Seite - 149 - in Der Arkadenhof der Universität Wien und die Tradition der Gelehrtenmemoria in Europa

THE SALUTATI TOMB IN FIESOLE: ANIMATION, REPRESENTATION AND SCHOLARLY MEMORIA Jeanette Kohl And marble’s language, Latin pure, discreet…1 ex-ante: imagination / fragmentation According to Pliny the Elder, the first portrait sculpture came into being under the impression of an impending loss. The Corinthian potter Bu- tades of Sikyon’s daughter drew the silhouette of her lover, who was preparing to leave, on the wall. Butades, who was touched by his daugh- ter’s grief, modeled upon this outline the boy’s portrait in clay, which he then fired in the ov- en along with the tiles he made for a living.2 This well-known Urszene of portraiture is mo- tivated by the impulse to compensate for an an- ticipated absence by means of a bodily likeness, a medium of Fernanwesenheit 3, which fills the sil- houette on the wall with three-dimensional ma- teriality. Love, loss, and the desire for a bodily praesentia in absentia thus mark the beginnings of mimetic sculpture. The ersatz body, however, is by nature deficient. The image and its physical presence implicate the absence of the sitter and thus its own illusion. As a medium of memory, the sculpted portrait is also a matrix of oblivion. The substitution of absence in the image of a bust portrait, an art form that traditionally served as a medium of memory-generating pres- ence, goes along with another deficit – that of bodily integrity. Busts are reductions in form and shape of the human sitter, and as such they are visual synecdoche: the isolated part implies the entirety of a human being. As ‘intentional frag- ments’, bust portraits are characterized by a gap, a vacancy in the spot where the body should be, making our perception of such objects an os- cillating act between utter familiarity (with the ‘human head’) and discomfiture (with the lack of ‘body’), touching upon both the illusion of presence and the distance of memoria, authen- ticity and artifice.4 Their essentially ambivalent position between representation and presentifi- cation, deadness and artistic vivification, rigid limitation (as fragments) and challenging imita- 1 R. Browning, The Bishop Orders his Tomb, verse 98, cit. The Poems of Browning. Volume Two: 1841–1846 (ed. J. Woolford/D. Karlin), New York 1991, p. 270. 2 N. Suthor, Caius Plinius Secundus d.Ä.: Trauerarbeit/Schatten an der Wand, in: Porträt (ed. Rudolf Preimes- berger/Hannah Baader/Nicola Suthor), Berlin 1999, pp. 117–126. 3 Thomas Macho defines faces as ‘Medien der Fernanwesenheit’ in the digital age, in reference to a term by Manfred Fassler. T. Macho, Das prominente Gesicht. Notizen zur Politisierung der Sichtbarkeit, in: Politische Inszenier- ungen im 20. Jahrhundert. Zur Sinnlichkeit der Macht (ed. S. R. Arnold/C. Fuhrmeister/D. Schiller), Vienna 1998, p. 172. 4 For the typology and materiality of bust portraits and the viewer-object relation see J. Kohl, Sichtbar sein. Mater- ialität und Facialität frühneuzeitlicher Porträts, in: Trajekte 17 (Zeitschrift des Zentrums für Literatur- und Kultur-