The acheiropoieton, an image not made by human hands, has long been an object of fascination for medieval art historians for what it reveals of how medieval people understood images, non-human agency, and artistic practice. Too long overlooked, perhaps, is its non-miraculous cousin, the “spontaneous object,” a chance image produced by the vicissitudes of nature—from figures in clouds to fossilized mollusks embedded in marble. Medieval and Renaissance artists and writers wrestled with such natural images, seeking in them insights into Nature’s generative powers, her vibrancy, and her capacity for representation. As Rebecca Zorach demonstrates in her new book, many early-modern writers determined that artists, in their related capacity for representation, are something like extensions of Nature, or at least her imitators. This intimate relationship between artists and Nature (that is, the personified semi-independent force of God’s Creation) is in stark contrast to the mechanized disenchantment with the natural world characteristic of a technocratic and capitalist modernity. Zorach’s argument is thus a “throwback to an older kind of credulity” (3), an effort to recover traces of a pre-modern relationship to nature that persisted, if sometimes unnoticed, through early modernity and into the eighteenth century.
In a tradition going back to Lynn White Jr., and as a way of making up for Michel Jeanneret’s lack of interest in the visual arts, [1] Spontaneous Objects is an attempt at recovering Western environmental ethics via the image, an “alternative genealogy” (18) that undermines twentieth-century claims that Renaissance naturalism was evidence of man’s conquest of the natural world. While similar attempts to disrupt modernity’s nature-culture binary and anthropocentrism are now part and parcel of new materialist scholarship, Zorach’s explicitly feminist and postcolonial approach enables her to further contest narratives of the Renaissance that insist on white, Western, and male exceptionalism. She also, crucially, endeavors to reinscribe the history of European colonization into our understanding of early-modern discourses on nature.
Zorach takes on these ambitious objectives over seven chapters. The first three largely focus on the work of late-sixteenth-century Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi and his seventeenth-century readers. His books and letters addressing the morphology of stones and the origins of fossils interrogate whether Nature had intention, whether she played, and whether human art was the result of her working through the hands of the artist. Zorach traces late-medieval Aristotelian ideas about Nature’s capacity to make images from Albertus Magnus to Aldrovandi and connects them to writing, painting, and sculpture from Giotto to later Renaissance titans like Michelangelo and Leonardo. Their meditations on artistic creation as analogous to the work of Nature led them to produce unfinished sculptures and “meta-images” of figures painted into clouds, fictive ammonite shells hidden in pavements, and faces imagined in marble revetments. In the second chapter, monsters, grotesques, and “useless” images are evidence of the chance mismatch of form and matter, rather than failed attempts at natural generation, giving greater purpose to the artist’s struggle to reconcile form and medium. The third chapter then contends with early-modern thinkers’ view of the universe as increasingly mechanistic. In response, Nature herself became the mistress of math—an embodiment of order and intellect—offering artists the possibility of ennobling their craft by an adherence to mathematical rules, yielding familiar Renaissance perspective and proportions.
It is only in the book’s second half that Zorach reveals her bogeyman, Michel Foucault. For Zorach, Foucault’s epistemes, introduced alongside his celebrated study of Las Meninas in The Order of Things, are too homogenous, rigid, and built on selective readings dictated by a teleological desire to understand twentieth-century Modernity. His Baroque, or “Classical” age is orderly, mechanistic, and uninterested in (linguistic) representation. Zorach’s salve here is the union of Merlau-Ponty’s phenomenological decentering of the human with the “auricular style” of the Baroque—a combination of precise naturalism and bombastic ornament reminiscent of shells—that reveals the playful agency of Nature in the eighteenth century and thus undermines Foucault’s entrenchment of Western anthropocentrism. Her final three chapters contend, in turn, with Agostino Scilla, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant, in each case arguing that a vitalist aesthetics, identified with Smith’s “invisible hand,” derives from earlier discourses on Nature and underlies the foundations of modern science, economics, and philosophy, respectively. For this art historian and medievalist, it is the long influence of artistic practice on scientific knowledge and the role of Nature as an artist, nourishing human artists’ sense of the significance of their profession, that are most striking and encouraging to see reemerge across the longue durée of European history.
