Seite - 150 - in Der Arkadenhof der Universität Wien und die Tradition der Gelehrtenmemoria in Europa

tion makes them rather puzzling objects with a strong physical and psychological appeal to the beholder. Busts are memorials and mementos per se – ‘Denkmäler in des Wortes eigentlich- ster Bedeutung’ (Burger 1904) – confronting us with faces and heads of the past, activating our response en face. To the beholder, busts intuitively represent a state of being ‘undead’: ‘Tu vivi e in te non puo la morte’, you live and death can do no harm to you, as the paradox is addressed concisely in Antonio Tebaldeo’s cycle of sonnets on a female marble bust of ca. 1493.5 By substituting human transience with more durable materials, busts are placeholders between life and death, heads repre- senting spiritedness, achievements, beauty, social standing, intellect, and virtues in the monadic seclusion of fragmented torsos. The rigorous cut, perhaps most pronounced in the multitude of Quattrocento busts divided horizontally at chest height, leaves behind all the formidable mov- ability of the human body in favor of a rigidly defined immobile body-box. And the more mi- nutely lifelike the artistic rendering of face and poise, the more alien and irritating is its state of bodily incompleteness. We understand that it is an artwork hinting at the entire person, yet we cannot help being puzzled by its obvious reduc- tion.6 This irritation is essentially motivated by the bust’s bodily presence as opposed to paint- ed portraits. Beholder and bust share the same space, the same ‘reality’ (even though they might be a millennium apart). The divided body im- age of a bust portrait seems to have a life of its own, yet it is not responsive. The representation of all that defines the exceptional human being in the sculptural pars pro toto of his ‘upper half’ throws us back onto ourselves and our imagina- tion in completing the image of the totus homo. The intentionally chosen fragment, at least in the case of Renaissance busts, references man’s integ- rity and relies upon the observer’s imagination to complete the picture. What is mute, immobile, controlled, clearly contoured, cut and incom- plete in the realm of the Renaissance’s prevail- ing ‘aesthetics of effect’ (Wirkungsästhetik) gen- erates more effectively than any other form of art the liveliness, presence, and much lauded, quasi- breathing presence of the individual.7 jeanette kohl150 forschung: Ausdruck. Erscheinung. Affekte) 10, 2008, pp. 17–24; J. Kohl, Gesichter machen. Büste und Maske im Florentiner Quattrocento, in: Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 34, 2007, pp. 77–100; J. Kohl, Talking Heads. Reflexionen zu einer Phänomenologie der Büste, in: Kopf/Bild. Die Büste in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (ed. J. Kohl/ R. Müller), Munich/Berlin 2007, pp. 9–30. 5 A. Tebaldeo, Rime, Bd. 2, Teil I, Rime della vulgata (ed. T. Basile), Modena 1992, p. 358, sonnet 226. 6 Irving Lavin discusses the essential difference between antique and Renaissance bust portraits. While the marble and stone objects from Roman antiquity are usually conceived as self-contained formal entities designed for frontal viewing and mounted on a pedestal to emphasize their status as representative artworks, the vast majority of Ren- aissance busts from the Quattrocento are more pronouncedly three-dimensional bodily objects whose ‘unartful fragmentation’ – as if amputated below the shoulders – hints at the absent body and thus at the entire person (totus homo). I. Lavin, On the Sources and Meaning of the Renaissance Portrait Bust, in: The Art Quarterly XXXIII, no. 3, 1970, pp. 207–226. 7 The paradoxical effort of capturing the dynamics of the living human body in the static medium of an image has, since antiquity, also been understood along the lines of techniques of memorization. The immobile image serves as an incentive for mechanisms of ‘enlivenment’ in the beholders imagination. Cicero’s advice in the Rhetorica ad Herennium points to the usefulness of imagines agentes – unusual, eye-catching images with the potential for agency, which create a presence by hinting at what is absent. Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium, III, 22, 37, see also P. Matus- sek, Bewegte und Bewegende Bilder. Animationstechniken im historischen Vergleich, in: Kunst der Bewegung. Kinästhetische Wahrnehmung und Probehandeln in Virtuellen Welten (ed. C. Lechtermann/C. Morsch/H. Wenzel), Bern 2004, pp. 1–13. Open Access © 2018 by BÖHLAU VERLAG GMBH & CO.KG, WIEN KÖLN WEIMAR