2
Vision
Some understanding of what it means “to see” underlies any concept of art. In recent years it has been argued, however, that sight is not the immutable and a historic sense that it was once understood to be. Rather, as “visuality,” it has a history. This chapter will examine some of the ways that conceptions of vision and visuality have shaped and driven scholarship on medieval art.1
Before beginning, it should be noted that vision has two distinct meanings in medieval art, both important to our purposes here. The first concerns the theological, scientific, and cultural understanding of the means and possibilities of sight or the gaze. The second meaning, related, but often treated quite separately, concerns mental and revelatory or nightmarish experiences. These visions2 are important theologically and culturally, but are only a subset of an understanding of the more abstract issue of the meaning of vision.
An intriguing starting point for the understanding of vision derives from its negation. That is, in a recent book, Moshe Barasch has treated the “mental image” of blindness. Just as vision has a history, so too does blindness – one which illuminates some of the issues that will concern us in discussing sight. Barasch clarifies that blindness in antiquity might be a physical failing but also could represent special qualities of vision, as for example, those of a “seer”; in his analysis of the Gospels and early Christian era, he shows that blindness can represent a state of sin or a temporary state of nothingness, as when Paul is struck blind on the road to Damascus. Later medieval meanings shift yet again, continuing the notion of the blind sinner but introducing a new ambiguity with the figure of the itinerant beggar who can be either devious or virtuous. The Middle Ages additionally creates the category of noble and allegorical figures, such as Synagogue, that represent a condition of disastrous blindness signified by a blindfold.
Just as these meanings vary from seer to sinner, so cultural perceptions of the utility and status of sight vary widely throughout the Middle Ages and even verge upon contradiction. They range from the insistence on the “eye of the mind” and lowered eyes in early medieval work, to the wary use of the visual, to the culturally determined “gaze” and a full confidence in the epistemological potential of physical sight in the later Middle Ages. Although our charge here is to consider discussions of art from the Romanesque to the Gothic, it will be necessary to include some scholarship on earlier and later art in order fully to understand the impetus for discussions of vision in medieval art.
One of the striking qualities of the literature on vision is how often the wheel has been reinvented. The core of scholarship has been produced in religious studies and history of science. Art historians have turned to this material for insight and have not, for the most part, built upon previous art historical studies. One might hope that a chapter like this, and the increasing interest in concepts of vision that it reflects, will help to make our discipline aware of the valuable work that has been done within its own boundaries.
Given the impossibility of constructing a coherent historiography because of the reasons noted above, I will not attempt to treat the subject chronologically, either in terms of bibliography or in terms of any “development” of the history of vision within the Middle Ages. Rather, I will rely upon disciplinary and conceptual categories to outline the complexities of the topic.
Of course, the first task must be a definition of terms. The fundamental understanding of vision for the Middle Ages develops from writings by the Church Fathers, principally Augustine. Sixten Ringbom’s seminal book, Icon to Narrative, represents an early treatment of this material by an art historian. A fuller and more contextually grounded treatment can be found in an article on Augustine by Margaret Miles, a scholar of religion. Finally, Jeffrey Hamburger has contributed significantly to this tradition by clarifying the limits and possibilities of the application of Augustine’s ideas to the treatment of art.3
Augustine’s treatment of vision occurs in his treatise On the Literal Meaning of Genesis.4 In that treatise, the Church Father discusses Paul’s visions from 2 Corinthians 12, in which the Apostle is lifted to the seventh heaven. (Already we see the importance of the intermingled ideas of vision and visions.) In a text fundamental to all of Christian theology on sight, Augustine clarifies that there are three sorts of seeing: The lowest level, “corporeal vision,” consists of what one sees with the eyes of the body. “Spiritual vision” is the occurrence of images in dreams or the imagination, largely but not exclusively dependent on the recollections of corporeal vision. As the first level functions in the second, so the second level is interpreted in the third, although it may also work independently. The third level, “intellectual vision,” occurs exclusively in the highest levels of the mind and is the only site where Augustine admitted the possible perception of divine truths. It is not visual in the normal sense of the word but concerns divine knowledge. In fact, Augustine did not discuss art at all in this commentary; he was primarily interested in the imagery of dreams and prophecies.
Related religious commentary on visions and dreaming is essential to understanding the significance of Augustine’s categories. This has been a fruitful area of discussion in recent years, particularly distinguished by the work of Steven Kruger.5 Again Augustine’s treatise on Genesis takes a central place.
For Augustine dreams are a middle ground of mixed nature with the potential to reveal both the human and the divine.6 Made up of images, garnered from corporeal vision, they have the potential for “prophetic insight” (XII.21.44). In Augustine if such dreams/visions emanate from a “spirit” source (i.e., an angel as opposed to a demon) and are “used” rather than “enjoyed,” they may lead to the highest form of sight, the non-sensory intellectual vision. Augustine’s dream theory is repeated almost without change in theological sources throughout the Middle Ages.7
Some later sources, however, shift emphasis. For example, Richard of St Victor, following other early medieval traditions in Tertullian and Prudentius, argues that the reliability of dreams is correlated to the relative cleanliness of the soul.8 Albertus Magnus and others even discuss relative levels of individual perception. As Kruger summarizes the De divinatione per somnum:
the human [imaginative soul] receives the celestial “lumen,” or “motus” or “forma” in images, perceiving celestial truths more or less clearly [according to what is appropriate and possible for each individual].9
The terminology that Albertus uses is identical to that of both cosmology (with origins in Plato’s Phaedrus) and optics. The discussion of visions and dreams, therefore, leads to much larger questions of meaning and epistemology.
