10.54103/ai/18191
In the first of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1984, Frank Stella focused on “The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane,” and claimed that “No one helped lighten this burden more than Caravaggio.” At a certain point in his talk, the American artist went so far as to say that Caravaggio anticipated the invention of the gyroscope, the technological device which makes the virtual experience possible. Stella’s lecture is the starting point for developing an anachronistic path through pictorial and digital media, in light of their ability to produceillusionistic effects on viewers. In particular, building on Michael Fried’s theory of art and image, this paper investigates virtual experience with reference to two different moments: the “immersive” moment, in which one has the impression of stepping into the frame, and the “specular” one, where the illusionistic effects are revealed; the attraction, when sinking into an image that has become an environment, and the distancing, when the image itself beckons to us and we are invited to reflect on our position as viewers.
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Francesco Zucconi
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
Virtual Reality Cinema
Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two “moments” of the virtual experience
Text.Serial.Journal
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2022-12-20
2022-07-04
2022-12-20
2023-04-17
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Francesco Zucconi
2022/12/20
10.54103/ai/18191
Università Iuav di Venezia 
2785-7433
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Virtual Reality Cinema
en
Zucconi, F., “Regarding the image of the pain of others: Caravaggio, Sontag, Leogrande,” Humanities 11 (2022), https://doi.org/10.3390/h11020044.
Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two “moments” of the virtual experience
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/download/18191/17773
1
             Caravaggio’s
             gyroscope:
on the two “moments”
of the virtualCaravaggio
                experience
by Francesco Zucconi
                       Frank Stella
                       Michael Fried
                       Immersion and Specularity
                       Virtual Reality Cinema




                             Issue №2 Year 2022
                             → Just an illusion? Between simulation,
                             emulation, and hyper-realism
                             Edited by Pietro Conte
                             and Lambert Wiesing
Caravaggio’s gyroscope:
on the two “moments” of the
virtual experience
FRANCESCO ZUCCONI, Università IUAV di Venezia – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9580-1000
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/18191



Abstract                       In the first of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures
                 that he gave at Harvard in 1984, Frank Stella focused on
                “The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable
                 of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane,” and
                 claimed that “No one helped lighten this burden more than
                 Caravaggio.” At a certain point in his talk, the American
                 artist went so far as to say that Caravaggio anticipated the
                 invention of the gyroscope, the technological device which
                 makes the virtual experience possible. Stella’s lecture is the
                 starting point for developing an anachronistic path through
                 pictorial and digital media, in light of their ability to produce
                 illusionistic effects on viewers. In particular, building on Mi-
                 chael Fried’s theory of art and image, this paper investigates
                 virtual experience with reference to two different moments:
                 the “immersive” moment, in which one has the impression
                 of stepping into the frame, and the “specular” one, where
                 the illusionistic effects are revealed; the attraction, when
                 sinking into an image that has become an environment, and
                 the distancing, when the image itself beckons to us and
                 we are invited to reflect on our position as viewers.




Keywords         Caravaggio                     Frank Stella                     Michael Fried
                 Immersion and Specularity                          Virtual Reality Cinema
To quote this essay: F. Zucconi, “Caravaggio’s gyroscope: on the two ‘moments’ of the virtual
experience,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 67-88, https://doi.
org/10.54103/ai/18191

FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                                67                                        AN-ICON
                                 Introduction

                             I put on the headset and immerse myself in
               another world – in a theme park or in a refugee camp, in a
               disaster-stricken village or perhaps in the city of Hiroshi-
               ma immediately after the launch of the atomic bomb.1 In
               some cases I am a mere sightseer, while in other cases I
               am the “witness” to significant events. I have to enter into
               an empathetic relationship with those who dwell very far
               from me, I am expected to “put myself in their shoes” and
               to experience their condition “directly.”2 Yet I cannot help
               but realize, sooner or later, that I find myself physically in
               the safe spaces of a museum or a gallery, in the section
               dedicated to VR cinema at the Venice International Film
               Festival, or perhaps in the pavilion of an NGO that uses
               virtual reality as a form for raising public awareness on
               sensitive topics. No matter how effectively illusionistic this
               virtual environment is. Always, in the media experiences of
               VR cinema, something pushes me inward, draws me into
               the virtual environment, while, at the same time, something
               else pushes me out, reminding me that I am just facing an
               image, and bringing me back to the spatial and temporal
               coordinates of our physical world.3
                            This article does not intend to analyse immer-
               sive videos by trying to deconstruct the nonchalant use of
               the notion of “empathy” and the ideology of “transparency”
               that has characterized their promotion, which has already

