by Jon Lackman | 12 January 2009 | Museums
In an article on the Rijksmuseum’s recent dalliance with Damien Hirst, art historian Gary Schwartz writes:
If Hirst exploits violence and Koons sex, Lucas Cranach went after them both in combination. Cranach has gotten into the best collections and museums in the world with paintings of the suicide of the rape victim Lucretia. He wasn’t the only one to paint that subject, of course, but Cranach went for the most sensual effect he could achieve. As it seems to me, Cranach was expecting male viewers to be turned on not only by the vulnerable beauty of his half-naked Lucretias, but also by the anticipated plunge of the dagger into their bodies. You do not have to be a feminist to be revolted by Cranach’s idea of Lucretia as a coquette to the death. The question is: where do you draw the line? Is there a point beyond which love of art brings you to betray yourself?
by Jon Lackman | 9 January 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Contemporary
In an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau, art historian Horst Bredekamp discusses Abu Ghraib, Bush, Sept. 11, the case of the Bulgarian art historian Martina Baleva, Darwin, Abraham Bosse, The Matrix, and more:
Le Brun’s contemporary Abraham Bosse taught perspective at the Paris Academy. He was let go because he took it too literally. In his view, not even the king was above perspective. The king was subjected to a higher power, the constructive power of space and that of the artist who represents space. For an absolute ruler that was not the usual. In addition, the gaze reached into the long invisible worlds of outer space and the microscopic. In the 17th-century, pictures began assuming their dominant position …
The 1990s lived the philosophically vulgar delusion that there’s no more reality; everything rather played out in a symbiosis of floating image-worlds abstracted from reality. The simulation theory generated a culture of the Neobaroque. The film version of the theory, The Matrix, won four Oscars in 2000. That’s less than ten years ago, but it appears to us today like another epoch.
Also see, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a profile of art historian / museum director Uwe M. Schneede.
by Jon Lackman | 7 January 2009 | Renaissance
Amid all the talk of the UK’s national galleries buying Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, The Art Newspaper “has delved into the untold story of the 1916 Titian negotiations, combining material from archives in London, Glasgow, New York and Los Angeles”:
The two Titians of Diana, Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, both 1556-59, were nearly sold at the height of World War One, when the National Gallery in London and American collector Henry Clay Frick competed to buy them. Joseph Duveen, the key intermediary, told Frick that the Titians were the greatest paintings in the world. The price asked for the pair was £420,000, an enormous sum at the time.
Most astonishing is what occurred at the National Gallery—and the extraordinary lengths it was prepared to go to in order to acquire them. Lord Curzon, the trustee who then effectively ran the museum, proposed buying both Diana paintings. Diana and Actaeon was to be kept, but Diana and Callisto would be sold on at a large profit, passing to a secret “syndicate” of the four leading Anglo-American dealers—Agnew, Colnaghi, Duveen and Knoedler …
In 1916 Frick was 66, but he was still a voracious collector … he wrote to Lord Ellesmere’s family … asking if they would sell the two Titians of Diana. “I have space in my gallery which would accommodate them nicely,” he explained.
by Jon Lackman | 5 January 2009 | Contemporary
From Artinfo:
Alanna Heiss, the founder of P.S.1 contemporary art center, is retiring from her position as the center’s director, the New York Press reports. Heiss founded P.S.1 in 1976 as a space for large-scale visual and performing artworks by established and emerging artists; the center merged with the Museum of Modern Art in 2000. In 2009, Heiss plans to launch Art International Radio (AIR), which will feature artistic, musical, and performance programs, as well as conversations with artists, curators, and academics. A search committee will be formed next year to find a replacement director for P.S.1.
by Jon Lackman | 2 January 2009 | Uncategorized
From The Telegraph:
Sir Michael Levey, who died on Sunday aged 81, was a distinguished art historian who rose through the ranks of the National Gallery to become its director. Levey joined the National Gallery in 1951, aged 24, as an assistant keeper. His academic career had ended abruptly when he left and lost his unfinished BLitt thesis in a café in Oxford … Levey worked immediately alongside the eminent art historians Cecil Gould and Martin Davies, the latter of whom would be Levey’s immediate predecessor as director. He also worked closely with Anthony Blunt … Levey published numerous books, notably Painting in 18th Century Venice (1959) and Giambattista Tiepolo (1986), which has been regarded as one of the finest monographs on any individual artist. He was delighted when the Ateneo Veneto, the leading Venetian learned society, created a category of Foreign Fellows and he was among the first to be elected. He also surprised contemporaries when he published The World of Ottoman Art (1976), which succeeded in stimulating even experts despite its being well outside Levey’s main field of interest.