The types and contents of visions have been summarized10 and art historians such as Ringbom and Carloyn Carty have concerned themselves with the representation of dreams and visions. Ringbom has described conventions of such imagery and Carty has gone from the history of dream representations to linking visions to the initiation of narrative.11
Perhaps the most potentially productive extension of the interrelationship of visions and art is Mary Carruthers’s work on memory and imagination. She has shown the interdependence of visions and the process or “craft” of thought. Most importantly, she has been able effectively to link these mental processes that lie at the core of medieval thought and religion to the visual and even to art.12
As noted above, discussions of dreams and visions in the Middle Ages share a vocabulary with the medieval science of optics. Whereas the theology of vision and visions remained relatively stable (i.e., Augustinian) throughout the Middle Ages, optics, in its guise as natural philosophy, evolves in significant ways.
The foremost historian of optics for the Middle Ages has been David Lindberg, who ardently asserts the centrality of his material: “Because optics could reveal the essential nature of material reality, of cognition, and indeed of God himself, its pursuit became not only legitimate, but obligatory.”13 Optical theory of the Middle Ages consists primarily of a series of variations upon two major theories of sight: that of extramission and that of intromission. The extramission theory contends that the eye emits a visual ray. This ray, strengthened by the presence of light, goes out to encounter its visual object, is shaped by that object, and finally returns to the eye. Lindberg explains that in this, the Augustinian tradition which he characterizes as the epistemology of light, “the process of acquiring knowledge of unchanging Platonic forms is considered analogous to corporeal vision, through the eye.”14 The intromission theory is Aristotelian in origin and is transmitted through the Arab scholar Alhazen to the Oxford school. It is based on a visual pyramid originating in the visible object. Rays leaving all parts of the object enter the eye. The perpendicular rays are the strongest and dominate reception.15 Again, light and its divine origin plays an important part.
Thus far, I have given a very crude sketch of some of the theological and scientific bases for the medieval understanding of vision. However, for cultural historians, it is of course, the implications of these ideas for medieval art and expression that are of the highest interest.
Literary historians have been more active than art historians in thinking about how such theories, dogmas, and cultural constructions might affect artistic creation. For example, the early medieval literary scholar Giselle de Nie, in attempting to understand the power of images and how they might differ from words, has delved into anthropology, philosophy, and psychology. Following René Devisch, she argues for the embedding of meaning in the body by means of vision which can be subsequently revealed through ritual: “Ritual symbols… arise from a potential which, akin to the dream, unconceals both images and inner energy woven into the texture of the body.”16 Or taking the derivation from perception to image, that is, from the other direction as does Paul Ricoeur, in his Rule of Metaphor, she argues that an apt mental image or a combination of images can bring awareness or experience into focus.17 De Nie concludes that both modern anthropology and philosophy can help to explain the antique and early medieval belief that God communicated through dreams and miracles: “the visible could be regarded as a figure – congruous or inverted – of the invisible, and was thereby thought to participate in the latter’s qualities.”18 She uses the example of a miracle in which a man was healed through the contemplation of a candle flame. The man’s gaze “generated not only some mental picture of the saint as a person, but also an affect-laden mental image of the powerful mystic fire… [combined with] the central early Christian imaginative model of illumination by Christ.” Thus “affectively enacting a metaphor + a mental image.”19 Nevertheless, de Nie rarely discusses art images, and the complications of transferring these provocative ideas about vision to art are many.20
As long as three decades ago, another literary scholar, Ruth Cline, demonstrated the connection between looking and love in medieval texts, an association forged through theories of vision.21 Current scholarship links similar, but significantly different categories – desire and the gaze. Among medieval literary scholars, Sarah Stanbury has done important work on determining the operation of the gaze and its implication in structuring gender in medieval literature from the twelfth century and later. In an article using the methodology of film theory to investigate Chrétien’s Erec et Enide, she concludes that: “descriptions of women’s bodies in medieval texts are shaped by gendered social conventions governing the rights and restrictions on looking.”22 Through the gaze of the court, Stanbury argues that Enide is “transformed from a natural girl to the courtly maiden… a constructed woman” and concludes that, “gaze [is] a generative process, one that creates self through its very apprehension of the other.”23 The literary critic become art historian, Norman Bryson, established the gaze as an art historical issue. He defined the gaze as a means of apprehending art, distinguished in its aloofness from the emotionally laden glance through which the perception of the “real” is gleaned.24 Medieval art historians, such as Madeline Caviness, have also described the gaze and its constructs, but in general, that interest has been more productive for issues of concern to feminist art history than for those of visuality.25 Very recently, the historian Suzannah Biernoff has integrated this material, describing the interrelationship of the gaze, especially as it is grounded in the body, gender, and carnality, with scientific and theological theories of vision. For example, theories of extramission allow “carnal vision [to extend] the appetite and attributes of the flesh beyond the boundaries of individual bodies.” She forcefully reasserts the idea that, rather than a physiological process, “vision is always mediated by discourses about vision.”26
Hal Foster most decisively defined this concept of the cultural construction of vision for art history, using the term visuality. He noted, “difference, many differences, among how we see, how we are able, allowed or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen therein.”27 In the substantial wake of other historians of modern art, including Jonathan Crary and Martin Jay, medieval art historians have begun to explicate modes of visuality operant in medieval art. Two notable moves in this direction have included Marvin Trachtenberg’s use of visuality in discussing architecture and urban space dependent upon a new “viewing subject” and the “scopic power” of Florentine civic planning;28 and the organization of a symposium by Robert Nelson at the University of California Los Angeles in 1995 to consider a wide variety of aspects of pre-modern visuality. The introduction of the published volume and five of its essays concern the Middle Ages or its antecedents.29
Jas Elsner argues against the exclusivity of the “voyeurism” of naturalism in ancient art and suggests that in ritual settings such as pilgrimage (as described by Pausanias) an alternate “medieval” visuality obtained that was “oracular, liturgical, and epiphanic.”30 In an intentional confrontation with the frontal image that returns the viewer’s gaze, “viewing the sacred is a process of divesting the spectator of all the social and discursive elements that distinguish his or her subjectivity from that of the god into whose space the viewer will come.”31