      1 As an example of a virtual theme park experience, see “Disneyland Paris - 360 VR -
      Main Street,” Disneyland Paris, YouTube video, 1.19, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/
      watch?v=RNly6mSF0-o, accessed January 10, 2023. Regarding the applications of such
      technology to the field of humanitarian communication, see http://unvr.sdgactioncampaign.org,
      accessed January 10, 2023. As for the fourth example, please refer to the official web page of
      the project https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/new-virtual-reality-experience-drops-
      you-hiroshima-right-after-its-been-bombed-180968903, accessed January 10, 2023.
      2 As an emblematic example of the promotional use of a term such as “empathy” and on the
      idea of putting oneself in another’s place through VR cinema, see https://youtu.be/
      vAEjX9S8o2k.
      3 These issues can be conceived with reference to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological
      lesson and the relationship among the notions of Bildding (the physical thing), Bildobjekt
      (image-object) and Bildsujet (image-subject). See E. Husserl, “Phantasy and Image
      Consciousness,” in Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898-1925). Edmund
      Husserl Collected Works, vol 11 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). On the illusionistic forms of virtual
      reality, examined through a rereading of Husserl, see P. Conte, Unframing Aesthetics (Milan:
      Mimesis International, 2020): 46-52.

FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                               68                                           AN-ICON
              been the subject of several studies.4 Rather, I would like
              to take up and further develop some issues present in my
              previous works, with the aim of opening a space for reflec-
              tion on immersive technology following an anachronistic
              path through pictorial and digital media by referring to some
              concepts of art history and theory.5
                           The main objective is to focus, in analytical and
              theoretical terms, on the double effect of attraction and
              distancing described above, as structuring the experience
              of VR cinema. While the impossibility of fully capturing
              and keeping the viewers within the virtual environment has
              mostly been conceived as a negative limitation of such
              technology, in this paper I try to argue otherwise. Through
              the reference to a repertoire of images from the past, the
              aim is to describe the paradoxical character of an experi-
              ence that is made up as much of attraction as of distancing.
              But before this can be sustained there are some interme-
              diate steps.
                           After this introduction, in the second section,
              taking up a hypothesis advanced by Frank Stella, I explain
              the idea that gives the title to this paper: that Caravaggio,
              anticipated the invention of gyroscope technology and
              therefore made possible the first immersive experience in
              the history of Western painting. In the third, fourth and fifth
              sections, building on Michael Fried, I try to emphasize the
              two moments that characterize Caravaggio’s paintings:
              immersion, the formal device that attracts within the image,
              and specularity, understood as the set of figurative and
              compositional elements that produce an effect of aware-
              ness on the viewer.6 In the conclusion, I reconsider Fried’s
              analysis and the concepts that characterize his theoretical

      4 The literature on the notion of empathy is vast and constantly evolving with reference
      to new technological and expressive forms. For an early critical reflection on the facile
      use of this concept in relation to VR cinema, see W. Uricchio, S. Ding, S. Wolozin, and B.
      Boyacioglu, Virtually There: Documentary Meets Virtual Reality Conference Report (The MIT
      Open Documentary Laboratory, 2016): 17-18, http://opendoclab.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/
      uploads/2016/11/MIT_OpenDocLab_VirtuallyThereConference.pdf, accessed January 10,
      2023.
      5 I refer to F. Zucconi, Displacing Caravaggio: Art, Media, and Humanitarian Visual Culture
      (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
      6 On these two notions, which will also be referred to in the following pages, see M. Fried, The
      Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010).

FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                               69                                          AN-ICON
              work in relation to contemporary media. What emerges is
              an opportunity for developing an ethic of VR: to what extent,
              can immersive technology facilitate the assumption of a
              testimonial gaze? Under what conditions can the gesture
              of wearing a virtual reality headset assume a critical value?

                                Frank Stella’s hypothesis

                           The American artist Frank Stella is, without a
              doubt, someone who understands visual surfaces and me-
              dia frames, their ability to offer illusionistic effects. One only
              has to think of his works in the 1960s, where a series of
              frames relentlessly squeeze against each other, leaving a
              small coloured square in the centre. Taking inspiration from
              Louis Marin’s analysis of Gran Cairo (1962), it is fair to ask
              whether these squares-frames are a well or a pyramid (Fig.
              1). As the French historian and theorist notes, they are “a
              well and a pyramid, but never at the same time. The eye
              cannot predict the necessary and the arbitrary moment of
              conversion in which all the serious play of the frame and
              its modern and contemporary figures seem to be concen-
              trated: the play of the rhythm of presentation and repre-
              sentation, the play of the subject of the art of seeing and
              the art of describing.”7
                           If we compare them to the famous example of
              the rabbit/duck illustration investigated by Ludwig Wittgen-
              stein and Ernst Gombrich, Stella’s paintings do not merely
              work on the viewers’ perceptual and cognitive limits in the
              recognition of the figures depicted. Rather, the represen-
              tational undecidability and instability of image produce a
              spatial effect, by modulating the relation between the ob-
              serving subject and the observed object. In other words,
              when confronted with the rabbit/duck illustration, the viewer
              does not have the illusion of being confronted with a duck or
              rabbit coming off the page; rather, the graphic representa-
              tion produces an illusionistic effect that makes it impossible
              to visualize the two animals at the same time. In contrast