by Jon Lackman | 22 December 2008 | Uncategorized
We’ll return Friday January 2.
by Jon Lackman | 19 December 2008 | Books
In caa.reviews, Susan P. Casteras reviews Jason Edwards’s Alfred Gilbert’s Aestheticism: Gilbert Amongst Whistler, Wilde, Leighton, Pater and Burne-Jones and Elizabeth Prettejohn’s Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting:
[They] exemplify newer methodological approaches in Victorian art, a blend of the intertextual and historical, and each superbly succeeds in diverse ways. Edwards’s book challenges preexisting assumptions that Aestheticism did not embrace the realm of sculpture and reinscribes the question dramatically … From its initial paragraphs’ dazzling reading of homosexual subtexts in the coded language of a letter from Gilbert to Whistler, to the solid historical review of the literature on Aestheticism, the introduction presents an intellectually rigorous foundation and provides a glimpse into how different and revealing Edwards’s approach will be … Ultimately, Alfred Gilbert’s Aestheticism is an impressive and densely rich book … Edwards’s attention to detail is astounding, as are his multivalent and masterful close readings of text, history, correspondence, social encodings of behavior and place, and scores of other hidden cues, all of which have been carefully and sensitively retrieved and re-presented … there is no doubt whatsoever that Edwards himself has created a highly original publication …
Another stellar publication that explores new terrain is Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting by Prettejohn, a powerhouse of scholarship who in the last decade has written many compelling books that make significant contributions to the field of Victorian art. Art for Art’s Sake not only qualifies as a major contender in its own right, but also makes an excellent pendant for Edwards’s book, with the latter serving as a kind of sequel to the intellectual territory that Prettejohn covers. Both authors apply intertextual approaches very effectively and treat some overlapping material, and Edwards mentions in his own book Prettejohn’s example as a source of inspiration … While Art for Art’s Sake lacks a proper conclusion, it is nonetheless filled with trenchant new ideas matched by a complex and compelling series of brilliant arguments …
by Jon Lackman | 17 December 2008 | Uncategorized
Noted: Art Historians at Work. “Ideas, tips, and ruminations about the teaching of art history. A blog instigated by the History of Art & Architecture graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh.”
Various art magazines also maintain blogs we’ve never much discussed because they’re mostly concerned with who bought what for how much last night. ArtReview, for example, recently posted an interesting report by John Holden on the democratization of culture. See also Artforum‘s Diary, where we recently got word of Dave Hickey’s recent excellent Vanity Fair piece on art fairs:
… [We get] back to the fair for my so-called keynote address, which turns out to be less than the really big deal for which I flew across the Atlantic. The harmony of the Frieze fair, I discover, is so complex as to require four keynotes. Every afternoon some idiot like myself mounts a rickety platform in a dank tent with folding chairs, faces two blazing spotlights, and, with rain drumming on the canvas, says something. When my turn comes, I embark upon a cascade of really bad decisions. First, blinded by the light, I decide to wing it. Second, since I have known nearly everyone in the tent for decades, I abandon euphemism and simply identify the people I’m talking about. Some of them are in the tent, so it seems pretentious not to. Third, I forget my opening remarks and suggest that integrity may be coming back into fashion. This scares everyone sober …
Back at the hotel, there are tantrums in my e-mail from Nebraska and California damning the off-the-cuff remarks I made two hours ago to a few friends in a soggy tent in Regent’s Park. Unbeknownst to me, my talk had been podcast worldwide by Frieze magazine. Oops! The next morning The Art Newspaper hits the stands with a crude, unauthorized, tragically ungrammatical transcription of my remarks. Double oops. To make matters worse, at one point in my talk, I mentioned that collectors in my hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, own a lot of paintings by Morris Louis. Unfortunately The Art Newspaper has turned “Morris Louis,” the post-painterly abstractionist, into “Maurice Lewis,” an artist almost certainly concocted by Googling up a long history of misspellings in the British press. A week later, tan reprints my talk, still uncorrected and unauthorized, with “Maurice Lewis” still featured prominently. This is why we had a revolution.
