unified space and illusionistic volume. In contrast, by being attentive to Schwob and Artaud’s analyses, I propose that the fresco presents a never-fulfilled visual experience in which resonating negations (of centrality, spatiality, and existence) articulate the spatial relationship between the artwork and its viewers. A reticent monument, the paradoxical space in Uccello’s Hawkwood presents a series of dislocations, traces, and erasures, which disclose the artifice of the painting and bring Hawkwood forth, not as a living being, but as a disembodied memory.

Through an interdisciplinary examination of sixteenth-century theatre, Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces studies the performative aspects of the early modern stage, paying special attention to the overlooked complexities of audience experience. Examining the period’s philosophical and aesthetic ideas about space, place, and setting, the book shows how artists consciously moved away from traditional representations of real spaces on stage, instead providing their audiences with more imaginative and collaborative engagements that were untethered by strict definitions of naturalism. In this way, the book breaks with traditional interpretations of early modern staging techniques, arguing that the goal of artists in this period was not to cater to a single privileged viewer through the creation of a naturalistically unified stage but instead to offer up a complex multimedia experience that would captivate a diverse assembly of theatre-goers.

Velázquez’s Democritus (ca. 1630) presents a unique encounter: not only are there few depictions in which the Greek philosopher appears with a sphere that shows an actual map, but Velázquez used a court jester as a model for Democritus, thus placing the philosopher within a courtly space. When we study the painting in relation to the literary interests of the Spanish Golden Age and its socio-political circumstances, we can see the figure of Democritus as far from just another instantiation of a conventional trope. The philosopher’s smile and his crepuscular globe entrap the viewer in a semiotic game with pedagogical and ethical goals. While the scholarship on the painting has dwelt extensively on the identification of the figure, this essay moves beyond the superficial aspects of subject identity in order to explore how the painting articulates and requests a profoundly philosophical engagement. I thus examine Democritus in relation to contemporary literary and philosophical themes, many of which were present in Velázquez’s own personal library: the period’s understanding of the philosopher, cartographic spheres, and treatises on laughter. Considered in this manner, Velázquez’s figure is not responding to the folly of humanity in general, as is commonly the case in representations of the philosopher, but is rather presented through a courtly prism in which conquest, geography, and politics are inescapably interrelated. Velázquez’s Democritus emphasizes the philosophical and moral qualities of a learned and decorous laughter, which performs a critical and ethical role framed by Spain’s political difficulties.

“Perspective is much more than a secret technique for imitating a reality… It is the invention of a world dominated and possessed through and through.” These inimical words by Maurice Merleau-Ponty encapsulate a customary philosophical position, as explicit and implicit references to early modern culture by critical theorists and continental philosophers lead to an uninviting and even sinister picture. Because of its emphasis on the human eye, quantitative spatial relations, and the virtual incising of pictorial space via linear perspective, the Renaissance was cast as a formidable villain in order to uphold modern artistic production. It is an accusatory characterization..