8
Art and Exegesis
Definitions and Period Terminology
This chapter sets out to describe the relationship between art and biblical exegesis as it is expressed in the Romanesque and Gothic periods, as well as in the modern art historical literature on the subject. Two remarks must be made at the outset. Unlike such subjects as, say, Gothic architecture or Romanesque manuscripts, there is no distinct body of literature on art and exegesis; instead, we have individual scholarly works that address the issue to a greater or lesser degree as part of other projects. Secondly, there is a question of period versus modern terminology, and I offer the following not to be pedantic, but because one wants to be clear about how modern critical discourses correspond – or do not – to medieval concepts. It is important to note that both “art” and “exegesis” are terms medieval writers used either in a different sense from ours or not at all. As for art, to a medieval ear, the Latin ars signified something more of a skill or craft. Writing around 1100, the Benedictine monk Theophilus entitled his technical treatise De Diversis Artibus, the word ars here carrying none of the modern associations with creativity or self-expression. Instead of art, one might substitute pictorial or visual modes of expression.
Similarly, the term “exegesis” requires clarification. A word of Greek origin, exegesis is not commonly used by the Latin writers of the Middle Ages. A survey of the titles of some exegetical works gives us a sense of the range of words they employed instead: Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos; Hrabanus Maurus’ Expositiones in Leviticum; Rupert of Deutz’s Commentaria in Evangelium Sancti Iohannis; Hugh of St Victor’s Quaestiones in Epistolas Pauli. In the Didascalicon, a handbook for study written in the late 1120s, Hugh of St Victor uses another range of verbs to describe the act of what we call exegesis, among them iudicare, investigare, studiare, and interpretare. What is clear from all of these Latin terms – and the texts that follow them – is what exegesis means: the interpretation of sacred scripture, and not theology. In the Didascalicon, Hugh of St Victor, quoting Boethius and Isidore of Seville, defines theology as “discourse concerning the divine,” or the “searching into the contemplation of God and the incorporeality of the soul,” concluding that “it is theology, therefore, when we discuss with deepest penetration some aspect… of the inexpressible nature of God.”1 Therefore this chapter will restrict itself to works of art bearing some relation to exegesis, or the systematic interpretation of scripture, and not consider the relation of art to theology.
Certain terminological adjustments having been made, it is clear that throughout the High Middle Ages a deep connection was felt and then effected between what we call art and exegesis. Twelfth-century authors make clear that pictorial or visual modes were viewed as an effective way of expressing exegetical thought. For example, the probably English and Cistercian author of the Pictor in Carmine (c.1200) recommends typological programs (and typology, as we shall see, is the most common form of exegesis to be represented in art) for church decoration, not only because he believes this subject matter to be more edifying than others, but also because the representation of typologies in pictures will imprint exegetical concepts on the mind more forcefully than by other means.2 Similarly, Hugh of St Victor, who seemingly had a developed sense of the powers of visual exegesis,3 makes use of an elaborate, extended pictorial metaphor to explicate the allegorical sense of Noah’s Ark in his commentary De Archa Noe, again working with the assumption that the mental construction and visualization of a picture will fix the exegetical content of his work more securely in the mind of the reader. In this text, Hugh claims to be drawing and painting an elaborate, quasi-diagrammatic picture of the ark, which he then harmonizes with his exegetical interpretation. At the end of De Archa Noe, Hugh offers a spiritual reason for attending to this picture:
And now, then, as we have promised, we must put before you the pattern of our ark. Thus you may learn from an external form, which we have visibly depicted, what you ought to do inwardly, and when you have impressed the form of this pattern on your heart, you may rejoice that the house of God has been built in you.4
This passage suggests that the contemplation of a visual image – in this case, an extremely complicated one which may or may not have ever been executed5 – will clarify for the “viewer” the moral or tropological sense of scripture.
A similar medieval conjoining of the visual and the exegetical occurs in the lengthy inscription found on Nicholas of Verdun’s Klosterneuburg Altar (finished 1181). The opening hexameters of the dedicatory inscription by the donor, Prior Rudiger, makes this abundantly clear: in the inscription, he not only explains the traditional exegetical habit of dividing sacred history in three eras (before the Law, under the Law, under grace), he also tries to focus vision and attention on certain features of the work’s pictorial decoration. These beginning verses not only refer to an abstract exegetical system but also direct our visual experience of the object before us: “You see in this work” how the events of sacred history mirror each other, Rudiger tells us. To see, we are instructed to “seek” the time before the Law in the upper zone; below that we will find the time under the Law; and “in between the two” stands the era of grace. These detailed instructions inform the viewer where, according to Rudiger, the main visual interest lies, which is in how the system of the three ages has been translated into a pictorial program. The verses also suggest a schedule for studying the various regions of the work. Taken as a whole, the inscription not only lays out the exegetical foundation for the work’s iconography, but strongly encourages us to experience it visually, and not just conceptually. The underlying reason for insisting on the visual perception of exegesis can only have been a strong belief in the efficacy of that relationship.
