Abstract

In premodern Europe, it sometimes seemed that paintings were discredited by their materiality. The very splendor of the pigments that made paintings into treasures could also make them material in the wrong way, implicated in an attachment to the superficial and an economics of inequality. In some times and places, the only acceptable response to this fault was iconoclasm, destroying the things that misplaced the attention of devout right-thinking citizens, and rededicating resources to the poor. Yet in early Renaissance Italy, another possibility emerged as well. That response hinged on the conceptualization of painting as a medium of surfaces.