Between the Artwork and its Actualization: a Footnote to Art History in Benjamins Work of Art Essay BRIGID DOHERTY

Abstract: This article analyses a footnote to the third version of the Work of Art essay in which Walter Benjamin presents an account of a certain oscillation between cult value and exhibition value as typical of the reception of all works of art. Benjamins example in that footnote is the Sistine Madonna (151213), a painting by Raphael in the Dresden Gemldegalerie that has played an important part in German aesthetics since Winckelmann. Benjamins footnote on the Sistine Madonna, along with his critique of Hegels aesthetics in that context, demand to be understood in relation to his remarks on Dada elsewhere in the artwork essay, and to his claim that technological reproducibility leads to the actualization of the original reproduced. In that connection, the article concludes with an analysis of Kurt Schwitterss 1921 montage picture Knave Child Madonna with Horse. Keywords: actualization, technological reproducibility, cult value, exhibition value, Sistine Madonna, Hegels Aesthetics, Dada, Schwitters

The medium though which works of art continue to affect later ages is always different from the one in which they affect their own age; in those later times that medium also constantly changes in relation to older works, wrote Walter Benjamin in an unpublished 1920 fragment. He continued:
But this medium is always comparatively fainter [dnner] than that through which works affected their contemporaries at the time they were created. Kandinsky expresses this by saying that the eternal value [Ewigkeitswert] of works of art appears more vividly to later generations, since they are less receptive toward their current value [Zeitwert]. Yet the concept of eternal value is perhaps not the best expression of the relation. We ought instead to investigate which aspect Paragraph 32:3 (2009) 331358 DOI: 10.3366/E0264833409000637

332 Paragraph of the work it really is (quite apart from the question of value) that seems more evident to later generations than to contemporaries. (GS VI, 1267; SW I, 235; translation modied)

Benjamins ongoing work between 1935 and 1939 on the epochal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility represents, in no small part, an attempt to conceptualize both the relation of the media through which he believed older works of art continued to affect his contemporaries to the media in which those works existed in their original forms and the relation of contemporary media to those older works themselves. Rather than dispensing with the question of value as such, in The Work of Art Benjamin explores the question of which aspect of the work it really is that seems more evident to later generations in terms of the relation of what he calls the cult value (Kultwert) of the work of art to its exhibition value (Ausstellungswert). Crucial to Benjamins concerns in the essay is his effort to formulate a theory of the work of art and of the effects of its changing media of presentation within and across historical epochs, a theory in which technological reproducibility leads to the production of more powerful effects of apparent proximity and vividness for later generations than original works of art retain the capacity to generate. Among Benjamins preparatory notes for the rst version of The Work of Art appears a numbered list of eight Preliminary Theses. The rst four theses each present something to which the technological reproducibility of the work of art variously leads: rst, the artworks reassembling (Ummontierung); second, its actualization (Aktualisierung); third, its literarization (Literarisierung) with that term crossed out and replaced by politicization (Politisierung); and fourth, its wearing out (Verschlei ) (GS I.2, 1039). In what follows, I consider Benjamins notions of Ummontierung, Aktualisierung, Literarisierung and Verschlei in relation to his eeting engagement, in a footnote to the third version of The Work of Art, with Raphaels Sistine Madonna (151213), a painting housed since 1754 in the Gemldegalerie in Dresden, where from 1855 to 1940 it was exhibited in a custom-built, free-standing, decorative frame that bore an inscription from Vasaris Lives of the Most Eminent Painters (gures 1 and 2). From the time of its arrival in Dresden to the moment of Benjamins writing of The Work of Art, the Sistine Madonna was widely revered and often described as singularly impressive in its original form as a work in oil paint on canvas. It was also reproduced in unusually wide-ranging media and large numbers beginning in 1780, the date

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Figure 1. Raphael, Sistine Madonna, 151213, oil on canvas, Gemldegalerie, Dresden.

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Figure 2. Raphaels Sistine Madonna (151213), as installed in the Semperbau, Dresden, 18551940, photograph circa 1930.

of the rst reproductive engraving of the painting by Christian Gottfried Schultze. By 1908, Theodor Lessing could write: There is no painting, no work of art of any sort, as popular and as widely beloved as the Sistine Madonna. It hangs in every parlour. It is displayed in every shop window. All over Europe, all over America. Billions of people have beheld this painting. For countless numbers it is the only painting they know.1 Some twenty years earlier, in Das Leben Raffaels (The Life of Raphael) (1886), art historian Herman Grimm dated the eforescence of reproductions of the Sistine Madonna to the period between his childhood in the 1830s when, he says, perhaps only a few thousand people knew of the painting, an engraving of which hung in his father Wilhelm Grimms sitting room and the time of the writing of his own book on the artist, when countless reproductions could be found world-wide. Thus he traces, concisely, an aspect of what Benjamin set out to explore as the fate of the work of art in the nineteenth century.2 It is, of course, to the invention of

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Figure 3. Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Mller, copperplate engraving (1815) after Raphael, Sistine Madonna (151213), Albertina Museum, Vienna.

photographic technologies that Grimm attributes the vast increase in the number and accessibility of reproductions of the Sistine Madonna. Subsequent editions of his popular book on Raphael describe the uncanny effects of one such reproduction: I had the latest largescale Dresden phototype framed and hung it in my room. After a short while I felt as if assailed, for these forms, mother and child, fastened their gazes too rmly upon me. It was as if this space no longer belonged to me, but to the Madonna.3 Hence when Benjamin turns to the Sistine Madonna in a footnote to The Work of Art, he turns to a picture whose technological reproducibility had since the nineteenth century gured prominently in literary, philosophical, and art historical discussions. As early as 18356, Stendhal had described the impact of Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Mllers 1816 copperplate engraving of Raphaels painting (gure 3) in terms that hint at the force Benjamin would attribute a century later to techniques of photographic reproduction in particular and to the

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technological reproducibility of works of art broadly conceived. In his autobiographical text The Life of Henry Brulard, Stendhal establishes an effect that would seem to resemble what Benjamin called Aktualisierung as a cause of something like the Verschlei, the deterioration or depreciation, of the original work of art. As Stendhal puts it, a reproduction has the capacity to take the place of the original in the memory of someone who views rst the latter and then the former. My memory, Stendhal writes, is nothing more than the engraving.
Which is the danger of buying engravings of the beautiful pictures you see on your travels. Soon the engraving constitutes the whole memory, and destroys the real memory [le souvenir rel]. Thats what happened to me with the San Sisto madonna in Dresden. Mllers beautiful engraving has destroyed it for me, whereas I can picture to myself perfectly the nasty pastels by Mengs, in the same Dresden gallery, of which I havent seen an engraving anywhere.4

