Medieval Christian Art Research Articles

Voix entrelacées de Proust et de Ruskin. Par Cynthia Gamble

Craftily interweaving the voices of John Ruskin and Marcel Proust, Cynthia Gamble amasses here an eclectic selection of her essays, reworked and expanded, previously published mostly in English between 2000 and 2016. Although the texts differ greatly from each other, together they amount to an illuminating theoretical stained glass that accounts for the decisive role played by Ruskin in Proust’s creative process. Echoing medieval Christian art, the book is organized as a triptych, preceded by a personal narrative marked by generous accounts of Gamble’s serendipitous academic encounters and relating the author’s introduction to the French language, Proust, and Ruskin, a testimony that, given Gamble’s distinguished contribution to both Proust and Ruskin studies, helps to chart the history of these two fields. An ‘onomastique poétique’ (p. 11), the book’s first section takes the reader on a trip to the Gothic cathedrals of Amiens and Chartres, an art nouveau gallery in Paris, and the Sistine Chapel. Interlacing Proust’s many works and Correspondance with Ruskin’s Diaries and Complete Works, Gamble reveals how these four locations are crucial markers of Proust’s and Ruskin’s intellectual and personal lives, and how they intersect, often with Proust setting off on Ruskinian pilgrimages. The second and most robust part of the book, ‘Traductions’, rigorously peruses Proust’s trajectory as one of Ruskin’s translators. Insightful and well documented, it examines Proust’s performance as a language student (based on his school records, esp. pp. 128–32) and his connection with the English language; it probes into Proust’s ‘cercle anglophone’ (p. 146), his relationship with English teacher Mrs Higginson, and his friendship and collaboration with Marie Nordlinger. It also examines Proust’s mother’s contribution to his translations of Ruskin’s works — she provided him with a literal translation of The Bible of Amiens, upon which he worked — ‘Pourtant, le rôle indispensable de Mme Proust […] n’a pas été reconnu publiquement par Proust’ (p. 262). This section, moreover, perspicaciously demonstrates that Proust ‘n’est pas le traducteur,mais “l’interprète” de Ruskin’ (p. 267), and that La Bible d’Amiens — a model forGamble’s own book? — is not only a translation but a polyphonic creation, the fruit of both Ruskin’s and Proust’s endeavours and whose reading requires ‘un mouvement incessant de l’œil et de l’oreille entre le canon de Ruskin, les commentaires de Ruskin et ceux de Proust’ (p. 272). The third section of the book brings this study to an elegant close by shedding light upon three figures distinctly associated with Proust: art collector René Gimpel, his son Jean Gimpel, and Sybil de Souza, author of one of the first doctoral theses devoted to Proust (L’Influence de Ruskin sur Proust (Montpellier: Imprimerie de la Manufacture de la Charité, 1932)). This final part reveals Gamble’s skill as a chronicler and presents the transcription of two valuable sets of documents: the ‘Cahier René Gimpel’ and fourteen letters De Souza addressed to Gamble between 1983 and 1991. If reading, as Proust suggests in the preface to his translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, is a ‘miracle fécond d’une communication au sein de la solitude’ (Sésame et les lys(Paris: Societé du Mercure de France, 1906), p. 29), Gamble’s passionate study of these varied voices offers an ingenious polyphony in the midst of this same solitude.

Jewish Bodies in Divine Form: Jewish Difference and Historical Consciousness in Medieval Kabbalah

