




































[Expositions 4.1&2 (2010) 128-132]  Expositions (online) 1747-5376 

Nagel, Alexander and Christopher S. Wood. Anachronic Renaissance. New York: 

Zone Books, 2010. 455 pp, hb $39.95. ISBN: 978–1–935–40802–4. 

 

“I saw everything but comprehended nothing,” states Herman Melville’s intrepid voyager 

observing the religious rituals of Polynesian inhabitants. In this story, Melville points to 

the intricacies of religion, travel, colonization, and their relationship to the emergence of 

print media.
1
 Thanks to guidebooks, plaques and inscriptions, tourists today have 

seemingly complete access to see and to comprehend everything. But what was travel 

like in the world before print, and how did the inhabitants and travelers of Western 

Europe comprehend their local and far-flung buildings, paintings, and artifacts before the 

“standardization” of printed texts and guidebooks?  

In their recent contribution to Renaissance studies, Alexander Nagel and Christopher 

Wood, authors of the book Anachronic Renaissance, focus on temporalities. Yet the 

issues raised within their twenty-eight chapters have contemporary implications that go 

beyond questions concerning late-medieval and Renaissance periods. The underlying 

assumptions of their book touch upon issues such as pilgrimage, tourism, travel, and how 

these have become commodities in the West. Preceded by their article “Toward a New 

Model of Renaissance Anachronism” (2005), the title of this new book and its earlier 

article imply a certain focus: works that construct a sense of temporalities that is neither 

within the present nor the past. An example here would be a painting of St. Augustine in 

which his study is a fifteenth-century humanist studio.
2
 Through various late-medieval 

and Renaissance understandings of time, the authors attempt to explore both the beliefs of 

pilgrims and the incredulity of humanists who believed or doubted that the Virgin’s 

house could fly and position itself as a shrine in the Southern Italian city of Loreto and be 

worthy of veneration even though constructed of materials obviously not from the 

historical period of the Virgin’s life.  

One of the pleasures of reading this book is the attention that it brings to objects and 

buildings often overlooked in surveys of Renaissance art. Here is a study of works that 

range from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century but pivot around the 1480s and the 

1490s: devotional prints, Renaissance mosaic-work, geometric patterning of 

Cosmatesque pavements, the titulus of Christ’s cross, medal portraiture and an 

assortment of idiosyncratic and important reliquaries and relics, from houses to paintings. 

The authors interweave these “lesser-known” works with canonical Netherlandish 

paintings, such as Jan van Eyck’s Three Marys at the Tomb of Christ (1425-1435), iconic 

architectural structures from the Dome of the Rock to Bramante’s Tempietto (after 1502), 

and Raphael’s wall paintings in the Stanza della Segnatura (ca. 1510). The Renaissance 

built by Nagel and Wood is a dynamic world of “global exchange” (receptions of Islamic 

architecture and Byzantine icons in the West), competing ideologies found in the 

philological concerns of Renaissance humanists, and the forceful relationship between 

medieval forms and the developing Antique style in Italy, exemplified in their readings of 

Alberti’s Tempio Malatestiano (1450’s) and their refreshing and provocative revisiting of 

the interplay between Romanesque and Gothic architecture in Netherlandish painting.  

Nagel and Wood build their infrastructure with two categories, “substitutional” and 

“performative.” They compare substitutional works to the “Ship of Theseus.” In this 

“thought experiment,” the Ship of Theseus is constantly rebuilt, so that the original 

material of the ship is gradually replaced, while the ship maintains the titular inscription 



129 

 

 

of Theseus’s ship. The ship’s name identified the ship, not the material of its 

construction. Like the Ship of Theseus, “substitutional” objects  such as devotional icons 

or religious edifices  exist in a chain of substitutions. For example, an icon of the Virgin 

and Child might have no material relationship to the icon of the Virgin and Child 

mythically painted by St. Luke, but like the Ship of Theseus, the icon maintains its 

“identity” as a devotional icon of the Virgin and Child.  

