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Introduction: A Sense of Loss: An Overview of the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art
Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating a Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb
And pulled out a plum,
And said, What a good boy am I!
So began for Glastonbury, as it had for countless other monasteries, the destruction of the ancient, wealthy, and powerful institution of monasticism – or, according to a different view, the defeat of an oppressor, or, according to another still, the transition of Christianity into the modern age. But it was also, in a way, the birth of medieval art historiography, a birth with a very long period of labor. When Jack (or Thomas) Horner (as the nursery rhyme is popularly and probably correctly understood to relate) rode into London from Glastonbury in 1539, three years after the Dissolution of the Monasteries had begun and one before it would end, he carried with him a gift from Abbot Richard Whiting of Glastonbury for King Henry VIII. The gift was a mince pie and, apparently having a sweet tooth, Horner, the abbot’s steward, extracted one of twelve manorial deeds (the one for Mells Manor, a real “plum,” as we still say today) hidden in the pie before delivering it in accord with the abbot’s intention of sweetening Henry’s decision regarding Glastonbury in the Dissolution process.1 A man of prodigious appetite, Henry’s hunger was not so easily satisfied and – even before Horner had served on the jury in a sham trial that condemned the abbot, his master, to death – he consumed Glastonbury as well, perhaps the oldest and one of the wealthiest abbeys in England. Among the last monasteries to hold out during the Dissolution – a great pilgrimage place with legendary associations with the beginnings of Christianity in the British Isles, Joseph of Arimathaea, St Patrick, King Arthur, and Dunstan – Glastonbury’s riches were plundered, its lands sold, and its great buildings demolished. (Little Jack Horner’s descendants still live in the manor at Mells.) In all, 577 religious houses were suppressed by Henry – 200 of them great institutions with substantial holdings – their buildings torn down, their artworks destroyed, and their libraries dispersed.2 With this, one of the great cultural institutions of Britain ceased to exist.
Around the same time, the medieval patrimony of Northern and Central Europe suffered irreparably from a series of wars, uprisings, and acts of iconoclasm that took place following the momentous posting of Luther’s 95 theses at Wittenberg in 1517. And in France, the Wars of Religion (1562–98) were virtually unrivalled in their destruction of the French artistic inheritance.
The breadth and finality of this destruction would bring about a sense of loss that combined with a number of other vital factors such as incipient antiquarianism, the early development of national identity, and a general spread of education that would lead, eventually, to the formation of the field of medieval art history as we have it today. This field, however, can be a multifaceted one, and the times since the Reformation have been no less complex than those in which the very first “medievalists” worked. In the hope that the chapters in this book might be better understood by those readers unfamiliar with the general history of the writing of medieval art history, this introduction will attempt to give a brief overview of this history, a basic narrative, to explain, as best it can, how we got here from there.
The Pre-History of Medieval Art Historiography
Already in the midst of the wreckage that followed in the wake of the Reformation, the first steps were taken to preserve from total loss the vestiges, both documentary and physical, of a rapidly disappearing culture, a culture seen as both compelling and threatening, even at the same time. This spontaneous and erratic rescue arose first in Britain and only later elsewhere in Western Europe, originally always the result of individuals operating on their own initiative, whatever their professional positions and institutional support may have been. But, in a sense, the historiography of medieval art began long before its writing, and the rescue of medieval culture’s remains in the formation and continuation of the authority of Classical art. This was an authority so overwhelming that it acted as an almost insurmountable barrier to an acceptance of the standards of medieval artistic culture in general and of the aesthetic basis of medieval art in particular. It was also an authority that had a long and venerable ancestry in the historiography of Western art.
Not long after what is now called the Late Classical period, the first known history of Greek art was written by Xenocrates (fl. 280 BC), a history that is believed to have taken as its basic theme the systematic progress toward the perfection of naturalistic or illusionistic rendering through the solving of formal problems by a succession of famous artists. Xenocrates’ writing has not survived, nor have those of his contemporaries, such as Douris of Samos (c.340–260 BC), who is thought to have put the history of art that he wrote into the form of a series of biographies. However, both Xenocrates and Douris, among others, were heavily used by Pliny the Elder in his great Natural History (71–7 AD). Pliny continued the concept found in their work of a clear trajectory of phases of broad stylistic development from initial formation to perfection, and from perfection to decline, this perfection being seen as reaching its high point in the High and Late Classical periods. He also generally followed the biographical format, which was a very popular one. Unlike most of the other early writings on art, Pliny’s did survive and served as an enormously influential model in the first centuries of early modern art historical writing. In no small part because of this, from the very beginning of early modern art history and for more than two hundred years to come, the standards by which art was judged were those of naturalism, and the format in which the history of art was presented was typically that of the biography. Or, put another way, the paradigm of art historical writing was that of the historically known individual advancing the naturalistic and illusionistic standards of the Classical period. Equally as critical for the historiography of medieval art was the stylistic developmental model of initial formation, naturalistic perfection, and eventual decline. From the very beginning, the deck was stacked against the art of the Middle Ages with a standard that was generally foreign to medieval culture, which, for much of its history, privileged the abstract and the iconic over the naturalistic and illusionistic; and which saw the role of the artist as that of a craftsman, irredeemably below those individuals within medieval culture – saints, great ecclesiastics, and the most important nobles – who were thought of as worthy of having their lives and deeds recorded.
The changes that the naturalistic and biographical paradigms underwent in the beginning of early modern art historical writing were, for the purposes of this introduction, moderate. But the stylistic developmental model of initial formation, perfection, and decline was to be reconceived in a way that Pliny and his contemporaries could never have imagined at the height of the Roman Empire. In the mid fourteenth century, with Petrarch, an awareness arose in Italian humanist circles not only of the decline of civilization that accompanied the fall of Rome, which had never been in question, but also of a Classical (that is, “Roman”) cultural revival in their own time. Petrarch referred to the decline as a time of “darkness,” a time of almost unrelieved ignorance – this first articulation of the idea of “the Dark Ages” being, clearly, a negative one (1337–8).3 Soon, Boccaccio (1348–53) and others applied this concept to the history of art, although in an unsystematic way, most notably in regard to Giotto (1267/75–1337). It was only a matter of time before historians such as Flavio Biondo came to see the interval between the Empire and their own time as a distinct period (posthumous 1483), something Biondo’s contemporaries and immediate followers gradually formalized with terms such as media tempestas (1469), media aetas (1518), and media tempora (1531). (The actual term medium aevum, the direct Latin of “the Middle Age” or “the Middle Ages” as the source of the word “medieval,” is first found at least by 1604; with the English equivalent appearing immediately afterwards with “the Middle Age” being used by William Camden in 1605 and “the Middle Ages” by Henry Spelman in 1616.4) By the early fifteenth century, Niccolò Machiavelli presented a flexible cyclical theory of history (posthumous 1531), largely based on the work of the Greek historian of ancient Rome, Polybius.5
In regard to the historiography of medieval art, these developments took their definitive form in the work of Giorgio Vasari, considered by some to be the founder of modern art history. There had been earlier writings on the history of art from Italian humanist circles, including by the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (begun c.1447), but Vasari’s Le vite de più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori (1550; rev. edn. 1568) is regarded as the first modern history of art because of its broader, more synthetic, and more critical nature. Following the authority of Pliny, Vasari presents a history of (largely Italian) art employing a standard of naturalistic progress and a format based on biographies of the artists. On the one hand, his emphasis on technical knowledge and aesthetic judgment gave an enormous impetus to the practice of connoisseurship with its estimation of quality and the determination of attribution that was to dominate art historical discourse for so long. On the other, the biographical format, encouraged by the Italian humanist affinity for the individual, opened the biographical paradigm to the new topos of the artist as genius. (This realm of genius was apparently open only to practitioners of painting, sculpture, and architecture; Vasari is considered to be the source of the distinction between the so-called major and minor arts, a distinction that every period potentially faces but that is particularly disadvantageous to the medieval, whose book painting was considered a “minor art” until the late nineteenth century.) At the same time, in also employing a variation of Pliny’s stylistic developmental model of initial formation, perfection, and decline, Vasari was forced to address something Pliny never was: the millennium and a half of artistic activity since Pliny’s death in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
If Pliny could interpret a few hundred years of what he saw as an artistic decline in his own time simply as the result of an essentially moral decline, Vasari was compelled to explain more than a thousand years of what he saw as an artistic decline of morally superior Christian culture with reference to both the Classical period and his own time – as well as in light of recent developments in the Italian humanist view of history. He did this by accounting for artistic decline in general not in moral terms but by conceiving of the pattern of artistic change as a biological cycle (birth, growth, old age, and death) superimposed on the history of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Thus, the periods of initial formation and naturalistic perfection of the Classical world were followed by that of the decline of the arts of the Middle Ages (begun before the fall but fully realized through the destruction and culture of the Germanic invaders); the cycle then beginning again around the time of Giotto and others who strove toward the ideal of naturalistic perfection with a new sequence of initial formation, increasing perfection, and, finally, perfection itself (embodied in the work of Michelangelo). Vasari describes this process of the re-establishment of naturalistic standards as a “rebirth” (rinascita), our “Renaissance” – a concept that not only recognizes a self-conscious view toward the present and future, but also signals a consciousness of a break with the Classical past, any sense of continuity irrevocably ruptured by the Middle Ages. In an attempt to account for major artistic change as something more than technical advances, Vasari attributes this change to “the very air of Italy,” a very unphilosophical and conceptually unrelated predecessor of Hegel’s Zeitgeist and Riegl’s Kunstwollen, mentioned below. Vasari is, perhaps, most notoriously known among medievalists for his characterization of what is now called Gothic architecture as an invention of the Goths (or Germans), who “filled all Italy with these damnable buildings”; the reference to the Goths – including through the use of the adjective – being one that had been made by other writers earlier (and by Vasari himself) to indicate a much broader variety of forms of medieval architecture with which Italian humanists were out of sympathy.6 But his great importance for the historiography of medieval art lies in the fact that his work was so enormously influential throughout Europe that it gave the impression there was only one methodology, only one way of looking at art. This was a way that, in the emulation of Vasari’s own particular naturalistic and biographical paradigms and cyclical model of stylistic development, removed art from its cultural context and relegated medieval art to the low point of Western culture for more than two hundred years to come.
The Reformation and its Aftermath
What was to Vasari only too ubiquitous, Gothic, was – in the broader sense of medieval culture – to many others now in danger of being lost. Since the mandate of this volume is Romanesque and Gothic art and architecture in Northern Europe, let’s return to England of the Dissolution to look at John Leland, the person who is generally described not as the first medieval art historian, but as the first modern English antiquary.
In 1527, after eighteen years of marriage without a male heir to the throne, Henry VIII began a series of efforts aimed at having his marriage with Catherine of Aragon annulled and his association with Anne Boleyn legitimized. Unable to achieve this end after seven years of contesting the issue (including a great deal of public pressure on the Church in England), he broke with Rome in 1534, and began preparations for the Dissolution of the Monasteries mentioned at the opening of this introduction in that same year. The “visitations” began in 1535 and the monasteries were incrementally suppressed from the weakest to the strongest from February 1536 to March 1540. (In the end, the monasteries lasted longer than Anne, the second of the king’s six wives, who was beheaded in May 1536.) It was in the midst of this gradually escalating state of affairs, from 1534 to 1543, that John Leland undertook a project with the king’s support to research the libraries of all the monasteries and colleges of England, so that “the monuments of auncient writers as welle of other nations, as of this yowr owne province mighte be brought owte of deadely darkenes to lyvely lighte” (the latter possibly being a reference to Petrarch). Leland, who had been in Holy Orders and had been appointed Henry’s librarian around 1530, was an antiquarian (antiquarianism being a form of the study of the past that is based on physical as well as literary remains, typically with an aim toward classification rather than a comprehensive historical view). His antiquarian proposal, however, seems to have received an urgent impetus from the Dissolution, of which he approved but whose destruction of the ancient libraries he deeply regretted (even as he contributed to it himself in his acquisition of books for the king’s library). In the end, this already daunting project expanded its goals to include everything from libraries to inscriptions, important buildings, artistic remains, coins, and geography, in both England and Wales. The result is considered to be a significant innovation in antiquarian method, even if an uncritical one.7 Far less a study of art and architecture than it was a broad review of the topography and antiquities of the kingdom, Leland’s project remained unfinished when he was declared insane in 1547 at the age of around 44, dying five years later. His extensive notes, however, were widely known to the next generation of antiquaries who used them, cited them, and even indexed them. These were finally published in nine volumes from 1710 to 1712 as the Itinerary; further notes were published in six volumes in 1715 as the Collectanea. Some scholars believe that Leland’s insanity was the result of distress at the equivocal role he played in the destruction of his beloved libraries. However this may be, what is not in doubt is that the impetus for this seminal work was Leland’s strong sense of nationalism, and that its purpose was to contribute to an awakening of English national identity.
