Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God's Invisibility in Medieval Art (review)

Abstract

210 Reviews various elements out of order. O n the other hand, the account of Charles VIII's ceremony gives details of aspects of the event that were outside and surrounded the actual coronation and consecration. Changes to the rituals continued after 1500 and, although the records of the ceremonies are easier to access, Jackson has apparently no intention of publishing a third volume to bring the edition down to thefinalcoronation, that of Charles X in 1825. This is in many ways a great pity. Despite the Internet, volumes of this sort are an essential part of a research library in parts of the world still distant from the original sources. Sybil M. Jack Department ofHistory University ofSydney Kessler, Herbert L., Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God's Invisibility in Mediev Art, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2000, cloth; pp. xv, 265; 8 colour plates, 133 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$49.95, £35.00; ISBN 0812235606. This beautiful volume is a collection of eight recent essays by Kessler on t ways in which the Byzantine and Western Church engaged with the question ofthe theological value ofimage-making. Chapter 1, 'The Icon in the Narrative', discusses the relationship between the portrait (icona) and the narrative picture (historia) in medieval writings about religious images. In light of the prohibition of images in the Second Commandment, narrative pictures were easier for Christian theologians to accept. However, an iconic element entered many narrative pictures, as when the actions of God were apparent in human affairs, and Kessler argues that there was an 'elision ofthe difference between historia and icona' (p. 12) in many artistic works. Kessler also gives considerable attention to the use of Jewish or Old Testament symbolism and referents for the depiction of N e w Testament themes. Chapter 2, 'Thou Shalt Paint the Likeness ofChrist Himself, and Chapter 4, 'Configuring the Invisible by Copying the Holy Face', explore in greater detail the theological controversy surrounding the Mosaic prohibition of images. The former essay argues that there were excellent arguments on the side of both the iconoclasts and the iconodules in the eighth-century debate, and that the iconodules argued from a variety of positions, including that 'the Second Commandment is no longer in force because God had revealed himself in Christ', (pp. 35-36) and Reviews 211 that the sacred objects of the Old Testament were but prefigurations of the Incarnation, which renders them obsolete. The second of these two essays considers the relationship between archetype and physical realisation through an examination of the medieval practice of continually copying from older images. Several fascinating arguments are discussed, including how the defenders of images 'invoked the processes of art to explain how invisible archetypes could generate copies free of the physical matter of which they were made' (p. 69). The two lengthiest examinations in the book are Chapter 6, 'Real Absence: Medieval Art and the Metamorphosis of Vision', and Chapter 7, 'Fades Bibliothecae Revelata: Carolingian Art as Spiritual Seeing', both approximately fifty pages in length. The former is a response to Peter Brown's argument that the Christian use of and response to images was transformed at the end of the sixth century. Kessler considers particular late antique images (the burial of Jacob in the Ashburnham Pentateuch) and later medieval ones (the burial of Gregory the Great in an Eton College manuscript), to see whether Brown's argument is convincing. He concludes that, in the issue of depictions of Paradise, it is: that late antique painters believed art could depict celestial visions; where later medieval artists had come to suspect art's capacity to do this. The ninth century saw a fundamental distrust of the materiality of pictures. Kessler argues that Carolingian art demonstrates a tendency to contain within it 'systems for demonstrating [the] fundamental limitation to corporeal seeing' (p. 127). Thus the images themselves made clear 'that what the faithful saw on the walls of churches were images perceived with the human eye and not the divine presences that could be apprehended through the spirit alone' (p. 128). Because so much Carolingian material is featured, this essay is a natural companion to 'Fades Bibliothecae Revelata'. This is an extended examination...