Arts fateful hour has struck for us

For Benjamin, the reassembling and the actualization of the work of art recognized as effects of the works technological reproducibility precede, mediate, and perhaps potentiate the works politicization as well as its Verschlei. If actualization, for Benjamin, is a primary effect of the technological reproducibility of works of art, it is also crucial to his conceptualization of the history of art as such. The history of art is a history of prophecies, he writes in a fragment prepared in connection with the second version of The Work of Art:
It can only be written from the standpoint of the immediate, actual present; for every age possesses its own new but uninheritable potential to interpret the prophecies that the art of past epochs conveys to it. It is the most important task of art history to decipher in the great artworks of the past the prophecies valid for the epoch of its writing. (. . . ) In order for these prophecies to become comprehensible, circumstances must have come to fruition, ahead of which the work of art has rushed, often by centuries, often also by just a few years. These circumstances are, for one thing, specic societal transformations, which alter the function of art, and, for another, certain mechanical inventions. (GS I.2, 10467)

Although the signicance of the term image (Bild) differs from, and arguably exceeds, that of artwork (Kunstwerk) in Benjamins writings, his remarks on the history of art in the 1935 fragment resonate with his formulations in the Arcades Project regarding what he calls the historical index of images. According to Benjamin,

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such an index not only says that they belong to a specic time, but, above all, that they rst come to legibility in a specic time. And indeed this attaining to legibility is a specic critical point of the movement in their interior. Every present is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each now is the now of a specic recognizability [Jetzt einer bestimmten Erkennbarkeit] (GS V.1, 5778; AP, 4623; translation modied). In his correspondence of October 1935, a period of intense work on the artwork essay, Benjamin explains that he has recently recognized a hidden structural character in present-day art in the present-day situation of art that allows for the recognition of what is for us decisive, what indeed breaks through for the rst time in the present moment, in the fate of the work of art in the nineteenth century. Thus, in that aspect of the art of the nineteenth century which only now is recognizable, which never was so before and never will be so again, Benjamin located a decisive example by means of which he was able to realize my theory of knowledge, which is crystallized around (. . . ) the concept of the now of recognizability a concept, he acknowledges, whose implementation in his work remains very esoteric.5 The now of recognizability reappears, famously, in Benjamins meditations On the Concept of History and related writings of the late 1930s. While those texts fall outside the scope of the present essay, this text aims to illuminate, perforce obliquely, aspects of Benjamins philosophy of history and theory of knowledge in relation to the history of art and the conceptualization of the work of art in his writings of the 1930s.6 Arts fateful hour has struck for us, Benjamin writes in a letter to Max Horkheimer of 16 October 1935, and I have captured its signature in a series of preliminary reections entitled The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. These reections attempt to give the questions raised by art theory a truly contemporary form: and indeed from the inside, avoiding any unmediated reference to politics.7 In the Preliminary Theses, Ummontierung and Aktualisierung appear as concepts intended to mediate the connections Benjamin proposed to draw among technological reproduction, works of art, and politics. Aktualisierung names what would take place in a now of recognizability, or in a moment of art-historical deciphering of the prophecies encoded in works of art, while Ummontierung gures the transformation of the work of art as such. Though neither term appears in the artwork essay, the concepts they were meant to manifest remain central to Benjamins claims.

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A certain oscillation between two polar modes of reception

A long footnote to section ve of the third version of The Work of Art, invokes the history of the Sistine Madonna as an instance in which a certain oscillation between (. . . ) two polar modes of reception [of works of art] can be demonstrated, namely, one that accentuates the artworks cult value (Kultwert) and another its exhibition value (Ausstellungswert). In a condensed presentation within this nal but arguably incomplete version of the artwork essay, on which Benjamin worked from spring 1936 to March or April 1939, he asserts that this oscillation between modes of reception that variously emphasize cult value and exhibition value can be demonstrated for each individual work of art. And he insists that the aesthetics of Idealism, which conceives of beauty as something fundamentally undivided [ungeschieden] cannot account for the polarity of cult and exhibition value in the beautiful image (schnes Bild), even as that polarity announces itself , in particular, and crucially, within Hegels philosophy (GS I.2, 4823; SW IV, 2734, 257). If, as Hegel put it in his Aesthetics, by the nineteenth century, Europeans were past the stage of being able to venerate works of art as divine and as objects deserving our worship [Andacht] and if at that point in history it could be said instead that the impression [works of art] produce is of a more reective kind, and what they arouse in us requires a more stringent sort of test and proof by other means,8 Benjamin would construe that rst stage of the reception of works of art (venerating works as divine objects) as emphasizing cult value, and the second (both more reective and requiring more stringent testing) as emphasizing exhibition value. And he would further recognize cult value as that which is typically associated, in Hegels terms, with a notnecessarily-beautiful image whose reception is oriented to the worship of the work of art as a thing, and exhibition value as that which is typically associated, again in Hegels terms, with the work of art as a beautiful image which contains something external (ein uerliches) and possesses a spirit (Geist) that speaks to the human being (GS I.2, 4823; SW IV, 273).9 In the quotations from Hegel as Benjamin congures them in the footnote that immediately precedes the note on the Sistine Madonna in the artwork essay, the beautiful work of arts production of a more reective impression than that of the not-necessarily-beautiful work of art made to be venerated as divine, goes hand in hand with the arousal, by the beautiful work of art, of something in us that requires

