The Curse of Anachronism. Interpreting and Perceiving Pictures from the Past

In history of art, anachronism is the experience of the contemporary observer being projected onto a picture of the ancient times, it is the memory of one era being introduced into another era, it is the present informing the past. According to Lucien Febvre, anachronism must be avoided like the plague. It is the (art) historian’s bogey. Nevertheless, reconstructing the past without appealing to our present seems impossible. But how to avoid it? How could the art historians leave the mental universe of their own era to penetrate that of the period they are analyzing? It seems that we have reached a sort of dead end. I suggest calling this impasse the paradox of anachronism. The planning of the paper is as follows: (i) I will examine the underlying methodology of some critics and art historians in relation to the paradox of anachronism, showing which proposition of the paradox they have rejected in order to overcome the impasse; (ii) I will sketch an alternative solution to those examined, which involves resolving the paradox by focusing strictly on pictures as objects that admit a peculiar visual experience, exploiting some arguments from the so-called ‘history of vision claim’ and depiction theories.