by Jon Lackman | 24 November 2008 | Medieval, Theory
In caa.reviews, Kathryn A. Smith considers A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, edited by Conrad Rudolph:
The advent of a new millennium is an opportunity to take stock. Blackwell Publishing has begun to do just that, inaugurating several ambitious series whose aim is to map the past, present, and future of the discipline of art history. A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, one of the first volumes to appear in the series Blackwell Companions to Art History, is the middle installment of three essay collections that will treat the state of research on the art of the Christian Middle Ages … A Companion to Medieval Art is neither comprehensive in its coverage (the volume’s heft notwithstanding) nor a “systematic historiography of medieval art” (xxii). Rather, the aim of this collection, in Rudolph’s words, is to aid the scholar and the student in “understand[ing] the issues and arguments that have contributed to the formation of the current state of the field” …
The first dozen essays, according to the editor, are “methodological or conceptual . . . and thematic” pieces that are “unconnected to any specific media” (xxi). The titles and their authors include “Vision” (Cynthia Hahn), “Reception of Images by Medieval Viewers” (Madeline Harrison Caviness), “Narrative” (Suzanne Lewis), “Formalism” (Linda Seidel), “Gender and Medieval Art” (Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz), “Gregory the Great and Image Theory in Northern Europe during the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries” (Herbert L. Kessler), “Art and Exegesis” (Christopher G. Hughes), “Whodunnit? Patronage, the Canon, and the Problematics of Agency in Romanesque and Gothic Art” (Jill Caskey), “Collecting (and Display)” (Pierre Alain Mariaux), “The Concept of Spolia” (Dale Kinney), “The Monstrous” (Thomas E. A. Dale), and “Making Sense of Marginalized Images in Manuscripts and Religious Architecture” (Laura Kendrick). The succeeding ten essays, which treat established chronological and geographical sub-fields, form a second group … The volume concludes with a pair of articles that explore modern encounters with the medieval: “‘The Scattered Limbs of the Giant’: Recollecting Medieval Architectural Revivals” (Tina Waldeier Bizzarro) and “The Modern Medieval Museum” (Michelle P. Brown) …
A notable effect of the organization of A Companion to Medieval Art is the almost complete absence of the word “style” from virtually the entire first half of the book … Had this volume been conceived two decades ago, it is likely that the media- and period-based articles, in which style is a fundamental concern, would have preceded any methodological or conceptual essays. The organization of the volume should not be interpreted as a sign that questions of the origins, influence, and meaning of style are now deemed unimportant, however. Rather, the arrangement of the essays signals the sustained interest of scholars working today in addressing the issues of style (and meaning and agency) with a greater self-consciousness regarding their methods and motivations, and in recalibrating traditional approaches in light of what can be speculated about how medieval audiences perceived, viewed, used, and valued the images, artifacts, and monuments that are the objects of modern inquiry. The sentiment that, “one wants to be clear about how modern critical discourses correspond—or do not—to medieval concepts” (173), as Hughes aptly puts it in his essay, is a thread that runs through many of the articles in A Companion to Medieval Art …
Where will the discipline itself be ten or twenty years from now? Caviness’s essay on reception may provide a hint in this regard. Caviness takes an expansive view of her subject, listing as potential sources for medieval reception not only the usual classes of textual/verbal material like medieval writings about art, theological and philosophical texts, and sermons, but also evidence grounded in the monuments themselves: examples of architectural imitation or of the copying of manuscripts or images; instances of medieval iconoclasm and the editing or erasure of images; and evidence concerning the manufacture, use, and reuse of medieval objects. Many of these types of evidence are of equal value in theorizing about the intentions of medieval artists, patrons, or clients: intention could even be seen as a subset of reception. If the essays by Caviness and many of the volume’s other authors are any indication, then medieval art history has entered a phase in which monuments and artifacts are viewed as material bearers of meaning in an unprecedentedly broad sense of that term; and intensive, open-minded interrogation of the visual and material evidence itself, a tool too often neglected in the rush to embrace new methodologies, has reasserted a central place in our investigative endeavors. Maybe, too, scholars will redouble their efforts to study not just canonical artifacts but also the ones that have been relegated to the margins of medieval art history by virtue of their perceived stylistic inferiority or alleged lack of conceptual complexity. For medievalists working today and in future generations, A Companion to Medieval Art will be a valuable reference tool, and, indeed, an inspiration.
