Medieval Art after Duchamp: Hans Belting’s

Likeness and Presence at 25

R o l a n d B e ta n c ou rt   University of California, Irvine

Abstract proach postulated by Belting allowed scholars to venture into

In the early 1990s Hans Belting’s Likeness and Presence initi-
ated a consideration of the history of medieval art “in the era
before art.” This book attempted to reconsider the binaries be-
tween the beautiful and the functional, the aesthetic and the
cult image. These investigations, however, relied on beauty and
neo-Kantian aesthetics to define art, circumventing the con-
temporary history of art and its discourses. While arguing for
the validity of “non-art” as an object of investigation, I posit
that this scholarship reified the very modernist myths from
which it sought to distance itself by accepting such paradigms.
In medieval studies, the years following—until now—have
seen research into sensual experience, moving from the focus
on visuality in the early 2000s to the present’s concern with the
soundscape. Parallel to this trend is a growing neoformalism, a
return to the alleged fundamentals of paleography, style, and
iconography. While seeming to be wholly opposite projects, I
contend that these threads evidence a concerted return to mo-
dernity’s bureaucratization of the senses and a faith in the tran-
scendental signifier.
areas of visual production outside the art historical canon or
strictures of “high” and “low” culture. At the time of its pub-
lication, this was met in the broader discipline with parallel
moves, such as theories of reception and agency, and with the
inception of visual culture studies, which had developed by
the turn of the millennium into autonomous departments
or interdisciplinary programs at various universities. Such
drives expanded the purview of a history of art by produc-
ing alternative critical spaces for images and their study. This
is the established narrative as it is often passed down tacitly
through schooling and conversations and which has made
Belting’s work such a heartening manifesto about the chang-
ing discipline and its hoped-for utopias of inclusion for so
many scholars and students of medieval art.
Looking back at the past twenty-five years, however, I wish
to consider how this very conception of “the image in the era
before art” could likewise be said to have allowed for the his-
tory of art to persist unchallenged and untouched, while rele-

T
he year 2015 marks the twenty-fifth anni-
versary of Hans Belting’s landmark volume
Bild und Kult.1 When it was published, and
particularly following its translation into
English in 1994, this book invigorated medieval art history
2
with the study of “the image in the era before art.”3 The ap-
gating the medieval image to new peripheries as business as
usual was allowed to continue in a newly fortified center for
the art image. I wish provocatively to propose as well that, in
a parallel move, the discursive trajectory of the image in me-
dieval art history likewise came to accept its own alienation
from the history of art, no longer seeing its objects of study
as artistic works, indicated by a shift toward studies that focus
on theories of response, bodily experience, and the conditions

I wish to thank Charles Barber, Jacqueline Jung, Christopher Lakey, Robert S. Nelson, and Eric Ramírez-Weaver, whose invaluable com­
ments on this work in its various written and aural manifestations contributed to its present character. Additionally, Assaf Pinkus and an
anonymous reviewer generously provided invaluable feedback. Particular thanks must be extended to Aden Kumler, with whom long con­
versations on this topic not only helped formulate this argument in its present form but also demonstrated the ethical imperative of its publica-
tion. Finally, for their enthusiasm, ferocious friendship, and support of me, this project, and all things ontological, hearty thanks must be given
to Samuel Ray Jacobson, Luke Fidler, and Eileen A. Joy.

1. Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich: Beck, 1990).
2. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
3. For a perspective on Bild und Kult’s influence and status at twenty years, see Jeffrey Hamburger, “Art History Reviewed XI: Hans Belting’s
‘Bild und Kult: eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst,’ 1990,” Burlington Magazine 153, no. 1294 (2011): 40–45.

Gesta v55n1 (Spring 2016).

0031-8248/2015/7703-0004 $10.00. Copyright 2016 by the International Center of Medieval Art. All rights reserved.

v55n1, Spring 2016    Belting’s Likeness and Presence at 25    5

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and factors of production.4 The intent here is not to produce
an intellectual biography of Belting’s thinking or a histo-
riographic analysis of his methods in the context of its time.
Instead, the task at hand is to consider the by-products, effects,
and consequences of Belting’s intervention on the history of
medieval art through a close reading of his work’s emergent
logics, implications, and unquestioned givens. By reading Belt­
ing closely, it may be argued that his unintended effects on
the field resulted because, philosophically, Art—proper and
with a capital A—was ultimately treated as a normative and
fundamentally transcendental concept incapable of direct in-
tervention. This took form, ironically, not because of a poor
historiographic understanding of art but, rather, through an
overhistoricization of the deep history of art. Contemporary
scholarship, echoing and following Belting, has attempted to
see the rise of an ontologically defined concept of art in the
post-Renaissance world, albeit with interruptions and hic-
cups; yet, this concept was characterized as unmoved from its
basic tenets since then and fundamentally impossible before
then. In this established model, art (and particularly its art-
ist) accrued power and definition over the centuries after the
Renaissance, even if it still followed in the trajectory that the
latter set out.5 Thus, this model takes for granted the notion
of the Renaissance as a radical break from tradition, as has
been eloquently challenged by Alexander Nagel, Christopher
Wood, and others before them, and it has also reified the no-
tion of art’s history as a mere fulfillment of archaic typologies
within a Hegelian teleology of historical progress.6
The Cult Image as Double Bind
The problem arises when one considers that Belting never
extensively develops precisely what he means when he speaks
4. Michael Camille insightfully predicted these shifts in the
field in his response and decisive re-performance of Meyer Scha­
piro’s “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art” (originally
published in Art and Thought: Issued in Honour of Dr. Ananda K.
Coomaraswamy on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday, ed. K. Bhara-
tha Iyer [London: Luzac, 1947], repr. in Schapiro, Romanesque Art
[New York: Braziller, 1977], 1–27). Camille, “ ‘How New York Stole
the Idea of Romanesque Art’: Medieval, Modern and Post­modern in
Meyer Schapiro,” Oxford Art Journal 17, no. 1 (1994): 65–75.
5. Andrew Martindale, The Rise of the Artist in the Middle Ages
and Early Renaissance (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972).
6. Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1–12; Christopher S. Wood,
Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Ren­aissance Art
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 61–108; Alexander
Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York:
Zone Books, 2010), 7–20; and John Monfasani, “The Renaissance
as the Concluding Phase of the Middle Ages,” Bullettino dell’Istituto
storico italiano per il Medio Evo 108 (2006): 165–85.
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of  “art” in Likeness and Presence. In his foreword, for instance,
Belting acknowledges the perplexing notion of an “era of art”
and seeks to ameliorate the readers’ understandable confu-
sion by defining the concept as follows:
Art, as it is studied by the discipline of Art History
today, existed in the Middle Ages no less than it did af-
terwards. After the Middle Ages, however, art took on
a different meaning and became acknowledged for its
own sake—art as invented by a famous artist and de-
fined by a proper theory.7
In this statement, Belting seizes the discursive space allowed
by the disciplinarity of art history to argue that while the field
may study a plurality of premodern artifacts under the ru-
brics of art, these objects cannot be considered artworks. Tac­
itly, he asserts the possibility of the tautology that whatever
the discipline of art studies is art, but he eschews this course
of action by critiquing this as a symptom of the discipline’s
myopic presentism. This would have been an important eman­­
cipatory gesture that might have made Likeness and Presence
an unnecessary project, seizing in particular the equitable
discursive field offered by Bildwissenschaft without the need
to draw tenuous lines of separation between the art image
and the cult image, which would only come to reify the no-
tion that cognate fields, such as visual studies, are “everything
that the narrowest definition of art history is not,” as Horst
Bredekamp aptly put it.8 Instead, Belting does quite the con-
trary: he forces an unnecessary divide that orients Art proper
around its own cultic practice of invention, the artist, and “a
proper theory.” This was the tenuous definition of art adopted
by many medievalists in the past quarter century. Even Mi­
chael Camille, for example, stressed in his epilogue to The
Gothic Idol that art emerges when a discipline of formal study
builds up around the image and art becomes “art for art’s sake”;
that is, when looking supplants using.9
7. Belting, Likeness and Presence, xxi. This is expanded in the
revised foreword to the book’s English translation, yet a similar
articulation of this statement is evident in the original German vol-
ume: “Die ‘Kunst’, wie sie der Autor hier verstehen möchte, setzt die
Krise des alten Bildes und seine Neubewertung als Kunstwerk in
der Renaissance voraus. Sie ist an eine Vorstellung vom autonomen
Künstler und an eine Diskussion über den Kunstcharakter seiner
Erfindung gebunden. Während die Bilder alter Art von den Bilder-
stürmern zerstört werden, entstehen damals Bilder neuer Art für die
Kunstsammlung. Man kann nun von einer Ära der Kunst sprechen,
die bis heute andauert.” Belting, Bild und Kult, 9.
