22
Toward a Historiography of the Sumptuous Arts
When Giorgio Vasari published the second edition of his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects in 1568, architecture, painting and sculpture were brought together as the sister arts whose common father, disegno, was held by the “father” of modern art history to be the equivalent of the most God-like principle and least matter-bound element in a human being, the intellect. 1 And even as Vasari allowed other media to make anecdotal showings on the primeval scene of art, his theoretical emphasis leaves no doubt that these lesser siblings were best tossed into the unenviable bag of the mechanical arts. Thus expelled, the products of goldsmiths, ivory carvers, or enamelers found no place in the discipline’s founding narrative. It was to be a tenacious prejudice. Perceived to be ensnared by the bonds of physicality, devoid of stories to tell, lacking the freedom of the painter’s brush or the virile impact of the architect’s conceit, the so-called minor arts were pushed to the edges, literally confined to a decorative role. That explains why we still lack an adequate terminology with which to designate them as a class of objects; and why the substitution of the charged labels of “minor,” “industrial,” “applied,” or “decorative” art with more neutral designations has not done away with the stigma of a devaluation in aesthetic worth, seemingly attendant upon the shift to both smaller size and costly materials. The precarious status of what here will be called the sumptuous arts is in fact so deeply etched into the historiography of medieval art that virtually all influential and best-known academic medievalists have concentrated on the major arts (book illumination being assimilated as a medieval variant of painting), while most of the scholars evoked in this chapter belong to the world of museums and are unlikely to be household names even to other medievalists.
There is much evidence, both written and visual, that the relationship between the different forms of artistic expression was very much the reverse during the Middle Ages. Sumptuous objects were the locus of an intensive investment – aesthetic, financial, functional, and otherwise – and their sheer quantity, filling church and palace interiors, must have been staggering. For the most part, we have to rely on written evidence to reconstitute that original splendor in our mind’s eyes, since only a fraction of these works of art, religious and secular, has withstood the vagaries of time, if often in painfully fragmentary or altered condition.
Because medieval society was to a large extent an oral one, rituals were of paramount importance in the ordering of its practices and beliefs. Rituals, however, do require objects for their performance, and with no church vessels to receive that most precious of all substances, the body and blood of Christ, there could have been no liturgy, no way to commemorate the Passion of Christ that re-enacted the regenerative communion between the divine and the human. Along with Romanesque ciboria and Gothic monstrances exquisitely wrought into miniature buildings, chalices studded with gleaming gems occupied pride of place on the altar. They were flanked by a wealth of other vessels and splendid altar crosses, the signs that made Christ present, and were collectively known as the ornatus (or ornamenta) of a church.2
Without brilliantly adorned reliquaries to protect the remains of the most exemplary champions of the Christian faith, there likewise would have been no cult of saints, no pilgrims, no donations, sometimes no elaborate church buildings at all. Reliquaries, such as the famous “Majesty” of St Foi at Conques (fig. 22-1), are benefiting from historians’ renewed efforts to unravel medieval piety, and are currently one of the more richly studied categories of medieval art.3 Earthly rulers needed brilliant external trappings – a political ornatus of sorts – just as much to make their status manifest. But while regalia, that is, crowns, orbs, scepters, mantels, and the feudal swords and spurs, rank as a major group of medieval sumptuous arts, only a few individual pieces, like the crown of the Holy Roman Empire (fig. 22-2), now part of the Imperial Treasury housed in the Schatzkammer in Vienna, have been at the center of intensive study and debates.4
That the only artist ever to attain sainthood was a goldsmith, Eligius (Eloy) (d.660), court artist to two Merovingian kings, later bishop of Noyon and still the patron saint of goldsmiths, is further proof of the high status that his craft enjoyed during the Middle Ages. In Romanesque and Gothic times, many wellregarded churchmen are reported to have excelled in this medium (whether myth or fact is irrelevant here). The best-known case is that of Bernward (d.1022), the canonized abbot of the powerful Benedictine abbey of St Michael at Hildesheim and an energetic patron who commissioned, among other things, a pair of magnificent bronze doors and a monumental bronze column to serve as a base for a now lost Crucifix. The prestige of goldsmiths, who handled one of the rarest, most resplendent, and therefore auratic substances, is also demonstrated by the fact that the first documented case of an ennobled artist is that of Raoul, goldsmith to King Philip the Fair. Other goldsmiths are known by name, either because they proudly signed their works, such as Nicolas of Verdun (d.1205) or Hugo d’Oignies (d.c.1240), or because they are mentioned in written documents, such as Guillaume Boucher, the early thirteenth-century Parisian goldsmith who, having been taken captive, found himself in the distant Mongol capital of Karakorum, where he fashioned for Mangu Khan a much admired silver fountain, shaped like a tree whose branches dispensed wine and other intoxicating beverages. And though it has not been conclusively proven, scholars like to believe that Roger of Helmarshausen, an artist of Mosan origins to whom several accomplished works from the first quarter of the twelfth century can be ascribed, is the author of the De Diversis Artibus, arguably the most important medieval treatise on the arts. Signed with the fancy-sounding Greek pseudonym Theophilus Presbyter, this elegantly written technical tract, prefaced by considerations about the theological import of the artist and his creations, provides invaluable insights into the working methods of painting (Bk. 1), stained glass (Bk. 2), and, in the most extensive part, of metalworking (Bk. 3).5
FIGURE 22-1 Reliquary statue or “Majesty” of St Foi, ninth to twelfth century, wood, gold sheeting, precious stones; Conques: Church of St Foi, treasury. Photo: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY.
FIGURE 22-2 Crown of the Holy Roman Empire, late tenth/eleventh century, gold, enamels, precious stones. Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Schatzkammer. Photo: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY.
