Charles Lock
University of Copenhagen
Ombremanie and skiaphilia are labels from the past that might be revived in honour of the tenebration in which we are cast by the three books under our wary, lurking inspection. Review is too luminous, too clearly optical a word for any response to this epithemic. What we must reckon with is that after such energy has been expended on the study of iconography and perspective and light, our shadow has caught up with us.
Of this moment there have been foreshadowings: an essay by T. Da Costa Kaufmann, "The Perspective of Shadows: The History of the Theory of Shadow Projection" in The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (Vol. 38) in 1975, and in three works all of 1987: G. Bauer's "Experimental Shadow Casting and the Early History of Perspective" in the Art Bulletin, an unusual insistence on shadow in Paul Hills's The Light of Early Italian Painting (New Haven: Yale UP), and J. Roudaut's Une ombre au tableau: littérature et peinture (Chavagne: Ubacs)
Shadows have the interest of the ubiquitous: instructed to look, one sees them everywhere. The strange thing is that our blindness to shadows has coexisted within a philosophical tradition whose point of departure and reflection is Plato's cave, ourselves watching shadows, ourselves even the shadows that we watch. We are culturally conditioned to entertain the hypothesis - as a kind of routine reality check - that all is shadow. And it may be as a consequence of that strong figuration of the 'real' that we have so ignored and overlooked and looked through and beyond those shadows that even the least of Platonists would concede to be shadows in and for themselves. Plato's myth becomes conflated with his treatment of mimesis, so that the painter of a chair is often said - though not by Plato - to have painted a shadow of a shadow. And the logic of the shadow is that it must be cast by a substance. And so we have degrees or gradations of shadow, well-phrased by the seventeenth-century Quaker, Isaac Pennington: "All Truth is a Shadow except the last. But every Truth is Substance in its own place, though it be but a Shadow in another place. And the Shadow is a true Shadow, as the Substance is a true Substance."
That a shadow is necessarily cast by a substance tells us not only about space and light, but also about temporality. The substance is assumed to exist before the shadow. And the last truth will be no shadow. Yet there is a contradiction here. In the world of optics we can say that the substance precedes the shadow. But what is the Truth that has the power to convert substance into shadow? It is a new substance, of which the old substance appears now as mere shadow. That is, the old substance provides a form or outline - figura - which is then filled in, to such a degree of detail or 'reality' that that which made the shadow now appears insubstantial. This is the conceptual device of pre-figuration, also known as foreshadowing. In the development of the idea of figura - the figure of prolepsis - we witness a remarkably distorted (disfigured) analogy between figura and veritas, and shadow and substance. Figura precedes the truth: but how can the shadow take temporal precedence over the substance that causes it? The mediating term appears to be praemonstratio, by which we are moved from a classical and atemporal polarity of figura-veritas - through the optical pair of substance-shadow - to the Christian, historical polarity of typology: shadow-truth, promise-fulfillment. Erich Auerbach, in "Figura," translates praemonstrationes as 'foreshadowings' without pausing to consider the offence to optics and physics in that word. 'Prefigurings' would be conceptually no better: what is the difference between a prefigure and a figure? The Greek plays quite physically with typos and antitypos, within a logic of causation and succession. When typos enters Latin as figura or even as umbra, that logic is transgressed.
Shadow enjoys a special status - shared with reflection - in the tropical cocktail. The tropes of metaphor and metonymy are determined by, respectively, likeness and contiguity. Almost all signs work by means of one or the other. We could introduce Peirce's distinctions also, and speak of the index as metonymic, of the icon as metaphoric. What we notice about shadows and reflections - and it is surely this that gives them such literary prestige - is that they combine both likeness and contiguity. They only exist in contiguity with that which causes them. At the same time, as likenesses they function as images of what need not or (in the case of self) cannot be seen. A shadow is, indexically, a pointer to that which is its cause, as well as being an icon, in outline, of its cause.
