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This article examines the extent to which Wyndham Lewis's Vorticism was underpinned by the art of the Byzantine and Early Renaissance masters. I argue that Lewis's borrowings from certain Italian 'primitivist' artworks are critically important given the way he emphasized the concept of the superiority of the eye and how he claimed that the eye has socio-political relevance. I suggest that previous commentators, focusing on Lewis's trade-off between Cubism and Futurism, have underestimated the importance of these links. A recent example is Fredric Jameson's article 'Wyndham Lewis's Timon: The War of Forms' (2013).1 Jameson provides a masterly exposition of how Lewis manipulated Cubist and Futurist structural forms to create a Vorticist aesthetic, but fails to mention any art-historical antecedents. Commentators tend to take as given references to Uccello's The Battle of San Romano (1440) in Timon of Athens: Alcibiades, and to Piero della Francesca's The Flagellation of Christ (c. 1455-60) in A Battery Shelled (1919), which derives its structural arrangement from the earlier painting, but fail to emphasize their importance to Lewis's aesthetic position. I show that whereas Lewis's manipulation of Cubist and Futurist techniques is primarily a device to achieve formal closure by bringing action to a standstill, his close modelling of a contemporary subject in relation to a fourteenth-century religious painting indicates a higher aesthetic position in keeping with his authoritarian socio-political views. Lewis stands detached; the aristocrat of the spirit stands on the Nietzschean high ground to 'Mock the herd perpetually with the grimace of its own garrulity or deadness.'2 Nietzsche ascribes to the artist a role model for humanity: 'Only the aristocrat of the spirit who was free from the self-torture of the herd morality, and who, consequently, combined great instinctual energies with great creative energies, has the potential for true freedom'.3 Furthermore, this aesthetic position is one that Lewis would reserve for his most discerning viewers, not a bourgeois audience that he held in contempt. In 'The Credentials of the Painter' (1922), setting out what makes the artist different from other men, Lewis stated:
The gesture of dragging art down to the level of a possible general humanity, empirically decided on, or of 'educating up to art' an unnumbered public, is equally absurd. Art always has been, and within limits...