Medieval Aesthetics Research Articles

Contesting Chaosmos: (Re)Viewing Medieval Aesthetics

This article analyses the hermeneutic dispute of the contemporary value of medieval aesthetics within the writing of two giants in the 20th century—Umberto Eco and Hans Urs von Balthasar. I claim that Eco’s Joycean adaptation of medieval aesthetics uses religious language to insert a permanent, postmodern aesthetic dismantling of cosmic form. I argue that Balthasar’s reading of Dante challenges the limits that Eco frames as inherent within the medieval cosmos, and that Balthasar offers an adaptive medieval aesthetics that rebuts the religious overhaul Eco demands. This debate amplifies the flexibility of aesthetics based on form to attune to contemporary concerns while remaining faithful to the fundamental religious commitments of Christian tradition.

The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable

The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable

РИТМЫ ЗЛА В АНГЛИЙСКОЙ ПСАЛТИРИ XIV В

In medieval iconography, one of the main properties of evil is its multiplicity and changeability. As we know from the works on medieval demonology published by Alexander Makhov, such fluidity of forms was often equated with disorder and contrasted with an orderly hierarchy of the sacred. The author demonstrates that this applied not only to demons, but also to figures of non-Christians, primarily Jews and Romans in scenes of the Passion of Christ. The author of the present article takes the case of the Fitzwarin Psalter, one of the most extraordinary manuscripts illuminated in England in the 14th century. He shows that the variations of forms and colors in the figures of demonized enemies of Christ were sometimes organized in the rhythmic sequences which gave disorder a partial ordering. However, even in images of saints, in which symmetry and hierarchy dominated for a long time, variations were constantly introduced. They complicated (made more “live”) the static composition and led the viewer’s gaze. These observations suggest that many of the transformations of markers of otherness that researchers have long noted should be seen not only as visual figures of evil, but also as particular instances of the desire for varietas characteristic of medieval aesthetics in general

City governance and visual impression management: Visual semiotics and the Biccherna panels of Siena

A major preoccupation in the contemporary organizational landscape is governance and how to cope with conflict and uncertainty. These challenges are particularly evident in the governance of cities, with their complex histories, politics and administrative processes. We argue that visual artefacts can form powerful visual impression management, constituting ‘visual governance’, for dealing with such complexities. We construct a framework from the visual semiotics of Umberto Eco, extended by medieval aesthetics. We analyse the pre-modern case of the Sienese Biccherna panels (painted covers and paintings linked to the city accounts) to show how their calligraphy, heraldry and pictures convey idealized reassuring images of orderly administration, in times of complicated, disordered underlying realities. In demonstrating how art and accounting are intertwined as tools of governance, and that there are contemporary resonances in corporate annual reporting, we add both to research in governance and to visual organizational research, and pave the way for further interdisciplinary work on the relationship between art and organizations.

Free Beauty and Functional Perspective in Medieval Aesthetics

The concept of functional beauty is characterized by including an aesthetic appreciation of objects that evaluates their efficiency in terms of satisfaction of attributions. As opposed to the concept of free beauty, which includes an appreciation of perceptual qualities for their own sake, the knowledge of functions is a necessary condition for the aesthetic experience itself. The aim of this paper is to reintegrate the medieval tension between these two conceptions, which has been surprisingly neglected in contemporary aesthetic reflection. We start from the hypothesis that the modern opposition between functional beauty and free beauty is rooted in the medieval controversies concerning the role assigned to sensitive beauty. If this is true, it would open a path of interlocution for contemporary aesthetic and theological thought that, based on Patristics, runs through the whole of the Middle Ages. We focus on three tensions which constitute three turning points: (1) the categorical distinction between beauty and appropriateness through St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and St. Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636), who raise the question in the tradition of Latin Patristics; (2) the opposition between aesthetic judgment based on function satisfaction or one based on the free and mere appearance of the object, as can be seen in the foundational thought of St. Basil the Great (330–379), whose influence is not only extraordinary in Greek Patristics, but also in the Latin world; finally, the controversy about practical value of aesthetic attitude, through texts by Hugh of St. Victor (1096–1141), St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) and Suger of St. Denis (1081–1151). The conclusions reveal the irreducible aesthetic value of functional beauty in medieval period and the extraordinary difficulties in accommodating a free and autonomous notion of beauty, as well as the practical benefits of its everyday treatment. In fact, the consideration of a free beauty as a good in itself persists in medieval thought, which is important not only for History of Philosophy, but also for the contemporary concern shared by Philosophy of Religion and Aesthetics about the role of sensitive beauty in the life of human being.

