Dr. Mateusz Kapustka

The project starts with recent reflections on the motif of the transparent veil as a principle of aesthetic presence and absence, raised recently by the Bildwissenschaft to the rank of a textile paradigm creating the early modern definition of the painted image. The aim of this study is, nevertheless, most of all to explore depicted cloths and clothes as autonomous pictorial representatives and replacements for the absent body. In this way, removed cloths and clothes presented independently as ‘speaking’ objects within the internal space of the image can also function as pictorial metaphors just as well as the veil, especially in late-medieval and early modern religious visual media, but also – in form of a self-commentary – in the contemporary culture.

The role of textiles as pictorial motifs carries with it their functioning within various memory codes, primarily because of their specific physical features that enable us to record a trace visually, store it symbolically, hide it or uncover and reveal it. A garment, cloth, shroud or veil accumulate in them a charge of plastic recall, reminiscence – this role, dating back to antiquity, has become in early modern times a permanent cultural topos, particularly within liturgical representation. What is important, though, is that textiles do not create a lasting, static language. Their physical, elastic properties, which allow us to shape their referential possibilities in a most extraordinarily flexible manner, are associated with the fact that the gradual evolution of their role as visual carriers of meaning has been dynamic and is not entirely definable. On the one hand, the very introduction into a picture of the robe or cloth motif as an element with a separate meaning makes such a visual statement a strictly individual and unrepeatable act that often goes beyond the boundaries of media. On the other hand – and this moment will be crucial to the present project – what undergoes reception–related transformations, socioreligious manipulations not less than political manoeuvrings alongside this ‘double flexibility’ of textiles is the memory and primary emotions they authomatically evoke.

Therefore, this historical context of depicted textiles will also be a field of anthropological-phenomenological investigation. The ‘theory of response’ by David Freedberg, the image-antropology by Hans Belting (Bild-Anthropologie) as well as the phenomenological approach of intuitive reception of images by Michael Brötje (existentiell-hermeneutische Kunstwissenschaft), deliver several methodological inspirations for the project in the sense of researching various implied hermeneutical values of textile images provoking the beholder to an intermedial dialogue.

In this way, the textile as the pictorial representative and ersatz of the body becomes paradigmatic most of all in the case of Christ’s body and its image-making power, e.g. in the case of the sindon and sudarium (the motiv of cloths’ exposition), the empty chlamys on the throne (in the Early-Christian iconography), and also the Christ’s tunica (the problem of the robe’s structure). Therefore, the project explores i.a. the textile metaphor of the vera icon, the iconic function of Christ’s clothes as well as clothes of his followers (e.g. Saint Francis’ habit) in religious imagery, the pictorial relevance of the institutionalised robe of tortured martyrs in the post-Tridentine ideology, the fundamental textile aspects of the body of Christ itself within the theology and its visual transmissions, and eventually the problem of knitted fabric as a pictorial medium in its relation to the iconic representation of the vanishing body. The initial analysis of the textile metaphors in medieval theological image theory and liturgy, meant as ‘prospective commemoration’ (Wilhelm Durandus et al.), shall show how the textile medium serves as a means for authenticating the perpetual presence and meaningful visual absence of the Christ’s historical body. Furthermore, the above mentioned aspects of the textile such as its mechanical power of reproducing of three-dimensional objects, its evidentiary indexicality, and its emotional, expressive, and enlivening visual language will be analyzed in case studies comprising works i.a. by Giotto, Giovanni Pisano, Meister Francke, Michele Giambono, Konrad Witz, Botticelli, Alessandro Allori, Pasquale Cati, or Jacopo da Empoli. Moreover, in form of a mirror-like reflection showing the end of this long-lasting tradition, the project’s investigations will also concern the contemporary discourse on the role of textiles and textile metaphors in art and media with respect to the context of dehumanization (e.g. the art of Christian Boltanski) and loss of the body in the post-industrial culture (the digital images).