This sense of nationalism and of a need for a more clearly defined national identity in the face of an irrevocably changing world was a common factor in much of the work (from both sides of the aisle) on British antiquities and topography that followed Leland. It was a time of first beginnings, and the progress – however much erudition and initiative was involved – gives, in historiographical retrospect, something of the impression of intellectually feeling around in the dark. Two scholars who emerge most strongly from this challenging period before the English Civil War were William Camden and Robert Bruce Cotton. Camden built upon Leland’s manuscript notes to produce what Leland never managed: a comprehensive and coherent antiquarian study of England, and one that was extremely popular (1607). Cotton was a great antiquarian and collector who is known to every medieval art historian from the cataloguing of his famous manuscript collection according to the Classical busts, particularly of Roman emperors, that stood on top of the bookcases that housed the manuscripts. (Cotton also bought and moved the room in which Mary, Queen of Scots, had been executed at Fotheringay Castle to his own house at Connington, perhaps the first “period room.”) A vital part of the great activity of this formative era was the creation of a number of modern institutions, if only in their nascent forms. Cotton’s collection, which was actively used by contemporaries in the manner of a modern research library, would later become an important part of the manuscript collection of the British Library. Together, Camden and Cotton were part of the founding of the Society of Antiquaries in 1586, an important institution in the encouragement and dissemination of scholarship at this time of early development (dissolved in 1614 but to be re-established).
But there were also a number of other scholars who, if less well known than Camden and Cotton, contributed perhaps more directly to the foundation of an art historical base of methodologies, terminology, and periodization. For example, William Somner wrote on a number of medieval churches, including the Cathedral of Canterbury, distinguishing between Romanesque and Gothic elements (though not using these terms) and trying to use architectural form as a means of dating (1640), a method that was to have a long history. It is from this time that we have the first recorded use of the term “Gothic” in English: in 1641 as an adjective and in 1644 as a noun, although it is not clear from the passages whether the author, John Evelyn, was using the word specifically in the sense that we understand it today or more generally in the meaning of “medieval.”8 William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of Oxford University, left his valuable collection of manuscripts to the Bodleian Library in Oxford and helped to obtain the Great Charter for Oxford University Press before being beheaded for Royalist support by order of Parliament in 1645. And John Webb, in an edition of some of Inigo Jones’s writings on Stonehenge of 1655, incorporated the distinction between round and pointed arches already made (though unsystematically) by Somner in 1640 into a broader conception of architectural style, calling them “Saxon” and “Norman,” respectively.
But the potential prejudice against medieval art remained, and not just on the intellectual level. With the outbreak of the English Civil War (1642–48) and its aftermath, the Protectorate (1653–9), the destruction of the medieval patrimony continued, attention now turning to the British cathedrals, since the monasteries had already been destroyed in the Reformation. From the symbolic cutting down of the famous Glastonbury Thorn (said to have sprung from Joseph of Arimathaea’s staff) on the Tor (where Abbot Whiting had been executed and dismembered) during the Civil War by a member of Cromwell’s New Model Army to “rattling down proud Becket’s glassy bones” (the partial smashing of the stained-glass windows of Canterbury Cathedral in 1643) by an iconoclastic Puritan minister, the losses continued to mount up (fig. 1-1 shows a 1642 “slighting”).9 But Cromwell’s death in 1658, in the old Somerset House on the Thames in London, symbolically marked the end of the conscious political destruction of medieval art. The Lord Protector’s effigy lay in state – his funeral being described by Evelyn as “the joyfullest funeral I ever saw” – and his body (or at least one answering to that description) was disinterred from Westminster Abbey, publicly hanged, and then decapitated. Despite the efforts of the iconoclasts – or, rather, because of them – this second phase of destruction of medieval art in England had the same effect as the devastations of the earlier Dissolution, and acted as an impetus to further scholarship, although one that was still largely limited to England at this time.
FIGURE 1-1 Puritans “slighting” (“disrespecting,” in the current vernacular) Canterbury Cathedral, 1642. From Mercurius Rusticus, a series of Royalist reports about Parliamentary depredations, particularly those involving the great medieval cathedrals. These reports began the same year as this slighting, and from 1646 to 1732 were published in book form. The depiction here is from the frontispiece of the 1685 edition.
On the Continent, the Thirty Years War raged (1618–48), taking its toll as well. Yet ancient and Renaissance scholarship was in full swing by now, with important implications for the development of medieval art history. This was the time of the beginning of modern biblical criticism. The Early Church became a subject of great study as a result of both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. The catacombs of Rome were accidentally rediscovered in 1578, and Antonio Bosio’s great work on the catacombs, Roma sotteranea, was published in 1632–4. Historical terms such as “BC” (Bousset, 1681) and “century” began to be used. The quality of published reproductions of artworks improved, and archaeological reconstructions began to be used in publications. The antiquarian societies that had been popular in Italy for some time were beginning to spread throughout Europe. The Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture was established in Paris in 1648. Collecting increased at a dramatic rate, the art market developed, more collections began to be opened to a select public, buildings began to be designed specifically as museums, catalogues were sometimes even printed for visitors (Villa Borghese, 1650), and the Grand Tour became an institution. In the Low Countries and Germany, the influential histories of art written by Karel van Mander (1604) and Joachim von Sandrart (1675–9) included Northern artists in their biographical formats, contributing to a loosening of the grip of Classical and Renaissance dominance. All of this helped build an intellectual atmosphere and professional structure that encouraged the growth of the discipline of medieval art history, if only indirectly.
In France, in particular, much work was done under the stable regimes of Louis XIII and Louis XIV and in the less secure region of present-day Belgium to save the medieval heritage, even if little of it was immediately related to art and architecture. The Jesuit Bollandists in Antwerp published the first volume of the renowned Acta Sanctorum in 1643 (we eagerly await the final volume, whose introduction was written in 1940) in order to provide dependable primary sources of the lives of the saints as part of the defense of the Church in the Counter-Reformation. The Benedictine Maurists, of whom the best known is Jean Mabillon – who said of Cluny at the absolute low point of popularity of medieval art, “If you see it a hundred times, you are overwhelmed by its majesty just as often” (1682) – set new standards of historical methodology, Mabillon himself being especially prominent for his work in paleography and diplomatics. Operating out of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, they distinguished themselves with such works as the Acta SS. Ordinis Sancti Benedicti (1668–1701), the Annales Ordinis Sancti Benedicti (1703–39), and the opera of many Fathers, which quickly became part of the essential foundation for medieval studies for generations of scholars. Among lay scholars, Charles Ducange published his Glossarium ad Scriptores Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis in 1678, still an authority in the field. In the area of art history generally speaking, the first scholarly art historical bibliography was compiled (by Raphaël Trichet du Fresne on Leonardo in 1651). The grave of Childeric, rich in Merovingian jewelry, was accidentally discovered in Tournai in 1653, causing a sensation. In the debate known as the Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns, Charles Perrault (an influential voice in French artistic circles and the “author” of Mother Goose) declared that contemporary architecture was superior to Classical, and that, alongside absolute beauty, there was a relative beauty that could change with time (1688) – an idea that led to an increasing subjectivity of standards, contributing to the undermining of the Classical ideal as the sole authority. Roger de Piles did much to counter the assumption that the history of art could only be written by artists, an idea that owed its basis to the Italian precedent, and, like van Mander and Sandrart before him, included Northern artists in his work, thus helping to weaken the near monopoly of Mediterranean artistic authority in the Northern conception (1699, 1708). But more significantly for the development of the field of medieval art history in particular, Jean-François Félibien des Avaux differentiated (for the first time in French scholarship) between systems of structure based on round and pointed arches, which he termed gothique ancienne and gothique moderne, respectively (1687). Although this strain of thought was not taken further at the time in France, it was across the Channel.
England after the death of Cromwell was more concerned than ever with better understanding its medieval art historical past, something largely manifested through a very gradual awareness and articulation of architectural styles and their origins. In this effort, by far the most influential English antiquary of his generation was William Dugdale, the intellectual heir of Camden and Cotton. Dugdale is the primary author of the Monasticon Anglicanum (written with Roger Dodsworth; 1655–73), a deeply researched history of monasticism in England that incorporated a discussion of the building histories and the destruction of the various institutions with which he was concerned. A Royalist who had at one time been commissioned to make a record of the monuments of the leading churches of England in anticipation of the Civil War – an action not so different from the removal of stained glass from the great churches during World Wars I and II – Dugdale’s book both employed the work of Leland and went beyond it in setting new standards for documentation and quality of illustration, even being called “the first illustrated architectural history of a mediaeval style” (figs. 1-2 and 1-3).10 While the three-volume work was being released, Dugdale also published a history of St Paul’s Cathedral, which was the first illustrated monograph on a work of English ecclesiastical architecture and an important step in the beginnings of medieval art history (1658).11 Aside from this, John Aubrey wrote an important, inclusive history of English architecture in the 1670s in which the round and pointed styles were clearly distinguished, a history that was widely known among scholars despite the fact that it was not published at the time.12 Roger North took the differentiation between the two forms further, characterizing rounded-arch structures as “elder Gothick” (1698; apparently following Félibien) and associating what is now called English Romanesque with Roman architecture for the first time in print, this connection contributing to the intellectual respectability of medieval architecture in a time of classicizing standards. Even so, the approaching Enlightenment was not sympathetic to the study of medieval architecture, seeing it as the irrational antithesis of its rational self in its darkness, its absence of Classical proportions, its particular use of architectural sculpture and detail, and its delight in monstrous forms.
FIGURE 1-2 Canterbury Cathedral, engraving by Thomas Johnson and Wenceslaus Hollar from William Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum (1682 edition). The engravings in Dugdale’s edition are perhaps the first reproductions of medieval art intended for serious scholarly study.
It was, ironically, precisely this “irrational” quality that spearheaded a broader acceptance of medieval architecture on the part of a more general public at the time of the Enlightenment. This was a social phenomenon of unexpected origins and complex development, one that must have seemed extraordinary to its contemporaries. In 1711, Joseph Addison introduced the philosophical concept of the Sublime into the discussion of architecture, a concept that distinguished between the traditional concept of beauty (as understood from the principles of Classical art) and awe (the Sublime). Generally speaking, this new appreciation for the Sublime permitted the qualities of vastness, irregularity, and obscurity commonly associated with Gothic architecture to be opposed positively to the qualities of human proportions, regularity, and clarity universally associated with Classical standards. This obviated the almost unshakable principle that associated both Classical and Renaissance art with beauty as an expression of truth – or Beauty and Truth, as the terms are often rendered. A theme given significant development by Edmund Burke (1756) and Immanuel Kant (1790) over such a period of time as to ensure its continued viability, the concept of the Sublime gave an intellectual respectability to Gothic architecture that was extremely important in the slow process of breaking down the walls that shut off medieval architecture from mainstream artistic thought.
FIGURE 1-3 Detail of frontispiece engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar from William Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum (1682 edition). If Dugdale’s Monasticon is “the first illustrated architectural history of a mediaeval style” (Frankl), it may also contain the first pointed juxtaposition of images, and in no less a place than its frontispiece. On the left, a good king (perhaps Edward the Confessor, mentioned in the coronation oath in connection with the liberties of the Church) places what seems to be a deed of foundation for a monastery (seen in the background) on an altar (whose triptych appears to include a monk and another robed figure, perhaps Augustine of Canterbury and Gregory the Great, shown elsewhere in the frontispiece), dedicating this work “To God and the Church.” On the right, Henry VIII is shown ordering the destruction of a monastic church (perhaps meant as Glastonbury, with the Tor in the background), declaring, “As I will,” an apparent reference to “As I will, so I command,” from Juvenal (Sat. 6: 223), a passage occasionally cited at the time in the characterization of tyranny. Henry is thus said to have put his own will above the rule of law in the Dissolution of the Monasteries; this is made even more pointed through a scene (not shown here) at the top of the frontispiece of the signing of Magna Carta, whose first article guarantees the liberties of the Church for all time.
