The body of imagination and the technology of imagery in the Renaissance and in Modernity

I

Let us now summarize our results about soul, and repeat that the soul is in a way all existing things; for existing things are either sensible or thinkable, and knowledge is in a way what is knowable, and sensation is in a way what is sensible: in what way we must inquire. (Aristotle, 1931: 431b)

Phantasia, while different from the operations of the mind and of sensory perception, nonetheless connects both through images: ‘For imagination is different from either perceiving or discursive thinking, though it is not found without sensation, or judgement without it’ (Aristotle, 1931: 427b). And just as the psyche operates through forms, ¹ not through the things themselves, so the image produced through our imagination is thought to be without matter: ‘For images are like sensuous contents except in that they contain no matter’ (Aristotle, 1931: 432a). ² The Aristotelian comprehension of the phantasia-image complex thus defines the image in relation to sensorily perceived objects of the real world. This coupling of the image with empirical reality also seems to reflect the quasi-natural state of pictorial art at the time. If we consider the technical state of the image in classical antiquity, one of its main characteristics is the fact that the picture is an unmoved object; in order to see pictures people had to visit them. The fact that pictures could come to people will only occur with the invention of print in the early 15th century, ³ which enabled the dissemination and reproduction of pictures on a mass scale compared to previous techniques of hand-copying pictorial artefacts. Thus Aristotle’s writings know of material pictures, statues, frescos, mosaic features, textiles or vases mostly as unique forms of a single physical image. ⁴

The reproductive quality of the imagined image at the time could therefore be seen primarily and exclusively in its ontological understanding of re-presenting a singular entity and, as such, the image is defined in early theoretical discourse on painting as a means to re-present the absent, not to reproduce the same object in a plurality of identical images. Representing an absent person or thing is also what Pliny later regarded as the explicit feature of the painted image: the first paintings, according to him, were construed by following the outer line of a particular human shadow cast onto the wall (cf. Pliny, 1997: 23, 115). The ontological quality of re-presenting a real but absent person in a painted picture (as opposed to the technical reproductive quality of woodcuts or copperplates in print) can obviously be linked to the structure of phantasia and its images, ⁵ because the imagined is also a representation of a material object which is absent as a real thing, and appearing only as its form. Phantasia then, one could suggest, is thought by Aristotle already to be structured similarly to painting, or vice versa. At least a quite evident structural homology between painting and phantasia should not be discarded when addressing the theoretical concept of imagination. And even though we can only conjecture that Aristotle’s lost book on anatomy was filled with extraordinary pictures, their function would hardly have been more than to assist the ontological definition of pictorial re-presentation of ‘real’ and particular body parts themselves. And in any case, the basic medical paradigm of humoral pathology at the time made the use of images due to its conceptual ‘fluidity’ rather superfluous, and consequently their use was restricted to the lesser but ‘physical’ and ‘object(ive)’ discipline of osteology. ⁶

The topical description of phantasia linking the mind and the visual sense has been remarkably stable throughout history, ⁷ as we shall see, which seems to contradict any premise that historical changes in pictorial technologies should be apparent in the corresponding conceptualization of phantasia or imagination. But this is only a contradiction if we cannot see the imaginative force that resides in theory (theorein) or the theoretical force that might reside within the imagined. To allow a productive level of epistemological uncertainty, I will put the above mentioned contradiction on hold for now, keeping in mind that our understanding of history itself has been strongly linked to the particular technology of print, so that how we conceptualize history as a coherent development over time might be partly due to the features of this technology itself (such as linearity, progression, perspective and typography). Christian theology continues to describe phantasia primarily as an interface between body and mind. But now, in line with Christian doctrine, for which the body is a sinful entity and the bearer of fleshly temptations, phantasia is given an overall negative quality. Augustine, extending Aristotle’s conceptualization, further differentiates between phantasia and phantasma. Phantasia is viewed as the reproductive quality of our memory, phantasma as fictitious images of the mind disturbing the clear sight of reason; but in both cases phantasia and phantasma stand against reason and have to be controlled in order to see God’s word properly. Everything the eyes, the ear, the nose, the mouth or the whole body perceives is stored in our memory, Augustine asserts:

All these sensations are retained in the great storehouse of the memory, which in some indescribable way secretes them in its folds. […]. The things which we sense do not enter the memory themselves, but their images are there ready to present themselves to our thoughts when we recall them. (Augustine, 1961: 214–215)