Further evidence for the medieval connection of pictorial exposition and exegesis can be seen in the many Romanesque manuscripts that rely heavily on visual devices such as schemata or diagrams to make exegetical points in a way that was clearly thought to be more forceful and expeditious than textual exposition. As Michael Evans has argued, diagrammatic exposition makes clear that medieval exegetes believed that certain ideas could be expressed visually, but less effectively verbally, which implies that the modern emphasis on prose as the primary medieval medium for the transmission of knowledge is overstated.6 Finally, certain works of art make their relationship to exegesis explicit. For instance, when the designer of the so-called “anagogical” window at St Denis (c.1140–4; see below) frames an image of Moses receiving the Law with an inscription which makes direct reference to Paul’s dictum “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (II Corinthians 3: 7–8, 16–17), the viewer is obliged to interpret the image in the light of scriptural exegesis, in this case concerning the transition from the Old to the New Dispensations.7
All of this suggests that “Art and Exegesis” is a topic with an authentic medieval pedigree (as opposed to, say, the study of iconography). However, given the fact that there is no established modern bibliography or methodology concerning the relationship of art to exegesis, this chapter will sketch out the ways the problem has been addressed by scholars by looking at three categories in which the two terms have been brought together in art historical research, and then give examples of each. These categories, which overlap each other at times, are: (1) art or decoration found in Romanesque and Gothic exegetical manuscripts; (2) art that illustrates or gives visual expression to exegetical ideas found in texts, or, to put it another way, art that adopts exegetical ideas as its iconography; (3) art that functions as a visual form of exegesis. Before proceeding to examples, I would like to offer a caveat about discussing the relation of art to a textual tradition such as scriptural exegesis (this issue will be touched upon again below). Georges Didi-Huberman reminds us that medieval exegetes did not view sacred texts as, to use his idiosyncratic terminology, lisible, or open to an immediate and complete apprehension. Instead, they viewed the interpretation of scripture as an ongoing mystery which would never completely reveal itself. In painting, a similar distinction can be made between what Didi-Huberman calls the visible and the visuel: an iconographic approach to art history considers pictures to be visible, or fully understandable once we have deciphered their subject matter. Pictures, however, are, in fact, visuel, a distinction meant to stress the irreducible, resistantly non-verbal, visual nature of a picture.8 When speaking of art’s relation to exegesis, this analogy not only reminds us of the medieval attitude towards the interpretation of scripture, but also asks us to think of works of art as manifesting a visuality that functions very differently from textuality, and finally suggests that because of this distinction, exegetical art will proceed by means of its own visual logic, never merely illustrating exegetical texts. This will become mostly apparent in my third group of examples, works of art that embody a notion of visual exegesis.
Before turning to works of art, a brief descriptive history of the practice of biblical exegesis is in order. Generally speaking, the Christian interpretation of scripture is, at its heart, allegorical. That is to say, the events of both the Old and New Testaments are thought to have not only a literal or historical meaning, but a “spiritual” or “mystical” sense as well. Usually, the New Testament is taken to be the allegorical sense of Old Testament; that is to say, the New Testament is viewed as a fulfillment of the prophetic Old Testament. This idea of the mystical concord of the two Testaments gives rise to the idea of biblical typology, which permeates scriptural exegesis throughout Early Christianity and the Middle Ages. It is not always easy to sort out the differences between typology and allegory and it is not clear that medieval exegetes felt a need to do so.
A system for the hidden meaning of scripture was developed very early on and remained in place well beyond our period. This system, referred to as the “four senses of scripture,” sees in scripture a literal sense, an allegorical sense, a moral or tropological sense, and an anagogical or eschatological sense.9 The significance of each sense is nicely summed up in a much-quoted couplet by Nicholas of Lyra, writing about 1330 at the end of a very long tradition:
Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria,
Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia.10
(The letter shows acts, allegory shows what to believe,
The moral shows what to do, anagogy what to strive for.)
Theoretically, every utterance in scripture can be interpreted in terms of all four senses, although in practice it was recognized that some were better suited to certain senses than others. One finds the three spiritual senses of scripture explicated in straightforward terms throughout, for example, the Glossa Ordinaria, each sense introduced by allegorice (allegorically), moraliter (morally), or mystice (mystically), depending on what the glossator wishes to stress in a given passage. One should also note that all three of the non-literal senses were thought to be sub-categories of a more general allegorical or spiritual sense. In terms of practice, this means that in the many commentaries on the Bible written in the patristic period and in the early Middle Ages, one can find a verse-by-verse exposition of scripture that explains each sense of that verse. On the other hand, certain commentaries, such as Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job (c.590) could transform the ostensible explication of a biblical text into a work of extended theological meditation.
Closely related to the allegorical sense of scripture is what modern scholars call biblical typology (referred to again, somewhat vaguely, as allegoria in medieval usage), a more specialized practice that seeks to elucidate parallels between the Old and New Testaments. According to Augustine, the typological or figural meaning of scripture is closely related to the allegorical sense.11 This approach is founded on the idea, promulgated by Christ, the evangelists, and Paul, that the truths of the new Christian dispensation are latent in the events of the “old” Jewish one. Typology was not only one of the most common and enduring ways of understanding the allegorical sense of scripture, it was also, for reasons we shall see shortly, the exegetical type that had the greatest impact on the visual arts. In order to do justice to the textual-exegetical aspect of this chapter, and given the pre-eminence of typology in this world, it seems useful to pause and briefly consider a representative example of typological exegesis. This is taken from Hrabanus Maurus’ ninth-century explication of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22). After discussing the literal sense of the passage, including information provided by Jews concerning the location of the incident’s mountain setting, Hrabanus notes the parallels between this Old Testament event and one from the New – the Crucifixion. The father, willing to sacrifice his only son for God, is likened to God himself sacrificing his son, Christ, for the sake of human salvation. Hrabanus also notes that the very wood carried by Isaac up the mountain resembles the cross carried by Christ. There is a further allegorical meaning to be discovered in this typology as well – the two servants dismissed by Abraham “signify” the Jews who “do not understand the humanity of Christ.”12 This conclusion is typical of typological exegesis in that it stresses not only mystico-structural similarities between the Old and New dispensations, but also stresses the superiority of the New.