8. Horst Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bild-
wissenschaft,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 3 (2003): 418–28, at 419.
9. Michael Camille, “Epilogue: Idols as Art,” in The Gothic Idol:
Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 338–51, esp. 341.
 By these terms, one may summarize that art is that which
has lost its power and gained a medium. Belting, in fact, ex-
presses this notion precisely in the form of a retrieval of
artistic mediation. He describes the emergence of art follow-
ing the Protestant Reformation in the following terms: “The
image, henceforth produced according to the rules of art
and deciphered in terms of them, pre­s­ents itself to the be-
holder as an object of reflection. Form and content renounce
their unmediated meaning in favor of the mediated mean-
ing of aesthetic experience and concealed argumentation.”10
Therefore, Belting’s premodern cult image is an image that re-
nounces the operative status of the medium as the structure of
mediation. Even in his Bild-Anthropologie, medium operates
for Belting as a mere site of mediation between presence and
absence, a binary that is allegedly absent from the paradigm
of the Middle Age’s cult image. The cult image, for Belting, is
an image that is made fully manifest through re-presentation
rather than representation.
In a special issue of Gesta in 1995 devoted implicitly to
a consideration of Belting’s thesis, Charles Barber argued
that Byzantium approximated a notion of art in the post-
iconoclastic period. His article, tellingly titled “From Image
into Art: Art after Byzantine Iconoclasm,” faithfully follows
Belting in its reading of the iconophile writings of Patriarch
Nikephoros of Constantinople but uses Belting’s logic to argue
the opposite: that the Middle Ages did indeed have “Art,”
understood as a site for the formal and semiotic mediation
of presence and absence, and, moreover, that such art could
function as a cult-bearing image. Barber successfully demon­
strates that “in the era before art” there were pockets of resis­
tance that counter Belting’s monolithic and teleological nar-
rative while adhering to what few tenets are provided for an
operative definition of art. Barber argues, then, that Nike­
phoros viewed the icon as a work of art because it was, in
Barber’s words, “no longer an image that can be considered as
the one it re-presents.”11 Over the course of Byzantine icono-
clasm, ideas shifted so that notions of presence were rejected
in exchange for what Barber calls a “formalist reading,” one fo-
cused on the relationship between the icon and its archetype.12
10. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 16. “Das Bild, das nunmehr
nach den Regeln der Kunst entsteht und sich nach ihnen auch
entziffern läßt, bietet sich dem Betrachter zur Reflexion an. Form
und Inhalt treten ihren unmittelbaren Sinn an den vermittelten Sinn
einer ästhetischen Erfahrung und eines verborgenen Arguments ab.”
Belting, Bild und Kult, 26.
11. Charles Barber, “From Image into Art: Art after Byzantine
Iconoclasm,” in “The History of Medieval Art without ‘Art’?,” ed.
Henry Maguire, special issue, Gesta 34, no. 1 (1995): 5–10, at 7.
12. Formalism and its precise definition have an errant trajectory
in the discourse of medieval art, one that I am not able to treat in
this article, seen in the context of art’s modern historiography as an
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Despite his recognition of mediation as a crucial concept
for the image and its parsing into an art history, Belting’s focus
on the artist, innovation, and formal reflection under­pinned
the trajectory of the image in his thinking and emerged as
the dominant art-based narrative in medieval art’s history
after Likeness and Presence.13 Studies on artists, patronage,
originality, visuality, and practices of artistic contemplation
in the mid-1990s and early 2000s all consented to further-
ing Belting’s investigation into the cultural contours of the
premodern artwork and its artist by attempting to analyze
critically medieval thoughts on such defining concepts, while
nevertheless sticking to this constellation of concepts as be­ing
somehow definitive of what art is.14
In his introduction to the Gesta volume in which Barber’s
essay appeared, Henry Maguire, the volume’s editor, stresses
that “art,” as has been noted by “many recent critics,” is for the
most part a nineteenth-century invention oriented around
individual achieve­ ment, monetary value, and detachment
from everyday life. However, Maguire gives no footnotes for
these “many recent critics.”15 For Maguire, as for Belting, art
is not something that needs to be critically defined, since as
a transhistorical or diachronic term it either remains ever
the same as merely a disciplinary nomenclature or it is so
infinitely di­visible in its successive evolution that it ends up
meaning nothing in particular. In fact, Belting’s “image” in
Likeness and Presence has been criticized for its narrow pur-
view: staunchly against narrative images, as Camille pointed
out in his review of the volume, and often limited to portrait
analysis of material and visual form. Barber’s use of the term here,
however, is not rooted in such art historical iterations of formalism
but instead follows in the semiotic relations between the icon and
its archetype. His use is in keeping with the semiotic definition of
formalism that can be attributed to the so-called Russian Formalists
of the Moscow Linguistic Circle.
13. Arguably, it would not be until his publication of Bild-
Anthropologie in 2001 that Belting developed the importance of
the medium in the history of art. Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie:
Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (Munich: Fink, 2001), trans. by
Thomas Dunlap as An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium,
Body (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
14. E.g., see, respectively, “Artistic Identity in the Late Middle
Ages,” ed. Sherry C. M. Lindquist and Stephen Perkinson, special
issue, Gesta 41, no. 1 (2002); Colum Hourihane, ed., Patronage:
Power and Agency in Medieval Art (Princeton: Index of Christian
Art, Dept. of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, in associa-
tion with Penn State University Press, 2013); A. R. Littlewood, ed.,
Originality in Byzantine Literature, Art, and Music: A Collection of
Essays (Oxford: Oxbow, 1995); Robert S. Nelson, ed., Visuality before
and beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2000); and Herbert L. Kessler, Seeing Medi-
eval Art (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2004).
15. Henry Maguire, “Medieval Art without ‘Art’?: Introduction,”
Gesta 34, no. 1 (1995): 3–4, at 3.
Belting’s Likeness and Presence at 25    7
icons, which Arthur Danto noted in his response to Belting
and which opened Danto’s landmark After the End of Art.16
This contradiction, or double bind, seems likewise to have
affected Belting’s theorizations. While Belting’s work has had
important effects in art history at large, given its wide appeal
by virtue of its breadth and scope, it derived its force and ap-
plicability primarily from a Foucauldian investigation of deep
history. As such, because Belting’s and cognate projects strive
to undertake an archaeology that in its depth forces present
myths and tautologies to buckle under the stress of their
own historiographic weight, the author never has to address
explicitly or criticize the present conditions of the matter
at hand. The mere apocalyptic force of historical revelation
itself is seen as doing the critical conceptual work, thus al-
lowing Belting to avoid resolute judgment and definition in
the present. Consequently, the present fades from view in the
archaeological approach, because in this model the present is
nothing more than a willing receptacle that masquerades as
lacking inherent or relevant definition. As such, for Belting
art need not be defined, nor do these recent critics merit
enumeration.