These images are only considered relevant as they serve the proper faith, with faith equated to reason. However, not all are representations of sensory perceptions: spoken language seems to be exempt. Although we remember the image of sounds, which make the words, the meaning of those words is not sensorily perceived but purely seen by the mind without images in our memory (cf. Augustine, 1961: 216–217). The re-presentative imagination in our memory is seen solely as a service to reason, and reason as the proper vehicle of God’s word, because God has created everything through his ‘Word alone’ (Augustine, 1961: 258). The short circuit between spoken words, reason and truth of faith prevents images from gaining more than a serving role for the mind. And when confronted with phantasmata, the mind has to be even more alert when separating itself from the ‘confusion of images’ (Augustine, 1961: 151).

A change in the concept of phantasia slowly occurs throughout the Middle Ages by redefining aspects of it and giving it a slightly more positive epistemological role, but only in the oeuvre of Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino is phantasia described as representing the highest form of all inner senses, identical with the sensus communis itself (cf. Huber, 2001: 178). In this respect, the first monograph on the subject of imagination, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s De imaginatione, published in Venice in 1501, could easily be read as a strong rebuke of Ficino’s attempt to give phantasia a positive epistemological quality and to reassert Augustine’s ascribed negative qualities of the image. But this train of thought involves a history of ideas separated from any technology that might impact on the given idea itself, including the idea of history or the idea of the idea. Therefore we should also be looking at Pico’s monograph in the context of the proliferation of images through print to obtain a new perspective, keeping in mind that the Renaissance period shows across discourses and disciplines an emphatic acknowledgement of the impact that images and pictures have gained in the shaping of knowledge. ⁸

Of particular interest within the discourses on imagination is the essential role the body plays in relation to the image, that is, how the body is shaped within the discourses about pictures and images and also how it is shown in various pictorial visualizations. In this respect four areas of interest stand out when addressing the body-image complex: first, the body as a form of measurement within the development of perspective as reflected in the genre of the paragone (particularly in treatises on painting); second, the body as vehicle to shape the individual character of a person as it can be observed, most predominantly in the art of portrait painting; third, the shift in medical discourse as the anatomical body takes centre stage not only in the public spectacle of the ‘theatres of surgery’ of the time but also in the understanding of the human body in general; and fourth, the conceptualization of the image itself as a ‘body’ in comparison to the text as the ‘soul’ in the literary genre of emblem books and in iconoclastic discourse.

Ad 1) Alberti’s highly influential De pictura (1435) leaves us in no doubt about the important role the body plays as a measurement for any painting: ‘The very great achievement of a painter is not a colossus, but the historia; […]. Parts of a historia [are] the bodies; part of a body is a member; part of a member is the surface’ (Alberti, 2011: 55). The body here is not only meant to be a technical but also a rhetorical measurement. Alberti fashions the argument by drawing a parallel between the learning of compositions in rhetoric and in painting (body equals sentence; member equals word; surface equals letters), thus trying to use the authority of rhetoric as one of the canonical artes liberales and have the new technique of perspective painting via analogy participating in an established form of authority (cf. Baxandall, 1986). The body in the paragone discourse forms an essential part within the picture but is not the picture (nor the statue) itself; Alberti’s mathematical metaphor of the fenestra aperta gives precedence to the picture not as a body but as presenting an abstract perspective:

First I trace as large a quadrangle as I wish, with right angles, on the surface to be painted; in this place, it [the rectangular quadrangle] certainly functions for me as an open window through which the historia is observed, and there I determine how big I want men in the painting to be. (Alberti, 2011: 39)

But as painting seeks to find its alliance with rhetoric, Alberti’s famous window is not just technical but also closely linked to a rhetorical-philosophical form of visual knowledge: ‘contrary to the common and flawed use of Alberti’s window as a model for realistic representation, Alberti supplies us with a Renaissance root for a concept of a windowed elsewhere – not a realism of subject matter but a separate spatial and temporal view’ (Friedberg, 2006: 32).

Ad 2) Renaissance portrait painting added to the emphatic positioning of the body within the discursive context on images; the reflective language accompanying portrait painting in particular stressed concepts such as ‘true to life, similarity, probability, liveliness’, and it is during this period that portrait painting and its commentary tries to establish the idea of an ‘autonomous character’ of a person (Boehm, 1985: 11–12). Despite the potential that lies within the bodily individualization, the single portrait had still to adhere to an overall Christian doctrine of ‘harmony between beauty of the body and of morality’ (Boehm, 1985: 40).

