Bross Lecture | Parenthesis: an interruption.

This lecture series: The lectures trace an alternative morphology of European art structured by neglect of the rules of perspective; trespassing across frames; intrusion of the still-unnarrated world into the narration; prophecies and other foldings of time; and the limitless contagions of pathos. The urgent or drastic approach especially to narrative painting generated effects of inevitability and emotional intensity. The scope is 1250 to 1650, from the late medieval period to the Baroque: a sea of time navigated with the help of three technical terms that describe such “violations”: metalepsis (the inapproprate inhabiting of one rhetorical trope by another); parenthesis (an interruption understood either as a side-by-side arrangement or as a hierarchical embedding ); and epiphany (the manifestation of the radically Other).

This lecture: The focal point of this lecture is a panel painted in Bruges but commissioned by a merchant from Bologna in the late fifteenth century. It depicts a modern Bolognese holy woman, Caterina de’ Vigri, worshipped by a member of the Loiani family and his wives. The hybridity of styles prompts us to consider the phenomenon of the donor portrait, the image of a layperson who at that point had been comfortably inhabiting sacred paintings for nearly two centuries. The panel takes a flattened, “tiled” approach to composition: all the elements, including a window affording a view onto the mummified body of Caterina back in Bologna, are arrayed not in intelligible virtual space but side-by-side, like a poster.

By giving the painting its own incoherent space-time, the artist creates a force-field in which the libidinal dynamics of the dilated family (the male patron surrounded by women) is intertwined with the profession of devotion to the modern saint. The parenthesis seemingly represented by the portraits of the patron and his living and dead wives toggles, such that the holy woman Caterina can herself be seen as a parenthesis interrupting a family portrait.