The voluminous commentaries on the Bible, as well as other types of texts like the City of God, written over centuries by authors who had assimilated and repeated the work of their forebears, constitutes a kind of culture of exegesis, or a shared set of texts, practices, and paradigms that give this world its distinctive flavor. However, the harmony (or homogeneity, depending on your point of view) of this culture broke down sometime in the twelfth century as the emphases and aims of scriptural exegesis changed. Masters such as Peter Lombard increasingly inserted quæstiones, or theological discussions, into their explications, thereby combining exegesis and theology in a manner quite different from their early medieval counterparts. In the early thirteenth century, a new trend in glosses of scripture, partly as a tool for preaching, emerged in the circle of Stephen Langton in Paris. This combination of interests in the moralizing of scripture and preaching naturally found an eager audience among the Dominicans and Franciscans, and certain masters such as the Dominican Hugh of St Cher became famous as authors of postillae, or running commentaries on the Bible, meant to complement the more atomized glosses. In the meantime, the pursuit of the spiritual or allegorical sense, beloved in the old monasteries declined in influence and practice, and in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, emergent noble and bourgeois approaches to scripture focused new attention on books of the Bible previously neglected by the Church Fathers, which spoke to new interests in politics and kingship.13
Historiography of Art and Exegesis
Although never attaining the status of an “approach” or method, the use of exegetical texts to interpret works of Romanesque and Gothic art goes back to the early days of the systematic study of medieval art. Consequently, if the following historiographic overview of the relation of art and exegesis seems thin, it is because the bulk of the study on the subject has concentrated less on paradigms and more on individual cases. Nevertheless, a provisional history of the topic can be attempted. A prominent nineteenth-century example of exegetical texts being brought to bear on the interpretation of a work of art is found in the monumental study of the stained-glass windows at Bourges Cathedral by the Jesuit Charles Cahier (1807–82), who makes his interpretive stance clear by giving the typological window (c.1215) pride of place, devoting more than 100 pages to its explication.14 Cahier offers no methodological statement explaining his decision to discuss the window in light of exegetical texts (ranging from Tertullian to Rupert of Deutz), because he views exegesis as an expression of the truths of the faith, not as a body of material to be brought to bear on a historical problem. Similarly, he sees the artist’s representation of exegetical thought as a parallel affirmation of the “correct” way to convey the tenets of Catholicism. To put it another way, Cahier feels that both exegesis and art depicting exegetical ideas respond naturally to the reality of sacred scripture.15 In some sense, it is fair to say that Cahier works as an exegete himself, and not as an art historian.
The most influential medievalist to champion not only the use of exegetical texts in the interpretation of works of art, but also to reveal the extent to which works of art themselves should be viewed as forms of exegesis was Emile Mâle (1862–1954). Particularly in his magisterial L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France: Étude sur l’iconographie du moyen âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration (1898), Mâle proposed a view of medieval art that remains very much with us to this day:
Everything essential said by the theologians, encyclopedists, and the interpreters of the Bible was expressed in stained glass and sculpture. We shall attempt to show how artists translated the thoughts of the Church Doctors, and do our utmost to present a full picture of the abundant teaching the thirteenth-century cathedral furnished to all.16
Choosing Vincent of Beauvais as a model for a totalizing vision of all medieval knowledge, and citing inter alia Paul, Hilary of Poîtiers, Origen, Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory the Great, and Isidore of Seville, Mâle interprets the art of the Gothic cathedrals as a complete visualization of “the immense chain of Catholic tradition.”17 As this statement makes clear, Mâle viewed most medieval art not simply as the visualization of theology and exegesis, but as didactic, rather than decorative, in purpose. In fact, for Mâle, exegesis practically drives or determines Gothic art. In his view, it is impossible to understand medieval art simply in stylistic or cultural terms because this approach misses that original impulse behind those works.
Perhaps the most thoroughgoing theoretical or methodological debate of the last century about the use of exegetical texts to elucidate works of art appears not in the study of Romanesque and Gothic art, but in the discussion of so-called “disguised symbolism” in fifteenth-century Netherlandish painting. In the wake of the chapter in Erwin Panofsky’s Early Netherlandish Painting (1953) devoted to “Reality and Symbol in Early Flemish Painting,” some scholars began routinely to adduce exegetical texts as sources for the purportedly arcane “symbolic” iconography of works of later medieval art. When pursued in a mechanical or uncritical way, this practice led to interpretations of works of art that implied a naive relation of exegesis to image.18 Pursuing this thought, Brendan Cassidy notes that iconographic method’s recourse to exegetical texts often glosses over another important issue, the relationship of medieval texts to medieval images. He reminds us that “the visual is more intractable, offering only ambiguous answers to many of the questions that the text-bound historian is inclined to ask. However, it is not the appeal to texts for clarification of the meaning of an image that is the issue, for iconography would scarcely be possible without texts.” Cassidy also warns that, “the texts among which meanings were sought were predominantly the writings of medieval churchmen, and classical authors and their humanist admirers; again this approach is warranted only in some contexts.”19 This caveat reminds us that an expanded conception of the audience for a particular image, reflecting the social realities of literacy, class, and gender, means that certain exegetical texts might not be appropriate in the reconstruction of an artwork’s reception. This debate, however, has calmed somewhat, for, as Jeffrey Hamburger has recently observed:
[T]he interpretation of medieval art in terms of theology has fallen out of favor. The aversion to theology has many causes; not the least are disbelief and disinterest, allied with a general discrediting (and occasional abuse) of the iconographic method, which in turn entails a healthy disinclination to explain images through texts. Instead, popular piety, oral traditions, and the beliefs of marginal groups command scholarly attention.20
Finally, the tendency to view exegetical texts as sources for iconography, and not to understand (as was the case in the Middle Ages) exegesis as a cognitive act, misunderstands the degree to which works of art actively constructed exegetical meaning, rather than passively representing it.