The elevated social and aesthetic status of the sumptuous arts is finally corroborated by the role they played in the most pointed artistic controversies of the day. During the first millennium, disagreements over what constituted legitimate and illegitimate visual practices had rumbled around representational images. After the year 1000, the crux of disputes concerning things visual shifted to objects and expense. In the most famous of these, the eloquent Suger (d.1151), abbot of the French royal abbey of St Denis exchanged, albeit indirectly, verbal bullets with the equally charismatic Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux (d.1153). Bernard notoriously championed an attitude of minimalist restraint in matters seductive to fleshly eyes. In a wide-ranging tract on monastic customs sent as a letter in 1125 to a fellow monk, William of St Thierry, and now known as the Apologia, he aired his objections to mainstream Benedictine monasticism, including his fundamental opposition to what he deemed to be its excessive artistic policies. And while his views on the “deformed beauty and yet beautiful deformity” of cloister capitals easily count as the most frequently cited excerpts of medieval art criticism, it needs to be stressed that it is the “things shining in beauty,” those that should be mere “dung” to monks, which made him quiver more than anything else with disparagement. Bernard acknowledged that a priest’s mission differs from a monk’s, and that pastoral care can excuse the need to “stimulate the devotion of carnal people with material ornaments.”6 Nonetheless, in an argument that would ring with renewed urgency in the ears of Protestant reformers, he stigmatized the use of “idols” (e.g., reliquaries) whose main ostensible purpose was, as he saw it, to extract money from gullible congregations.
FIGURE 22-3 Chalice of Abbot Suger, second/first century BCE sardonyx cup; mounting in silver gilt with filigree, precious stones and glass insets, c.1140. Washington: National Gallery of Art, Widener Collection 1942.9.277. Photo: National Gallery of Art.
What Bernard rejected was the traditional justification for the commission of ornate works of art as a proper means to honor God (ad honorem Dei), a position that garnered support from many of his contemporaries. Some of them additionally subscribed to the idea, tempered by the heady vapors of neo-Platonic mysticism, that material beauty was a manifestation of divine glory. Suger proved to be the most vigorous partisan of this line of argument, and, untiring impresario as he was, he made sure that his opinions and record of achievements would be widely known and remembered by writing them down. His autobiographical accounts devote little attention to what matters most to our eyes: his decisive contribution to the shaping of Gothic architecture, sculpture, and stained glass. Instead, Suger goes to great lengths to justify spending vast amounts of energy and money to make artful vasa sacra, adorned with the rarest precious stones that he could secure. And it is during moments of rapt contemplation of objects like the chalice, crafted of a delicately variegated fluted sardonyx bowl, an antique spolia to which his goldsmiths added a showy silver-gilt foot and rim (fig. 22-3), that the abbot waxes most poetic:
Thus, when – out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God – the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner.7
Suger was not alone in defending the aesthetic experience on account of its anagogic power, its redemptive ability to lift us up from coarse, polluted materiality and propel us toward spiritual ethereality. Although less lyrically inclined, William Durandus, bishop of Mende (d.1296), also endorsed it; and he added, again contra Bernard, that the faithful precisely need to divest themselves of what is most coveted so as to combat humankind’s innate avarice. The first of the three books of his Rationale Divinorum Officiorum offers an extensive symbolical interpretation of all the constituent parts of a church, its architectural elements, painted and sculptural decor as well as of the “ornament of the altar,” the vessels to house the host, the altar cloths, phylacteries (or reliquaries), candlesticks, crosses, banners, and books needed to perform the service (I, 3: 24–50). The fact that he understands, for example, an altar cross placed between two candlesticks to represent Christ straddling the Jews and Gentiles makes his a simplified, user-friendly system of interpretation. Unsurprisingly, it enjoyed an enduring success. Not only does it survive in many manuscript copies, but was also one of the first books to leave the printing press and, finally, can boast of an early English translation published in 1843 by John Mason Neale and Benjamin Webb, founders of the undergraduate club dubbed the Cambridge Camden Society, primarily remembered for its unremitting crusade in the name of a High Church revival in Anglican England and its parallel embrace of a hard-edged nostalgia for the medieval past.
Burdened with the double handicap of being medieval and mechanical, the sumptuous arts were to be a latecomer, and often a timid one, in the great movement initiated by pioneer antiquarians and amateurs that led to the rediscovery of the Middle Ages in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A decisive early spark fomenting the interest in “national antiquities” came somewhat fortuitously with the much-publicized excavation of the tomb, complete with beautifully wrought insignia and items of personal adornment, of the Merovingian King Childeric in Tournai (Belgium) in 1653. A century later, Childeric’s objects, incongruously mixed with Egyptian beetle ornaments, prominently figured in the capacious five-volume Les Monumens de la monarchie françoise published between 1729 and 1735 by Bernard de Montfaucon (1655–1741), the first visual atlas to document the succession of French reigns during the medieval period.8 Montfaucon had been trained by the eminent medieval paleographer and Church historian Jean Mabillon in the learned world of the Benedictine congregation of St Maur, and edited and translated Origen, St John Chrysostom, and Athanasius before moving into the uncharted waters of visual documents. Compared to the immense success of the earlier L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures, his survey of the “barbarian” centuries, recovered from oblivion, as he himself claims, not because of any intrinsic artistic value, inspired so little interest that he was never able to bring it to completion. However, the parts that saw publication turned out to be path-breaking, and were subsequently used by anyone wanting to visualize the formative stages of the French monarchy, brought to life through fine reproductions of funerary monuments, seals, coins, miniatures, tapestries, and regalia. Even more interesting is the fact that, regardless of its numerous historical inaccuracies, Montfaucon’s method of embedding, indeed of dissolving artistic objects into a more general historical context is premonitory of very contemporary historiographic developments.
More squarely rooted in the nascent discipline of art history, the lavishly illustrated Histoire de l’art par les monumens, depuis sa décadence au IVe siècle jusqu’à son renouvellement au XVIe siècle was written by the French savant and Roman expatriate Seroux d’Agincourt (1730–1814), and published posthumously once the upheavals of the Revolution had settled. Unlike Montfaucon’s contextualist framework, Seroux arranged works of art according to independent series, wedded together by an internal logic – the succession of styles. Hundreds of attractive plates containing several thousands of elegant if overtly classizicing line engravings were made after originals that were sent to him by an extensive network of correspondents. The major arts, mostly of Italian origins, tower above the handful of specimens in other media, such as the superb Carolingian altar frontal executed by Master Voulvinus, rendered from different points of view across a number of plates; some coins and small-scale ivories here and there; and the forlorn Romanesque chalice from the abbey of Weingarten, signed by Magister Conradus, which Seroux chose to place at the center of the single plate (pl. 29) illustrating “Works executed out of Italy from the commencement of the decline to the 14th century.”
