The Fortress of Form, then, is the robber of consciousness. We are
trapped within the material world and an image-based, symbolic imagina-
tion through which to apprehend it. The image is unavoidable. Necessary,
it cannot be prohibited. Yet the materiality in which we live, itself an image
of the real, is also a trap, as is the image of that materiality. The concern
expressed in this tangle of stories, from dream images and apocryphal silk
portraits of the prophets to galleries in palaces, has nothing to do with
image prohibition. Rather, these images point to the importance of recog-
nizing the image as a trap. Idolatry becomes not the worship of idols as
pagan gods embodied in matter, but the act of imbuing anything–images,
but also objects, lovers, interpretations, authorities, and even ourselves–
with the status of the absolute, reserved for the divine.
This lack of interest in the image as a representational medium has
proven misleading to Western commentators looking for art-historical
guideposts in Islamic texts. ExaminingCanon of Forms(Qanun al-Suvar,
1597) by the portrait painter and head of the royal library under the Safavid
Shah Abbas I (r. 1587–1629) in Qazvin, Sadiqi Beg Afshar (1533–1610),
Yves Porter expects a pragmatic guide for artists and expresses disappoint-
ment with the relative absence of specific information on how to paint or
the establishment of a canon. This reflects not a lack, but a different
understanding, of the image: the need for a canon emerges in our epistemic
framework, not in theirs. While the text begins with the intention,“Let me
be the one who looks for meaning on the face of painting,”the author
ultimately alters his purpose:
I have searched for so long in the path of form
That I have changed my way from the form to the meaning.
Thus he praises his master not for representational skill, but for internal
vision:“He could see beyond the rules of sight.../ with a single hair he
painted both worlds.”^93 As in the poetry of Rumi and Galip, such state-
ments suggest a purpose and ontology of art, relationships between object
and artist, artist and artwork, and artwork and viewer, invisible to the
modern art-historical paradigm.
The working title of this book was Fortress of Form, Robber of
Consciousnessbecause this serves as an apt metaphor for how our desire
to rationalize often robs our ability to understand. Art history is a fortress
of form, the museum its trap. It robs our consciousness by offering objects
as substitutes for concepts. Facts become frames limiting meaning. Such
(^93) Porter, 2000 : 112.
The Ambivalent Image 221