Conjuring: How the Virtuoso Romantic Learned from the Enlightened Charlatan

Barbara Maria Stafford
Art Journal, Vol. 52, No. 2, Romanticism (Summer, 1993), pp. 22-30

 

commonality between enlightened and romantic

"For a perceptive and illuminating commentary on the Rheingold prelude as illusion of
“nature,” see Richard Leppert, “Paradise, Nature, and Reconciliation, or, a Tentative Conversa-
tion with Wagner, Puccini, Adorno, and the Ronettes,” Echo: A Music-Centered Journal4, no. 1
(2002)." from
SHERRY D. LEE

bimodal vs. bipolar illusion in 18th c. France

Cited by Gitelman Always Already New.
Focusing on the period from about 1880 to 1905, Jonathan Crary examines the connections between the modernization of subjectivity and the dramatic expansion and industrialization of visual/auditory culture.

Cited by Paulin - discussion of Wagner's 'concrete remaking of the spectator's experience' at Bayreuth, in a way that anticipated the coercively 'attentive' conditions of cinema spectatorship. 

Raphael, School of Athens (1509-11). Ndalianis's classical attitude to narrative and visual form. Murray: "each group is tied to the whole by some detail that serves as a hyphen that relates the details, through compositional arrangement" to the central narrative concern focused on Aristotle and Plato. 1-point perspective - lead gaze of spectator into the depth of the composition.

Pietro da Cortona's ceiling pating of The Glorification of Urban VIII (Rome, 1633-39). Ndalianis's "paragon of baroque attitudes to spectacle and illusionism...single, immobile viewpoint of the classical spectator is transformed into a dynamic process that chages as a result of its three-dimensional capacity to actively engage the spectator in spatial terms."

Cited in Techniques of the Observer on myth of persistence of vision

Implications of the Cel Animation Technique - 'animated film' first meant any motion picture. cartoons = equal distinct mode c. 1913. invention of celluloid animation reduced expense and allowed cartoons to flourish.

Machines of the Visible - photography decenters eye's place of mastery which had since Renaissance (123); becomes gauarantor of conformity of delusion with norm of visual perception. "The mechanical magic of the analogical representation of the visible is accomplished and articulated from a doubt as to the fidelity of human vision, and more widely as to the truth of sensory impressions. I wonder....if there is not, in the very principle of representation, a force of disavowal which gives free rein to an analogical illusion that is yet only weakly manifested by the iconic signifies themselves?"

The Place of Visual Illusions

cited by Newcomb

"Haydn, Laurence Sterne, and the Origins of Musical Irony," Mark Evan Bonds, Journal of the American Musicological Society 1991

From book description:
Whereas the concept of semblance, or illusion, points to Adorno's links with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the concept of subjectivity recalls his lifelong struggle with a philosophy of consciousness stemming from Kant, Hegel, and Lukacs.  Art, despite the taint of illusion that it has carried since Plato's Republic, turns out in Adorno's account of modernism to have a sophisticated capacity to critique illusion, including its own.

cited by mark evan bonds

Cited by Orvell the real thing.

Cited by Orvell the real thing. Originally Magic, Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions. 1897.

FA Carrel 307.