Page - 12 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

aSSAF PINKUS12 For example, the interior room of the Annunciation to St. Anne constitutes the ulti- mate interior both for the viewer and the maid spinning in the porch; the porch is the exterior of St. Anne’s house, but also a secondary interior for the viewer; a further exterior is provided by the painted exterior within the painting, namely that of the edifice as a whole and closed unit, an inactive exterior including blue sky and a brown band (signifying soil) in which nothing is hap- pening and to which none of the figures refers, but is nonetheless present.19 The final exterior is that beyond the mural itself, namely the space occupied by the viewer. The exchange and com- munication processes with and within the mural are performed through transmission between these exterior-interior spaces. In the first case, an angel erupting through the window is delivering the Annunciation to St. Anne; his and Anne’s postures are echoed in the gesture of the work- ing hands of the maid outside, who is eavesdrop- ping on the event through the wall. In the Birth scene, the maid has entered the room and is now seated in front of the nativity bed, handling the swaddling clothes, which she has prepared in the first scene and are now being used for the baby. Another exterior-interior exchange process is that of the giving of gifts to the parturient, in which not only is the gift seen being handed through the door, but so too are the donors themselves, recognizable by their hairstyles and long scarves, connecting the outside to the inside. All these secondary agents, who randomly observe and transmit the secret spheres of the private life to the viewer,20 operate simultaneously within the interior and the exterior of the painting, and therefore constitute a resonance of the external viewers. August Schmarsow contended that the addi- tion of the porch was designed to enable the maid to overhear the indoor occurrence, and he related it to the accounts of the apocryphal Evan- gels.21 Whether indeed related to these sources or not, Kemp has convincingly demonstrated that by the way her figure appears in the painting, her function is to intensify, reinforce, and resonate the indoor occurrence in several respects: com- positional orientation (with her gesture echo- ing the composition and communication of St. Anne and the angel), transformation (raw mate- rial turns into finished product, namely, virgin- mother, thread-cloth), and communication (the words of the angel are heard by both St. Anne and the maid).22 In a broader sense, however, the maid receives only a partial and imperfect reflec- tion of the sacred history (as she merely hears), while the more privileged viewer experiences it in its fullness, being also afforded a vision. In both murals the maid embodies the viewer: she is out- side the house, just as the viewer is outside the mural; her peering is aural and that of the view- ers – ocular. Both in-painting and out-painting participants are subject to the same conditions of visibility, either ‘erupting’ through a real/ fictive window (angel/ viewer, respectively), or exercis- ing aural/ ocular peering through a wall; in the case of the maid it is a (fictional) real wall, while for the viewer – become voyeur – a wall has been removed. 19 This is, as has been recently shown by Michael Viktor Schwarz, a remnant of the Byzantine formula – as, for ex- ample, in the Florentine mosaics – a pictorial convention that was gradually enriched and blurred by Giotto, see Schwarz, Giottus Pictor (cit. n. 13), pp. 90–104. 20 I have followed the terminology of M. M. Bachtin, Formen der Zeit im Roman. Untersuchungen zur historischen Poetik, Frankfurt on the Main, 1989, p. 53 as used by Kemp. 21 See A. Schmarsow, Italienische Kunst im Zeitalter Dantes, Augsburg, 1928, p. 87; White, Art and Architecture (cit. n. 13), p. 208; R. Deshman, Servants of the Mother of God in Byzantine and Medieval Art, in: Word and Image 5, 1989, pp. 33–60, esp. p. 50. 22 Kemp, Die Räume der Maler (cit. n. 5), pp. 34–35.