Why Medieval Allegory?

Why Medieval Allegory?

The Romanesque sculpture from Nowy Targ Square in Wrocław (Lower Silesia, Poland) in the light of interdisciplinary studies

The article discusses the results of interdisciplinary studies of a Romanesque stone head of high-quality artistry. It was discovered in 2017 during excavations at Nowy Targ (New Market) Square in the city of Wrocław (Lower Silesia, Poland). The sculpture originally came from one of the Romanesque sacred buildings of Wrocław, none of which have survived to this day. Although it had been made in the mid-12th century, it was found in the remains of a wooden residential building burnt down in the 14th century. The results of petrographic analyses indicate that the stone head was made of fine-grained sandstone classified as lithic wacke. The raw material was most likely a Devonian-Carboniferous sandstone from the Opava Mountains. However, similar sandstones also occurred in several medieval mines located in Upper Silesia. According to a popular belief, medieval aesthetics required such sculptures to be polychromed. The non-destructive analyses conducted with the microscopic XRF , XRD , and FTIR methods demonstrated that a clean stone surface was also acceptable.

A visual-acoustic duet of painting and music in medieval aesthetics

The purpose of this work is to study the visual and acoustic relationship of painting and music in the Middle Ages. When writing the article the authors focused on modern sources and used such important for the socio-humanitarian sciences methods of research as comparative, phenomenological, semiotic, art history, cultural studies and visual anthropology, which determined the interdisciplinary nature of the study, which focuses of the aesthetic specificity of the perception of the phenomenal image. The significance of the study lies in the fact that the results obtained allow to better understand the cultural foundations of the non-verbal way of perception, the peculiarities of medieval culture and aesthetics of Western Europe and its semiotic and symbolic forms, primarily in the perspective of the interaction of painting and music in the sacred and everyday spaces of the existence of medieval man.

Sexual and Erotic Transgression Through Aesthetic History: A Study of Algernon Charles Swinburne

This article examines the relationship between Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetic writing and history, especially in regards to how he explores sexual transgressions. The article begins with how aestheticism works in tangent with history to further these transgressions within a historical context and especially within the realm of Victorian Christianity. Next, Swinburne’s medieval aesthetics in “The Leper” will be analyzed in regards specifically necrophilia and the taking care of a leper, and how the writing of this poem was both a condemnation of Christianity and an accidental upholding of it. The violent homoeroticism and monstrous femininity of “Anactoria” are also looked at in reference to a classical history and how he tried and failed to use homoeroticism to his advantage in attempting to transgress against Victorian ideals. Finally, an examination of the relationship between Swinburne’s writing and history will conclude that Swinburne damned his own pre-Raphaelite/aesthetic movement as well as the Decadence movement that came after by accidentally associating these sexual and gender oriented transgressions with aestheticism.

Izgradnja sakralnih objekata kao put ka Еshatonu na primerima srpske žitijne književnosti

Starting from the postulate of Christian doctrine that every creation comes from the Holy Spirit, we have applied the already known principles of Theopoetics to the construction of churches and monasteries, through the topos of the struggle in God's name. We have found confirmation for this form of the preconditioning of human salvation in the hagiographical texts of old Serbian literature. In connection with the given topic, we pointed out timeliness (timely dedication to this God-pleasing work), as a key element which narratively shapes the soteriological motivation of this type of human feat. Speaking about the aesthetic correlation of the building of churches and monasteries, we pointed out the complexity of medieval aesthetics based on Christian doctrine.

