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Issue 3. Illustrations

Spectators in Jerusalem: urban narrative in the scenic tradition

Author: Dirk J. VAN DEN BERG
Published: August 2001

Abstract: This investigation of the narrative prospects of urban pictures in the scenic tradition is devoted to Hans Memling's painting depicting a sequence of Passion scenes set in a topographic view of Jerusalem. Refuting Goodman's view that here "is not only no direction but no order of telling at all" attention is drawn to the telling rhetoric of certain "micro-scenic" core motifs whose mature typiconic features only emerged with the formation of the scenic tradition's full array of picture types. It is conjectured that aposcopic vision may well be a source for scenic parallels between distance and proximity, hence also for narrative parallels between prospector and sightseer roles implicit in various scenic picture types.

A legendary Jerusalem is represented as urban scenery in The passion of Christ (Fig 1), a remarkable work by the fifteenth-century Flemish painter, Hans Memling. My conjectures on how it is to be read are prompted primarily by questions in narrative theory. Besides being a useful tool for narrative analysis, the notion of typiconic frames may also offer an account of this painting's extraordinary position in the historical formation of a scenic tradition in Western painting.

Figure 1: Hans Memling, The passion of Christ (c 1470). Panel, 54.6 by 87.3 cm. Turino: Galleria Sabauda.

A special issue of Critical Inquiry, "On narrative", had its genesis in a symposium in 1979 at the University of Chicago on "Narrative: the illusion of sequence". In his contribution, Nelson Goodman (1980) examines the often tenuous relations between stories and their telling, using a number of pictorial examples to demonstrate the many twists between the order in which story events occur and the possible sequential order in which they may be recounted. The Memling painting is one of these examples. It narrates the New Testament story of the Passion of Christ by picturing the events as a series of scenes in an imaginary topography of the walled city of Jerusalem set in a landscape of the surrounding countryside. Goodman even supplied a diagram of the sequence, with the scenes numbered in the order of their occurrence. From a synoptic or mapping point of view, we can readily follow the convoluted sequence of numbered events criss-crossing the city and the countryside.

Goodman (1980: 105) describes the telling of the Passion story in this painting as a "tortuous course" of events. The difficulty which spectators initially experience in tracing the labyrinthine course mapped by the events in the layout of the city resonates with recurrent features of an urban rebus (Table 1, no 10). The emphasis of such picture puzzles is the visual impenetrability of urban environments -- in this case a visitor's initial disorientation and anxiety on first visiting a foreign city.

Goodman (1980: 106) further describes the pictorial organisation of Memling's painting as "spatial, atemporal, motivated perhaps both by considerations of design and by regarding these events as eternal and emblematic rather than episodic or transient." I have a double objective in reviewing his rather hasty conclusion that "there is not only no direction but no order of telling at all". The first is to examine the painting as an early modern instance of visual narrative, specifically with respect to its use of the urban form as a unified narrative frame. The painting engages spectators primarily with a vivid scenic presence. The panel is of modest dimensions with the unobtrusive frame of a cabinet picture, yet the painting opens on a vast imaginary expanse. One may describe the purpose of its visual rhetoric as scenic display of the story's narrative frame.

A second objective is to remark on the narrative potential of certain image formats that came to be closely associated with the picturing of urban scenes. Apart from topography, Memling's painting offers mere glimpses in this regard, yet I would like to draw to attention certain 'micro-scenes' scattered across the composition and their contribution as ancillae narrationis or supplements to the main scenes in Goodman's plot plan. The mature typiconic features of core motifs in these 'micro-scenes' emerged progressively during the scenic tradition's subsequent history that saw the development of an elaborate array of urban scene picture types.

Table 1: Array of scenic images/picture types

Among these topography is the first and urban narrative the last in the summary list (Table 1). The main focus of this inquiry will be the latter composite picture type. A common feature of these picture types is their worldview scope in giving expression to the scenic tradition's ideological bias for the nonreductive or layered simultaneity of modern urban experience. The scenic tradition's typiconic features are discussed in Van den Berg (1997), in particular their alliance with a line of philosophical inquiry commonly described in the historiography of philosophy as parallelist conceptions or identity theories.