The undeniable legitimacy that the concept of the Sublime gave to Gothic architecture contributed to its further acceptance on the popular level through the Gothic Revival movement. The Gothic Revival began at least as early as 1717 with the Gothic Temple at Shotover, Oxfordshire, an overtly political monument (as were others, whether Whig or Tory). But for the purposes of this introduction, perhaps the most interesting example of this phase of the Gothic Revival is that of Strawberry Hill (1753–76), the country residence of Horace Walpole, an enthusiastic and astute advocate of the movement and the author of the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764). More historicist than many contemporary examples of the Gothic Revival (often described as “follies”) but less than would generally be the case in the nineteenth century, Strawberry Hill and other Revivalist works employed Gothic as a novel source of inspiration for contemporary design – one that broke away from the old Mediterranean precedent in its search for a new indigenous style as part of a gradually evolving and very self-conscious conception of national identity. “Gothic” was clearly no longer a term of criticism, at least to some. The pointed arch that had earlier distanced medieval architecture negatively from the Classical precedent with its round arch now did so in a positive way, one that was soon to spread throughout Europe (fig. 1-4).
Germany, too, began to build in the Gothic Revival style, but it was to be a while, if only a short while, before any truly broader recognition of Gothic would be achieved on the Continent, and then even as period styles earlier than Gothic were typically considered “decadent.” In other ways, however, the general infrastructure of art history, of which medieval is a part, began to develop significantly. In Germany, art began to be studied at the university level, most notably with Johann Friedrich Christ at the University of Leipzig (1734).
In France, Michel de Frémin’s architectural theory of rationalism (the idea that beauty is based on the degree to which the form of a building expresses its function and materials; 1702), which included medieval in its discussion, further continued the process of chipping away at the Classical stranglehold, as did Marc-Antoine Laugier’s recognition of the role of rationalism in Gothic architecture (1753), a subject that would be argued for generations. The Abbé Mai first presented the idea of French regional schools of architecture (1774), also a topic that would continue to receive attention. The Maurists carried on their work, including Gallia Christiana (1715–65), the Histoire littéraire de la France (1733–68), and Bernard de Montfaucon’s Les Monumens de la monarchie françoise (1729–33), the latter essentially presenting a history of the French monarchy through its artistic monuments. The latter also produced what might be called the first attempt at a national union catalogue of manuscripts (1739). And Rousseau’s writings on nature did much to prepare the way for the Romanticists.
In Italy, interest in things medieval was scant, but writing about art began to be undertaken less by artists, as had traditionally been the case, and more by connoisseurs – the often conflicting relationship between artists and non-artists in the writing of the history of art being one that would continue for some time. Greek art began to be distinguished from Roman. The evacuation of Herculaneum started in 1738, and of Pompeii in 1748.
Everywhere, museums were opening up to an increasingly wide segment of the public, although just what museum collections and their publics constituted varied greatly over the years. The Ashmolean was established in Oxford in 1683 by Elias Ashmole, son-in-law of William Dugdale. The Capitoline Museum (the first formal public art collection since antiquity, founded in 1471) was opened to the public in 1734 (by the Pope), the Uffizi was founded in 1743 (building designed by Vasari for court use in 1559), the Louvre in 1750, the British Museum in 1753, the Museo Pio-Clementino in 1770, the Albertina in Vienna in 1773, and the Schloss Belvedere in Vienna in 1781, to name a few. Proper layout of collections was an ongoing issue, particularly the question of aesthetic versus chronological layout – a manifestation of the ongoing conflict between connoisseurship and art history, the two principal and often contending approaches to the study of art at the time. Encyclopedias and dictionaries began to include or even be exclusively devoted to art, artists, and iconography. And some of the great medieval buildings began to be restored on a scholarly basis.
FIGURE 1-4 The Entry of Prince Frederick into the Castle of Otranto, pen and wash drawing by John Carter (1790). As fanciful as any medieval architectural drawing, this literally illustrates both the impact Horace Walpole’s book had on the Romantic conception of Gothic and one of the means of the diffusion of that conception. Reproduced courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.
As the eighteenth century progressed, the terminology of Saxon, Norman, and Gothic architecture continued to develop in England. Browne Willis wrote a series of studies on British cathedrals that provided an extensive body of plans and elevations for further study (esp. 1727–30). After a period of irregular association, the Society of Antiquaries received a royal charter in 1751 and began meeting in Somerset House, where Cromwell had died. The Cotton collection was finally acquired by the British Museum in 1753, as was the fine manuscript collection of Robert and Edward Harley. Thomas Gray advanced the study of what is now called Romanesque and theorized the origin of the pointed arch (1754, published 1814), work that was employed and furthered by James Bentham (1771). The journal Archaeologia, which published many medieval studies, was established in 1770. And William Stukeley helped raise the standard of scholarship through new attention to the differentiation of primary and secondary sources, as well as going beyond a gathering of strictly factual information through the analysis of those facts (1776), something of a new proposition.13
But, actually, the greatest change affecting the study of medieval art at this time of the Age of the Enlightenment was the work of a classicist, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, considered by some to be the founder of modern art history (as is Vasari by others, though Winckelmann might best be thought of as modern and Vasari early modern). In major publications of 1755 and 1764, Winckelmann wrote the first modern histories of figural art, more or less initiating the German dominance of the study of the history of art that was to last for so long and to be so distinguished. Choosing to write on Classical sculpture but forced to come to terms with the anonymity of the limited extant works that were available to him, he presented his study as an inclusive, synthetic analysis rather than a series of artists’ biographies or discussion of individual works. The basis of this synthetic analysis was Winckelmann’s periodization of Greek art on the cyclical model, a stylistically based methodology that became extremely influential in both art history and archaeology. Central to his conception of art was the notion of the Classical ideal of beauty, to or from which all art was understood to either adhere or deviate. Both the cyclical model and the standard of Classical beauty were almost insurmountable obstacles to the development of the study of medieval art. Winckelmann himself, however, applied these standards to all of ancient art, seeing Roman art – previously only poorly distinguished from Greek – as a distinct second to Greek. Thus, despite the unchanging ideal of the Classical that he set up, Winckelmann – with an almost unimpeachable authority – shattered the myth of the Classical period as a time of consistent artistic standards and so unintentionally opened the way, eventually, for the recognition of the respectability of the artistic production of other historical periods. At the same time, he explained the basis of the changes in his periodization as the product of historical context – social, political, and religious factors, including the concept of freedom.
Both Winckelmann’s attention to historical context and his demonstration of the utility of stylistic analysis were interpretive devices that had seen no systematic use before, and were strongly counter to the antiquarianism of the time. To these important new methods, he added a new interest in iconography, a scholarship free of nationalism, and the model of original research (as opposed to a rehashing of previous work). Before Winckelmann, the writing of the history of art had largely been the exclusive domain of the artist, one that generally followed the biographical format established by Vasari two hundred years before. Winckelmann broke with these two very substantial traditions, even if he did try to approach a given artwork with the “eye” of the artist. It was only once this constricting situation had been left behind that the history of art as a history of society and culture could begin to be written. But Winckelmann also called for the imitation of the ancients, and in so doing gave an unprecedented impetus to the establishment of neo-Classicism, whose underlying mind-set was by definition inimical to medieval. The result of this was, to a large extent, to firmly reinforce the already strongly entrenched idea that there was but one standard, the Classical.
The virtually unquestioned position of Classical as the only standard by which art might be judged was irrevocably shattered with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s essay On German Architecture of 1772. Gothic had traditionally been seen as the negative counterpart to Classical. In this essay, Goethe argued that it was the positive counterpart. He sharply criticized the fact that his German education had taught him to disdain Gothic architecture and, through the vehicle of Strasbourg Cathedral – despite a very imperfect knowledge of the historical details involved – he praised Gothic structure as based on necessity, Gothic ornament as appropriate to the structural framework, and Gothic variety within an overall harmonious unity, all of these subjects having been traditional points of criticism of Gothic in the past. It was, however, not the neo-Classical that Goethe was consciously challenging, but what he saw as the tyranny of contemporary tastes, particularly the “effete” French Rococo. Gothic was German architecture, the product and expression of the German psyche, and it was upon this – and not the expressions of other cultures – that German national identity should be based. Goethe later distanced himself from this identification with medieval (though he would eventually return to a limited acceptance of it), but the impact of this essay on others was profound and lasting. The influential Sturm und Drang movement – which had been heavily influenced by Rousseau – was especially affected by Goethe’s essay in its furtherance of the right of artistic genius not to be impeded by rules, of the importance of the potential emotional power of art, of a rejection of the universality of the standards of Classical culture, and of the legitimacy of the artistic production of other periods, particularly the medieval. Any pejorative sense to “that misunderstood word ‘Gothic’” was now laid aside forever. But, more to the point, the universal primacy of the fundamental premise of Classical – rationality – was brought into question. Goethe’s championing of an art form that should be “felt rather than measured” was, in its very emotion, contrary to the neo-Classical ideal.14 It was also a sentiment that was eminently better suited to this new Age of Revolution than it ever could have been before, in the Age of Reason.
A reaction to what some saw as the excessive Enlightenment emphasis on rationality had been forming for some time and culminated in the essentially emotional approach to history, literature, and art known as Romanticism. The beginnings of Romanticism are variously dated from around 1750 to 1800, depending on the particular aspect of this reaction, but it was given an enormous impetus by the French Revolution and by the Napoleonic wars that followed (1789–1815). The term was coined by Friedrich von Schlegel in 1798 as a means of indicating the basis in the medieval romance of an “irrational” strain within contemporary German poetry. Romanticism was, however, a very broad and rather amorphous movement, and it was not limited in its interests to medieval culture. In its “irrationality,” it encompassed, among other things, a deep attraction to nature and even to Classicism (in what has been called Romantic Classicism). It was concerned with the individual, but also became an important vehicle for national identity. It was a major cultural and political movement, but had no defined goal or universally recognized political association. And it was seen as being furthered by many contemporary artists and writers who claimed no affiliation with it. Medieval art, however, was ultimately central to who the Romantics were, an important part of their breaking free, intellectually and culturally, from the dominance of the Mediterranean precedent.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of this use of art in the formation of national identity in the early and mid-nineteenth century arose in Germany in the completion of the construction of Cologne Cathedral. In 1816, a movement sprang up to complete the cathedral, whose Gothic reconstruction had begun in 1248 but which had been left unfinished since 1560. Conceived by Johann Joseph von Görres, furthered by Sulpiz Boisserée, and supported by such influential public figures as Goethe and Karl Friedrich Schinkel and by the state of Prussia, actual reconstruction began in 1842 using the recently discovered plans of c.1300 (fig. 1-5). By the time the cathedral was completed in 1880, the project had become a symbol of German unity during this formative period of the German nation (federal state established 1871), contributing greatly to a sympathetic view of medieval art among the general public in the process. One of the leading voices in this rehabilitation of medieval art in Germany was von Schlegel who, along with his brother, August Wilhelm, argued for a greater recognition of the historicity of art and of the relation between art and religion. Historiographically, Friedrich von Schlegel is also especially important for his discussion of Gothic architecture as the representation of the infinite. The von Schlegels influenced and were influenced by many, including Boisserée and his brother Melchior, who built up an important collection of Northern European art from the medieval period to the Northern Renaissance. These developments in art history were an integral part of a much wider medievalizing movement. Romanesque revival architecture had begun to spread in Germany, where it was known as the Rundbogenstil. Caspar David Friedrich, Philipp Otto Runge, and the Nazarenes (one of the first secessionist groups) were influential in painting. And Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and Novalis, among others, made important statements in literature. In much of this, ties to the strong Catholic revival of the early nineteenth century both helped and hindered the movement.