by Jon Lackman | 15 December 2008 | Architecture
We belatedly take note of an interesting article published in July on Signandsight.com:
The German feuilletons spent the spring debating the relationship between architecture and morality … De Meuron told an interviewer that it would be stupid and cowardly not to build for China on the grounds that it has no democracy. Albert Speer, the son of Hitler’s architect, who has years of experience building for China … took an apolitical stance in the TV magazine Kulturzeit on 24.05.07: “I think of architects in general and our office is particular as service providers. (…) Ideology shouldn’t enter into things.” In an interview with die Welt, he was more affirmative: “I have made it my business to make sure the Chinese start thinking about the environment, energy provision and energy saving” …
In a brief interview with the German Vanity Fair of 19.02.2008, Daniel Libeskind stated: “I do not build for totalitarian rulers. I see architecture as a commitment to democracy and this means ethical responsibility.” But Libeskind also builds in Hongkong … Hanno Rauterberg asked, in die Zeit on 27.03.2008, why people would expect architects to reflect on their business with autocrats … “[Architecture] not only provides a state with the necessary rooms and spaces, but also with images and metaphors. It becomes a foundation, a support, a pillar of the system” …
Rem Kohlhaas … found it “rather fatuous that the west is always only critical. The west is critical, nothing but critical. This form of uninterrupted criticism only leads up a blind alley. (…) We simply have to recognise that the right of the individual, which we hold so holy, has no tradition in countries like China” … When questioned about the migrant workers and their working conditions, and the general issue of architecture and responsibility, Kohlhaas explained: “I think we have to be pragmatic.” In Kohlhaas’ eyes, the only way to change the world is to build in China. “CCTV is currently discussing whether to divide the state television into a traditional and a modern part, which would be strongly BBC-oriented. And the modern, enlightened TV people would then move into our building. Without wanting to blow my own trumpet, as I see it, the building is a symbol of change.”
by Jon Lackman | 12 December 2008 | Career
In the Wall Street Journal, we read that according to “a year-long survey of 1.2 million people with only a bachelor’s degree by PayScale Inc.,” art-history majors have a median starting salary of $35,800. Ten years after graduation, their median salary is $64,900. In that respect, they beat majors in anthropology, biology, criminal justice, drama, education, English, forestry, graphic design, health care administration, hospitality, interior design, music, nutrition, psychology, religion, sociology, and Spanish. That said, philosophy majors are earning a median $81,200 ten years out.
by Jon Lackman | 10 December 2008 | Americas
From The New Criterion:
Anyone who suspects that nineteenth-century American art has less to teach us than twentieth-century modernism should take a drive up the winding road of Route 23A, up Kaaterskill Clove in the eastern escarpment of the Catskill Mountains. Here in the town of Hunter, New York, a group of young artists is studying the nineteenth-century traditions of the Hudson River School by walking in the footsteps of the original American masters …
Dedicated to reviving nineteenth-century landscape technique by “modeling itself after the artistic, social and spiritual values of the Hudson River School painters,” [teacher Jacob] Collins wrote in his mission statement, his school aimed to “bring together the reawakening enthusiasm for the old American painters.” Ideally, he says, his student artists “and their beautiful representations of nature will help to lead the culture back to a stronger connection to the landscape” …
Collins’s students may be learning the vocabulary of the Hudson River School, but I saw little evidence that they are being taught how to speak it. Collins’s students are young, mainly in their twenties. They are the products of an art world that shouts but has little to say. So the silence offered by Collins’s draftsman drills, developed in his schools in New York and carried over to landscape, is itself a form of rebellion, a release that looks for depth in the details of leaves and bark. But this must only be a means to an end, not an end in itself …
The original Hudson River School artists did not go into the wilderness to paint illustrations of the natural world … Can there be a Hudson River School revival without the revival of God? … For the Hudson River School painter, the entire landscape was part of God’s world. Such thoughts, of course, rarely infiltrate modern belief. “And what remains when disbelief has gone?” asks Philip Larkin in his poem “Church Going”: “Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,/ A shape less recognizable each week,/ A purpose more obscure.” To understand the Hudson River School today, Collins’s students must learn to see themselves as seminarians as well as painters. They otherwise risk becoming the mere technicians of grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, and sky. Deep in the Catskill wilderness, they may be in a house of God, but that doesn’t mean they’ve got religion.
by Jon Lackman | 8 December 2008 | Uncategorized
There still are not many art historians blogging, but let’s note a couple worthwhile sites we’ve not yet indicated:
Jonathan Janson considers all things Vermeer. An artist himself, he writes with particular sensitivity to technical aspects:
Vermeer used glazing as other Dutch painters, with parsimony. They knew glazing is not an answer-all technical solution and is most effective in isolated areas of a painting where its characteristics are fully enhanced. By the way, the lemon yellow jackets of Vermeer’s women are not glazed. They are painted with the defunct lead-tin yellow, a rather thick, dullish yellow which pales next to cadmium yellow but through careful juxtaposition shines in Vermeer’s work.