1. Scenic picture types

Let me demonstrate what I mean in designating certain core motifs as 'micro-scenes'. Consider for instance the diminutive motif (immediately to the left of the picture's geometric centre) of a window with a couple witnessing the scenes of Christ's trial. I deem this a core motif since it lacks the detailed elaboration and enormous depth of vividly descriptive views which were common in the window scenes of Memling's Flemish precursors. In addition, this motif barely exhibits any of the features to be associated later with the window scene as picture format (Table 1, no 4) - its vital interplay between interior and exterior, between open and closed spaces, between public and private spheres, between confinement and depth of vision, between figures seen from the front and the back. Yet window scenes were destined to become one of the scenic tradition's most fertile and varied picture types with inexhaustible narrative potential.

One of its manifold versions, Umberto Boccioni's futurist painting of 1911, The street enters the house (Fig 2), represents the enveloping ambience of building sites, urban noise, traffic movement and mobile perspectives in a modern industrial city as a veritable force-field which shatters the perspectival closure of finestra aperta painting. Grasskamp (1992: 147-157) interprets this painting with reference to Bergson's durée, the 'cinematic' representation of modern urban perception and a number of anti-narrative devices (for instance, discourse without beginning, middle or end) James Joyce deploys in his novel Ulysses (1922). Conceding the effects of anti-narrative impulses in diverse modern arts (cf. Elkins 1991), he nevertheless disputes Goodman's position regarding visual narrative.

Figure 2: Umberto Boccioni, The street enters the house (1911). Oil on canvas, 100 by 100 cm. Hannover: Kunstmuseum Hannover.

Consider another 'micro-scene' in Memling's composition - that of a porter figure lighting the gate torch in the foreground on the left, a familiar dramatic device in early modern theatre (the porter scene in Shakespeare's Macbeth for instance). Its narrative function is to indicate a certain time and place in the city, and thus also in the reader's imaginative appropriation of a single link in the narrative sequence (in other words, following the exit, in procession, of the night-party sent to arrest Christ and prior to the return of this train in reverse order). This motif displays embryonic features of the urban record (Table 1, no 5) - a richly varied scenic type evolved in representations of urban traffic, processions, parades, carnivals, and urban crowds. This image format returns in the foreground on the right where the procession for Golgatha exits through a city gate. Rodini (1998) investigated the urban record's typically descriptive forms of narration.

A recent version of this picture type is Trafalgar Square, a painting from the 1960s by the British Pop artist, Richard Hamilton (Fig 3). It conveys a sense of metropolitan London by reducing to contingent and fragmentary blobs on a printing screen the snarled urban traffic and random groupings of urban crowds at a tourist site, thus drawing parallels between circulation in traffic systems and the industrial production and dissemination of images.

Figure 3: Richard Hamilton, Trafalgar Square (1965-7). Oil on canvas, 80 by 120 cm. Cologne: Museum Ludwig.

Finally consider in the upper right quadrant of the city, the solitary motif of a house with a stepped gable. It strikes a somewhat incongruous note of Flemish 'reality' amid the fantastic constructions in the urban texture of Memling's Jerusalem. Here we again encounter the kernel of a full-blown picture type in the scenic tradition - the urban fragment (Table 1, no 7) which only came into its own as late as the eighteenth century with paintings like Thomas Jones's stark Walls in Naples (Fig 4). This picture type specialises in close-up images of ordinary urban settings exhibiting still-life qualities due to the absence of human beings. The narrative potential of its familiar yet strange, prosaic yet poetic qualities is only realised by detecting and unravelling minute details bearing traces of human existence in an archeology of urban debris.

Figure 4: Thomas Jones, Walls in Napels (1782). Oil on canvas. Private collection.

By incorporating these 'micro-scenes' Memling's painting comprises an extraordinarily rich mixture of image types later associated with the scenic tradition. Their evolution as distinct picture types did not begin with Memling, though the Renaissance evidently saw the burgeoning of special genres of painting, including several varieties of scenic picturing. Memling's anecdotal scenic mixture rather seems indicative of the composite and configurative nature of urban narrative as a distinct picture type. I will examine Memling's use of the city as narrative frame in the light of the narrative potential of the various scenic image formats that developed from core motifs like thoses mentioned above.