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a more stringent test. And both effects are invoked as dimensions of a mode of reception oriented towards exhibition value. Benjamin does not name the problem he claims Hegel sensed within his own aesthetics of Idealism, but it might be fair to speculate that it would involve the potential for viewers and indeed theorists of works of art to identify aesthetic experiences of reective impressions generated by beautiful works of art with situations of religious devotion and hence implicitly to receive the beauty of those works as something other than undivided. That is to say, the problem would have to do with the potential for oscillation in the reception of the beautiful work of art between polar modes of reception variously accentuating cult value and exhibition value, a potential that went unrecognized as such by Hegel, even as he noted both the beautiful work of arts incorporation of something external and its possession of a spirit that addresses those who behold it. In order to demonstrate how the reception of a work of art oscillates between a mode of reception that is associated with worship and that therefore accentuates cult value and one that accentuates exhibition value, Benjamin appends a second footnote to the sentence in which he announces the existence of those two polar types of the reception of works of art.10 The transition from the rst kind of reception to the second denes the history of artistic reception in general, he asserts, while a certain oscillation between those two polar modes of reception can be demonstrated for each work of art (GS I.2, 4823; SW IV, 257, 2734). It is here that Benjamin directs his readers to the Sistine Madonna. Drawing on Hubert Grimmes brief 1922 study, Das Rtsel der Sixtinischen Madonna (The Riddle of the Sistine Madonna), Benjamin suggests that Raphaels painting was originally painted for exhibition, with its putative inaugural installation having been just above the cofn of Pope Julius II during his lying-in-state in 1513 in the choir chapel of San Sisto in the Papal Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome (GS 1.2, 483; SW IV, 274). The interpretation of the Sistine Madonna put forward in Grimmes study has been challenged convincingly in more recent accounts of the painting, as has the use to which Benjamin put Grimmes analysis.11 At stake here is not the accuracy of Benjamins claims about the painting, which indeed contain errors of fact large and small, but the conceptual foundations and implications of those claims in relation to the broader context of The Work of Art. What Raphael presents [darstellt] in this picture, says Benjamin, is how the cloud-borne Madonna approaches the papal cofn from the rear of the niche, which was framed by green portires

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[Portieren]. On the occasion of the funeral service for Pope [Julius II] an outstanding exhibition value of Raphaels painting found its use. Only later, outside the frame of the aims of its original commission and production as, according to Grimme, a provisional memorial to Pope Julius II,12 did the Sistine Madonna come into a new kind of use as an object of worship on the high altar in the abbey church of San Sisto in the Benedictine monastery at Piacenza (GS 1.2, 483; SW IV, 274). Thus, for Benjamin, the history of the Sistine Madonna reveals the reception of the painting to have oscillated between a situation in which a primary exhibition value emerged and one in which the cult value of the painting subsequently came to the fore. Moreover, Benjamin seems to assume, each of those two situations of reception possesses an internal counterpart within the painting itself. The devotional postures of the two saints depicted in the painting exemplify the activity of prayer before an object of cult value, while the green curtain that frames the Madonnas seemingly imminent movement out of the picture indicates a threshold between two kinds of space, that of the painting and that of the site of its original display, where the works primary exhibition value was established. Benjamins choice of the word Portieren, which also signies in the sense of the English porter or doorkeeper, to name the green curtain in the painting is striking in this connection. It effects a kind of virtual displacement or minimal animation of the curtain in relation to the intercessory saints, those gures of devotion who instantiate as models for the viewer a properly devotional relation of prayerful reverence to the gures on the other side of the threshold marked by the curtain and the area at the bottom of the picture that Benjamin identies as a wooden panel representing a part of the papal cofn. Crucial for Benjamins notion of an oscillation between polar modes of reception is his understanding, based on Grimmes innovative history of the picture, that an outstanding exhibition value of the Sistine Madonna was rst revealed in the ritual context of a papal funeral in St. Peters, and that the pictures subsequent deployment for its cult value in liturgical contexts on the high altar of the abbey church of San Sisto implied that the painting had within certain limits declined in value [war (. . . ) in gewissen Grenzen entwertet] in the course of its move from Rome to Piacenza (GS 1.2, 483; SW IV, 274). Benjamin recognized Grimmes account of the Sistine Madonna as an example of a new and rigorous approach to art history which, insofar as it was built upon the most inconspicuous data [unscheinbarsten Daten] of an object

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and focused on the material determination [Materialbestimmtheit] of the work of art, demonstrated its practitioners capacity to wrest fresh insights from even a hackneyed object (abgegriffenes Objekt) (GS III, 366; SW II, 668; translation modied). By the 1920s, Raphaels masterpiece could justly be seen as hackneyed or, more literally, worn out, as if by the touch of many hands in relation both to its place in the history of German literature and philosophy since the mid-eighteenth century, and to its status as perhaps the most widely reproduced work of art in German culture. In the original, unpublished version of his essay Rigorous Study of Art, Benjamin grants Grimmes short history of the Sistine Madonna a prominent place in connection with his review of the rst volume of the Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen (Studies in the History of Art), a 1931 collection edited by Otto Pcht and with an opening essay by Hans Sedlmayr, from whose title Benjamin derived that of his review.13 Benjamins inclusion of The Riddle of the Sistine Madonna in that context is noteworthy, as he acknowledges that Grimme, whose eld of expertise was Oriental philology, does not belong to the group of art historians of the so-called Vienna School whose work was represented in the Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen. Benjamin nevertheless attributes to Grimmes study, in which an inquiry into the roles of the wooden panel and the green curtain is crucial, a devotion to the insignicant (Andacht zum Unbedeutenden) animated by its authors readiness to drive research forward to the ground from which even the insignicant no, precisely the insignicant acquires meaning. And he praises the way in which, by making contact with the concrete ground of past historical existence (geschichtliches Gewesensein), Grimme demonstrated that the insignicant [with which his research] is concerned (. . . ) is the inconspicuous [Unscheinbare] or also the striking [Anstige] (the two together are not a contradiction) which survives in true works and which is the point at which the works content breaks through for the authentic researcher (GS III, 366; SW II, 668; translation modied). With regard to the reception of the Sistine Madonna, beginning with the description of that work in Johann Joachim Winckelmanns Reections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1756), it would not be improper to associate the wooden panel and the green curtain with what Benjamin calls the Unscheinbare, and the gure of the Madonna as arca dei bearing the Christ-child as the Word-becomeesh with what he calls the Anstige. Benjamin brings those two elements of the painting together in his single-sentence account of the

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work which links the wooden panel and green curtain to the staging of the Popes lying-in-state in 1513, and accordingly associates the appearance of the Madonnas forward movement with her seemingly imminent traversal of the boundary between the depicted space of the painting and the real space of the chapel in which he believed its inaugural exhibition took place as if his own footnote to art history might be read as an exemplary instance of its writing in miniature. In Benjamins description, the Madonna appears to be moving forward out of the clouds in the painting in such a way that she would have seemed in the context of what he understood from Grimme to have been the paintings original installation to be stepping out towards the popes cofn from a niche-like space framed by a tomb curtain. In referring to the seeming movement of the Madonna, Benjamin invokes as anstig an aspect of Raphaels painting that had been crucial to its reception in Germany since the publication of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroders Outpourings of the Heart of an Artloving Friar in 1797. And in calling up the forward-stepping Madonna as a gure who appears as if about to enter the real space in which the painting is seen, he links Raphaels pictorial production of an effect of apparition to the historical situation of reception in which Grimmes study had located the Sistine Madonna. Thus Benjamin attempts in the single sentence of his art historical footnote to demonstrate that the Unscheinbare (the wooden panel, the green curtain) and the Anstige (the as-if forward-stepping, threshold-crossing Madonna and Child) have survived in this well-worn masterpiece, and have broken through to the true researcher (that is, to Grimme, and to Benjamin himself). Whereas art historical interpretations of the painting have associated the powerful effects of the appearance of the Madonna and Child in Raphaels painting with the theological signicance of the revelation of the Christ-child as the incarnation of God, a preguration of Christs sacricial death, and hence a kind of foundational gure of prolepsis or prophecy,14 Benjamin in effect takes the appearance of those gures as an occasion to read the history of art as a history of prophecies in relation to which his own inquiry into the fate of the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility might be situated. Moreoever, in stating that what Raphael presents in the picture is how the cloud-borne Madonna approaches the papal cofn from the rear of the niche, which was framed by green portires (emphasis added), he presents the paintings capacity to produce an effect of apparently imminent movement across the threshold between the space depicted

