The Enchanted Groom is the last gathering, the final invocation, the final listing in the painter's catalogue: what was invoked has now turned into what it only calls out, and so the author himself is - recalled. While in Wild horses the plot was still set in the atmosphere of a dark forest, which provided some form of escapism, in To the enchanted groom it largely takes place in the intimacy of the home: the author is at his most vulnerable unheimlich phenomenon. The painter is overcome in this enumeration that seems to turn against its creator: accepting the harshest consequences, reducing artistic calculations. balding is surrounded by the figures he exploited, the symbols he used, the metaphors he (mis)used. The mare at the stable door, whose wagging tail reveals a bodily opening that could be both vulva and anus, turns her demonic eye on the viewer who is unsure what kind of perversion is being enacted here or has already been interrupted: like her counterpart from the work Horse that ejaculates, she may have violently injured and tragically disabled the groom with her hind hooves. On the right, although old and with a withered left breast, the aggressive witch with the torch has probably done her maleficium Meanwhile, without providing any protection, the unicorn on the wall silently observes the evil deed: it is the coat of arms of the Baldung family, which was heraldically taken from the painter's hometown, so that emblematic confirms that in this setting, regardless of the prominent mark of recognition, the double-placed Name-of-the-Father is nevertheless suspended under the onslaught of vengeful female energy. The pitchforks under which the groom collapsed in the author's other horror scenes are always at the witches' disposal, but here they also emphasize the complete passivity, or rather the immobility, of the male body. The only object that has not previously been iconographically valorized is the scabbard that fell from the left hand, although it is in the preparatory drawing for The Enchanted Groom There stood an unusual hat or, at least, a very bulging convex mirror.
Under the influence of metaphorical chaining, the author's body lies radically shortened. The angle is precisely chosen so that the face of the bearded and mustachioed painter - another nod to Düreru! - remains in permanent ambiguity: a face that may or may not belong to the already aged Baldung, which is a clear warning that a self-portrait can never be fully trusted. But the indications are, at the same time, inexorable: at the same angle as the massive corpse, the material remains of an indomitable spirit, there is also a monogram, which, leaning back, imitates the position of the corpse in a vectorial manner. What a face cannot guarantee, perhaps a supporting sign can. Thus, the monogram - which is suitably shortened, becoming almost a citizen's card, a legal document in which there is no room for an artistic nickname (at the end of his career, the G, or Grien, is deleted) - is a double extension of the grave or, at least, an adequately placed tombstone: Baldung is outlined in both the corporal and the signifier volume. In the act after which the curtain falls, the exposed body is a laid body: a vital and poetic corpus, which truly brings an artistic opus to an end.
But this position of Baldung as a dead author is not only specially framed to indicate the bitter factography, the inevitable outcome of every confessional literature that the artist is in a hurry to write - a year before his actual death - since in every autobiography the last pages shaped by the all-encompassing phenomenology of Thanatos are always missing. Baldung, in fact, lowers his body into the mise-en-scène and in order to maintain the ultimate illusion, the last phantasmatic projection, the turn and the address to the viewer who looks up to notice in the horizontality of the corpse the significant and signifying 'unevenness', indeed 'protrusions'. The perspectival spatiality inscribes on the stored body three 'protruding' surfaces: in the mortal and dying linearity, what is 'upright' on the numb corporality are the rounded tips of the groom's shoes, his nose and - the central moment when the natural setting passes into an artificial reconstruction - the 'proud' codpiece which, despite the fact that the vaginal line in the middle of it is mentally associated with van Eyckov the stalk on Adam's crotch, offers a fetishistic delusion in reinstalling the phallus. Even in the death of the author, the phallic signifier remains: certainly as a phantasm, as a trompe l'œil, as the power of deception and the deception of power, as a representation, as a representational surplus, but still formal and formative.
Only at the very end, after having previously avoided it at all costs, does Baldung decide on a sudden procedure of identification. Abandoning, in the narrative's point, Adam as the referential support for the exploration of the utter sexual corruption of the human condition, Baldung, in a moment of terrible illumination or equally threatening obscurantism, makes a fatal configurational takeover. Namely, the reason for this operation is that identification, as in Dürer, does not take place at the highest, but at the lowest (existentially, sotiriologically, sexually) point: the protagonist as author in To the enchanted groom holds a very similar pose to Christ in the woodcut Lamentation, except that Christ's raised legs at the knees 'censorially' implied the presence of drapery that would cover the genital region, while in the artist's final work, naturalism was strategically replaced by imaginary and symbolic compensation. But Baldung, as a painter who obsessively varied the (i)stories of the Fall, did not want to prevent the application of the same repercussions to the very subject of enunciation, which is a fate that even some angels could not resist: The Enchanted Groom is a study of a fallen author.
Slavoj Žižek points to a fundamentally important discursive-historical implication, which plays a crucial role precisely in the field of art: 'The main characteristic of appropriate historical thought is not “mobilism” (the motif of fluidity or historical relativization of all forms of life), but the full acceptance of a certain impossibility: after a true historical turning point, you cannot simply go back in time, or continue as if nothing had happened - even if one tries, the same practice will take on a radically changed meaning'. What if this fundamental impossibility - in which the weight of historical progress is actually reflected both ontically and ontologically - does not apply only to Dürer, whose epochal role in any and all art history is undeniable, among other things because, due to the strength of the intervention of his painterly genius, the format of the self-portrait unachievable to return to a past, naive, or even uneducated time, but also for Baldung himself, after whom - in recognizing that the position of epigone does not suspend the competences of the artist who insists on the paradoxical foundations of the excess and lack of authorial structure in creative writing - in historical reconstruction it becomes unrealistic or, moreover, unrealistic ignorant intertextuality. In other words, after the creator The Enchanted Groom, even as a 'minor' artist, impossible is the ghostly and scandalous authorial signature in the economy of (dis)enchantment to be observed without internal deviations and transgressions: in the identity turbulence of the torn self in front of and within the image, the mannerism of Hans Baldung (Griena) becomes paradigmatic. Regeneration will stop at some point: civilization must accept its own demise or mortality as a frame of reference. With Baldung - and again, in a spectacular display of signifiers - the visual era of decadence begins.
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