Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Laurent Girardin
French; 15th-century
Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art
90%
The Trinity. c1460. Oil on wood
There are certain old paintings which you know Clement Greenberg would've not just disliked but disapproved of, and which you know too you should probably get in line and turn your nose up at, whether because they're symbolical or decorative or stiff or overbusy or what... but then there's something about the way they not only fail as pictures but actually end up flying in the face of what makes Western painting great when it's great — namely, its anxiety over how paintings convey false worlds while at the same time being real things in our real world — that makes you feel the need to swat away the little Greenberg hemming on your left shoulder and work towards new (or broadened) frameworks for evaluating European art. Such artworks typically creep out of weird interstices in the history of painting, like just after perspective proliferated out from Italy but before it quashed medieval forms completely. This piece by Girardin is one such painting. It is an immanent fiction layered without layers, no depth, no hierarchy, no internal reality that's much distinguished from the reality it has as an object before its viewer. It is straight-up design, and exquisitely so: mandorla and crucifix refracting each other in a skein of pure surfaces. (TFS, 2025)