2. Narrative painting and reading spectators

The sequence of Passion scenes distributed across Memling's painting derives from a well-known and central narrative series in the iconographic tradition of the medieval church. A representative case is the stained glass windows of Chartres cathedral's western portal. Here the fourteen scenes of the Passion window are combined with the Root of Jesse and the Youth of Christ in three lancet windows. In this case the telling or reading follow a vertical order from below, beginning at the bottom of the righthand window and concluding at the top of the lefthand window. Together this set of lancet windows narrates but one of many sequences in a Gothic cathedral's full iconographic programme which covers sacred history in the encyclopedic manner of a scholastic summa. In medieval pictorial systems stories are, as a rule, narrated visually by means of their placing within various architectural co-ordinates (for instance, the frames of portals, windows or altar wings) - ultimately grounded in allegorical interpretations of the church edifice itself as symbol of the heavenly Jerusalem (cf. Kemp 1987, 1993 & 1996a).

Memling's painting, however, exemplifies a new class of pictorial narrative involving as well a new breed of spectators. Regarding the first item - a new genre of pictorial narrative - the events of the Passion story have been transposed from the typically medieval, allegorical cum architectural, frame into a historical topography of the city of Jerusalem. Memling narrativises the urban form in a novel way by plotting the sequence of events in a 'continuous narrative' (Andrew 1996) as a series of scenic settings in the general spatial layout of the city - with the main actors, the figure of Christ in particular, making repeated appearances. In summary, while retaining certain elements of medieval 'polifocality' (cf. Hofmann 1998: 31-50), the painting's rhetoric of scenic description converts the placing of the story (formerly the architectural frames of sacred edifices) into the story's places (the sequence of scenic settings) and, finally, into the story of a place (the scenic narrative frame of the city of Jerusalem depicted in a 'unifocal' painting).

Figure 5: M C Escher, Portrait of G.A. Escher, the artist's father (1935). Lithograph, 23,6 by 20,8 cm.

Regarding the second item - a new kind of spectator - the 'choric spectator' (Bryson 1981) consonant with the medieval church's liturgical spaces is replaced in this instance by a scenic variety of aposkopeïn (cf. Stoichita 1885: 32) - since time immemorial the posture and gesture of staring into the distance. Aposcopic vision is the subject of a time-honoured Pathosformel depicted, for instance, as an environmental action in Sir Joshua Reynolds' heroic Self-portrait shading the eyes of 1748. Of greater significance is the fact that this action may also be adopted for a distinctive manner in scrutinising pictures, as can be seen in the early portrait of his father by the Dutch print artist, M C Escher (Fig 5). Combining hyperopia and myopia (the elderly gentleman's long-sightedness corrected by a view through a magnifying glass) this print conveys a touching image of scenic aposkopeïn - an image format remarkable for its dynamic blending of distance and proximity. This parallel is often projected in the compositions of Escher prints and recurs in general as a special feature of pictures in the scenic tradition. Beyond any formalist dialectics of Nahbild and Fernbild, Elkins (1996) cites abnormalities of vision and varieties of blindness as metaphors for biased distortions of human vision, particularly the ideological partialities of visuality. Thus hyperopia and myopia, or distance and proximity of vision allude to ideologically charged notions of perspectivity or territorial surveillance inherent in the typiconic features of pictures in the scenic tradition. I should like to subject Memling's use of aposcopic vision in a scenic narrative to further consideration.

3. Scenic prospector and sightseer

Figure 6: Michael Wolgemut & Hans Pleydenwurff, 'Jerusalem', woodcut print in Hartman Schedel's Weltchronik or Liber chronicarum (Nürnberg: Anton Koberger, 1493)

Memling's painting tells its story by means of mediating narrative interactions between two imaginary points of view. In reading the picture a spectator is prompted to appropriate and to alternate between two distinct narrative perspectives. My labels for the spectator's two scenic roles are prospector and sightseer. Prospecting viewers adopt an observer stance towards the expanse and the horizon along with a surveying orientation towards the schematic layout of the city map. Sightseeing spectators, on the other hand, are faced with ground level urban experience. They have to make local sense of the city in orientating themselves by means of a mobile array of routes, addresses, traffic in motion and changing scenery (cf. Lynch 1960). With this ability in common - the city-dwellers' 'habitat tact' in effortlessly linking orientation at the micro- and macro-scenic levels - each of the image formats in the scenic tradition's array of picture types may project distinct configurations of prospecting and sightseeing roles.