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within it and that of its exhibition an effect of what we might call Anstigkeit as the subject of the painting itself.15 Citing the foreword to Heinrich Wlfins Classic Art (1898), Benjamin opens his Rigorous Study of Art with a critique of the art historians attempt to remedy the bleak condition in which his discipline found itself in the late nineteenth century by means of the formal analysis he placed at the center of his method (GS III, 364, 369; SW II, 666). In his analysis of the Sistine Madonna, Wlfin explores the formal pictorial problems posed for a painter of the classic style wanting to render a gure standing erect and walking over the clouds as an apparition [Erscheinung] that is only visible for an instant. The direct emergence out of the picture, the bearing down on the spectator, Wlfin writes, is inevitably connected with an unpleasant impression. There are indeed modern paintings which seek this brutal effect. Raphael has used every means to arrest the movement [sistieren], to contain it within certain limits (. . . ) The motif of movement is a wonderfully light, hovering gait.16 Thus, for the formalist art historian, Raphael succeeds in at once presenting and arresting the movement of the Madonna as the Anstige in the work of art. The effect of direct emergence, which Wlfin describes as virtually bound to be unpleasant, even brutal, is here contained and transformed by means of the painters virtuosity and invention to produce a motif of hovering movement, preserving the autonomy of the work alongside or rather by means of its astonishing appearance. The near-pun on the title of the painting suggested by Wlfins use of the Latinate sistieren indicates a point of intersection between Benjamins formulation of a rigorous art history as one able at once to contain and to analyse the Anstige (as in his own condensed demonstration in presenting the subject of the Sistine Madonna) and Wlfins method of formal analysis, according to which, in the case of that painting, the production of an effect of dynamic movement nds its proper, which is to say classical, fullment in the production of an effect of arrested movement, an effect registered in the art historians own striking use of the verb sistieren. For Wlfin, the pictorial effects that establish the Madonnas apparent forward motion belong to a new aesthetic disposition of classical art in the early sixteenth century made manifest as a demand for spaciousness [Rumigkeit] in which, among other transformations, the horizontal increases in signicance, as in the arrangement of the clouds over which the Madonna treads, and in their relation to her presentation as a pure vertical that has an awesome effect [ungeheure

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Wirkung], the primitive in the larger context of a fully realized art.17 Wlfins distillation of the striking gure of the Madonna in Raphaels painting into this vertical that appears to emerge and set itself loose upon the viewer might be said to stand for the positionality of the easel picture when hanging vertically, and at a considerable height above the viewer: the Madonna should descend, Wlfin insists. If one places the painting low it loses its best effect. Interested not in the historical circumstances of its original exhibition but in the implications of its present-day display for the realization of effects of pictorial form, Wlfin remarks at the end of his discussion of the Sistine Madonna that the massive decorative frame in which the painting had been exhibited since 1855 seems perhaps a little too heavy: without the large pilasters the gures would appear much more impressive [bedeutend].18 In his footnote, it is as if Benjamin was transposing an adaptation in miniature of Wlfins account of the classical containment of the anstig effects of the composition of the Sistine Madonna into the historical construction built up by Grimme in his account of the paintings commission and initial exhibition. The Anstige is thus placed within the frame set by Grimme in his scrutiny of the inconspicuous data of the wooden panel and the green curtain, elements of the painting unmentioned by Wlfin. The aim of Benjamins presentation is to insist on the signicance of the specic characteristics and effects of a singular work of art in the situation of its original installation and primary exhibition value. Thus, in his formulation of an oscillation between poles of reception variously emphasizing exhibition value and cult value, the inbuilt exhibition value of the Sistine Madonna is understood to have been actualized in a particular historical context, where a painted gure appears on the verge of stepping out of the space of a picture into that of its exhibition.

Hegel and the mastery of presentation

Given the context in which the Sistine Madonna comes into play in the artwork essay, it makes sense to assume that Benjamin had read Hegels various remarks on the painting; and surely he would also have been familiar with discussions of the painting in the work of Wlfin, Winckelmann, Wackenroder, August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Friedrich Nietzsche, each of whom took pains to body forth in writing the apparent movement (in Winckelmanns case, the related

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and at least equally vivid stillness) of the Holy Virgin as painted by Raphael. What, declares Hegel in his Aesthetics, has Raphael not made of the Madonna and Christ-child! It is not the visible beauty [sinnliche Schnheit] of the forms, he asserts, but the spiritual animation [geistige Beseelung] whereby mastery manifests itself and which leads to the mastery of the presentation.19 Hegels emphasis on spiritual animation as that by means of which mastery manifests itself in Raphaels painting nds an historical-materialist counterpart in Benjamins claim that what Raphael presents in the picture is how the cloud-borne Madonna approaches the papal cofn. What Benjamin intends to invoke is another kind of manifestation of mastery, one that would reveal how an outstanding exhibition value of Raphaels painting found its use on the occasion of its rst display. Benjamin makes the presentation of exhibition value integral to the composition of the picture itself. For him, what Raphael presents in the picture is not so much a subject as a process not a what but a how and the gure of the Madonna treading over clouds as if taking hovering steps towards the actual space of the paintings display stands in the footnote as an emblem of the placement of emphasis on exhibition value. Absent from the artwork essays one-sentence history of the Sistine Madonna are those elements of the picture that might serve as emblems of the placement of emphasis on cult value, elements attended to vigorously in so many other accounts of the painting. Hegel, for example, notes an effect produced by Raphaels depiction of the Christ-childs face that reveals the most beautiful expression of childhood, and yet we can see [in it] something beyond purely childlike innocence, something which makes visible as present [lt gegenwrtig sehen] the Divine behind the veil of youth and gives us an inkling of the expansion of this Divinity into an innite revelation.20 Thus conceived, the Christ-childs face is a gure of prophecy or prolepsis within the painting, and hence potentially also a gure for the way in which, when presented as Benjamin proposed, works of art convey prophecies across the ages. In this connection it might be said that Hegels concept of devotion or worship (Andacht) as it gures in the section on the Romantic arts in the Aesthetics presents worship itself as a kind of actualization an activity or perhaps a state of being which, as the subject matter as well as the aim of a painting, provides an occasion for the revelation of spiritual animation as the medium of the manifestation of mastery and the origin of the mastery of presentation in painting. Worship itself is the prayer answered; the petition itself is bliss, writes Hegel,

