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The Oratory of San Giorgio in Padua has a magnificent fresco of the Annunciation by Altichiero da Zevio. It is somewhat difficult to contemplate in sunlight, writes Dominique Scarfone, but when the weather is overcast it can be seen in all its irradiance. What obtrudes is an oculus, a rose window through which streams blinding light. Visitors need to let their eyes adapt to the “luminous irruption” that interposes itself between Mary and the Angel Gabriel (Scarfone, , p. 71). While initially this strikes the viewer with annoyance, Scarfone in this marvelously evocative reading finds that here, the once familiar theme is rendered unfamiliar and not because of the newness of the content but because Altichiero actually “annunciates” the experience. The intensity of the light, the obscuring of vision embody the encounter with “strangerness.” He goes on to add that the “interpretation of this experience may be both religious or abstracted as the universal experience of being summoned to something larger than itself.an event that presents—and puts us in the presence of—the other” (72). Scarfone elaborates on this idea to talk about how in fact this rendering “marks the limits of representation, that there is something that goes beyond meaning, an enigmatic depth, an opaque or empty core at the heart of all representation as of all psychic production” (71-74).
This reading of Altichiero's fresco brings together at least one theme that is common to these two remarkable books. While the angles of vision are rather different, Withy's tenacious mapping of Heidegger's “uncanny” and Scarfone's recuperation of the “unpast” deal with the liminality of a terrain that haunts by its elusiveness. Echoing Hamlet-esque unease, Withy writes: “ghosts, epileptic seizures, and automata straddle the gaps between the joints in our ways of making sense of the world and in doing so reveal that these joints do not match up perfectly with the way that the world is jointed” (Withy, , p. 17). Both b