Three Conceptions of the Study of Art and Exegesis
The illustration of exegetical texts
This is certainly the least important area of our topic, but it would seem remiss not to mention what kind of art appears in actual exegetical texts. Compared with the great bibles, psalters, and service books made in the Romanesque period, generally speaking exegetical works were not as lavishly painted. There are, however, notable exceptions. For example, for a copy of Richard of St Victor’s In Ezechielem (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale Ms lat. 14516), produced c.1150–75, Richard wanted Ezechiel’s temple illustrated by plans, elevations, and exterior views in order to prove the literal sense of the text. However, the extensive illustration seen in this exegetical manuscript is unusual, owing to the polemical nature of the text.21
Art illustrating exegetical writing and thought
Art may also give visual form to an interpretation of scripture, as opposed to a scene or event from scripture. A pair of stained-glass windows ordered by Abbot Suger around 1140 for the choir of the abbey church at St Denis illustrates exegetical thought with great sophistication. One of the windows, variously referred to as the “anagogical window,” or more accurately as the window of the “Pauline Allegories,” contains five roundels which visualize typologies and allegories of the concord of the two testaments. One roundel, now lost, depicted the “Mystic Mill” of St Paul, which Mâle, and after him Louis Grodecki, correctly interpreted in the light of Paul’s writings as a symbolic statement of how the Old Testament is metaphorically transformed into the New. (This subject is also depicted on a slightly earlier capital at Vézelay.) In order to insure a correct reading of the image, Suger appended a verse which states that “the wheat of Moses and the prophets became the pure flour with which the church nourishes mankind.”22 A surviving panel showing Christ crowning Ecclesia and unveiling the eyes of Synagoga similarly gives visual form to a variety of verses from the Pauline Epistles that deal with the transition from the Old to New dispensations. Throughout his authoritative discussion of this window’s icongraphy, Grodecki insists that its exegetical sources in the Epistles are as clear as they are venerable, and he thoroughly rejects Erwin Panofsky’s “anagogical” reading of the windows as overly-complicated and institutionally unlikely.23 By placing the emphasis instead on traditional allegorical readings of scripture, Grodecki returns the St Denis window to its proper place in the history of illustrating established biblical commentary. This type of iconography was already present at St Denis in the Carolingian altar frontal refurbished by Suger at this time, as well as in the subject matter of the great twelfth-century cross, now lost, which was, to quote Suger, “enameled with exquisite workmanship, and [on it] the history of the Savior, with the testimonies of the allegories of the Law [cum antiquae legis allegoriarum] indicated, and the capital above looking up, with its images, to the death of the Lord.”24 Grodecki’s analysis of the windows also has the virtue of reminding scholars that the exegetical sources for twelfth-century art need not be contemporary – for example, the Victorines are often pressed into this service – and the New Testament and the patristic authors remained a vital source for iconographic ideas throughout the Romanesque and Gothic periods.25 On the opposing window, dedicated to stories from the life of Moses, the panel of Moses receiving the Law is accompanied by an inscription, cited by Suger, which alludes to II Corinthians 3: 6: “Lege data Moysi, juvat illam Gratia Christi/Gratia vivificat, littera mortificat.” This orthodox statement makes it clear that Suger wishes for the Exodus scenes to be interpreted in the light of traditional typological exegesis as well. As Grodecki says, it is clear that in some respects the “allegorical” window provides exegetical methods for interpreting the Exodus window, and others have argued for specific cross-window interpretive structures.26 Finally, it should be noted that Suger’s choice of conservative interpretations of scripture for the iconography of the windows and his cross is in part a response to criticisms concerning the place of art in the monastery leveled at St Denis by Bernard of Clairvaux.27
A later example (fig. 8-1) from an English Gothic manuscript shows another way in which exegetical thought could be rendered pictorially. An illumination from the Queen Mary Psalter (c.1315) accompanying Psalm 68 shows the marriage at Cana; the historiated initial S beginning the first verse contains the story of Jonah and the Whale. At first glance, it is difficult to figure out why these two biblical stories have been chosen to illustrate this psalm. It turns out that the image presumes a familiarity with (which is different from saying something “is derived from”) a bit of exegesis derived from Jerome’s commentary on Jonah. Explicating Jonah 2: 1–11, which Christ had already interpreted typologically (Matthew 12: 40), Jerome says that “The Lord explains the mystery of this topic (mysteriorum loci) in the Gospels, so it’s superfluous to repeat it either in the same terms, or in different ones.”28 Recognizing that the obvious typology – Jonah’s three days in the whale foreshadow Christ’s three days in the earth – is well-known, Jerome turns to the allegorical significance of other aspects of the story: “If Jonah is compared to the Lord, and his passing three days and three nights in the whale is a sign of his passion, then Jonah’s prayer should be a figure of the Lord’s prayer.” In his prayer, Jonah cries out, saying the Lord has “cast me forth into the deep heart of the sea, and a flood hath encompassed me” (Jonah 2: 4). This suggests to Jerome a passage from Psalm 69: “Save me, O God, for the waters are come in even unto my soul… I am come into the depth of the sea: and a tempest hath overwhelmed me” (Psalm 69: 2–3). So far, we have two Old Testament texts but no New, yet Jerome intends a typological reading. He brings this about by reminding us that the psalms not only prophesy Christ, but that the psalmist, David, is a prefiguration of Christ. Therefore, the Psalms can be attributed to Christ. He speaks of “the person of Christ who, under the name of David, sings the psalm.”29 The psalm prayer, uttered by David-Christ, is the typological equivalent of Jonah’s prayer in the whale. It is therefore not surprising that we should find Jonah at the beginning of Psalm 68 in the Queen Mary Psalter – or in other Gothic psalters.30 However, this cryptotypology is further complicated by the marriage at Cana miniature above, given that the marriage at Cana was customarily interpreted as an allegory of the water of the Old Testament being changed into the wine of the New by Christ. The watery psalm verse and Jonah anecdote, both from the Old Testament, support the typological reading of water in the gospel scene above, which, as has been noted, unusually represents only a goblet of wine.31 This is a rather complex set of exegetical ideas to present to the viewer of the page without any textual hint as to its intended meaning. Nevertheless, we must assume that the designer of the Queen Mary Psalter expected the images to be understood in some way.