In A Short History of the Shadow, Victor I. Stoichita makes the useful observation that it was photography which prompted semiotics to consider the function of contiguity, and was thus enabled to think again about reflections: "It was only later - when Monet and Steiglitz were submitting their experiments - that American pragmatism arrived on the scene to confer on the photographic image in addition to its mimetic value (as an icon) the value of index, token of physical connection" (113; Peirce is then cited, but in translation from a French anthology and without reference to the English original: this is a serious and recurrent flaw in an otherwise serviceable translation).
A foreshadowing is slightly different. Clearly indexical, pointing towards something not yet present, a foreshadowing is not iconic until that which to which it points is made present. With shadows we assume that the substantive thing comes before, precedes its shadow; with foreshadowing, we acknowledge the indexical and metonymic function before we encounter the substance, and it will be the substance that will make clear the iconic and metaphoric aspects of the shadow.
One sense of foreshadowing is simply that the shadow is in front of one, to the fore, as in Giovanni di Paolo's "Flight into Egypt." Here, as Stoichita observes, the picture is lit from the back, so that the trees and the houses in the background cast shadows towards us. More remarkably, the Holy Family in the foreground cast no shadows at all. Stoichita argues that two distinct modes of representing space are operating in one picture: "The foreground scene is faithful to the rules of a flat, two-dimensional world, typical of the medieval image; whereas the background is the product of a revitalized experience of the real" (46). There might be another explanation: that the background is the space of foreshadowing; the foreground is the space of presence or substance: the shadows in the background point to the Holy Family. The Holy Family are themselves; they have no function to point elsewhere, no supplementary role. We might say that the shadows in the background are indexical: their pointed tree shapes are aimed directly at the Holy Family. Only when we can see the Holy Family can we see the latently metaphoric and iconic in those shadows.
This might explain the absence of shadows in Byzantine and Western medieval painting, despite their presence in antiquity, and especially - sharp, clearly-defined shadows - in the mummy portraits of Egypt which are acknowledged to be the pictorial 'type' of icons. Shadows disappear from pictorial representation because they both point elsewhere and indicate an emptiness to be filled: shadows are, in Derrida's doubling sense, supplements. In The Light of Early Italian Painting, Hills rightly points to the importance of light and colour and shading in the development of 'realism.' We are the victims of documentary and conceptual distortion, in that Alberti, Brunelleschi and others wrote and discoursed at length about perspective, but there is no such discourse about light. The absence of textual record or verbal formulation is no argument against its presence in pictorial technique, and Hills shows us how much we miss when we explain the space of Renaissance painting exclusively in terms of perspective.
But even Hills is unable to explain why shadows should disappear between antiquity and the late middle ages, "why so many of the illusionistic techniques mastered by the painters of antiquity were lost, disregarded or transformed between the period of the later Roman Empire and the thirteenth century" (Hills, 10). As the study of medieval and Byzantine art advances, it is surely time to ascribe change to something other than decadence, negligence or forgetfulness. A civilization that thinks of itself as a realization of what had been foreshadowed will see in shadows only the provisional, the contingent, the now redundant. Laws, writes St. Paul to the Colossians, "are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ" (Col. 2.17). In Hebrews we read further: "For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things...." (Heb. 10.1) - which exactly distinguishes between the indexical and iconic properties of shadows.
St. John Chrysostom (PG 51, 247) uses the analogy of shadows as outlines to explain the difference between the Old Testament foreshadowing and the New Testament presence:
It is worth noting, with reference to Stoichita's treatment of the various images on the theme of "The Origin of Painting," that the Greek for sketch is skiagraphia. Philologists and etymologists are unanimous in their assurances that sketch/esquisse/Schatten has nothing to do with shadows but everything to do with Latin schedium, an 'extemporaneous poem.' (In Danish, shadow is skygge, from which a more plausible etymology might be adumbrated.)