The wholesale destruction of medieval art, reviled as the epitome of the unsavory alliance between Church and aristocracy, during the French Revolution did not fail to produce its opposite: the desire to preserve. Formed in that iconoclastic crucible, early collectors and students of medieval objects included the Lyonnais painter Pierre-Henri Révoil (1776–1842). A pupil of Jacques-Louis David, he modified his teacher’s neo-Classicism to initiate the first truly neo-medieval movement; and propped the credibility of the so-named Troubadour Style by filling his canvases with colorful imitations of the objects that he avidly collected (what he nicely called his “cabinet de gothicités,” bought in 1828 by the Louvre). More decisively, the Revolution spawned the first public museum of medieval art created by Alexandre Lenoir as the Musée des monuments français (1794–1816). In its period rooms one could admire medieval sculptural ensembles saved from the Jacobin hammer as works of art, that is, stripped as much as possible of any liturgical or monarchic associations. Inspired by it, Alexandre du Sommerard (1779–1842) founded the first museum of medieval and Renaissance decorative arts in 1832 by opening up his growing collection to the public, suggestively displayed in the rooms he rented in the Hôtel de Cluny in Paris, the present-day site of the Musée national des arts du moyen âge.9 Here the tone was a different one, as viewers were coaxed into discovering broad facets of medieval life exemplified by objects illustrating the religious sentiments or the art of warfare, and by romantic domestic interiors arranged into collage-like installations. The best part of the collection consisted in works from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, yet Sommerard had been able to secure such unique earlier pieces as the Visigothic votive crowns, then recently excavated at Guarrazar in Spain, or the golden altar frontal from the cathedral of Basel commissioned in the early eleventh century by emperor Henry II. After Sommerard’s death, the collection was bought by the state, then at the height of the conservative climate ushered in by the restoration of the Orléans-Bourbons monarchy, under which the vogue for the “age of saint Louis” reached a passionate climax.
By then, the fashion for the “Gothik” age ran high throughout Europe, often fueled by reactionary, nationalistic, and sectarian religious agendas. Gothic architectural follies had of course been imparting an exotic frisson to English parks since the late eighteenth century, but now churches and secular buildings steeped in the Gothic idiom sprang up everywhere, like so many pinnacled mushrooms.10 Somewhat paradoxically, the most decisive opportunity for a wider public to become acquainted with more rarefied medieval visual relics than cathedrals was given when the “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations” opened its doors in 1851 outside London. The magnificent glass and iron “cathedral” erected by William Paxton, and quickly nicknamed the Crystal Palace, sheltered more than 100,000 industrial and natural products as well as handicrafts sent, or extorted, from all over the world. Amid this extravagant celebration of British colonial might, only one specific time period had the – now suspect – honor of being singled out: the centrally located Medieval Court designed and overseen by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–52), who by that time had completed not only the neo-Tudor Windsor Castle, but also churches, both major and minor, inclusive of their furnishings. To us, Pugin’s room (fig. 22-4), chock-full with church vessels and secular plate, with tapestries, furniture, sculpted objects, and jewelry, all jostling for space and the viewer’s attention, may be reminiscent of an Ali Baba’s cavern. Contemporaries, however, hailed its aesthetic unity, finding it “attractive” and “picturesque” despite the “clumsy contrivances of the middle ages” it sheltered. In reality, the items on display were a fantasy. For they had been designed “in the mediaeval style” by Pugin and his associates in the fastidiously archeological manner for which he became famous and which, production methods notwithstanding, tried to remain as true as possible to medieval forms, materials, and designs.11
FIGURE 22-4 A. W. N. Pugin’s Medieval Court, Crystal Palace, 1851. Reproduced from An Illustrated Cyclopaedia of the Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations (London, 1851), pp. 216–17.
The Medieval Court was far from being to everyone’s taste, either because it showcased objects from “the culminating point of barbarism” or because it was too intensely redolent of the smell of popery. But whether one was for or against him, Pugin set the tone; all subsequent connoisseurs and scholars, irrespective of their religious or political leanings, had to move within the parameters he staked out. Endless arguments arose around the usefulness of rescuing the Middle Ages and, if so, how and why; ever more heated theoretical disagreements pitched those who defended the advantages of industrial manufacture against those who saw in it only the handmaiden of modern alienation. If there was a consensus that drew the supporters of “industrial” arts together, it was their shared belief that a revival of past cooperative working methods could only improve on current standards of production. After Pugin, that belief was most ardently advocated by the Arts and Crafts Movement inspired by John Ruskin (1819–1900) and William Morris (1834–96), both Gothic devotees, both committed to easing the distinction between design and execution, fine and applied arts.12 With even more lasting consequences, the reformation of present tastes and technical know-how proved to be a robust argument in the hands of those who pressed governments to endow museums besides schools of applied art. The first of these, built in the aftermath of the Crystal Palace exhibition, was the South Kensington Museum (forerunner to the Victoria and Albert Museum), which was then emulated in short succession across Europe in likeminded institutions that were generally granted substantial departments of medieval art. Collectors too followed in these footsteps with renewed enthusiasm, and since they were few and far between, they were able to bring home medieval objects by the cartloads. One can here remember individuals as diverse as the Lyon merchants Jean-Baptiste Carrand (1792–1871) and his son Louis (1827–88), who donated their vast collection to their adoptive city, Florence, where it forms the core of the Museo del Bargello, founded in 1864 in explicit imitation of the Cluny and South Kensington museums; the canon of Cologne Cathedral, assembler of a prodigious collection of church art, and founder of the influential Zeitschrift für christliche Kunst, Alexander Schnütgen (1843–1918); the Russian diplomat stationed in Paris, Count Alexander Basilewsky, whose collection of some 750 pieces was bought in 1884 by Czar Alexander III for the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg; or, a little later, the New York financier and omnivorous collector John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), who had breathed his first medieval air at the Crystal Palace exhibition during his European study years.