FIGURE 1-5 Building of Cologne Cathedral, engraving of 1842/6 by Wilhelm von Abbema. The continuation of the construction of the cathedral in 1842 was one of the most dramatic uses of art in the formation of national identity in the nineteenth century. This engraving depicts a ceremony of 1824 in a way that dramatically captures both the excitement of the event and the Romantic conception of the Gothic cathedral as one of the great unifying expressions of the human spirit. Reproduced courtesy of Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln.
As Görres and Sulpiz Boisserée were contemplating the completion of Cologne Cathedral in Germany, in France the great Romanesque abbey church of Cluny was being systematically dynamited and sold for construction material (1811–23). Feelings were still very bitter on the part of many in France in regard to the ancien régime, and French Romanticism took a course different from that in England or Germany. Some French Romanticists were Catholic revivalists, such as the highly influential Chateaubriand, who saw Christian art in general and medieval art in particular as not just equal to Classical art, but superior (esp. 1802). Others, such as Nicolas Chapuy (1824–30) and the team of Charles Nodier, J. Taylor, and Alphonse de Cailleux (1820–78), produced important illustrated studies of the regions and cathedrals of France that were heavily influenced by the Picturesque movement and that took advantage of the new technology of lithography. Artists such as Géricault and Delacroix were outstanding in the area of painting, even if the latter would later distance himself from the movement. Less renowned but more medievalizing were the artists of the Troubadour style. Sensational “Romantic” gestures were made to the past; for example, the reinterment of Abelard and Heloise from the Paraclete (indirectly) to Paris around 1796 in a newly constructed tomb in the Musée des Monuments Français (see below), made of spolia from St Denis (Abelard was then known as a famous lover, not a scholar, still awaiting rehabilitation as a philosopher by Victor Cousin in 1836).
But by far the single most influential incident in regard to French Romanticism was the publication of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris in 1831. Hugo, who established his reputation with the drama Cromwell, created a sensation in regard to medieval art with this book, both through his own explicit digressions on the subject and through the role of the cathedral in the story (fig. 1-6). (Hugo was active in bringing about the restoration of the cathedral, which began in 1843, arguing against over-restoration.) Now it was the architecture of the Renaissance that was “decadent,” and pre-modern architecture that was the “book of stone,” the “great book of humanity,” in which every human thought found a page. The Gothic cathedral, in particular, was a book in which the artist was free as never before to express his own imagination, often in a non-religious way.
FIGURE 1-6 Esmeralda before Notre-Dame by Daubigny and Thomas, from the 1850 Perrotin edition of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. The publication in 1831 of Notre-Dame de Paris, in which the cathedral plays such an important part, was one of the most influential events in the rehabilitation of medieval art. Here, Esmeralda is taken to the place of both her execution and her salvation, the cathedral. In one of the most dramatic episodes of the novel, Hugo makes a point of mentioning the “Gothic portal,” the “Romanesque pillars,” the reliefs of the main doorway – and Quasimodo watching from the Gallery of Kings, equated with one of the building’s monstrous gargoyles.
In Britain, Romanticism resonated deeply with the increasingly historicist Gothic Revival architecture that was rising throughout the island, but nowhere to better effect than in the work of Charles Barry and A. W. N. Pugin (most notably in the Houses of Parliament, designed 1835). In the visual arts, medievalism affected William Blake (esp. 1792–1827), the Pre-Raphaelites (esp. 1848–53), and the Arts and Crafts Movement (particularly William Morris, esp. 1861–96) in prints, paintings, books, stained glass, and furniture of often unsurpassed design. Sir Walter Scott and Alfred, Lord Tennyson were but two among many who popularized the Middle Ages in literature. And John Ruskin was of enormouss influence in his many publications throughout his life, particularly The Stones of Venice (1851–53), which spoke of the freedom of the medieval artist, among other things. Ruskin, in 1869 the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, was also strongly opposed to over-restoration. But the pull of the medieval past went way beyond the arts in the profound impact of the Oxford Movement (esp. 1833–45), a religious reform movement that, as one of its goals, sought to restore (according to some) certain “medieval” or Roman Catholic rituals to the Anglican Church – a proposal so threatening that it resulted in occasional riots and the imprisonment of members who refused to recognize the parliamentary court that sought to suppress these efforts.
Nineteenth-century Non-Romantic Developments
If Romanticism had helped legitimize medieval art in the course of the nineteenth century, medieval art contributed to the development of a total view of the history of art distinct from Romantic concerns – and not just of Europe, but of the world. It was no longer a question of some perceived need to justify medieval art in face of Classical standards. Art history was in the process of significant change – begun by Winckelmann, but with his Enlightenment blinders now left behind – and no field profited more than medieval. There was now a greater emphasis on methodology, historical documentation, the publication of primary sources (including Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1826f.; Patrologia Latina, 1844–64; the Rolls Series, 1858f.; and Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 1866f.), encyclopedias, and bibliographies. Scholars focused increasingly on such issues as periodization, dating, regionalism, and the use of exegesis in interpretation. In architecture, techniques such as the reading of molding profiles, among others, began to be used. The modern sciences of archaeology and philology developed out of antiquarianism. Historical, social, and philosophical theories were articulated that remain influential to this day. And access was continually improved through the opening up of collections, the founding of new museums (stimulated initially partly through their establishment by Napoleonic regimes, later partly through the return of Napoleonic war booty), the increasing ease and safety of travel, and the introduction of photography (1839).
Of the many developments of this time, a few deserve specific mention. In France, the Musée des monuments français opened in 1796 under the direction of Alexandre Lenoir (disestablished 1816). The museum was a direct result of the French Revolution in that it both appropriated its holdings from the institutions of the old regime and protected them from the unstable social situation of the new (the government began efforts to preserve the artistic patrimony already in 1790). The collection – which included some of the royal tombs and stained glass of St Denis – represented all periods of French history, and was structured on a room-by-room organization, each room representing a given century. Although this layout was meant to visualize Winckelmann’s cyclical model of growth and decline, with medieval representing decline, the museum had an enormous effect on the acceptance of medieval art in France. For the purposes of this introduction, perhaps the most important influence was on the Hôtel de Cluny, the first museum of medieval art (1832; reorganized in 1844 by Lenoir’s son, Alexandre-Albert, as the Musée de Cluny).15 Equally important, Jean-Baptiste Seroux d’Agincourt published his Histoire de l’art par les monumens from 1811 to 1823, a work that is generally considered to be the first comprehensive study of medieval art. Actually written from 1779 to 1789, however, the book really looked more to the past than the future in regard to medieval, being conceived of as a continuation up through the Renaissance of Winckelmann’s work, and still retaining the old characterization of medieval art as decadent. Even so, the times were changing, and it, too, caused a positive sensation for the art of the Middle Ages. Other important writings include a history of medieval painting by Paillot de Montabert in 1812, influenced by Seroux d’Agincourt; and a study of French architecture through the Middle Ages by Alexandre de Laborde of 1816, which first put forth the idea of the monk-architect. The Ecole des Chartes, founded in 1821, provided the educational basis for a flood of fundamental documentary research on medieval art, typically of a non-interpretive nature. In 1824, the Norman scholar Arcisse de Caumont called for a halt to the destruction of French monuments and for their preservation, a call that was repeated by Charles de Montalembert, among others, in a published letter to Victor Hugo entitled “Du Vandalisme en France”; the latter being a condemnation of those who destroyed the architectural patrimony as Vandals, a theme first put forth by Hugo, and whose ethnic re-characterization was undoubtedly made with Vasari in mind (1833). The government responded to the wide public support for this position through the creation of the post of Inspecteur général des monuments historiques by the historian and conservative minister François Guizot in 1830, to which the art historian Ludovic Vitet was appointed in 1831 and the author Prosper Mérimée in 1834 (redefined as a Commission in 1837). In 1834, the Société française d’archéologie was founded, immediately publishing Bulletin monumental and working to preserve medieval monuments. And Jean-François-Auguste de Bastard d’Estang began to publish a comprehensive series of facsimiles of manuscript illumination (largely medieval) in 1835. While he never completed this project, a fuller study of book painting did appear not too long after by Ferdinand Denis, one that drew attention to the importance of the twelfth century in the history of manuscript illumination (1857).16
In Britain, the working out of crucial terminology continued. Thomas Rickman’s English Architecture of 1817 established the widespread use of such terms as Norman, Decorated, and Perpendicular. The origins of the term “Romanesque” are more complex but, in short, the word was first used in the sense we employ today by William Gunn by 1813 in his Origin and Influence of Gothic Architecture, which, however, was published only in 1819. The French romane appeared at almost exactly the same time, apparently under British influence, in the correspondence of Charles de Gerville of 1818; the use of the term being propagated in France by de Caumont through a public lecture of 1823 (published 1824).17 In each case, the word was meant to associate Romanesque architecture with “legitimizing” Roman architectural precedents. It was also around this time that the adjective “medieval” (or “mediæval”) first appeared in English (1827) – some time before the definitive use of renaissance by Jules Michelet in 1855 (though the latter is found in a looser sense earlier).
It was, however, in Germany that the most profound changes were taking place in the early and mid-nineteenth century. There were, at this time, two leading approaches to the study of art.18 The first was historically based. Art history had long been used as a vehicle of patronal, regional, and national identity, and would continue to be in varying degrees. But with the French Revolution, historicism began to be seen as a means of a broader cultural understanding, though often in very different ways – something that allowed art history to break free of earlier paradigms. The great historical theorist at this time was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who saw change (including artistic change and its resultant form) as the progressive development of an informing spirit (Zeitgeist) throughout history. According to Hegel’s idealist view, the process of historical change is a dialectical one: a given thesis (or historical factor) is confronted by its antithesis (or opposing historical factor), resulting in a synthesis – which then becomes the thesis of a new process of dialectical synthesis. On a broader historical level, artistic change, in particular, takes place through three ages (the Symbolic, Classic, and Romantic), each of which has three phases of development (youth, maturity, and decline). In this very complex and detailed theory, Gothic architecture represents the highest phase of architectural development; and both the medieval and the Renaissance periods are seen as belonging to the Romantic age, because they are both concerned with human rationality and emotion. The second leading approach of the time turned to the artwork’s more immediate examination through connoisseurship, especially for reasons of attribution and the judgment of quality. Both of these approaches, and every possible combination of them, form the basis of the best contemporary work.
Perhaps the most influential art historians at this time – the time when art history began to be integrated into the university curriculum and chairs in art history began to be established (the first, according to some, was Johann Fiorillo, at Göttingen, 1813) – were the members of the so-called Berlin School. Gustav Friedrich Waagen, director of the Altes Museum and professor at the University of Berlin (sometimes said to be the first chair, 1844), wrote an important monograph on Hubert and Jan van Eyck in 1822 that was based on both connoisseurship and historical documentation, and that contains a study of medieval painting from the Carolingian period up to the Northern Renaissance, with the latter now being put forth as a synthesis of the medieval and Classical traditions and as the basis of the modern artistic conception.19 Karl Friedrich von Rumohr, considered to be the founder of art historical archival research, wrote on Italian medieval art in a more general study of Italian art (1827–31) that set new standards for objectivity through a critical connoisseurship. In this work, he expressed his strong opposition to both the Hegelian view and the more tendentious approaches of the Romanticists, who, by mid-century, were widely beginning to be seen as too subjective. Franz Kugler saw medieval art as equal to Classical art and superior to Renaissance – a view he expressed in the first world art historical survey, an important, technically oriented survey that extended from prehistoric to contemporary, including pre-Columbian, Asian, and Oceanic (1842). In contrast was Karl Schnaase’s survey of the following year, one that ran through medieval and was more philosophically based (1843–64). Strongly Hegelian, this work was known and criticized for beginning each chapter with a general historical introduction, rather than having this material inform the discussion of individual artworks. Here, also, only Classical and medieval art were said to have attained the highest spiritual expression, the dialectical synthesis of which was contemporary European art.20
Outside of the Berlin School, Anton Springer rejected both Romantic and Hegelian approaches (esp. 1857, 1879). Critical of studies that he felt actually separated art from its historical context through the use of generalized historical introductions, he sought to integrate the formal analysis of art with its specific historical conditions.21 He also advocated the employment of iconography in the art historical endeavor, and was perhaps the first to note the survival of Classical traditions in medieval art. One of the most influential art historians of the nineteenth century was the Swiss scholar Jacob Burckhardt, a student of Kugler (and Leopold von Ranke). Burckhardt, also a historian, worked on medieval early in his career, but his most significant work is on the art of the Italian Renaissance (esp. 1860, 1867). In this, he employed historical and cultural (including philosophical and religious) contexts to a degree not seen before, emphasizing the importance of the secular dynamic in Italian Renaissance culture and paying greater attention to individual artworks. Despite his enormously successful synthesis of the period, Burckhardt saw his work as “problem solving.” Considering himself to be pragmatic rather than theoretical, he was primarily interested in concepts, rejecting both Hegelian idealism and the straightforward accumulation of facts.22 Burckhardt is generally considered to have struck a middle ground between the broad theoretical views of history and the narrower approach of connoisseurship.