In this overhistoricized purview of art, Maguire did not
have to cite recent critics because the judgment of art as a
modern condition was treated as an unnecessary and self-
evident universal. The tacit assumption by Maguire here is
that while we might not know what art was for past audiences,
we certainly know what art is for us today, yet the latter does
not necessitate critical definition or research, which, in this
model, would only detract from the historical work. As such,
Maguire’s introduction goes on to address the distinction be-
tween the cult image and the work of art in terms that qui-
etly played out the implications of Belting’s work and enacted
their own archaeology.
Is the present-day researcher, for example, to concen-
trate on the icons that are considered the most beau-
tiful, or on those that have the largest cult following
(they are rarely the same)? Are the graffiti on medieval
frescoes to be considered an impeding disfigurement
or a valuable source of social history? Such opposi-
tions as “fine” versus “applied” art, as quality versus so-
cial function, or as aesthetic beauty versus numinous
16. This tendency would likewise be repeated in Belting’s Anthro-
pology of Images (84–124), which places the death mask and images
of the dead in a central relation to the ontology of the image. See also
the review of Belting, Bild und Kult, by Michael Camille in Art Bul-
letin 74, no. 3 (1992): 514–17, esp. 515; and Arthur C. Danto, After
the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997), esp. 3–4.
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power, may exercise modern writers, but they usually
did not apply in the Middle Ages, for in each of these
supposed oppositions one factor was a condition or a
consequence of the other.17
Maguire’s sentiment may be a sound reflection on the rela-
tionship between beauty and function, but these binaries and
the paradigms that they enact have little if anything to do
with the question of art in any capacity as it was being for­
mulated in the mid-1990s. The distinction that Maguire was
thus purporting to address was not one of art versus image,
but one of “fine” versus “applied” art, “quality versus social
function,” and “aesthetic beauty versus numinous power.”18
Recalling that Belting was then first and foremost a Byzan­
tinist, and that the investigation that resulted in Bild und
Kult emerged from a long-term study on icons undertaken
for Dumbarton Oaks, the resonances between Maguire’s and
Belting’s perspectives are not surprising.19 In fact, it is telling
that Maguire’s special Gesta issue was titled “The History of
Medieval Art without ‘Art’?” In summarizing the issue’s de-
sire to reconsider such binaries, which “may exercise modern
writers, but they usually did not apply in the Middle Ages,”
Maguire only indicates the manner in which he himself con-
ceived of the idea of art, colloquially and idiosyncratically,
without critically questioning his sensibilities. The poignancy
of  Maguire’s introduction comes from the absence of  Belting’s
name and the fact that the issue emerged from a session at
the 1993 College Art Association meeting in Seat­tle targeted
at nonmedievalists. Note, in particular, that the issue result-
ing from this panel came out barely a year after Belting’s vol-
ume was translated into English, as evidenced by the fact that
Barber, the only author to engage with Belting directly by
name, used only the original German publication and pro-
vided his own translations, noting the volume’s very recent
English translation. Thus, it would seem that even as the Gesta
issue attempted to grapple with Belting’s propositions at large,
there was little desire on the part of the majority of scholars
included in it to address critically and diligently the rubrics,
language, and logics that Belting articulated in his text to dis-
tinguish the work of art from other forms of visual culture. It
is almost as if the proposition of “Medieval Art without ‘Art’ ”
was sufficient description to conduct the investigation, since
again art itself did not need to be rigorously defined.
17. Maguire, “Medieval Art without ‘Art’?,” 3.
18. Ibid., 5.
19. Hans Belting with Alice-Mary Talbot and Gudrun Bühl,
“Oral History Interview with Hans Belting,” Oral History Project,
http://www.doaks.org/library-archives/dumbarton-oaks-archives
/oral-history-project/hans-belting.
 The overall shorthand with which Belting’s volume treats
the concept of art itself as a universal, without definition and
clarity as to what art precisely meant and for whom, cru-
cially cuts out the one true constituent in this whole discus-
sion: the medieval art historians doing the research. Rather
than seizing a grounded present of art historical discourse,
looking around to consider what art was for scholars in the
early 1990s, such projects overhistoricize the art concept in
a manner that makes it either teleologically specific or fully
transcendental. Few scholars in the period engaged with
contemporary critical writings on art; instead, they took for
granted that art is rooted in the artist’s cult, originality, qual-
ity, and aesthetic beauty—all notions that had little traction in
the artistic and theoretical world of the mid-1990s, which fea-
tured a rich and diverse landscape of thought about art in the
onslaught and wake of the decade’s culture wars. Fragments
of this trajectory of art may have started in the Renaissance or
the nineteenth century, centered on the issues that Maguire
and Belting point out, but this was certainly not their status
by the mid-1980s or 1990s. As such, this body of work has
often failed to view its own writing of history as a present-
oriented practice and thus unintentionally transcendental-
ized the very concepts that it was attempting to work past.
The dissolution of a critical avenue in medieval art history in
the late 1990s is in large part due to the limiting imposition of
such double binds in its academic discourse.
The double bind is a crucial concept here because it oper-
ates as a linguistic anomaly in which two irreconcilable com-
mands or statements produce a contradictory situation that
makes it impossible to act.20 Here the double bind is mani-
fested as the contradictory impulse between the expansion of
the objects of study in art history via the inclusion of the non-
art/premodern image and the simultaneous problem of these
objects’ inability to be reconciled into the history of art, given
their alleged existence as something other than the artwork
itself. While the German Bildwissenschaft inherently defies
these limitations, in the Anglo-American sphere the “era be-
fore art” solidified for medievalists the growing rift between
art history and visual studies. This contradiction is united and
enacted not by these propositions and disciplinary conditions
alone but, rather, is exacerbated by the artwork’s lack of defi-
nition and articulation, given that this lack ends up allowing
only a negative definition of art whereby art itself becomes
an other to the cult image but lacks any operative contours
beyond that. Belting’s project thus becomes a binary of nega-
tively defined terms: non-art/non–cult image. As such, my
20. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Northvale, NJ:
Jason Aronson, 1972), 276–84.
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goal is to consider tactics by which we might come to remedi-
ate the conflict of Belting’s double bind through a reparative
reading of the arguments in Likeness and Presence.21
Belting after Duchamp
The discourse on the cult image at large resulted, albeit
unintentionally, in a Kantian system, given its understand-
ing of aesthetic judgment or, more precisely, the judgment of
what art is. That is to say, such texts as Belting’s and Maguire’s
came to imply, vaguely, that art is founded on aesthetics, or
explicitly on beauty in the case of Maguire, as that which
is free from concepts and is a result of subjective taste that
cannot be communicated at second hand but must be expe-
rienced firsthand. As Kant writes, “The judgment of taste is
not based on concepts, for otherwise it would be possible to
dispute about it (decide by means of proofs).”22 This comes
into play in the idea of art for art’s sake, something that can
only be experienced in relation to itself through primary and
unmediated sensual experience. Maguire’s binaries, for in-
stance, make it clear that while art objects may be subjected to
historical analysis, these analyses do not question their ontic
status as art. Since, in these binaries, the notions of “fine” art,
quality, and aesthetic beauty are opposed to concepts of appli-
cation, social function, or numinous power, the latter are left
out of art history because they do not pass—or, better said,
cannot be subjected to—a judgment of taste. All these latter
ideas direct one away from subjective experience; thus, they
describe an object that cannot be rooted in the disinterested
pleasure it produces (that is, art as that which is beautiful and/
or a site of aesthetic reflection). Hence, these objects are only
of interest for their secondary signification, as scientific evi-
dence of sociohistorical issues. Such a perspective stresses the
self-evident autonomy of art, a concept that can likewise be
linked to Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. The prolific
lack of a grounded and contemporary working definition of
art is a telling gesture, since it follows in the conceit that the
experience of the beautiful is that which is universal. In other
words, this resolution implies that while art as a phenomenon
may have a history, what art is is not historically contingent.