The authors contextualize material substitution within a famous reading of medieval 

typology of the figura by Erich Auerbach, in which a historical event in the present is 

absorbed and understood in relation to a historical event in the past, both legitimizing 

each other as events within the Christological understanding of time that will only be 

fulfilled by Christ’s parousia.
3
 The Sacrifice of Isaac in the Old Testament was a figura 

for the Sacrifice of Christ, both events figuras for the final Resurrection. This 

understanding of time runs counter to a chronological understanding of time  in which 

events unfold along a linear timeline. Against these substitutional works, Nagel and 

Wood posit the “performative,” which is a “caesura” on the linear timeline. The works 

that structure Nagel’s and Wood’s book embody a play between the “performative” and 

the “substitutional” strategies of artistic making. This tension creates a series of works 

that are “anachronic,” or express their temporal instability, caught between the 

typological thinking in figuras and the march forward of the chronological timeline. So 

far, this summary of the book conveys almost as much as the article published in Art 

Bulletin in 2005, which is in fact only an introduction to Nagel’s and Wood’s project.  

Like many of the painted architectural structures that trace ruin and rebuilding under 

discussion in Anachronic Renaissance, the thrust of Nagel’s and Wood’s project maps 

out the disintegration of “substitutional” thinking. The brilliance of this book is its 

dedication to the careful unfolding of substitutional thinking, and to its eventual erosion 

as a mode for understanding not only time but also material works. Indeed one may be 

tempted to criticize the authors for having only paid attention to one mode of “temporal” 

thinking – the figural typology – but that is to miss the strength (and blindspot) of this 

argument. This book traces the end of substitution and the introduction of terms that are 

very important for contemporary discussion of art, trace and difference. In the early 

sixteenth century, substitution was replaced by citation, exemplified in the continual 

copying and reinsertion of Michelangelesque figures in compositions. For the authors, it 

was the development of print culture that led to the replacement of substitution with 

citation. 

The mastery of their own craft allows the authors to present, in a captivating and 

persuasive argument, a ground plan for understanding an earlier and a later mode of 

artistic production, substitutional versus citational, and binding these modes to the 

seismic epochal shift introduced by print culture. It is hard to imagine other modes of 

early-modern artistic production and another cause, besides print, of the movement away 

from substitutional thinking in material objects. Yet like a Palladian plan, the neatness of 

their schema shows aberrations in execution. 

Interestingly, Nagel and Wood provide only one version of the Theseus myth. In the 

seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes told another version of the story of Theseus’s ship. 

Like Nagel and Wood, Hobbes used the myth to explore a crisis in substitution and 

“identity.” For Hobbes, there is no linear progression of substitution. By accident, two 

forms of the same identity exist at once. While the parts of the ship are gradually 



  130 

 

replaced, a man collects the discarded materials and stores them away. One day, the man 

reconstructs another ship from the collected pieces. Then, as Hobbes states, “there would 

have been two ships numerically the same, which is absurd.” Hobbes reverts to the 

metaphor of the human body in order to determine which is the actual ship of Theseus. 

His conception of identity relies on ideas of motion  which developed in the seventeenth 

century with the work of Galileo and Descartes: “Also, if the name be given for such a 

form as is the beginning of motion, then, as long as that motion remains, it will be the 

same individual thing; as that man will always be the same, whose actions and thoughts 

proceed all from the same beginning of motion, namely, that which was in his 

generation.” Hobbes concludes, “so that a ship, which signifies matter so figured, will be 

the same as long as the matter remains the same; but if no part of the matter be the same, 

then it is numerically another ship: and if part of the matter remain and part be changed, 

then the ship will be partly the same, and partly not the same.”
4
  

Hobbes’s parable reveals a crisis in substitution; two replicas of the same object with 

the same name cannot exist at once and maintain the same identity. There can only be 

one Ship of Theseus. This crisis in substitution is caused not by Hobbes’s relationship to 

the development of print and artistic developments, but by contemporaneous 

philosophical debates regarding the question of motion. Prior to Galileo and Descartes, it 

was thought that bodies inclined to rest and were only put into motion by force. One of 

the revolutions of the seventeenth century was to understand motion and rest as equal 

states, and to consider bodies in motion rather than rest. Of course, one might very well 

argue that Hobbes’s version is a product of the seventeenth century and not applicable to 

questions of fifteenth-century substitution.  

