by Jon Lackman | 9 January 2012 | Awards, Books, Medieval
It’s awards season again. CAA’s Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Charles Rufus Morey prizes may not be as ballyhooed as the Oscars but they are coveted by members of the American art history academy. This week I begin examining the finalists for this year’s Barr Award, which is awarded to museum catalogues published between September 1, 2010, and August 31, 2011:
- Maryan W. Ainsworth, Stijn Alsteens, and Nadine M. Orenstein, Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance; the Complete Works (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2010)
- Suzanne Glover Lindsay, Daphne S. Barbour, and Shelley G. Sturman, Edgar Degas Sculpture (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2010)
- Elizabeth Morrison and Anne D. Hedeman, Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250–1500 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010)
First up: Imagining the Past in France. If you are feeling sentimental about the fate of the book, in this age of bookstore bankruptcies, digital competition, and limited attention-spans, then take heart. This catalogue will whisk you to an era when the book mattered greatly to its public and received the attentions of top artists. In her introductory essay, Morrison paints a touching portrait of those craftsmen, who struggled to adapt the religious illuminated manuscript to the secular topics increasingly prized by their customers. At first, they amusingly tried to cram complex narratives into drop-caps (“historiated initials”). This had worked with well-known Bible scenes, which can indicated synecdochally, but good luck with the War between Antiochus and Ptolemy.
Four excellent thematic essays follow Morrison’s, then a long series of detailed object entries. I most enjoyed Gabrielle M. Spiegel’s essay, which asks why the aristocratic public demanded secular histories in this moment. She identifies various ideological ends to which history was put, but also finds ways in which books slipped out from underneath and even subverted those ends:
The French aristocracy, no longer able to impose its needs and concerns in the governance of the realm, contributed to the dominant ideology itw own defeated discourse, achieving on a literary level the success that eluded it on the political … It is, perhaps, one of the finer ironies in the history of medieval historiography that the original quest involved in the French aristocracy’s romancing of the past should issue, ultimately, not in an idyll of a lost age but in a new vision of the French nation.
The catalogue is copiously illustrated in color, but the image quality being only average, its greatest strength is its prose, which breaks scholarly ground and addresses the general reader. It is particularly strong on the issue of word-image interaction, which seems increasingly relevant in our age that mixes the two so promiscuously, on- and offline.
[See also this review (pdf) by Mark Cruse, and critic Christopher Knight's review of the exhibition.]