Also concerned with pilgrimage, but of the early Christian era, Georgia Frank’s “The Pilgrim’s Gaze in the Age Before Icons” emphasizes that “vision was believed to contain the power to conjure, constitute, and respond to the presence of the divine…. The physical sense of sight was anything but a passive activity in antiquity; it was a form of physical contact between the viewer and the object.”32
Robert Nelson, like Elsner, wants to treat the “cultural construction and maintenance” of visuality in the Byzantine world. Using evidence from ekphrasis, he argues that vision was more important than hearing in Byzantium because it was “dynamic, forceful, consequential, and even performative.”33
In my own contribution to the Nelson volume, without trying to explain the mechanism of change, I make use of the medieval theological presumption of vision as a means of knowing to show that the understanding of the operation of sight shifts in the later Middle Ages from the possibility of an epiphany of divine truth perceived in the sudden glance to an appreciation of divine truth growing with the contemplative gaze.34
Finally, in his contribution to the same volume, an essay much expanded from the talk originally presented at a symposium at Northwestern University in 1994,35 Michael Camille generally offers an argument about the crucial role of vision to Gothic perception and therefore to Gothic art. He weaves together medieval scientific texts and observations of artworks to describe medieval psychology and its resultant images that “were so much more powerful, moving, and instrumental, as well as disturbing and dangerous, than later works of art.”36
Camille later expanded and generalized these ideas in a survey text, Gothic Art: Glorious Visions, arguing that “[Gothic people] were enraptured witnesses to a new way of seeing” (12).37 His discussion of the thirteenth-century understanding – Roger Bacon via Avicenna – of the completion of vision in the brain is essential to an understanding of Gothic scholastic vision:
One only perceived something when the “species” traveled to the brain, where the internal senses were located. The system of five cells or ventricles… illustrates how the visible species passed first into the ...sensus communis, which apprehended appearances, located at the front of the brain. Next came the ...ymaginatio vel formalis, which retained these forms; above it, the estimativa judged them. Further back, linked to the first kind of imagination, was a second kind, labeled cogitativa, which composed and combined images…. Finally, at the back of the head was the storehouse of memory, the vis memorativa with its little flap… which opened to let the images flow in and out.38
Camille shows how important this understanding is to the increasing “transparency” of images and to their reception in the human brain.
Elsner was concerned to describe two competing modes of vision in the ancient world. Camille, Frank, Hahn, and Nelson look at particular periods, documents, and scientific theories to allow a characterization of visualities dominant in various periods. Clearly, Nelson’s volume provides no single understanding of what the concept of visuality offers, but certain themes dominate the volume. Perhaps the most important conclusion is that discussions of the way sight works can readily be expanded into what sight can mean and what sight can allow us to know – that is, the epistemological dimension of vision in a given era.
Of course epistemology in the Middle Ages was essentially the realm of theology. In trying to trace the significance of modern scholarly thought on these issues, one must turn to a larger cluster of work on medieval “image theory” that attempts to understand what medieval viewers believed about art and what it could do. This material, of course, is best read against ecclesiastical image policy and theology. Although it is by no means always cast in terms of “visuality,” image theory is essential to the understanding of the cultural history of vision, especially within the Christian tradition.
A fundamental text in the theology of the medieval image is Paul’s pronouncement in 1 Corinthians 13: 12 that “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.” This prophecy of clear and divine vision after death, when the faithful will see their Lord directly and without mediation, is subject to much controversy in medieval theological discussion, culminating in a fourteenth-century papal constitution.39 In contrast to the confidence in vision of the late medieval period, in the early Middle Ages, this same text is treated very differently. One might begin with art, but any vision of God was founded in prayer and the exercise of the “interior eyes.” The corporeal eyes were lowered, even perhaps pressed into the dust of the earth in a symbolic abasement of the corporeal sense.
In his Spiritual Seeing, Herbert Kessler is concerned with the cluster of theological ideas variously characterized as “interior sight,” seeing with the “eyes of the mind,” spiritual sight, etc. He characterizes this interior phenomenon, which might or might not be prompted by a corporeal stimulus such as art, as “spiritual seeing,” in a chapter entitled “Real Absence: Early Medieval Art and the Metamorphosis of Vision,” an important survey of early medieval attitudes both positive and negative toward art’s possibility to contribute to “spiritual seeing,” Kessler builds on the work of Celia Chazelle, Jean-Paul Schmitt, Gerhard Wolf, and Jean-Marie Sansterre, among others.40
Of central importance to this discussion as the foundation and origin of Western theology on the image are Gregory the Great’s renowned letters to Serenus of Marseilles that established papal approval for narrative and commemorative art.41 The relationship is not a complicated one: those that are illiterate can “read” in images as others do in books and thereby be reminded of religious truths. Complications arise in aspects of the way that Gregory presents his case. He notes an emotional element and the striking quality of visual imagery. Memories of edifying stories are stirred and strengthened by the narrative images. Many modern scholars have understood Gregory’s policy to be very limited and conservative, but when all the Father’s writings are considered, Gregory evinces a much more powerful and sympathetic vision of art. Instead of the simple reaction of the memory, he speaks of “revolving images in the mind until they are portrayed on the heart.”42 He also demonstrates a belief in the power and potential of the visual to change the soul of the viewer, if that soul is first prepared with prayer and “acts of faith.” These “tangential” issues are the ones that later medieval commentators turn to and build upon.43
One aspect of the commentary tradition on the letters that deserves particular attention is the privileging of certain categories of objects within the realm of Christian vision. Gregory himself mentioned pictures of Bible stories and lives of holy persons, praising their commemorative quality. In an eighth-century forged addition to a letter from Gregory the Great to Secundinus, additional sorts of artworks are mentioned and it is claimed that they have the power to lift the mind to higher things:
Your request pleased us greatly, because you seek with all your heart and all intentness Him, whose picture you wish to have before your eyes, so that every day, the corporeal sight renders Him visible; thus, when you see the picture, you are inflamed in your soul with love for Him whose image you wish to see. We do no harm in wishing to show the invisible by means of the visible…. Thus, we have sent you two images: one of the Savior and Mary the Holy Mother of God and the other of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, and a cross. CCSL 1110f.44
Perhaps it is not surprising that the representation of the cross and icons of Christ and Mary stand above other art objects in their status as access to the divine. This text, however, in mentioning an icon of the apostles Peter and Paul, opens the door to yet other images.