Another theory of history that came out of German-speaking culture in this period that was to have an impact on the study of art – though only within limits and only after some time – was that put forth by Karl Marx. Influenced by Hegel’s dialectic but rejecting Zeitgeist as a motivating force, Marx saw an inevitable progress of social change in history through a dialectical process of class struggle. He conceived of society as composed of base (economic factors) and superstructure (religion, philosophy, law, art, etc.), with the base determining the superstructure. Marx argued that the elements of the superstructure, including art, tend to advance the ideological system of which they are a part, whether directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously (esp. 1848, 1867; most of Marx’s writings on art have been lost). While strict Marxist thought has not had a major impact on medieval art history, it has been important because of the impetus it has given to a more generalized social history of art, one that attempts to explain art through its social context without a dogmatic emphasis on class struggle.
In mid-nineteenth-century France, meanwhile, efforts were being made in different directions. If Gothic had been a term of abuse in the centuries following Vasari, now Britain, Germany, and France all wanted to claim it as their own. Gradually, the French origins and the nature of Gothic began to be articulated – a process that was not worked out by the French alone. In 1843, the German architect Franz Mertens identified the origins of Gothic, as we understand it today, in St Denis (c.1135–44). Around the same time, important analyses of Gothic structural dynamics were being given by the German Johannes Wetter (1835) and the Cambridge professor Robert Willis, the latter also writing many important studies of the English cathedrals, particularly Canterbury (1845). And, in 1842, the French scholar de Caumont gave an influential expression of the so-called French schools in his Abécédaire ou rudiment d’archéologie. These and other studies like them provided the beginning of a much needed structural, geographical, chronological, and conceptual foundation upon which to build a fuller understanding of medieval architecture – a better distinction between Gothic and what had come before, as well as an informed beginning of an architectural chronology of Gothic.
But certainly the most brilliant figure in France at this time in medieval archaeology – as medieval art history was called by the French – was the architect and scholar, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. Among his many influential writings are the Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture (1854–68) and Entretiens sur l’architecture (1863–72), two works that give full expressions of Romanesque and Gothic structure, function, and design. These writings are best known for Viollet-le-Duc’s theory of the rationality of Gothic architecture, a theory that would be debated far into the twentieth century, particularly the question of the structural versus the aesthetic function of the ribbed groin vault. Also, like Hugo, Viollet-le-Duc saw the sculpture of the Gothic cathedral as providing a field for not just artistic freedom, but even “a kind of freedom of the press” (using Hugo’s phrase). His written work was, in general, extremely well received. However, he was deeply involved in the restoration of many of the greatest Romanesque and Gothic churches that was then being undertaken in France; and his belief that restoration meant the restoration of a building as he considered it to have existed at a particular moment in history – not as it stood at the time of restoration – met with a far less popular reaction.
Equally as influential, though far less controversial, Adolphe-Napoléon Didron, considered the founder of a systematically researched iconographical method, produced the ground-breaking Iconographie chrétienne (1843), as well as a number of other works and initiatives, including the Annales archéologiques (1844f.). Taking up Hugo’s idea of the cathedral as a book for the illiterate, he tried to show in his unfinished iconographic study that the basis of the sculptural program of Chartres Cathedral was Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum Maius (1247–59). Didron’s iconographic method brought a far broader outlook to art historical research, leading to a deeper investigation of the literature related to theology, scripture, and natural science than had ever been the case before. Interest in iconography stimulated work on stained glass, the serious study of which began at this time and was second only to architecture.23 The investigation of manuscript illumination also increased dramatically, both because of iconographic interests and because of the belief that manuscript illuminations had served as models for medieval monumental sculpture. It is not often realized today just how thoroughly the iconographical meaning of even very prominent images had been forgotten; for example, no less a figure than Alexandre Lenoir could describe the kings of the Jesse window of St Denis as a series of images of God the Father (among other striking misidentifications). What structure was becoming to architecture, iconography was becoming to the visual arts, allowing the study of the art of the “renaissance of the Middle Ages” (Didron) to extend further and deeper than the old limits of antiquarianism.
The Later Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century
Didron’s efforts were brought to fruition in Emile Mâle’s great iconographic work of 1898, L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle, described as the first comprehensive study of medieval French visual art and as the culmination of nineteenth-century scholarship on the subject.24 Explicitly following in the footsteps of Hugo and Didron, Mâle attempted to show that the same encyclopedic program that informed Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum Maius also informed the sculptural programs of the Gothic cathedrals. He did, however, challenge Hugo and Viollet-le-Duc on the idea that elements of the great Gothic sculptural programs were the result of the imagination of the artist, free of Church control, something Mâle admitted only for “purely decorative work.” This was a book of enormous impact and an important step in deepening our understanding of the interpenetration of the literary and artistic cultures of the Middle Ages. In this study, Mâle expressed an attitude that was common for most of the nineteenth century: that it was only with thirteenth-century Gothic that medieval art attained its highpoint, or, as an earlier generation might have said, even respectability.
However, beginning with de Gerville – and greatly developed with the work of de Caumont and Mérimée’s Commission des monuments historiques – the Romanesque art of France began to be seriously catalogued and studied.25 This effort was continued enthusiastically in the research of many scholars, of whom only a few can be mentioned here. Louis Courajod’s lectures of 1887 to 1894 at the Ecole du Louvre (posthumous 1899–1903) emphasized the Gallic component over the Roman in the development of Romanesque in unabashedly nationalistic terms.26 Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis helped establish a chronology of Romanesque architecture (esp. 1899). With a nationalism consonant with the colonialism of the Third Republic, Camille Enlart strove to show that Romanesque architecture originated in France and was disseminated from there, including to the Crusader states (1902–27).27 André Michel oversaw the production of a collaborative survey from the Early Christian to the modern era, giving full attention to all periods of medieval and contributing to a wider popular recognition of pre-Gothic medieval (1905–29). Robert de Lasteyrie, among many others, played an important part in the ongoing discussion of the French regional schools of architecture (esp. 1912).28 The influence of the new abstract movements of painting provided a contemporary intellectual and artistic justification of medieval abstraction, and, in a work on the Romanesque sculpture of Burgundy (not yet a popular subject), Victor Terret went so far in accepting the abstract basis of Romanesque art as to condemn the previous rejection of the style’s lack of naturalism (1914).29 In fact, such a change had come about that, in 1901, Emile Molinier, curator of the Département des objets d’art at the Louvre, could describe the twelfth century as superior to the “sterile” thirteenth. And Courajod could declare, “Nous sommes tous des barbares”30 – quite a change from Vasari’s “Goths” and Montalembert’s “Vandals.” To this came Mâle’s L’Art religieux du XIIe siècle en France in 1922. If his book on the thirteenth century was the culmination of nineteenth-century medieval art historical scholarship, this one looked forward to the twentieth.31 In it, Mâle masterfully rehabilitated Romanesque visual art as the art of a great period, a subject that retains the interest of scholars to the present day. The themes he wove throughout his text included monasticism, the pilgrimage, the cult of saints, various aspects of the liturgy, and the question of Eastern influence. He concluded with a still important discussion of Suger and St Denis, and the role of all this in the making of the art of the thirteenth century.
None of this went unchallenged, either from inside or outside France. The distinguished German art historian Wilhelm Vöge – with whom Erwin Panofsky wrote his doctoral dissertation – rejected the prevailing French view that monumental sculpture arose at Chartres, arguing instead for origins in Burgundy and Languedoc, particularly Provence (1894).32 The American Arthur Kingsley Porter disputed French proprietary claims to the origins of Romanesque architecture (which was generally seen by French scholars of this time as arising in northern France) and to the predominant role of the so-called schools. In a series of important publications (esp. 1915–17) he demonstrated the priority of the architecture of Lombardy, Spain, and Southern France, a position in which he was joined by Josep Puig y Cadafalch, who gave to this architecture the term “First Romanesque” (1928). In his Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads (1923), Porter argued that the vehicle for this cultural transmission was not the French “schools” but the intellectual traffic of the pilgrimage roads aided by the interests of monasticism.33 He offered a radical new dating of certain key works of sculpture, characteristically based on documentary evidence and stylistic analysis (rather than simply fitting the works into the current French theoretical constructs of stylistic development), and giving precedence to Spain and Burgundy over Languedoc, contrary to the mainstream French position, including that of Mâle (the “Spain or Toulouse” controversy).34
More radical still were the theoretical developments that were taking place in the German-speaking countries, in general, and in Vienna, in particular. The interest in the historical and cultural context of art as exemplified in Burckhardt’s work found its counterpart in two major trends. The first was a more rigorously conceived version of traditional connoisseurship, the self-proclaimed “scientific” method of Giovanni Morelli, a French-Italian of largely German-Swiss and German education, who, even in 1890, described the irreconcilable differences between connoisseurs and art historians as of very long standing. After spending most of his life either studying medicine or in politics, Morelli began to apply the methods of comparative anatomy that he had learned in medicine in Germany and France (and the arrogance he apparently had learned in politics in Italy) to the study of art, achieving phenomenal success in the attribution of artworks. His method consisted of the minute analysis of figurally complex but otherwise often insignificant elements of a composition such as ears, hands, and drapery folds whose depiction, he claimed, were unique to a given artist and so acted to identify the artist. (Bernard Berenson, who did at least some work in medieval and late Roman, was, perhaps, Morelli’s best-known disciple.) A revitalized connoisseurship, whether following Morelli’s method or not, had a strong base in the thriving sphere of the museums, its natural home today. The second trend was based on the theorization of artistic form. This was given an important impetus by Konrad Fiedler, who was strongly opposed to historicism and who postulated that artistic form is autonomous, independent of its historical context, and that it comprises an ordering of experience on a level equal to that of language (esp. 1887).
Franz Wickhoff, sometimes described as the founder of the Vienna School of art history, could be said to have been strongly influenced by both trends. Wickhoff combined the study of form and Morellian connoisseurship – which he saw as a means of creating a “scientific” basis for the study of art – with cultural and intellectual history in his desire to demonstrate uniform principles of artistic development for all periods.35 More particularly, he legitimized the study of Roman art, which had been discredited since Winckelmann, seeing it as a discrete period with its own artistic methods and goals. This he achieved largely through his famous study of the Vienna Genesis (1895, with Wilhelm von Hartel), a work that integrated the terms “illusionism” and “continuous narrative” into the art historical vocabulary. Wickhoff’s colleague, Alois Riegl, was also concerned with articulating universal artistic laws (esp. 1893, 1901). He explicitly rejected the old cyclical theories of perfection and decline – which contemporary abstract art had helped undermine – seeing instead a Hegelian Kunstwollen at operation (an artistic urge, whether of a culture or of an individual), an extremely well-known concept that, however, has not been taken up by the discipline. The primary vehicle through which Riegl explained this new theory of artistic change was his idea of the progression from the haptic to the optic, an idea based on contemporary perceptual psychology.36 A relatively complex theory that applies to all media, it might be briefly described in terms of the medium of sculptural relief as the development of a given form from relatively strongly outlined, linear, and flat figures isolated in the single picture plane in Egyptian art to relatively well modeled, three-dimensional figures integrated into multiplanar illusionistic space in early Imperial Roman. Riegl stressed that no period is inherently superior to another, emphasized the continuity of the antique with the medieval, denied the distinction between the major and the minor arts, and rejected contemporary attempts to model art historical methodology and theory on the sciences. While much of what he wrote was formulated in response to certain contemporary materialist theories (especially those of the students of Gottfried Semper, who exaggerated Semper’s emphasis on the roles of function, material, and technique in artistic creation), he also directed some of his later writings against Josef Strzygowski, who replaced Wickhoff at the University of Vienna and with whom Riegl clashed as well.