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and points to the prayerful situation of St. Sixtus and St. Barbara in Raphaels picture as an exemplary instance in which prayer not only shines through the gure and situation as a ray of transguration, but is in itself the situation and what exists and is to be presented.21 In this Hegel suggests that he, like Benjamin, understands Raphael to be making visible in the Sistine Madonna less a depiction of a specic subject matter, whatever the relative conceptual or theological complexity of that subject matter might be, than a presentation of how something transpires in, and by means of, a painting. For Benjamin, the how concerns the Madonnas seeming to tread over clouds as if on her way out of the painting and into the space of its exhibition, in other words the presentation of a gure of actualization by means of what Hegel calls the manifestation of mastery and the mastery of presentation. For Hegel the how concerns this double form of mastery in relation to a situation not of exhibition but of devotion, one in which worship itself and the actualization of that to which devotional prayers are directed not only emerge as identical to one another, but become so to speak the situation of their own existence.
Dada and the brandmark of reproduction

In the artwork essay, Benjamin presents an instance of actualization by means of technological reproducibility that demands to be understood in relation to his invocation of the Sistine Madonna elsewhere in the essay. The Dadaists, Benjamin asserts:
attached much less importance to the commercial usefulness [merkantile Verwertbarkeit] of their artworks than to the uselessness [Unverwertbarkeit] of those works as objects of contemplative immersion [kontemplative Versenkung]. They sought to achieve this uselessness not least by thorough degradation [Entwrdigung] of their material. Their poems are word salad containing obscene expressions and every imaginable kind of linguistic refuse. It is the same with their paintings, on which they mounted buttons or train tickets. What they achieved by such means was a ruthless annihilation of the aura in their creations, which they imprinted with the brandmark of reproduction through the very means of production. (GS I.2, 463; GS I.2, 5012; GS VII.1, 379; SW IV, 2667; SW III, 11819; translation modied)22

In writing those lines about Dadaist artworks, Benjamin almost certainly had in mind the work of Kurt Schwitters, whose pictures of the 1920s frequently incorporated tickets and other materials drawn

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from everyday life. For Benjamin, imprinting works of art with the brandmark of reproduction effects an annihilation of aura which is to say, among other things, that it destroys the means by which artworks achieve and maintain the appearance of their autonomy from the ordinary world in which they are exhibited and seen.23 The appearance of the autonomy of the artwork as exhibited in the here and now of its original form is associated in The Work of Art with the production of perceptual effects of distance understood as effects of the artworks aura. Hence imprinting an artwork with the brandmark of reproduction has, for Benjamin, the anti- or counter-auratic effect of presenting the work to its beholders as one among other real things, of bringing it so to speak within the reach of those who behold it. Where reproductions as such are concerned, Benjamin insists on the signicance of the fact that they place the copy of the original in situations that cannot be reached by the original itself: The cathedral leaves its site in order to be received [Aufnahme zu nden] in the studio of an art lover. It might be stated as a general formula, Benjamin continues, that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition (. . . ) And in permitting the reproduction to encounter its recipient [dem Aufnehmenden] in his or her own situation it actualizes that which is reproduced (GS VII.1, 3523; GS I.2, 438; GS I.2, 4767; SW III, 1034; SW IV, 254; translation modied). Benjamins use of Aufnahme and der Aufnehmende the latter replacing and in effect both activating and virtually technologizing what was in the rst version of the artwork essay der Beschauer (the viewer) brings reception into association with processes of technological reproduction, while his assertion that the technology of reproduction at once detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition and actualizes that which is reproduced expands upon the Preliminary Theses. In imprinting their creations with the brandmark of reproduction in the course of their production, the Dadaists so the logic of Benjamins argument made works of art that effected their own actualization while removing themselves, proleptically, from the sphere of tradition. Or, perhaps better, those works were intended to refuse from the moment of, even by the very means of, their own production to take up a place in tradition, insofar as those means of production incorporated signs and indeed on occasion traces of the Verschlei the wearing-down and using-up of the work itself. This incorporation was effected by techniques of what

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Benjamin called Ummontierung, a term that itself incorporates, through the transformative turn of its Um-, both a deconstructive and a reconstructive moment a reassembling perforce preceded by a disassembling. As productions marked with the brandmark of reproduction, original works that manifest their own Aktualisierung and Ummontierung by means of the technique of Aufmontierung (assembling or montage) through which they were produced, Dadaist artworks as Benjamin describes them take on an intensied, indeed violent, effect of sensuous presence:
From an alluring appearance before the eye or an enchanting composition of sound the Dadaist work of art became a projectile. It struck the beholder. And it thereby stood at the brink of winning back for the present the tactical/tactile quality [taktische Qualitt] that is most essential to art in the great periods of historical transformation. That everything perceived, everything sensible is something that jolts us this motif of dream-perception, which comprises the tactical/tactile side [taktische Seite] of the artistic was set in motion once again by the Dadaists. (GS I.2, 4634; GS I:2, 5012; GS VII.1, 37980; SW IV, 267; SW III, 119; translation modied)

Thus Benjamin suggests that, under certain historical conditions, precisely those works that take up an avowedly, indeed vehemently, destructive stance in relation to artistic tradition might be said nonetheless or indeed thereby to actualize aspects of the art of the past, by activating, tactically, the tactile qualities he believes to have been essential to works of art in past epochs of radical historical change.24 The great period of historical transformation with which Benjamin was inclined to associate the period in which Dada emerged was, of course, the cultural epoch of the Baroque, and his description of the barbarisms, excesses and crudities of Dada art locates the force of those works precisely in the sort of brutal effect that Wlfin in his account of the Sistine Madonna had ascribed to modern paintings, works whose effects, like those of the Baroque, staged an opposition to the aesthetic autonomy and sensuous containment of the classical style.25 For Benjamin, the Dadaist artwork at once stands on the brink of winning back for the present the taktische Qualitt of works made in great periods of historical transformation and strains after effects whose realization demands a changed technical standard, that is, a new art form, specically lm (GS I.2, 4623; GS I.2, 5012; GS VII.1, 378; SW III, 118; SW IV, 266; translation modied). The incapacity of Dadaist works to achieve the physical shock effects