In contrast to this textual (or theological) validation, it should be noted that medieval ritual and cult importance testify to the special possibilities of vision offered by certain other categories of objects. These objects include relics (and reliquaries); acheiropoietae, that is images that avoid the taint of human manufacture in their origin as miraculous images “made without hands”;45 and once again, the cross.
The cross is exceptional among manufactured images – it is at once an image but also, in its physicality, it is like a relic (and of course, crosses often serve as reliquaries). It is allowed a particular status as an enduring and revealing sign, already promoted by Paul himself in the first letter to the Corinthians (1: 18): “For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” However, in early medieval images of devotion to the cross (fig. 2-1), it is notable that the devotee’s eyes are not even lifted to gaze upon the sign of salvation. Instead, the hand grasps and the eyes are averted, focusing attention away from corporeal eyes, turning to the “eyes of the heart,” in contrast, later medieval art allows and even encourages contemplation of the cross and the crucifixion, arguing that such contemplation, a type of prayer, will bring faith.46
One particular example of the crucifixion as means of divine access through vision is discussed by Jeanne-Marie Musto. Musto relies on the Carolingian theologian John Scottus Eriugena, who describes a hierarchical status of vision: “each shall behold that Vision in his own way… through certain apparitions of Himself appropriate to the capacity for contemplation of each one of the Saints, shall God be seen.”47 Musto argues that the upper cover of the Lindau Gospels in the Morgan Library represents an early medieval version of the relative access of persons to the divine vision, dependent on the perfection of their souls. Thus angels, floating at the top, view directly. In the mortal realm, saints are granted sight but mere mortals must turn away and look for guidance to the saints. Although Musto’s example is a particularly concrete instance of the special status of the cross or crucifixion, presumably all of the crosses produced in the Middle Ages, although not explicitly presented with such interpretive supplements, were held in similar regard.
FIGURE 2-1 “Adoration of the Cross,” Psalter of Louis the German (the drawing is a late ninth-century addition). Berlin: Staatsbibliothek MS lat. theol. fol. 58, fol. 120r. Reproduced courtesy of Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.
In striking contrast to such approved objects of vision, some subjects seem to have been represented due to their negative status. Thomas Dale argues for the importance of the mechanism of “sublimation” in the operation of monastic viewing in the Romanesque period. Monks looked at images of vices, nudes, monsters, etc., in order to overcome sensual temptation and weakness.48
Such functionality of images, working on the mind of the viewer, leads us from categories of images to types of imagery privileged by image theory. Here we return to Gregory’s original letters and the intimation that he is particularly interested in the edifying possibilities of narrative: “the deeds of holy persons.” This is one of the elements that has been exploited in recent studies on narrative in medieval art, including those of Caviness and Hahn.49 In the Life of Saint Alban by Matthew Paris, the saint’s sight of the cross leads to a narrative that explicates and realizes a series of concepts about faith and Christian meaning.50 Furthermore, the investigation of certain isolated narrative scenes, particularly moments of Christ’s divine epiphany such as the Transfiguration and the Ascension, has proven particularly fruitful in revealing possible mental processes set in motion by medieval images. Such studies include Jas (then John) Elsner’s treatment of the Transfiguration at Sinai as well as Robert Deshman’s discussion of the Ascension in Anglo-Saxon art.51 In the latter, for example, Deshman argued that the English monastic reform, in warning of the dangers of corporeal vision, held that the Apostles themselves were distracted by Christ’s physical presence. The miniatures of the Ascension depict, not Christ’s presence but his “disappearance,” allowing the viewer to begin to see His true and divine nature with the “eyes of mind.”52
If images can tell “effective” narratives and work to lift the mind to God, a final question concerning image theory remains. Can images convey the intricacies of theological meaning? And in particular, can art explicate or facilitate the relationship of sight and knowledge? In “Medieval Art as Argument,” Kessler expands on the possibilities of dogmatic or epiphanic images. He argues that art can be used to evoke “spiritual seeing” through its ability to “synthesize diverse sacred texts” and its capability, even in the early medieval period, to have an anagogical effect.53 For example, he argues that in the Apocalypse frontispiece from the Touronian Bible in London (BL Add. Ms. 10546, fol, 449 recto) the mysterious figure in the lower register, from whom the four evangelical beasts pull the veil, is a composite figure of Moses, John, and Paul, representing the videntes, or seers, of the Bible, both Old and New Testament. In a “subversion” of the author portrait type, the figure ends the manuscript with a portent of the vision to come in which the veil of both text and image will be lifted in order that the faithful will at last gain sight of the divine. However, far from thus creating a comprehensive and sufficient vision for the faithful, Kessler also contends that artists consistently reminded their audiences of the shortcomings of their media. He cites a series of Roman images of Christ’s face on board that were inserted into frescoes to argue that medieval artists consciously highlighted the materiality of their artistic product, denying that it actually represented a vision of the Lord’s face. Kessler compares these uses of images to Byzantine icon theory. He emphasizes: “Western image theory [was differentiated] absolutely from Byzantine notions that the icon was transparent, a window onto the higher reality.” “If the sacred image in the West was a bridge, then it was a drawbridge drawn up, if a window, then only with a shade pulled down. It marked the existence of the ‘world out there,’ but it also revealed its own inability to transport the faithful into that world.”54