Jewish Bodies in Divine Form:Jewish Difference and Historical Consciousness in Medieval Kabbalah Hartley Lachter (bio) Introduction The struggle over the place of Jews in Christian society, especially as it developed between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, was a negotiation over the religious meaning and political place of the Jewish body within the body politic. This cultural tension created the space and the need for the development of a religious discourse of Jewish bodily otherness by both Jews and Christians. The first section of this article considers how kabbalistic discourses of the Jewish male body constructed in the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth century were inversions of Christian depictions of Jewish maleness. Kabbalistic constructions of Jewish male identity are in this sense counter-theologies formulated in light of Christian anti-Jewish arguments. The second section explores the counter-histories found in two kabbalistic texts written in the wake of calamitous historical events that took place in Spain in 1391 and 1492. Each of the texts addressed in both sections advance, in their own way, a notion of Jewish distinctiveness that responded to challenges faced by Jews. By claiming secret knowledge about the hidden power of Jewish male bodies and Jewish ritual observance, and about the salvific role of the Jewish historical experience, kabbalists made an important contribution to the ongoing redefinition of the Jewish self in relation to, and in terms of, the Christian other. Redefining Boundaries and Bodies The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed an important shift in the way that Jewish difference was articulated in Christian discourse in Western Europe. While Christian men, and especially Christian male clergy, were frequently described as rarefied spiritual beings in Christian texts, Jewish men were often characterized as overly carnal, sensual, and feminine. Christian art in the High Middle Ages depicted increasingly grotesque images of male Jews [End Page 123] who, through their attachment to the physical practice of the law, refuse to see the spiritual message of the Hebrew Bible revealed by Christ. As Sara Lipton points out, male Jewish ugliness in medieval Christian art is constructed to "proclaim his [the Jew's] misunderstanding of the law and consequent carnality and perfidy, even fiendishness."1 And while Jewish women were rarely depicted as being physically different from Christian women, Jewish men were often described in polemical as well as medical literature as somatically distinct from Christian men, suffering a monthly bloody flux similar to menstruation as punishment for shedding the blood of Christ.2 The strategy of feminizing Jewish men in Christian polemical and medical literature signifies more than a denigration of Jewish masculinity. The association of Jewish men with feminine characteristics,3 especially that of menstruation, was connected to a broader demonization of Jews.4 The introduction of scientific medical ideas and terminology into the Latin West during this period contributed to the characterization of women's bodies as a site of danger and impurity. This in turn contributed to a new discourse regarding Jews, according to which the punishments they suffer for rejecting Christ entail feminization. Take, for instance, Jacques de Vitry's comment in the early-thirteenth century that the Jews are those: … whose fathers cried, as the Gospel says, "The blood of Jesus Christ be on us and on our children," who are scattered throughout the world, serfs and vassals, and so it is as the prophet says, "Their strength has turned to ash." And so they do not make use of arms and also like women every month they suffer, and for this it is written, "The Lord struck them in [their] posteriors and gave them eternal opprobrium"—which is to say God struck them in [their] shameful parts and gave them perpetual reproach—because since they killed their brother, the true Abel, Jesus Christ, they are made vagabond and broken throughout the lands like the cursed Cain, they have a trembling head, which is to say, a fearful heart, shaking night and day, and they do not believe at all in their own lives.5 In this passage de Vitry brings together well-worn notions regarding the collective bloodguilt of the Jews for the death of Christ and their subsequent suffering as part of their...

Pühaduse performatiivsus ja kristlik teater / The Performativity of Sacrality and Christian Theatre

Pühaduse performatiivsus ja kristlik teater / The Performativity of Sacrality and Christian Theatre

The Afterlives of New Testament Apocrypha

This essay explores the place of parabiblical literature in biblical studies through a focus on New Testament apocrypha. Countering the assumption that the significance of this literature pivots on its value for understanding the origins of Christianity, this essay calls for fresh attention to the afterlives of these writings. The first section traces the genealogy of the notion of the NT apocrypha as countercanon, as well as the history of the debate over whether “apocrypha” preserve secret or suppressed truths about Jesus and his earliest followers. It points to the influence of post-Reformation anthological efforts and new concerns for forgery and censorship in the wake of the advent of printing, especially for popularizing a disjunctive model whereby “apocrypha” are imagined to have been systematically suppressed by ecclesiarchs during the Christianization of the Roman Empire. The second section surveys evidence for the elasticity of such writings and for their reception in contexts as far-flung as medieval Christian art and contemporary Japanese anime. This evidence points to the value of alternate approaches to NT apocrypha, reread as an integral part of the making of the memory of the biblical past from late antiquity to the present.

Lost Histories of a Licit Figural Art

The idea that theology is either irrelevant to artistic production or “a baleful influence” on its history has recently been critically explored by Jeffrey Hamburger, in relation to medieval Christian art. Engaging the perennial problem of moving between immaterial concepts, normative texts, and material things, Hamburger's observations resonate with the long shadow cast by theBilderverbot, the prohibition of images often assumed to characterize Islamic and Jewish cultures, on the modern reception of Islamic art.

Tiempo de Dios. Tiempo de los Hombres: El Breviario de Belleville

The Christian images, heirs of the roman narrative systems, visually expressed scriptural content. One of the notable elements constitutes the way of representing temporal sequence into two possible dimensions: human and divine. A journey through late ancient and medieval Christian art allows us to establish how an iconography was created that made it possible to visualize a particular message that, according to the corresponding literary exegesis, was sought to be promoted/ publicized in several historical moments. The aim of this paper is to establish the way in which image follows conception of time in its double dimension. Belleville’s Breviary (Paris, 14th century) offers an example in which both conceptions of man’s life course are combined in a particular iconographic interpretation.