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realized in lm has in Benjamins account two closely related causes: rst, the Dadaists commitment to presenting works of art as the centre of a scandal, which kept the virtually physical shock effects of their projectile-like works wrapped up inside the packaging of the moral shock effects of scandal; and, second, the inbuilt technical limitation of the canvas [Leinwand] on which a painting is located as compared to the screen [Leinwand] on which a lm unrolls. The image on [the screen] changes, the image on [the canvas] does not. The latter invites the viewer to contemplation (GS I.2, 464; GS I.2, 502; GS VII.1, 379; SW III, 132; SW IV, 267; translation modied). The rst version of the artwork essay presents the effects of Dadaist artworks in terms of a motif of dream perception that the Dadaists succeeded in setting in motion or putting in play again as the taktische Seite of the artistic, even as their original works could not quite win back for the present the taktische Qualitt of art as that quality had been realized in past eras of historical change. Benjamins invocation of a motif of dream perception in which everything perceived, everything sensible is something that jolts us [ein uns Zustoendes] recalls his formulation of the Anstige in works of art as not so much shocking in the moral sense of scandalous or offensive, but striking in the aesthetic sense of singular and powerful.26 Thus the motif of the Zustoende encompasses both the mechanism of the Dadaist works destructive relation to artistic tradition and to reception in a state of contemplative immersion, and its engagement, as art, in an historical enterprise of attempting to win back for the present aspects of aesthetic experience no longer generated by paintings in their traditional forms.

Knave Child Madonna with Horse

Kurt Schwitters, once a student of painting in Dresden, used a reproduction of the Sistine Madonna of the sort whose ubiquity Grimm and Lessing had described as the ground for his 1921 montage picture Wenzelkind Madonna mit Pferd (Knave Child Madonna with Horse) (gure 4). The composition of Schwitterss picture turns on the Ummontierung of the threshold gures in Raphaels original that art historian Daniel Arasse dubbed spectator angels, gures whose postures and gazes constitute what he calls a reexive look, the look of the painting upon itself , which aims to orient the spectator outside the painting towards what happens within it.27 In Knave Child, all that can be seen to remind the viewer of the appearance of Raphaels

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Figure 4. Kurt Schwitters, Mz.151 Knave Child Madonna with Horse (1921), collage, paper, on paper, Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Sammlung NORD/LB in der Niederschsischen Sparkassenstiftung. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG-Bildkunst, Bonn.

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spectator angels is a glimpse of the hair and of a single wing of the angel on the right as those elements of the reproduction of the original remain exposed alongside the mounted-on fragment of a technical illustration that covers the entirety of the angel on the left. And yet in Schwitterss montage the mechanical apparatus shown in the technical illustration, which looks as though it might be part of a manual press used to produce phonograph records (the word RECORD can be seen imprinted on the surface below the wheel), recalls the posture of the angel who in Raphaels picture tilts his head backward slightly to look up and back at the Virgin and Christ-child as he leans on the wooden panel at the bottom edge of the canvas. In Knave Child, the mechanical apparatus makes up something like a composite gure of the spectator angels in the painting as it rests not on a graphic reproduction of the wooden panel as depicted in the painting but on a cut-out and pasted-on printed phrase that reads: Gedankenvoll lie Viktor das Blatt sinken (Thoughtfully Victor let the sheet drop). In Knave Child, then, a spectator-angels tilted head has been covered by, and in effect transformed into, a machines tilted wheel, as if to present the montage picture as guring and potentially inducing a tactile activation of spectatorship that might proceed, as if tactically, according to a set of instructions presented in the illustration for implementation by the spectators hand. This guration of a tactical, tactile activation of spectatorship is achieved by means of a recasting of the boundary that in the original painting has been understood variously to announce the works autonomy (thus Wlfin and Arasse), or, as in Benjamins account, to represent the pictorial threshold that stages the paintings subject as the how of its potential interpenetration with the space of its exhibition. In this connection, the Ummontierung into an unseeing machine of a gure which in the original embodies a spectatorial position of contemplative immersion potentially stages, in Benjamins terms, at once the actualization and the Verschlei of the original by means of a kind of transformation made possible through its technological reproducibility. That transformation or reassembling appears oriented towards reactivating what Benjamin in the artwork essay calls the taktische Seite of the artistic, and it might be said to involve an attempt to retrieve or rather to reinvent a taktische Qualitt understood to be absent from the worn out or hackneyed object that a work like Raphaels original had become for Benjamin in the age of its technological reproducibility. Thus Schwitterss picture might be said to nd common cause with Benjamins own one-sentence history of the Sistine Madonna, in which the paintings central gure emerges as if set in motion by his interpretation.

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The Madonna at the centre of Schwitterss picture bears the head of a contemporary lady on top of that of Raphaels Virgin Mary, with just enough of the reproduced original remaining for the viewer to see (through visual anamnesis of an already familiar composition) those parts that have been covered over in course of the artworks Ummontierung. Crucially absent in Knave Child is the Madonnas intense gaze as aligned in the original with the grave cast of her mouth, the latter a feature that in Schwitterss work appears below a double that makes the Virgin sport a supplementary coy grin. And if the shape and orientation of the wheel at the bottom of the picture might put a viewer in mind of the haloes in the painting that are also now only partly visible, the band and the arched feather on the ladys up-to-date hat seem to invite an amused acknowledgment of the loss of an aurole.28 As with the lone angels wing and the lower part of the Madonnas face, the Christ-childs partial halo sets in motion a recognition of what cannot be seen in Schwitterss picture a recognition he could have assumed would be actualized in a viewers mind by means of a visual anamnesis derived from the reception of virtually omnipresent reproductions of the Sistine Madonna like the one deployed in his montage. The single patch of color that appears in Knave Child a quadrilateral of blue paper pasted on to the left above the wheel that recalls the hue of the painted robes of the Madonna in the original gures forth a different sort of actualization as it invokes the seeming movement of the Virgins garments in the painting only to bring them to a standstill, attened against the pictures literal surface. That quadrilateral patch of blue paper might be seen as something like a gure for the actualization of the work of art reproduced that is, something like a formal counterpart to the historical Ummontierung of the Virgin Mary into a new woman from ca. 1921. Schwitterss deployment of the piece of blue paper alongside the technical illustration of a fragment of a mechanical apparatus sets in motion a play of spatial relations within the work that is keyed to the acknowledgment and articulation of its literal surface by means of the appearance of the pasted paper as a small quadrilateral gure for the picture surface as such, and as a piece of material mounted on that surface.29 Crucial in Schwitterss picture is, further, the way in which that small, at, non-representational blue form might be said to establish an ambiguous but visually consequential relation to the absent blue of the Madonnas cloak as it appears in the original painting. That blue cloak manifests in its folds the dynamism of the Madonna that