Scholarly oriented publications followed in the wake of this fervent museographic and collecting activity. Thus, another visitor who had been swept off his feet by what he saw at the Great Exhibition, the lawyer turned medievalist Jules Labarte (1797–1880), curator of a legendary collection assembled by his father-in-law, the art merchant Louis-Fidel Debruge-Dumesnil, started in 1864 to publish the Histoire des arts industriels au moyen-âge et à l’époque de la Renaissance. Acknowledging the efforts of the rare daring souls who had ventured into this terra incognita, Labarte’s preface offers a poignant summation of the difficulties of even seeing, let alone documenting, much of this material. His work’s success undoubtedly depended as much on the fact that it offered the first modern overview of medieval small-scale art as on its generous illustrations using not only engravings and chromolithographs but also the then-innovative technology of black-and-white photographs. Ensuing publications that sought to emulate or improve on Labarte similarly covered a broad chronological compass and relied on seductive illustrations. One work that stands out is Les Arts du moyen-âge et à l’époque de la Renaissance by Paul Lacroix (1806–84), a serious scholar and writer of best-selling historical novels and plays all in one. Conceived as a one-volume distillation of an earlier eight-volume work on the history and customs of the Middle Ages, Lacroix hoped that this version, pruned of “scholarly roughness” and therefore likely to be financially more appealing, would attract young readers, women “interested in serious readings,” and the family “who likes to gather around a book both instructive and pleasant.”
Other noteworthy enterprises of the second half of the nineteenth century comprise the hefty dictionaries and glossaries, painstakingly compiled from archival sources by some of the best connoisseurs of medieval art.13 The most famous of them was the indefatigable Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79). Now chiefly remembered for his sweeping architectural restorations of medieval buildings, he in fact shared with his English revivalist colleagues a deep interest in the decorative arts. That led him to publish his even now indispensable Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier français; and to design some of the most persuasive Neo-Gothic objets d’art, like an impeccably historicist receptacle for the hallowed relic of the Crown of Thorns, transferred during the Restoration into the newly installed treasury of Notre-Dame of Paris.
On the whole, these publications have weathered the passing of methodological currents better than the more descriptive texts. Among them, the more worthwhile include the vivid panoramas drawn by Henry Havard (1838–1921) and by the prolific Emile Molinier (1857–1906), whose claim, in the introduction to his Histoire générale des arts appliqués à l’industrie du Ve à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, that the “industrial arts” have definitively left the scholarly limbo, is a good – if overly optimistic – reminder of the distance covered since Vasari.14 The position of Jacob von Falke (1825–97) was much the same in the first comprehensive survey of German sumptuous art, Geschichte des deutschen Kunstgewerbes, a study meant to compensate for the heavily Francocentric slant of the literature then available. As with his other wide-ranging publications on the decorative arts, Falke’s textbook remains an excellent source of information – once clipped, that is, of its patriotic partiality. For that compelled von Falke more than once to laboriously reassign objects, hitherto considered Byzantine imports, to Ottonian workshops or else to campaign for a German origin of champlevé enamel against the contention of “French archaeologists” that it was not only perfected but invented in Limoges as well. Molinier and von Falke both were leading museum curators, the first at the Louvre, the second at the Museum für Kunst und Industrie in Vienna, the 1864 founding of which he had been instrumental in (in tandem with his mentor Rudolf von Eitelberger, the initiator of the Vienna School of art history). Moreover, both Molinier and von Falke were among the first to hoist the “industrial arts” to the level of academic respectability: Molinier offered public lectures and trained younger scholars at the École du Louvre, alongside his more famous colleague Louis Courajod, while von Falke was appointed to a chair at the University of Vienna.
Compared to the flurry of publishing activity of the later nineteenth century, the early part of the twentieth century was decidedly quieter. The grand mappings of medieval sumptuous arts had run their course, and a more modest period settled in. Not in quantity – the volume of specialized studies on particular objects, artists, and workshops actually grew – but rather in scope, because most of the publishing occurred in scholarly journals and was absorbed by questions of dating, attribution, and style. The one type of publication that stands out is the systematic catalogue of all known objects in a given class gathered by schools and themes, by stylistic and formal genealogies. Thus the mighty corpuses of Carolingian, Ottonian, and Romanesque ivories (Goldschmidt) complemented the one on (French) Gothic ivories by Koechlin (1860–1931), while objects in other media and even texts (Lehmann-Brockhaus) were inventoried according to the same meticulous standards. Unlike many individuals evoked so far, Adolph Goldschmidt (1863–1944) was a prominent art historian of his generation, an inspired teacher who formed many leading younger scholars when he took over Heinrich Wölfflin’s chair at the University of Berlin. Both he and Raymond Koechlin were lovers of Islamic art, and that familiarity with visual languages that differed from dominant realistic Western norms may have made them more sensitive to the expressive powers of medieval ivories, which they excelled at describing with flawless attention to the most imperceptible changes in form or style.