Opicinus de Canistris: some notes from Jung's unpublished Eranos Seminar on the medieval Codex Palatinus Latinus 1993

Jung held an informal seminar for a limited number of students after the end of the Eranos Conference in August, 1943. All traces of this seminar were lost until the notes taken on it by one of the students, Alwine von Keller, were found in 2006. Jung's talk consisted of a psychological commentary on a series of images in the medieval Codex Palatinus Latinus 1993, attributed to Opicinus de Canistris (1296-c.1352), a fourteenth-century Italian clergyman, mystic, miniaturist, and cartographer. Jung interpreted Opicinus' images as a series of mandalas in which the Shadow, the dark principle, does not manage to be integrated into a balanced system. Opicinus tried to settle this division into opposites, which constitutes the main problem in modern times, while remaining inside the system of Christian doctrine. However, he did not succeed in his attempt to integrate the principle of the Shadow on the doctrinal level because he was not aware of the very same division in his own unconscious. Our article points out the features in the seminar where Jung seemed to show much more originality in his interpretation than other psychoanalytic studies on Opicinus or other analytical-psychological readings of medieval Christian art.

Review: Environmental Values in Christian Art

Review: Environmental Values in Christian Art By Susan Power Bratton Reviewed by Byron Anderson Northern Illinois University, USA Bratton, Susan Power. Environmental Values in Christian Art. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008. ix, 282 pp. ISBN 9780791472651. US$30, cloth. Environmental Art in Christian Values claims that Christian art is an underutilized primary source for research and sets out to “correct this deficiency and to explore the evolution of environmental values through Christian history by investigating trends in religious material culture” (p. 2). The book examines many examples of Christian art and architecture from the late 2 nd century in Rome to the 17 th century in the Netherlands. Bratton, Professor of Environmental Studies at Baylor University, provides descriptions of art found in catacombs, on sarcophagi, stained glass, bas-reliefs, mosaics, and other works of art. Of the many pieces of art described, fifteen are accompanied by a black-and-white photo. Christian art is best understood “as an evolving dialog among Christians and between Christianity and the greater culture” (p. 229). Early Christian art was environmentally peaceful and generous toward nature, and did encourage a more respectful attitude toward animals, which were generally portrayed as humble servants. Jesus is strongly associated with nature and animals, and in early paintings, takes on the personae of the Good Shepard. Medieval Christian art reflected the belief that beauty in nature reflected the beauty, perfection and regeneration power of Christ. During this time, “…the Franciscans became the first ‘environmental movement” (p. 157). Paintings of St. Francis reflect nature as a co-participant in the sacred story. Renaissance painters, such as Giovanni Bellini, Pierodella Francesca, and Leonardo da Vinci, used nature as a metaphor of Christ’s life and God’s intentions. Paintings no longer needed a saint or steeple to verify divine presence. By the 16 th century, Calvinism saw the natural world as a miracle worthy of praise. The text does not research Christian environmental action per se. Having “Environmental Values” at the start of the title could prove misleading to interested readers. The cataloging-in-publication data places this book in the Library of Congress classification of Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, subclass Doctrinal Theology. The book does research how the relationship to nature changed from Roman and Celtic paganism to Christianity, how Christ related to nature, how animals and plants are depicted in Christian art and the spiritual roles nonhuman creatures play, and how the art represents ownership, economics, and management of natural resources. The information provided could be of interest to students and scholars of the environment. The book refutes the misguided notion that the environment and Christianity are at odds. Through an examination of Christian art there is an environmental aspect to be found in the evolving history of Christianity. Each of the book’s chapters is supplemented with a “Suggested Reading” bibliography and most chapters have a “Locating Art” section of related resources, databases, and keywords to try when searching the Internet. Notes and an index complete the book. Recommended for academic and research collections. Byron Anderson , Acting Associate Dean, Northern Illinois University Libraries, DeKalb, IL 60115 USA. TEL: 815-753-9804, FAX: 815-753-9803.