KC writes on life after art history:
I used to be an art historian. I had a tenure-track position, students who loved me, students who hated me, interesting colleagues, uninteresting colleagues, a great office with a wall of windows, a laser pointer and funky shoes. Then I met N, fell in love, decided to give it all up, came to Italy, got married, started this blog, and had a baby. A good friend from graduate school, who, like me, now lives a life bereft of art history, recently confessed to me that she misses it. I miss it too. I miss it bitterly.
by Jon Lackman | 6 December 2008 | Uncategorized
At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,
he was senior curator and oversaw the department of classical art for 40 years … Although his bibliography of articles and books filled 60 printed pages, Dr. Vermeule may have been the least stuffy classicist to prowl the MFA’s halls. He was fond of draping plastic Hawaiian leis around the necks of centuries-old statues in his office and often wore what he called his “Dalmatian” sneakers. A friend, he explained, had painted spots on the shoes, and they were “the only work of contemporary art that has been seen in every gallery in the museum.” (Boston Globe)
by Jon Lackman | 6 December 2008 | Uncategorized
I read in the York University newspaper that
With Halifax’s vaunted ‘Golden Generation’ jettisoned out into the real world of 9 to 5, mortgages and finding school for the littl’un, it has taken the leadership of metrosexual art historian Joseph Harrison-Davis to blend the new blood of rotund-ladies man (the ladies being rotund) ‘Lundy’ with some veteran paramedics like jive-talking Geordie Joe Brennan.
I can’t actually parse this sentence, but I venture to suggest that “metrosexual art historian” is redundant.
by Jon Lackman | 6 December 2008 | Uncategorized
The Fluxus artist just died in a retirement home in Cologne at the age of 82 years, according to this short article from the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger.
by Jon Lackman | 3 December 2008 | Architecture, Conservation
Smithsonian Magazine writes about current attempts to restore and safeguard Hagia Sophia:
“For months at a time, you don’t see anybody working,” said [Zeynep] Ahunbay, a professor of architecture at Istanbul Technical University. She had directed a partial restoration of the building’s exterior in the late 1990s and is regarded by conservators as its guardian angel. “One year there is a budget, the next year there is none,” she said with a sigh. “We need a permanent restoration staff, conservators for the mosaics, frescoes and masonry, and we need to have them continuously at work” …
Astonishingly—although many scholars have studied Hagia Sophia over the years—the building has never been completely documented. New discoveries may yet be made. In the 1990s, during emergency repairs on the dome, workers uncovered graffiti that had been scrawled by tenth-century repairmen, imploring God for protection as they worked from scaffolds 150 feet above the floor. “Kyrie, voithi to sou doulo, Gregorio,” ran a typical one—”Lord, help your servant, Gregorius.” Says [UPenn architectural historian Robert] Ousterhout, “You can imagine how scared they might have been up there.”
by Jon Lackman | 1 December 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical
According to ANSA,
Caravaggio’s reputation for revolutionary artistic genius has received a further boost following the discovery he may have used fireflies to create primitive ”photographs”. Roberta Lapucci, conservation chief at the Florence-based SACI institute, believes the baroque artist created a firefly powder as an essential tool after converting his entire studio into a kind of camera obscura. Writing in the monthly art journal Stile Arte, Lapucci reports Caravaggio filtered light through a purpose-made hole in his ceiling, using a biconvex lens and a concave mirror to reflect the image he planned to paint directly onto the canvas … Analysing the content of Caravaggio’s paintings, Lapucci discovered traces of photosensitive substances that react to light.