FIGURE 8-1 Psalm 68, Queen Mary Psalter, c.1315. London: British Library, MS Royal 2.B.VII, fol. 168v.
Art as visual exegesis
The third way in which art and exegesis can be related to each other is to think of works of art performing a kind of visual exegesis. That is to say, beyond the simple representation of an idea gleaned from an exegetical text, these works, through their formal arrangements, act as an exegetical mode themselves. As Marcia Kupfer has said in relation to Romanesque murals, visual exegesis is “a nonlinear mode of narration that correlates the dynamics of perception and interpretation. The viewer comprehends the various particular elements in light of the global arrangement in which they are subsumed.”32 It is in this area that “exegetical” art shines most brightly, constructing scriptural interpretations as ingenious and compelling as anything found in a text – and often more so.
Made around 1160 in the valley of the Meuse, possibly to contain a longvanished relic of the True Cross, the Alton Towers triptych (fig. 8-2) is a noteworthy example of how visual exegesis might work. Its iconography is both allegorical and typological. Complemented by allegorical voices, typology asserts itself as the featured pictorial program of the triptych. The central panel is dedicated to events from Christ’s Passion: the Crucifixion, the Harrowing of Hell, and the Three Maries at the Tomb. The left and right wings provide each New Testament event with an Old Testament prototype. These particular matchings of Old and New Testament events is conventional, repeated throughout the patristic and early medieval commentaries. They also occur regularly in twelfth-century Mosan enameled metalwork. What is original about the Alton Towers triptych is the format in which these exegetical commonplaces are presented: they are accompanied by unusually ornate inscriptions and arranged in a diagrammatic network of roundels. This combination of inscription, diagram, and image give the work its distinctive exegetical power.
FIGURE 8-2 Alton-Towers Triptych, c.1160. London: Victoria & Albert Museum.
The inscriptions draw our attention to parallels in the Old and New Testaments by creating a system of verbal rhymes and echoes – in other words, formal structures meant to suggest a meaningful relationship. Similarly, the appearance of the Alton Towers triptych’s imagery works by means of an equivalent visual process. Drawing on the rich tradition of medieval diagrams, or figurae, the abstract system of connecting bars and roundels on the triptych encourages the viewer to consider why various subjects are compared or contrasted. Both designer and audience would sense that roundels of similar size and position implied a formal comparison of their contents. Formal differences would register themselves as well: the roundels on the wings are blue, while those in the center are white. Those on the wings are incomplete, while those in the center are complete; this probably denotes the approved belief that the revelation of the Old Testament was incomplete, while that of the New is complete and perfect. These distinctions correspond to the Old/New dispensation distinction, or, to put it another way, one visual type of figura is used to elaborate an exegetical one.
Finally, the center panel of the triptych includes allegorical imagery that sets the Crucifixion and Resurrection in a cosmic setting. In the top and bottom borders appear personifications of Charity, who bears a scroll inscribed with her name, and Justice, with an identifying inscription just below her, two of the four cardinal virtues. Justice, a worldly virtue, occupies the lower place, ceding the higher, spiritual position to Charity. Versions of this allegorical schema, derived from patristic exegesis and reinforced by later commentators including Rupert of Deutz, were incorporated into early medieval representations of subjects such as the Majestas Domini, giving the Christ in Glory a broader setting.33 The designer of the Alton Towers triptych complicates this theme by framing the retable’s New Testament subjects with quasi-classical personifications of the Sun, Moon, Earth, and Sea, complete with inscriptions in the panel’s outer border. Also present on the central panel are the symbols of the four evangelists, inserted into the corners of the box framing the Crucifixion. The two trees in half-roundels flanking the Crucifixion may be the Trees of Life and Knowledge. All of these symbols and images offer different perspectives on the narrative events depicted in the main column of roundels.
Compositional strategies closely related to those found in Mosan enamels can be found in early Gothic stained-glass windows as well. Windows at Canterbury, Bourges, and Chartres have complex, usually diagrammatic, typological programs.34 Another popular “exegetical” subject for glazing programs is the parable of the Good Samaritan complemented by a series of Old and New Testament typologies.35 This interest in interpreting the parable – itself already an allegory – along typological lines lacks textual precedent; that is to say, the windows deviate from the conventional ways of explicating the text found in the early Christian and medieval glosses. Thus, they truly act as an independent form of visual exegesis. Deviating from contemporary works such as the late twelfth-century Hortus Deliciarum of Herrad of Hohenbourg, which accompanied literal illustrations of the story of the Good Samaritan with an allegorical gloss from Honorius Augustodunensis’ Speculum Ecclesiae, the Good Samaritan stainedglass windows at Sens (c.1200) and Bourges (c.1215) visually engage the literal and allegorical senses of the parable at once.
