Page - 25 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

VOYEURISTIC stimuli 25 thus turned into a powerful and sovereign one; it shaped meaning and consciousness. This invasion into the domestic and private spheres of the sacred protagonists could define the voyeurs’ own reality, enabling the narrators-voyeurs to apply meaning drawn from the painted narratives to their every- day lives. Moreover, the voyeuristic stratagem of peering into domestic scenes through an artificial missing wall in the edifice continued to be favored into the fifteenth century, as for example in the February peasant scene from the Hours of Duc de Berry (fig. 7). This example is explicitly scopo- philic as the peasants are exposing their genitals to the voyeuristic observer. To conclude, although voyeurism is not an aesthetic category but, rather, a cognitive one, it might help to elucidate the nature of verisimilitude representations in trecento painting. Seeing in the late medieval culture did not leave the observer unchanged.74 To see was to become similar to the object of vision, to be partly and temporar- ily assimilated within the otherness of the sacred history through the visual apparatus. Voyeuristic cycles seem to have become an instructive appa- ratus that could organize and bring meaning to everyday life. Such a voyeuristic order of discourse was able not only to repeat the dominant forms of culture, but also to generate them. In a society overwhelmed by the all-seeing, invisible, omnipo- tent, and omnipresent eye of God, the voyeuristic gaze could in turn become a self-regulating devo- tional mechanism, reminding the observers that they themselves were permanently watched. To quote Meister Eckhart: “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me,”75 a phrase that asserts not only the co-existence of intromissive and extramissive ways of seeing, but also relates to the late medieval ‘panopticon’ sur- veillance mechanism.76 By inquiring into the nature of Giotto‘s Annunciation to St. Anne and modes of late medieval voyeurism, I have attempt- 73 J. P. Satre, Being and Nothingness, New York 1943, p. 379. 74 Biernhoff, Sight and Embodiment (cit. n. 6), p. 137. She relies on Roger Bacon, De multiplicatione specierum, 7 (1.1) in: D. C. Lindberg, Roger Bacon’s Philosophy of Nature: a Critical Edition with English Translation, Intro- duction, and Notes of De multiplicatione specierum and De speculis comburentibus, Oxford 1983. 75 Meister Eckhart, True Hearing, in: Meister Eckhart’s Sermons, trans. C. Field, London 2001, pp. 32–33. 76 The return of the regulating gaze upon itself and the birth of the voyeuristic viewer, commonly ascribed to the Albertian perspective regime, was thus already incarnated in late medieval art and devotion. See N. Bryson, Vision and Painting. The Logic of the Gaze, New Haven 1983, p. 106. The new discoveries in optics and the invention of the perspective system in the age of ‘humanism’ distanced the viewer from the viewed, minimizing the active role of seeing for the Renaissance spectator. Linear perspective alienated the viewers from the pictorial realm they now observed on the other side of the window, and arranged a fixed visual universe over which the observer had no influ- ence or primacy, see Nelson, Visuality Before and Beyond (cit. n. 4), pp. 5–7; Jay, Downcast Eyes (cit. n. 25), pp. 50–61; Lindberg, Theories of Vision (cit. n. 33), pp. 149–151. Furthermore, in his distinction between the applica- tion of the mathematical perspective to the historia of the early Renaissance and the ‘psychological perspective’ of 7: Limbourg Brothers, Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, 1438–1441, Février, Chantilly, Musée Condé, f. 2v