Michelangelo’s David

Michelangelo’s David is an example of how an image can both assist and distract thought when a person tries to grasp an abstract concept. In the discussion of the Renaissance, the statue is not simply a symbol whose meaning is fixed by the concept. It is also apprehended as a work in its own right, carrying associations independent of the idea it has been summoned to clarify. That double status makes it an illustration image: a possible step toward understanding, but also a point where thought may lose its direction.

Role in the Discussion

The statue appears in a comparison between a symbolic schema and an illustration. Asked to define the Renaissance briefly, a person might first form an indeterminate image of a jet of water opening out and falling, or of a flower opening. Such images function as symbolic schemas: their features render the concept present. Michelangelo’s David offers a different case. Someone hearing the word Renaissance may see the statue, even though the statue is not the Renaissance itself.

Whether this image is functioning symbolically cannot be determined simply by inspecting it from the outside. The subject must say whether Michelangelo’s David is being thought as a symbol or apprehended for itself. In a symbolizing apprehension, the thought confers the sense of Renaissance on the statue. In a non-symbolizing apprehension, it is constituted instead as Michelangelo’s work, encountered as a particular statue and associated with its place in a museum in Florence. The same imaged object can therefore take part in different acts of thought.

A Detour with Two Directions

The image may mark a spontaneous deviation from the original task of defining the Renaissance. The deviation does not occur because the statue suddenly appears and forces thought off course; it takes place at the level of knowledge and ideation, and is a condition of the image’s appearance in this role. The thought that began by seeking the concept has taken a detour to form an image of Michelangelo’s David. The book treats that detour as meaningful rather than accidental, and asks what work the statue performs within it.

The image is linked to earlier productions of consciousness by the unity of the same search. Michelangelo’s David can serve as a step toward comprehension, a point of departure for mentally reviewing works of art known to have been produced during the Renaissance. Yet it can also hold thought in place, as though the sought understanding might be found within this particular statue. It vaguely claims to contain the meaning of the period, much as visiting a castle in Berlin might be expected to disclose the sense of Bismarck’s Prussia. At the limit, the statue may appear almost to be the Renaissance by a kind of participation, though that relation is less exact than the one established by a symbolic schema.

The Statue’s Independent Associations

A symbolic schema is more tightly governed by the concept it presents. Its spatial features have no significance apart from that concept, unless they carry another meaning that remains subordinate to the work of making the concept present. Michelangelo’s David differs because its identity as the statue is independent of the Renaissance. Recognizing it draws on a body of knowledge that cannot all serve the task of defining the period: it is known as a work seen during a journey in Italy, as the work of a sculptor whose other works may also be known, and as one artistic production among others.

Those associations can extend beyond explicit factual knowledge. The statue may carry an affective sense that can be developed: it may be bound to the unique experience of encountering it and to the atmosphere of a vanished period that the encounter allows a person to reconstruct. These layers make the image richer than a bare conceptual sign, but they also make it less controlled by the question that summoned it. Michelangelo’s David can become the correlate of consciousness that loses its equilibrium and slips into daydream. Its apparent participation in the Renaissance is therefore not as pure or determinate as the symbolic schema’s representation.

Illustration as a Preliminary Response

The statue illustrates a lower, hesitant stage in the movement from an abstract question toward a concept. The book compares this tendency with the response to a question about beauty: Socrates asks Hippias what beauty is, and Hippias names beautiful examples, including a woman and a horse. Likewise, someone asked about beauty may produce the image of the Venus de Milo, as if identifying one beautiful thing answered the question of beauty itself. These examples show thought beginning with an individual image before it has reached a clear concept.

Illustration can also gather several instances without resolving what they mean. A person’s knowledge of the subject may assemble images such as the Venus de Milo and Michelangelo’s David, while thought remains divided over whether any one image is beauty itself, an example of beautiful things, or something from which the concept can be inferred. The resulting image is posited both for itself and as a step toward understanding. Its ambiguity reflects the indecision of the thought that produces it, rather than an inherent failure of the object.

From Image to Comprehension

A glance toward a statue or painting in a museum hall containing Renaissance masterpieces exemplifies the empirical pull of illustration. Asked to characterize the period, a visitor may look first at one of the works, attempting to observe the thing itself and examine it. Even without the masterpieces present, the same impulse may take the form of making Michelangelo’s David present in the mind. In either case, thought gives priority to experience, although it may not know whether the image is the concept, an example of the concept, or evidence from which the concept can be understood.

Proper comprehension changes the nature of thought rather than the basic role of the image as a correlate of consciousness. Through a creative effort, thought leaves the illustrative image and considers the Renaissance itself as present; at that point, the schema appears. From Michelangelo’s David, thought can thus take either of two routes: it can abandon its assignment and become lost in daydream, or it can proceed toward genuine comprehension. Psychologists such as Binet have taken the image’s potential to obstruct thought as evidence against the image, but the account places responsibility for the disequilibrium on thought itself. Michelangelo’s David exposes the fork in the process: the image can be a provisional means of approach or the occasion for a detour, depending on the activity that gives it meaning.