Figure 7: Wassily Luckhart, An die Freude (1919). Utopian design.

From the prospector's central and elevated point of view the topography of Memling's city furnishes the reading spectator with a synoptic key to the Passion story. It effects this in part by recalling the city's eschatonic topography in medieval iconography. Such a medieval model of the heavenly Jerusalem can be seen in a famous wood-cut illustration of 1493 by Michael Wolgemut and Hans Pleydenwurff for Hartmann Schedel's Weltchronik (Fig 6) - the 'holy city' with the temple in its centre and surrounded by walls with twelve towers. This centralised view of an ideal city not built by human hands, depicted from an elevated if not divine point of view, will become a recurrent image format in many subsequent representions of visionary or mythic cities (Table 1, no 11). The same image format persists even in cases of secular urban visions of modern utopias. One need only mention instances like Wassily Luckhart's An die Freude from 1919 (Fig 7) or several film posters from 1926 for Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

4. Narrative temporality

In Memling's topography, however, the city has the irregular layout of a changing settlement - the human site of historical events in a pre-modern urban constellation of walls, gates, temple, palace, public square, towers and roofs. Memling's Jerusalem is still a notional city; not the historical destination a crusader might experience. Crucial for visual narration, however, is the fact that this fifteenth-century rendition of a New Testament version of the old royal city of David describes a corrupt capital (according to post-exilic re-interpretations of Old Testament prophecies) - a city ready for the sacking - the historical fate of Jerusalem foretold in the destruction prophecy Christ uttered immediately prior to the first of the Passion scenes depicted in the painting. As a narrative frame this urban prospect thus fixes the story's past and future parameters. The incorporation of references to prefigurative typology charge the urban constellation with the before-and-after dynamic of unfolding events, the Passion events recounted here from beginning to end between the first and the last of the scenes, respectively depicted in the top left- and righthand corners.

The temporal directionality of Memling's narrative, its inherent before-and-after dynamic, contrasts with the centralised spatial format common in picturing the mythic time frame of visionary cities. Due to visionary cities' eschatonic or apocalyptic, utopic or dystopic nature, particularly their spatial paradoxes (cf. Marin 1984), this contrast involves more than a mere opposition of time and space - the 'atemporal spatialisation' as conceived in Goodman's illusion of narrative sequence. The fact that Memling's painting manages to project a unified narrative perspective in the form of a scenic synopsis emancipates it from medieval triptych conventions still holding in the fifteenth century for the narrative structure of altarpieces (cf. Pilz 1970). Visual narration by means of a scenic division of story events nevertheless retained its currency in popular visual culture - as can be seen, for example, in applications of the 'comic strip' convention of episodic sequence in a seventeenth-century woodcut print The great London plague of 1665 (Fig 8).

Figure 8: Anonymous, The great London plague of 1665. Woodcut print.

Memling's prospector-narrator's topographic synopsis sets the temporal frame for the telling of the story - a narrative parcours embracing the passage of several days, with the Sabbath and all but one of the nights elided from the sequence. This is achieved by depicting the city like a gigantic sundial, with darkness reigning in the lower lefthand quarter - the setting for the nocturnal scenes that tell the events of Thursday evening: the scene of the Last Supper with Judas withdrawing to meet with the Jewish council, the scenes in the garden of Gethsemane with Christ praying and then being arrested, and finally Peter's denial at the border between day and night sections. Note also the hint of narrative ties across the diagonal axis, between the lower nocturnal quarter of the city and the darkness enveloping the Crucifixion scene at the top. The disciples' sleeping figures in the garden of Gethsemane thus double as the dead rising from their graves at Friday noon. Such scenic clues about local time sequences within the city are telling devices of visual narration.

Figure 9: Giacomo Balla, The labourer's day (1904). Oil on paper, 100 by 135 cm. Private collection.