One student of Goldschmidt was Georg Swarzenski (1876–1957), who, like his mentor, was forced to flee Nazi Germany. Once in the United States, Swarzenski collaborated on a landmark exhibition that kindled the American reception of medieval “decorative” arts, helping them to move from the sphere of private collectors into that of public institutions. That was the show on the so-called Guelph Treasure, put up for sale by its impoverished owner, the Duke of Brunswick-Hanover, and displayed to much acclaim during 1930–1 in search of prospective buyers. Overcoming the initial tepid response from his trustees, who worried that this treasure was “beyond the appreciation and understanding of the general public for whom the Museum had been built,” William M. Milliken, then director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, bought the best pieces.15 Swarzenski went on to mount a more comprehensive and equally successful show on the “Arts of the Middle Ages, 1000–1400” a decade later, when he was in charge of the medieval collection at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA); a show only surpassed in 1970 with the Metropolitan Museum’s Centennial exhibition “The Year 1200,” for which hundreds of magnificent objects crossed the ocean. Even more important in our context is Swarzenki’s son, Hanns. He had joined his father at the MFA in 1948, and is the author of Monuments of Romanesque Art, a textbook that, despite drab reproductions and a terse introduction, had the merit of revealing to American readers many marvels of what he classified as “church treasury art.” Broader in chronological scope, yet narrower in methodology with its avowed espousal of an “unrepentant history of style,” was the 1972 contribution by Peter Lasko, long-time director of London’s Courtauld Institute and one of the finest connoisseurs of medieval small-scale art, to the widely read Pelican History of Art.16
The feverish reconstruction era after World War II did propel medieval objects into the center of an exhibition activity whose momentum continues to this day. And, keeping pace with a general trend in art history, each major exhibition was almost required to be enshrined in substantial and steadily weightier catalogues, gorged with glossy color illustrations. In France, the tone was given by 1964’s hugely popular Les Trésors des églises de France, which assembled in the rooms of the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris the exorbitant number of 649 reliquaries and vasa sacra. In the introductory essay to the catalogue, Jean Taralon, an official of the government agency in charge of historic preservation, the Commission des monuments historiques, and who in 1954 had overseen the restoration of the reliquary statue of St Foi, confidently stated that the “arts previously qualified as minor” were now firmly embedded in the mainstream of medieval art. In retrospect, one has to wonder if these little-known riches, marshaled from grand cathedrals to obscure parish churches, were summoned for scholarly reasons or if to attest to a glorious past that could spread its healing balm on a country recovering from the humiliation of military defeat and the stain of Fascism.
It is postwar Germany, however, that has supplied the best up-to-date information on medieval sumptuous arts. Ambitious exhibitions have been mounted there almost every year, perhaps in this case too as a not-so unconscious strategy to reach an innocent past, an empire whitewashed of imperialism. Remarkable in size, some also experimented with unorthodox displays. “Rhein und Maas,” for instance, curated by Anton Legner, did away with glass cases and put the massively bejeweled Mosan reliquary shrines directly in contact with viewers, one imagines, to great psychedelic effect (fig. 22-5). Typically, the German exhibitions have invited metalwork and ivories, textiles and daily artifacts made of humbler materials to play a leading role alongside their better-known sister arts in the interpretation of particular cultural areas,17 individual patrons,18 or specific time-periods.19 Drawing on the expertise of scholars in a wide range of disciplines, they have regularly featured essays by some of the best specialists of medieval sumptuous arts, including Hermann Fillitz, Renate Kroos, Anton Legner, Anton von Euw, and Hiltrud Westermann-Angerhausen.
FIGURE 22-5 Viewers looking at Nicolas of Verdun’s Shrine of the Virgin, “Rhein und Maas” exhibition, Cologne 1972. Reproduced from the exhibition catalogue, ed. Anton Legner, ill. 59.
A comparable move from catalogues tilted toward stylistic and technical concerns to ones that encourage a thematic approach has taken place in other countries as well, albeit more sporadically. Thus, one can compare the inter-disciplinary 1987 exhibition devoted to the Gothic period in England, “The Age of Chivalry,” to its earlier and methodologically more limited counterpart, “English Romanesque Art.” Other accomplishments in the same vein include Peter Barnet’s “Images in Ivory” and Henk van Os’s evocatively titled “The Way to Heaven,” which had the additional merit of featuring little-known reliquaries loaned from the Hermitage Museum. For it needs to be said that one of the unfortunate consequences of the dominance of exhibition catalogues in this field has been to leave objects that are neither part of the exhibition circuit nor housed in prestigious institutions languishing in barely accessible treasuries, as insufficiently documented as they were in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the pre-eminent medieval production centers, such as Paris, Limoges, or Cologne and the Mosan region, have tended to obscure other geographic areas and, especially, more “peripheral” countries like Scandinavia or Eastern Europe.20
Toward an Academic Renaissance?
As these last examples show, the recent decades have been ones of hybrid undertakings, which straddle the corpus and the exhibition catalogue on the one hand, and more academic writings on the other. The thousands of surviving enamels and ivories are now extensively catalogued and embedded in a larger interpretative framework that takes into account, besides traditional questions regarding technique and style, the organization of production methods, aspects of patronage, and, if appropriate, iconographic programs.21 Instead of focusing on a particular medium, other publications proceed chronologically, such as Johann Michael Fritz’s impressive examination of Gothic metalwork, which brings together detailed information on more than 800 objects with a significant, sociologically inflected introduction that examines issues of use, function, production, and consumption.22 Yet other publications center on a particular category of objects, among which the work of Ronald Lightbown, a former curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, can be singled out. His Mediaeval European Jewellery, for instance, catalogues the objects that were in his care, all the while drawing an admirably thick picture of the production, collecting and uses of jewelry.
In conclusion, a few thematically oriented publications can be retained. Methodologically unique was the fruit of the collaboration between the innovative if politically fraught historian Percy Ernst Schramm, whose interest in visual realities was awakened during his contacts with the effervescent circle formed around Aby Warburg in Hamburg, and the manuscript specialist Florentine Mütherich. Their Denkmale der deutschen Könige und Kaiser reverted to the literal meaning of monument (that is, memorial). It led them, somewhat provocatively, to exclude from their study any large-scale representations to rely instead on reliquaries, manuscripts, regalia, and even musical instruments, in sum, on any object upon which rulers’ “eyes have rested, across which their fingers have glided.” In a correspondingly unprecedented move, Schramm and Mütherich extended the notion of patronage to include objects obtained by inheritance, purchase and gift, with the refreshing if slightly disconcerting result that a Carolingian reliquary possessed at a later date, say, by emperor Henry II was taken to be the latter’s monument.