Because aesthetic judgment is an act of judgment that
cannot be validated through concepts but only through that
which is seen to inhere in the object and consequently is uni-
21. On the method of reparative reading, see Eve Kosofsky Sedg-
wick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–51.
22. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul
Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), 215, sec. 56 (German ed., 5:338).
Belting’s Likeness and Presence at 25   9
versally perceptible, there would be no need for Maguire or
Belting to truly investigate what art is. Therefore, the catego-
ries that Belting uses in his work to define a historicized no-
tion of art are nothing more than the long-standing Kantian
underpinnings of the discipline of art history, particularly in
the German-speaking world with such figures as Heinrich
Wölfflin and Erwin Panofsky.23 In the 1990s specifically, as
David Joselit has analyzed, these Kantian ideals were key to
art historians’ and curators’ defense in the obscenity trial of
Dennis Barrie, director of the Contemporary Arts Center in
Cincinnati, in 1990, following the censorship of the Robert
Mapplethorpe exhibition “The Perfect Moment” at the Cor­
coran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1989. Despite
being well intentioned, the “Beauty Defense,” as Joselit calls it,
played perfectly into the radical right’s attack on the show.24
After all, the Kantian structure of the beautiful was in no way
different from Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see
it” colloquialism to describe the threshold test for obscen-
ity in 1964, an idea reiterated twenty-five years later by Jesse
Helms. In the Mapplethorpe case in particular, the alleged gay
(that is, minority) taste could neither be seen as something
that might be universalized (for a majority) nor understood
as free from concepts because of the homosexual (“special”)
interest. This ingrained Enlightenment notion of the beau-
tiful in art history thus continued to demonstrate its effects
in both the Mapplethorpe case and also in the discussion of
medieval art in the 1990s, as my reading of Belting shows. As
such, it is necessary to ask how it is possible to move forward
and rehabilitate the scholarship that has been produced under
the conceptual aegis of “the image in the era before art.”
A helpful guide through this medievalist minefield is
Thierry de Duve’s Kant after Duchamp, a work whose very
23. Joan Hart, “Reinterpreting Wölfflin: Neo-Kantianism and
Hermeneutics,” Art Journal 42, no. 4 (1982): 292–300; and Mark A.
Cheetham, Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of Discipline (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. 67–100.
24. David Joselit, “Mapplethorpe’s Beauty” (keynote lecture,
symposium for the exhibition “Imperfect Moments: Mapplethorpe
and Censorship Twenty Years Later,” University of Pennsylvania,
12 February 2009). For a brief discussion of Jesse Helms and the
Mapplethorpe case in relation to medieval art, see Michael Camille,
“The Pose of the Queer: Dante’s Gaze, Brunetto Latini’s Body,” in
Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 57–86, esp. 59.
The issues discussed in Camille’s 2001 essay have strong resonances
with Joselit’s essay on Mapplethorpe and the queer pose from 1988.
Joselit, “Robert Mapplethorpe’s Poses,” in Robert Mapplethorpe: The
Perfect Moment, ed. Janet Kardon (Philadelphia: Institute of Con-
temporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1988), 19–21. See also
Mark Jarzombek, “The Mapplethorpe Trial and the Paradox of Its
Formalist and Liberal Defense: Sights of Contention,” Appendx: Cul-
ture, Theory, Praxis 2 (1994): 58–81.
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title is founded on the present-oriented nature of historical
thought and writing. In this critical re-reading of Kant after
the work of Marcel Duchamp, Duve engages with the judg-
ment “this is beautiful” by replacing beauty with art.25 This
simple substitution is one of the landmark contributions of
the text, which stresses the conditions of art in the late twenti-
eth century. Through this change, Duve is able to produce his
own reparative reading of Clement Greenberg’s modernism
through Kant. The move initiated by Duchamp in the history
of modernity, particularly via his 1917 Fountain, is the shift in
art from the specificity of painting, for example, to the generic
statement “This is art.” As Duve writes:
[Duchamp’s] Fountain spoke of art, or prompted people
to speak of art in connection with it. We have passed
from the specific to the generic, and this passage is a
switch of names. Exit the painter, enter the artist, the
artist in general. His name was Richard Mutt, that is,
anybody, since anybody could be an artist at the Ind­e­
pendents, even a manufacturer of bathroom fixtures.26
This nominal ontology of art as a proper name nevertheless
still ingrains in language the affect or feeling of quality emerg-
ing from aesthetic judgment, as if such quality were a prop-
erty of the object’s form. In Duve’s words,
In a way, art critics cannot write about “art as art”; they
can write about painting, sculpture, poetry, or music,
that is, about the medium, and treat the medium as the
only subject matter of art, even if the artist didn’t. In
this case, they are modernist even if the work is not.
They are formalist if “art as art”—that is, their aesthetic
judgment, their feeling of quality—is what makes them
speak of a given work, whose form alone they can de-
scribe in language.27
The double bind of medieval art history in the early 1990s
could be characterized as having emerged in an attempt to re-
ject the Kantian roots of the judgment of art as dependent on
the beautiful, in order to expand the purview of art historical
study. Yet it implicitly validated the same terms by transpos-
ing them on to a period already bereft of such strictures, from
which new critical discourse could have emerged and offered
its own theoretical frameworks to answer not what art is but,
rather, what it could be, for us, as its only extant public.
25. Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1996), 283–323.
26. Ibid., 194.
27. Ibid., 214–15.
 On some level, it is possible to see Belting’s nondefini-
tion of art as relying on Duve’s substitution of beauty for art,
thus enabling the non-necessity of definition. The problem,
however, emerges when one realizes that instead of seizing
the nominal ontology of art itself as art’s definition—such as
stating simply that medieval art is art because it is studied
as art—lines were drawn in a failed attempt to use historical
distance and depth as an emancipatory tactic by attempting
to circumscribe art along the lines of the artist’s cult and a
proper theory, not understanding these to be the by-products
rather than the consequences of art. In other words, this his-
torical project fell victim to a failed archaeology because it
sought rubrics for liberation in an extinct past instead of in
its own present.28 As Duve notes in his introduction, “Even if
you write on the Middle Ages, your writings bear a date and
what you will transmit will be the ‘modernity’ of the Middle
Ages.”29 Even Duve’s substitution of beauty for art, a stereo-
typically postmodern move, results in a modernist product.
After all, he was attempting to undertake an “archaeology” of
modernism, not of his own late modernity or postmodernity.
Duve is conscious of this and uses this potential pitfall as a
generative friction in his work, and not as a deterrent. If there
is a moral to this story, it is that one cannot emancipate one’s
own future through a distanced past, but only through a past
oriented toward a present with a proleptic eye on the future
one wishes to create.
Such ethically motivated and present-oriented methods
were shaping the discipline of archaeology at the same time
that Belting’s arguments were taking form and proliferating
in art history. Similarly motivated by a desire to expand the
canon’s purview and include new and unique stakeholders,
archaeologists advocated for archaeological writing that un-
derstood contemporary subjects as the prime interlocutors
in the writing of history. This discourse was opened in 1989
by the British social archaeologist Christopher Tilley, who
convincingly argued that the production of archaeological
scholarship is “a form of social and political action in the
present with emancipatory potential.”30 Innovative figures in
the field, such as the founder of postprocessual archaeology,
Ian Hodder, have even incorporated contemporary ethno-
graphic research into their studies of distant pasts.31 Through
a critique of the universalizing notions of art and cultural
28. Ibid., 82.
29. Ibid.
30. Christopher Tilley, “Archaeology as Socio-Political Action
in the Present,” in Reader in Archaeological Theory: Post-Processual
and Cognitive Approaches, ed. David S. Whitley (London: Routledge,
1998), 305–31, at 307.
