NEITHER HERE NOR ELSEWHERE: DISPLACEMENT DEVICES IN REPRESENTING THE SUPERNATURAL

How might the supernatural be represented in religious paintings that imply continuity between the virtual space of painting and the real space of the beholder? Such an implied continuity might be thought to threaten a necessary distance demanded of religious works. This article examines how a number of Italian paintings employ strategies for representing the supernatural through displacement devices that create a ‘gap’ within perception – an inviolable space that is implied as being outside normal spatiotemporal relations. The contention is that these distancing devices are dependent on an imagined spatial proximity that is established but then broken. They exploit inherent ambiguities as to where a painting is relative to its beholder, by means of withholding both perspectival distance and positional cues for a discrete section of the work.

"human" terms'. 2 Cloud is used as a signifying element within a pictorial structure that is characterized by a shallowness of space -what Erwin Panofsky refers to as an aggregate space. 3 It is the signifying role of cloud that establishes the separation of the supernatural and the mundane realms. Given that the viewer's position remains largely undefined, this separation does not yet bear upon the beholder's implied relationship to the virtual space of the painting. Damisch argues: 'From the motif (of cloud denoted by a signifier made "in its image") one moves, again with no break in continuity, to the theme (the miraculous vision, the opening up to divine space).' 4 As with Giotto's Ascension (c. 1305-10), which forms part of the fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel in Padua, it is the motif of cloud that here resolves the essentially twodimensional division of the picture into different realms. The integration of the supernatural element into a shallow pictorial space is thus realized primarily by symbolic means. But perspectival representation introduces its own difficulties with respect to depicting the supernatural.
As Rona Goffen argues, 'Naturalism or Realism is not necessarily suited to the supernatural themes of Christian art'. 5 With the shift from a late medieval aggregate space to the 'systematic' space of perspective, painters faced a real problem in how the supernatural might be plausibly depicted within the latter's unified spatial logic. It is a logic that at least with some works includes the implied location of an implicit viewer relative to the pictorial space. While such positioning is a factor with some late Giotto works, the viewer is not located with any kind of precision. But for in situ perspectival works seeking to establish a spatial continuity between real and fictive space, the presence of the implicit beholder fundamentally alters how the miraculous might be represented within such an implied continuum and spatial proximity.

II
Any abandonment of the beholder's externality is dependent upon a kind of imaginative engagement I shall loosely term, after Maurice Merleau-Ponty, seeing-with: a seeing according to the painting. 8 This is a pictorial seeing ancillary to any perceived resemblance of content, and is subject to the will (that is, a use to which we put pictures), where any subsequent propositional imagining of repertoire is itself founded upon the work structuring an imagined face-to-face encounter, an imagining of the beholder's physical presence in relation to the virtual space of the picture. 9 I argue that the vehicle of such imagining is a form of 'spatial' mental imagery, where imagined representational distances are integrated with, and penetrate, an occurrent perception of pictorial content.
With such 'spatial' imagery the perceived shape and colour properties of pictorial objects are bound (or anchored) to our sense of extrapersonal space using depth and positional cues found within the painting. We imaginatively realign our frame of reference to that of the painting. There is a functional separation in how we process 'what' the picture represents and 'where' such content is experienced as being situated, a separation that is consistent with the functional dichotomy between the ventral and dorsal pathways of the brain, which in turn process object and spatial properties.
The structuring of such an imaginative encounter is a prerequisite for overcoming (or problematizing or both of them) the extraneousness of the viewer to the virtual world of the painting. The paintings I draw upon in this essay constitute specific examples of the kind of engagement afforded by such imagining, in that the distancing devices they use in turn depend not only on an implied proximity, but importantly also on the potential for using inherent spatial ambiguities in pictorial seeing to problematize the location of discrete sections of the painting. space that abandons architectural definition and perspectival representation.
There is a radical asymmetry between the fictive and viewing space, although the work still orientates itself towards an 'instinctive' viewpoint, a position that John Shearman observes is 'at the bottom of the steps' that cross the nave just prior to the western supporting arch. 13 The threshold between realms is seen as one that calls into question the very reality of the supporting architecture. And yet the experience of the work draws upon the very architecture it seeks to negate, an architecture that might be said to constitute the work's bounding frame. The viewer is situated by the processional demands of the physical building, and the painting draws this religious architecture into its content. As such, I believe it is a mistake to assume that Correggio's intent is purely, or even primarily one of illusion; rather, while undoubtedly using illusory devices, such paintings draw upon the imaginative consent of the viewer (in that we enter into the imaginative game they propose), whereby the spatial schemata are allied to the works' religious content. This is illustrated by Correggio's The Vision of Saint John ( belying the notion of a work that is simply to be experienced as a trompe l'oeil.

