Thinking of image – XVII century Dutch painting as ontology of the visible world

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate unobvious connection among material praxis of producing a painting, structure of modern knowledge, and ontology. I claim that a painting is something more than a picture on canvas that we can adore or investigate in some other way.  The Baroque art, with its new topics and new forms of depiction, inaugurated modernity as fresh, visual knowledge separated from the enchanted world order, but this separation was not something obvious and complete. I accept this incompleteness as a clue to investigate in the sense Bruno Latour expressed it in his famous sentence; we have never been modern. A painting, as I define it, rules and constructs sight but simultaneously covers the whole performative (enchanted) spectacle which generates it on the level of material mediations.  It means that direct relation between the  subject and the object does not correspond with the obtained epistemological or even aesthetic scheme of analysis. Therefore, anthropology of painting needs ontological reflection constituted on a blurred border between the enchanted and the disenchanted world.