Rather than see continuity between the Antique and the medieval, Strzygowski saw certain elements of the great artistic changes of Late Roman and early medieval as the result of the introduction of Eastern influences, especially from Syria, Armenia, and Iran (a subject that would later interest Jurgis Baltrugaitis, a student of Henri Focillon). The exchange has come to be known as the “Orient oder Rom?” controversy, one of the key debates of turn-of-the-century medieval art history. It is now generally accepted that while the change took place from within late Roman culture – and while there were some Eastern influences – other internal factors not identified by Riegl were operative, such as popular culture. (Toward the end of Strzygowski’s highly successful career, as the Nazis rose to power, his original ethnic interests began to take on racist overtones.) Other Vienna School medievalists also made important contributions to the field. Max Dvořák once said that a sense of history was something a person was born with, that it could not be taught,37 and in this he may be right. Originally close to Riegl in his theoretical position, a study of Goya’s Disasters of War during World War I led Dvořák away from Riegl’s one-sided emphasis on a virtually autonomous evolution of form to make the relation between style and the Christian world-view the driving force of his medieval work, especially as seen in his major medieval study, Idealismus und Naturalismus in der gotischen Skulptur und Malerei (1917).38 Seeing the interrelation of all aspects of culture – theology, patristics, philosophy, literature – Dvořák felt that it was necessary to critically study all of these aspects, ultimately seeing Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte (the history of art as the history of ideas, the title of his last book). This approach, as obvious as it may seem to many today, was in strong contrast at the time to most previous scholarship, which, with some exceptions, typically came from the strong anti-clerical tradition of post-Enlightenment and post-Revolutionary Europe. Finally, Julius von Schlosser, another distinguished member of the Vienna School, should be mentioned, being particularly well known for his Die Kunstliteratur (1924), an important discussion of art historiography from the medieval period through the eighteenth century.39
Outside of the Vienna School and even of medieval, Heinrich Wölfflin, the Swiss contemporary of Wickhoff and Riegl, did important work that had reverberations in the field of medieval. Wölfflin wanted an “objective,” “scientifically” based art history, one whose goal is the explanation of artistic change through the art object, a purely visual concern with little reference to historical or cultural context. Continuing in the path of Fiedler, his was a history of the autonomous evolution of pure form, influenced by recent work in psychology, an “art history without names.” His best-known articulation of this is his theory of the development of form using a number of dichotomies to express change, such as the progression from the linear to the painterly, from planarity to depth, and so on; a progression he saw in the context of a non-biological and nonqualitative cycle of “early, classic, and baroque” phases for each Western period style (esp. 1898, 1915). Though his principles are no longer employed in the sense that he originally espoused, the influence of Wölfflin, perhaps more than any of the other grand theorists of his time, does live on in the institutionalization of the practice of looking and describing as the explicit first stages in art historical study, and in the ubiquitous use of juxtaposed images in classes and lectures, for which he is generally believed to be the source. Theories claiming universal validity, however, were hardly universally accepted by contemporaries. It was against such theories that Georg Dehio – the influential author of the widely used Die kirchliche Baukunst des Abendlandes (1884–1901) – railed as “the cold, clinical concepts in art history, which only an unfeeling dilettante could adopt with any confidence.”40
Equally influential in his time was Henri Focillon, a scholar who worked in a number of fields but who is best known for his studies of Romanesque sculpture (esp. 1931, 1938). Focillon’s work was in strong reaction to the currently popular iconographic and contextual study of art, despite the fact that he was the immediate successor of Mâle at the Sorbonne. In contrast, he was interested in finding basic rules governing the nature and development of form (esp. 1934, 1943). He did this in a way that was at times related to Riegl and Wölfflin, expressing himself in a variation of the developmental model of initial formation, perfection, and decline – calling them experimental, classic, and baroque – although he explicitly rejected any basis in Hegelian thought, which was increasingly losing prominence at this time.41 In the process, Focillon articulated the basic relation between Romanesque sculpture and architecture (medieval architectural sculpture, in particular, had been seen earlier as contrary to general classicizing principles), broadly established a new level of aesthetic acceptance for Romanesque sculpture (which had been low), and gave a new legitimacy to the art of the eleventh century (in distinction to Mâle’s twelfth). His work had an especially great impact in the United States, where he taught from just before the war until his death in 1943.
Even more widely received were the methods of Focillon’s contemporary, Adolph Goldschmidt. Like so many before him, Goldschmidt wanted an objective, “scientific” approach to the artwork, one that, to one degree or another, borrowed from and could claim to be the equal of the scientific methods of the time. And, like others (especially Dehio), Goldschmidt was concerned with establishing the documentary evidence of his subject. He did this by combining unusually precise stylistic analysis (as opposed to the formal analysis of Wölfflin), iconographical investigation, and comparison with other artworks to group, localize, date, and relate large bodies of works that had never been systematically studied before. This was an approach that both revealed and allowed the study of the interrelation of the “major” and “minor” arts. Toward this end, Goldschmidt undertook work of lasting importance particularly on Carolingian, Ottonian, Romanesque, and Byzantine ivories (writing several distinguished corpora that showed the interaction between East and West; 1918, 1930–4), Carolingian and Ottonian illuminated manuscripts (1928), German Romanesque bronze doors, and German Romanesque and Gothic sculpture. Believing that art historical study begins with the individual artwork, he preferred practice to theory. Because of the wide reception of his methodology, of his role as perhaps the first major art historian in Germany who was primarily concerned with the Romanesque and Gothic periods, and of the almost one hundred dissertations completed under his direction, Goldschmidt was of great importance in the development of medieval art history in Germany and the United States, where he taught as a visiting professor on three different occasions.42
As influential as Goldschmidt was – and he was very influential – perhaps Germany’s greatest contribution to art history, including medieval, was the iconological method originating from Aby Warburg and those associated with him. Warburg, who was strongly influenced by Burckhardt’s cultural history of art, first applied the term “iconology” to his method in 1912. Though not a medievalist, he set before the discipline a new approach to the study of art, one that went beyond either stylistic analysis or iconography and that fundamentally ran counter to the theories of Riegl and Wölfflin on the autonomous development of artistic form. In the field of art history properly speaking, Warburg did important work on the meaning of antique survivals in Renaissance art. He was, however, a scholar of enormous breadth, with very diverse interests that included religion, magic, philosophy, cosmology, astrology, science, literature, psychology, and memory, among others. He believed that art can only be understood in its broad historical and cultural contexts, and toward this end incorporated all branches of learning and all forms of visual representation – as well as the patron and the patron’s general goals – in his radical vision of an interdisciplinary cultural history of art.
Warburg was a man of independent wealth and enormous enthusiasm for his subject, both of which enabled him to establish first a library and then a research institute in Hamburg, the Bibliothek Warburg, which opened to the public in 1926, shortly before his death in 1929. In 1933, the scholars of the Bibliothek Warburg, under the direction of Fritz Saxl (who did important work on medieval astrological manuscripts), were forced to flee the waking nightmare of National Socialism with their library, and, like so many others, found refuge in England. Here, re-established as the Warburg Institute, they soon began to publish their distinguished journal (1937). They were joined in this publication effort a few years later (1939) by the Courtauld Institute, which was founded in 1932 and which eventually took up residence in the (new) Somerset House, the site of the death of Cromwell and the former quarters of the Royal Society of Antiquaries. More than any other approach to the study of art from this period of vital intellectual experimentation, the cultural history of art as conceived of by Aby Warburg – his interdisciplinary blend of iconography and iconology – retained its influence, if not its form, over the years.
One of the reasons, only one, that Warburg’s method became so strongly integrated into the historiographical tradition of art history was that it was taken up and refined by a man considered by many to be the most brilliant art historian in the history of the discipline, Erwin Panofsky. Panofsky wrote on art theory, the Italian Renaissance, and the Northern Renaissance, as well as medieval. He was not a student of Warburg’s, but he met and was influenced by Warburg at the Bibliothek Warburg when Panofsky held the first professorship in art history at the University of Hamburg (which continues the tradition of distinction to this day). Panofsky took Warburg’s method further and theorized it, in this way both demonstrating its applicability and broadening its appeal. As differentiated in his famous Studies in Iconology (1939), there are three levels of visual interpretation. Though more complex than explained here, preiconographical description deals with a relatively direct reading of the artistic motifs of an image; this was characterized by Panofsky as a history of style. Iconography is the study of the themes or concepts of imagery as conveyed through the literary and visual traditions; this is a history of types. Iconology is the “intrinsic” meaning or content related to the “symbolical” values, that which was the impetus to the selection of the iconography and which is understood by determining the “underlying principles of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion… which are generally unknown to the artist himself and may even emphatically differ from what he consciously intended to express”; this is a history of “cultural symptoms – or ‘symbols.’”43 Employing all branches of learning, as in Warburg’s method, this is very much a cultural history of art, but it is not one that attempted to interpret specific artworks in light of their more immediate social and political contexts. As it pertains to medieval, this approach is most effectively seen in Panofsky’s discussion of medieval renascences in Renaissance and Renascences (1960), a study that transcended not just the fields of Renaissance and medieval but the disciplines of art history itself. Less successful was his Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951), which attempted to explain the subdivision, division, and totality of the physical structure of the Gothic cathedral as a display of “visual logic,” the result of the same mentality that brought about the intellectual structure of the Gothic summa – a theory that has not received broad acceptance. Though certain points of his Abbot Suger (1946) have also long been questioned in Europe – and increasingly so in the United States – it is nevertheless one of the seminal books of medieval art history of the twentieth century, his discussion of the relation of Pseudo-Dionysian mysticism and the art program of St Denis still being one of the central issues in medieval art history today.44
Panofsky was enormously influential in the United States in no small part because of his presence in America for 35 years, after having been forced to flee Germany in 1933. This period, before and after World War II, was an extremely active one for medieval art history, and Panofsky was, tragically, joined in his flight by a large number of distinguished art historians, many of them medievalists, scholars who had an important effect on art history in the US. It is impossible to present the scholarship of either these individuals or those others who continued to work in their home countries in this present paper, authors whose names and significance will be covered in greater detail in the chapters of this volume.45 But let me mention one last scholar, known equally well for his work in medieval as in modern, Meyer Schapiro.
One of the most influential art historians of his time, Schapiro managed to address contemporary interests in form, style, and artistic change in a truly fundamental way, one that had no need to resort to theories of autonomous laws of art. He did this by accepting many of the techniques used by previous historians of form and style while rejecting the universalizing claims of their theories. At the same time, he followed the practice of the members of the Vienna School and others of employing methods from outside art history proper, especially psychology, although he strongly cautioned against excess in this general practice. Perhaps most persuasively for many, he was instrumental in introducing the approach of social art history to the art of the Middle Ages, even if he himself followed it only inconsistently. For the purposes of this introduction, this process shows up most clearly in his studies of the French monastery of Moissac and the Spanish monastery of Silos, both of which present penetrating examinations of Romanesque style. In 1931, Schapiro attempted to explain the sculpture of Moissac not as a point in an autonomous development of form or as a complex of iconographical puzzles to be deciphered, but as an art whose principle of abstraction was as intentional as that of the art of Schapiro’s own time. But he was not concerned with the dynamics of this purposeful abstraction alone, emphasizing as well – on a level of sophistication that had not been seen before – a realism that he saw emerging from this abstraction, and that he saw as in opposition to it. In 1939, however, in his famous study of the art of Silos, he took his exploration of style further, no longer limiting himself to the visual component of style alone. Introducing a more contextually explicit approach than the excellent, though typically more general, cultural history of Warburgian iconology, he explained two competing styles – one indigenous (Mozarabic) and the other foreign (Romanesque) – as the result of competing ideologies within the same institution in this period of fundamental political and social change in Northern Spain. In the process, he provided a historical basis to an emerging realism, seeing it as a manifestation of artistic freedom attributable to the rising bourgeoisie in the face of the traditional Church establishment; at the same time, he also attempted to counter the dominant view that art production was entirely subject to Church control. His reading is shaped by Marxist theory, though not in the sense of simplistic or forced theories of class struggle. However, by the time of his article on the aesthetic attitude in Romanesque art (1947), his arguments for a culture of artistic freedom were now largely based on testimony that came from the same establishment Church that he had earlier seen as fundamentally opposed to such freedom.46 Schapiro’s Marxist art history was short-lived and his themes of the freedom of the artist, the interaction of styles, and psychology had all been broached before. But it was all used to such effect – even if many of the individual arguments have been shown to be incorrect – that his work still commands enormous respect today and is seen both as a model of formal and stylistic analysis and as a crucial stage in the development of a social history of art.
