A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting (review)

No one can write philosophy-imbued history like the French. As it is sometimes a chore to read for non-native speakers, a translation of such work is always appreciated. The translation of the Origin of Perspective made Hubert Damisch's challenging thought available to a wider audience, and now Damisch's even earlier Théorie du /nuage/, published in 1972, is also available. Wearing his structural-semiotic methodology on his sleeve, Damisch seeks simply to understand the sign-quality of the cloud, which he holds between slashes to remind the reader that clouds per se are not his interest. His idea is that the cloud exists in Western painting as a complement to the terrestrial reality ordered via perspective. One needs the other to have a full, oppositional meaning.

In a discussion ranging from painting to theology, theater and symbology, Damisch shows how the opposition of celestial-terrestrial is indeed deep. Even when the imagery for the clouds beneath Mantegna's Christ in His Ascension in the Uffizi is derived from the roughly suggestive props of a local sacra conversazione, the clouds serve as the means to stake out the alternative space of Christ as against the world below. Perspective, as comprised by lines, and clouds, which resist delineation, mark out two graphic procedures for signifying different realms. The perspective helps build the storia while the cloud suggests a space where stories do not unfold.

Damisch presents a cogent case for the cloud as representing alterity for Renaissance and Baroque painting. The realism of perspective is not pure reference. It enters into a semiotic system with the cloud and takes on meaning as non-celestial, while the cloud takes on meaning as non-terrestrial. Damisch's reminder that clouds and other representational objects are signs in a representational order is a refreshing one and leads one to bring the discussion of naturalism in early modern painting to a more sophisticated level.

It is inevitable that after 30 years many of Damisch's references are a bit dated. He relies on many older authors to build his case, and we cannot fault him for not knowing recent work by John Shearman on clouds and dome imagery. The traditional reader of art history may be turned off by several errors in names and places and chalk it up to the overall speculative nature of Damisch's efforts. But this would be a mistake, as he is interested precisely in the system and not in the details.

Reading Damisch's well-thought-out ideas, it is clear that there is little truth to the occasionally stated idea that Panofsky's iconology brought semiotics into art history. For Panofsky, only the fixed order of antique symbols provides a pull on later use of the same symbols. To be semiotic, however, it is only important that the signs interact in their own order. In this sense, art history has not witnessed its semiotic revolution. Structuralism was one of the most promising social scientific methodologies of the past and certainly ought to have had its insights played out better in art history. Equally striking, however, is Damisch's dogged explanatory attitude. In contrast to the few keepers of semiotics' flame in contemporary art history, Damisch really wants to get down to business. Perhaps until the publication of The Origin of Perspective and Theory of /Cloud/ we did not know quite how to do this. Now we cannot say we have an excuse.