An Other Love

As LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER I have been in love with some manifestations of Christianity (not always ones that my Christian friends would themselves love, or even approve). Tennessee Ernie Ford singing on television the hymn The Garden moved me to tears when I was a child (I won't pretend to remember how old). For an oddly gendered teenager, St. Francis the Sissy proved an incredibly tantalizing figure of a man. Later on it was medieval Christian art and architecture, the cathedrals of Europe, the spirituality of Meister Ekhardt and Jacob Bohme. Still later, and most significantly, it has been the writings of the Fathers of the Church (and their excluded others, the Christian heretics) that have been most riveting to me, pulling me into a world so close to that of my own beloved rabbis of late antiquity and yet so foreign as well, a world in which oceans of ink (and rivers of blood) could be spilt on questions of detail in the description of the precise relationships between the posited persons of a complex godhead -a world, as well, in which massive numbers of men and women could choose freely and enthusiastically to live lives without the pleasures of sex and the joys of family. I find this world endlessly moving, alluring, even at its most bizarre to me. For the last decade or so I have devoted much of my time and spirit to learning the languages of and understanding something of the inner and outer worlds of those early Christian men and women who wrote such texts and lived such lives. Some Jews, it seems, are destined by fate, psychology, personal history, or whatever to be drawn to Christianity.2 My research won't be

Insights and Interpretations: Studies in Celebration of the Eighty-Fifth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art ed. by Colum Hourihane (review)

REVIEWS 240 tion rather than passive spectatorship (195). Green spaces provide relief from a perceived health threat—sometimes made real by the plague—but, inversely, they provide sites for perceived moral deviance. Williams concludes ultimately that the matter is one of “striking a balance” where “the desire to preserve and blend greenery with the urban fabric becomes increasingly self-conscious” (209). The final section of the collected essays treats morality. Except for Tim Harris ’s chapter on the “Perceptions of the Crowd in Later Stuart London,” which outlines how the London (political) crowd “could be both loathed and revered, hated and loved, by the same people”—a phenomenon he identifies as a “schizophrenic attitude”—the contributions to morality theorize more generally about the city. Peter Lake argues in his essay (“From Troynouvant to Heliogabulus ’s Rome and Back: ‘Order’ and Its Others in the London of John Stow”) for an inverse or “underside of order” as means of seeing “what, even as they praised the place, frightened and alarmed contemporaries about London” (220). Lake catalogs deftly those perceptions of the city that are simultaneously positive and alarming, ultimately concluding that they represent the “logical, moral, and rhetorical consequences of that lack of an unambiguously positive contemporary language for the description and praise of commercial wealth” (247). The scenes of Nigel Smith’s contribution (“‘Making Fire’: Conflagration and Religious Controversy in Seventeenth-Century London”) are less ambiguous , even as they cut rapidly between brief sections titled “Heresy and Hollywood ,” “Apocalypse and the Fire-Engine,” “From History to Prophecy: Writing Fire,” “Retribution, Division and the Great Fire of 1655,” “Goodness Gracious , Great Balls of Fire,” “Urban Fire Interpreted,” and, finally, “Firespeak.” The argument is clear, easily understood, and provocatively depicted: fire poses a physical, moral, and apocalyptic threat to the city. Smith documents an argument —citing the Great Fire of 1666 and William Finch’s apocalyptic pamphlet A Third Great and Terrible Fire, Fire, Fire (1655)—that maintains that because London is the “site of the most intense change, be it social, political, or religious, fire becomes the leitmotif of both civilization and the fear that civilization will end in annihilation” (292). Indeed, the essays in Merritt’s edited collection of early modern London are wide-ranging, covering the span from Stow’s nostalgia to an anticipated apocalypse, but they provide an informative and well-documented look of individual mental worlds in relation to the city, of its perceptions and portrayals. ROBERTO ALVAREZ, English, Cornell University Insights and Interpretations: Studies in Celebration of the Eighty-Fifth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art, Index of Christian Art Occasional Papers 5, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton: Index of Christian Art / Princeton University Press 2002) xvii + 236, 101 b/w ill. This book, a collection of essays by the staff of the Index of Christian Art and by visiting scholars and researchers, is in celebration of the eighty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Index. The essays are all largely iconographical in their approach and together they encompass the entire medieval period, although there is a strong emphasis on late medieval art. Each and every study draws heavily from the Index’s rich files and demonstrates the wealth of infor- REVIEWS 241 mation the archive can provide. Indeed, the Index of Christian Art stands as the largest archive of medieval Christian art in the world. Besides its home at Princeton and the four hard copies in the Vatican, Utrecht, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., the Index is also available to institutions and universities online , a fact that has dramatically increased its number of users. The first essay in the book is by Colum Hourihane, the current director of the Index. This article discusses the fundamental role the Index played in the early development of iconographical studies. Hourihane places the Index and its founder, Charles Rufus Morey, as the fixed corner stone in a fluid scholarly triangle that included the great iconographers Erwin Panofsky and Henri van der Waal. Hourihane’s contribution is a very important one for all those with an interest in iconography and the history of its development. Nevertheless, this article is not solely concerned with historiography and he goes on...