One may compare temporal indices in scenic settings with their symbolic use in emblematic prints on the 'times of day' theme which became popular in the seventeenth century, as a rule depicting seasonal actions against scenic backgrounds in which accessories from nature or from urban settings serve to establish a time of day or night. The latter, formerly subsidiary or parergonal, elements are special features in scenic pictures and will gradually attain dominance in the work of artists in the scenic tradition. Appreciated in this light, the scenic day-night combinations in Memling's painting take on the cast of a rudimentary urban landscape (Table 1, no 8) - pictures in which built environments are rendered like scenes from nature - another image format typical of the scenic tradition. Thus the Italian futurist artist, Giacomo Balla, uses a modern variation on the triptych format in a painting from 1904, The labourer's day (Fig 9), to visually narrate the incessant cycle of day and night, the numbing alternation of labour and sleep in a construction worker's cheerless existence. As in the Memling, one section of the painting depicts a nocturnal scene while the presence of the complete cycle serves to suggest the universality of events or conditions.

Figure 10: John Sloan, The city from Greenwich Village (1922). Oil on canvas, 66 by 135 cm. Boston: National Gallery of Art.

Another comparable instance of an urban landscape is The city from Greenwich Village (Fig 10), a painting by John Sloan, the most distinguished member of New York's so-called Ash Can school (cf. Zurier, Snyder & Mecklenburg 1995; Conrad 1984: 86-113). The contrast between the gloomy foreground and the glowing city rising in the background again represents a particular time of day - a nightfall scene. However, the visionary qualities of the glowing city rising on the horizon to the left, in combination with the converging elevated railway and traffic lanes in the foreground also suggest the powerful attraction of the modern city as an enduring condition. It thus tells the fateful story of urbanisation as a social force that affected the life history of massas of the population, resonating with American novels from Theodore Dreiser to John Dos Passos.

5. Pilgrimage

I return to Memling's painting, now gradually shifting attention towards topography's second spectator role - that of a sightseeing spectator negotiating the site of historical events at the ground level of urban experience or, in the case of a painting, that of a close reader who responds to telling pictorial detail, for instance, a spectator like Escher's father. In this connection one should keep in mind that Memling's painting was a devotional picture, in fact an altarpiece for private use. Hence the requisite sightseer attitude is prefigured by the donor portraits of the Italian merchant, Tommaso Portinari and his wife, shown kneeling in the painting's lower left- and righthand corners. The narrative plot has to be read in this meditative key - not any sightseeing traveller consulting a city map, on the move as it were, but a devout pilgrim visiting and revisiting, lingering and delaying, offering prayers at a string of shrines along a meandering via sacra. The spectator is meant to bond with the scenic via dolorosa in the manner of a worshipper fingering the beads of a phylactery or poring over a daily sequence of prayers in a well-thumbed book of hours - both incidently are celebrated metaphors of narrative succession (cf. Botvinick 1992).

Figure 11: Michael Wolgemut & Hans Pleydenwurff, 'Jerusalem', woodcut print in Hartman Schedel's Weltchronik or Liber chronicarum (Nürnberg: Anton Koberger, 1499)

Adopting the imaginary role of a traveller-pilgrim, spectators reading the Passion scenes join a Bakhtinian chronotope - the chronotope of the way (cf. Bahktin 1981 & Kemp 1996b: 159-185). Their itinerary follows the historical route of a saintly hero's trial by ordeal from the point of departure to the arrival at a final destination, from the entry scene's royal advent to the triumph of the resurrection scene. The string of scenes along the Kreuzweg thus has to be read as stations in the founding legend of a spiritual way of salvation and as the narrative source of various ways of living - the most significant in this case being, among others, the pilgrimage image of the Christian sojourner's ascetic identity. A further item from Hartmann Schedel's Weltchronik, an illustration of Rome with its ancient ruins and sanctuaries (Fig 11), demonstrates the notion of urban topography as mirabilia Romae - the scenic itinerary of a pilgrim's journey as well as the ritual setting of Holy Week in Roman Catholic station liturgy. In the secular culture of the modern era the idea of pilgrimage to 'holy cities' or 'holy sites' and residual traces of the sojourner mentality are exploited commercially by the mass tourism industry (cf. the Roman Catholic church's website: " <http: christusrex.org>", for a sample of available tourist offerings).