Ad 3) The perspective as an all-conquering new pictorial technique across the arts and the scholarly disciplines also inspired a renewed interest in the human body within medical discourse; however, despite dramatic changes in medical epistemology in the discourse on anatomy, the Renaissance is still far from the scientific shape that will define the medical discourse in the 19th century. Until then, anatomy remains rather ‘a heteronomous mix of philological proceedings, religious and philosophical interpretations of nature, experimental examinations, theatrical spectacles and image-defining operations’ (Böhme, 2012: 25). ⁹

Ad 4) The image itself is being defined as a body in the iconoclastic disputes as well as in the genre theory of emblem books. While extreme religious critiques regarded images as material forms insufficient to truthfully embrace God’s word and wished to see the image as body banished completely from religion, more moderate voices opted for the acceptance of images as they were no different than any other ‘sign’ in that they too only aid us as guides to proper faith. In particular the body or the matter of the image is addressed in those debates. While Andreas Karlstadt von Bodenstein is the most vitriolic in blaming the materiality of the picture for its lack of capacity to ‘understand’ things – pictures only show us how Christ was crucified but cannot explain to us why (Karlstadt, 1911: 11) – Luther simply subsumes the image as memory device amongst any other ‘medium’ through which we carry God’s signs in our hearts (Luther, 1890: 151).

A similar spectrum of arguments can be found in emblem theories. On the one hand the majority of theorists simply regard the image-body (pictura) as serving the words of the inscriptio and the subscriptio; in these theories the word forms the soul of this mixed-media genre and carries its true meaning. On the other hand, Menestrier’s L’Art d’Embleme (1662) argues for the epistemological precedence of the image over the poetic word. Menestrier writes about the three parts of the emblem – la peinture, le sentence, & les vers: ¹⁰ ‘The essential parts of this beautiful composition are the figures and their signification, or their sense of moral, which is the soul of this body, and the form, which gives it its whole beauty. The sentence, & the verse only serve this signification, of which they are the interpreters’ (my translation; emphasis added). Clearly the word here is fashioned to serve the image, and the body is given more epistemological weight than it had ever been burdened with until this time.

Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s De Imaginatione could comfortably be linked to all of those trajectories: with the influence of pictorial perspective on the transparency of God’s original illumination, which guides us all; with the ‘body’ as the only truth of an image, which therefore lacks any inherent truthfulness and faith and is consequently morally inferior to the word; with the medical body and the new pictorial weight in shaping medical knowledge it carries in comparison with the discursive fluidity of humoral pathology; or, finally, with the singularity of the image-body and the resulting ethical problem that individualization can produce for any orthodoxy. But any such reading would also constrain Pico’s text within a contextual imprisonment that is dictated by the assumed weight of history for any form of explanation of a cultural context.

By contrast, the following will reconstruct the concepts of phantasia and inner images in Pico’s De imaginatione in comparison to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, at a time when once again new pictorial technologies of photography, x-rays and film could have caught the attention of epistemology; I shall then try to critically align similarities and differences of the imagined image in Pico’s and Freud’s projects with the pictorial technologies available at the time.

II

Let us assume that the new reproductive print technologies of imagery and the first mass proliferation and circulation of pictures in the Renaissance as well as the new pictorial technologies of photography and film in modernity had an evident impact on respective discursive conceptualizations of imagination. In both periods we find a heightened notion that the psyche is stressed or even disturbed (by medial overload) and that images could be the key to understanding these forms of psychological distress. Scholars like Pico or Freud seem to have noted that the material pictures have intensified our sensory perception and thus have also impacted on the inner pictures fabricated by phantasia. The transition from pictorial quantity to imagined intensity could thus have caused problems for the psyche’s economy: ‘If phantasies become over-luxuriant and over-powerful, the conditions are laid for an onset of neurosis or psychosis’ (Freud, 1985: 136). And Pico writes that if we are more than usually attracted by an image, we should turn away our mind (abstrahere inde cogitam) because at times it has occurred that people have broken down and been ‘driven to insanity’ (ad insaniam etiam perducti) from an over-stimulated imagination (ex imaginatione plus aequo intenta) (Pico, 1971: 60–61).

