After his artistic maturation, his departure from the Master's workshop and the emphasis on his own, independent poetics, Baldung's works always bear his monogram: within the diegetic space itself lies the painter's identity card, his own handwritten signature intended for all transactions that take place between the work and the world, the body and the letter, the object and the Law, narration and enunciation. This indisputable sign - the signifier that applies to all other signifiers, or the signifier to which all other signifiers can be reduced - is at the same time a recurrence, as well as an anticipation and the final product of the procedure undertaken. It does not arise in isolation, but is constantly present in it. manifests i looks his origin: the Name-Father, in the process mirroring, transforms into the Name-Author which, in the established intertextuality, necessarily assumes a fantasy or phantom status because, in Lacan's famous maxim that should apply to all artistic processes, 'truth has the structure of fiction'. As we have pointed out earlier, the subject subjected to representation also becomes - a representation, because the imaginary ingredient is inevitable in every construction of the self, inside and outside the proscenium.
Baldung's signature - the mark by which he establishes his inalienable ownership of his growing opus - arises in a paradoxical, yet developmental, relationship with Dürer, simultaneously revealing familiar a closeness to an unattainable paragon, and a desire to continue, even at the cost of mannerist 'deviation' and derogation, regardless of whether the end result ends in irony, copy or conceptual reevaluation. The drama of authorship that Baldung joins, tying himself into Dürer's powerful genealogy where decline, corruption and decadence must be accepted as a fatal but inevitable consequence, is nevertheless - in the newly established history of art as a fictional plot about a dramatic persona becoming a creative personality - a reaction to what is the inaugural text of the Northern Renaissance, brilliantly organized under the dominance of one name: Jan van Eyck.
Because, the entire van Eyck oeuvre is nothing other than: a captivating, devastating, redeeming, first and foremost constitutive promotion of the authorial sign in the medium of painting and thus the ultimate, irrefutable proof that the painting, transcending its own phenomenological background, refers to the founding creative act of its creator. Because, the painting always maintains its signatory, revealing the veil that was originally placed: the revelation of the Name-Author. In the mechanism of inscription, the world must be revealed in order for the author to appeared, marked his own presence in the text that beckons to be absorbed. The significance of this complex strategy gains additional importance precisely because van Eyck, realizing to unimaginable heights the potential of oil paints in an irresistible, challenging and provocative illusionistic description of the world where it obsessively and fetishistically doubles, sharpened to the extreme the difference between original and copy, idea and reality, which can only be overcome or reconciled by introducing the author as a place that guarantees truth beyond mimetic rules. Although the painting as a (precious) object is created within an elaborate scheme of direct ordering, a market in which patrons who determine all external factors (finances, choice of subject and format) have the main say, although its destination is to end up in public institutions or intimate private possessions, the painter, if they include the metatextual sphere of influence, still persists as the owner of what is depicted, leaving material and artistic traces of presence in the very process of production and expression: the author's sign is, in fact, a complaint, a symbolic return to the right to the owner.
The depth and breadth, the vertical and horizontal dimension of van Eyck's artistic inscription is monumental because already at the beginning of the Renaissance the author, or rather the Name-Author, appeared in all three of his manifestations, within the most subtle and determining interaction of the IRS triad. Van Eyck achieves this through complex procedures in which the image and the figure are combined, signing, writing and describing, with a dense network of signs, throughout his entire oeuvre, where various linguistic concretizations intersect in a knot - generating both text and texture -: script, motto, code, password, form. The spirit of the author is born in the image itself, but also outside it, on the margin, or frame, a frame that also defines the image as a critical limitation, but also as a space in which the artist - in something that should be just a void - manages to include his own name. On Self portrait from 1433, defining the author in his symbolic mandate, van Eyck, above the image that brings his physical appearance, inscribes a linguistically condensed code that functions not only for this, but for all his works: AΛΣ · IXH · XAN (ALS ICH CAN), As much as I can, or more precisely, As best I can.
The experience of painting gains the most reliable equation, which is the most concise personal statement that will be present in at least three more works, including a portrait of his wife. Margarete van Eyck (1439): the motto used instead of a signature represents a moment of crystallization and sublimation where existence is determined by means of poetic principles: the author is primarily, but also primarily, an aesthetic phenomenon. Fake an expression of modesty becomes that's right, a supreme testimony of prestige, while the use of Greek letters indicates that van Eyck's approach - at once mysterious and erudite - had already reached a magical identity formula that had been elevated to the level of an axiom. That some art historians, out of senseless caution, still refuse to confirm that this is a literal Self portrait, in fact, only confirms van Eyck's point: even though it is not, in conclusion, in the painting real the figure of the painter, certainly authentic did his hand. The author is someone who possesses his own language, and thus a universe based on the dominance of the signifier-master, where every analysis must ultimately return to him. Van Eyck, although he belongs entirely to the visual field and linguistic verification, emphasizes this supporting thesis also sonically: when his motto is spoken aloud, it also contains the painter's surname, which once again translates an arbitrary physical presence into a legitimate poetic (making, creating) being, symbolic affirmation.
The next dimension of the author's script is made known, or even more radically, made unknown, in imaginary order: the painter's technique, skill, craft, the language he uses, the language that is intended for a special, distinctive and decisive marking, also serves to make van Eyck announce precisely in the image it creates, as a reflection, as a conditional reflection, as a silhouette in an illuminated area, where the crucial thing happens Let there be light. without whom there is no scene as such, without whom there is no phenomenology of surface and illusion. The author is, therefore, a necessary iconic consequence of the mise-en-scène itself: for the artist who is perceptive, the painting becomes a mirror that reflects, first and foremost, its creator, who is caught in the act of creation. According to the new aesthetic rules advocated by van Eyck with an authority that no one has even attempted to challenge, for the representation to be adequate it must impregnate within itself an imaginary content in the form of the author who, in the act of inscription, takes shape in the scene he has decided to present. The projection of the author is a projection of desire and fear: regardless of whether it is a simple realistic scene or, in a religious sense, a transcendental one, the author's form will be found, even in the narrative spatiality, within the stylistic and semantic economy of the painting as an inevitable double that cannot be erased in the visual setting, since it rests on it, and even as trompe l'oeil. That's the van Eyck effect luminosity: Na Madoni canon Jorisa van der Paelea (1436), d sacra conversazione In the ambience, on the shield of Saint George in luxurious armor on which the light plays, there is also the figure of the artist himself, as he works in front of the easel and, certainly, plays the role of director, the one who arranges his own and other figures for the best result. in-print.
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