IV
If, as Damisch suggests, cloud remains 'a key term in the figurative vocabulary of Correggio' , then it is a theme that, 'contradicts the very idea of outline and delineation and through its relative insubstantiality constitutes a negation of the solidity, permanence, and identity that define shape'. 15 Yet while the signalling role of cloud is retained, I would argue that the spatial experience of Correggio's ceiling paintings is dependent upon situating a spectator within an architectural context that frames the fictitious celestial space. While cloud functions as the very antithesis of perspectival construction, the effect follows from Correggio's integration of the threshold between realms into both host architecture and fictional space, into the painting's inner and outer apparatus.
This is consistent with the type of relationship that is afforded by works implying an external spectator as part of their content. This imaginative engagement, which draws in the spectator's experience of the surrounding architecture, is key to the emotional effect of the dramatic rupture of such a situated relationship that the fictitious opening onto the celestial realm represents. This is not the mere 'reading' of signs, but a dynamic interaction between fictional space, host architecture, and an embodied viewer. Ibid., 183-84. 15 Damisch, Theory of /Cloud/, 15. 16 The fresco was detached and relocated to another part of the church in the nineteenth century, but subsequently reinstalled to its original position in 1954. 17 Sandström, Levels of Unreality, 30.
If the religious representation 'behind' the picture surface is itself differentiated from the viewer's reality, the Trinity (which exists outside time) involves a further ambiguity as to its placement in space, and conforms to a viewing position It is only by integrating the work's painted frame into its architectural context, and into both its inner and outer apparatus, that the inherent difficulty in saying 'where the painting is' can be applied to a discrete fragment of the painting associated with the Trinity. This ambiguity exploits an anomaly of perspective: that while it can locate with precision an object in pictorial space, it can also withhold the necessary cues required to reconstruct this position.
(We have already noted this in relation to Bellini's Resurrection.) This is why attempts to reconstruct the space of Trinity miss the point. As Goffen notes: 'Certainly, this spatial imprecision is purposeful, and its purpose is to place the Trinity beyond spatial limits and constraints, literally immeasurable, ultimately and profoundly mysterious.' 21 It is therefore no coincidence that Trinity occludes its horizon. It is the deliberate withholding of the vital information necessary to locate the Trinity in space, combined with the insistent frontal depiction of Christ and God, that introduces the required ambiguity of positioning in space -a device entirely dependent upon an otherwise strongly felt spatial continuum. The Trinity thus occupies another realm, another reality: an experience that is particularly apparent from a kneeling position, from a height that (particularly for a contemporary viewer) removes us from our normal spatial relation to painting.
In contrast to the use of cloud as sign, this is a solution that uses means entirely internal to the system of perspective in order to depict states beyond perspectival means of representation. As a break from the so-called 'mathematical space' of perspective (and yet not inconsistent with its internal logic), it constitutes a spatial equivalent to the role Damisch argues cloud plays, as perspective's 'necessary counterpart'. A discrete space is opened up within the painting, a visionary 'gap' in reality (the 'unrepresentable'). For its effect, such a displacement is dependent on the implication of an inviolable, sacred or dreamlike space from which we are excluded, both spatially and temporally. This, in turn, is founded upon the kind of situated relationship and implied continuity provided by aligning our own sense of extrapersonal space with that of the painting. In other words, such a spatial displacement is predicated upon the imaginative (rather than illusory) engagement of an external beholder, an embodied presence where the internal and external spectators fuse, blurring the boundaries between real and fictive, inner and outer reality. If this situating of a viewer is largely achieved through a work's framing, combined with perspective, then the subsequent spatial ambiguity follows from the concealment of the very means by which perspectival depth is implied, and by a corresponding rupture between such a displaced space and the work's bounding frame. upon the viewer, however, fundamentally differ. While the former requires our imaginative engagement, the latter is 'read' as sign.

VII
To summarize, the works I have been considering incorporate a distancing or displacement device in order to depict the supernatural within the unified logic of perspectival space. These devices are features of works that otherwise situate a viewer, where the architectural surrounding of the painting is imaginatively drawn into a direct relationship with the virtual space of the painting by integrating the frame into both the figurative space and architecture. Here the implicit and external beholders might be said to fuse in the resulting spatial continuum between fictive and real. But faced with a potential loss of necessary distance, the works also draw attention to the frame and picture surface as temporal and spatial markers, part of a work's inner and outer reality. The metaphysical divide between realms is allied to religious content. These works establish a further inviolability by opening up a 'gap' within perceptiona space that is implied as being outside normal spatiotemporal relations. This abandons perspectival representation; the latter creates a deliberately 'nonmathematical' placement of a figure (or figure group) within an otherwise 'rationally' constructed pictorial space.
The experiencing of these distancing devices is dependent upon a pictorial seeing supplemented by the imagination. An imaginative engagement is necessary precisely because the affective aspect of such a 'gap' in perception is dependent not upon the disinterested 'reading' of signs, but upon the implication of a spatial proximity that is felt, and a continuity that is then broken: a gap that is experienced rather than decoded as a sign. Moreover, this gap is experienced in a way that is constitutive of the work's meaning.
Seeing-with provides the necessary vivid experience of pictorial space on which such reciprocity depends. 27 Ken Wilder