Although for both authors the pathway into the psyche depends on the understanding of imagination, their commentaries on the human faculties of desire and reason in relation to the imagined are in stark contrast. In Pico’s neoplatonic Christian conceptualization of a three-staged world, the hierarchy between phantasia – ratio – intellectus ¹¹ reflects the ascending capacity of the mind to see God and exercise proper faith. In this construction human desire should be completely controlled by reason: we desire only what we know (appetitusque ipse de cognitione pendeat), Pico asserts (Pico, 1971: 38). In Freud’s threefold psyche of the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious, reasoning appears to be no more than a manoeuvre to obscure proper knowledge of any underlying desire, which in turn is in true control of any form of rationalization. In either case a bodily desire is central in De imaginatione and in The Interpretation of Dreams and is, as such, closely connected to the way phantasia operates. This opens up a space not only where the theological could become psychoanalytical but also where the psychoanalytical might become theological.

Referring the difference between body and mind back to Aristotle is essential in Freud’s as well as in Pico’s theoretical framework and marks the common point of departure in the description of phantasia. In its most abstract description phantasia still simply links body and mind (the sensory and the intelligible, perception and reason). In this function Pico describes phantasia as a ‘medium’, which connects a realm between (intervallum) the material and the immaterial (mediumque per quod conjunguntur) (Pico, 1971: 36). This connection seems for Pico to be best secured by images, which are fabricated by phantasia, and are true mental representations of material objects perceived through our senses. While the image does not always necessarily represent an absent object it is essentially thought to be a representation more than a reproduction of the physical world within the immaterial form of the mind. And only phantasia is capable of presenting all things physical to be critically assessed by the intellect (discurrent rationi contemplantique intellectui) (Pico, 1971: 36). Because it shares with sensory perception the access to the particular, the physical and the present (particularia, quemadmodum ille, et corporea et praesentia percipit) phantasia is understood to function as interface (Pico, 1971: 30). And at the same time phantasia surpasses sensory perception due to its ability to produce images without simply depending on an original object from the outside world. Although Pico contends that all sensory perceptions are worked through by phantasia it is the visual sense that stands out, and visual pictures alone (not tactile or aural images) are considered as pathways into the psyche. This precedence of the visual image is given axiomatic status without any further explanation. Pico’s text simply implies that visual images form a connection between the body and the mind better than any other ‘medium’ or form of perception can. In this construction phantasia transmits the similarities of objects only via images; reason then assesses those similarities without reference to the physical world and the intellect finally assesses the intelligible, which is free of materiality or physicality (sed ab omni materiae similitudine prorsus abjuncta) (Pico, 1971: 28). Consequently images cannot possess reason; they are always in need of interpretation as they never just ‘speak for themselves’. Their strength lies in their capacity to visualize the singular and the present, but this strength comes with the disadvantage of having to ‘reach out’ to reason (logos) to be understood in the first place. Images therefore seem not to have a ‘sense’ of ‘self’ and are thus meaningless in themselves. Whatever they illustrate must stay opaque if not enlightened by a text.

It makes perfect sense to switch to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams for a moment, for here the concept of the image is also constructed on the threshold between body and mind. Of course Freud is not primarily interested in placing and analysing phantasia within a hierarchy of the human faculties; he is more interested in the special case of dreams, but he does ascertain that dreams work exactly like phantasia. The dream within (t)his scenario is a product of ‘unsatisfied desires’ and physical ‘urges’; happy people do not phantasize. The Wunscherfüllungsphantasie (‘every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality’; Freud, 1985: 134) is from its very beginning a product of deficiency.

Freud partially still works with the Aristotelian understanding which links sensory perception to the mind. And while in Pico’s De imaginatione reason and intellect, men and angels, control this threshold, The Interpretation of Dreams knows of this threshold only as being under constant threat and by no means controlled by the individual persona. But despite different controlling mechanisms (angelic stabilizing intellect and devilish destabilizing unconscious), in both works we can find corresponding ways in which the inner image is being described.