6. Tourism

A postwar Guide for visitors to the Ise Shrine (Fig 12) illustrates the pilgrim's way of entering into a narrative chronotope. This intriguing hybrid combines two distinct scenic image formats - a schematic map with a section of Japan's national railway network on the extreme right, and a landscape scene depicted in a pictorial style traditionally reserved for sacred scenery. The geometrically reduced figures in the network map become flowing lines extending into the panorama of landscape scenes. Pilgrims join tourists on this excursion, yet they look with different eyes or an unlike set of visual habits. With the guide open on their laps they read the schematic map in the conventional Western manner - plotting their position on the route from a perpendicular point of view while disregarding the ethnic elaboration of the picture's decorative landscape background.

Figure 12: Guide for visitors to the Ise Shrine, Japan (1948-54)

Pilgrims, on the other hand, have a special chronotopic orientation and experience another form of transport during the excursion. Peering out through the train window at passing scenery, they adopt a horizontal point of view towards the image of the landscape with its sacred sites. Meditated in the stillness of this imaginary frame, the picture in fact exegetes what is visible on the outside. In this altered state of consciousness it is no longer the landscape that is moving past the travelling train; instead it is now the pilgrim who is advancing and who uses the picture to gauge progress in an exercise of spirituality. In other words, in reading this hybrid image's narrative, the scenic parallel of distance and proximity registers elements of an anthropological contrast between insider and outsider perspectives. As natives of a secularised culture with ideologically informed scenic habits, we have to negotiate barriers of a similar scope in aspiring to read the visual narrative presented by Memling's late medieval or early modern painting.

In Western cultures scenic picture formats associated with travelling and with modern travel literature evolved in conjunction with the development of the industrial metropolis and the emergence of modern tourism, during the era when mechanised systems of transport began to afford travellers ever accelerating velocity and increasing comfort of movement - the origin of the traveller's roving perspective and the tourist's scenic gaze (cf. Urry 1990 & 1992). The velocity of human movement through scenery and the attendant experience of disembodiment and environmental detachment became fully topical only with twentieth-century scenic pictures and tourist posters. Wandering and travelling was valued during the nineteenth century as notable expressions of human freedom and the slow progress of pilgrimage (formerly a model for Grand Tour itineraries) was converted into the leasure and luxury of secular tourism.

The latter development is visible in an early precursor of the cinema, a fascinating example from 1823, Robert Havel's Costa scena, or cruise along the southern coast of Kent. This hand-coloured engraving for a 5,48 meter long panoramic roll records a continuous sequence of scenery viewed in roving perspective from the fixed point of view of a ship travelling parallel to the coast. For greater freedom of movement we have to turn to examples of a later date, like the urban scene from Excursion dans Paris sans voitures, an anonymous guide published around 1867 with the telling subscript: 'new guide for sauntering: a simplified plan indispensible to foreigners making their own way in Paris'. Needless to say, the spectator is here projected into the commodified metropolitan world of the flâneur (cf. Tester 1994), a well-known subject in nineteenth- and twentieth-century storytelling, sociological writings and urban novels.

7. Scenography

I return to the pilgrim's circumspect progress along the via dolorosa in Memling's painting by observing that ritual recitation of prayers from a book of hours in the comfort of one's home has little in common with the perilous experience of actual pilgrimage in the Middle Ages. For the original spectators this gap was bridged somewhat by the liturgical scenography of mystery plays. I am referring to a common item in the late-medieval city dweller's experience, possibly even the immediate source for Memling's painting - to see wagons with the stage decor of various plays dispersed among various urban addresses, parked before the residences of guilds participating in a city's passion plays (cf. Pochat 1990: 46-51). In other words, the sequential order of the Passion story is read by stringing the scenes together like remembered episodes in the urban experience of perambulating from address to address in a city. Such scenic episodes are gathered together (the original sense of 'reading') in a theatre audience's memory of performances of the acts of a passion play.

