Early Medieval Architecture as Bearer of Meaning by Günter Bandmann (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 216 order of acquisition as the organizing principle for this volume, which results (she speculates) “in a pleasingly random mixture of dates and places of origin, while at the same time providing an unusual overview of the way in which one particular part of the manuscript collection has evolved” (9). The distribution of images is, as it happens, very pleasantly random and diverse, and their subtle framing within a more modern than historical context lends currency to their interest. CHRISTINE THUAU, French & Francophone Studies, UCLA Günter Bandmann, Early Medieval Architecture as Bearer of Meaning, trans. Kendall Wallis (New York: Columbia University Press 2005) 368 pp. Kendall Wallis’s recent translation of Günter Bandmann’s Mittelalterliche Architektur als Bedeuntungsträger (1951) marks the first time the Englishspeaking world can enjoy direct access to this seminal work of medieval architectural scholarship. Due to the half-century lapse between publication and translation, younger historians and art historians may be less familiar with the late Bandmann, and his work may not appear particularly groundbreaking for the early twentieth century. Art historical and related fields, however, are indebted to him and his contemporaries (such as Richard Krautheimer), who all emerged in the years surrounding the Second World War and opened up medieval architectural research to new methodologies and approaches, most prominently the philosophy and iconography of architecture. Bandmann broke relatively new ground in arguing for historical and symbolic forms—not, for example , artistic originality or aesthetic quality—as the principle ways through which medieval people understood architecture. For these reasons, any reader not acquainted with Bandmann would be well served to begin his or her first encounter with the book by reading Hans Josef Böker’s “Afterward,” itself a veritable if unassuming gem (249–255). Here Böker places the book into a broader context, not only historically, but also historiographically and even politically, and provides a fuller portrait of Bandmann. Günter Bandmann (1917–1975), a German who began studying during the Nazi era, produced Mittelalterliche Architektur als Bedeutunsträger—described by Böker as “an important turning point in the history of art and architecture in postwar Germany at a time when the discipline was undergoing an important and necessary reorientation” (251)—as his habilitationsschrift. Unlike many of his contemporaries, including Krautheimer, Erwin Panofsky, and Otto von Simson, Bandmann had not fled Germany. Remaining in the country through the war, he wrote a dissertation on the abbey church of Essen-Werden, developing his “growing interest in the question of meaning” (252). In further pursuing these ideas with his habilitationsschrift, Bandmann moved beyond the predominant formalistic and stylistic approaches, and confronted heavy resistance , entering into a debate about agency, influence, and motivation in architecture. Yet, his work became foundational in the field, constantly in print in Germany ever since, though never translated into any other language—that is, until now with Wallis’s translation. While the once considered to be provocative nature of Bandmann’s work barely causes the present reader to bat an eye, nevertheless it is clear that this is a revolutionary and unusual work of architectural history. On many levels, this REVIEWS 217 book states what is obvious to present-day medievalists. For example, one point that Bandmann drives home in his first chapter, “The Problem of Meaning in Architecture,” is the fundamental role of symbolic meaning to medieval art and architecture in contrast to the importance of aesthetic quality in Renaissance and post-Renaissance art. In doing so, he crafts an elegant, if implicit, argument for the importance of contextualization, analyzing a piece of art or architecture according to the standards of its period. Furthermore, the second chapter, “The Symbolic Meaning of Buildings according to Written and Visual Sources,” focuses on points often articulated since this work’s original publication. Topics emerging from his discussion of written sources include the role of the medieval Bauherr as a figure as, or even more, important than the artist himself, the medieval meaning of a copy (namely, a replication of content or meaning rather than of formal aesthetics), and the peculiar notion of historical consciousness in the Middle Ages. Both visual and written sources underline the influence of the...