This is not to say that there is no place for shadows in Christian art: it would be a gnostic conclusion that Christ - not being properly incarnate, not being embodied - did not throw a shadow. Shadows are found in medieval painting for some of the reasons noted by Leo Steinberg in The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (New York: Pantheon, 1983; 2nd rev. ed., Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996): shadows, like genitalia, attest to the fullness of human nature assumed by the incarnate Christ. In the Incarnation it might be said that Christ entered into natural optics, the created light of which shadow is a necessary part. But Christ is also visible and can be depicted in the uncreated light, as in the Transfiguration, but here without shadows. An iconoclastic argument, articulated by the fourth-century bishop and historian, Eusebius, runs that Christ in his transfigured glory is not representable, and in his earthly, 'merely human' condition is not worthy of representation: "He showed [on Mount Tabor] that nature which surpasses the human one - when His face shone like the sun and His garments like light. Who then would be able to represent by means of dead colours and inanimate skiagraphiai the glistening, flashing radiance...?" (cited in Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312-1453: Sources and Documents[Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, [1972], 17).
Thus early Christian art was both motivated positively by a theology of matter redeemed and the divine made visible, as well as being threatened by iconoclasm. In response a sort of pictorial compromise evolved: Christ was visible because incarnate, but in being depicted he is visible in the uncreated light of Tabor, except in scenic iconography. This may explain why hieratic images of the face of Christ, or of the Virgin or saints - as groundless and shadowless portraits - survive from the pre-iconoclastic period in greater numbers than scenes from his life.
The re-introduction of the shadow cannot be explained without reference to the replacement of a non-representational ground by a represented ground and sky, and to the modifications of the halo: at first, the halo is on the perpendicular, at one with the picture surface. Then it begins to tilt in accordance with the position of the saint, as if it were fixed not in relation to the picture plane but as an accessory attached to the head. Masaccio is one of the last 'progressive' painters to preserve the halo, and he does so minimally, as supplementary headgear: by c.1450 Filippo Lippi will denote a halo by a thin circle, not apparently painted but incised in the paint. Remarkably, in the great "Trinity" (1428), as Hills noted, Christ's halo casts a shadow on the cross behind Christ's shoulders. Hills is perplexed - quite properly - as to the source of the light that casts the shadow, and decides that the light must issue from the dove/Spirit. What escapes comment is the absurdity of a halo being treated as a solid object.
There are haloes still in that painting to which any study of represented shadows must attend, "St. Peter Healing with his Shadow." The iconography is uncertain, based on Acts 5.15: "they brought forth the sick into the streets, and laid them on beds and couches, that at the least the shadow of Peter passing by might overshadow some of them." Stoichita writes: "We see Peter, John and an unidentified disciple walking down a street lined with sick people...." Only Peter and John (identifiable as beardless) have haloes; the third figure walking behind them does not, and is therefore either not a disciple or belongs - incongruently - to a post-haloic mode of saintly representation.
The word translated in Acts as 'overshadow' is episkiazo, and Stoichita's unfolding of what it contains is impressive. The author of Acts, Luke, in his Gospel uses the same word in his account of the Annunciation: "the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the highest shall overshadow thee [episkiazein/obumbrabit]" (Luke 1.35). The only other occurrences of this word in the New Testament are in all the synoptic accounts of the Transfiguration/ Metamorphosis: "a bright cloud overshadowed them" (Matt. 17.5; Mark 9.7; Luke 9.34). The vital sense of this word, in Stoichita's understanding, is that in Alexandrian neo-Platonism episkiazo "refers to an activity similar to that of making images. The angel was therefore saying that in the Virgin's womb God would form (that is to say, would make a first sketched image of) the 'shadow' of himself: meaning Christ" (Stoichita, 68). To this one must add the overwhelming shadow of the Synoptics in speaking of the Transfiguration, as the making of a paradoxical image of the uncreated light.
Masaccio's fresco has always been treated as an exceptional thematization of its own method - a deixis of deixis - but Stoichita is right to point out that the skia-thematic is equally present in the Annunciation. His analysis of Filippo Lippi's "Annunciation" at the Frick (c. 1440) distin-guishes between the angel's cast shadow which is confined to his part of the diptych, and Mary's cast shadow, clearly cast by the dove in almost maximal proximity to Mary's head. Stoichita fails to note that Mary's halo casts no shadow, nor that the shadow is an accurate outline of Mary's head and shoulders. This would seem thus to be the first iconic shadow in Renaissance painting: Masaccio's shadows of Sts. Peter and John are conspicuously disappointing in the way that they form two regular strips on the road, which become iconically unreadable as soon as they cross/overshadow the cripples at the point on the shadow at which the columnar tunics should be resolved into arms and heads.