Along the central axis of the Bourges window are arranged in descending order five scenes from the parable. In the large half-roundels which stand on either side of the parable scenes we see Old and New Testament scenes. Ten of the Old Testament scenes illustrate the story of Creation, beginning with God creating the sun and the moon and ending with the angel shutting the gate of Paradise after the Expulsion of Adam and Eve. This abbreviated Genesis cycle corresponds to the first three Good Samaritan roundels – the quitting of Jerusalem and the attacks on the pilgrim. The fourth parable scene, the priest and the Levite before the wounded pilgrim, is framed by four scenes from Exodus: Moses and the burning bush, Moses breaking the tablets of the law, Aaron collecting the jewels of the Israelites, and the worship of the golden calf. At the bottom of the Bourges window (fig. 8-3) we see two New Testament events, the Flagellation and the Crucifixion, placed on either side of the Samaritan leading the man to the inn. The meaning of these juxtapositions is clear. Two scenes of God creating the prelapsarian world suggest that the city of Jerusalem (at center) is like Paradise; the man’s ordeals on his journey recall the sins of Adam and Eve, whose creation and fall parallel those scenes; the priest and the Levite, who signify the failures of Judaism for Honorius, find analogies in the scenes of Moses, Aaron, and the Israelites. Finally, the merciful deeds of the Good Samaritan are likened to the events of Christ’s passion, events that stress the meaning of his sacrifice for humanity.
FIGURE 8-3 Typological window, c.1215. Bourges Cathedral.
An even clearer pictorial version of this interpretation of the parable appears in the choir at Sens Cathedral. Here, the parable narrative proceeds clearly down the vertical axis, as at Bourges. The groups of typologies, arranged in four partial roundels abutting each of the three scenes of the parable, attain an even greater level of internal logic than those found at Bourges, in that the Old and New Testament “glossing” scenes read in a linear narrative (left-to-right and top-to bottom). The result is one narrative serving as a commentary on another – quite a feat to accomplish within a rigid diagrammatic framework. It should be noted that typological exegesis exists side by side with more pure narrative in these windows of the early decades of the thirteenth century, suggesting it would be wrong to oppose an “old-fashioned” typological mode with a “progressive” narrative one. The popularity of allegorical and typological subject matter in diverse media at this time strongly contradicts this teleological notion.
Surely the most ambitious example of visual exegesis of the Gothic period is the Bible moralisée.36 The intention of the original manuscripts’ designers was to illustrate in roundels biblical texts (the number of which far exceeds previous biblical cycles), which were then paired with both a textual and pictorial exegetical gloss.37 The result, in the case of the exemplars made in Paris in the 1230s and ’40s, is a vast exegetical work that functions on both a textual and visual level. The visual system constructs exegetical meaning out of clear rhymes, correspondences, and parallels, whereas the textual glosses state their exegetical points more plainly. The designers of this vast book have created an infinitely extendable, seductive mode of visual exegesis, one that engages the eye and mind in an open-ended way. The texts inform the reader in one way, while the possibilities inherent in the visual imagery encourage a kind of engaged looking that was clearly thought to be a useful skill in thirteenth-century Paris.38 One sees, for example, similar validations of visual interpretation in stained glass and in the great sculptural programs of the French Gothic cathedrals.
Postscript: Art and Exegesis in the Later Middle Ages
Just as in the later Middle Ages forms of monastic worship were increasingly imitated by the laity (most conspicuously in the recitation of the canonical hours), types of biblical exegesis originating and perfected in monastic circles found their way into personal devotional books. These developments were also influenced by such widely read fourteenth-century texts as the Biblia Pauperum and the Speculum Humanae Salvationis, which presented exegetical thought in a more moralizing, homiletic context than had been the case in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.39 An ambitious early fifteenth-century example of a devotional work flavored with exegetical imagery would be the Rohan Hours (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. lat. 9471), in which a reduced version of a Bible moralisée cycle is interwoven with the more traditional imagery associated with the various hours. This means that at any given hour, the owner of the book would not only consider the imagery found at that point in the book’s temporal structure, but would also be asked to consider an atemporal, typological relationship of Old and New Testaments as well. This dual activity must have considerably enriched the owner’s conception of the place of his or her devotions within a much larger and quite complex Christian world-view. The presence of such an exegetical cycle in a Book of Hours confirms the general sense of intellectual innovation found in the ultra-lavish personal books of this later period, and reminds us that private “devotional” manuscripts were hardly removed from the more professional and erudite world of scriptural exegesis.
FIGURE 8-4 Spinola Hours, Eucharistic procession (left) and gathering of the manna (right), c.1515. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, MS Ludwig IX 18, fol. 48v–49r. © by The J. Paul Getty Museum.
By the early sixteenth century, the combination of exegetical and devotional imagery in private devotional manuscripts reached new levels of interpretive as well as pictorial subtlety in the Low Countries. For example, the Spinola Hours (c.1515), features an unusually rich cycle of double-page openings for the Weekday Hours which represent cleverly paired scenes from the Old and New dispensations.40 Two openings stand out in term of their seriousness of visual exegesis. At the Thursday Office of the Eucharist (fig. 8-4), one finds on the left a picture of a Eucharistic procession, complete with the host displayed in an elaborate monstrance, and on the right the Gathering of the Manna. The latter image is complicated by the inclusion of the meeting of Abraham and Melchisidech, from Genesis, in the border, which not only mirrors the ritual procession leading from left to right in the Eucharistic scene, but also deepens the meaning of the Exodus story in that Melchsidech is often shown in medieval art as a priest offering Abraham the host and a chalice in return for his tithe. Another opening for the Tuesday Office of the Holy Spirit compares the Pentecost to a scene of Elias calling down fire from heaven, which ignites a sacrificial offering on an altar. The link between the Old and New Testament scenes here is clear enough, but again, it is the border of the recto page that deepens the meaning of the whole. Here, we see illustrated the building of the Tower of Babel, the negative inverse of the speaking in tongues brought on by the descent of the Holy Spirit at the Pentecost. It is also worth noting in both cases that the New Dispensation scene always appears on the left side of the opening, with the one from the Old on the right. This deliberate inversion of the scriptural commentary reflects the by now ancient belief that the relationship of Old to New is not strictly chronological, but also allegorical and timeless. It was also considered appropriate for the New, or “correct” Dispensation to be given precedence over the Old. (It should also be said that this verso/recto arrangement of images is also informed by conventions of books of hours.) Finally, while it is true that many aspects of both these complex sets of cross-readings of the Bible and Christian ritual had appeared in both earlier art and exegesis, it is only with the ingenious development of the border in later Flemish illumination as a space both complementary to and separate from the main image, that these imaginative and highly visual types of devotional exercise are made possible. This reminds us that two characteristically “medieval” endeavors – namely, interest in traditional exegetical thought and creativity in the field of book illumination – extended beyond our period and well into the Renaissance.