Special mention should be made of Marie-Madeleine Gauthier, who, in addition to her many publications on Limoges enamels, wrote an early multidisciplinary study on the cult of relics and pilgrimages across medieval Europe.23 Her High-ways of the Faith remains one of the best introductions to the subject, especially for the skillful way in which it relates reliquaries to all sorts of physical movements – travels across Europe and Outremer; long-distance trade and military confrontations that brought raw materials, ready-made objects as well as artistic motifs from East to West; the translations of relics, staged like triumphal processions; the political transactions underlying the collecting of such desirable rarities.24 It is appropriate, however, to end this survey by mentioning two recent publications that herald a new direction. The first is The Medieval Art of Love by Michael Camille, an art historian of terrific and untiring talent, who left us prematurely after having single-handedly renewed many of the questions we ask of medieval art. Though above all a scholar of manuscripts, in this book he takes into account a broad range of media – Limoges and ivory caskets, jewels and textiles, miniatures and paintings – in order to grasp how medieval artists and viewers embodied in concrete things the “manufacture of desire.” The second is Herbert Kessler’s energizing survey Seeing Medieval Art, which likewise dispenses with the conventional framework of separating medieval art by media; moreover, it gives the question of materiality, so fundamental for the understanding of the sumptuous arts, pride of place in the first chapter.
To overcome the misguided view that considers such complex achievements of the sumptuous arts as the reliquary of St Foi or the crown of the Holy Roman Empire to be minor artistic manifestations will indeed require an understanding of the full spectrum of medieval representational possibilities. If we are to reckon with their powerful visual impact, we will need to make a more deliberate effort to shift our attention away from mere problems of style and authorship; and will have to attend to these objects’ sophisticated combination of techniques and visual languages, their multifaceted religious and political functions, the theoretical challenges they pose for a discipline whose key conceptual tools were forged by the study of architecture, on the one hand, the figurative arts, on the other. Centuries of patient, often arduous scholarly inquiries may have bequeathed to us a considerable inheritance of accumulated knowledge, but little, all too little, of it has been renewed by fresh theoretical insights and bolder debates. Only when questions about ritual functions, the politics of gendered patronage, the economics and metaphorics of raw materials, or the sumptuous arts’ role within the larger cultural landscape are routinely taken up will the memorable objects that lent their ornamental luster to churches, palaces, and people be promoted to fully fledged historical subjects of our current Middle Ages.
1 In his first edition, published in 1550, Vasari gave more credit to goldsmithing, at least as an idiom in which many important painters or sculptors had been trained. It is likely that he downplayed its importance in the later edition as a consequence of his animosity toward his rival Benvenuto Cellini, then the most celebrated goldsmith.
2 They have been studied in their liturgical function by Braun, Der christliche Altar and Das christliche Altargerät. See also Sauer, Symbolik des Kirchengebäudes, and, in English, McLachlan, “Liturgical Vessels and Implements.”
3 In this case, aided by the spirited hagiographic documentation of St Foi’s tireless miracle-working activity, as recorded in the first two books of the Liber miraculorum sancte Fidis written in the early twelfth century by Bernard of Angers. Translated by Sheingorn, The Book of Sainte Foy; and for the critical edition of the original text, Robertini, Liber miraculorum. On reliquaries more generally, see Braun, Die Reliquiare; Gauthier, Highways of the Faith; Legner, Reliquien in Kunst und Kult; The Way to Heaven, ex. cat.
4 Fillitz, Die Schatzkammer in Wien, as well as the broader historical perspectives by Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen, to which can be added the exhibition catalogue Krönungen: Könige in Aachen.
5 Also known as the Schedula diversarum artium, following the title provided by the great Enlightenment writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who discovered this manuscript while he was librarian to the Duke of Brunswick in Wolfenbüttel. English translation by Dodwell, The Various Arts; Latin edition with German translation of Book 3 by Erhard Brepohl, Theophilus Presbyter.
6 See Conrad Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance, for the text, translation, and a detailed examination of the art historical implications of Bernard’s Apologia in the context of contemporary monastic culture.
7 Suger, Abbot Suger, pp. 62–5. [On spolia in general, see chapter 11 by Kinney in this volume (ed.).]
8 Montfaucon abundantly recycled the graceful watercolors made by Roger de Gaignières (1642–1715), an earlier student of medieval art, who by the end of his life had assembled a collection numbering several thousand drawings documenting medieval tombs, portraits, and costumes. As many of the works reproduced by Gaignières have since been lost, his documentation has become an irreplaceable source of information. The Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris) is in the process of digitizing it to make it available online.
9 He published its contents in the lavish Du Sommerard, Les Arts au moyen âge, completed after his death by his son Edmond. For early collectors and scholars of medieval art in France, see Le “Gothique” retrouvé avant Viollet-le-Duc, ex. cat. [On the modern medieval museum, see chapter 30 by Brown in this volume (ed.).]
10 [On medieval revivals, see chapter 29 by Bizzarro in this volume (ed.).]
11 The Crystal Palace and Its Contents, Being an Illustrated Cyclopaedia of the Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, 1851 (London, 1852), pp. 215–16. For Pugin’s ideas in this realm, see his beautifully contrived publications, Designs for Gold and Silversmiths and, with Bernard Smith, the Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament.
12 The texts assembled by Frank, Theory of Decorative Art, offer a handy overview of these debates.
13 Texier, Dictionnaire d’orfèvrerie; Laborde, Glossaire français; Gay, Glossaire archéologique.
14 Molinier died before the completion of his work, and the fifth and last volume on tapestries was published by Jules Guiffrey.
15 Quoted after Bruhn, “William M. Milliken and Medieval Art,” p. 197.
16 Swarzenski, Monuments, and Lasko, Ars Sacra, a title borrowed from a German exhibition on early medieval sumptuous arts mounted in 1950 in Munich.