      7 L. Marin, On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002): 372.

FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                              70                                       AN-ICON
              to that, Stella’s paintings produce an illusionistic effect to
              the extent that they alternately draw the viewer inward – as
              in a well – or push him or her out, as if the surface had a
              pyramidal shape. Those who observe Stella’s paintings are
              thus subjected to the rhythmic redundancy of the “opac-
              ity” of the painted frame that becomes recognizable – we
              might say that makes itself “transparent” – in the metaphors
              of the pyramid and the well.8 In more general terms than
              those used by Marin, we might speak of Stella’s work as a
              gestalt effect capable of inducing, alternately, in the viewer
              both the impression of attraction and that of rejection or
              distancing. In fact, beyond the series of concentric squares,
              Stella’s artistic research would continue in the 1970s and
              1980s by focusing on the relationship between the space




                               Fig. 1. Frank Stella, Gran Cairo, 1962, New York, Whitney Museum of
                         American Art, purchase with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum
                             of American Art; © Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

      8 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (London: Pearson, 1973); E. Gombrich, Art and
      Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representations (Princeton: Princeton University
      Press, 1961).

FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                               71                                           AN-ICON
              of the canvas and the pictorial space, between the surface
              and depth (Fig. 2).




                                                            Fig. 2. Frank Stella, Eccentric Polygon,
                                                              1974, Jane Kahan Gallery, New York;
                                                               purchased by Walter and Joan Wolf,
                                                               Indianapolis, Indiana; ©Frank Stella/
                                                            Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.



                           Beyond the theory of art that is implied in Stel-
              la’s works, it behoves us to pay particular attention, then,
              to what he had to say in the first of the Charles Eliot Norton
              Lectures that he gave at Harvard in 1984. In developing
              a line of thought that sweeps from Leonardo da Vinci to
              Seurat, and from Vermeer to Velázquez, Stella focused on
              a theoretical problem that is crucial in the history of arts
              and images; a problem that equally concerns both “old”
              and “new” media. “The necessity of creating pictorial space
              that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface
              plane,” he says, “is the burden that modern painting was
              born with.”9 And immediately afterwards he goes on to
              state that “No one helped lighten this burden more than
              Caravaggio.”10
                           As often happens, when artists are willing to
              share their theory, their tone tends to be assertive: Stella’s
              remarks are full of ideas for creative practice but possibly a
              font of perplexity for art historians. Still, how can one not ap-
              preciate his attempt to concisely express the transformation

      9 F. Stella, Working Space (Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1986): 10.
      10 Ibid.

FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                             72                                           AN-ICON
                that Caravaggio’s painting forced on the regimes of pictorial
                representation of space and bodies? Stella’s observations
                aptly describe Caravaggio’s propensity for experimenting
                with the phenomenological limits of the idea of “realism,”
                by creating environments in which the viewer’s gaze must
                grope its way around, wrapped up in the composition but
                equally attracted by the vivid emphasis on colour, and by
                the chromatic nuances seen in some of the details.
                             Stella’s reflections did not stop here. He de-
                veloped his argument by examining Caravaggio’s entire
                body of works and focuses on a few paintings. He used
                anachronistic terminology to highlight several aspects that
                prefigure artistic and technological developments that took
                place in the following decades as well as to identify their
                potentialities:

To be able to carry in our minds the space of Caravaggio’s large
commanding works, such as the Vatican Deposition and the Seven
Acts of Mercy from Naples, we need some kind of image to help
form an idea about the design and purpose of Caravaggio’s pictorial
space. The image that comes to mind is that of the gyroscope—a
spinning sphere, capable of accommodating movement and tilt. We
 have to imagine ourselves caught up within this sphere, experienc-
 ing the movement and motion of painting’s action. [...] The space that
Caravaggio created is something that twentieth-century painting
could use: an alternative both to the space of conventional realism
and to the space of what has come to be conventional painterliness.
The sense of a shaped spatial presence enveloping the action
of the painting and the location of the creator and spectator is a
 by-product of the success of Caravaggio’s realistic illusionism.11
                              Within a reflection on VR cinema and immersive
                media, it is the idea of “realistic illusionism” and even more
                the metaphor of the gyroscope that attracts attention. The
                gyroscope, invented in the 19th century by French physi-
                cist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault is still the basis of virtual
                reality devices. It is also thanks to it that the visors worn

