In any case, back to Florence. As with any image of event, there is a kind of textual ellipsis. What we get is one heightened moment of the episode rather than the more inconsequential ones along the way. Any meaning that can only be acquired by the actual experience of duration--something that our non-representational arts now teach us--is lost. It can be said that this immediacy of meaning to be found in the shorthand of the still image is what allowed the Renaissance to break from medieval Scholasticism. However, it is precisely the difficult dialectic of the Scholastics--the durational experience of insistent reflection--which Kierkegaard wants to reinject in the above episode of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac.
