How to interpret that they are Three witches, as a drawing that is completely adapted to female pleasure, completely preoccupied with the focus on feminine sexual essence and energy, yet (over)directed to the specifically indicated male, priestly address that stands at the bottom, right next to the monogram, below the protagonists who, however, are not literally touched by it: The Cor Capen · a good Jar (Pop, happy new year.). The scene in which the witches are unwaveringly surrendered to their own needs and urges, to their own experience, possesses at best only dubious 'usefulness' for the male observer whose exploitative appropriation is limited, although the potential for voyeuristic 'transparency' seems to be at its highest point, since the protagonists pay no attention to external usurpation, since they are - both visually and 'narratively' - focused only on themselves: without the usual gratification, balding He only finds his own satisfaction - as a witty addressee, as a master of irony, even when it is directed at the subject - in being cynically addressed as a (clergyman) person who is sexually inactive, vowed to celibacy.
Thus, the author sends his letter to a destination that will not be able to fully '(mis)use' the sexual content of the scene, even if the female is replaced by male masturbation. Unlike the view within the picture - each of the witches intensely observes her own sex - which unquestioningly (that is, without question, without the need for subsequent or additional reference to the already completed text) sees the ineffable agent of the female body, the male gaze, coming from the vandiegetic sphere, encounters constant frustration, liminal deprivation, libidinal obstacle, even though the female body seems available in nudity. In a way, the voyeuristic gaze - hence the constant need to get closer to the phantasmatic canvas, even when it is more justified, in considering the whole, to take a step or two back - is always already short-sighted, myopically deprived: Baldung's magisterial 'postcard' - the sexual field is compulsively sightseeing - which, in order to fulfill (New Year's) wishes, reconstructs the very mechanism of description, which rests on a structural void in perspectival spatiality, that is, on a crucial, yet absent signifier.
The system of visual representation in Renaissance painting rests on this lack of the signifier as the lack of the (female) object. The lack as a traumatic 'residue' of the Real must be stated, lest it be fetishistically refuted and overcome. That is why Three witches, in fact, Baldung's ultimate metapoetic and metapictorial essay that focuses on the lost object that is beyond the domain of the representational powers of painting as a dispositif that regulates the scopic regime, even after the discovery of a new libidinal world that is caused by the dialectical dynamics between prohibition and desire. No matter how much language - as a symbolic network in which all things should be referentially connected, that is, textually u-tied - strove for 'penetration' (evidenced by the 'raised' monogram where the initials HBG are placed vertically), one the area remains obscure or inaccessible to the Illumination (or Enlightenment, which would come two centuries later). This is precisely because, preserving an autonomy that almost no one talked about, Baldung arches drawing dimension Three witches profiles as radical act female self-examination in which a man constitutionally cannot participate.
That the author's interest was precisely in this extremely important segment of painterly rhetoric, which faces numerous philosophical, aesthetic and eminently technical consequences of a situation where dilemmas related to the ambivalence of the incision, the inscription of sexual difference in the attempted enunciation, emphatically enter the scene (sexuality, in fact, once included in the sought-after scene, more often entails questions about what kako nego what is shown!), and not in some particularly virulent misogynistic 'sentimentality', is very instructively evidenced by two later works by Baldung, outside the witch cycle, which are now preserved only as copies in which - to make the point clearer - the missing element or referent from Three witches.
As their titles already say, Naked woman holding a mirror (1524) and Women's bathroom with mirror, in relation to Three witches where everything deliberate is left in the realm of sub-understanding, these works also include a cardinal visual mediator that institutionally ensures specularization, the doubling of an object that cannot be dislocated: the convex mirror as the foundation of female spectacularity. Baldung organizes the scene so that the woman observes her own reflection, first in the genital sphere, from an angle that the male observer cannot take: this image - 'produced' by the dark mirror - returns exclusively to her, making not only the female body but also the enigma about it erotically conditioned. Vertical habitus Naked woman dramatizes a setting where the mirror, between her strong thighs, serves to show the 'origin' of female fascination, the transition of inner sensation into outer sensationalism: identification as autoerotic observation. In Women's bathroom with mirror, however, Baldung precisely captures the fascinating, crucial moment when belief should pass into cognition, that is, when the fetishistic vision, which belongs to the domain of male inscription, will be abolished in the sudden promotion of a different dawn that cannot be adequately reproduced or appropriated, which the author - under the very plausible assumption that the copy faithfully follows the original idea and design - boldly confirms by introducing a completely separate figure of a female voyeur: an older, also naked woman with a brimless hat - who stands in perfect parallel with the petrified warrior in the relief, symbolically dead male authority - mysteriously witnesses the autonomous female scene, suggesting the recognition of alternative pleasure. This means that in the recorded moment - the image acquires its crucial semantic quality by a strategic decision when that's right the action will be interrupted, and thus frozen forever - Women's bathroom with mirror it functions as a staging of a fetishistic catechism before the very intrusion of the real in the form of an unrepresentable sexual object.
Namely, the image is dominated by the aestheticization of women's hair, as a permitted, indeed recommended libidinal arrangement, a stylization that can divert attention from erotic mimesis, but with an inevitable 'lowering' of focus: the blonde hair (which has not yet been 'arranged' into a recognizable hairstyle, half down/down, half up) of the woman on the left, the girl's hair spread out on the right, which, at the same time, is being brushed with a brush is grooming her pubic hair (similar brushes in earlier scenes with witches, therefore, now show that they are actually intended for their pleasure, not magical rituals), all this confirms that the most classic aesthetic choice is at work, while tearing the hair of a gray-haired old woman with large scissors and literally reminds us that the mobilization of the fetishistic manuscript is always against the background of castration anxiety. But Baldung here also goes over of the captured scene, in order to underline the author's insight once again: it is enough that, in the next moment, which is strongly implied, the girl comes a little closer, and the blonde steps over with her already raised right leg - the painter not only presents the movement, but also its intention - so that the lying mirror again becomes the very center of events and reflection: that the two of them, in the 'swollen', distorted surface of the convex mirror, see the same thing that Naked woman: a fragmentary, metonymic, vaginal reflection of what cannot (still) be represented.
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