Iconoclasm by David Freedberg

Author:David Freedberg [Freedberg, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL000000 Religion / General, Religion, General, Europe, Renaissance, history, ART000000 Art / General, HIS037020 History / Renaissance, ART015000 Art / History / General, art
ISBN: 9780226445335
Google: iq9qzQEACAAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-06-29T00:27:30.806562+00:00

VIII

From Defamation to Mutilation

Reason of State and Gender Politics in South Africa7f

Gherardo Ortalli’s La pittura infamante of 19791 was of much wider relevance to the modern history of the relationship between politics, image making, and the defamation and mutilation of images than its explicit chronological range might suggest.2

Although Ortalli himself was aware of the applicability of his topic to the broader sociology of images, he explicitly abstained from drawing any wider conclusions. His was a strictly historical analysis of the uses of defamatory images in the Middle Ages, especially in Italy. He dealt largely with a specific legal use of images, often by the authorities themselves, intended not only to defame the persons they represented but actually to punish the images, especially when the traitors or criminals they showed were absent.

The immagini infamanti were thus more of a top-down than a bottom-up phenomenon, whereas this essay may seem to be about the opposite—the even more familiar phenomenon of an image that is intended to defame from the bottom up by the people themselves, and that is eventually punished and executed. But in the end this may be misleading too. It turns out that such cases were often orchestrated from the top and that the eventual destruction of the image was in many ways intended to save the reputation of the person represented rather than to destroy it.

Although Ortalli was very clear that his book was about a legal practice that was both juridically and penally normative,3 for the rest his definition applies very much to the particular case presented here. He showed that the aim of the medieval and early Renaissance defamatory images was to strike their human subjects in their individual dignity and honor by displaying their images to the derision and disdain of the community. In it they were deprived of the necessary attributes of their social status, and sometimes even of those even more elementary attributes that are particular to every human being (such as the parts of the body). Ortalli noted that “to strike at an individual via his image meant using a symbol for a concrete purpose, following a method that was especially congenial for a still largely illiterate context, and one that was—precisely for this reason—all the more attentive to figurative representation, capable of conveying a rich series of messages and information.”4 Moreover, in a society in which the image offered an especially good vehicle for news, information, and persuasion—just as ours has become, perhaps more than ever before—the defamatory image had a particularly strong effect.

All this offers a remarkable parallel to the South African case I will describe. It offers a striking example of how a single image may stand at the center of a complex array of political, legal, and aesthetic issues, culminating in iconoclasm. Many similar examples of images that begin as defamatory—or are construed as defamatory—and end in being destroyed, whether spontaneously and illegally or by design and legally, can be found elsewhere as well.

The context of this case contains a personal trajectory.

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