Resumen de Late Gothic abstractions
The steeply inclined ground planes of Early Netherlandish paintings are often covered with a drapery so stiff and heavy that it seems to break rather than fold. Known as the hard style�in opposition to the soft style common at 1400�this drapery tends to push up toward the flatness and verticality of the picture plane, where its angular folds rhyme reflexively with the rectilinear corners of the painted panels in which it appears.
Despite its sweeping generality and seeming anachronism, Wilhelm Worringer's account of this drapery as a form of abstraction gets a good deal right. If Worringer is right�that what he calls Gothic drapery is, in an important sense, nonmimetic�that drapery, especially in its late hard form, may be more �thing� than picture��thing,� that is, in the specifically medieval sense that Friedrich Ohly describes. Ohly's account of medieval Dingbedeutung (thing-meaning) lends unexpected support to Worringer's abstraction thesis by demonstrating the centrality of formal properties to certain modes of medieval exegesis.
At the same time, Ohly's work suggests an important corrective to Worringer's formalism: because the formal properties of a painting relate it to all those things beyond its frame that share its properties, a painting should not be thought of as an autonomous entity. Reading Worringer through Ohly helps us see that the reflexive abstraction of hard-style drapery�with its flatness and its rectilinear folds, which echo the framing edges of the picture, particularly where they meet to form corners� opens the picture, in fact, first, to its own material substrate and, then in turn, to a wider world of things.
