The Blind Spot

At least since the ancient Greeks, sight has been regarded—in theory, at any rate—as the supreme sense, especially in relation to touch. Sight dominates the language of cognition: I see what you mean; a man of vision and insight; etc. The right hand of the Judaeo-Christian God is far more likely to point and gesture than touch, and so too are the arm reliquaries of saints, with their extended index fingers. The ‘conflict’ between soul and body is mirrored in the ‘conflict’ between sight and touch. Only in the eighteenth century—roughly, from Locke to Herder—and in the twentieth century—especially in developmental psychology, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis—has the crucial role played by touch in cognition been given much credit. The hierarchy of the senses became a central theme of the Italian Renaissance paragone (comparison) debates—a variation on the medieval disputa—in which the various art forms are compared and ranked. Apologists for painting insisted that their artform exclusively pertained to sight, the supreme sense, whereas sculpture pertained to touch as well, rendering it inferior. Apologists of sculpture countered that as sculpture could be experienced by touch as well as sight, this made it a more universal art form. Benedetto Varchi, a supporter of Michelangelo, claimed that while sight was the noblest sense, touch was the surest, citing Lucretius in support: ‘For touch, through its divine omnipotence, is the sense of our whole body.’ Perhaps sensibly, Varchi omitted the next lines in which Lucretius says that touch performs ‘the generative deeds of Venus’. It took Galileo, when helping out a Florentine painter friend in a paragone debate, to confront the issue of what exactly the spectator can learn by touching a sculpture: while a sculpture may show ‘elevations and depressions’, it cannot represent ‘soft and hard, hot and cold, smoothness and roughness, heaviness and lightness’. The hostility towards touch in relation to the visual arts is in part a way of establishing them as objects of aesthetic contemplation rather than simply as cult images (relics of touch)

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Literature · Painting · Sculpture · Sight · Aesthetic Perception and Analysis · Architecture and Art History Studies · Philosophy · Visual Culture and Art Theory

• A Unified Account

  Open Access•Gary Kemp•Theoria•2020

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