Zorach is undoubtedly at her best parsing the dense, at times even dry, texts of her Italian Renaissance interlocutors. Beyond Aldrovandi, her feminist re-reading of Michelangelo’s famous sonnet “Non ha l’ottimo artista” and her astute corrections to a handful of long-published Latin texts make for convincing demonstrations that Renaissance writers and artists saw Nature as a collaborator and guide. Aside from a compelling interpretation of Johann Jakob Thurneysen’s 1680 dizzying spiral print of Latona, the artworks that populate the book receive slightly less devoted attention (most lamentably the jeweled cradle with an amorphous pearl-Christ today in the Uffizi). In the first two chapters, with their focus on “meta-images,” this reader had a hard time identifying faces hidden in the paintings by Botticelli (61), Filippino Lippi (67), and in the marble-faced pier of San Vitale in Ravenna (87), something that might have been alleviated by more generous descriptions or more graphic interventions like the one outlining the hidden rock face behind Lippi’s centaur (70).
These observations do not make Zorach’s argument any less compelling, but they raise an essential question: to what extent are these meta-images instead a comment on the artist’s or viewers’ imagination? In the second chapter, Zorach considers both Leonardo’s and Athanasius Kircher’s interest in the faculty of invention (ingenio) and the role of imagination in recognizing the spontaneous object. She largely abandons this line of inquiry, however, perhaps because it seems to threaten Nature’s agency: if viewers must form the resemblance in their mind, how good on an artist can Nature be? But the beholder’s share is crucial for how medieval and early-modern artists understood “natural” images, as well as those they produced. Paul Binski’s interest in medieval aspectual seeing, for example in the blood-red columns of Canterbury Cathedral, and Emmanuel Alloa’s concept of “seeing-with,” championed by Margaret Graves in her recent Arts of Allusion, both require the viewer to mentally reconcile representation with a real thing, making the artist and Kircher’s Nature all the more similar.
Throughout, Zorach is painfully aware of the colonial history that haunts Western discourses on nature; as it seems to haunt her own text, literally appended as a “coda” to the first chapter and mentioned elsewhere in brief parentheticals. In the book’s final chapter, “Signs on the Shore,” she tackles head on the embeddedness of nature in racial and colonial discourses, from caricatures of the noble savage to Kant’s characterization of non-Europeans as animalistic in their incapacity for abstraction. Because these social and racial hierarchies are bound up in notions of nature and natural law, the “invisible hand” of Nature appears to make them inevitable. To Zorach, this is a diversion of an “older and deeper reverence for nature towards other ends” (232). She proposes that by recovering such reverence for nature—one she locates in both pre-modernity and the non-West—we might begin to dismantle colonial-era hierarchies and rediscover a less anthropocentric history of the West. These are high stakes, to which the book certainly rises, though they perhaps overly romanticize the purity of “nature” within pre-modern and non-Western societies. One need only look to the many medieval examples of racial hierarchies grounded in analogous discourses on nature: for example Otto of Freising’s twelfth-century description of Hungarians as hominum monstra, a dehumanizing caricature that exploits centuries-old tropes about the body, climate, natural history, and biology.
While Zorach’s stated aim is to “decenter the [anthropocentric] narrative of the ‘Renaissance’” (19), medievalists will likely chafe at some of her characterizations of the Middle Ages. The notion that Bernard Silvestris, Alain of Lille, and Jean de Meun viewed nature as sexually normative has been complicated in recent decades by medievalists including David Rollo, Barbara Newman, and Christopher Richards. The Aristotelian phrase natura naturans may have been introduced by translations of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) but the idea was long present through Eriugena’s ninth-century natura creans et creata. The Platonic solids may have been absent from medieval copies of the Timaeus, but the Calcidian commentary still had a discussion of the four elements built on mathematical structures (which was itself central to other medieval texts like Isidore of Seville’s De natura rerum and Bernard of Chartres’s Glosae super Platonem). Also surprising, but inconsequential to her argument, the relief of Theodoric on the façade of San Zeno in Verona is from the twelfth century, not the tenth.
These observations are not meant to be gripes that the Middle Ages are imperfectly characterized in a book on Renaissance and Baroque art, but to suggest that Zorach’s important interventions in our understanding of nature and art making in early modernity highlight how much work is yet to be done excavating even deeper and older environmental ethics in Western art and thought. This energetically written and beautifully illustrated book has cut a path as far back as Giotto. It remains for others to take us through the Middle Ages and beyond.
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Note:
1. Michel Jeanneret, Perpetual Motion: Transforming Shapes in the Renaissance from da Vinci to Montaigne, trans. Nidra Poller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).