ABSTRACT
In chapter 1, we explored the rhetoric of mastery and possession, the semiotics of violence and rape, informing the at once aesthetic and epistemological motif of the Naked Lady. We found that, even in its capacity as an icon of desire, subsuming natural truth in an image that expresses representation's prehensile power to expose and grasp the underlying order of feminized nature, the Naked Lady betokens nature's finally indigestible otherness. It thereby symbolizes the ambiguities in which representation both meets and expounds its insuperable limits. This led us in the next chapter to examine the peculiar ontology of baroque art: a Pauline ontology of fallen flesh one of whose entailments is the dialectical problem the artist's self becomes as a source of light that mirrors the very darkness it claims to dispel. The latent T of baroque representation, the image of identity set forth in baroque self-portraiture, turns out to be far more complex than we tend to imagine. In particular, it not only proves vulnerable to contesting forces overtaking it from without; contestation inhabits it as an indissociable condition of its inner mode of being.