The ‘psychical apparatus’ in The Interpretation of Dreams is a ‘reflex apparatus’, built like the ‘various systems of lenses in a telescope’ (Freud, 1976: 685). In the metaphor of the ‘reflex apparatus’ Freud captures the relation between the sensory world and its entry into our psyche. Every psychological movement runs from the ‘perceptual end’ (Wahrnehmungsende) to the ‘motor end’ (Motilitätsende). In order to preserve perceptions in time there have to be some memory traces (Gedächtnisspuren or Erinnerungsspuren). These traces build the minimum requirement for ‘psychical functions’ (psychologische Leistungen) and in general the ‘reflex process’ forms the ‘model of every psychical function’ (Freud, 1976: 686). The transfer of perceptions into ‘permanent traces’ (Dauerspuren) is then described via the notion of ‘association’, which finds its basis in the ‘mnemic systems’ (Freud, 1976: 688). The proper place of dreams or of ‘phantasies’ is to be found in the unconsciousness, which taps into the preconscious (Freud, 1976: 690–691).

The specific modus operandi of dreams is to ‘recast their ideational content into sensory images’ (Freud, 1976: 698). Visual images, Freud asserts, are more characteristic for the dream, because they appear to be more similar to sensory perception than other memory traces (Freud, 1976: 113). While Freud shares this presumption with Pico, The Interpretation of Dreams, in contrast, also refers to ‘other’ images: ‘Dreams, then, think predominantly in visual images – but not exclusively. They make use of auditory images as well, and, to a lesser extent, of impressions belonging to the other senses’ (Freud, 1976: 114). A strict hierarchy between word and image is evident. The example of the ‘picture-puzzle’ in a dream can illustrate this hierarchy more explicitly. One should replace every singular image in a ‘picture-puzzle’ with syllables or words in order to attain the hidden meaning of the images (Freud, 1976: 382) – because when it comes to reasoning, the dream has no apt means to display logical relations. In this respect the image is as restricted as the performing arts are in comparison to speech (Freud, 1976: 422–425). The example he gives is that dreams are incapable of expressing either/or relations and that their proper form of presentation is defined by similarity (Freud, 1976: 422). ¹² And Freud adds:

A thing that is pictorial is, from the point of view of a dream, a thing that is capable of being represented: it can be introduced into a situation in which abstract expressions offer the same kind of difficulties to representation in dreams as a political leading article in a newspaper would offer to an illustrator. (Freud, 1976: 455)

The image in Freud serves the logos, the word, and in a similar fashion to Pico’s qualification of the image as encapsulating the particular, the sensory and the present, Freud assumes those qualities to be essential for any image. This in turn is its weakness since only through the interpreting word can the image ‘speak’ to us, can gain meaning. Freud’s very telling example here (referring to Herbert Silberer) is that of reading images as transformed ‘thoughts’. One should, when sleepdrunk, exercise to replace one ‘image’ with one ‘thought’; Freud exemplifies further: ‘I thought of having to revise an uneven passage in an essay. Symbol: I saw myself planing a piece of wood’ (Freud, 1976: 340). Even if we set aside a deconstructive reading here, which could stress the ambivalence between ‘wood’ as ‘surface for scripture’ (hyle) and as phallus, it is obvious how close the interpretation of dreams can be linked to the symbolic openness of reading literary art. In particular the rhetorical figures of metaphor and metonymy, which Freud has emphasized as being central in the workings of dreams, have been singled out to prove the ‘natural’ closeness between the interpretation of a dream and the analysis of a literary narrative. Nevertheless, in contrast to modern hermeneutics, The Interpretation of Dreams considers all images in principle as explainable, given the time to analyse them (Freud, 1976: 79) – an assumption that corresponds to Pico’s interpretation of images, which is aligned with the medieval hermeneutics of the Bible. Pre-modern Bible hermeneutics also knew of the incomprehensible passage as a ‘dark’ passage, which in principle is always explainable by scholarly authority. But the reader of Freud or of Pico is also cautioned in this respect: while Freud concedes that there is always a danger of misreading images, Pico regards only one force as exempt from misreading images, the one that needs no ‘media’ to see things: God himself.

