Neither here nor elsewhere: displacement devices in representing the supernatural

How might the supernatural be represented in those religious paintings that imply a continuity between the virtual space of painting and the real space of the beholder? Such an implied continuity, dependent upon an engagement where the beholder imaginatively realigns her frame of reference to that of the picture, might be thought to threaten a necessary distance demanded of religious works. This paper examines how a number of painters exploited innovative displacement devices, utilizing inherent ambiguities as to where a painting is relative to its beholder through the withholding of perspectival distance and positional cues for a discrete section of the work.