The Intertextuality of Late Medieval Art and Drama

a subject of wide interest and divergent views throughout the history of modern scholarship. It is perhaps fair to say that at least one major issue has now been put to rest, namely, the proposition that the religious drama generated various iconographic motifs in medieval Christian art. Foremost among the proponents of this theory was Emile Male, though others in more recent times, including W. L. Hildburgh, M. D. Anderson, and Otto Paecht, have brought forward specific arguments that attempted to advance the thesis.' The theory, to which A. M. Nagler has applied the label primo/dopo (based on a long-standing feud between the followers of Puccini and Gluck summarized as primo le parole, dopo la musica),2 has evinced no credible evidence. In response, for example, to M. D. Anderson's claim that the Norwich Cathedral roof bosses were inspired by the lost Norwich Whitsun cycle of guild plays,3 one must still ask two fundamental questions: (1) In the face of the absent dramatic text, how does she know? And (2) even if the influence was there, what does it tell us either about the bosses or about the plays? Recent scholarly studies, including Nagler's provocative last chapter in The Medieval Religious Stage: Shapes and Phantoms and Pamela Sheingorn's helpful methodological essay on Using Medieval Art in the Study of Medieval Drama,4 have been influential in dismissing the approach as not only unprovable but also unenlightened. What then is the consensus about this relationship in our time? In recent years, it has been examined most conspicuously in the series of monographs on Early Drama, Art, and Music, sponsored by the Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University. The prevailing dogma concerning the interrelations of the two forms of artistic expression is represented most explicitly by Clifford Davidson's opening remarks in Drama and Art, the introductory guide to the series of subject lists of extant and lost art in selected counties and cities of England. Davidson begins with the incontestable position New Literary History, 1991, 22: 317-337

The charge of deicide. An anti- Jewish motif in medieval Christian art

To the mind of the antique and medieval Christian expositors, the ‘self-execration’ of the Jews (Matt. 27:25) proved their collective complicity in the crucifixion. The everlasting guilt of the Jews was underlined by many authors throughout the centuries, and in medieval Passion plays it was often emphasized in the most drastic and inflammatory manner. While such renderings, however, did not openly contradict the gospels, the unvarnished pictorial representation of the Jews as the murderers of Jesus, and thus a blatant misrepresentation of the Passion narrative, constituted a veritable tradition in Christian art. In this article a first attempt is made to outline this pictorial tradition from the highly stylized and symbolical representations of the crucifixion in the early Middle Ages to the calvaries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to describe its development as well as its disappearance toward the end of the Middle Ages against the background of general tendencies in Christian art, and to assess its significance in regard to the relations between Christians and Jews.

“I slaughter barbarians”: Triumph as a mode in medieval Christian art

“I slaughter barbarians”: Triumph as a mode in medieval Christian art

When the Kingdom Comes Messianic Themes in Medieval Jewish Art

Students of medieval Christian art are all too familiar with Last Judgment scenes on the tympana of medieval Gothic cathedrals. The tympanum over the west portal of Bourges Cathedral is a good example in its awesome and dramatic depiction of the fate which awaited every Christian in the world to come. At the summit, Christ is seen enthroned on the seat of judgment, surrounded by angels, St. John and the Virgin. At the bottom, the resurrected dead rise from their tombs to appear before their judge. Below Christ is the chief actor in the drama of Judgment—St. Michael. With a balance suspended from his hand, he carefully weighs the deeds of every Christian to determine which soul is to be eternally damned to the tortures of hell on the left, and which is to enjoy the rewards of eternal bliss in paradise on the right. Such Christian representations need little explanation, but were I to ask how medieval Jewish art conceived the afterlife, my question might be met with some surprise, since it is common to find...

Seven Sacraments Compositions in English Medieval Art

Émile Mâle says that medieval Christian art in its last period had lost touch with the great tradition of symbolism which had been so important in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and still largely dominated the art of the fourteenth. But there was one great symbolical idea which survived, and that was the harmony of the Old and New Testaments; and so we find among the most popular subjects of fifteenth-century Church art the concordance of the Apostles and Prophets in the Creed, and the series of parallels between the life of Jesus and episodes of Old Testament history, which were summed up and digested in the Biblia Pauperum and the Speculum Humanae Salvationis. The reason for the popularity of these subjects was, no doubt, their didactic value, and though Mâle does not develop this side of the subject, we may say that one, though not the only, characteristic of the religious art of the fifteenth century was that, instead of being symbolical, it became didactic. We find in this period a whole series of subjects which reduced the articles of Christian faith and practice to pictorial form, and seem to have been intended to illustrate the medieval catechism by which the teaching of the Church was imparted.