Such ambitious, densely intellectual, and self-reflexive images tend to be the exception in the early medieval period. A symposium at Princeton University in 2001, sponsored by Anne-Marie Bouché and Jeffrey Hamburger, attempted to make a stronger case for such imagery in the art of the High and Late Middle Ages. Although “over recent years the interpretation of medieval art in terms of theological discourse has fallen out of favor,” they contended that:
Given all the uncertainties inherent in the interpretation of images, it seems significant that such important theological material [on the nature of Christ, the Eucharist and the meaning of the Incarnation] was entrusted to the visual realm…. Instead of using theology to explain art, we are now beginning to consider art as a special kind of language for communicating theology.55
The conference allowed a variety of approaches to that end. Mary Carruthers argued that in De Archa Noe mystica, Hugh of St Victor speaks of the ark in terms of its construction, using active verbs of craft and painting in a “preimaginative” process similar to that which craftsmen were taught to use in the Middle Ages. She argued that no material diagram was ever intended to accompany the text but that the visualization was a form of theological thought. In contrast, Bernard McGinn argued that Joachim of Fiore’s diagrams were communicated to him by vision and scripture and that these figura were intended to allow fleshly eyes to open spiritual eyes. Images could be used to go beyond images in a distinctly theological setting. (This approach is, of course, reminiscent of the early, important work of Anna Esmeijer.) Further in this vein, Christopher Hughes presented typology as a “cognitive style,” using Augustine’s City of God to argue that the comparative approach represents essential aspects of the structure of knowledge and encourages the viewer to think more deeply about the world. Anne-Marie Bouché even argued that the Floreffe Bible frontispieces directed their own interpretation in a puzzle-like procedure that privileged hermeneutic processes. In a talk that discussed primarily popular and liturgical sources of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Thomas Lentes focused on the spiritual senses and discussed how vision – “you are what you see” – shaped the person. (Of particular interest is how these ideas have precedents in the earlier Middle Ages.56) Katherine Tachau discussed scientific and theological aspects of the work of Grosseteste, Bacon, and others, showing its profound importance in the medieval understanding of the possibility of divine knowledge. Again, the conference had no single message about the status of “vision” in the Middle Ages, but instead, in these and other papers, provided a remarkably rich picture of the possibilities of medieval images in explicating and even advancing theology.57
Surprisingly, at the Princeton conference, one of the richest veins of theological imagery concerning vision from the Middle Ages remained untapped. We can end here with a further consideration of “Last Things”: illustrations of the Revelation of John. Suzanne Lewis has discussed the manuscript history of the many versions of the fantastic book, finding particular interest and narrative richness in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman examples.58 According to Barbara Nolan, in her groundbreaking book The Gothic Visionary Perspective, however, issues concerning vision were already broached in Apocalypse manuscripts and frescoes from the Romanesque period. Nolan detects shared “visionary” elements in literature and art, largely based on Apocalypse commentary, 59 and writes in her preface that she became “aware that common spiritual backgrounds must have supported the pervasive and long-lived persistence of the several ‘arts of vision’ once they had been invented during the twelfth century.”60 Nolan is particularly interested in the theology of Richard of St Victor who, in a variation upon the standard description of Augustine (whom she does not discuss), adds a “fourth mode of seeing.” Richard’s third mode involves the “eyes of the heart,” the oculi cordis, which “by means of forms and figures and the similitudes of things,” sees the “truth of hidden things.” His fourth mode is anagogical following Pseudo-Dionysius in which “anagogy is the ascent or elevation of the mind for supernatural contemplation,”61 but this ascent is through imagery: “Fixed on that light of eternity, he draws into himself the likeness of the image he perceives.”62 As Nolan clarifies, this “visionary approach to God was personal and vertical rather than social and historical”.63 Indeed, in this material we see the beginnings of a focus on the devotional use of vision.64
Despite her primary interest in the thinkers of the twelfth century, Nolan does draw attention to earlier commentators on the Apocalypse, especially singling out Bede, Alcuin, and Haimo of Auxerre. Bede and Alcuin both characterize the Apocalypse as concerned with “intellectual vision.”65 But Bede was also interested in the possible action of this vision. In his Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, he remarks that when Benedict Biscop imported models including Apocalypse imagery and portraits of Christ, Mary, and the Apostles from Rome for the decoration of his church at Wearmouth in 674, his intention was to better contemplate a certain “amabilem… aspectum,” to recall the grace of the Incarnation, and to allow viewers to judge themselves when they see the Last Judgment.66 In the same vein of personal involvement through sight, Haimo claims that John’s suffering on Patmos enabled him to see the heavenly secrets and will also serve as an example to allow others to share in this vision.67
Perhaps reflecting this possibility, an abbreviated text of Revelation that introduces a copy of Haimo of Auxerre’s commentary is illustrated with miniatures (Bodleian Library Ms. Bodley 352.). Folio 5v. shows John speaking to the Churches of Asia in two upper registers and, below, the Apostle receives the command “Ascende huc” (“Come up here”). He ascends to see a vision of God in the Heavenly Glory of his court.68 The miniature shows the figure of John adjacent to the court of heaven with the scroll carrying the words Ascende huc above him and the abbreviated biblical text squeezed into the borders of the miniature. John stands outside the “door into heaven” which the Apocalypse text specifies that he looked through (“After these things I looked and saw a door opened in heaven”: Rev 4: 1). Rather than peer through the door, John points to his eye – an early occurrence of a gesture that came to signify interior contemplation in contrast to corporeal sight (fig. 2-2).