1 Didascalicon, 62–3.
2 James, “Pictor in Carmine,” pp. 141–66.
3 See Zinn, “Suger, Theology”; and Rudolph, Artistic Change, p. 95, n.24.
4 De Archa Noe, p. 117. English translation taken from Hugh of St Victor, Selected Spiritual Writings, p. 153.
5 For a skeptical view of the picture’s existence, see Evans, “Fictive Painting.” A comprehensive study of Hugh’s ark is being prepared by Conrad Rudolph.
6 Evans, “The Ysagoge in Theologiam,” pp. 1–42.
7 On this window and its relationship to exegetical sources, see Grodecki, “Les Vitraux Allégoriques.”
8 Didi-Huberman, Devant L’image, pp. 29–32.
9 The authoritative account of this method is Lubac’s Exégèse médiévale. See also Smalley, Study of the Bible, pp. 1–66. It should be noted that a threefold interpretation of scripture, practiced from Origen to Hugh of St Victor, was practiced as well.
10 Quoted in Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, vol. I, p. 23.
11 Hoefer, Typologie im Mittelalter, pp. 85–6.
12 Hrabanus Maurus, Commentaria in Genesim, PL 107:566B–569D.
13 These thirteenth-century developments are reviewed in Smalley, Study of the Bible, pp. 264–355.
14 Cahier, Monographie, pp. 19–132.
15 Ibid., pp. 22–5.
16 Mâle, Religious Art in France: The Thirteenth Century, p. vi.
17 Ibid., p. 143.
18 See Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, pp. 131–48; Marrow, “Symbol and Meaning.”
19 Cassidy, Iconography at the Crossroads, pp. 6–7.
20 Hamburger, St. John the Divine, p. 1. For an extended meditation on the relationship of art to theology as a methological issue, see Hamburger’s introductory essays in Bouché and Hamburg, eds., The Mind’s Eye.
21 See Cahn, “Architecture and Exegesis,” pp. 53–68.
22 Mâle, Religious Art in France: The Twelfth Century, pp. 155–77 and Grodecki, “Les Vitraux allégoriques.”
23 Panofsky, Abbot Suger, pp. 1–37. Despite his use of the Panofskian label, Konrad Hoffmann, “Suger’s ‘Anagogisches Fenster’,” clearly agrees with Grodecki’s interpretation of this window.
24 Panofsky, Abbot Suger, pp. 58–9. Translation slightly adapted by me.
25 Hugh of St Victor’s thoroughgoing revival of Augustine in the early twelfth century and Louis IX’s stocking of the Ste-Chapelle in the mid-thirteenth century with works by all the early Church fathers attest to the fact that, despite new trends in biblical study in this period, the patristic writers never lost their authority.
26 Hoffmann, “Suger’s ‘Anagogisches Fenster’,” p. 76.
27 On this conflict, see Rudolph, Artistic Change, pp. 8–31.
28 Jerome, Sur Jonas, p. 77.
29 Ibid., p. 81.
30 For illustrations of Jonah and the whale found at Psalm 68, see Haseloff, Die Psalterillustration im 13, tables 2 and 16; and Oliver, Gothic Manuscript Illumination, vol. I, pp. 69–70.
31 Warner, Queen Mary’s Psalter, p. 26.
32 Kupfer, Romanesque Wall Painting, p. 127. The notion of visual exegesis is given a more theoretical treatment in Berdini, Religious Art of Jacopo Bassano, pp. 1–35.
33 Esmeijer, Divina Quaternitas, pp. 47–61.
34 For a discussion of a typological window and its connections to Mosan art, see Kline, “Typological Window,” pp. 83–130. The iconography of the 12 typological choir windows at Canterbury (which are now largely lost) is reconstructed by Madeline Caviness, who also lays out the methods and topics shared among the Canterbury windows and those in France (Early Stained Glass, pp. 115–38).
35 For an introductory study of these windows, see Manhes and Deremble, Le Vitrail du Bon Samaritain.
36 [On the Bible moralisée, see chapter 20 by Hedeman in this volume (ed.).]
37 On the institutional and cultural background of the Bibles moralisées, see Hausherr, “Sensus litteralis” and “Über die Auswahl.”
38 For a further discussion of this aspect of the Bible moralisée, see Hughes, “Typology and Its Uses.”
39 See Schmidt, Die Armenbibeln, pp. 88–101.
40 On the manuscript in general, see Kren and McKendrick, Illuminating the Renaissance, pp. 414–17.
Paolo Berdini, The Religious Art of Jacopo Bassano: Painting as Visual Exegesis (Cambridge, 1997).
Anne-Marie Bouché and Jeffrey Hamburger, eds., The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 2005).
Helmut Buschhausen, Der Verduner Altar (Munich, 1980).
Heide and Helmut Buschhausen, “Studien zu den typologischen Kreuzen der Ile-de-France und das Maaslandes,” Die Zeit der Staufer. 5 vols. (Stuttgart, 1977–9).