Finally, the period from the beginning of the Vienna School to around 1968 (the date usually given as marking, in however symbolic a way, the great changes that took place in Western culture in the years following World War II) or a bit later was also an important one in the continued development of the art historical infrastructure, without which the discipline would not have developed in the way that it has. In 1873, the first International Congress of the History of Art of the Comité international d’histoire de l’art (CIHA) was held in Vienna. Other national and international organizations followed, as did a number of journals. Let me cite only a few, aside from those already mentioned: the Deutsche Verein für Kunstwissenschaft in 1908; the College Art Association in 1911, the first professional organization of academic art historians (Art Bulletin really was a bulletin when it first began in 1913; scholarly articles appeared only in 1917); the Medieval Academy of America in 1925 (Speculum, 1926); the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte in 1932; the Verband Deutscher Kunsthistoriker in 1948; the Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale in Poitiers in 1953 (Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 1958); the International Center of Medieval Art in 1956 (originally the International Center of Romanesque Art; Gesta, 1963/1964); the (British) Association of Art Historians in 1974 (Art History, 1978); and Arte medievale in 1983. The development of university art history departments and university presses is a story in itself.47 Important research guides, such as periodical indices, were established: the Répertoire d’art et d’archéologie (1910–89) and the International Repertory of the Literature of Art (RILA, 1975–89) merged in 1991 to form the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA, covering from 1973). Efforts in the area of iconography continued: the Index of Christian Art was founded at Princeton University in 1917 through the efforts of Charles Rufus Morey, primarily a scholar of Early Christian art; and other important iconographical aids were produced by Karl Künstle (1926–8), Louis Réau (1955–9), Gertrud Schiller (1966–80), and Engelbert Kirschbaum (1968–76). Indispensable reference works appeared: The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907f.), Fernand Cabrol and Henri Leclercq’s Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie (1907–53), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (first edn. 1957; word for word, the best medieval reference work available), the Encyclopedia of World Art (1959), The New Catholic Encyclopedia (1967), and The Dictionary of Art (Grove, 1996), to name only a few. Many distinguished catalogues appeared and continue to appear (of which I will mention only two series, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, 1975f. and Manuscrits enluminés de la Bibliothèque nationale, 1980f.), as well as corpora (most notably the Corpus Vitrearum series, 1952f.48). New editions of sources, also, continue to be published (Corpus Christianorum, 1953f., being only the most prominent), as do many translation series.
With the great changes that began to emerge in the 1960s, changes that affected almost every aspect of Western culture, came an increasingly complex environment for medieval art history. There were many reasons for these far-reaching changes. But as they apply to art history – which was especially affected by them in the 1970s and throughout the 1980s – one of the initial causes may be said to be the relativism that has for so long been a central factor in Western thought. Although a recognition of the impossibility of achieving an objective historical reality appeared already with Herodotus – the “Father of History,” considered to have written the first comprehensive, more or less critical history in the West – an increasing appreciation of this issue had a particularly destabilizing effect on art history at this time. The claim of a universal standard for Classical art that had been so taken for granted from the first history of Western art by Xenocrates to at least the late nineteenth century was now seen as thoroughly invalidated, as was that of a “scientific” basis to so many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theories of art. Not only did the universal theories of the leading scholars of earlier generations seem hopelessly antiquated, but the basic necessity of continuing to identify, document, and classify the vast body of artistic remains from the past seemed lacking to some as the primary mission of art history. And while most of the great theorists of the earlier generations would never have insisted that a given approach was the only way, a reaction set in to what seemed to some to be attempts to put forth a single way of viewing and interpreting art. A new art history that was socially relevant and intellectually current was being called for, and the discipline seemed to be in a crisis.
While the “new art history” would have been quite impossible without the gains of the “old” – the indispensable work on authentication, localization, dating, periodization, style, attributions, biography, and so on – the “new” has revitalized the field and opened up new areas of research by asking new questions. This has come about through the adoption of interdisciplinary methodologies that have transformed other areas of the humanities and social sciences, typically described under such designations as literary criticism, structuralism, deconstruction, post-structuralism, linguistic theory, semiotics, reception theory, narratology, psychology, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, post-colonialism, feminism, the new historicism, Marxism, and social art history. What these new methodologies all have in common is that they have often redirected attention from very circumscribed approaches regarding questions of style, form, dating, the œuvre of the artist, biography, and so on to broader concerns of the function of the artwork in its historical context – economic, social, cultural, ideological, gender, perceptual concerns – while reading the artwork as an active agent in the construction of that context.
However, these new “theories,” as they are sometimes called, are not always compatible, with one stating that the meaning of an artwork is constructed by the viewer (not the artist), another that the original meaning is unknowable, another still that meaning is found only deeply beneath the surface of the subject, and still another that the meaning of a given artwork is based in a generally recoverable historical reality even if formed by a complex and variable dynamic of economic, social, and political conditions. Structuralism, for example, looks beneath surface content at social relationships in terms of an abstract system of signs, whose meaning lies in the relationships between these signs. Deconstruction, in contrast, analyzes the text, or in the case of artworks, the “text,” in terms of binary oppositions, revealing a number of contradictory meanings that subvert the hierarchy that is the basis of the oppositions, ultimately hoping to show that there is no single authoritative reading of a given text (or “text”). And Marxism and social art history in general (which are not new at all, although they are usually associated with these other methodologies as part of the “new art history”) find very specific meanings in texts and images, though they typically see those texts and images in relation to contemporary ideologies.
Most of these new theories originated in the study of modern or contemporary culture, and, generally speaking, they were first introduced into the discipline of art history through those same fields of modern and contemporary. Whether because the medieval field already had a tradition of image theory and exegetical interpretation49 or because some of the new theories are so strongly based in modern (as opposed to medieval) modes of thought, medieval has taken up some methodologies more quickly than it has others.50 These new approaches have resonated, in particular, in the areas of vision, reception, narratology, and gender.51 Other areas might be said to be affected in a significant, if relatively indirect, way by post-colonial theory.52
New issues have also arisen, sometimes as a result of the new environment of interdisciplinarity, sometimes as a development of earlier issues that were never worked out, such as patronage and collecting, which, at times, may now investigate the relation between art and society with regard to a wide range of social and political issues beyond the immediate identification of a given patron or pieces of a collection.53
But none of this means that proven methodologies have simply been cast aside – non omnia grandior aetas, quae fugiamus, habet, “Not everything old age has is to be spurned,” as Dugdale so boldly stated (see fig. 1-3).54 Good, often excellent, work continues on stylistic analysis, attribution, dating, biography, and iconography, whether as discrete topics or as part of broader studies. At the same time, subjects and issues that have been of interest to medieval art historians for generations continue to be of interest, although, now, they are often informed by the so-called new theories in such a way that they would not be characterized as overtly dependent on these theories. The study of Romanesque architecture may address questions of economics, that of Romanesque sculpture may ask questions about the subjectivity of the viewer of an artwork, and that of Romanesque manuscript illumination may take up feminist issues.55 Work on Gothic architecture may reflect the new interests in the function of the artwork in its historical and social contexts, Gothic manuscript illumination may be concerned with the reception of the image, and stained glass may employ narratology.56 This is true for all the areas of architecture, sculpture, painting, stained glass, and the sumptuous arts.57 Some subjects that were of concern in the past have now become virtually distinct areas of research, including architectural layout, sculptural programs, spolia, the monstrous, and the marginal.58 While important monographic studies continue to appear, specific groups of artworks – sometimes institutionally based, sometimes thematically – have taken on a new interest, such as the art of the Cistercian Order, the illustration of saints’ lives, and the art of the pilgrimage.59 The primary sources continue to be given attention. And the interest in medieval has extended into the modern period in the study by medievalists of medieval revival movements and the modern medieval museum.60 Of all the recent changes, perhaps the most conspicuous is the increasingly wide and deep acceptance of one form or another of social art history. This interest in the social function of art has been on every point of the spectrum – typically not Marxist, although usually with a more specific focus than Burckhardt’s cultural history or Panofsky’s iconology. Its subjects may range from specific social interactions to broad social control to the particular spirituality associated with a specific social group, all of which may be seen as reinforcing the current social system, though often interpreted through different dynamics and understood in different degrees, according to the different authors. What has fallen by the wayside is an exaggerated concern with explaining medieval art through universally applicable artistic standards, cyclical theories of history, the exaltation of medieval art in the formation of national identities, studies of the artist as genius, and universal theories regarding autonomous artistic form.
In trying to come to terms with the basic difference between Middle Eastern and Western modes of thought, T. E. Lawrence perceptively identified the underlying characteristic of modern Western thought as relativism, describing it strikingly as, “doubt, our modern crown of thorns” (private edn. 1926, public 1935). His analysis of Middle Eastern thought would now be seen as open to question in a number of ways. But Lawrence – “Lawrence of Arabia,” who wrote what today might loosely be thought of as an MA in medieval art history at Oxford in 191061 – was on target with his representation of relativism (which he accepted), implying that it both marks a certain level of attainment for Western culture and punishes and perhaps even mocks its bearer at the same time. Today, the multiplicity of approaches within art history, whose basic impetus has been, in large part, modern relativism, suggests to some that the discipline is in crisis. But as this historiography has shown, there has never been a time since Winckelmann – that is, since the generally accepted beginning of modern art historical studies – that art history did not seem to be in crisis. It is a commonplace that each generation conceives of itself in reaction to the previous one. Indeed, these are not crises in the sense of an uncertainty over the nature of the discipline, but the periodic tensions of re-addressing attitudes and focuses of study to correspond to current interests and perceived gaps of knowledge; such current interests, of course, not being in any way monolithic or accepted uncritically. For some, methodological positions are like a religion – there is no other way. For most, however, there has been a distinct rejection of dogmatism and a willingness to use differing methodologies according to the demands of the problem chosen, seeing methodology and theory as means to shed light on objects of study, rather than the other way around. Whatever the negative aspects of this problematic relativism may be, it has resulted in a positive multiplicity of approaches as called for, most notably, by Hans Belting in 1983, whether or not this has matched Belting’s personal conception. While some of these new theories will be with us in the future and some, like the grand theories of the past, will be discarded, a multiplicity of approaches is as characteristic of the early twenty-first century as Romanticism was of the early nineteenth.
The current environment, however, is not explained so easily as simply one in which anything goes. It is not the same world it was when medieval art history began to establish itself so many years ago. Times have changed – including more than academic theories. The world-view of the educated public has also changed, and the major Western cultures that could look to the past as well as the present for national identity in the nineteenth century increasingly look only to the present and the future in the twenty-first. If, in the early nineteenth century, Hugo’s popular novel could electrify the public in regard to medieval art and architecture, in the late twentieth, Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose (1980), elicited no such reaction. In a key incident in The Name of the Rose, a foreshadowing of the main events of the novel is conveyed through the experience of one of the protagonists (Adso) of viewing a medieval sculpted portal based directly on the twelfth-century south porch of Moissac (the same one studied so remarkably by Schapiro). And, later, the introduction of one of the crucial figures (Jorge) culminates with his vehement condemnation of the potential of medieval art to distract the monk from spiritual pursuits, using the words of Bernard of Clairvaux’s famous Apologia.62 But, despite the popularity of this book (nine million copies sold; the basis of a major motion picture), it had no discernible effect in stimulating an appreciation or even an awareness of medieval culture on the part of the modern public. Admittedly, Eco does not provide such a gloss on medieval art and architecture as Hugo did in his chapter, “This Will Kill That” (book 5, chapter 2). Yet medieval art and architecture are a constant in The Name of the Rose, a key part of the narrative, even of the plot.
