Symmetry’s generative side

Previous articleNext article FreeSymmetry’s generative sideShira BrismanShira Brisman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes recounts that the human figure was once spherical, until the indignant Zeus severed it down the middle and instructed Apollo to turn the face and genitals around. The god’s anger explains the body’s bilateralism. “If they show any more insolence,” the immortal threatened, “I will cut them up in half again, so they shall go about hopping on one leg.”1* * *What form does a generative image take? What is the look of a picture that inspires appropriations and improvisations? In the sixteenth century, patterns organized with respect to a central axis communicated fecundity and provoked more iterations of making. Theorists committed to the description of well-made pictures, such as Albrecht Dürer, had little to say about this structural principle of a dividing line with mirroring sides. Dürer’s discussion of proportion, which is how the Latin symmetria was understood in his day, referred to the commensuration of parts with regard to the whole.2 The term had not yet come to apply to the principle of imitative sides, as it would only in the eighteenth century.3 But this compositional arrangement—symmetry—spawned creativity during the early modern period and with particular effectiveness through the medium of prints. Impressions drew from antique sources such as the painted decorations of once-buried Roman walls or the carved narratives of sculpted tombs. Catalyzing the classical as a point of origin for ornament permitted artists an unbridled approach to the body. The general realm of the mythological gave license to lascivious couplings, compromising positions, and recombinant beings, part man and part beast. Heinrich Aldegrever’s engravings—used by book designers and craftsmen of stone, metal, embroidery and leather—balance Dionysian fauns, fruits, and flora around an attention-summoning head.4 In one configuration (B.274), the visage funnels into a female torso, and then into roots. The frontal hybrid serves as the middle of a layout that opposes and combines bearded and breasted forms. A highly organized spatial principle gives way to wild permutations of sexual associations between man, woman, beast, seeds, stems, and shoots.In the essay that follows, the central vertical alignments of Aldegrever, the Beham brothers, and Dürer will serve as axes around which a number of turns take place: bodies rotate toward or away from each other, figures pivot around midpoints in suggestions of circular motion, and artistic “turns” upend or pry open representational conventions established by predecessors.* * *By the sixteenth century, the reproductive medium of prints was catalyzing a potential that had once been mostly restricted to the realm of drawing: the ability to share designs—be they figural studies, compositional arrangements, or geometrically based patterns—among members of the same profession or interrelated trades. Prints offered artists an opportunity to speak to one another. Sheets dedicated to ornament pronounced most clearly the imperative to make, and did so most audibly and with a self-reflexive flair, when they combined the fecund imagery of male and female counterparts with floriated motifs and naked youths. Thus the elements of these symmetrical patterns, which could also be observed in architectural adornment and elsewhere, carry a particular conceit when transmitted through the medium of the ornament print. The engraved design acts as a proposal. Whether it stimulates transference to another medium or an improvisation in the form of another engraved design, the ornament engraving instigates another instance of making. As surviving evidence of interartistic communiqués, these prints allow any viewer, even those outside of craft trades, to perform some of the mental operations that artists enacted in the process of generating variant forms.Symmetry stimulates this effect. A frontal face summons ocular attention and corporeal awareness. With its analogous appearance to the reproductive organs of the human body (nose as navel, eyes as nipples, and mouth in the genital realm), a visage addresses the facing stance required of viewership and arrests the beholder with the recognition that he or she is symmetrically structured and sexed.5 In Aldegrever’s ornament prints, frontal visages metonymically invoke the reproductive organs. A staring skull in the midpoint of the lower third of a design from 1549 conjures a uterine shape (B.277; fig. 1), a resemblance that startles when compared with Leonardo’s anatomical study of a woman’s body, whose lower portion screams and glares like a horned beast (fig. 2). Leonardo’s sheet shows evidence of prick marks, indicating that the artist folded one side over, thus generating a symmetrical image through self-copying. He then traced the entire contour he had created and inscribed a message to repeat the transfer over again.6 These words prod the image-making hand to draw the female reproductive organ once more, even as this form seems to threaten with a terrifying stare. In Aldegrever’s prints, the frontal face does not astonish like the gorgon’s immobilizing gaze; instead it gives way to male and female forms whose corporeal interchange deepens the space of the image. The two satyrs pull their tails through their legs. In the foreground their hooves cross in a visual metaphor for sex.7Figure 1. Heinrich Aldegrever, ornament design with two couples of satyrs, 1549. Engraving, 8.8 × 4.2 cm. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.Figure 2. Leonardo da Vinci, anatomical study of the principal organs and arterial system of a female torso, 1508. Black and red chalk with ink and wash on pricked paper, 18.9 × 33.3 cm. The Royal Borough Museum Collection, RL 12281R. Photo: © DeA Picture Library / Art Resource, NY.In transmitting the impression of bilateral sameness, a frontal face slows the ability to apprehend difference. Designers of ornament prints utilized the left and right registers flanking the centralizing element to explore sexual possibilities. A scheme favored by Aldegrever involved stacking forms on either side of a beastly countenance with enough mirroring to lend the overall impression of lateral mimicry, yet allowing some rows to diverge. In one such arrangement (B.273), he establishes a fulcrum of vertically aligned grotesque masks topped by a thigh-spreading satyr with an erect phallus. At the upper register are two horned heads in profile. At the center, two men in contemporary dress clasp the central mask’s horns while facing opposite directions (one peers out toward the viewer, the other turns his gaze away). At the bottom, a child on either side mounts a female (left) and a male (right) triton. The print is representative of a compositional type by Aldegrever in which the motifs on either side may be either imitative reflections, forms that turn with different orientations from the axis, or sexually dimorphic beings. This variety lends the sense that different modes of creation are happening within the print. In the middle row of another engraving of this type (B.281; fig. 3), the tails of the female beasts sprout from beneath the bearded mask as if self-replicating, recalling the Latin root of that verb (plicare); they seem to fold out from the center.8 Yet the gender differentiation of the two figures just below them exerts an alternate impact.9 A female hybrid seduces her male counterpart, who swivels to her song. Their tails conjoin to support a saucière mounted by weaponry. Immediately above the weaponry appears the frontal face at the center of the composition that is framed by the pair of bilaterally symmetrical hybrid beasts. Rather than splitting apart from the center, their tails may be coming together to create the scene above. The motions implied by the print engage the possibility of multiple directions: Forms sprout from other forms, or merge to yield new forms. At the top of the print, two putti lunge in a rotationally symmetrical configuration: one is displayed from the front, the other from the back. Their positions offer a further possibility: that the process of turning might be generating the creative energies at play in the print’s reproductive realm.Figure 3. Heinrich Aldegrever, ornament design with music-making satyrs, 1550. Engraving, 6.7 × 4.9 cm. Washington, DC: The National Gallery of Art.* * *Engravers of ornament prints extended this defiance of symmetry to figures that do not face but flip, presenting circular motion as part of the creative process. David Summers has argued that the transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional symmetry apparent in Italian painting at the turn of the sixteenth century emerged as an effort to perfect a new visual order.10 On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, as Michelangelo’s God calls into being the sun and the moon, the artist displays his anterior and posterior sides. Together the two depictions of the deity announce the artist’s solution to the problem of how to show an entire figure.11 Aldegrever evokes a Michelangelesque twist of bodies rotating around a center in a print that uses back and front to explore the dynamic between the sexes (B.260; fig. 4). Both the facing female hybrid and the dorsal male swerve toward a vertically erect plant. This central sprout splits two wavelike motions at either side, formed by stems that are being bent by the forward motion of the two putti who run in either direction, mimicking the central dialectic of adult bodies that reveal and conceal. The plant in the middle divides left from right, female from male, at the same time that it lends the apprehension that the figures on one side are semi-elliptical rotations of those on the other. Divorced from the biblical narrative of creation that provides the context for the Italian master’s figuration of the divine turn, Aldegrever establishes an energetic force by coupling a flip-flop with a gender swap. By virtue of an association that has been elegantly explicated by Ittai Weinryb between silva, primordial matter, and arboreal ornament, the foliage that bends backward, as though yielding to the “parents” within the print, also summons intimations of genesis.12Figure 4. Heinrich Aldegrever, ornament design with two hybrids and two putti, 1537. Engraving, 4.5 × 15.1 cm. British Museum, 1853,0312.262. Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum.Through the diminutive format of the miniature ornament print, engravers experimented with spatial suggestiveness by creating compositions whose dynamics involved not only a left and a right, but also a front and a back side. While they are not based on precise mathematical calculations, Aldegrever’s exercises in rotational symmetry designate the realm of the print as a place for play. If the representation of vessels may have served as actual designs to be executed in another medium, the expressive energies of the print seem dedicated to conveying the kinds of processes involved in the execution of a three-dimensional form: turning around, conceiving of another side. An engraving of Aldegrever’s dated to 1529 (B.230; fig. 5) is inspired by Hans Sebald Beham’s arrangement of three years earlier (B.238; fig. 6). Though no portion is so morphologically similar as to repeat with exactitude the elements of his predecessor’s, Aldegrever’s print includes similar components. Both engravings set two putti at the bottom of a double goblet, the upper portion of which is flanked by two tendrils. Beham’s image suggests a degree of spatial dimensionality: in the lower register, the arms of the putti overlap, while in the upper register, two blossoms are turned away to reveal their undersides, fostering the viewer’s awareness that the elaborate vessel possesses a backside.13 The implication is that, for the flowers to yield their full petalwork, the putti would have to reveal their rears. Both symbols associated with fecundity, the blossoms and the companions of Eros, instigate a kind of visual chase scene, where the genitalia of the boys and stamens of the plants are either hidden or exposed.14 Beham effectively activates in the mind of his viewer the ability to imagine the fullness of the seed-bearing bodies of blossoms and boys.Figure 5. Heinrich Aldegrever, ornament design with two putti at the base of a vase, 1529. Engraving, 6.5 × 4 cm. British Museum, 1853,0709.216. Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum.Figure 6. Hans Sebald Beham, ornament design with two putti riding dolphins, 1526. Engraving, 5.4 × 3 cm. Washington, DC: The National Gallery of Art.Aldegrever enriches the spatial suggestiveness of Beham’s print by conveying a sense of spin. Two putti seem to be whirling the chalice around by its neck: one places his hand in front of the spherical joiner, the other behind it. They themselves, through their bodily position, present the notion of semicircular rotation; together, they manifest the same pose turned 180 degrees. The diagonally sweeping lines at the vessel’s top and the light that falls to the lower left assist in evoking a sense of carouseling motion. The right foot of each putto rests atop the engraver’s monogram plate. As they project out into the falling light, the winged figure’s toes cast a shadow over the maker’s initials, obscuring his claim to the image’s conception.Comparing Beham’s and Aldegrever’s engravings enriches our understanding of the generative nature of ornament prints. On one level, the components of Beham’s design gave way to a new construction: Aldegrever was inspired by, but did not copy, his predecessor. Beham’s engraving might be seen as originally serving the purpose of setting forth a model to be executed in metalwork, in which case the artist receiving the delineation would recognize the need to supply the alternate views of the flowers and figures on the vessel’s other side. The imaginative act that it prompts—the conception of the ulterior view—might be seen as a directive from the engraver to the vessel’s executor, who must give form to the undisplayed side. Yet the image’s size, 5 1/2 by 3 centimeters, complicates the question of whether to classify the print as a proposition for something to be executed in another medium. Some of Beham’s engraved prototypes can more clearly be seen to have served as models for metalsmiths, such as those that include dividing lines to designate where the top cover disengages from the goblet below, or textual instructions about manufacture (B.239–240).15 These blueprints tend to be somewhat larger (just over 9 by 5 centimeters) than the Beham and Aldegrever examples discussed here.16 Aldegrever’s engraving could be seen as an alternative proposal to the model, another possibility for the craftsman to consider. Yet his use of shading and his placement of the feet of the putti on the monogram tablet also indicate the cognitive process involved in apprehending the design. By suggesting rotational movement within the print, Aldegrever acknowledges that to consider a model of a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface requires turning the object over in the space of the mind. Through the ludic motion of cherubic spinning, the miniaturist engravers offer a meta-commentary on what it means to behold, which is articulated in Beham’s and Aldegrever’s prints not through an Albertian perspectival geometry of seeing through, but through a process of imaginatively supplying a full circumference when only half is shown. This explication of the relationship between visual apprehension and cognitive consideration is achieved within a pictorial space smaller than the palm of a human hand.* * *By the start of the sixteenth century, semicircular rotations had already become part of the conversational exchange about creation and reproduction that artists articulated through the visual language of prints. 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Washington, DC: The National Gallery of female of Dürer’s was and by a who his with the monogram her double in a from on Dürer, for the of to (fig. 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