Page - 14 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

aSSAF PINKUS14 under the heavy burden of Mary’s dowry, flank the scene, enabling us the sight of Mary climb- ing the Temple steps through the framing screen of their backs. These figures reflect the position of the viewers and, concurrently, distance them. It is remarkable that in the pictorial space that is much closer and more accessible to the view- ers – namely the lower second and third strips – Giotto does not use the same voyeuristic struc- ture as in the upper register. On the contrary, there he opens up the event to the viewers as a ceremonial spectacle. Whereas Giotto’s predeces- sor in Assisi, the Isaac Master, had already placed all the painted occurrences on the front plane of the mural, as close as possible to the viewers’ space and reality, Giotto in his Annunciation to St. Anne seems to have pushed it back through several planes and peering devices. This is highly surprising, as the scene is located on the highest register of the Arena chapel. It would have been more reasonable to facilitate their viewing by bringing the sacred history forward to the front plane, as it is in Assisi, or in the Arena lower reg- isters. His distancing strategy in the depiction of St. Anne’s chamber seems to strive against the logic of the gaze and the narrative impulse of the cycle: in order to be more readable and tangi- ble, and in order to maintain the narrative flow, the Annunciation to St. Anne should have been constructed with a high degree of clarity and vis- ibility. Giotto, on the other hand, enhanced the invisibility of the scene by several means: first, it is located in the distance; then, the Handlungs- raum or Haus der Erzählung pushes the ‘domes- tic’ event even further back from the frontal plain of the fresco’s surface; and, finally, St. Anne is represented deep in the interior of her room. All this challenges the act of viewing, thereby rein- forcing the voyeuristic gaze. Whoever wishes to see St. Anne at her private prayers, must accept the precondition of being a voyeur. The panel seems to have been deliberately designed to be only partially visible, thereby maintaining the distance between observers and observed so essential to the voyeuristic experience. Voyeurism is a charged term, generally under- stood as a disorder of sexual arousal, a practice in which an individual derives sexual pleasure from watching other people who are, usually, but not necessarily, unaware of being watched.24 Never- theless, the voyeurs do not directly interact with the object of their voyeurism, but rather observe the watched from a distance by peeping through an opening or aperture. Modern technologies have given rise to various forms of voyeurism using aids such as binoculars, mirrors, cameras etc.; eavesdropping is another form of oral peer- ing, utilizing implanted bugs, camera phones and the like; one can watch others people’s lives and private moments in the media; one’s image can be captured in a public space by the media’s agents, by candid or controlled cameras, and then be broadcast.25 These modern forms of voyeur- ism expand the ranges of meanings related to the term, now usually used to signify the desire to see and know what other people do, to mas- ter and process it, and to gain some advantage from and control over what one sees. Voyeurism has became a part of the surveillance systems of the panoptical machinery, in a disciplined soci- 24 For a clinical definition, see R. J. Campbell, Psychiatric Dictionary, New York 1989, p. 684; S. Freud, Instincts and their Vicissitudes, in: Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, London 1953, vol. 14, pp. 109–140. See also notes 25, 39 and the introduction to D. Kelly, Telling Glances. Voyeurism in the French Novel, New Brunswick 1992, pp. 7–11. 25 For an introduction to the function of voyeurism as surveillance system in the modern era, see M. Jay, Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth–Century French Thought, Berkeley 1994, p. 381– 434; idem, In the Empire of the Gaze: Foucault and the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, in Foucault: D. Couzens Hoy (ed.), A Critical Reader, New York 1986, pp. 175–204; C. Calvert, Voyeur Nation; Media, Pri- vacy, and Peering in Modern Culture, Boulder 2000, pp. 1–19.