31. Ian Hodder, “The Past as Passion and Play: Çatalhöyük as a
Site of Conflict in the Construction of Multiple Pasts,” in Archae-
ology under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the Eastern
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heritage, such archaeologists as Alfredo González-Ruibal have
demonstrated how such transcendental notions of art and
heritage rooted in beauty and a fetishization of history emerge
from globalism’s industrial complex, tied to neocolonial and
neoliberal agendas and epistemes.32
Not surprisingly, this gen­erative assessment of fundamen-
tal categories in archaeolog­ical research led to several meth-
odological innovations in this cognate field in the early 1990s
that would not occur in medieval art history until the mid-
dle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Consider,
for example, the proliferation of studies in materiality that
have thrived in archaeological research since that time but
were only introduced into medieval art history through re-
cent work built directly on that research, even if not often ac-
knowledged or properly credited.33 While “material culture”
studies may have been popular in these years in certain areas
of medieval art history, particularly in research groups and
multiyear projects, the study of material culture has focused
more on the deep history or close study of everyday objects
and their social life than on concern for the structures of mat-
ter and what it signifies, which defines materiality and also
places it closely in line with the recent ontological turn in the
humanities at large in the middle and end of the first decade of
the twenty-first century.34 I would argue that this differential
Mediterranean and Middle East, ed. Lynn Meskell (London: Rout-
ledge, 1998), 124–39.
32. Alfredo González-Ruibal, “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism: An
Archaeological Critique of Universalistic Reason,” in Cosmopolitan
Archaeologies, ed. Lynn Meskell (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2009), 113–39, esp. 128.
33. See, e.g., Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape:
Places, Paths and Monuments (Oxford: Berg, 1997); idem, with
Wayne Bennett, The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape
Phenomenology (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Lynn Meskell, Object
Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present
(Oxford: Berg, 2004); and eadem, ed., Archaeologies of Materiality
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
34. For a recent survey of material culture studies in medieval
art, its distinction from materiality, and common trends, see Beth
Williamson, “Material Culture and Medieval Christianity,” in The
Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity, ed. John H. Arnold
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 60–75, esp. 67–68. For
precedents of medieval material culture studies, see Harry Küh-
nel, ed., Die Erforschung von Alltag und Sachkultur des Mittelalters:
Methode, Ziel, Verwicklung; internationales Round-Table-Gespräch,
Krems an der Donau, 20. September 1982 (Vienna: Österreichi-
schen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1984); and Andrzej Klonder,
“Geschichte der materiellen Kultur des Mittelalters und der Früh­
neuzeit: Theorie, Methoden, Forschungsbilanz,” in Mensch und Objekt
im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit: Leben, Alltag, Kultur; inter-
nationaler Kongress, Krems an der Donau, 27. bis 30. September 1988,
ed. Gerhard Jaritz (Vienna: Österreichischen Aka­demie der Wissen-
schaften, 1990), 23–36.
Belting’s Likeness and Presence at 25    11
time, characterized in terms of methodological interest, can
be correlated with medieval art historians’ relative disregard
for critically defining the ontological operation of the work of
art itself and a concomitant disregard for innovatively seizing
the scholar’s lived presence as the primary avenue of approach
to the image, despite the fact that it was a radical change in
these two interrelated avenues of approach that sparked the
interest in materiality in medieval art and likewise pointed to
its origins in social archaeology.
To summarize my responses to Belting’s text twenty-five
years later, it seems that in the early 1990s Likeness and Pres­
ence initiated a consideration of the history of medieval art
“in the era before art” that came to orbit around the binaries
between the beautiful and the functional, the aesthetic and
the cult image. His and others’ goal was to bring into a history
of art elements of visual culture previously ignored and left
by the wayside. By relying on an unarticulated (perhaps even
unconscious) neo-Kantian logic to define art, however, Belting
and his contemporaries circumvented present realities and
conditions of the field and consequently left intact the op­
pressive logics and systems that they were implicitly attempt-
ing to combat. This impetus was not limited to Belting’s work,
and perhaps the phrase most emblematic of the period’s
doubled logic is David Freedberg’s opening to The Power of
Images, where he writes, “This book is not about the history
of art. It is about the relations between images and people in
history. It consciously takes within its purview all images,
not just those regarded as artistic ones.”35 There is perhaps no
more perfect embodiment of a double bind than an art his-
torian opening his book on the history of response with the
statement, “This book is not about the history of art.” Like
Belting’s, Freedberg’s contemporaneous text specifically at-
tempted to broaden the scope of the canon and understand
a history of images rooted in people’s interactions with them.
Neither author tried to define what art was for him in his own
historically contingent experience and only then move on
to ask whether forms of art could or could not be identified
in the Middle Ages and beyond. While Freedberg aptly lo-
cated his volume in the history of response and thus respon-
sibly prevented ontologizing the relations between people
and images as defining a particular type of image, as Belting
did, both volumes positioned themselves against a history
of art and against a working definition of art while claiming
merely to investigate its postulated other. Even in 2002, Bar­
ber would deem it necessary to begin his study of Byzantine
image theory in the wake of iconoclasm with the statement,
“Any art historian who turns to the subject of Byzantine icon­
35. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the His-
tory and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1989), xix.
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oclasm might well ask whether it is a topic proper to the field
of art history.”36 Barber’s volume, in part a response to Belt­
ing’s Like­­ness and Presence, was subversively titled Figure and
Likeness and sought to offer a “different approach” from that
of Belting.37 Such an opening disclaimer only a decade la­­ter
evidences the litheness and fragility of Belting’s and Freed­­
berg’s allegedly groundbreaking interventions in the field.
While arguing for the validity of “non-art” and the methods
of external disciplines as objects and formats of investiga­­
tion, their scholarship thus reified the very modernist myths
from which it sought to distance itself by accepting the para-
digms of their broader epistemes as givens.
In medieval studies, the years following have seen research
into sensual experience, moving from the focus on visuality
in the early 2000s up to the present concern with soundscape,
materiality, and affect. Parallel to these trends, however, is a
growing neoformalism, a return to the alleged fundamentals
of paleography, style, and iconography. Although they seem to
be wholly opposite projects, I would argue that these threads
evidence both a faith in transcendental signifiers and a con-
tinuation of double-bind logics alongside a return to moder-
nity’s “bureaucratization of the senses,” to borrow Caroline
Jones’s concise words.38 This entwined development finds the
roots of its trajectory in the conceptual frameworks estab-
lished by early 1990s scholarship oriented around the ques-
tion of art as an ontic category, which provided us with a series
of double binds rather than with a synchronic and present-
oriented reflection on the philosophical underpinnings of the
present-day work of art. This development has been fed by the
ontological investigation of the picture, not of the epistemo-
logical conditions of the image.
The Cult Image: Primitivism at the End of History
Returning, then, to the problem of the cult image as an im­
passable double bind, embroiled as it is in the methodo­
logical tides of the field over the past twenty-five years, it is
necessary to consider the cult image of Likeness and Presence
within the concurrent discourses of Belting and others on the
“end” of art history. In a recent critique of the ontological turn
in the humanities, Jordana Rosenberg argues that the flour-
ishing of object-oriented ontologies, new materialism, and
vitalism have manifested themselves as a “theoretical primi-
36. Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Repre-
sentation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2002), 7.