       11 Ibid.: p. 11.

FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                        73                               AN-ICON
            by viewers can track head movements and thus accurately
            detect movement along one, two or three axes, thus mak-
            ing the virtual experience possible. Without the gyroscope,
            there is no possible balance between the viewer’s gestures
            and movements in the virtual environment, nor any possi-
            bility of orientation within it.
                          It is time to give a chance to Stella and his
            hypothesis that Caravaggio invented the gyroscope and
            with it virtual reality helmets. But I would like to develop
            this suggestion in a key that is not merely “technological,”
            by investigating the forms of composition that character-
            ize the pictorial medium and the effects they produce. To
            do so, it is necessary to re-conceive the American artist’s
            hypothesis into a series of operational questions: what is
            or would be, exactly, in Caravaggio’s painting capable of
            prefiguring the conditions of illusionism made possible by
            contemporary technologies? How do his paintings help
            us understand the dual effect – hitherto described as one
            of attraction and distancing – that we experience within
            immersive environments like those of VR cinema?

                        The two moments of Narcissus

                         To my knowledge, no contemporary photogra-
            pher or artist has yet investigated in detail the instant when
            viewers put on or take off their virtual reality helmets. This
            is really a pity, because the image of that precise instant
            could make us think a lot about the potentialities of such
            technology. We must therefore be content with the myths
            of the past and their survival in our contemporary practices.
                         About to plunge into a virtual world, we find the
            figure of Narcissus. As noted by Andrea Pinotti – who has
            identified in Narcissus a kind of “conceptual character” of
            the an-iconic tradition in Western visual culture – there are
            two versions of the myth: the first aimed at producing a
           “naïve” image of the young boy who falls into the illusionistic
            trap of the image (recurring in Plotinus, Pausanias, Marsilio
            Ficino, etc.); the second coinciding with a “conscious” Nar-
            cissus (Ovidian variant), who is aware of the, so to speak,
FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                  74                             AN-ICON
               media environment with which he is confronted and with
               which he is about to make one body.12
                            It matters little that the Narcissus painted at
               the end of the Sixteenth century is not a signed work by
               Caravaggio but only an attribution, widely discussed by
               art historians (Fig. 3). For the purposes of the reasoning
               proposed in this paper, it should be noted that the young
               man is already fully rapt and about to plunge into the world
               of image. Yet, the figure of the double reflection still reveals
               a gap between two representational and sensible worlds
               or regimes.




                                                              Fig. 3. Caravaggio (attribution), Narcissus,
                                                                   1597-1599, Rome, Palazzo Barberini.

                            Explicitly taking up the terms proposed by Mi-
               chael Fried, Narcissus constitutes an explication of the two
              “moments” that Caravaggio’s painting produces on view-
               ers. According to Fried – let it be said in passing: a friend

      12 A. Pinotti, Alla soglia dell’immagine. Da Narciso alla realtà virtuale (Torino: Einaudi, 2021):
      3-6.

FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                                 75                                             AN-ICON
              and one of the most important interpreter of Stella’s work
             – Caravaggio’s pictorial corpus involve a moment defined
              as “immersive, imagining the painter as so caught up, so
              immersed, in this phase of his work on the painting as to be
              less than fully aware of any sharp distinction between the
              painting and himself.”13 The second “‘moment,’ notionally
              instantaneous, of separating or indeed recoiling from the
              painting, of becoming detached from it, which is to say of
              no longer being immersed in work on it but rather of see-
              ing it, taking it in, as if for the first time; I call that ‘moment’
              specular, meaning thereby to emphasize the strictly visual
              or optical relation between the artist - viewer and the image,
              or image - artefact, that has just brought into being.”14
                            Reading these pages on Caravaggio, thoughts
              evidently run to the dialectic between “absorption” and
             “theatricality”15 identified by Fried himself in the painting of
              the eighteenth century, or to that between “art” and “ob-
              jecthood”16 as a key to theoretical and critical interpreta-
              tion of the relationship between media, art and spatiality in
              the second half of the twentieth century. Even before the
              eighteenth century, well before the twentieth-century and,
              we might add, contemporary media experience, Caravag-
              gio would have had the ability to reflect in an original way
              on the tension between the painter and his work (through
              the use of self-portraiture), between the canvas and the
              pictorial space (the composition of volumes, the relation-
              ship between light and shadow) producing unprecedented
              effects on viewers, now driving them inward, now pushing
              them outward.
                            Hovering between the classicism of the myth
              and the technological actuality of the present, Narcissus is

a virtual allegory of the ‘moment’ of immersion, or perhaps I should
say of absorption becoming immersion, conjoined with the strongest
      13 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 39.
      14 Ibid.
      15 M. Fried, Theatricality and Absorption: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot
      (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
      16 M. Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago-London: University of
      Chicago Press, 1998).

FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                              76                                          AN-ICON
possible statement of the specular separation of the viewer — orig-
inally the painter-viewer — from the painting. There is in it also the
strongest imaginable thematization of mirroring as distinct from
painting, another of the basic polarities that, in varying ratios and
combinations, structure much of Caravaggio’s art. And of course,
it is a scene of hyperbolic self-portraiture, the core practice of his
lifelong endeavor.17
                          Narcissus is in a sense, for the purposes of the
              anachronistic reasoning I am proposing here, a portrait of
              the exact moment when the viewer is about to put on the
              headset to access the virtual experience: it is in the middle,
              between plunging and retreating.

                              Within Caravaggio: immersion and
                              reflection

                             Beyond the myth, the comparison between
              contemporary media and the tradition of western art can
              be developed through other Caravaggio masterpieces, in
              which the effect of spatial encompassment is strong. Even
              better, it is possible to argue that some of Caravaggio’s
              paintings represent the virtual experience as viewed from
              the outside but not without investigating the effects it pro-
              duces in those inside.
                             Let us focus on the Taking of Christ (1602) and
              The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610). In the first of these
              two paintings (Fig. 4), the centre of attention is located on
              the left, at the point of Judas’s dramatic gesture of betrayal,
              toward which all eyes converge, except for those of the
              disciple, who flees terrified toward the edge of the frame.
              In the second painting, considered to be the last that Car-
              avaggio completed before his death, what is represented
              is the exact moment when Saint Ursula is wounded by
              Attila after she refuses his advances. What connects the
              two works, in addition to the horizontal composition and
              the precise staging of a dramatic event, is the presence of

      17 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 139.

FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                            77                          AN-ICON
            a figure located on the right side of each painting. This is
            a man shown in profile: he has a black beard and bushy
            eyebrows. His head is stretched up, as if he were standing
            on tiptoe so as to better observe the violent scene unfold-
            ing just a few steps in front of him. In the 1602 painting
            the man is attempting to lighten the darkness of the night
            and illuminate Judas’s kiss by means of a lantern, which
            he holds in front of himself with his right hand.
                         This figure is of particular interest for at least
            two reasons. The first, which Roberto Longhi divined earlier,
            is that the man on the right side of the image is Caravaggio
            himself. This is a self-portrait, one of the many in his picto-
            rial corpus, confirmed moreover by its reproduction – like a




                                            Fig. 4. Caravaggio, Taking of Christ, 1602,
                                                     Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland.




                                                Fig. 5. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of
                                                  Saint Ursula, 1610, Naples, Palazzo
                                                                   Zevallos Stigliano.

FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                  78                                         AN-ICON
              signature – in the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (Fig. 5).18 The
              second reason concerns the role that this figure plays in
              both works. The art historian Sergio Benedetti – who has
              the merit of having rediscovered the original Taking of Christ,
              after years of investigation into various copies – noted that
              the figure of Caravaggio “is well defined and holds up a
              lantern, the function of which is purely compositional as it
              appears to throw no light, the true light source being high
              on the left, beyond the scene depicted.”19 In a similar way,
              Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit noted how, in this work,
             “Caravaggio puts himself within the painting not in order
              to get closer to his historical subject but rather in order to
              see himself both illuminating and experiencing congested
              spaces.”20 Even more explicitly, Giovanni Careri identified in
              this self-portrait a kind of declaration of intent of the artist
              that invites us to reflect on our position as spectators: “I
              paint with light, with light I show a scene that belongs to
              the past, but also to the present, the armour testifies to
              this. I am here to see the arrest of Christ but I cannot in-
              tervene, as you spectators, witnesses safe from a violence
              that outrages and fascinates.”21
                             By re-conceiving such analytical insights in
              Fried’s terms, the artist’s self-portrait with lantern can
              therefore be conceived of both as being in the process of
              becoming immersed in the pictorial environment and as
              becoming “expelled from it in a ‘moment’ of specularity
              which was to all intents and purposes the aim and purpose
              of that work (the establishment of the painting as a painting,
              as an artifact to be looked at.)”22
                             Retracing our steps to the theoretical notions
              structuring this paper, with these paintings we are confront-
              ed with two different and apparently contradictory effects.
              At first, like Caravaggio trying to observe the scene, with

      18 R. Longhi, “Un originale di Caravaggio a Rouen e il problema delle copie caravaggesche,”
      Paragone 121 (1960): 23-36.
      19 S. Benedetti, “Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ, a masterpiece rediscovered,” The Burlington
      Magazine 135, no. 1088 (1993): 731-741, 738.
      20 L. Bersani, U. Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge-London: MIT Press, 1998): 57.
      21 G. Careri, Caravaggio. La Fabbrica dello Spettatore (Milano: Jaca Book, 2017): 234.
      22 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 217.

FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                              79                                         AN-ICON
              or without his lantern, we are pushed into the painting as
              a medial environment made of light and shadow. Then lat-
              er, once we have searched the environment and once we
              have recognized the figure of the painter-witness, we are
              pushed outward, that is to say that we begin to reflect on
              the pictorial composition and on our position as viewers:
              in front of an image, with our feet planted on the museum’s
              floor, in Dublin, Naples or in another city.
                            Putting it in anachronistic terms, one could first
              argue that the contemporary experiences offered by VR
              cinema are also characterized by an “immersive” moment:
              here the field of view itself coincides with a “portable lan-
              tern” located on the forehead of the spectator; a wearable
              lantern that illuminates a spherical space that coincides
              with full darkness, except for the frontal portion framed
              from time to time. Darkness that the VR cinema viewer
              will never have occasion to see or feel, except when it is
              diegetized in the production of a given narrative effect. At
              the same time, a “specular” moment, always persists: pri-
              marily in the glitches of the digital environment; in the very
              fact that lowering my gaze to look for my body I tend to
              find nothing or at least the scarcely credible simulation of
              arms and legs; in the presence of extradiegetic music, in all
              those compositional effects – whether intended or not by
              the video-makers – that invite us to see the image behind
              the simulation of a virtual environment and in so doing to
             “reflect” on our position as viewers.23

                               Regarding the image of the pain of others

                          As in many VR cinema projects, the two paint-
              ings described above are about situations of suffering or
              violence, scenes which invite the viewer to assume the
              position of a witness but in which, at the same time, it is
              impossible to immerse oneself completely. One painting
              by Caravaggio seems capable of interrogating, more than

      23 On the limits of VR cinema, through some concrete examples, see F. Zucconi, “Sulla
      tendenza utopica nel VR cinema,” Carte Semiotiche 7 (2021): 118-126.

FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                             80                                        AN-ICON
              any other, the paradoxical character of virtual experience,
              as well as the idea of being able to experience a world and
              a living condition that are profoundly different from those
              characterizing the viewer’s everyday life.
                            At the centre of Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St.
              Matthew (1600) is the half-naked, fully lit body of the assas-
              sin (Fig. 6). On the left, a group of men in seventeenth-cen-
              tury clothing recoil, trying to shield themselves from the
              violence. While an angel hands St. Matthew the palm of
              martyrdom, on the right we see the gesture of a novice
              walking away. In the foreground, some catechumens lying
              on the ground observe the scene. The composition is cen-
              trifugal: the viewer’s gaze gradually moves away from the
              centre as it moves from one body to another. In the back-
              ground, one meets a figure characterized by a particularly
              intense gaze who seems to stare at the act of violence be-
              fore his eyes. This is the bearded man leaning out from the
              black background behind the assassin. Again, that man is
              Caravaggio. Also in this large painting, the painter portrays
              himself in the role of a witness to a violent act.
                            Those who would try to go even further in their
              analysis might go so far as to argue that what Caravaggio
              painted in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew is not simply a
              self-portrait, but a “self-portrait as painter.” To support this
              hypothesis, I would like to emphasize the inclination of the
              figure’s head to the side to observe the scene as if he had
              a canvas in front of him (Fig. 7). One could also conceive
              of the left hand reaching forward as a transfiguration of the
              palette, while the right hand holds the brush. The artist’s
              sad gaze might then be re-conceived as a concentrated,
              absorbed gaze. If this were the case, it would be an antic-
              ipation of some of the traits that characterize the extraor-
              dinary visual dispositif that is Las Meninas (1656) by Diego
              Velázquez, notoriously and masterfully analysed by Michel
              Foucault in The Order of Things:

Now he [the painter] can be seen, caught in a moment of stillness, at
the neutral centre of this oscillation. His dark torso and bright face
are half-way between the visible and the invisible: emerging from
FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                        81                              AN-ICON
                                                          Fig. 6. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of St.
                                                             Matthew, 1600, San Luigi dei Francesi
                                                                                   Church, Rome.




                                                             Fig. 7. Caravaggio, The Martyrdom of
                                                           St. Matthew, 1600, Rome, San Luigi dei
                                                                           Francesi Church. Detail.


that canvas beyond our view, he moves into our gaze; but when,
in a moment, he makes a step to the right, removing himself from
our gaze, he will be standing exactly in front of the canvas he is
painting; he will enter that region where his painting, neglected for
an instant, will, for him, become visible once more, free of shadow
and free of reticence.24