Despite some strong similarities in regard to the transcriptive element between word and image, there seems to be a stark contrast between De Imaginatione and The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud’s method of transcription of images into words we don’t find in Pico, where image and word seem to stand side by side as monolithic blocs. Consequently Pico’s interpretation of images for the purpose of therapy seems to address the image directly: those who are capable of forming simple and pure images (puriora simplicioraque) are also more capable of understanding the world (Pico, 1971: 52). No words need to interfere. But the image is never without danger: its potential to arouse or deter needs to be kept in mind, controlled by reason (Pico, 1971: 77, 91): ‘When we imagine, we are no more affected than if we were looking at some horrible picture, unless opinion follows upon this imagination’ (Pico, 1971: 76). ¹³

How then is it possible, despite all the attempts to control the image by the mind and its text, that images have the power to drive a person insane? Pico points out two problems here: excess and intensity. Excess is caused by the plethora of images, which causes instability and distraction; conversely, the intensity that one single image can bring with it leaves us in danger of not seeing other pictures at all (and therefore hardly anything else at all as the all-encompassing operations of phantasia are essential to the human understanding). For this kind of tunnel vision Pico cites a book as example; imagining the book evokes phantasies, which might become, as they further develop, uncontrollable (Pico, 1971: 59–61). However, the passage is meant to explain how everything is a question of proper selection (aut ex aliis deligat) (Pico, 1971: 60).

One contrast between Freud and Pico should become more and more evident as we go along. Since the image in Pico’s De imaginatione is monolithic and can apparently operate without any particular need of words despite being constantly policed by them, Pico’s suggestions for therapy of the psyche addresses the image directly. If one focuses too much on a single image one should turn away; and if one’s attention is scattered one should focus on a single image to refocus the mind (cf. Pico, 1971: 59–63). A Freudian transcription between image, word, and thought is out of the question here. Instead, the Bible (the Holy Scripture) forms an alliance with logos and intellect, just as the image forms a holy alliance with phantasia. In contrast to Freud’s analogies between image and word, Pico’s silent analogies are only guaranteed by a third power, a model of truth beyond all media. And of course it is God, who is presented to us as the third option, because God can see things in themselves and does not need any means of discourse (non per discursum) (Pico, 1971: 80). The natural light that lets us ‘see’ and ‘understand’ the world through ‘media’ is excelled by God’s immediate illumination, which guides our lives and allows us to read the Bible without failed interpretations (Lumen autem fidei, divinae scripturae veritates naturae lumini impervias perspectas faciens; Pico, 1971: 88).

Pico’s fideism superimposes an immediate truth superseding the question of word and image. The assumption of an immediate and original illumination has to ignore all technical media; those who wish to have proper faith therefore have to look beyond images and words.

But could there not also be a silent ‘fideism’ at work in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams? Freud’s individualized narrative of images in a dream, in fact any transcription of visualizations into a discursive narrative, is superimposed by the axiomatic status of primordial phantasies or scenes (Urphantasien or Urszenen). These basic patterns refer any particular image back to a set of underlying immediate universal ideas and thus define also all forms of transcription of images into words. Although ‘primordial phantasies’ are not explicitly emphasized in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud’s later work will clearly give precedence to such a set of universal ideas that govern the individual events of any particular dream: ‘I call those phantasies, the observation of parental coitus, the seduction, the castration and other primordial phantasies’ (my translation). ¹⁴

Instead of Pico’s universal ideas of ‘God’ and ‘light’ (phos), Freud introduces us to ‘psyche’ and ‘darkness’: in either case an essentialist and strict ordo naturalis could be imagined beyond the historical differences for Freud as much as for Pico. And what defines the image first and foremost – besides its quality of individualization, particularization, and immediate presence, characteristics we find in Pico’s as well as in Freud’s circumscriptions of the image – is the analogy between the body and bodily urges. And those urges seem to find their apt form of expression primarily in the physical nature of the image. In order to control body and desire, in both cases one has to keep control of the image as a medium. But access to the image in order to control it is problematic. In Freud’s psychoanalysis, it is every person’s individual mechanisms of censorship which complicate access to the meaning of images, and Pico reminds the reader right at the beginning of his book that he wishes to write about phantasia for the benefit of others if he is not ‘deceived’ by his own phantasia (nisi et ipsa nos imaginatio nostra fefellerit) (Pico, 1971: 21).

III

Before the advent of print, material images other than the concept of the mental image never caught the serious attention of epistemology; the pursuit of truth relied unchallenged on the discursive medium of the word. Therefore Pico’s De imaginatione should be read not only as a defence of Scripture against an alleged loosening of moral standards through an unleashed imagination, but also as a discursive reaction to the contemporary proliferation and dissemination of material images. As such, De imaginatione negatively acknowledges the image’s serious impact on our psyche beyond its simple instumentalization as reproductive imagery for the purpose of memory. Despite all the generic epistemological assumptions Pico shares with the Aristotelian concept of phantasia as well as with Augustine’s commentary, there is also the acknowledgement of an unsettling force of imagery that more than ever before appears to pose a challenge to the modus operandi of the human faculties. Pico is not just using image technology here to illustrate how images are able to falsify our natural perceptions as much as our physical eye can be deceived by coloured or distorted lenses (oculus, […] corporeus depictis variegatisque specillis hallucinatur; Pico, 1971: 50). His conceptualization of the image itself can be directly aligned with the state of image technology at the time.