Sir Ernst Gombrich draws our attention to the shadow behind St. Francis in Sassetta's depiction of his stigmatization (c. 1440). Gombrich describes it as a "complex shadow." It is certainly not iconic, not an outline of the saint's complex posture - one knee on ground, both hands and face raised to the seraph - but it may be iconic of St. Francis's tunic alone. The seraph clearly is a source of light which casts a shadow. But St. Francis's body, receiving the stigmata, may not be opaque, and therefore the shadow is that which is cast only by his cloak. A cloak has been important in two earlier scenes, when St. Francis gives his brocaded robe to his father by way of renouncing all earthly possessions, and later when he gives his modest garment to a poor soldier. Insofar as a cloak is a covering, and as the stigmata reveal the divine, so the cloak alone is subject to the solidity that causes shadows.
Henceforth - whether in Sassetta or in Filippo Lippi, or, to the north, in Jan Van Eyck and Conrad Witz - the shadow is iconic as well as indexical, and is an object of fascination in the distortions and colorations to which it can be subjected. Foreshadowing, except in the technical sense of backlighting (of which Gombrich supplies the example of Turner's "Petworth Park: Tillington Church" [1828]), now serves only the obvious, as in Holman Hunt's "The Shadow of Death" (1870) in which the young Jesus, taking a break in the carpenter's shop, stretches his arms: beams and nails are in all the right places. Somewhat more subtle is Gêrome's "Golgotha: Consummatum Est" of 1867, in which the Crucifixion is represented by the shadows of three crosses on the ground. By no coincidence, also in 1867, Renoir painted "Le Pont des Arts" in which we see on the quai below the shadows of those on the bridge with us.
Outside of painting, however, shadows have been used ingeniously in photography: in Duchamp's "Readymade Shadows" in 1918, by Man Ray's rayograms (1921), by Christian Schad's "Schadographs" (c. 1919). The topic was theorized as long ago as 1920 in Paul Lindner's Photographie ohne Camera (Berlin, 1920). Duchamp or Moholy-Nagy may have been the first persons in modernity to think of a shadow quite apart from a substantive cause. Duchamp's "Tu m'" is discussed at some length by Stoichita: the shadows of a corkscrew, a bicycle wheel and a hatstand are arranged so as to create a set of images on an already painted canvas. Moholy-Nagy's thoughts on the proper value of photography have still not been heeded (see Eleanor M. Hight's Picturing Modernism: Moholy-Nagy and Photography in Weimar Germany [Cambridge: MIT Press,1995]). Moholy-Nagy wrote in 1922:
Hight paraphrases: "Up to this point, photography had been used only to reproduce objects from nature. He suggested that the medium should now be explored in terms of its inherent characteristics, that is, the reaction of light-sensitive materials to the manipulation of a light-source." These images Moholy-Nagy termed photograms, to distinguish them from photographs as images of objects: in the photogram all we can see is light and its dispositions.
Shadow is the subject of the photogram. Not shadows of anything, shadows caused by no one thing in particular, not foreshadows nor aftershadows, traces not of substances but of interferences and manipulations of light. Shadows and reflections - sharing a special complicity with both metaphor and metonymy - become in such photograms indistinguishable. Stoichita has a fine account of Brancusi's photographs - under Man Ray's tutelage - of his own sculptures, in which one cannot tell reflection from shadow, nor the image of the sculpture from its own shadowed/reflected image.
Stoichita has a varied repertoire of images in which shadows are not only depicted but thematically focussed. A number of these are treatments of the origin of painting according to Pliny: "all agree that [painting] began with tracing an outline around a man's shadow." Stoichita has a fine gloss on this, that what Pliny was asserting was that "the Greeks discovered painting, not by looking at Egyptian works of art but by observing the human shadow" (12). This is in accord with the thesis of Martin Bernal's Black Athena, and leads us to the 'reflection' that reflection or mimesis was developed as a concept of representation specifically in order to deny any obligation to one's precursors. It is surely notable that the earliest treatment of this topic is by Vasari, in 1573: all those shown by Stoichita, this is the only one in which the artist draws the outline of his own shadow.