17 For instance, Kunst und Kultur in Weserraum; Rhein und Maas; Europas Mitte.
18 Such as Bernward, 1993; Kaiser Heinrich II, 2002. [On patronage, see chapter 9 by Caskey in this volume (ed.).]
19 Still unsurpassed in scope and impact is Ornamenta Ecclesiae, 1985; see also Das Reich der Salier.
20 An exception is Hungary, whose objects have been studied by Kovács, notably in The Hungarian Crown and Romanesque Goldsmiths’ Art. Sumptuous arts also lag behind in web-based projects, which are making vast visual databases available for other media. For an exception, see the government-sponsored online exhibition of Limoges enamels at <http://www.culture.gouv.fr/emolimo/emaux.htm>.
21 Gauthier, Émaux and Émaux méridionaux (the second tome, covering the years 1190–1216, is in preparation); Enamels of Limoges, ex. cat.; Gaborit-Chopin, Ivoires. See also Randall, Masterpieces of Ivory and The Golden Age of Ivory.
22 Fritz, Goldschmiedekunst; to complete with Lüdke, Die Statuetten. For another important inquiry on the social status of goldsmiths and their workshop practices, see Claussen, “Goldschmiede des Mittelalters.”
23 [On pilgrimage art, see chapter 28 by Gerson in this volume (ed.).]
24 [On collecting in the Middle Ages, see chapter 10 by Mariaux in this volume (ed.).]
Exhibition catalogues (in chronological order)
Arts of the Middle Ages, ed. Georg Swarzenski (Boston, 1940).
Les Trésors des églises de France, ed. Jacques Dupont (Paris, 1965).
Kunst und Kultur im Weserraum, 800–1600, 2 vols., ed. Bernard Korzus (Münster, 1967).
The Year 1200: A Centennial Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2 vols., ed. Florens Deuchler and Konrad Hoffmann (New York, 1970).
Rhein und Maas, Kunst und Kultur, 800–1400, 2 vols., ed. Anton Legner (Cologne, 1972–3).
Le “Gothique” retrouvé avant Viollet-le-Duc, ed. Louis Grodecki (Paris, 1979–80).
English Romanesque Art, 1066–1200, ed. George Zarnecki, Janet Holt, and Tristram Holland (London, 1984).
Ornamenta Ecclesiae: Kunst und Künstler der Romanik, 3 vols., ed. Anton Legner (Cologne, 1985).
Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1200–1400, ed. Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski (London, 1987).
Das Reich der Salier, 1024–1125, ed. Konrad Weideman (Sigmaringen, 1992).
Bernward von Hildesheim und das Zeitalter der Ottonen, 2 vols., ed. Michael Brandt and Arne Eggebrecht (Hildesheim, 1993).
Enamels of Limoges, 1100–1350, ed. John P. O’Neill (New York, 1996).
Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age, ed. Peter Barnet (Detroit, 1997).
Europas Mitte um 1000, 3 vols., ed. Alfried Wieczorek and Hans-Martin Hinz (Stuttgart, 2000).
Krönungen: Könige in Aachen, Geschichte und Mythos, 2 vols., ed. Mario Kramp (Mainz, 2000).
The Way to Heaven: Relic Veneration in the Middle Ages, ed. Henk van Os (Baarn, 2000).
Kaiser Heinrich II, 1002–1024, ed. Josef Kirmeier (Suttgart, 2002).
General
Joseph Braun, Der Christliche Altar in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung, 2 vols. (Munich, 1924).
——, Das Christliche Altargerät in seinem Sein und in seiner Entwicklung (Munich, 1932; repr. Hildesheim, 1973).
——, Die Reliquiare des christlichen Kultes und Ihre Entwicklung (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1940).
Erhard Brepohl, Theophilus Presbyter und die mittelalterliche Goldschmiedekunst (Vienna, 1987).
Heather McCune Bruhn, “William M. Milliken and Medieval Art,” in Elizabeth Bradford Smith, ed., Medieval Art in America: Patterns of Collecting, 1800–1940 (University Park, 1996), pp. 195–8.
Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (New York, 1998).
John Cherry, Goldsmiths, Medieval Craftsmen (London, 1992).
Peter Cornelius Claussen, “Goldschmiede des Mittelalters,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenchaft 32 (1978), pp. 46–86.
William Durand, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medievalis, CXL, 3 vols., ed. A. Davril and T.M. Thibodeau (Turnhout, 1995); partial trans. of bk. 1 as The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments, John Mason Neale and Benjamin Webb (Leeds, 1843).
Jacob von Falke, Geschichte des deutschen Kunstgewerbes (Berlin, 1888).
Hermann Fillitz, Die Schatzkammer in Wien: Symbole Abendländischen Kaisertums (Salzburg, 1986).
John Fleming and Hugh Honour, The Penguin Dictionary of the Decorative Arts, new edn. (London, 1989).
Isabelle Frank, The Theory of Decorative Art: An Anthology of European and American Writings, 1750–1940 (New Haven, 2000).
Johann Michael Fritz, Goldschmiedekunst der Gotik in Mitteleuropa (Munich, 1982).
Danielle Gaborit-Chopin, Ivoires du moyen âge (Fribourg, 1978).
Marie-Madeleine Gauthier, Emaux du moyen âge occidental (Fribourg, 1972).
——, Les Routes de la foi: Reliques et reliquaires de Jérusalem à Compostelle (Paris, 1983).
——, Highways of the Faith: Relics and Reliquaries from Jerusalem to Compostela, trans. J. A. Underwood (Secaucus, NJ, 1986).
Marie-Madeleine Gauthier, with Geneviève François, Emaux méridionaux: Catalogue international de l’œuvre de Limoges, vol. 1: L’Epoque romane (Paris, 1987).
Victor Gay (completed by Henri Stein), Glossaire archéologique du moyen âge et de la renaissance (Paris, 1887–1928).
Adolph Goldschmidt, Die Elfenbeinskulpturen aus der Zeit der Karolingischen und Sächsischen Kaiser, VIII.–XI. Jahrhundert, 2 vols., Denkmäler der deutschen Kunst (Berlin, 1914–26; repr. Berlin 1969–70).
——, Die Elfenbeinskulpturen aus der romanischen Zeit, XI.–XIII. Jahrhundert, 2 vols., Denkmäler der deutschen Kunst (Berlin, 1923–6; repr. Berlin 1972–5).
