Michel Foucault’s understanding of painting oriented him and his readers to an alternative history of art through a means or an approach well known to philosophers and literary critics, that of irony. A close reading of the first chapter of The Order of Things shows that Foucault rejected the traditional interpretations of art history generated by a focus on the intentions of the individual artist, the identification of the subjects portrayed, and the expectations of a genre, relying instead on a (...) synthesis of the approaches to painting given by Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan, which converged with his ironic approach. (shrink)

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. (shrink)