MEMS Lecture Series. Pisanello, Adrian Stokes, and the Image of the Threshold

In his mind-bending early essay, “Pisanello” (1930), Adrian Stokes laid the groundwork for the project that claimed the “Quattro Cento” as the period that contained the beating heart of humanist culture. Central to the essay is an elaborate ekphrasis loosely evoking the arch fresco that Pisanello painted circa 1438 in Church of Sant’Anastasia in Verona. In constructing his own image Stokes both stages a passage and holds it in suspension, as a threshold. My paper explores the potential of Stokes’ threshold as a means of formulating a critical position capable of engaging the unruly, sometimes disturbing aspects of Pisanello’s art, those aspects that the central discourses of modernist art history found difficult to accommodate.