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emerges in Benjamins interpretation as the how of her cloud-borne movement as if into the space on the other side of the picture plane, which Benjamin names in turn as the what that Raphael presents in the painting. The patch of blue paper also recalls the blue of the left arm of Saint Barbaras garment, which in the original encloses a limb whose gesture, like that of its counterpart drawing back the curtain at right, structures the presentation of the pictorial space of the Sistine Madonna as one into which the viewer looks. Finally, the quadrilateral shape recalls the Gestalt of the work of which it has been made a part. Placed near the illustration of the wheel (an apparatus to be grasped) and the caption that invokes a sheet let sink by one himself versenkt, the pasted-on blue quadrilateral sets up a tactile orientation of Schwitterss montage to a hand that might, in the scene of viewing, grasp the picture itself as a sheet. That patch of blue, then, at once afxed to and seeming to have the potential to oat free from the surface of the picture, appears as an actualization of something akin to the how that Benjamin framed as what Raphael presents in the Sistine Madonna. If, for Benjamin, what Raphael presents in the painting is how the cloud-borne Madonna approaches the papal cofn from the rear of the niche, which was framed by green portires, what Schwitters presents in his Knave Child might be described as how the tactical/tactile side of the artistic is set in motion again by means of an Ummontierung to which the technological reproducibility of the original painting leads. Both Schwitters and Benjamin, it seems, recognize as if in a Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit something like an anti-classical taktische Qualitt in Raphaels painting. Schwitters presents that taktische Qualitt as a pseudo-painterly pastedon patch of blue, while Benjamin invokes it as an apparently actual (perhaps proto-cinematic) movement as if across the threshold that separates the space of the painting from the space of its exhibition. Rather than facing, at the threshold of the depicted space, a pair of spectator-angels, the viewer of Schwitterss work encounters a technical illustration of a wheel, a representation of a thing she or he might reach out to grasp with a hand. For its part, the fragment of paper that presents the phrase Gedankenvoll lie Viktor das Blatt sinken invokes thoughtfulness and the tactile act of a hand letting drop a sheet of paper in its grasp; and it thus seems to comment upon the now invisible states of thoughtfulness and gestures of touch presented by the spectator angels in the painting. Read as a caption to the work of which it is a part, the phrase at the bottom of Schwitterss montage, along with its counterpart at the top, might be said to indicate, in

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the terms Benjamin proposed in his preliminary notes for the artwork essay, the literarization of Raphaels original. Indeed the role of the mounted-on printed phrases is crucial in Schwitterss montage, in which the spatial and metaphorical relations of the curtain and the wooden panel on which the angels in the original lean that is the compositional elements through which the pictures central gures are revealed in Benjamins interpretation as if permanently on the verge of moving out of the picture-space are transformed by the Ummontierung manifested in the presentation of the phrases Amerika ist angenehm berhrt (America is pleasantly touched) and (to repeat) Gedankenvoll lie Viktor das Blatt sinken. Read as ironical gurations of aspects of what Benjamin called contemplative immersion (kontemplative Versenkung), those phrases provide a linguistic counterpart to the mechanical apparatus into which the bodies of the spectator angels have been transformed. Amerika enjoys a feeling of being touched, perhaps as one might be touched or moved by a work of art, while Viktor, a name that in the post-World-War-One German context might have served as a virtual synonym for Amerika, has in his contemplation lowered or let slip from his grasp a sheet of paper, perhaps a sheet bearing a picture at which he had been looking, a now sinking sheet displaying an image that had induced his sinking into thoughtful or contemplative immersion in the rst place. To reintroduce Benjamins terms from the artwork essay, Schwitterss Knave Child takes shape as a production imprinted with the brandmark of reproduction, bearing signs specically of reproductive technologies for printing words and images for a mass market, and perhaps also for pressing phonograph records for a new kind of listening audience. Among the pictures printed phrases is the cheap price tag 3 Pf.. Pasted onto the picture surface near the image of the horse (Pferd) who has joined Saints Barbara and Sixtus as a third gure alongside the Madonna and Christ-child, the Pf. in 3 Pf. suggests the repetition of the sound with which the word Pferd begins, and thereby signals, comically, something like that third gures nonsensical contribution of a mere aspiration (Pf.) to a now profane exchange which in the original had taken the form of a sacra conversazione. If the pastedon phrases in Schwitterss montage mock, as manifestations of the literarization of the original work of art, the kind of contemplative immersion associated with the reception of pictures in devotional contexts and therefore with what Benjamin calls cult value, they also interfere with the appearance of an effect of seeming movement in

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Raphaels painting that serves in Benjamins account of the picture as the formal pictorial evidence of the works primary exhibition value. When recognized as a work of art in which Ummontierung, actualization and literarization neither revive nor redeem Raphaels original painting, and in which those effects, moreoever, emerge alongside and as techniques for revealing the Verschlei of the original as an effect of its technological reproducibility, Knave Child Madonna with Horse points to the insightfulness of Benjamins analysis of Dadaist works of art. And yet by means of its own enigmatic gurations Schwitterss picture also points to the esoterism Benjamin acknowledged as characterizing the artwork essay as an inquiry into a hidden structural character in present-day art. Returning to Benjamins preliminary notes to the artwork essay, we might read his gesture in crossing out Literarisierung and replacing it with Politisierung as itself one of Ummontierung, Aktualisierung and Verschlei, a gesture whose graphic ambition and critical insufciency would continue to shape the claims within and about The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility throughout the history of its composition and reception.