The real difference lies in the fundamental change of social and political dynamics since Hugo’s time. Medieval culture does not relate to modern Western cultures – especially American – in the present day in the same way that it did in the nineteenth century, at a time of tumultuous formation of national identities. We, today, are no longer drawn to medieval by the Romanticism of an earlier century or by the nationalism; or by the desire to establish universal theories – the often captivating theories of previous scholars that are, generation after generation, called into question. Rather, we are drawn to the Middle Ages because the art and architecture speak to us differently from that of other times and places: the seeming contradictions of simplicity and complexity, stability and change, domination and freedom, the looking backward and the looking forward, the memory of empire and the growth of urbanism, regionalism and internationalization, superstition and the beginnings of modern thought, the differences from and the similarities to our own culture. And we are drawn by a sense of loss, the same sense of loss that motivated our predecessors, the first medievalists. Relevancy, in any field, is the same as it ever was, even if a given field cannot spearhead national movements: addressing issues of contemporary concern, asking new questions, filling in the gaps of knowledge (both newly perceived and of long standing). And here, medieval seems wide open. Having only recently emerged, with the aid of relativism, that double-edged sword, from the need to compete with the standards of Classical and Renaissance art – and the need to seek justification in modern abstract art – a new history of medieval art is now being written, one step at a time. Whether we look at art history for social relevancy or in terms of Burckhardt’s “problem solving,” this is an exciting time for medieval. A new critical awareness has combined with a dedication to historical research that was not always the case in the past, though there have been eminent exceptions. In many ways, the field is open as never before. The issues of the time are varied and point no less than those of the past both to the heart of medieval art history and to its future. The destruction of the medieval patrimony with the Reformation and its aftermath was a great loss for Western culture. But it is a destruction from which many a plum is still waiting to be plucked.
To Françoise Forster-Hahn, on the occasion of 40 years of distinguished scholarship, curatorship, and teaching.
My thanks to my friends and colleagues, Françoise Forster-Hahn and Steven Ostrow, for their critical reading of drafts of this chapter.
It was not possible to fully reference this chapter for reasons of space. The vast majority of the historiographical information in it, however, is common knowledge. For this, I have consulted a large number of original authors and secondary studies. The works of the original authors will be clear enough to anyone wishing to read further. Among the secondary studies, unless otherwise cited, see especially the following (referred to in the notes by author name and short title).
For general art historiographical studies: W. Eugene Kleinbauer, ed., Modern Perspectives in Western Art History (New York, 1971); Heinrich Dilly, Kunstgeschichte als Institution: Studien zur Geschichte einer Disziplin (Frankfurt, 1979); Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, 1982); Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art?, trans. Christopher S. Wood (Chicago, 1987); Gert Schiff, ed., German Essays on Art History (New York, 1988); Udo Kultermann, The History of Art History (New York, 1993); Vernon Hyde Minor, Art History’s History (Englewood Cliffs, 1994); Eric Fernie, ed., Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology (London, 1995); Donald Preziosi, ed., The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford, 1998); Peter Betthausen et al., eds., Metzler kunsthistoriker Lexikon (Stuttgart, 1999).
For specifically medieval art historiography: Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries (Princeton, 1960); Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm, 1960); Wayne Dynes, “Tradition and Innovation in Medieval Art,” in James Powell, ed., Medieval Studies: An Introduction (Syracuse, 1976), pp. 313–42; Harry Bober, “Introduction,” in Emile Mâle, Religious Art in France: The Twelfth Century, A Study of the Origins of Medieval Iconography (Princeton, 1978), pp. v–xxi; Tina Waldeier Bizzarro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism: A Prehistory (Cambridge, 1992) (especially for the early historiography of England and France); W. Eugene Kleinbauer, “Introduction,” in Helen Damico, ed., Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, 3 vols. (New York, 1995–2000), vol. III, pp. 215–29. A number of other more narrowly focused medieval art historiographies are cited in the notes.
The dates in parentheses in the text are normally original publication dates, not references to works cited in a bibliography; I have given these in the hope of providing a better sense of the chronological progression of the historiographical issues than might be the case with the usual birth and death dates of authors.
1 Iona and Peter Opie, eds., Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, new edn. (Oxford, 1997), pp. 275–9.
2 James Gairdner, The English Church in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1924), pp. 419–30.
3 Theodor E. Mommsen, Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Ithaca, NY, 1959), pp. 106–29.
4 Paul Lehmann, “Mittelalter und Küchenlatein,” Historische Zeitschrift 137 (1928), pp. 197–213; Nathan Edelman, “The Early Uses of Medium Aevum, Moyen Age, Middle Ages,” The Romanic Review 29 (1938), pp. 3–25; Oxford English Dictionary, “middle age.”
5 Harvey C. Mansfield, Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders: A Study of the Discourses on Livy (Chicago, 2001), pp. 35–41.
6 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori, Dell’Architettura 3, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence, 1878–85), vol. I, pp. 137–8; trans. Frankl, in The Gothic, pp. 290–1. The terms “Baroque” and “Enlightenment” were also used in a pejorative sense at one time.
7 T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London, 1950), p. 63.
8 Oxford English Dictionary, “gothic.”
9 Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts: Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988), p. 86.
10 Frankl, The Gothic, p. 352.
11 Bizzarro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism, p. 59.
12 Thomas Cocke, “Rediscovery of the Romanesque,” in English Art 1066–1200 (London, 1984), pp. 360–6, esp. p. 361.
13 Bizzarro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism, p. 47.
14 All quotations from Goethe are from John Gage, ed., Goethe on Art (Berkeley, 1980), pp. 103–12, esp. pp. 105, 108–9.
15 On the modern medieval art museum, see chapter 30 by Brown in this volume.
16 Walter Cahn, Romanesque Manuscripts: The Twelfth Century, 2 vols. (London, 1996), vol. I, pp. 28–30.
17 Bizzarro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism, esp. pp. 132–49.
18 Kultermann, History of Art History, p. 62.
19 Mitchell Schwarzer, “Origins of the Art History Survey Text,” Art Journal 54:3 (1995), p. 25.
20 Ibid., p. 27.
21 Françoise Forster-Hahn, “Moving Apart: Practicing Art History in the Old and New Worlds,” in Michael F. Zimmermann, ed., The Art Historian: National Traditions and Institutional Practice (Williamstown, 2003), pp. 67–77, esp. pp. 69–70.
22 Fernie, Art History, p. 85.
23 See chapter 21 by Pastan in this volume.
24 Bober, “Introduction,” pp. v–xxi, esp. p. xi.
25 Ibid., pp. vii–xi. For the state of research on Romanesque art in France, see Marcel Durliat, “L’art roman en France (Etat des questions),” Annuario de estudios medievales 5 (1968), pp. 609–27.
26 Louis Grodecki, “La sculpture du XIe siècle en France: Etat des questions” (1958), reprinted in Le Moyen Age retrouvé (Paris, 1986), pp. 49–67, esp. p. 49.
27 See chapters 23 and 24 by Folda and Papacostas, respectively, in this volume.
28 See chapter 16 by Maxwell in this volume.
29 Bober, “Introduction,” pp. ix, xix.
30 Cited by Thomas Lyman, French Romanesque Sculpture: An Annotated Bibliography (Boston, 1987), p. 4.
31 Bober, “Introduction,” pp. xi–xii.
32 Kathryn Brush, The Shaping of Art History: Wilhelm Vöge, Adolph Goldschmidt, and the Study of Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 63–5. For the state of research on early Gothic sculpture, see Willibald Sauerländer, “Sculpture on Early Gothic Churches: The State of Research and Open Questions,” Gesta 9 (1970), pp. 32–48.
33 Walter Cahn and Linda Seidel, “Introduction,” Romanesque Sculpture in American Collections (New York, 1979), pp. 1–16, esp. p. 9.
34 Linda Seidel, “Arthur Kingsley Porter,” in Damico, ed., Medieval Scholarship, pp. 273–86. See also Seidel, “Arthur Kingsley Porter: Life, Legend and Legacy,” in Craig Hugh Smyth and Peter M. Lukehart, eds., The Early Years of Art History in the United States (Princeton, 1993), pp. 97–110.
35 On formalism, see chapter 5 by Seidel in this volume.
36 Margaret Olin, “Alois Riegl,” in Damico, ed., Medieval Scholarship, pp. 231–44, esp. p. 236.
37 Cited by Kultermann, History of Art History, p. 167.
38 Schiff, German Essays on Art History, pp. xlix–l.
39 On the successor to the Vienna School, the New Vienna School (particularly the medievalists Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt), see the introduction by Christopher S. Wood, ed., to The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (New York, 2000), pp. 9–72.
40 Cited by Kultermann, History of Art History, p. 138.
41 This was not without some contradiction; see Walter Cahn, “Henri Focillon,” in Damico, ed., Medieval Scholarship, pp. 259–71, esp. pp. 263, 267, 269. For more on Focillon, see also chapters 15 and 16 by Hourihane and Maxwell, respectively, in this volume.
42 Kathryn Brush, “Adolph Goldschmidt,” in Damico, ed., Medieval Scholarship, pp. 245–58, esp. pp. 254–5. See also Kathryn Brush, The Shaping of Art History: Wilhelm Vöge, Adolph Goldschmidt, and the Study of Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1996).
43 Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York, 1939), pp. 3–17.
44 For a recent review of the literature on the architecture of St Denis, see Lawrence R. Hoey, “A Critical Account of Suger’s Architecture at Saint-Denis,” AVISTA Forum 12 (1999), pp. 12–19.
45 On this intellectual diaspora, see Colin Eisler, “Kunstgeschichte American Style: A Study in Migration,” in Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds., The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), pp. 544–629. For a detailed review of medieval art historical scholarship from approximately 1978 to 1988, see Herbert L. Kessler, “On the State of Medieval Art History,” Art Bulletin 70 (1988), pp. 166–87. For approximately 1988–2004, see Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art (Peterborough, 2004), which – in an unintended challenge to the statement of Sauerländer cited in the Preface, that no one can read everything – is an extended essay explicitly intended as a review of the scholarship covering 16 years, whose subject is a number of issues that have been central to the study of medieval art during this time.
46 Karl Werckmeister, review of Meyer Schapiro, Romanesque Art, in The Art Quarterly n.s. 2 (1979), pp. 211–18; John Williams, “Meyer Schapiro in Silos: Pursuing an Iconography of Style,” Art Bulletin 85 (2003), pp. 442–68.
47 On the development of art history in Europe in general, see Kultermann, History of Art History; in Germany, see Dilly, Kunstgeschichte, and Betthausen et al., eds.,s Metzler kunsthistoriker Lexikon; and in the US, see Smyth and Lukehart, eds., The Early Years of Art History.
48 On the Corpus Vitrearum series, see chapter 21 by Pastan in this volume.
49 See chapters 7 and 8 by Kessler and Hughes, respectively, in this volume.
50 On the distance, at times, of medieval from the rest of the discipline of art history, see Kessler, “On the State of Medieval Art History,” p. 166. On modernism as the source of the dichotomy between pre-modern and modern art history, see Belting, End of the History of Art?, pp. 34–46.
51 See chapters 2, 3, 4, and 6 by Hahn, Caviness, Lewis, and Kurmann-Schwarz, respectively, in this volume.
52 See chapters 23 and 24 by Folda and Papacostas, respectively, in this volume.
53 See chapters 9 and 10 by Caskey and Mariaux, respectively, in this volume.
54 Ovid, Metamorphoses 6: 28–9.
55 See chapters 14, 15, 16, and 17 by Fernie, Hourihane, Maxwell, Cohen, respectively, in this volume.
56 See chapters 18, 20, and 21 by Murray, Hedeman and Pastan, respectively, in this volume.
57 See chapters 19 and 22 by Büchsel and Buettner, respectively, in this volume.
58 See chapters 25, 26, 11, 12, and 13 by Zenner, Boerner, Kinney, Dale, and Kendrick, respectively, in this volume.
59 See chapters 27 and 28 by Fergusson and Gerson, respectively, in this volume.
60 See chapters 29 and 30 by Bizzarro and Brown, respectively, in this volume.
61 On Lawrence’s Master’s thesis, see chapter 23 by Folda in this volume.
62 Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (New York, 1983), pp. 40–5, 78–83.