C. Cahier, Monographie de la Cathédrale de Bourges: Vitraux du XIIIe Siècle (Paris, 1841–4).
Walter Cahn, “Architecture and Exegesis: Richard of St. Victor’s Ezechiel Commentary and Its Illustrations,” Art Bulletin 76 (1994), pp. 53–68.
Brendan Cassidy, ed., Iconography at the Crossroads (Princeton, 1993).
Madeline Caviness, The Early Stained Glass Canterbury Cathedral (Princeton, 1977).
M. D. Chenu, La Théologie au Douzième Siècle (Paris, 1957).
Jean Danielou, From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers (London, 1960).
Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image (Paris, 1990).
Anna Esmeijer, Divina Quaternitas: A Preliminary Study in the Method and Application of Visual Exegesis (Amsterdam, 1978).
Michael Evans, “Fictive Painting in Twelfth-Century Paris,” in Sight and Insight, Essays in Honour of E. H. Gombrich on his 85th Birthday (London, 1994), pp. 73–87.
——, “The Geometry of the Mind,” Architectural Association Quarterly 12/4 (1980), pp. 32–55.
——, “The Ysagoge in Theologiam and the Commentaries attributed to Bernard Silvestris,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991), pp. 1–42.
Louis Grodecki, Études sur les Vitraux de Suger à Saint-Denis (Paris, 1995).
——, “Les Vitraux allégoriques de Saint-Denis,” Art de France 1 (1961), pp. 19–41.
Gerald Guest, Bible Moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, Vienna Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (London, 1995).
Jeffrey Hamburger, St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (Berkeley, 2002).
Günther Haseloff, Die Psalterillustration im 13. Jahrhundert (Kiel, 1938).
Reiner Hausherr, “Sensus litteralis und Sensus spiritualis in der Bible Moralisée.” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 6 (1972), pp. 356–77.
——, “Über die Auswahl des Bibeltextes in der Bible Moralisée,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 51 (1988), pp. 126–46.
Hartmut Hoefer, Typologie im Mittelalter: Zur Übertragbarkeit typologischer Interpretation auf weltliche Dichtung (Göppingen, 1971).
Konrad Hoffmann, “Suger’s ‘Anagogisches Fenster’ in St. Denis,” Wallraff-Richartz Jahrbuch 30 (1968), pp. 57–88.
Hugh of St Victor, De Archa Noe and Libellus de Formatione Arche, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, vol. 176, ed. Patrice Sicard (Turnhout, 2001).
——, Didascalicon, ed. and trans. Jerome Taylor (New York, 1961).
——, Selected Spiritual Writings (London, 1962).
Christopher Hughes, “Typology and Its Uses in the Moralized Bible,” in Anne-Marie Bouché and Jeffrey Hamburger, eds., The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 2005).
——, “Visual Typology: An Ottonian Example,” Word and Image 17 (September 2001), pp. 185–98.
M. R. James, “Pictor in Carmine,” Archeologia 94 (1951), pp. 141–66.
Jerome, Sur Jonas, ed. and trans. Paul Antin (Paris, 1956).
Wolfgang Kemp, The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass (Cambridge, 1997).
Naomi Reed Kline, “The Typological Window of Orbais L’Abbaye: The Context of Its Iconography,” Studies in Iconography 14 (1995), pp. 83–130.
Thomas Kren and Scot McKendrick, Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe (Los Angeles, 2003).
Annette Krüger and Gabriele Runge, “Lifting the Veil: Two Typological Diagrams in the Hortus Deliciarum,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 60 (1997), pp. 1–22.
Marcia Kupfer, Romanesque Wall Painting in Central France: The Politics of Narrative (New Haven, 1993).
John Lowden, The Making of the Bibles Moralisées (University Park, Penn., 2000).
Henri de Lubac, Éxégèse Médiévale: Les Quatre Sens de L’Écriture, 2 vols. (Paris, 1959–61).
——, “Typologie et Allégorisme.” Recherches de Science Réligieuse 34 (1947), pp. 180–226.
Émile Mâle, Religious Art in France: The Twelfth Century (Princeton, 1978).
——, Religious Art in France: The Thirteenth Century (Princeton, 1984).
Colette Manhes and Jean-Paul Deremble, Le Vitrail du Bon Samaritain: Chartres, Sens, Bourges (Paris, 1986).
Colette Manhes-Deremble, Les Vitraux Narratifs de la Cathédrale de Chartres (Paris, 1993).
James Marrow, “Symbol and Meaning in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance,” Simiolus 16 (1986), pp. 150–69.
Judith Oliver, Gothic Manuscript Illumination in the Diocese of Liège, c.1250–c.1330 (Leuven, 1988).
Erwin Panofsky, ed. Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St-Denis and its Art Treasures. 2nd edn. (Princeton, 1979).
——, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (Cambridge, Mass., 1953).
Conrad Rudolph, Artistic Change at St-Denis: Abbot Suger’s Program and the Early Twelfth Century Controversy over Art (Princeton, 1990).
Gerhard Schmidt, Die Armenbibeln des XIV. Jahrhunderts (Graz/Cologne, 1959).
Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1952).
Neil Stratford, “Three English Romanesque Enamelled Ciboria,” Burlington Magazine 126 (April 1984), pp. 204–16.
George Warner, Queen Mary’s Psalter (London, 1912).
O. K. Werckmeister, “The Lintel Fragment Representing Eve from Saint-Lazare, Autun.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972), pp. 1–30.
Grover A. Zinn, “Suger, Theology, and the Dionysian Tradition,” in Paula L. Gerson, ed., Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis (New York, 1986), pp. 33–40.