Carl Theodor Dreyer's Gertrud: The Moving Word

Is Dreyer quoting Botticelli?

48 Is Dreyer quoting Botticelli? We find that Dreyer has as an iconographical precursor in his encounter with Nastagio no less an artist than Botticelli, who made in 1484 a series of paintings depicting Nastagio’s story and spectacle—a series of paintings made not as individual canvases, but, appropriately, as panels meant as wedding gifts to adorn the home of a newlywed couple, akin to the paintings often made on the sides of the traditional Venetian wedding casket (figs. 5 through 8). Here again, the occasion as well as the subject is marriage, and more particularly the relation between marriage, violence, and spectacle. The four panels tell their story in chronological order. In the first panel, Nastagio sees the lady being chased by the knight on horseback and his dogs. In the next panel, the knight disembowels her as Nastagio stands watching in horror. In the next panel, the scene is replayed for the assembled banquet guests. And, in the final panel, Nastagio is married. Notably, within each of the first two panels, multiple moments in the narrative are depicted within a rigorously organized perspectival space—a wonderful example of what Lew Andrews has called “continuous narrative” in his remarkable Story and Space in Renaissance Art. While the space depicted is a single, unified field, it is inhabited by multiple moments in the story. In the first panel, for example, Nastagio appears twice, moving through the woods, from left to right, and again, “later,” practically stabbing the fleeing woman as  For an account of some of the social conditions that caused such anti-feminist representations to flourish in the wake of Boccaccio’s writings, see Ellen Callman’s “The Growing Threat to Marital Bliss as Seen in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Paintings,” Studies in Iconography 5 (1979): 73–92.  Lew Andrews, Story and Space in Renaissance Art: The Rebirth of Continuous Narrative (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1998). Thanks to Anne Friedberg for this reference. she rushes from right to left. In the next panel, as she lies prostrate in the foreground , her entrapment is again depicted, in a kind of flashback, in the background , as she moves from left to right. Boccaccio’s narrative, as a temporal unfolding, envisions the perspectivally organized space as containing multiple narrative instances; the story does not simply bridge our movement from one panel to the next, as if, in a proto-cinematic montage, Botticelli were editing his images by linking scene to scene. For, especially in the first two panels, the pictorial space is itself broken up by the action of the story depicted within it. Andrews argues convincingly that the depiction of such multiple narrative moments within a single space is not some medieval holdover from preperspectival pictorial practices. Instead, he shows that our current thinking about perspectival representation is shaped by later developments, such as instantaneous 5 The source: Nastagio’s forest. Sandro Botticelli, Story of Nastagio degli Onesti (first panel), Museo del Prado, Madrid. Reprinted by permission from Erich Lessing, Art Resource, New York. photography, which have led us to conflate single-point perspective with the depiction of single instants. Quattrocento artists and audiences, however, had no such expectations, and easily accepted the depiction of multiple narrative moments within single frames. But looking again at the progress of the panels, we do see a distinct movement toward a more emphatically perspectival and unified depicted space, as the actions become more theatrically staged and ritualized—and reduced, indeed, to single “moments” viewable through a kind of proscenium theatrical fourth wall. From panel one to two we note an increased emphasis on the vanishing point reinforced by the placement of the (trimmed) tree trunks to frame the action within the panel’s frame. In panel three, depicting the banquet in the woods, we see in the foreground that the trees have actually been chopped 6 One space, many moments. Sandro Botticelli, Story of Nastagio degli Onesti (second panel), Museo del Prado, Madrid. Reprinted by permission from Erich Lessing, Art Resource, New York. down to better our view of the action. And, in the final panel, Botticelli moves the action to a hall or loggia, whose architecture reinforces a rigorous perspectival centering, and where the only remnants of the forest are the decorative wreaths that adorn the pillars. Civilization replaces nature; marriage orders and structures the sexualized violence of the wilds. Significantly, the theatrical architecture of the proscenium itself has now taken...