37. Ibid., 141n3.
38. Caroline Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modern-
ism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006).
tivism that presents itself as a methodological avant-garde.”39
Such methodologies postulate a realm of being outside the
scope of human action and knowledge, endowing matter, in
its most molecular definition, with an agency and animacy
of its own. Rosenberg observes, however, that in examining
this “ancestral” realm, which Quentin Meillassoux defines as
a “reality anterior to the emergence of the human species,”40
where the flux and being of matter exist parallel to human ac­­
tion, the ontological turn sees matter as the site for the play-
ing out of a primitivist fantasy. That is to say, the ontological
turn enables the radical break with social orders known to us
and opens up a fetishized site of radical alterity that becomes
nothing more than a crude remediation of neoliberal forms of
settler colonialism and financial capital accumulation on the
level of molecules.
The intellectual legacy of the ontological turn is not unre-
lated to Belting’s own concern with the question “What is an
image?,” which marks his work’s development from Likeness
and Presence to An Anthropology of Images and investigates
the valences of the image across time and space. This has
paved the way for current medieval art historical discourse to
be a site of lively discussion regarding the material presence
and endurance of objects, as championed by such research
groups as the Material Collective.41 While Ro­senberg’s cri-
tique is specific to the status of an ontological discourse that
has not yet fully penetrated medieval art history, although it is
certainly thriving in medieval literary studies, Rosenberg’s in-
sights make one painfully aware that methods that ascribe an
innate animacy to matter in an ancestral realm (whether that
realm be chronologically anterior or parallel to human exis­
tence) also allow a space for the re-performance of a primitiv-
ist fantasy of a system not ruled by the civilized and rational
human, which scholarly analysis can now colonize and then
combine with a consumerist-driven desire for matter. As
such, Rosenberg asks that one be particularly sus­picious of
a “lust for dehistoricization, for demediation, for a tempo-
rality outside of history.”42 This critique is ethically poignant
for my discussion because its problems with the ontological
seem to echo the very function of Belting’s cult image: an
animistic object of cult fascination, which lies in the anterior
protoplasm of the image. In this model, the art image proper
39. Jordana Rosenberg, “The Molecularization of Sexuality: On
Some Primitivisms of the Present,” Theory & Event 17, no. 2 (2014):
n.p.
40. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Neces-
sity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008),
10.
41. Karen Eileen Overbey and Benjamin C. Tilghman, “Active
Objects: An Introduction,” Different Visions: A Journal of  New Perspec-
tives on Medieval Art 4 (2014): 1–9, http://thematerialcollective.org/.
42. Rosenberg, “Molecularization of Sexuality.”
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emerges from under the governance of the ra­tional, creative
artist whose generative originality pushes  his­tory forward
from the Renaissance toward the utopic fulfillment of man in
late modernism.
When described in such terms, Belting’s cult image reveals
itself as a construct analogous to a fetish object, with all the
mired baggage that this primitivist notion carries in anthro-
pological historiography.43 The cult image enabled an unme-
diated experience with inanimate objects in the prehistory
of the image, whereby the medieval viewer became akin to a
noble savage. Seen in a vacuum, one might be able to ignore
these critiques of the cult image, but they are thrown into
relief when one understands them in dialogue with Belting’s
“anthropology” of images that seeks out an ontology of art
through wide cultural analysis, that picks and chooses from
human history to produce a monolithic argument about the
image despite its call for cultural specificity through case
studies. In his 1992 review of Bild und Kult, Camille noted
Belting’s uneasy primitivist tendencies when he critiqued the
book’s interspersing of photographs of modern rituals and
their use as transparent examples of medieval cult practices,
which demonstrated Belting’s overall lack of “any ethno-
graphic sensibility”—a matter only exacerbated by Belting’s
ex­plicit distancing from anthropological discourse because
it is, according to him, too bound within the present’s own
cul­tural concerns.44 Yet the belief that certain peoples living
outside European and North American modernity have pre-
served ancestral traditions, which can in turn be used to study
historical rituals, is a hallmark of a primitivist outlook even
if those peoples are monks on Mount Athos. In doing so,
Belting ignored the basic teachings of contemporary archae­
olo­­gists and anthropologists, who were using their present
and lived experiences as necessary avenues for entering and
approaching their work in order to undo this very legacy of
Western ethnocentrism, primitivism, and universalism.
In Christian Materiality, Carolyn Walker Bynum attempts
to separate her work on materiality from the theories of
Bruno Latour, Alfred Gell, Daniel Miller, and others precisely
because she sees them as often contributing to “universaliz-
ing theories about the power of things.”45 Bynum goes on to
clarify:
Questions of how we talk about visual objects in the era
before art, theories about the agency of ordinary objects
(from domestic aids to scientific equipment), and the
43. William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” RES: Anthropol-
ogy and Aesthetics 9 (1985): 5–17.
44. Camille, review of Belting, 517.
45. Carolyn Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on
Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 31.
Belting’s Likeness and Presence at 25   13
 somewhat reductive investigation into the physiology
of seeing currently popular with some art historians
have, of course, shaped the way I have pursued my topic.
But my argument is a historical one. . . .46 [my emphasis]
By distinguishing her proposition from that of Belting as
being a “historical one,” Bynum opts to work past the univer-
salizing and ethnocentric implications of such narratives to
think in a grounded and specific manner about the problems
of materiality. The breadth of topics that fall under her cri-
tique here likewise speaks to the proliferation of studies that
have cultivated a desire to see the medieval as a radical depar-
ture from our own social norms and as an ancestral realm of
estrangement and difference, notably including the “reductive
investigation into the physiology of seeing,” the aims of which
could be understood to take part in the desire for a medieval
subject whose very bodily nature and perception were radi-
cally different from our own. For instance, Robert Nelson’s ar-
gument that Byzantine visuality relied on haptic contact with
the work of art follows in this desire for alterity in which even
perception succumbs to the tenets of unmediated and direct
contact with the cult image.47
The cult image and its methods (as well as the cult image
as a method) thus seem all the more like some primitiviz-
ing myth about primal, agentic relations with images and an
uncritical enchantment with their forms and strategies of
representation. Even the volition of the artist in the modern
world becomes transposed on to a culture-wide will that has
been abstracted into a quasi-shamanistic force of creation,
and so Belting’s cult image starts to lead us to early narra-
tives of artistic form generated by a near-sentient, willful,
and ultimately monolithic notion of culture, reminiscent of
Aloïs Riegl’s Kunstwollen.48 One is left with the sense that
“the era before art” is a period of image making driven by a
raw cultural force, producing re-presentations of unmediated
presence, existing in a realm anterior to our own epoch and
consequently outside history, all dehistoricized in a universal-
izing notion of the cult image.
46. Ibid., 31–32.
47. Robert S. Nelson, “To Say and to See: Ekphrasis and Vision
in Byzantium,” in Nelson, Visuality before and beyond the Renais-
sance, 143–68; and Roland Betancourt, “Why Sight Is Not Touch:
Reconsidering the Tactility of Sight in Byzantium,” Dumbarton Oaks
Papers 70 (forthcoming 2016).
48. Jaś Elsner, “From Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture: Some
Reflections on Riegl’s Concept of Kunstwollen,” Critical Inquiry 32,
no. 4 (2006): 741–66; and Aloïs Riegl, “The Main Characteristics of
the Late Roman Kunstwollen,” in The Vienna School Reader: Politics
and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, ed. Christopher S. Wood
(New York: Zone Books, 2000), 87–104, esp. 94–95.
