Reviewed by: Abstraction in Medieval Art: Beyond the Ornament ed. by Elina Gertsman Frances Lilliston Elina Gertsman, ed., Abstraction in Medieval Art: Beyond the Ornament ( Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 384 pp., 88 ills. Invoking abstraction in an art historical text inevitably gestures toward a particular historiography: the alarmingly vast corpus of literature regarding the rise of nonfigurative art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This presence looms large over the fourteen contributions compiled in Elina Gertsman's new edited volume, which deals lucidly and kaleidoscopically with the use of abstraction as both an aesthetic and philosophical principle in the Middle Ages. While the sheer density of scholarship to contend with on the conception of abstraction in modern and contemporary art could easily lead to a methodological muddle, Gertsman and the featured contributors combat this potential confusion with precision, clarity, and discernment. In her introductory chapter, Gertsman pays particular attention to the importance of employing language deliberately. She catalogs and glosses terminology that "flit[s] in and out" of the gathered essays (20). Many of these terms are notably prefixed with non-, and are thus defined in large part as negations—by an absence of one thing rather than a presence of another. Overwhelmingly, these terms are loaded with baggage from their years of use in the context of modern and contemporary art. Gertsman foreshadows a major theme of the volume, saying that "each essay toils, on the one hand, to disentangle present-day terms from objects at hand, and, on the other, to formulate productive ways to think through and build up concepts of what medieval abstraction might and might not be, how it might be manifested, and how it might be described" (20). Pinning down what abstraction means undergirds many of the essays gathered here. Two chapters, the first cowritten by Adam S. Cohen and Linda Safran, and the second by Danielle B. Joynor, directly cite standard dictionary definitions of abstraction. For Cohen and Safran, the key quality of abstraction, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is that it is "free from representational qualities" (91). Joynor emphasizes the capacity of "abstract" to behave as a transitive verb meaning, "to take away, extract, or remove (something); to move (a person or thing) away, withdraw" (249). Another chapter, by Megan C. McNamee, explores the etymology of the word, from the Classical Latin abstrahere, meaning "to pull away" or "to separate," and its historical usage to describe the "severing of spiritual from worldly" concerns (271). Each author's distinctive emphasis on [End Page 253] a different side of the meaning of abstraction illustrates the exigent need for this volume. Throughout the essays gathered here, the contributors vary widely in the extent to which they integrate or grapple with modern and contemporary terms and concepts of abstraction. Danny Smith, for example, explicitly cites Barnett New-man's explanation of the impetus—both for himself and for contemporaries such as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt—toward abstract color field paintings: "shape was a complex living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable" (144). Carefully, though, Smith excises Newman's definition of an "ideograph" from its original context. Smith instead aims to adopt the term. Despite being coined in relation to color field painting specifically, Smith identifies its potential to elucidate other art, from other times: namely, swaths of color, a later addition to the Ashburnham Pentateuch (6th c., with 9th-c. repainting), purposefully deployed to obfuscate figures in an illumination. As demonstrated time and again throughout this volume, discussions of abstraction as a vehicle for meaning in the medieval period are often saddled with a responsibility nearly never demanded of scholars in assessments of abstraction after 1900: the need to contend seriously with the possibility that a lack of figuration is mere error on the part of artist or patron. Different contributors to this volume afford more or less attention to the task of proving the intentionality behind the occasions of abstraction highlighted throughout these chapters. Vincent Debiais, for example, only briefly acknowledges, and then sets aside, the possibility that unadorned, framed purple color fields in...