Later treatments, by Murillo, (c. 1660), von Sandrart (1683), and Eduard Daege (1832), all have a model, following Pliny's story that Butades outlined the shadow of his daughter's shepherd-lover when he was forced to leave her - as if to obscure the origins of Pliny's myth of the origins of painting in the myth of Narcissus. The earliest identified representation of this story has been thought to date from 1771, a painting by Runciman, according to Robert Rosenblum's "The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism' (Art Bulletin, XXXIX, 1957). The late eighteenth-century was certainly a moment in Classical aesthetics, as in scholarship, in which it was particularly important to uphold Greece as fons et origo. Stoichita antedates Rosenblum's earliest example not only with Vasari's (somewhat irregular) exemplum but - still by over one hundred years - with the Murillo in the National Museum, Bucharest: Murillo is "the first modern artist, it appears, to have devoted a painting to this theme" (39). No explanation for Murillo's initiative is forthcoming from any of these books, yet such an explanation ought to be crucial for a historical account of the represented shadow.
Two more depictions of this theme are illustrated in Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (1990; trans. P.-A. Brault & M. Naas [Chicago : U of Chicago P, 1993]), a text so taken up with the opposition between vision and blindness that another essay asks to be written on the shadows in the assembled images. Where Stoichita and Derrida would be in agreement is in observing that because the shadow must be drawn in profile, Butades's daughter must be standing at a right-angle to her lover: they cannot look at each other. She looks at his image while he looks into the distance. The image of the origin of painting itself foreshadows the enduring absence that a painting can only mitigate. David Allan's version ("The Maid of Corinth") of 1775 is the earliest instance illustrated in Gombrich, and in this composition the two manage not only to face each other but to be amorously entwined and in each other's place: the artist is sitting on her sitter's lap.
Such blindness or oversight in Derrida's work of 1990 - accompanied by an exhibition at the Louvre - is the best testimony to the significance of Gombrich's "Shadows" exhibition at the National Gallery, London, in 1995. The book is thin, its fifty-two illustrations rendering the text brief indeed. Gombrich's selection of Caravaggio's "Supper at Emmaeus" prompts the thought of combining the resources of the Louvre and the National Gallery in order to investigate the limit or the territory between shadow and blindness. For in the Caravaggio painting, the apostles are able to see but not to see: "their eyes were holden that they should not know him" (Luke 24.16); yet at what seems to be the moment of illumination - "how he was known of them in breaking of bread" - the eight eyes around the table are all in shadow.
Whether it is said that art is imitation of the ideal, or of the real, or whether the poet is commanded to "look in thy heart, and write," the common thread is that each deed of representation is individually autonomous. The entire aesthetic discourse of the West remains enthralled to the Greeks' envy and resentment of the Egyptians.
Gombrich and Stoichita are on the side of a tradition, even a momentum of representation: the shadow is a cultural representation, never simply painted 'because it's there.' Michael Baxandall by contrast is an empiricist, whose interest in shadows begins in optics and physics, and moves on to computational visual processing. Baxandall's historical argument begins with Locke who notices in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1693) that we take shadows for granted when we rely on them in order to understand the shapes to which colours belong. Once we have recognized a cube or a sphere, we become oblivious of the process by which such recognition is achieved:
Thomas Reid makes a similar point, indeed quite obviously develops Locke's thought, about both signs and shadows, in his Inquiry into the Human Mind of 1764:
Shadows, Reid continues, are exceptionally pure signs:
Baxandall cunningly offers to turn these arguments against his own project: "Indeed, am I destroying shadows, as normal objects of perception, by submitting them to something as abnormal to them as perception?" (Baxandall, 75). Shadows may enjoy in art criticism the same sort of status as catachresis (dead metaphor) in literary and rhetorical analysis. Their very function is to be unnoticed. But Baxandall's question gains force from the books with which it shares a time, and which so sequentially solicit ours.