Henry Havard, Histoire de l’orfèvrerie française (Paris, 1896).
Herbert L. Kessler, Seeing Medieval Art (Peterborough, Ont., 2004).
Raymond Koechlin, Les Ivoires gothiques français, 3 vols. (Paris, 1924).
Éva Kovács, The Hungarian Crown and Other Regalia (Budapest, 1980).
——, Romanesque Goldsmiths’ Art in Hungary (Budapest, 1974).
Jules Labarte, Histoire des arts industriels au moyen-âge et à l’époque de la renaissance, 1st edn. (Paris, 1872–5); Eng. trans., Handbook of the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (London, 1855).
Léon de Laborde, Glossaire français du moyen âge à l’usage de l’archéologue et de l’amateur des arts, précédé de l’inventaire des bijoux de Louis, duc d’Anjou, dressé vers 1360 (Paris, 1872).
Paul Lacroix (pseudonym Bibliophile Jacob), Les Arts au moyen-âge et à l’époque de la renaissance, 2nd edn. (Paris, 1869); Eng. trans., The Arts in the Middle Ages and at the Period of the Renaissance (London, 1870).
Peter E. Lasko, Ars Sacra, 800–1200, Pelican History of Art (Harmondsworth, 1972; 2nd edn., New Haven, 1994).
Anton Legner, Reliquien in Kunst und Kult zwischen Antike und Aufklärung (Darmstadt, 1995).
Otto Lehmann-Brockhaus, Schriftquellen zur Kunstgeschichte des 11. und 12. Jahrhunderts für Deutschland, Lothringen und Italien, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1938; repr. New York, 1971).
——, Lateinische Schriftquellen zur Kunst in England, Wales und Schottland, vom Jahre 901 bis zum Jahre 1307, 5 vols. (Munich, 1955–60).
Ronald W. Lightbown, Mediaeval European Jewellery, With a Catalogue of the Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 1992).
Dietmar Lüdke, Die Statuetten der gotischen Goldschmiede: Studien zu den “autonomen” und vollrunden Bildwerken der Goldschmiedeplastik und den Statuettenreliquiaren in Europa zwischen 1230 und 1530, 2 vols. (Munich, 1983).
Elizabeth Parker McLachlan, “Liturgical Vessels and Implements,” in Thomas J. Heffernan and E. Ann Matter, eds., The Liturgy of the Medieval Church (Kalamazoo, 2001), pp. 369–429.
Émile Molinier, Histoire générale des arts appliqués à l’industrie du Ve à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, 5 vols. (Paris, 1896–1919).
Bernard de Montfaucon, Les Monumens de la monarchie françoise, qui comprennent l’histoire de France, avec les figures de chaque règne que l’injure des temps a épargnées, 5 vols. (Paris, 1729–33).
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, Designs for Gold and Silversmiths (London, 1836).
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, with Bernard Smith, Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume, compiled from ancient authorities and examples (London, 1844; rev. edn. 1846).
Richard H. Randall, Masterpieces of Ivory from the Walters Art Gallery (New York, 1985).
——, The Golden Age of Ivory: Gothic Carvings in North American Collections (New York, 1993).
Adolf Reinle, Die Austattung deutscher Kirchen im Mittelalter: Eine Einführung (Darmstadt, 1988).
Luca Robertini, Liber miraculorum sancte Fidis (Spoleto, 1994).
Conrad Rudolph, The “Things of Greater Importance”: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude Toward Art (Philadelphia, 1990).
Joseph Sauer, Symbolik des Kirchengebäudes und seiner Ausstattung in der Auffassung des Mittelalters, mit Berücksichtigung von Honorius Augustodunensis, Sicardus und Durandus, 2nd rev. edn. (Freiburg, 1964).
Percy Ernst Schramm, Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik: Beiträge zu Ihrer Geschichte vom dritten bis zum sechzehnten Jahrhundert, 4 vols. (Stuttgart, 1954–78).
Percy Ernst Schramm and Florentine Mütherich, Denkmale der deutschen Könige und Kaiser: Ein Beitrag zur Herrschergeschichte von Karl dem Grossen bis Friedrich II, 768–1250 (Munich, 1962).
Jean-Baptiste Seroux d’Agincourt, Histoire de l’art par les monumens, depuis sa décadence au IVe siècle jusqu’à son renouvellement au XVIe siècle, 6 vols. (Paris, 1811–23); Eng. trans., History of Art by its Monuments, From its Decline in the Fourth Century to its Restoration in the Sixteenth, 3 vols. (London, 1847).
Pamela Sheingorn, The Book of Sainte Foy (Philadelphia, 1995).
Elizabeth Bradford Smith, ed., Medieval Art in America: Patterns of Collecting, 1800–1940 (University Park, 1996).
Alexandre (and Edmond) du Sommerard, Les Arts au moyen âge, en ce qui concerne principalement le palais romain de Paris, l’Hôtel de Cluny, issu de ses ruines, et les objets d’art de la collection classée dans cet hôtel, 5 vols., 1 atlas, and 1 album (Paris, 1836–48).
Suger, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St-Denis and Its Art Treasures, ed. Erwin Panofsky, 2nd edn. (Princeton, 1979); new critical edn., Suger, Œuvres, ed. Françoise Gasparri, 2 vols. (Paris, 1996–2001).
Hanns Swarzenski, Monuments of Romanesque Art: The Art of Church Treasures in North-Western Europe (Chicago, 1954).
Jacques Rémy Antoine Texier, Dictionnaire d’orfèvrerie, de gravure et de ciselure chrétiennes, ou de la mise en œuvre artistique des métaux, des émaux et des pierreries, in J.-P. Migne, Encyclopédie théologique, vol. 27 (Paris, 1857).
Theophilus Presbyter, The Various Arts, ed. and trans. Charles Reginald Dodwell, (London, 1971; repr. Oxford, 1986).
Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier français de l’époque carlovingienne à la Renaissance, 6 vols. (Paris, 1858–75).