In Templum, one of his Intercenales or literary pieces that were to serve as diversions between the courses of a meal, the Florentine humanist and art theorist Leon Baptista Alberti (1404-72) described how the foundations of a building rose in revolt against the inhabitants of the building they supported because they were outraged by their morals.1 When the Florentine banker Filippo Strozzi decided in 1489 to build a new Palazzo, he asked the humanist astronomer Marsilio Ficino to cast a horoscope to determine the best birth date for his new house. After the death of his beloved Beatrice de’Notari in the early 1490s, the humanist Ambrogio Leone da Nola commissioned a marble bust from the sculptor Tommaso Malvito, and asked the poets among his friends to write a poem about this bust. In one of these Antonio Tebaldeo made Leone exclaim ‘What can art not do? I know that you are a work of stone and yet, when I have clearly made out your members, I deceive myself and run to embrace you strongly, then my face pales with shame.’ The Venetian art critic Marco Boschini tells us that Titian’s Death of St Peter Martyr is so lifelike, that it leaves the church in the mind of everyone who has seen it, and that every spectator believes to have actually witnessed the death of the saint. And Leonardo da Vinci noted, 'Men will speak to men who will not hear, who will have their eyes open without seeing. They will speak to them but receive no response, ask favors of those with ears who hear not. They will light candles for the blind'. Considered superficially Leonardo ridiculed those who treat inanimate images as living beings, but actually he uses the language reserved for the living to designate these objects. 

Such responses to paintings and buildings, in which they are treated like living beings or seem so lifelike and vivid that the spectator believes to be in the presence not of the image but of the living being it represents, are not isolated instances. Throughout history, and all over the world, people respond to images as if they are alive: they say that they move, speak or look at the beholder. Paintings are addressed, touched, kissed and embraced, beaten or destroyed. Statues are treated as if they are the living being they represent; buildings are given food and drink, and reported to move, speak, bleed or look at the beholder. Such responses are not limited to non-Western or so-called 'primitive' societies. In Europe they were made by illiterate worshipers at shrines in pre-classical Greece, but also by sophisticated Italian humanists. They are extensively documented, from the numerous anecdotes reported by Pliny of viewers mistaking an image for the real thing or treating images as living beings, to numerous viewers’ statements that the eyes of the person depicted in a portrait follow them around the room, to Alberti's praise of the power of painting to make the absent present and the dead living. Vasari repeatedly wondered at the ability of images 'more real than life itself', to bring tears to viewers' eyes. Such responses are not a thing of the past either. In April 2003 the BBC news programme showed how Iraqi’s in Bagdad toppled a statue of Saddam and beat it with their shoes. 

These responses are clearly wrong: images are not alive, and if they move, speak or weep it is because there is a hidden mechanism at work. But they are so constant and widespread, that we cannot simply dismiss them as confusions, primitive reactions to art, critical hyperbole or cliché. In early modern Italy a paradoxical variety of this response is very wide-spread: works of art or buildings are considered to be so lifelike that they become alive in the viewers'experience. The representation dissolves into what it represents. In other words, when art reaches its highest quality and is most persuasive, it ceases to look like art. These responses were made in a period that saw the birth of art history as it is practised today, and in response to works of art whose study has defined that discipline for a long time. Yet because of its concentration on formal, stylistic or iconographical analysis of the art object, art history has not been able to deal adequately with such responses. They were also made in a culture that was much influenced by classical rhetoric in its thinking about art. Vividness (enargeia) and actuality (energeia) play a central role in rhetorical thought about persuasion. Living presence responses documented in early modern Italy show this paradoxical feature very strongly. It is the basis for the new approach developed in this programme.

Articles

• Stijn Bussels, 'De macht van levende beelden: Een onderzoek naar de agency van visualiteit in literatuur, retorica, beeldende kunsten en theater aan de hand van antieke bronnen', in: Maaike Bleeker, Lucia van Heteren, Chiel Kattenbelt and Kees Vuyk (eds.), Theater Topics 3: Ornamenten van het vergeten, Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP 2007, pp. 109-113.
• Minou Schraven, 'Out of Sight, Yet Still in Place. On the Use of Italian Renaissance Portrait Medals as Building Deposits', Res. Anthropology and Aesthetics 55-56 (2009), pp. 182-193.
• Caroline van Eck and Stijn Bussels (eds.), Art History 32 (2009) 3, Special Issue: Theatricality in Early Modern Visual Art and Architecture.

Forthcoming

• Caroline van Eck, 'Living Statues: Alfred Gell's Art and Agency, Living Presence Response and the Sublime', Art History 33 (2010). [full text] 
• Stijn Bussels, 'To Take in a Town with Gentle Words. The Use of Loci in the Antwerp Entry of 1549', in: Mette Bruun and David Cowling (eds.), The Role of Commonplaces in Western Europe (1450–1800): Reformation, Counter Reformation and Revolt,Groningen Studies in Cultural Change, Leuven: Peeters 2008 (forthcoming).
• Bram van Ooostveldt and Stijn Bussels, 'How to Perform the Polis. The Locus of Tragical Deception', in: Arthur Cools, Thomas Crombez and Johan Taels (eds.), The Locus of Tragedy, Leiden: Brill 2008 (forthcoming).
• Stijn Bussels; 'The Diptych of the Lentulus Letter: Building Textual and Visual Evidence for Christ’s Outer Appearance', in: Thérèse de Hemptinne and Veerle Fraeters (eds.), Speaking to the Eye. Sight and Insight through Text and Image (1150-1650), Turnhout: Brepols 2008 (forthcoming).
• Stijn Bussels and Bram van Ooostveldt, ‘Le merveilleux and the Sublime’, in: Jürgen Pieters and Caroline van Eck (eds.), Pre-Histories of the Sublime, 1500-1750,Intersections, Leiden: Brill 2009 (forthcoming). 
• Minou Schraven, 'I depositi votivi di Ponte Sisto. Ponti, Pontefici e rituali di fondazione nella Roma rinascimentale," in: Helga di Giuseppe, Mirella Serlorenzi (eds), I riti del costruire nelle acque violate. Atti del Congresso internazionale nel Palazzo Massimo di Roma (forthcoming, 2009).
• Minou Schraven, 'Foundation Rituals in Renaissance Italy: The Case of the Bentivoglio Tower in Bologna', in: Axel Michaels (ed.), Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual. Proceedings of the Conference at the University of Heidelberg (Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz: forthcoming).