The Deluge, the Plague--Paolo Uccello

In The Deluge, The Plague, Paolo Uccello's great fresco becomes the site for Jean Louis Schefer's rich investigation of the ways a viewer is impelled to read historical paintings. In this essay first published in France in 1976, Europe's leading cultural critic offers reflections on the condition of memory and images in the Florentine Renaissance; the relation of perspective to the representation of the body in space and time; the profanation of the Eucharist and thus of images and law; the investment of language into the material of painting; and the shapes that defy figuration in Western traditions of painting. Uccello's account of the Deluge can be read not only for its citations of classical and Renaissance texts but also for its anticipation of the visions of Georges Bataille, silent film, and Antonin Artaud. Schefer brilliantly demonstrates that Uccello's images and texts are a fragment of Western civilization's history of memory: the book offers an analysis of a painting as it performs a psychoanalysis of our experience of the collective past. In contrast to art history, in which a painting or an object is reconstructed and situated in the complexity of its past, Schefer's essay is a speculation on the ways we use fragments and images to create a sense of time and space in our cultural productions. Readers of literature, painting, and contemporary theory, historians of art and culture, and students of the Renaissance will all appreciate Schefer's imaginative reading of Uccello's art.