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This is promulgated by the notion of an “end” of history
in Belting’s work, which explicitly understood the all-present
power of the unmediated cult image as existing before our
time in “the era before art.” For present scholars this historical
trajectory of the artwork had now been completed, and thus
it would seem that one was left to repeat history in a utopic
state of lofty fulfillment. This was certainly the narrative of
late-modern neoliberal thinkers, as in Francis Fukuyama’s
1989 essay “The End of History?,” in which the Hegelian prog­
ress of history was seen as having been completed in the
“universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final
form of human government.”49 After the universalization of
democracy and capitalism, a certain progress of history finds
its neat ends, not unlike the final project of art history in the
late twentieth century. Given the strikingly similar narratives
of thinkers in radically different spaces, it is difficult to ignore
Rosenberg’s critique of methodological forms of primitivism
as adhering to neoliberal, colonial, and capitalist agendas.
While Danto would make a parallel proposition in After the
End of Art, based on his 1995 A. W. Mellon Lectures, at the
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and earlier writ-
ings from the mid-1980s, his work is a model of an end to a
static art in exchange for a dialogic model of art and theory
in which artists produce answers and counter-responses.50 As
such, the end of art for Danto emerges less as an ontological
shift in the being of art at the completion of its history, as is
the case with Belting, and instead manifests itself as a repo-
sitioning of its narrative amid changing stakeholders who are
confronting the limitations of art’s dogmatic institutions and
narratives. Danto’s end is one of radical pluralism.
In the context of Likeness and Presence, Belting sees the
end of a history of art bookended by the present and the me-
dieval past, in which a primitivist cult image now lies perhaps
at both ends of history but outside the temporality of a history
proper and dehistoricized from Belting’s own lived present,
as I have argued. Consequently, one is left with a proposi-
tion for the cult image that is developed methodologically
through wholly traditional art historical forms of analysis,
looking at formalist narratives of stylistic development and
cross-referencing these with textual sociopolitical sources as
a means of validating a narrative of the cult image’s progress
toward art. The problem at hand is not so much in the details
49. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” National Interest
16 (1989): 3–18, at 4. See idem, The End of History and the Last Man
(New York: Free Press, 1992), xi.
50. Danto, After the End of Art, 3–20. See idem, “The Last Work
of Art: Artworks and Real Things,” in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthol-
ogy, ed. George Dickie and R. J. Sclafani (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1977), 551–62. On the death of painting, see Douglas Crimp,
“The End of Painting,” October 16 (1981): 69–86; and Noël Carroll,
“The End of Art?,” History and Theory 37, no. 4 (1998): 17–29.
of Belting’s argument and methodology as in the basic prem-
ises, propositions, and unquestioned givens from which that
project develops and takes shape. Likewise, rather than ever
proposing a definition for art, or a model of an art history
after the end of art, Belting merely enacts a negative project
of defining not-art and not–art history. In this sense, Belting’s
inquiry took shape as nothing more than a breakdown of an
“Art” concept to blaze the way for a fantasy of the image built
on the cult, whose image produces a double bind of simulta-
neous inclusion and exclusion from the realm of art and its
modern discipline.
Coda: On Contemporaneity, or, How to Outplay the
Double Bind
If this essay is premised on the notion that contemporary
visual culture and its theoretical frameworks can and must
inform the manner in which we, as scholars of the medieval,
conduct our investigations of the Middle Ages, then it remains
to be seen what one such method of approach could be. Such
work has often been motivated not by clear historical lineages
or narratives but, rather, by the opportunities offered by the
potential to think of the medieval through the present and
the present through the medieval. Examples include Roger
Fry’s coining of the term “Proto-Byzantines” to describe the
Post-Impressionists in 1908,51 or, a couple of decades later,
Alfred H. Barr Jr. describing Byzantine art and its iconic her-
itage as fundamental to the development of modern art, des-
ignating Byzantine art as one of the “Prototypes and Sources”
propelling his torpedo diagram for the Museum of Modern
Art into the future.52 Recently, Nagel’s Medieval Modern: Art
Out of Time demonstrated how the medieval might be seen
to be an undercurrent in much of the art of the twentieth
century, while other scholars have strived to understand how
such cross-temporal thinking might offer a new understand-
ing of art in the present and in the past, such as Amy Knight
Powell’s exemplary Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval
51. Roger Fry, “Letter to the Burlington Magazine, March 1908,”
in A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 73.
52. Alfred H. Barr Jr., “Russian Icons,” Arts 17, no. 5 (1931): 297–
313, 355–62; and Richard Meyer, “Revolutionary Icons: Alfred Barr
and the Remaking of Russian Religious Art,” in Sensational Religion:
Sensory Cultures in Material Practice, ed. Sally M. Promey (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 215–24. See also Russell Lynes,
Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern
Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 27–30; Alice Goldfarb Marquis,
Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern (Chicago: Contem-
porary Books, 1989), 53–54; and Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H.
Barr, Jr., and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 164–66.
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Church and the Modern Museum.53 While Nagel seeks to put
“art out of time,” Powell’s method is one of forceful contempo-
raneity driven by a desire to flatten and enfold temporal space
and allow for eloquent dialogues to emerge from the tectonics
of two previously distinct planes.
From the late nineteenth century to the turn of the millen-
nium, what one encounters in such structures of “touching
the past,”54 to borrow Carolyn Dinshaw’s evocative words, is
a shift from doing history to colliding history together. From
the photomontages of John Heartfield to the “flatbed picture
plane” of Robert Rauschenberg,55 there has been a coherent
and multifaceted artistic prehistory to methodologies that
sought to re-present history by taking the fragments of lost
and displaced historical information and making them once
again physically present through forms of compilation, ag-
gregation, and accumulation that both enabled legibility and
disturbed the usual flows and understandings of history, time,
and culture. An earlier iteration of this phenomenon is what
Hal Foster described as “an archival impulse” in late modern
art, which in its retrieval allowed for the generation of  “alter-
native knowledge or counter-memory” and transformed the
excavation site into a construction site.56 In Foster’s words,
archival art has a utopian ambition, given “its desire to turn
belatedness into becomingness, to recoup failed visions in
art, literature, philosophy, and everyday life into possible sce-
narios of alternative kinds of social relations, to transform
the no-place of the archive into the no-place of a utopia.”57
This creative act of historical retrieval enacts a parallel dou-
ble bind in late modernist art, not unlike Belting’s own, be-
tween an amnesia of history and the presence of historically
distant objects and conceptual spaces.58 This archival impulse
is a project that relies first and foremost on the act of making
contemporary the fragment, of making a near or distant body
simultaneous with us in our present, and allowing for its out-
53. Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (Lon-
don: Thames & Hudson, 2012); and Amy Knight Powell, Depositions:
Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum
(New York: Zone Books, 2012).
54. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Commu-
nities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1999), 1–54.
55. Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confron-
tations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1972), 55–91. See also Douglas Crimp, “On the Museum’s
Ruins,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal
Foster (New York: New Press, 1998), 49–64.
56. Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (2004): 3–22,
esp. 4, 22.
57. Ibid., 22.
58. For a theorization of art historical amnesia in contemporary
art, see Rosalind E. Krauss, Under Blue Cup (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2010), 101–30.
Belting’s Likeness and Presence at 25   15
dated history to fade and become an active player in our world
again. One might even say that Powell’s Depositions embod-
ies the archival impulse in the opposite direction, throwing a
“vignette” of the present into the past’s archive. This is the age
of the work of art in syndication, the instantaneity and simul­
taneity of contact that globalism has enabled in our world.
Joselit understands the idea of the contemporary precisely
in these terms, taking the forward motion of the avant-garde
and stripping it of its forward movement, leaving only mo-
tion itself. The contemporary seeks not to be out of sync with
time but to exist fully and wholly within it. Investigation of
the contemporary in recent art is an approach that relies pre-
cisely on moving past and beyond the mere archival impulse:
rather than treating a past (or present, for that matter) as a
distinct fragment of another world, the contemporary un-
derstands that past (and, in a sense, the entirety of history)
as one of many things that may be aggregated to be fully
and wholly present in the present.59 This process of present-
oriented aggregation is bred from the logic of the internet and
the database, whereby the flow of information that can be il-
legible in its mass and accumulation is composed, curated,
and filtered through multiple aggregative sites for compre-
hensibility. As Joselit concludes, “In our current moment, it
is the aggregator that makes hyper-accumulation eloquent
by causing asynchronous objects to occupy a common space.
