A Feminist Picture Atlas: Images of Lactation in Medieval and Early Modern Art

Aby Warburg's (1866–1929) concept of Nachleben, the survival or afterlife of images, has recently been reactivated to invigorate theoretical approaches to the history of art, or, better, the study of visual culture. Warburg's parallel concept of Pathosformeln [pathos formula], has, likewise, enjoyed a "renaissance" of sorts. In contrast to predecessors such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68), who conceived of the systematic study of ancient Greek statuary as a way of mourning its loss, and to his followers Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) and Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001), who devised a neat and supposedly unambiguous method for decoding Renaissance art, Warburg cherished the art object as anthropological trace, capable of harboring, communicating, and re-instantiating an assemblage of meanings and histories that would otherwise be lost.¹ Warburg drew on ancient and Renaissance art, but also on contemporary Native American ritual, collecting visual evidence for a history of the expression of human emotions.² I propose to adapt Warburg's concept of pathos formula to investigate the afterlife of images of lactation in medieval and early modern visual culture, accompanied by an analysis of ancient precursors, forays into contemporary re-instantiations, and investigations of cross-cultural parallels. The purpose of my research is to analyze reoccurrences of the gesture or pathos formula of offering the breast and to demonstrate how the lactating breast functions as a sign of desire in different iconographic contexts, building on prior work by feminist art historians.³ I hope to contribute to the ongoing project of correcting Freud's and Lacan's ahistorical privileging of the phallus as universal signifier, and to revise our understanding of the early modern maternal body as a site of queer and utopian longing. Medieval and early modern images of milk-sharing subvert hegemonic fictions of patriarchal kinship and indicate alternative forms of belonging based on care. At the same time, the racialized context in which allegories of Charity—depicted as a "humbly" breastfeeding woman—were perverted to denote Native Americans' and Africans' proximity to the animal world reveals the multiplicity of adaptations of lactation imagery and the need for a differentiated, decolonizing analysis.⁴ While harboring the promise of anti-patriarchal utopias, images of breastfeeding women were also appropriated to express patriarchy's most flagrant hierarchies and exclusions.

Griselda Pollock stands out among art historians who approach Warburg's agenda from a feminist, gendered perspective. In 2007, she proposed a "virtual feminist museum" inspired by Aby Warburg's picture atlas and Bracha Ettinger's theory of the "matrixial."⁵ In her article "What the Graces Made Me Do," Pollock explains that Warburg's assemblage of photos "was aimed at producing a deeper, pictorial unconscious, a memory formation of deep emotions that were held in recurring patterns, gestures, and forms in images that survived across the differences of time and space."⁶ I propose to realize Pollock's idea of a virtual feminist museum, assembling a "Feminist Picture Atlas" à la Warburg's Mnemosyne, with the aim of analyzing the gesture of offering the breast across a multiplicity of iconographies while paying attention to the many resistances, recursions, and relays of iconographic cognition that Whitney Davis posits in his critique of Erwin Panofsky.⁷ Such a focus implies an immediately subversive perspective, as the lactating breast emerges as the site where maternal power is eroticized, Mary's divine fluids grace the beholder, the fiction of patriarchal blood is deconstructed, and different species create bonds of kinship.

If a gesture's most fertile and resilient afterlife points to its prior "tragic" attempt at repression, as George Didi-Huberman postulates, the lactating breast stands out, arguably, as the quintessential pathos formula.⁸ The dripping nipple is an abject and sacred site where the body's inside meets its outside, functioning as a proverbial locus of transgression, but it also denotes regression, proposing a retreat from language and its "phallogocentric" signifying scene. It conjures up an imaginary that defies the differentiation, hierarchies, and forms of exclusion that the "nom/non du père" [the name and the "no," or prohibition...