Abstract
Reviewed by: Aria Zan Cabot, Southern Methodist University, USA
In Baroque Visual Rhetoric, Vernon Hyde Minor applies two “master discourses,” rhetoric and poetics, to examine how visual narratives in painting, sculpture, and architecture are both “written” and “read” and “should be subject to modern critical theory” (p. 7). Following a brief introduction and discussion of his critical framework, the 10 main chapters are focused on 17th- and 18th-century “mostly Italian” (p. 3) works, which Minor considers in relation to style, hermeneutics, and the entire space in which they were created and experienced by viewers in past and present physical and cultural environs.
At the heart of Minor’s “baroque visual rhetoric” are the notions of the concetto (extended metaphors or conceits) and meraviglia (wonder, stupor), the “supraliterary power” of visual art, and the religious and philosophical topoi of ineffability and the sublime. Beginning in St. Peter’s in Rome, Minor explores Bernini’s use of metaphor, rhetorical strategies, and irony, and his “intuitive grasp of the slippage between image and meaning” (p. 39) in his Baldacchino (1624–1633), the gilded bronze canopy marking St. Peter’s tomb, and in the tombs of Urban VIII (1627–1646) and Alexander VII (1671–1678). Minor focuses on the “visual drama” and metaphorical function of Bernini’s sculptural drapery, which makes “visible the invisible, material the immaterial: his [the Pope’s] eternal soul vibrating through his vestments” (p. 42). Minor later returns to Bernini’s use of drapery in the Cathedra Petri (1624–1633), in which fire becomes a conceit (concetto) for “mystical theology” (p. 134), because Bernini “never shows flame” (p. 136). In another chapter, the scholar examines Borromini’s church of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza (1642–1660) as both exegesis of Solomon’s divine wisdom and architectural “poetry of the sublime” (p. 95). Following Wittkower’s comparison of Borromini’s use of architectural spaces at San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane to poetic meter (p. 100), Minor promotes a linguistic and literary reading of the architect’s patterns, forms, and metaphors, invoking Deleuze’s reading of the “fold” as “a figure for architecture and how it leads to the infinite and sublime” (p. 101).
Determined not to restrict “narrative to that which goes on inside the frame” (p. 112), Minor is particularly interested in how sculpture and painting stay within or break out of their prescribed spaces, challenging the “ontological divide” between “the world of the work of art and the world in which the work of art exists” (p. 36), or rather “breaking the frame” (p. 42). For example, Minor considers Domenichino’s pendentive, St. John the Evangelist (1623–1626), in which the saint’s hands and head extend beyond the confines of the triangular pendentive, literally and figuratively thrusting “into a higher realm” (p. 113). (Minor notes a similar “breaking” of the frame in another frescoed pendentive, Il Baciccio’s The Evangelists). He also considers the placement of Domenichino’s fresco within the Roman church of Sant’Andrea della Valle—noting how the “light of God” is heightened by the actual light filtered through the windows, which are further framed by Borromini’s sculptural and architectural designs—and regards the work as a “superb example of baroque […] visual conceit” (p. 110) through which the artist, by modeling his St. John after a bust of Alexander the Great, superimposes the archetypes of “saint” and “conqueror” (p. 112).
In addition to visual and ontological “frames,” Minor pays close attention to visual (spatial and temporal) narrative, for example in Bernini’s representation of Death alongside the “still ‘living’ pope” in his tomb of Alexander VII (p. 46), and in the Lateran Apostles, the 12 statues in the nave of Rome’s San Giovanni in Laterano (focusing on Camillo Rusconi’s four statues in the series and on Pierre Le Gros the Younger’s St. Bartholomew). Minor considers the entire “narrative domain” of the Lateran’s interior as well as the individual “domains” of each tabernacle that form an “achronic” or “sylleptic narrative, which is spatial rather than chronological” (p. 84). Regarding Le Gros’s St. Bartholomew, the artist followed the “the most famous” (p. 87) depiction of the saint at the time (that in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel), opting not for the traditional representation of Bartholomew “simply holding a knife,” but preferring “Michelangelo’s grisly image of Bartholomew shown twice, once intact and holding a knife rather gingerly, the second time a mere bundle of skin held like a sheet between the saint’s hands” (p. 89). Such a doubling not only demonstrates the kind of narrative sequence that visual, and not just literary arts are capable of communicating, but also creates a sense of bewilderment and repulsion in the viewer that might be likened to the Freudian uncanny (p. 90).
Finally, drawing on 19th- and 20th-century notions and paradigms of classical and baroque “style” (those of Heinrich Wölfflin and Denis Mahon in particular), Minor dedicates several chapters to works that reveal the persistence of a baroque aesthetic well into the 18th century, even as its rhetorical structure changed and cultural institutions like the Academy of the Arcadia inaugurated a new “age of buon gusto” (p. 69) while its antithesis, cattivo gusto, became associated with the baroque. For example, Minor contrasts Bernini’s papal tombs with Filippo della Valle’s Tomb of Innocent XIII (1743), also found in St. Peter’s. Minor posits della Valle as a Bloomian “weak” poet against his “strong” predecessor, citing the artist’s “oddly baroque treatment of folds” as evidence of Bernini’s lasting influence (or della Valle’s anxiety of influence), though della Valle fails to match Bernini’s “transcendence, hallowing of space, and disclosing of truth,” and at best “succumbs to immanence, artfulness, and aestheticism” (p. 54). Similarly, in the final chapter, Minor returns to San Giovanni in Laterano, this time investigating architect Alessandro Galilei’s Corsini Chapel (1732–1735), often viewed as occupying “a transitional zone somewhere between the baroque and a version of classicism” (p. 195). Minor focuses on Galilei’s departure from “baroque majesty” (p. 177), his insistence “on the separation between sculpture and architecture” (p. 179), and his preference for “closed” rather than “open” linear forms, in line with the “insurgent notion of buon gusto” in vogue at the time (p. 196).
Baroque Visual Rhetoric offers a convincing and valuable case for “reading” the visual arts. Despite a dense and diverse critical framework (moving from historical notions of the sublime from Longinus to Kant, to Kantian and Derridean parerga and différance, Heideggerian openness, the Deleuzian fold, Piercian semiotics, and Genettian narrative theory), Minor’s exploration of the problematic relationship between interior/exterior, body/drapery, sculpture/architecture, textual/visual is surprisingly readable and full of verve (Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza appears to “corkscrew itself into the Heavens”). Invoking Michael Baxandall’s notion of the “absurdity of verbalizing about pictures” (p. 105) and Chomsky’s claim that all speakers “know” without having “learned” language, Minor does a beautiful job of putting words to the grammar that we—tourists or pilgrims, students or scholars—often observe and absorb without being able to articulate.