In this book, I take Dante and Dante Gabriel Rossetti as two interdependent intellectual experiences that – in different times and contexts – face and problematize the problem of rendering, by visual means, something that eschews mimetic strategies of representation: the divine beauty of the angel-like woman in the case of Dante – a theological problem, therefore, connected to the sacred status of the image in medieval debates on iconolatry; and the depiction of the painter’s own interiority in that of Rossetti, taking place in a secularized age that witnesses the dethronement of the Ego from “its own house” (as per Freud’s famous expression) and the increasing awareness of the existence of a realm, inaccessible to diurnal logic, which was later to be labelled as the ‘unconscious’.
Both authors, from their own points of view, explore the limits of the tensile relationship between word and image without fully solving it, and therefore multiplying ambiguity. Hence my choice to speak of ‘imaginary’, a term by which I do not only mean to make reference to the ‘imaginary portrait’ genre, but also to exploit in its psychoanalytic – i.e. Lacanian – nuances. The Imaginary, for Jacques Lacan, does never merely denote what is ‘fictive’ as opposed to what is ‘true’. As the domain of illusion – which does not, however, coincide with the “illusory,” “insofar as the latter term implies something unnecessary and inconsequential” –, the Imaginary encompasses the broad spectrum of all that possesses a strong visual quality and cannot consequently be fully reduced to the verbal sphere, including images, dreams, mirror reflections, and fantasies: the profound “work of figurability,” in other words, characterizing the unconscious, which “gives to dreams, symptoms, and phantasms” – as Georges Didi-Huberman writes – “their paradoxical visual quality, their dissemblant semblances, […] touched by the great wind of the Unheimliche.”
In particular, for Lacan, the Imaginary plays a central role in the so called ‘mirror stage’, that is to say in the construction of subjectivity by means of self-identification with the subject’s specular image. As such, the Imaginary encompasses the illusions “of wholeness, synthesis, autonomy, duality and, above all, similarity” that are constitutive of the mirroring process; and, at the same time, it is the site of the radical alienation – one of the terms by which Lacan reformulates the Freudian notion of the ‘uncanny’ (das Unheimliche) – arising from doubling and dissociation. From this viewpoint, the Lacanian Imaginary is a powerful instrument for understanding the medieval theory of love, whose foundational myths – as Giorgio Agamben has reconstructed – are Narcissus and Pygmalion: as we will see more closely throughout the book, falling in love, for medieval medicine (and poetry), means to develop a burning passion for an image that is carved in the lover’s heart, so that articulating a lover’s discourse always means addressing an externalized simulacrum of the poet’s own interiority. Not incidentally, the Lacanian Imaginary “is manifested above all on the sexual plane, in such forms as sexual display and courtship rituals”: and, in the realm of the Imaginary, “the dual relationship between the ego and the counterpart is fundamentally narcissistic,” so that narcissism can be seen as “another characteristic of the imaginary order.”
First and foremost, as Lacan repeatedly makes clear, the Imaginary is not a self-sustaining realm, but is always structured in the symbolic order – that is to say, in the sphere of language. In other words, the Imaginary is irreducible to verbal signification, but nonetheless can only be conceptualized – even if as something that remains perennially ungraspable, a quintessential object of loss – by linguistic means. This is why, for Lacan, the task of psychoanalysis is ultimately to “transfor[m] the images into words, just as Freud treats the dream as a rebus”; and this is why – if we move from the psychoanalytic to the literary discourse – the ‘imaginary portrait’ genre does not only pose the image/word relationship in the terms of a dichotomy between true and fictive, but rather reveals itself as a powerful way of exploring the interrelation between literature and the visual arts. The imaginary portrait – Dante’s sketched angel, the paintings evoked in Rossetti’s narratives, the portrait of Willie Hughes – is not (only) a non-existent artwork: it is an artwork whose sphere of existence lies elsewhere, in the words that allude to, and incessantly circumscribe, its inexpressible quality. In the same way, thinking of Beatrice as of an ‘imaginary Lady’ enables us to move beyond the outworn debate about her actual existence, rather focusing on her quiddity, of a miracle made into flesh, that the poetic word seeks incessantly to grasp. Seen from this angle, the intergenerational dialogue between Dante and Rossetti – and between the thirteenth and the nineteenth centuries, literature and the visual arts, Italy and England – takes place within a deeply inter-medial short-circuit, oscillating between representation and its denial, mimesis and difference, concealment and performance.
(excerpted from the introduction)