NOTES
1 Theodor Lessing, Madonna Sixtina: Aesthetische und religise Studien (Leipzig: Seemann, 1908), 16. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 2 Herman Grimm, Das Leben Raphaels (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1886), 90. See also the incisive criticisms of Benjamins account of nineteenth-century reproductive media in Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 743. 3 Herman Grimm, Das Leben Raphaels, fourth, revised edition (1903), as cited in Emil Schaeffer, Raffaels Sixtinische Madonna als Erlebnis der Nachwelt (Dresden: Wolfgang Jess, 1927), 1223. 4 Stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard, translated by John Sturrock, preface by Lydia Davis (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2002), 486, translation modied. It is worth noting here that Benjamin understood Stendhals writing in terms that are closely related to the notion of Aktualisierung under consideration here. For Benjamin writing in 1928, Stendhal was a writer whose works belonged to a genre whose actuality is latent at the time they are published, so that scarcely anyone notices it; only later, in the light of their posthumous reputation, does it become recognizable

356 Paragraph how they manifest the deepest internal dimensions of their age (GS III, 155; SW II, 15960, translation modied). Walter Benjamin, Letter to Grete Karplus, 9 October 1935 (GB V, 171). On the signicance of paintings in Benjamins theory of knowledge, see Sigrid Weigel, Die unbekannten Meisterwerke in Benjamins Bildergalerie, in Walter Benjamin: Die Kreatur, das Heilige, die Bilder (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2008), 26596. To Max Horkheimer, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, edited by Gerschom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 509; translation modied; (for German, see GB V, 17781). G. W. F. Hegel, Werke 13: Vorlesungen ber die sthetik I, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 24; Hegels Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, I, edited by T. M. Knox (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 10; translation modied. On Benjamins references to Hegel in the artwork essay, see Eva Geulen, Under Construction: Walter Benjamins The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Benjamins Ghosts, edited by Gerhard Richter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 13741; see also Geulen, Das Ende der Kunst: Lesarten eines Gerchts nach Hegel (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 6589. The passage Benjamin quotes from the Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Geschichte appears in the edition cited in the artwork essay (Hegel, Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Geschichte, edited by D. Eduard Gans, Werke, vol. 9 (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1837), 414), but not in later editions. The English translation in Benjamins Selected Writings combines into one what are presented in his Gesammelte Schriften as two separate footnotes appended to a single sentence (GS I.2, 4823; SW IV, 2734). For an interpretation of the Sistine Madonna to which the refutation of Grimmes claims is crucial, see Johann Konrad Eberlein, The Curtain in Raphaels Sistine Madonna, The Art Bulletin 65:1 (March 1983), 6177. For a critique of Benjamins conceptualization of Kultwert and Ausstellungswert with regard to the Sistine Madonna, see Daniel Arasse, Lange spectateur: La Madone Sixtine et Walter Benjamin, in Les Visions de Raphal (Paris: Liana Levi, 2003), 11341. Hubert Grimme, Das Rtsel der Sixtinischen Madonna, Zeitschrift fr Bildende Kunst 57, Neue Folge 33:3/4 (1922), 49. See Thomas Y. Levin, Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History: An Introduction to Rigorous Study of Art, October 47 (Winter 1988), 7783; Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History, in Memoria: Walter Benjamin (18921940) zum 100. Geburtstag, edited by

5 6

10

11

12 13

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14

15

16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23

24

Uwe Steiner (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 77102; Wolfgang Kemp, Fernbilder: Walter Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft, in Links hatte sich noch alles zu entrtseln, edited by Burckhardt Lindner (Frankfurt/Main: Syndikat, 1978), 22457; and Christopher S. Wood, Introduction, The Vienna School Reader: Politcs and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (New York: Zone, 2000), 972. See, for example, John Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 1045; and Eberlein, The Curtain. Benjamins designation of the how of the Virgins movement as what Raphael presents suggests an emphasis on the capacity or ability of a painting on canvas to produce an effect of movement that relates to aspects of Benjamins thought and writing discussed in Samuel Weber, Benjamins abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), especially 1319, 3152, 95115. Heinrich Wlfin, Die Klassische Kunst: Eine Einfhrung in die Italienische Renaissance, sixth, revised edition (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1914), 131; Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance, translated by Peter and Linda Murray (London: Phaidon, 1994), 1313; translation modied. Wlfin, Klassische Kunst, 242, 245; Classic Art, 255, 257; translation modied. Wlfin, Klassische Kunst, 133; Classic Art, 135; translation modied. Hegel, Werke 15, 21; Aesthetics II, 8001; translation modied. Hegel, Werke 15, 49; Aesthetics II, 823; translation modied. Hegel, Werke 15, 545; Aesthetics II, 827; translation modied. In this and subsequent quotations from the Work of Art, I refer to the relevant passages in each of the three German versions of that essay, as published in the Gesammelte Schriften. References also appear to the second and third versions of the essay in the Selected Writings; an English translation of the rst has yet to be published. On Benjamins concept of aura, see Miriam Hansen, Benjamins Aura, Critical Inquiry 34 (Winter 2008), 33675; Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras, or: Art, Aura and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin, in Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 76107; and Josef Frnks, Aura, in Benjamins Begriffe, edited by Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 95146. On the signicance of Benjamins use of the term taktisch in The Work of Art, see Tobias Wilke, Medien der Unmittelbarkeit: Dingkonzepte und Wahrnehmungstechniken, 19181939 (Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 2008), 20242. On the motif of Handgreiichkeit in The Work of Art, see Geulen, Under Construction.

358 Paragraph 25 Theodor W. Adorno alluded to a link between Benjamins remarks on Dadaist artworks in The Work of Art, and his analysis of the Baroque Trauerspiel in Die Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1925/28) when he wrote, in a postscript to a letter to Benjamin of 18 March 1936, I should also like to express my particular agreement with your theory of Dadaism. It ts in with the essay as perfectly as the passages on bombast and horrors t into your book on the Baroque. See Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 19281940, edited by Henri Lonitz, translated by Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 133. 26 Benjamins invocation of a Formel der Traumwahrnehmung may be connected to his reception of Freuds discussion of traumatic dreams (Unfallstrume) in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), a text of which Benjamin rst made note in 1928, and which would come to play a signicant part in his 1939 essay, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire. It is worth noting in this connection that the term taktische Qualitt is translated as qualit traumatique in the 1936 French version of The Work of Art (GS I.2, 734). Benjamins Formel der Traumwahrnehmung also recalls, however, the very different theory of dreams in Ludwig Klages, Vom Traumbewutsein (1914), in Smtliche Werke, vol. 3, edited by Ernst Frauchiger, et al. (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974), 157238. 27 Arasse, Lange spectateur, 132. 28 See Benjamin on Charles Baudelaires Perte daurole in On Some Motifs in Baudelaire (SW IV, 342). 29 For a discussion of related kinds of pictorial effects in Cubist collage, and a brief but interesting treatment of Schwitterss work, see Clement Greenberg, The Pasted Paper Revolution (1958), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 195769, edited by John OBrian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 616.