Sull’estetica medievale dopo Eco. Un percorso storiografico

The essay outlines the debate around the question on the existence of Medieval Aesthetics starting from the publication of Arte e bellezza nell’estetica medievale by Umberto Eco (1987). Since the last decade of the 20th century, the question on Medieval Aesthetics receives a particular attention from a methodological point of view also because it is close to different disciplines as History, History of Art, Aesthetics and History of Philosophy. A renewed interest in the image theme, in History and History of Art, permits to study the pre-modern period without using anachronistic categories like that of “Art”. In the field of Aesthetics scholars rethink how to approach the question about its history. In this context, History of Philosophy reviews its own categories asking how it is possible to talk about thematic objects that traditionally belong to Aesthetics.

Olafur Eliasson and the Reuturn of Medieval Aesthetics

Olafur Eliasson and the Reuturn of Medieval Aesthetics

Passages. Meyer Schapiro's Early Travels and the Uniting Mediterranean Sea

In July 1926, while preparing material for his doctoral thesis on the Romanesque sculpture of the abbey of Moissac, Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996) traveled along the shores of the Mediterranean. Departing from Paris to follow several itineraries over fifteen months, Schapiro, not yet twenty-two, explored medieval southern France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Turkey. Traveling over land and sea, he traced the medieval pilgrims’ routes. In doing so, he was in fact crossing borders of his fellow art historians’ disciplines and regional-studies’ categories. “I feel as if space is different and the whole world more accessible”, Schapiro wrote to his fiancee. This openness suggests that Schapiro was able to unite, in this journey, the many histories of the Mediterranean - the space that came to serve as the foundation for his inquiry of medieval aesthetics. This essay considers Schapiro’s drawings from the eastern Mediterranean. Not only do they illustrate his particular method of processing...

Materiality, rhetoric and emotion in the Pietà

This study focuses on the representation of materiality on wall paintings, as depicted objects functioned as triggers of emotion to convey meaning in images. In medieval aesthetics images were made to engage all the senses in the spectator so as to create a truthful experience. The material perspective combines well with medieval rhetoric in understanding this process, particularly the concepts of ekphrasis, enargeia and ductus. By doing close readings of images, and identifying materials, figures, objects, gestures and so on, in the same manner as one can close read texts, narratives of the images can be discovered. It is also a reading that helps in identifying emotive expressions and rhetorical gestures that together with material aspects of images and texts also help in identifying gender-related contents. During the 15th century the Pietà (the mourning Virgin Mary holding her dead son) was introduced in Sweden. The image is key in understanding the Marian cult as it was established alongside the expanding devotion to the Virgin in the Nordic countries. By fusing the material aspect and rhetoric in a close reading of the motif that focuses on gender and emotion this study aims to find alternative paths in analysing medieval art.

Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music ed. by C. Stephen Jaeger (review)

