Pinkus’s reading of Uta as a simulacrum rather than an imago is compelling, yet it reveals a central unanswered question of the book. Are we meant to believe that the patrons, planners, and artists conceived of the sculpture with the concept of the simulacrum in mind? Or simply, in retrospect, that the medieval concept of the simulacrum offers a way to understand how viewers may have reacted to it? In example after example, Pinkus never clarifies this crucial point, seeming to want to have it both ways; he does occasionally use the word “conscious” to describe the Naumburg figures’ creation as simulacrum, yet stops with that brief claim. As I try to hypothetically reconstruct the contemporary conversations that must have led to the sculptures’ creation and design, I simply cannot accept that, for such large, prominent sculptures in a major church, the simulacrum would have been the prevailing inspiration for their meaning and creation. If it were, what purpose would it have been intended to serve? If we accept that a figure like Uta was an empty center onto which people projected their own ideas, why would an ecclesiastical or secular patron want this? For Pinkus, the sculpture simply “results” in imaginative, engaged acts of viewing, yet the author never spends enough time unpacking what these acts of response would really have been like, or what new understandings viewers might have emerged with, relying instead on terminology: sculpted simulacra inspire viewing experiences that are “imaginative,” “engaged,” “immediate,” “somatic,” “embodied,” “voyeuristic,” et cetera. In relying on these terms, which characterize viewer response rather than truly describing it, it seems that the author has either gone too far or not far enough. If the goal were to imaginatively re-create these viewing experiences, the reader might have been served by something even more adventurous or experimental—perhaps passages describing a hypothetical individual’s reaction to particular works (somewhat along the lines of what Michael Camille did in his imaginative re-creations of Pierre Remiet’s interior life in Master of Death). As it is, the reader is too often left only with words that describe the experiences, rather than a sense of what they were really like, or what their purpose was. The intentions behind medieval works can be opaque, and evidence for them can be difficult or impossible to find, but the author might have engaged this crucial question in greater depth, even if only speculatively. Does the meaning of the viewer’s experience emerge from a conscious recognition and understanding of the sculptures as simulacra? Or from viewers’ self-identification with them? Or is any emotional, bodily response enough to create a particular meaning and resonance in and of itself? Part of the problem is that the Naumburg sculptures are presented in a vacuum, with little discussion of how the donor figures relate to other works of art in the church, or to a broader sociocultural setting in which the proposed acts of viewer response might take shape. Pinkus asserts several times in the book that he is not presenting comprehensive historical analyses of these works, and while this decision does allow him to be admirably adventurous and exploratory, it limits his ability to explore the kinds of questions described above about the possible reasons for commissioning and sculpting these simulacra.
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Apr 7, 2017
Subitha G V 
Open Access