Page - 18 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

aSSAF PINKUS18 lacrum of the clandestine, private lives of the saints. Giotto’s depictions of the interior through an artificial aperture in the exterior thus appear to follow a similar practice of seeing to that encountered in the Meditations, which encour- ages assimilation in the things seen. Nevertheless, in contrast to the written simulation, by depict- ing domestic events (drawn from the sacred his- tory), being seen through an artificial aperture, the viewer remains outside the depicted realm, a foreign element to it. In order to mediate and to eliminate the gap between the viewer’s corporeal reality and the transcendental one illustrated by means of a voyeuristic device, as well as the dis- tance between the voyeur and the object of his spiritual devotion, the viewer needed to undergo an ocular religious experience and mental state, as suggested in the Schaufrömmigkeit. There are several differences, however, bet- ween the reader of the Meditations and the observer of the painted narrative. Whereas the Meditations evoke the entire range of sensory organs and cognition, the painted narratives focus mainly on seeing; and while the for- mer encourages ‘spiritual seeing’ in one’s mind (namely, the second Augustinian mode of see- ing),45 the painted cycle relies entirely on the first mode, the ‘corporeal seeing’, a prioritiza- tion that manifests the growing trust in the reliability of sight. More crucial are the two distinctly different roles allotted to the reader and the viewer. The reader is rewarded with a direct visionary interaction with the saints (he touches, acts, talks, and even smells them). Nevertheless, he is a more passive recipient of the narrator’s instructions. The viewer, on the other hand, will always remain an outsider to the visual narrative; yet, unlike the reader of the Meditations, the voyeurs of the painted narrative are active narrators of their own, credited with the ability to decipher the ideological mean- ings of the visual codes through peering. As dis- tanced and outsider narrators, the viewers did not interact with the sacred figures depicted but, rather, their controlling gaze needed to arrange the imagery into a coherent story and bestow it with meaning. Therefore, while a reader of the Meditations was granted a sensory interaction with the saints, the viewer-voyeur gained a con- ceptualizing gaze.46 The voyeuristic gaze offered by Giotto is more than a pure Schaufrömmigkeit; it is also erotically charged. Christian medieval culture constantly warned against the dangers of look- ing at voluptuous women on the one hand, and of letting women gaze at men on the other.47 The only exceptions were the iconic images of the Virgin and the Infant who gazed out at the observer. This tradition, to quote Janet Soskice, “prevented the female figure of Mary […] from being subject to our own gaze”.48 In contrast to this well-established prototype and convention, St. Anne in her room is an object of invasive gaz- es – that of the maid, of the angels, and of the viewers in her unawareness of being intimately inspected by us, our gaze is almost erotic. A high degree of eroticism is evident also in other rep- resentations in the Arena Chapel, as for exam- 45 On the Augustinian three modes of seeing, see M. H. Caviness, Images of Divine Order and the Third Mode of Seeing, in: Gesta XXII/2, 1983, pp. 99–120. 46 Although images can be read and texts can be imaged, reading and seeing cannot be regarded as synonymous in late medieval devotion, see S. Lewis, Reading Images. Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 2–10. See also W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory. Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation, Chicago/London 1994, p. 16. 47 M. H. Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages. Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy, Pennsylvania 2001, p. 2. 48 J. M. Soskice, Sight and Vision in Medieval Christian Thought, in: T. Brennan/M. Jay (eds), Vision in Context. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, New York 1996, pp. 29–43, esp. p. 35.