Reviewed by: Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music ed. by C. Stephen Jaeger Tara Williams C. Stephen Jaeger, ed., Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. pp. 320; 40 illustrations. ISBN: 978–0–230–61898–5. $90 This collection, which includes an introduction and eleven essays, developed from a 2008 conference on the medieval aesthetics of grandeur. It explores how and where concepts of the magnificent and sublime operated in the Middle Ages, and puts them into conversation with more widely known treatments by writers like Longinus, Immanuel Kant, and Theodor Adorno. In doing so, the volume challenges earlier assessments of the medieval sublime, particularly those by E.R. Curtius and Erich Auerbach, as well as an ‘overarching conception of medieval culture’ that C. Stephen Jaeger calls ‘the diminutive Middle Ages (DMA).’ Although the DMA may be a bit of a straw man—or at least may be a stronger paradigm in some disciplines than others—the contributors effectively undercut any idea that ‘the Middle Ages is a period of small, quaint things and people’ (p. 5). The arrangement of the essays highlights their variety, but several clusters also emerge. Readers who are most interested in the ontological categories at stake might begin with Jaeger’s introduction and ‘Richard of St. Victor and the Medieval Sublime,’ which argues for defining the sublime through its effects rather than any specific [End Page 116] qualities and takes Richard of St. Victor’s description of ‘ecstatic contemplative experience’ as the central case study (p. 163). In ‘How Magnificent Was Medieval Art?,’ Beth Williamson suggests that medieval and modern ideas of the magnificent and sublime have some general similarities but that medieval art encouraged the reader to connect with God rather than to remain disinterested, as required by the Kantian sublime. Architecture and art lend themselves perhaps most naturally to considerations of grandeur, and several essays explore those connections from different angles. Areli Marina’s ‘Magnificent Architecture in Late Medieval Italy’ examines both buildings and texts to demonstrate that ‘the sophisticated visual architectural language of magnificence was well-defined and clearly understood’ much earlier than previously recognized (p. 194). In ‘Reflections on the “Wonderful Height and Size” of Gothic Great Churches and the Medieval Sublime,’ Paul Binski considers how structures might inspire wonder at their colossal size or complex variety. Adam S. Cohen’s ‘Magnificence in Miniature: The Case of Early Medieval Manuscripts’ persuasively demonstrates that books, despite their smaller size, could evoke similar responses; they depicted their patrons as magnificent in addition to functioning as magnificent objects in their own right. Whereas Cohen approaches manuscripts from a visual culture perspective, other writers focus on textual representations of the magnificent and sublime. Martino Rossi Monti’s ‘“Opus es magnificum”: The Image of God and the Aesthetics of Grace’ shows how philosophers and theologians constructed grace as ‘something sublime and grandiose’ (p. 28). Danuta Shanzer considers the problems posed by biblical style’s apparent lack of magnificence in ‘“Incessu humilem, successu excelsam”: Augustine, Sermo humilis, and Scriptural ὕψος.’ In ‘“Error Left Me and Fear Came in Its Place”: The Arrested Sublime of the Giants in Divine Comedy, Canto XXXI,’ Eleanora Stoppino confirms that the sublime was a literary as well as a theological concern; she recognizes ‘disoriented perception’ as ‘a key element for the analysis of the gigantic Sublime’ in Dante p. (181). Proving that the sublime and magnificent were not restricted to what one could see or read, a subset of essays explores how sound also participated in those discourses. Christopher Page studies the writings of and about liturgical singer Mamertus Claudianus in ‘The Magnificence of a Singer in Fifth-Century Gaul.’ Margot E. Fassler’s ‘Helgaud of Fleury and the Liturgical Arts: The Magnification of Robert the Pious’ reflects on ‘the ways that music and musicians helped to make events and persons—both living and dead—worthy of praise’ (p. 103). Emma Dillon’s marvelous essay, ‘Listening to Magnificence in Medieval Paris,’ contends that civic sound, with its unpredictable, unruly, and ephemeral nature, ‘connot[es] the magnificence’ of that city (p. 216). The strengths of this...

“Betuix pyne and faith”: The Poetics of Compassion in Walter Kennedy’s Passioun of Crist

Walter Kennedy’s Passioun of Crist , the only surviving vernacular work in the tradition of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditations of the Life of Christ to be composed in rhyme royal stanzas, is a more significant artistic achievement in the history of Middle Scots poetry and of late medieval devotional writing than has been previously recognized. Combining historicist and formalist methods of analysis, the article describes in detail the cultural locations of the text. The carefully crafted poem reveals a remarkable cooperation between specific material practices of medieval affective devotion and a high courtly mode of medieval literary aesthetics.

Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music

Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music

Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West by C. Stephen Jaeger (review)

Reviewed by: Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West by C. Stephen Jaeger Albrecht Classen C. Stephen Jaeger, Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Pp. 427. ISBN: 978–0–8122–4329–1. $69.95. Readers who have had the chance to follow C. Stephen Jaeger’s research and publications over the years could notice a progressive line taking him from the Origins of Courtliness (1985) to a study of the rise of cathedral schools in his The Envy of Angels (1994), then to an exploration of the spiritual dimension of courtly love (Ennobling Love, [1999]), and now, after having edited the intriguing volume on Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics (2010), culminating, in a way, in his Enchantment (2012). Surprisingly, Jaeger here takes a pretty radical turn away from medieval studies and mostly focuses on the global issue of charisma, as it found its most dazzling expression in western art from antiquity to the present. Jaeger does not ignore the world of the Middle Ages, but his topic takes him all over the map, from the Homeric epic to Maxim Gorky, with a strong emphasis in-between on Albrecht Dürer’s self-portraits and Goethe’s Faust I and II. The chapters on Rainer Maria Rilke and the twentieth-century American cinema also appeal through their trenchant analysis of the charismatic element. Woody Allen fans will equally be delighted that Jaeger has discovered charisma in his cinematographic works, but all this cannot really concern us here, as significant the critical discussion of enchantment, aura, and charisma proves to be in a universal context, often, if not always, bordering on faith and religion. As Jaeger defines the charismatic person at the very end, ‘He or she gathers the force of suggested qualities and gathers bundled promises, promises of great things, beyond any hope of attaining or experiencing on our own: this individual is our conduit, our channeler, and our music . . . ’ (373–74). While children resort to fairy tales to internalize myth for the purpose of their own growth, adults seek redemption to gain a sense of meaning of life, which Jaeger clearly demarcates from the usual ‘happy end.’ Offering a kind of psychological reading, he concludes by arguing that movie-goers, for instance, look for more than just entertainment, instead for a charismatic enlightenment (my wording). Certainly, this might apply to a small [End Page 75] percentage of people, but certainly not to the masses. But we had better leave this debate to sociologists or religious scholars, whereas our interest rests on how much charisma comes through in medieval romances, a tiny section in this heavy tome. Jaeger suggests that the true secret of Arthurian and Grail literature rests in the presence of charisma which the individual can acquire through the quest either for love or God. But then he discovers a heavy dose of satire in works such as Chrétien’s Yvain (or Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein) directed at the idea of knighthood itself, which could actually threaten the element of charisma altogether. Next Jaeger alludes to the highly didactic element in romance, but that is not charisma either because no teacher there ever stands out because of his/her aura. Only the experience of love, as most poignantly formulated in Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan, could be identified as a moment conveying charisma. However, Gottfried only projects ideals and quickly undermines his two protagonists, as charismatic as they might be, because their need for honor clashes with the constraints of courtly life where marital principles dash their hopes of living out their deep feelings for each other. Neither Andreas Capellanus’ comments in his De arte amori nor the lais by Marie de France, to which Jaeger summarily refers, help us understand more clearly what the charismatic element might be, unless we identify it with the experience of courtly love by itself (such as in Eliduc, here not discussed). Perhaps we could identify the abstract society of those people with a noble heart (Gottfried) or of those who populate the Grail kingdom as a charismatic ideal, whereas a...

Praying by Numbers: An Essay on Medieval Aesthetics

In this essay I argue that the imitation of examples of sainthood in the practice of prayer is the formal basis of a medieval aesthetics that focuses on the animation and the phenomenology of sensation and emotion. Quoting from this tradition and drawing on the mechanical character of such techniques of animation, nineteenth and twentieth-century authors and filmmakers—Flaubert, Huysmans, and Buñuel—explore the aesthetic possibilities of these religious practices. Thus, they recover and illustrate a history of the evocation of sensation and emotion through images and texts, which in the medieval context can be best described as a highly formal art of "praying by numbers."

Trazos de estética medieval / Strokes of Medieval Aesthetics

This article discusses the key features of the medieval aesthetics. Its proposal is to «clarify» how are unjustified the accusations of obscurantism, while claiming its relevance to the general history of culture. The medieval aesthetics also helps us to better understand the view of the reality of an era that still remains overly. ignored.