As we have seen, for Pico the main qualities of the inner image are, first, that they are naturally closer to the human body than to the human mind and as such lack self-evidence; ¹⁵ second, that they gain their evidence only through being controlled by reason, which equates in technical terms to being controlled by words (logos). And third, paradoxically, the image is described as a form of self-reference (as therapy only ‘looks’ at treating the use of images via another use of images) that seems to qualify every image in a clear opposition to words. Why otherwise should we refocus on one image only if too many images have fragmented our gaze, or simply look away if one image has occupied our mind so intensely that we might find ourselves on the brink of insanity?

All three qualifications are in line with the new standard of image technology, the invention of early pictorial prints. Printed woodcuts, including accompanying text on a single piece of paper, had been circulated since the early 15th century. The main feature in pictorial prints since 1420 up to early emblem books from 1531 on is the juxtaposition of image and text in the same woodcut. Nevertheless, image and word must have been perceived as different entities as the integration of wording into the image itself only became more prevalent in later stages of print graphics. Despite the ethical mandate to submit the image to worded ‘reason’, there is an obvious if only implicit acknowledgement throughout Pico’s argument that images are of a different nature or, one should say, of a different technique, which escapes the form of writing. Controlling the power of imagination to connect body and mind then appears to be also an attempt to control the process of reproduction of technical imagery per se, with its threat to the knowledge monopoly of the clergy by enabling the individualization of phantasies.

Freud also tries to control the image as a technical form; but his method of control is the philological transcription of images. Why didn’t Pico think of transcriptions of single images into words? It is probably safe to assume that Pico could only fathom the inner image according to the outer technology available at the time as a total entity or as a complete object, which could not be broken down any further into images within a visual narrative. ¹⁶ And besides the development of photography in the 19th century, Freud was particularly aware of the new technologies of the moving image. But even though Freud’s psychoanalysis imagines the dream as an inner movie, he did not seem to take the new silent movie seriously as a whole and stayed within the paradigm of the text as the most apt tool of analysis. To transcribe inner images into words he therefore needed to arrest the flow of pictures for the purpose of transcription into a series of single images. In that process, he destroys the fluidity of the medium ‘film’ itself; despite some obvious analogies at work in Freud’s writings between film and soul, between the manifest surface of dream images and the celluloid surface of film images, between technical and psychical apparatus, Freud also seems to revoke those analogies at the same time through his philological analysis of images (Kittler, 1985: 213–216). Although there is a clear hierarchy between text and image in Freud’s writings, he nonetheless assumes a notion of the image as transcribable into words that could well be owed to the technology of the silent film. ¹⁷ The silent film ‘illustrates’ not only an isolated image or a pictorial scene within a narrative of moving images, it also visualizes the interruption of a sequence of images by slides, which present ‘spoken words’ as text.

In line with the new technology of silent film one could surmise that Freud has shifted his therapeutic practices around 1895 from hypnosis to the technique of free association (Andriopoulos, 2000: 89). While hypnosis is technically aligned with the theatricality of the drama focusing on a persona as a whole, free association is aligned with narration and focuses on the imagined or the inner images as a form of textual or visual narration.

In summary: while Pico and Freud each in their own way try to control the image through the epistemologically superior medium of the text, the stark contrast between their understanding of the image can be aligned with the technologies available at the time. And in particular the fact that both scholars don’t refer directly to technology as a theoretical underpinning of their concepts of imagination forms part of an undetected ‘imagination of theory’ by the authors themselves, which also naturally seems to escape any technical grasp of the theoretical realm as long as theory remains an exclusive endeavour of writing. ¹⁸

At present we can only imagine what digital technology is doing to the conceptualization of imagination – bearing in mind that digital technology treats image and text as the same from within the opacity of its code, and can only visualize both as different forms on its surface. And that is only one reason why we still have to wait for a theory of imagination in pictures.