       24 M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) (London-
       New York: Routledge, 2002): 4.

FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                             82                                         AN-ICON
                           In both Velazquez’s and Caravaggio’s master-
              piece, the self-portrait takes on a theoretical and critical
              function; they are within the painting and, at the same time,
              they explicitly invite the viewer to reflect on visual repre-
              sentation, on the point of view that structures it and on the
              limits of the composition.25
                           This may seem a bold interpretation. Yet, look-
              ing closely at the figure of Caravaggio, it can be argued
              that the image presented in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew
              is not only an image of self “regarding the pain of others”
              but also and at the same time – turning Susan Sontag’s
              famous expression – an image of self “regarding the image
              of the pain of others.”26 If in the Taking of Christ and The
              Martyrdom of St. Ursula the self-portrait is first and fore-
              most functional in expressing an idea of immersion of the
              painter-witness in the pictorial event – a closure and full
              autonomy of the pictorial as an “immersive environment” –
              in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew there is a shift that calls
              into question the composition of the image and the effect
              of immediacy of representation. Reading Fried again, this
              is a work “in which a Caravaggio semblable at once rush-
              es to leave the painting and looks back in evident distress,
              thereby enabling the viewer to recognize his characteristic
              features on the far threshold of the depicted space.”27 It is
              not so much or simply that the figure depicting the painter
              seems about to leave the scene but, as the art historian
              and theorist writes with great acumen, “rushes to leave the
              painting” and pushes the viewer’s gaze to the threshold of
              the image. If the self-portraits of 1602 and 1610 tend to
              provoke an identification between painter and viewer and
              reinforce the effect of immersion, that of The Martyrdom




      25 For a more in-depth reflection on this painting and on the modernity of Caravaggio’s self-
      portrait, capable of activating paths of critical reflection on contemporary media and visual
      culture, see F. Zucconi, “Regarding the image of the pain of others: Caravaggio, Sontag,
      Leogrande,” Humanities 11 (2022), 44. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11020044.
      26 The reference is to the title and thoughts developed in the famous book by S. Sontag,
      Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003).
      27 M. Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio: 209.

FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                              83                                          AN-ICON
            of St. Matthew traces the effect of immediacy back to the
            pictorial composition that produces it.
                         As Sontag herself points out in the above-men-
            tioned book, from the seventeenth century to the tradition
            of twentieth-century reportage, a self-portrait of the painter,
            photographer, or director is certainly not enough to vali-
            date the authenticity and effectiveness of the testimony or
            its ethical value. The risk of a self-referential drift, even a
           “narcissistic” tendency, is also discernible behind this trend:
            why represent ourselves when we are faced with the pain
            of others? Rather than glibly promote all self-reflexive ten-
            dencies, the self-portrait of Caravaggio in The Martyrdom
            of Saint Matthew is useful and interesting to the extent that
            it is a manifestation of the fact that, despite its illusionistic
            realism, it remains an image among many other possible
            images of this event and does not claim to coincide with it
            and reproduce it through the media for the viewer’s benefit.
                         The self-portrait on the threshold thus becomes
            a way to intensify the “specular moment” or, in other terms,
            to underline the fact that even during the more immersive
            virtual experience, we are just facing an image, a very well
            structured one. On the one hand, with his gaze, Caravaggio
            invites the viewer to immerse himself in an encompassing
            pictorial image; on the other hand, with his positioning and
            posture, he leads the viewer to observe the theatricality of
            the scene from another point of view, to analyse it as seen
            from the outside.

                         Attraction and distancing

                          Picking up the thread, Stella’s hypothesis was
            taken up and developed in this paper as a theoretical and
            analytical metaphor, certainly not in mere technological
            terms. If the gyroscope fitted in virtual reality helmets makes
            possible the stable connection between the movements we
            actually make in the physical world and those in the world
            of images, talking about Caravaggio’s gyroscope meant
            reflecting on the strategies of producing illusionistic and
            counter-illusionistic effects, on the balance between the
FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                   84                               AN-ICON
           “immersive” and “specular” moments. Reference to the the-
            oretical and methodological notions proposed by Michael
            Fried thus made it possible to observe the co-presence of
            such moments or, rather, such spectatorial effects that per-
            sist, by transforming, from the history of Western painting
            to contemporary immersive devices. Through reference
            to Susan Sontag’s critical theory of photography, it was
            thus possible to propose a hypothesis for an ethical and
            political approach to VR. In particular, what has emerged is
            that the co-presence of illusionistic and counter-illusionistic
            effects does not constitute a weakening of the experien-
            tial and testimonial value of immersive experience. On the
            contrary, a conscious ethical and political approach to VR
            seems to be able to develop precisely by making viewers
            feel the threshold between the environment in which they
            are physically situated and the virtual one. This is why it
            is not necessary to rely on technological implementations
            devoted to perfecting, once and for all, the immersive char-
            acter of VR cinema and other technological devices. While
            the slogans that accompanied the launch of many virtual
            reality projects relied on the simplistic use of the notions
            of “empathy,” “compassion,” and “immersion” in a geo-
            graphical elsewhere, the most interesting aspect of such
            technology seems to involve its capacity to produce both
            identification and estrangement.
                         Like Caravaggio observing the Martyrdom of
            Saint Matthew, even the gap between the physical world,
            in which the viewer is placed, and the virtual one can be
            re-conceived in positive terms within artistic experimen-
            tations capable of reflecting critically on the asymmetrical
            relations between the observer and the observed, between
            the here in which we find ourselves and the elsewhere of
            which we claim to have “direct” experience. In fact, the
            very ideas of virtual “presence” must be conceived as a
            media effect, resulting from specific compositional and




FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                  85                              AN-ICON
               technological determinations capable of modulating the
               relationship between subject and environment.28
                             Examples of artistic projects aimed at inves-
               tigating such limits are few, but their number is certainly
               growing. The survey and in-depth study of such exper-
               iments exceeds the specific objectives of this paper. To
               name but one – the most important, and often-addressed29
              – the installation Carne y arena (2017) by Alejandro González
               Iñárritu seems precisely to spur spectators into experienc-
               ing their own awkward extraneousness and powerlessness
               toward a group of refugees from Mexico who are trying to
               cross over the border to the United States (Fig. 8). Iñárritu’s
               subtitle for the installation – “Virtually present, physically
               invisible” – expresses, perhaps, the urgent need to tackle
               the paradoxical character of virtual experience.
                             Beyond Caravaggio, building on the analysis
               and concepts elicited by his painting, the field of experi-
               mentations of VR cinema and, more generally, virtual reality
               seems to be able to develop only by taking into account
               the co-presence of the different moments or effects that
               define our relationship with such media. Of course, in con-
               temporary virtual experiences, the viewer never has the
               opportunity to mirror himself or herself, that is, to see his
               or her own image reflected inside the media environment.
              The notion of “specularity” as understood in Narcissus and
               Caravaggio’s self-portraits seems in this sense to lose rel-
               evance. But at this point it should be clear that this notion

      28 On this point, see V. Catricalà, R. Eugeni, “Technologically modified self–centred worlds.
      Modes of presence as effects of sense in virtual, augmented, mixed and extended reality,” in
      F. Biggio, V. Dos Santos, G.T. Giuliana, eds., Meaning-Making in Extended Reality (Roma:
      Aracne, 2020): 63-90. For reflection in the different forms of exposure, interactivity and modes
      of presence, see R. Eugeni, Capitale algoritmico. Cinque dispositivi postmediali (Più Uno)
      (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2021): 127-174.
      29 For an analysis of Iñárritu’s installation, see P. Montani, Tre Forme di Creatività: Tecnica,
      Arte, Politica (Napoli: Cronopio, 2017): 132-138; A. D’Aloia, “Virtually present, physically
      invisible: virtual reality immersion and emersion in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y
      Arena,” in Senses of Cinema (June 2018), http://sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/
      virtually-present-physically-invisible-virtual-reality-immersion-and-emersion-in-alejandro-
      gonzalez-inarritus-carne-y-arena/, accessed January 10, 2022; A.C. Dalmasso, “The body as
      virtual frame. Performativity of the image in immersive environments,” Cinéma & Cie 19, no.
      23 (2019): 101-119; L. Acquarelli, “The spectacle of re-enactment and the critical time of the
      testimony in Inarritu’s Carne y Arena,” in F. Aldama, A. Rafele, eds., Cultural Studies in the
      Digital Age (San Diego: San Diego University Press, 2020): 103-118; R. Diodato, Image, Art,
      and Virtuality: Towards an Aesthetics of Relation (Cham: Springer, 2021): 72-74.

FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                               86                                           AN-ICON
               expresses not so much or only the mirroring of one’s own
               image, but the possibility of observing and reflecting on the
               relationship between subject and environment, between
               what separates us and what binds us to the image.




                        Fig. 8. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Carne y arena, 2017. ©Emmanuel
                                                           Lubezki/Alejandro González Iñárritu


                            To avoid any misunderstanding, let me propose,
               in conclusion, to call these moments by two very simple
               terms that I also used in the introduction: attraction and
               distancing, where – as in the case of the oppositions pro-
               posed by Fried – the second term encompasses the first,
               constituting a form of meta-reflection on the forms of artis-
               tic and media experience.30 In this sense, attraction defines
               the concave side of images, the one capable of becoming
               environment and drawing the viewer to show solidarity with
               them. On the other hand, distancing expresses the convex
               side or the modular spatiality of images, the one pointing
               at the viewer as such and forcing him or her to reflect on
               his or her own position, on the complex character of ev-
               ery experience. Whether such terms are convincing or not,
               the articulation of the two “moments” seems to define the
               ethical and political limits of both old and new immersive

      30 For a reflection on the notion of “distance” in the field of media studies, I refer to the
      introduction and the various contributions in M. Treleani, F. Zucconi, eds., “Remediating
      Distances,” IMG Journal 3 (2020).

FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                                 87                                            AN-ICON
            technologies. Hence the need to keep the door of art history
            open, imagining an anachronistic approach and aiming for
            artistic experimentations poised between different media,
            between two different moments.




FRANCESCO ZUCCONI                 88                             AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



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