Although he notes that Beatus, the most famous of Apocalypse commentators, has no particular understanding or theory of vision and the figure of John as “seer” does not occur in the Spanish manuscripts, Peter Klein sets Nolan’s earlier insights into the context of Augustinian commentaries on sight.69
By the time of Rupert of Deutz (c.1075–1130), Nolan claims that the Apocalypse has become “an intricately organized book of meditation – a systematic guide to spiritual consolation, and finally, to beatitude,” and in particular, “the images have become signs of spiritual progress, leading by ordered stages to the experience of beatitude.”70 In other words, Rupert is already focusing on the operation of the narrative in allowing the individual, through devotional study, to approach the divine, an aspect that will come to the fore in the Anglo-Norman manuscripts (and is remarkably similar to the “narratives” developed in the sequences of devotional images for women in the Rothschild Canticles, as explicated by Jeffrey Hamburger).
In St. John the Divine, Hamburger further amplified his many insights on the questions of medieval vision and devotion, recovering the history of “elitist” images “open only to initiates” which proposed to invite the viewer to “look beyond the rhetoric of imitation and think in terms of full and complete identification [with God].” He describes the pathway, images of the divinized John the Evangelist, as: “A figure of contemplative ascent, [who] incorporates, anticipates, and enacts the process of elevation [for the viewer],” in escaping mere similitude and reaching identity, the purified soul uses John’s exemplar because, as Aquinas held, his vision was high, wide, and perfect (alta, ampla, perfecta).71 Hamburger’s chapter, “Images and the ‘Imago Dei’,” reveals how Christian theologians have found such possibilities in images even as they have resisted them, discussing Athanasius, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, William of St Thierry, Eckhardt, Tauler, and Suso and, fittingly, ending with Eckhardt’s principle of invisibility.
FIGURE 2-2 “John receives the command ‘Ascende huc’,” Revelation with Haimo of Auxerre’s commentary, twelfth century. Oxford: Bodleian Library MS Bodley 352, fol. 5v. Reproduced courtesy of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
FIGURE 2-3 Omne Bonum, fourteenth century. London: British Library, Royal MS 6 E VI, fol. 16r. Reproduced courtesy of the British Library.
Ultimately, however, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, attention shifts decisively from the Imago Dei to the Visio Dei – from the nature of the image to the nature and possibility of sight itself, and “gazing upon the divine face” became an all-consuming goal for the devout, in imitation of John and other saints.72 The Omne Bonum, an illuminated fourteenth-century encyclopedia of “All that is Good” discussed by Lucy Freeman Sandler, includes a remarkable image that could be said to diagram issues of vision in the Middle Ages (fig. 2-3).73 It illustrates a papal constitution of 1336 which settled a controversy over whether the Christian would see God with corporeal eyes after the resurrection. At the top is the face of God represented as, in effect, the sun of “divine illumination.” The vision illuminated by divine radiance is enjoyed by angels and one naked soul after death. In the middle register representing mundane life, some of the divine illumination descends upon two saintly figures: Paul engaged in the vision that Augustine discussed, and St Benedict during a vision of the death of Germanus discussed by Gregory in the Dialogues. Both saints look upward with open eyes and provide an essential mediation for less saintly viewers as indicated by the downward but welcoming gesture of Benedict’s right hand. Below, on a lower rung of earthly existence and merit, Christians gather and direct their eyes toward a sphere illuminated by other sources of light including the sun and stars and centered on Adam and Eve as signs of fallen vision. Nevertheless, some divine illumination escapes the upper registers to illuminate even the fallen vision of earthly things (just as one learns of God in viewing his creation).74 At this moment in the fourteenth century, expectations of the possibilities of vision had reached a high water-mark for the Middle Ages. As never before, knowing God was seeing God.
1 I would particularly like to thank Jeffrey Hamburger for sharing a bibliography that he produced for a seminar at Harvard, although any errors of omission are mine alone. Unfortunately, neither “vision” nor “visuality” has yet become a key word in bibliographic tools or in titles (except in its sense as visions) and too much of the bibliography that I discuss here has come to my attention by chance. I am certain that I have missed other equally interesting studies and I ask that their authors excuse my oversight.
2 I will use “visions” for the latter meaning.
3 Ringbom, Icon to Narrative; Miles, “Vision”; Hamburger, Rothschild Canticles, p. 165.
4 An English translation can be found in St Augustine. The Literal Meaning of Genesis, pp. 41–2.
5 Kruger, Dreaming. See also the last chapter of Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, and Miller, Dreams in Late Antiquity. For dreams as a higher level of vision and purity see Elliott, Fallen Bodies.
6 Kruger, Dreaming, esp. pp. 41, 130.
7 Ibid., p. 62.
8 Ibid., pp. 79, 80, 49, 54.
9 Ibid., p. 190.
10 Aubrun, “Caractères.”
11 Ringbom, “Some Pictorial Conventions,” and Carty, “Dream Images.” See also Carty’s University of Michigan dissertation. [On narrative, see chapter 4 by Lewis in this volume (ed.)]
12 Carruthers, The Book of Memory.
13 Lindberg, Theories of Vision, p. 99.
14 Ibid., p. 95.
15 Ibid., p. 109.
16 De Nie, “Iconic Alchemy,” p. 159, quoting Devisch, Weaving the Threads of Life, p. 280.
17 De Nie, “Iconic Alchemy,” p. 246.
18 Ibid., p. 160.
19 Ibid., pp. 162, 163.
20 See De Nie, “Poet as visionary,” as well as Hahn, “Visio Dei,” Kessler, Spiritual Seeing, and Dale, “Monsters.”
21 Cline, “Heart and Eyes.”
22 Stanbury, “Feminist Film Theory,” p. 47; see also Stanbury, Seeing the Gawain-Poet and “Feminist Masterplots.”
23 “Feminist Film Theory,” pp. 54, 63.