The most important chapter in Baxandall's book is that on "Rococo-Empiricist Shadow" and especially that part devoted to the colour of shadows. The debate is traced from Leonardo to Diderot, and within the Enlightenment from Leclerc to Millot, but the severe limits of Baxandall's text prevent any discussion of Goethe. The novels of Nabokov are full of coloured shadows, and the investigator of Nabokov the chromaskiographer, as both novelist and lepidopterist, would collect a number of nuts from Baxandall's hoard. Squirrels are privileged beasts in the Nabokovian forest, thanks to their etymology - Greek skiouros: 'shadow-tail' - and while there are no squirrels in Baxandall's book, learned conceits abound, each as scrupulously understated as the book's title.
Things have engrossed all our regard. Any reader of these three books might become a skiaphiliac, a lover of shades, an admirer of squirrels. Empiricist and physicalist, Baxandall knows only positive terms of description: "If one thinks of a shadow as an entity out there, it is strange. It is a real material fact, a physical hole in light, but it has neither stable form nor continuity of existence." And he concludes: "Shadow is a secondary, the outcome of a relation between light and a dense solid" (144).
Gombrich and Stoichita are less burdened, less overshadowed by scientific knowledge: they invite us to conceptual flexings. The representation of shadows is a cultural and historical variable, whose interest is less in what it tells of the state of scientific knowledge than in its tropic significance. Stoichita devotes one chapter to von Chamisso's novel Peter Schlemihl (1814), the story of a Faustian pact in which the hero's shadow is sold to the Devil. For the French translation of 1839, von Chamisso added a 'scholarly preface' in which we read: "While the science of finance teaches us the importance of money, the science of the shadow is not widely recognized" (Stoichita, 169-70). This observation dazzles: for surely money ought to be suppressed along with shadows, sounds and characters as soon as we grasp the 'idea' that money signifies.
The fascination with money as pure signifier, that quickly becomes involved with "the discourse of the sublime" (as Peter de Bolla demonstrated in his 1989 book of that title), is simply not matched by an equivalent or analogous fascination with shadows. Why is money subject to reification? As Stoichita writes: "The exchange that precipitates the story is by its nature paradoxical. [Which is the prototype: the shadow or the reflection?] It is undetachable from, coexistent and simultaneous with the object it duplicates" (170). However, with regard to Brancusi's photographs of his own sculptures, we might ask whether it is the shadow or the reflection that makes the claim to be the prototype of the irremovable sign - that is, the sign doubly determined, by both metonymy and metaphor, the sign as both index and icon. Yet the detachment in Chamisso's narrative is contemporary with the detachment of a shadow effected by the silhouette. And of course the detachment has a value: the silhouette is a commodity. It also has a significance beyond that of identification or recognition: the silhouette becomes for Lavater the foundation of the science of physiognomy. The recent personification of institutions and even departments as being possessed of a 'profile' seems to go back to Lavater, and certainly to the naive faith that one could learn of an essence from an outline, of an intention from a profile - or of a Geist from a shade.
Shadows are tropes, and their cause is tropic. Shadows move through two causes: the movement of the substance and the movement of the light-source. Over the movement of the sun we have no control, and yet we know its movements with a complete certainty: that is the recurring and returning fascination of the shadow for Monet, Van Gogh, Bonnard. A turning of shadows is a shadow of turning, a tracing of the sun's motion, a tropics. The uncreated light is without motion and therefore without shadow: "every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning" (James 1.17).
Much of what was "lost, disregarded or transformed" in medieval pictorial representation could be understood exclusively in terms of 'transformation' if we attended to the theology of the concept of 'uncreated light.' In the sixteenth century this somewhat obscure verse was glossed by Theodore Beza, a Calvinist whose writings were to be of decisive importance for Rembrandt: "For the sun by his manifold and sundry kinds of turning, maketh hours, days, months, years, light and darkness." Uncreated light knows no darkness, nor shadow: the sun makes both light and darkness. Yet a shadow is not dark, if darkness implies invisibility. A shadow is what we see without noticing, a trope that operates beneath our attention, the light that we ignore: have ignored, until this surprising synchronized turn of the scholarly page.