The Performing Image, or How the Visual Dimension is Enacted by Pictures

This essay discusses the dimension of the visual in terms of its insight into how the human predisposition to react in a sensible, emotional and pre-cultural way to the natural and historical world is only ever wholly actualized if our experience of it is arti)cially shaped. Painted images force us to investigate this dimension, since they function both as optical devices and as iconic artefacts. A case study drawn from vision paintings – Bellini’s St Francis – demonstrates how visibility is necessary but not su*cient for visuality. The picture enacts the response of its viewer by stimulating him or her to turn towards or even to touch what is virtually at hand and to enter into the space depicted on the canvas even if he or she knows the attempt will fail. Finally, our understanding of the visual dimension emerges from the dialectic between the ‘representational capacity’ of the image with respect to the absent bodies recalled within the frame of the painting, and its ‘presentational power’ with respect to their aesthetic qualities. The contributions of visual studies, phenomenology and the neurosciences provide the explanation for this dialectic, since all of these )elds conceive of the act of seeing as an embodied experience: sight is not merely the sense of the image but also encompasses the sense of the metamorphosis that the image engenders in its beholder.