Rather than an urban mixture of weathered and recent edifices in a 'real' city, Memling's Jerusalem resembles a fantastic collection of stage decors for a passion play (as such the painting could also be read as an early example of architectural capriccio, Table 1, no 9). This is particularly evident in the transparent fourth wall scenography of private domestic spaces in the nocturnal scenes (e.g. the room of the Last Supper or Caiphas's house). In Western art history, the scenic tradition in fact grew from stage decor, and in this painting skiagraphia is expanded from scenic parerga to the narrative frame of an all-inclusive urban scene. Theatrical scenography is once again a figurative component that will prevail as recurrent strategy in the history of the scenic tradition. This becomes evident when Memling's city is contrasted with modern versions of this scenography. Despite obvious differences in the urban form of pre-modern and modern cities, a family resemblance is evident in the disjunct but pulsating, jazzy rhythms and urban simultané of the metropolitan ambience created in Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's Photographic collage of Berlin. This fragmented image was projected as scenic backdrop for stage actions in a 1929 performance of Walter Mehring's play Der Kaufmann von Berlin. It represents one of the many mise-en-scène strategies adopted by the director, Piscator, to break down the illusory fourth wall division of audience and stage space.

8. Narrative prospectivity

In conclusion it should be noted that Memling substitutes the city's inhabitants - the urban crowds of 'real' Jerusalemites - with an engaging collection of characters as witting and unwitting participants in the Passion events, who thus come to resemble the turba or crowd of an oratorio performance. Apart from the principal actors and the turba , however, the dramatis personae include a small number of onlookers who, with varying degrees of awareness, play a special role in visually telling the story. Being associated with the 'micro-scenes' one may well describe them as 'micro-narrative' actors. They include figures like the impassively and silently witnessing couple in the window near the centre of the composition (the window scene); the gesticulating and conversing pair of sightseers on the bulwarks behind the solitary stepped gable (the Flemish urban fragment); the porter as innocent bystander at the gate torch (the urban record scene) and, finally, the triplet of a father with a boy and a dog, shown from the back as 'Everyman' figures, seemingly unaware of the fact that they are heading the procession on the road to Calvary, depicted in the middle ground on the right.

Since they represent us - spectators of the Passion events in various sightseeing roles - these unobtrusive yet key figures are crucial operators in recounting and reading the visual narrative. The reader only detects them after subjecting the city as narrative frame to intensive scrutiny. Once they have been descried, however, the story comes alive for the reader. The telling presence of these narrative figures corroborates Wolfgang Kemp's view that fifteenth-century painting's most significant innovation was the narrativisation of pictorial depth perception (cf. Kemp 1996b: 88-90). They each embody narrative prospectivity at a specific station in the city, linking the deictic here and now of their situations with the there and then of the passage of events visible from their points of view along the Kreuzweg. Transcending mere ancillae narrationis, the joint function of these figures is to articulate narrative links between scenic distance and proximity, acting as relays between spectators inhabiting the painting's imaginary story world and spectators before the painting. The narrative effectivity of these minute figures seems poignant indeed for us, late-twentieth-century spectators occupying a secular gallery space in front of a devotional painting - spectators who, aside from the historical distances separating the story, its telling in paint and its reading in our time, within themselves have to contend with clashing spiritualities.

Note in particular, at the extreme boundary of visibility, the minuscule female figure near the horizon in the top righthand corner - a lonely traveller approaching the city or perhaps a worker returning from the field. This character may be taken as the figure inside the painting's imaginary world that most clearly represents scenic aposcopic vision. Her zoom-out remoteness in expansive space corresponds with the perspective of spectators who adopt an imaginary prospector's elevated point of view for scenic surveillance at a distance. On the other hand, she adds a concurrent challenge to spectators by stretching a sightseer's imaginative zoom-in or empathy capabilities to the limit as we endeavour to imagine her part in the story from her remote position.

She thus embodies an ultimate focal point for scenic reader responses - the point of our imaginative access to a narrative picture with a scenic version of historical Jerusalem as a world-at-a-distance. Though a story from redemption history is being told it is presented in a non-transendant setting - a typiconic feature of the scenic worldview. In a literal sense her remoteness represents our imaginative approach in the effort of drawing closer to the story events, the difficulties we experience in facing our committed and personal approximation and appropriation of a Passion narrative in the scenic mode.

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