24 Bryson, Vision and Painting, esp. ch. 5; see also Bryson, “The Gaze.”
25 [On gender and medieval art, see chapter 6 by Kurmann-Schwarz in this volume (ed.).]
26 Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, pp. 41, 44.
27 Foster, Vision and Visuality, ix.
28 Trachtenberg, The Dominion of the Eye.
29 Nelson, ed., Visuality Before and Beyond.
30 Elsner, “Between Mimesis and Divine Power: Visuality in the Greco-Roman World,” p. 46. (Jas Elsner, formerly John Elsner.)
31 Ibid., p. 61.
32 Frank, “The Pilgrim’s Gaze in the Age Before Icons,” p. 108; see also Frank, The Memory of the Eyes.
33 Nelson, “To Say and to See,” pp. 145, 155.
34 Hahn, “Visio Dei: Changes in Medieval Visuality.”
35 As was my essay, then called “Structuring Medieval Vision.”
36 Camille, “Before the Gaze,” p. 217.
37 Camille, Gothic Art: Glorious Visions, p. 12.
38 Ibid., p. 23.
39 Dondaine, “L’Objet et le ‘medium’ de la vision béatifique.” See also Sandler, “Face to Face with God.”
40 See Kessler’s notes for his bibliography in Spiritual Seeing, 225ff.
41 [On Gregory the Great and image theory, see chapter 7 by Kessler in this volume (ed.).]
42 Pastoral Care, 81 (II.10). This passage discusses the correction of sin, but Gregory’s aside on images is not any less interesting for that. Immediately afterwards he gives a visual example with which a “teacher” will reveal “vision” to “mundane hearts” (p. 83). Furthermore, he repeats the idea almost verbatim in the Moralia in Iob, XXVI.VI.65.
43 Hahn, Portrayed on the Heart, pp. 48–9. Also see Kessler, Spiritual Seeing, 118–25.
44 Kessler puts this forgery into context within Hadrian’s efforts to counter the iconoclastic thrust of the Libri Carolini. He quotes it in his letter to Charlemagne: see Kessler, Spiritual Seeing, p. 123.
45 Again Kessler discusses the latter in terms of the importance of the “copy” within the discourse of “images made without hands.” These images, although they justify the making of art – they are after all material images created miraculously – nonetheless in some sense are not “material.” Kessler notes that they “float” above their supposed material matrix and are only seen in copies, sometimes pairs or multiple copies together that collectively reference their divine origin: Spiritual Seeing, p. 83.
46 Hahn, “Visio Dei,” pp. 178–83.
47 Musto, “John Scottus Eriugena,” p. 13, quoting the Periphyseon V, ed. Migne PL CXXII, 945, trans. Sheldon Williams, p. 624.
48 Dale, “Monsters, Corporeal Deformities and Phantasms.” [On the monstrous, see chapter 12 by Dale in this volume (ed.).]
49 Caviness, “Simple Perception”; see also Hahn, Portrayed.
50 See Hahn, “Absent No Longer.”
51 Elsner, “The Viewer and the Vision”; Deshman, “Another Look at the Disappearing Christ.”
52 Deshman, “Another Look at the Disappearing Christ,” pp. 533f.
53 In Spiritual Seeing, pp. xv.
54 Ibid., pp. 124, 144.
55 Flyer for the conference, “The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Medieval West.”
56 Rahner, “Début d’une doctrine” and “La Doctrine des ‘sens spirituels’.”
57 The organizers have promised that the papers from this conference at Princeton will be published. The Utrecht conference papers will also be published.
58 Lewis, Reading Images.
59 Nolan, The Gothic Visionary Perspective, p. 5.
60 Ibid., p. xv.
61 Ibid., p. 37 (In apocalypsim, 687).
62 Ibid., p. 34 (Ben Maj. IV, ii in PL CXCVI 147–8).
63 Ibid., p. 4.
64 Caviness has also discussed the “third mode” of seeing and its potential for the interpretation of medieval art that attempts to portray the divine: “Images of divine order.” She discusses the first mode in “The Simple Perception of Matter”; in other essays she suggests feminist dimensions of vision: see, for example, “Artist: ‘To See, Hear, and Know All at Once’.”
65 Nolan, Gothic Visionary Perspective, pp. 5, 7.
66 Ibid., pp. 56–7 (PL XCIV 718).
67 Ibid., p. 9.
68 Ibid., pp. 55 n32, pp. 65–7, and figure 9.
69 Klein, “From the Heavenly to the Trivial.”
70 Nolan, Gothic Visionary Perspective, pp. 16–17, 19.
71 Hamburger, St. John, pp. 203, 164, 56.
72 Dondaine, “L’Objet et le ‘medium’ de la vision béatifique.”
73 Sandler, “Face to Face with God.”
74 Hamburger, “Speculations on Speculation.”
Michael Aubrun, “Caractères et porté religieuses et sociale des visions en Occident du Ve au XIe siècles,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, Xe–XIIe Siècles 23 (1980), pp. 109–30.
St Augustine. The Literal Meaning of Genesis. Ancient Christian Writers, trans. J. H. Taylor (New York, 1982).
M. Barasch, Blindness: The History of a Mental Image in Western Thought (New York, 2001).
Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York, 2002).
Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven, 1983).
——, “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” in Hal Foster, ed., Vision and Visuality (Seattle, 1988), pp. 87–113.
Michael Camille, “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing.” in Nelson, ed., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge, 2000).
——, Gothic Art: Glorious Visions (Prentice-Hall, 1997).
Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990).
Carolyn M. Carty, “Dream Images, Memoria, and the Heribert Shrine,” in. E. Valdez del Alamo and C. Stamatis Pendergast, eds., Memory and the Medieval Tomb (Hants, 2000), pp. 227–47.
Madeline H. Caviness, “Artist: ‘To See, Hear, and Know All at Once’,” in B. Newman, ed., Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and her World (Berkeley, 1998), pp. 110–24.