Yet as Nagel and Wood point out, things often existed in twos: “two tombs of David, 

two temples of Solomon, two huts of Romulus, two authentic frontal images of Christ – 

the Veronica and the Mandylion – two sites of the Last Supper, two sites of the 

Praetorium two houses of Caiaphas, two Via Dolorosas, and two places called 

Emmaus.”
5
 For Nagel and Wood, through the figura typological thinking, these two 

bodies reinforced each other; they did not cause the crisis in identity experienced by 

Hobbes’s ship owner. And yet can Hobbes’s demand to have the authenticated “one,” the 

determination of which ship is Theseus’s, only be traced to the print “revolution”? No 

doubt, as Nagel and Wood discuss, developments such as the art market, which in turn 

raised questions of forgery and authorship, helped to lay the foundation for a crisis that 

sought to identify the “authentic one” among the many copies. By noting Elizabeth 

Eisenstein’s work on print (without taking into consideration its reception and later work 

on early print cultures) and using the “art market” to explain the disintegration of 

substitutional thinking, the authors show their blindspot.
6
 While print and the art market 

undoubtedly played a major role that the authors persuasively describe, nevertheless, as 

Hobbes’s parable reveals, there were other profound questions (problems?), both 

philosophical and theological, that made it impossible to think figurally about material 

objects, and in turn led to crises in substitutional thinking and material object’s 

inscriptions. The impact of the Reformation and the ensuing revolution in thinking about 

the Eucharist remains glaringly absent for the authors’ discussion of the substitution’s 

cessation to citation.  

Finally, it is interesting to consider the role of substitution within today’s larger, more 

politically-weighted monuments, which in turn points towards the politics of substitution 



131 

 

 

in earlier epochs. I would argue that there are contemporary examples of substitution, 

such as the UNESCO’s rebuilding of Mostar Bridge in Bosnia or the declaration of the 

rebuilt central Warsaw as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Both these monuments retain 

no material relationship to the prior structures and are authenticated through 

“inscriptions.”
7
 A consideration of the politics at play in these two UNESCO World 

Heritage Sites recalls the greater complications that participated in the circulation of 

Byzantine icons in the West, representations of Dome of the Rock in Western painting, 

and the figural programs connected with imperial conquests of the New World. The 

authors point towards these “Renaissance” politics in graceful and well-footnoted prose, 

acknowledging the political motivations of “rediscovering” a certain relic or erecting a 

certain moment; but the reader feels disappointed that the intelligence of these two 

authors was not more deeply applied to other ramifications and considerations for 

thinking substitutionally. Indeed the contemporary examples of substitutional monuments 

that they provide, such as Thoreau’s house, remain safely embedded within the humanist 

realms of art and poetry. 

One wonders how, like the roots of tourism within pilgrimage, the substitutional 

paradigm persisted beyond its original religious structures. Anachronic Renaissance 

presents an interesting starting point to consider not only the uncomfortable feeling of 

encountering the UNESCO-Disneyfication of tourism but also the interweaving of 

secularization and substitution that often, like the preservation of well-visited 

monuments, may act as a euphemism for nationalism and commodification. When 

substitution persists in the absence of the figura – I call this a secularized substitution – 

what understanding of material objects in time does this beget? Unfortunately this is not 

an anachronic, but a present question that remains outside the authors’ own artistic-

historical concerns, which (like the temporality of the works under consideration) appear 

to the reader belated and overly-narrow as they are bound to the Renaissance and its 

artistic-historical receptions. 

 

CAROLINE O. FOWLER 

Princeton University 

 

Notes 

 

1. Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (Stillwell, Kansas: 

Digireads.com, 2008), 125. 

2. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, “Toward a New Model of Renaissance 

Anachronism,” Art Bulletin 87.3 (2005): 403-415. 

3. Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” Scenes from the Drama of European Literature 

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11-78. 

4. Thomas Hobbes, “Identity and Difference,” The English Works of Thomas Hobbes 

of Malmesbury, ed. Sir William Molesworth, vol. 2 (London, 1839-1845), 136-138. 

5. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 266. 

6. See, for example: Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and 

Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and the Eighteenth Centuries, trans. 



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Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1994); Lucien Febvre and 

Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, 

trans. David Gerard (London: N.L.B., 1976); Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers 

and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge 

University Press, 1999); Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and 

Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 

7. It’s uncanny how the language of the UNESCO charters resonates with the 

questions and language among fifteenth-century humanists, in their search for 

“authenticity.” See, for example: Christian Cameron, “From Warsaw to Mostar: The 

World Heritage Committee and Authenticity,” APT Bulletin 39.2/3 (2008): 19-24. 


