Barbara Baert |
Barbara Baert (1967) is Professor in Art History at the Catholic University of Leuven (www.illuminare.be). In 2016 she was awarded with the prestigious Francqui Prize for Human Sciences - often doubled as the Belgian Noble Prize - for her interdisciplinary research in Iconology. Her most recent books are: Pneuma and the Visual arts in the Middle Ages and early Modernity, (Art&Religion 5), Leuven-Walpole, 2016, and Kairos or Occasion as Paradigm in the Visual Medium. Nachleben, Iconography, Hermeneutics, (Studies in Iconology, 5), Leuven-Walpole, 2016.
In the context of margem is worthwhile mentioning the following titles: The woman with the Bloodflow. Narrative, Iconic and Anthropological Spaces, Leuven, 2014; and {Arm} {Head} {Cut}: Framing as Decapitation. The casus of St. John in Early Modern Painting, in “FRAMINGS”, eds. Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Hans Körner & Slavko Kacunko , Logos, Berlin, 2015, p. 211-233 |
border, hem, blood. on the visual and the haptic spectrum of the Haemorrhoissa in the Gospel of Mark |
In any vestimentary culture, borders (such as hems and tassels, but also lace) fragment and defragment the sensitive symbolic markers of the body: the feet, the middle, the neck (Vandenbroeck 2009, p. 174–205; Warwick/Cavallaro 2001, p. 72–88). The hem of the garment is a border between one’s own body and the body of the other. The hem is moreover the entrance and the exit of power par excellence, loaded, as it were, with the idea of the very transfer zone between the textile and the world. This symbolizes the hem as a liminal zone where transfer and transpositions become potent between the ‚I’ and the ‚other’, between me and you (Agamben 1999, p. 177–184). From the narrative and the iconic space, the hem is the symbol of demarcation and discontinuity (Baert 2011, p. 308- 359). The syntax of the interruption was translated into the medium of the hem. However, the hem as ‘discontinuity’ is not solely a rupture, but also a locus of exchange: the locus of the transit of power (dynamij) from one person to another. In this paper I will discuss this locus of exchange, of interruption and (dis)continuity from the point of view of the biblical story of the healing of the woman with the bloodflow in Mark 5:24b–34. By analyzing its textual and iconographic Nachleben, we will understand more about the complexity of the textile border as paradigm for the female outcast, as a archetypical image for blood and water fluxus, and as a highly dynamic apotropaic locus in the transfer between the body and its environment. |