——, “Images of Divine Order and the Third Mode of Seeing,” Gesta 83 (1983), pp. 99–120.
——, “‘The Simple Perception of Matter’ and the Representation of Narrative ca.1180–1280,” Gesta 30 (1991), pp. 48–64.
Ruth H. Cline, “Heart and Eyes,” Romance Philology 25 (1971–2), pp. 262–97.
Thomas Dale, “Monsters, Corporeal Deformities and Phantasms in the Romanesque Cloister of St-Michel de Cuxa,” Art Bulletin 83 (2001), pp. 402–36.
Robert Deshman, “Another Look at the Disappearing Christ: Corporeal and Spiritual Vision in Early Medieval Images,” Art Bulletin 79 (1997), pp. 518–46.
R. J. Devisch, Weaving the Threads of Life. The Khita Gyn-Eco-Logical Healing Cult Among the Yaka (Chicago, 1993).
H.-F. Dondaine, “L’Objet et le ‘medium’ de la vision béatifique chez les théologiens du XIIIe siècle,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 19 (1952), pp. 60–129.
D. Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1999).
Jas Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity (Cambridge, 1995).
——, “Between Mimesis and Divine Power: Visuality in the Greco-Roman World,” in Nelson, ed., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge, 2000).
John Elsner, “The Viewer and the Vision: The Case of the Sinai Apse,” Art History 17 (1994), pp. 81–101.
Anna C. Esmeijer, Divina quaternitas; A Preliminary Study of Method and Application of Visual Exegesis (Assen, 1978).
Hal Foster, ed., Vision and Visuality (Seattle, 1988).
Georgia Frank, The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 2000).
——, “The Pilgrim’s Gaze in the Age Before Icons,” in Nelson, ed., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge, 2000).
Gregory the Great, Pastoral Care (Regula Pastoralis), ed. H. Davis (Westminster MD, 1955).
Cynthia Hahn, “Absent No Longer. The Saint and the Sign in Late Medieval Pictorial Hagiography,” in G. Kerscher, ed., Hagiographie und Kunst: Der Heiligenkult in Schrift, Bild und Architektur (Berlin, 1993), pp. 152–75.
——, Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of Saints from the Tenth through the Thirteenth Century (Berkeley, 2001).
——, “Visio Dei: Changes in Medieval Visuality,” in R. Nelson, ed., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 169–96.
Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland Circa 1300 (New Haven, 1990).
——, “Speculations on Speculation: Vision and Perception in the Theory and Practice of Mystical Devotion,” in W. Haug and W. Schneider-Lastin, eds., Deutsche Mystik im abendländischen Zusammenhang. Kolloquium Kloster Fischingen, 1998 (Tübingen, 2000), pp. 353–408.
——, St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (Berkeley, 2002).
——, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York, 1998).
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, 1993).
Herbert Leon Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia, 2000).
Peter K. Klein, “From the Heavenly to the Trivial: Vision and Visual Perception in Early and High Medieval Apocalypse Illustration,” in H. Kessler and G. Wolf, eds., The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation: Papers from a Colloquium Held at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome, and the Villa Spelman, Florence, 1996 (Bologna, 1998), pp. 247–78.
S. F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1992).
Suzanne Lewis, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse (Cambridge, 1995).
David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago, 1976).
Margaret Miles, “Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s De trinitate and Confessions,” The Journal of Religion 63 (1983), pp. 125–42.
P. C. Miller, Dreams in Late Antiquity. Studies in the Imagination of a Culture (Princeton, 1994).
Jeanne-Marie Musto, “John Scottus Eriugena and the Upper Cover of the Lindau Gospels,” Gesta 40 (2001), pp. 1–18.
Robert Nelson, “To Say and to See: Ekphrasis and Vision in Byzantium,” in Nelson, ed., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 143–68.
——, ed., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge, 2000).
Giselle de Nie, “Iconic Alchemy: Imaging Miracles in Late Sixth-Century Gaul,” Studia Patristica 30 (1997), pp. 158–66.
——, “The Poet as Visionary: Venantius Fortunatus’s ‘new mantle’ for Saint Martin,” Cassiodorus 3 (1997), pp. 49–83.
Barbara Nolan, The Gothic Visionary Perspective (Princeton, 1977).
Karl Rahner, “Le Début d’une doctrine des cinq sens spirituels chez Origène,” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 13 (1932), pp. 113–45.
——, “La Doctrine des ‘sens spirituels’ du moyen âge: en particulier chez Saint Bonaventure,” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 14 (1933), pp. 263–99.
Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of Dramatic Close-up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting (Abo, Finland, 1965).
——, “Some Pictorial Conventions for the Recounting of Thoughts and Experiences in Late Medieval Art,” Medieval Iconography and Narrative: A Symposium. Proceedings for the Fourth International Symposium Organized by the Center for the Study of Vernacular Literature in the Middle Ages (Odense, 1980), pp. 38–69.
Lucy Freeman Sandler, “Face to Face with God: A Pictorial Image of the Beatific Vision,” in England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the Harlaxton Symposium (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1986), pp. 224–35.
Gudrun Schleusener-Eichholz, Das Auge im Mittelalter, Münstersche Mittelater-Schriften, 35, 2 vols. (Munich, 1985).
J. C. Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1998).
Sarah Stanbury, “Feminist Film Theory: Seeing Chrétien’s Enide,” Literature and Psychology, 36 (1990), pp. 47–66.
——, “Feminist Masterplots: The Gaze on the Body of Pearl’s Dead Girl,” Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. L. Lomperis and S. Stanbury (Philadelphia, 1993), pp. 142–67.
——, Seeing the Gawain-Poet: Description and the Act of Perception (Philadelphia, 1991).
Marvin Trachtenberg, The Dominion of the Eye. Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence (New York, 1997).