Aggregators filter a world saturated by commodified infor-
mation, making the unevenness of globalization plastic and
visible. Aggregators speak in tongues.”60 Thus, the logic of the
aggregator transforms the locus of asynchronous encounter
that the archival impulse developed into the synchronicity of
the collision, the event, the slash. In Rauschenberg’s flatbed,
where images and objects accumulate and compound, these
images remained as indexes of the world from which they
came. The logic of the aggregator, however, thrives instead
on full presence and the wonderful complexities and associa-
tions that the networking of sites and objects allows. While
the movement once described as “postmodernism” attempted
to rely on a radical break with the modernist movement of
times and peoples in the capitalist assembly line of consump-
tion and progress,61 the aggregator demonstrates that the late
59. On the contemporary and its precedents, see Richard Meyer,
What Was Contemporary Art? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013);
and idem, “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary, ’ ” October 130
(2009): 3–124. See also Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Julieta Aranda,
Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle, eds., What Is Contemporary
Art? (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010).
60. David Joselit, “On Aggregators,” October 146 (2013): 3–18,
at 8.
61. On the crucial critiques of postmodernism, see David Har-
vey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins
16    Gesta  v55n1, Spring 2016
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modern period is resolutely not postmodern but, rather, a re-
mediation of modernist methods of historical engagement.62
This explains why the double bind of historical amnesia and
the archival impulse could exist alongside each other, since
both attempted to remediate the same tenets of modernism’s
temporality through twinned structures that only reified this
very temporality by taking as a given what Elizabeth Freeman
has described as modernity’s chrononormativity.63
In a decisive reading of Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aes­
thetic Education of Man, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak utilizes
Schiller’s notion of “play” (Spieltrieb) to allow the subject to
shuttle between contradictory states of being, primarily those
of rational and emotional behavior.64 Spivak sees an aesthetic
education as enabling one to play between the binaries of the
double binds inherent in contemporary systems of late capi-
talism and globalization. Not coincidentally, it is necessary
to note that Schiller’s own work is premised on the idea that
the experience of freedom emerges from an experience of
beauty that results precisely from one’s aesthetic sensibilities.
Spivak’s goal, however, is to sabotage Schiller by modulating
the experience of beauty under the rubrics of aesthetic af-
fect and phenomenology, sites that in themselves cannot be
globalized. For Spivak, the aesthetic education shifts the ba-
nalities of an ethical defense of beauty on to phenomenology,
which expands the horizon of play’s operative workings in
and about the double bind. Consequently, she concludes that,
in light of contemporary globalization, the inclusive view of
cultural studies, postcolonial critiques of ethnocentrisms, and
subsequent expansions of the canon are all valid methodolo-
gies today. On their own they are not attuned to the needs of a
world driven by globalization’s instantaneity and contempora-
neity, however. The latter requires a level playing field where all
things in a sense become modern. As such, Spivak’s concerns
echo my own dissatisfaction with Belting’s methods of canon
expansion and disciplinary critique, while also providing the
concept of play as an operative agent in the resolution and
rehabilitation of the work done by Belting and his followers.
A condition of contemporaneity—a flat temporality across
which linear and lateral moves can be undertaken simulta­
of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 3–120; and Fredric
Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 1–54.
62. On the temporality of capital and modernism, see Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2008), 47–71.
63. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer
Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–19.
64. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the
Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2012), 1–34.
neously—therefore outplays the paradigm of amnesia/history
or Art/cult image. That is to say, contemporaneity subverts
the temporal double bind of modernism’s and late modern-
ism’s strategies through the tactic of colliding time together
in the event of synchronicity. I propose that in order to undo
Belting’s double binds, avoid their implicit bad faith, and
enact a self-possessed program that reflects contemporary
trends in the field and in our lives, all that is necessary is to
seize contemporaneity as method: to experiment with tempo-
rally oriented methods derived from our own lived realities
and that seek to foster what Manuel De Landa has referred to
as a “flat ontology,” where all forms of being exist as equals.65
Exit the historian as accumulator, enter the historian as aggre-
gator: the producer of collisions, events, and slashes that con-
dense space-time into a dense singularity of peoples, times,
and places in a present.
Nevertheless, the aggregator function must be distanced
from mere additive structures of methodological pastiche and
revival that situate themselves as an avant-garde. There has
been a tendency in recent art historical discourse to claim re-
course to distant methodological sources and writers as a way
of constructing seemingly new methodological spaces, from
the Vienna School to Heinrich Wölfflin. While my call for
spaces of encounter might seem to harken back to the work
of a figure such as Aby Warburg, it is not necessary to resort
to such methodological primitivisms that seek to take an out-
dated source from a now distant and august past and then
alchemically attempt to transform and elevate contemporary
work with its revival. Operating in the contemporary means
accepting the lineages of our thoughts and theories and re-
sponsibly taking on the weight of their traditions and ethi-
cal implications. If one were to accept the myth of an end to
an art history, one would need to postulate a postapocalyptic
future that takes advantage of that end, not take a single or
unique fragment from that past as a prosthetic and place it ad
hoc as an appendage to a historical project that has run out
65. Manuel De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy
(New York: Continuum, 2002), 41. See also Ian Bogost, Alien Phe-
nomenology, Or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2012), 11–22; and Levi R. Bryant, The
Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press,
2011).
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of steam, in the hope of extending its life. To become an ag-
gregator it is necessary to be a conscientious observer of the
contemporary, filtering, compiling, and composing a present
with an eye on the future. The death of art history cannot be
remedied through séances and resurrections.
In keeping with these goals, I wish to posit this article as
being set in 1990, as an imagined encounter with Hans Belt­­
ing twenty-five (or so) years ago, yet one happening in the
present today—a triangulation of a medieval object, a histo-
riographic past, and a discursive present. This methodology
of a setting in time is not a revivalist or revisionist gesture
but, rather, a reparative temporal tense for engaging with past
sources that still exert their weight on our present, yet also
bear within their logics incongruous and at times unethical
projects that must be remediated before they can be respon-
sibly reintegrated into our present work. As such, this essay
picks up at a moment of radical change in the humanities at
large and of the validation of the alleged “era before art” in me-
dieval art history. Not surprisingly, the field has now returned
to that time in its methods and investigations. By distancing
itself from a history of art, Belting’s thesis unintentionally
sep­arated medieval art from the discipline of the history of
art with the goal of creating an emancipatory utopia. Here
I have chosen, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, to return to this
mythical point of origin as a way of forging another path
forward. To move past this impasse, I would urge us always to
consider our present first and then—and only then—attempt
to provide answers and arguments for the artworks we study
(the artwork defined here as anything studied by an art his-
torian, thus anything that can be tautologically defined as art,
encompassing all forms of objects). The goal is to harness the
power of the encounter itself that initiates our scholarship
as the driving methodological force, acknowledging that our
knowledge production is present-oriented and made for our
peers instead of for those lost, imagined communities that we
study. Yet we must always remember that our methods are
monads. They bear, bundled up within themselves, the entire
logic of the episteme from which they came. Logics endure
and over time manifest themselves in the systems they oc-
cupy. If the episteme of our methods is contaminated, then
they too will quietly and insidiously enact the violence of the
approaches from which they came, no matter how innocuous
we might think their immediate implications to be.
Belting’s Likeness and Presence at 25   17