Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration.

Fra Angelico's mural paintings in the Dominican priory of San Marco in Florence are the subject of this study. Finding art history's traditional categories to be misleading, Didi-Huberman turns to semiotics as the conceptual tool that enables him "to shore up the imperiled historical imagination" and recover the "universe of thought" inhabited by the community of monks instrumental in the creation and reception of these paintings. Focusing on the Noli me tangere, the Madonna with Eight Saints, and the Annunciation, he reveals their multivalent significance, treating the paintings as virtual figurations of theological speculation and vehicles for spiritual meditation.

Didi-Huberman's interpretation - written in a dense style that makes no concession to simplicity - is informed by a consideration of Dominican devotional practices and the writings of the order's philosophers. There is neither an explicit thesis statement nor a summation; rather, the author explores the network of ideas evoked by Fra Angelico's imagery, colors, and compositions. Tracing the exegetical tradition from late antiquity to the quattrocento, Didi-Huberman's text presumably exemplifies the contemplative process he believes Fra Angelico's paintings were designed to stimulate.

Fundamental to the discussion are the concepts of figuration and dissemblance, which Didi-Huberman considers "the privileged means" of accessing the spiritual mystery encapsulated in the Incarnation. Figuration conventionally refers to the historical, figurative, allegorical, or analogical congruence discovered between one event, object, or person and another. Traced in scholastic literature back to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, dissemblance is a related but altogether more complicated and ambiguous concept that is nowhere distinctly defined, but on which Didi-Huberman places the burden of his analysis. It evidently refers to a relationship between things that lack apparent or material similarities. Such a "displacement of iconic value" is exemplified by the "blotches" of red that dot the landscape in Fra Angelico's Noli mi tangere. Didi-Huberman reads these marks (while ignoring the equally non-representational white marks also present) not as graphic abbreviations for flowers, but as "signs" of Christ's stigmata, emblems of the Passion, that open "the royal road" to an astonishing network of meanings (20-22).

The circumlocutions that are the essence of dissemblance are explored in the author's interpretation of the fictive marbles that form the bottom half of the Madonna with Eight Saints. Rather than seeing these trompe-l'oeil elements as embellishments in keeping with extravagant composite capitals and gilding found in the most sumptuous of the San Marco frescos, Didi-Huberman asserts that to the spiritual imagination the marmi finti possess an importance equivalent to the explicitly figurative portion. As a figuration that "opposes its opacity as a dissemblant and mysterious surface to the clarity of the 'figurative' figures of the Madonna," these non-figurative elements invite contemplation (90, 100). In the final chapter, the Annunciation in the north corridor initiates a review of the network of similitudes conceived by medieval theologians discussing the Incarnation. This complex of ideas, Didi-Huberman suggests, is incorporated in images that move beyond the istoria, make manifest a mystery, and encourage devotion (227). For their original audience, Fra Angelico's pictures were not mere illustrations; rather they were didactic in the special sense that they moved the viewer to speculate on the mystery of the divine Word becoming flesh - a process the author likens to "a mad maze of pathways where the gaze becomes engulfed and meaning raves endlessly on" (154).

In spite a passion for linguistic obscurantism, Didi-Huberman's erudition is apparent throughout and his observations on individual paintings and their theological context, though often controversial, are rewarding for the specialist. One may begin by questioning, for example, whether his hypothesis is plausible if Fra Angelico's conceptions are unique as well as the premise that the friar - an illuminator who entered the order as an adult, and who then continued to paint while directing a flourishing workshop had the time to immerse himself in the "veritable ocean of [scholastic] knowledge" that Didi-Huberman calls upon to explicate the paintings. However, if Fra Angelico's paintings do swim in this ocean, then it may be the greatest testament to his spiritual and pictorial intelligence that he was able to succinctly communicate ideas the author and theologians found incommensurate with simple expression.

Regarding technical qualities, it seems appropriate to note that a bibliography is lacking and to complain that citing illustrations by figure rather than page number complicates the process of reading this volume.

BERNARD BARRYTE Stanford University Museum of Art