The Deluge, the Plague--Paolo Uccello

In The Deluge, The Plague, Paolo Uccello's great fresco becomes the site for Jean Louis Schefer's rich investigation of the ways a viewer is impelled to read historical paintings. In this essay first published in France in 1976, Europe's leading cultural critic offers reflections on the condition of memory and images in the Florentine Renaissance; the relation of perspective to the representation of the body in space and time; the profanation of the Eucharist and thus of images and law; the investment of language into the material of painting; and the shapes that defy figuration in Western traditions of painting.