On the website of Stile Arte, I see an article by Stefania Mattioli on Roberta Lapucci’s researches, but no article by Lapucci.
by Jon Lackman | 28 November 2008 | Conferences
The 2009 CAA conference in Los Angeles now has sessions and individual paper titles listed on its website. A few highlights:
“The Disciplined Body and Rational Architecture: The Foro Mussolini in Rome as the Setting for Performative Ritual of Synchronized Gymnastics”
“Statelessness: Gregor Schneider’s Weisse Folter, Clean Torture, and Guantánamo Bay”
“Riding the Rails of the Tenure Track”
“White Out: Extraordinary Rendition as Metaphor for Assimilation”
“What’s Eating You? The Graphic Language of the Hole: Consumer Culture Vol. 1″
“Where’s the (Brotherly) Love? Or, a Strange Thing Happened on the Way to the Pro Bono”
“No Institutional Affiliation? No Problem! Materials and Services for Independent Fine Artists in Public Libraries”
“USCO: Getting Out of Your Mind to Use Your Head”
“Persuading with the Unseen? “Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung”, Photography, and German Communism’s Iconophobia”
“Tangled [Int|T]angibles: Code as Thing and Idea”
“Invisible Intimacies and Cold Burn: Haptic Migrations in 3D Tele-Immersion Choreography”
“Making Love Not War: The Iconography of the Cockfight in Medieval Egypt”
“Madness and Ecstasy in Muslim Menswear: Gender and Self-Expression”
“Of Beardless Youths, Courtesans, and Voyeurs: Modern Persian Erotica in the Kinsey Institute”
“Take It to the Air: Radio as Public Art”
“The Power of Instant Communities: MySpace and Facebook as Activist Centers”
“Adopting Identity: Afterlife Personae in Second-Third-Century Rome”
“Second-Life Dumpster”
“MyFrienemies.com: Anti-Social Networking”
“Rembrandt and the Art of Others: Why Is It So Essential That We Contextualize Rembrandt’s Art?”
“The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men”
“From Bust to Bone: Making and Seeing Faces in Art and Plastic Surgery”
“Got Tickets? To the Gun Show!”
“Fiction; or, Will the Real Real Please Stand Up?”
“Devotion and Veneration: Chicano Lowrider Processions and Audience Interaction”
“Jean Epstein’s Aesthetics and “The Normal Subconscious”: The Generative Potential of Chronic Intellectual Fatigue”
“Why N’Art Ain’t Art: Critically Thinking Critical Theory”
“The Impossibility of Neutrality”
“Make It Fucked Up (An Object-Maker’s Ode to Jon Spencer Blues Explosion)”
“Remove My Heart and Bury It in Your Choir: Body Parts and the Politics of Portraiture”
“Natural Attacks? The Politics of Lightning and the French Revolution”
“Destructive Salvation: Max Ernst’s Microbes and the Politics of the Atom”
“AntiGyne: Biotechnology and the Dream of Birth without Women”
“Beautiful Hermaphrodite”
“In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art”
“But Is It Synesthesia?”
“Faggotstitch”
“Virtus and the Virtuous Breast”
“Breasts and Eggs for Breakfast: A Surrealist Farm”
by Jon Lackman | 26 November 2008 | Photography
Just as Sarah Palin’s fashion was hamfistedly spruced up by individuals hoping to help her fit in on the national stage, so a French minister’s image was recently edited by a sympathetic newspaper worried she might stand out in the wrong way. Or was it? André Gunthert writes in Actualités de la Recherche en histoire visuelle:
L’Express informs us that le Figaro, [on the cover of] its recent Nov. 19 issue, subtly removed a 15,600-euro diamond ring from the finger of the justice minister. An ungenerous reader might interpret this operation as a politically motivated manipulation — as Le Figaro , a pro-government newspaper that is nonetheless alert to the hardships of la France qui se lève tôt, working to correct the superficial blunders of less experienced ministers. The truth is much more interesting. Responding to questions from Eric Mandonnet, the daily’s photo-service editor Debora Altman clarifies: “We botched it in haste. We accept responsibility. We didn’t want the ring to be the subject of controversy, when the real subject was the judges’ petition. Rachida Dati had nothing to do with it.”
To my knowledge, it’s the first time that a national news organization fully admitted retouching an image. Recall the embarrassed denials of Paris-Match when it anatomically manipulated the head of state, assuring us that “the alteration of photos” should be “strictly forbidden.” Testimony to the advancing culture of retouching, these pious lies are no longer the fashion. But the confession made of the correction reveals another aspect of image usage that is also usually passed over silently. To admit that it was necessary to remove the jewel because it risked confusing the reader, is to admit that the usage of photography in journalism isn’t just determined by the primacy of the information. In conceding the retouching, one clearly acknowledges that the image appears here only by way of illustration, as a decorative material with no journalistic necessity.
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.
